Sunday, December 17, 2017

Apparently Trickle Down Has A Lot Of Leaky Pipes

Not Surprising when there is less and less revenue for human infrastructure, and always more to supposedly encourage more investment; which is interesting when the Fed is raising interest rates now because they fear the economy may be starting to heat up too much already.

So obviously most of corporate America is already raking in revenue as fast as they can. And most American workers are already working their asses off (quite often with more than one job because one doesn't pay nearly enough to even cover getting to and from in an insured, decently working vehicle). So what's going on here?

What is going on is the fact that money people have figured out that there are so many better ways to put information to work for them than simply generating various forms of hard copy product output. And since we don't bother much with demanding the same kind of performance standards from investing as we do in, oh, I don't know... say worker productivity... money can go make more money any damn way it pleases.

And doesn't it just make more sense to folks, who don't like dealing with the messy, too easily squished, and always complaining, wetware in the first place, to start finding more of the things to churn through to make a profit? You know, more than actually making something that isn't just electrons, or photons; the somethings that have to be purchased by those who are also the ones less and less able to purchase anything at all (that doesn't involve addiction), anyway anymore, in the first place (because gods know, if they could purchase a lot of hard copy stuff, they might also purchase a real change in how things work fundamentally)? And we wouldn't want that now, would we.

So now you have the spectacle of server farms drawing more electricity than many small countries so that more bitcoin can be minded. Or more fancy algorithm armies can mine market metrics to snag fleeting price correlations, and thus turn millions of minute, tiny price fluctuations, into profit plays every second. Or you simply corrupt, or game, the system in other ways, usually with other forms of manipulating information so that you can either get away with not paying for what you should be paying for, or getting others to pay for things they probably aren't even aware they are paying for at all (it is, after all, not just the hackers that can gouge you, stealing the ethereal numbers of electronica. It's the big data guys as well, through lots of tricky, your information used without your knowledge stuff, behind the fancy front of whatever application you've been sold on as the must have).

So now you know why you are working poor, and probably will always be so. So much so, in fact, that it is now time to introduce an important new economic concept:

"Economic Cannon Fodder."

You, dear reader, if you are a wage earner, are probably now a part of "Economic Cannon Fodder;" a concept not hard to understand at all.

You see, the idea has never been to completely replace workers with automation. Even though that might make a lot of operations, a lot more profitable, in the short term, in the long term it isn't a good idea. No, it most definitely isn't, for you see, the masters of money know that you need a counter weight to the guys who will be making the robots (always remember: everybody wants to buy from a competitive market, but nobody wants to sell there).

Understand. The purchasers like the potential economies of going full auto, make no mistake, but they know viscerally, if not consciously, that if they don't maintain a, what is essentially a virtual slave work force, they will have nothing to beat back attempts by the automate entrepreneurs to gauge them in a "we've got you by the balls" situation.

So, as you can now imagine, they'd have incentive to avoid this. You then only need add the more traditional sense of the term "cannon fodder" to know that the masters of money will want a lot that as well. Protecting the servers, and the continued supply of electrons, you see, will also be a big incentivizing factor in the future. That and the gated, climate controlled, and walled to the max, places to continue enjoying having more ethereal counters than the other guy.

What a way to build a foundation for the advancement of civilization, culture, and the human condition.

Didn't I tell you that the crazy was just going to keep getting worse and worse?

WELCOME TO AMERICA




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