Tag Archives: exploiting workers

October 19, 2017

The Downside Of Economic Growth

By wise sloth

Economic growth increases some people’s chances of getting a job or a raise, but it doesn’t mean everything is getting better. Quite the opposite, economic growth isn’t bringing the world closer to Utopia. It’s making life unbearable for the poorest of the poor and bringing the entire human race closer to extinction.

In order to understand why economic growth is so perilous, you have to understand what makes the economy rise and fall. Thousands of mind-bending books have been written on that subject, and understanding the economy has become more complicated with the invention of the stock market, futures, short sales, trade sanctions, treaties, and taxes.

Ultimately, economic growth mainly boils down to how much money people spend, and this concept is easy enough to see with your own eyes. The more customers buy goods and services, the more money businesses have to pay employees, hire new employees, expand/improve their business and ultimately sell more goods and services. The less money people spend, the less money businesses have to invest. If their profits are too low, they’ll eventually have to fire some, or all, of their employees. The more businesses go bankrupt, the more “the workforce” turns into “the unemployed.”

 

 

That’s basically common sense, and on the surface, it sounds reasonable. The problem lies in how businesses increase profits and what they do with those profits. Business is war, and war is hell. In this economic climate, the most ruthless companies rise to the top, because in order to be the most competitive, they have to underpay employees, gouge customers, lower health standards for workers and customers, eliminate employee benefits, create meaningless and hidden fees, manipulate stock prices, outsource jobs to countries where slavery is less ambiguous, manipulate customer’s minds through disingenuous marketing and exploit tax loopholes and tax havens.

Every blue-chip company does this, and they’re just the tip of the iceberg. This is the standard business model for the entire economy. The most successful companies just do it better than anyone else. The “health” of blue-chip stocks is one of the ways we measure the “health” of the American economy, but when companies grow using a slash-and-burn business model, it doesn’t mean life is getting better for most people. It means those companies are bankrupting their less oppressive competitors and creating more jobs in their financially crippling, bureaucratic hell. That’s not taking us closer to a better world. That’s taking us closer to a dystopian novel.

To make matters worse, when the economy is making record-breaking profits, it means businesses are selling an unprecedentedly high number of goods and services. This means our factories and highways are working faster than ever to convert all of the world’s natural resources into consumer garbage destined to become toxic landfills.

If you want to know what the future of the world looks like, go to the island of Oahu in Hawaii. Businesses took the quintessential example of paradise and paved it over with urban sprawl until there wasn’t any room left to build. Now half the beaches are too toxic to swim in, and many have turned into homeless camps that the government bulldozes every few years to keep up appearances.

The cost of buying or renting property in Oahu is astronomical, even in the slums. It takes an hour to drive twenty miles in any direction. Meth use is epidemic among the poor. Brown-skinned workers toil in the tropical heat and humidity harvesting pineapples for barely enough money to survive, while across the island, millionaires get blowjobs from high-priced call girls in penthouses. This is not the world you want to live in, but every day we’re laying more concrete in every direction, solidifying our future in that world.

When the entire world has been converted into strip malls and suburbs, blue-chip companies will have secured every human being as guaranteed customers for life, because in suburbia your only access to food, water, clothing, shelter, education, and amusement are predatory businesses. When every city looks the same, you can run as far as you want; you’ll still end up somewhere identical to where you started. You’ll still work for the exact same companies and have to buy the same cheap, toxic products.

Even if you like eating at McDonald’s and working for Max Lumburg at Initech, you’re still left with the problem that everyone’s employers are converting the world’s natural resources into trash as quickly as possible. I doubt we’ll reach the point where every square inch of usable land in the world is covered in grimy suburban sprawl because we’ll have burned through our resources before the system has a chance to reach its inevitable end.

 

 

If I had to bet money on whether or not suburbia will succeed at consuming the world’s resources to apocalyptic proportions, I would bet that it will, because the more economic growth there is, the more money predatory business owners are able to spend influencing public opinion and government policies. The bigger the marketing industry grows, the more Orwellian our world will become. The more influence companies have over politicians, the more they can design the laws to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else.

The richest men in the world already have practically unlimited access to political power. So at this point, it’s not about the rich gaining power; they’ve already got it. Now they’re just tightening their grip, and the greater economic inequality grows, and the more time they have to mold the law, the more guaranteed their financial security and growth will be. The more guaranteed “economic growth” is, the more guaranteed the suburbanization, and thus, destruction, of the entire world is.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

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October 23, 2012

School And Work Should Be Fun, And They Can Be.

By wise sloth

"Why is it called 'Sunday fun day' when it's the day before Monday and we all have to go back to work; it should be called 'Sunday fuck day' cause we all realize it's Sunday and say to ourselves, 'fuck.'"

 

When I was in third grade almost all of the teachers at my school looked and acted like somber versions of The Golden Girls. Between classes, they would gossip in the halls, and sometimes I’d overhear them. One time I overheard my homeroom teacher telling the teacher next door that they heard someone on television say that learning should be fun. Those two old mother hens vehemently disagreed with that philosophy. They said, and I quote, “You don’t go to school to have fun; you go to school to learn.”

A little over twenty years later and schools are still run under the philosophy that classrooms shouldn’t be fun…. because fun is the opposite of disciplined. Granted, there have been advancements in academic culture since I was in third grade, but most of them have already been trampled under the foot of standardized testing. I don’t have to make a big list of ways school sucks to convince you that it does. You know that. If you liked everything about school then you were the 1% it was designed for. The rest of us were varying degrees of miserable. And to our credit, the fact that we graduated shows that we toughed it up and dealt with it… to varying degrees of success.

If you went to college then you know that the amount of fun you had partying was only matched by the misery of your classes and assignments. University courses are traumatically stressful. That’s why so many people fail out of college. Most of the people who fail out of college aren’t stupid or lazy. They just don’t have the stress tolerance to get hit in the head with a sledgehammer constantly for four years. A lot of the people who do pass the gauntlet manage to do so because they treat the stress with drugs and alcohol until they pass the finish line. A lot of them don’t let go of the bottle or the pills afterward, and then the solution becomes the problem. Those who do tough it without chemical assistance are still shattered and traumatized by it to varying degrees, and they all carry these problems with them to their jobs where they’re supposed to be the leaders. And since four years of basic training has conditioned them to take it for granted that traumatically stressful workloads are the norm… that’s the standard they hold everyone else to. In addition, they run their offices using the same rote, discipline-oriented (or nonsensical new age bullshit) approach their professors used to to make class miserable. Now, since the workforce reflects the education system, and the education system is based on archaic, degrading, inhumane, unproductive, unenjoyable standers, the end result is that everyone has to live in Stick-Up-Your-Butt Land.

This is ironic because America is famous for its nightlife… and to the extent that America is famous for how fun its nightlife is, it’s also famous for how dull and soul-crushing its working hours are… starting in first grade and ending at retirement or death. The American workplace is so soul-crushing that America’s youth are famous all over the world for being broken and giving up. The most absurd thing about that statement is that everybody knows it, but we’re still going to be doing the same thing this time next year…. and the year after that… and the year after that… until the nightly news won’t report on a shooting spree unless there are more than ten dead bodies.

We don’t have to do that, yet we keep doing it. We don’t have to drive ourselves insane and hate life. Classrooms and jobs could just as easily be places we enjoy and look forward to going to. The only reason life sucks is because the rules are written to butt hole standards. We just need to tear up the rule books and write new ones that aren’t built around the philosophy that life is supposed to be as anal retentive and exploiting as possible.

To this you might say, of course, we all wish life was more fun, but that’s easier said than done. To that I would reply, it’s easier than you think. You know how you change the whole world? You do one thing right and then ask yourself how to change the whole world again. Repeat those two steps ad infinitum, and you’ll change the world. So until you’ve done one thing differently, it’s illogical to sit there with your thumb up your ass wishing your butt didn’t hurt.

The only way the game was ever going to change was for each classroom and each office to change… one at a time. The education problem is the easiest to fix. All you have to do is donate to free online education and get other people to do the same. Brick and mortar schools with elderly teachers will likely always exist, but total free online education will change the nature of their jobs to full-time tutors instead of full-time drill instructors, and that’s vital for everybody. So if you’ve never donated to free online education or encouraged other people to do so, then don’t ask what you can do to change the world. That’s step number one.

If there’s no hope of you changing the rules in your office then you should be burning the midnight oil figuring out how to start your own business so you can work for yourself and create a fun environment for yourself and for your future coworkers. That’s ambitious to the point of arrogance, but what’s the alternative? Spending the rest of your life in shit, soul-sucking offices and letting your children grow up in shit classrooms only to escape to shit offices after they graduate where they’ll drown in shit until the light in their eyes goes out.  The point is… it doesn’t take courage to run from a tiger.

On a side note, it’s worth noting (and lamenting) that we’ve all been so conditioned to accept shit as the norm that we consider it immature to seriously consider living any other way, and we rationalize all the reasons we need to justify why it’s a good idea to stay in our shit lives and throw shit at other people who seriously consider, let alone try, to learn or work differently.  The mature, rational solution to this problem is not to suck it up and deal with it. That’s confusing optimism with apathy.

If your environment is inhumane and you don’t have the power to change it then the mature, rational thing to do is to leave that environment and find or create a more ideal one. Unfortunately, since shit is the standard, running away will just take you from McDonald’s to Burger King.

The only option that leaves left is creating your own environment, and the road to Utopia is realistically short because you don’t have to change the whole world to get there. It should also take a little more weight off your shoulders to know that you shouldn’t change the whole world anyway, because your utopia is everyone else’s nightmare. Conformity is the problem. Freedom is the solution, and diversity is the product.

It’s not easy to start your own business, and it’s not without significant sacrifices, but it’s achievable, and the benefits outweigh the costs. Dumber, lazier people than you have succeeded. Having said that, if you’re the exception who is truly, hopelessly locked into too many contracts, debts and obligations that neither change or escape are possible…. there’s no risk in shaming the status quo on the internet and hoping you inspire some boss out there somewhere to pull the stick out of his ass, let down his hair and let go of his grip around his employees’ throats. If you can play any role whatsoever in changing any office anywhere in the world, then you’ll have brought the professional culture one step closer to the tipping point where fun catches on and becomes the norm. So if you do nothing else, don’t stop bitching about how much school and work suck. Every public bitch session is a butterfly, and the more butterflies that get released into the internet, the more likely it is the winds will change.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

The Importance of Public Education
Flaws in the Public Education System
Improving Public Education

 

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