Saturday, November 19, 2016
Friday, November 18, 2016
Mr. Trump Will Undoubtedly Write This Change To Arctic Temperature Off...
...As just another bit of Liberal bias in the media. Or an expansion of the cunning plot by the Chinese to make us think climate change is real (those rascals).
When a candidate finally gets into this high office his view on reality often changes. What we have here is a real litmus test on whether the new guy can be made to see reality at all.
Stand By For More Supply Side BS...
...And government, both state and national, without the resources to do basic services. That is what you can expect as Mr. Trump prepares to take office.
What this boils down to is corporations able to do more profit wise, but without any regard to working americans being able to spend any more; which is, of course, the down side when you ignore the demand side of things here. You couple that with government increasingly unable to do basic services... You know, like make sure your drinking water isn't contaminated with lead. Or consumer protection agencies aren't able to watch for products that will either severely sicken you, or outright kill you. Or education forced to hand over more schooling to the charter schools ordinary working folks can't afford. Or the undermining of established programs like Social Security, and Medicare (which working folks in the past supported because they were promised to receive when their turn to need it came around). Just to name few of the more prominent areas of concern.
I know that a lot of you have real concern about the efficiency of government tasked to do much of anything. As a Libertarian Socialist I share a good portion of those concerns. Government's tendency to bog down within the inter workings of bureaucracy are well established. The problem is government is the only counterbalance we have to corporate power, and accumulated capital. And unless you're willing to talk about starting over as far as what we have for an economic operating system, then, as a practical matter, there's an inherent limit to how much you can apply understandable Libertarian ideals.
Interestingly enough, if one were to give serious consideration to the alternative model for an operating system that I have proposed, you would see a great deal more in the application of those ideals. This would be so automatically not only because the power of capital would be removed, but also because we would be in direct control, community to community, of how things were initiated and managed. Just as we would be responsible for making our own end use items to meet our personal needs.
In any case, though, those of you who voted for Mr. Trump better prepare yourselves for a great deal more disappointment than what we Liberals and Progressives felt when Obama short changed us on the majority of the things he promised. Not only are you not going to get what he promised, you are likely to get an economy made worse. Much worse.
A good deal of that will depend on just how much he is able to both screw with world trade agreements (which I did not support, but again, if you stay with Capitalism, those are the things that make capital happy), and piss off all of our current allies, as well as those who are already at odds with us. Only time will tell there.
The bottom line here is that you have placed upon yourselves the epitome of that famous Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times." Boy are you going to get interesting in spades.
Thursday, November 17, 2016
Throwing More Money At It Hasn't Helped...
...Maybe it's time to start considering, with all this money being thrown around, that money itself, and the economic operating system that supports it is the real problem. That and the fact that profit is the only real reason we have it at all.
Sure, a lot of other developed countries have done better but, just as with how Socialism in general is showing signs of strain in being able to continue, going into the 21 century, as competition gets more intense, resources get more scarce, and severe weather events increase, what do you think the long term prospects are going to be for anybody to continue to provide generous healthcare benefits?
As you ponder that I'll just leave you with the two most telling paragraphs from the nbcnews.com article below:
"...'The United States trailed other countries in making health care affordable and ranked poorly on providing timely access to medical care (except specialist care),' the report reads. ' Problems were often particularly acute for low-income adults.'Yet Americans now spend $9,523 per person a year on medical expenses — by far the most among developed countries. Health spending now tops $3 trillion a year. Health insurance premiums have been steadily rising since 2008 and employers, who cover 60 percent of Americans, have been increasing the amount their workers must contribute to their own medical care..."
See Also:
Surprise Medical Bills Found in 22 Percent of ER Visits
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
When You Think About What's Possible For AI...
...Think about it in terms of what it could contribute to a society that tried to deemphasize specialization. Think about what the human-AI connection could be if it allowed non experts to perform a significant portion of tasks that only experts can do now.
I make this suggestion because this is precisely what I mean when I say that moving away from the current economic operating systems reliance on specialization, and the universal experience translator that money was meant to be (to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan) would allow us to find the best balance of personal involvement with AI and automation. Especially would this be so if we also no longer had to worry about these same systems undercutting our competitive stance in a commercialized labor market.
I would propose to all of you who see AI as a potential for great benefit to humanity to consider that doing so, while still shackled by that same outdated operating system, is in no way the best means to achieve that desired goal. For my way of thinking, the best way, without question, would follow from accepting the need for a complete rethink on how we do the management, and maintenance, of a production/distribution system where specialized labor for production is taken out of the equation. A new model where everyone in a community shared the responsibilities for productive management and maintenance of material basics, and the individual made their own end use items; with everyone participating getting an equity share of the productive output the community, as a whole, decided they were willing to support.
It is in that kind of new social environment, in my opinion, that visionaries like Professor Manuela Veloso would be able to really make AI a shining contribution.
HUMANITY AND AI WILL BE INSEPARABLE
MANUELA VELOSO | HEAD OF MACHINE LEARNING, CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY
BY RUSSELL BRANDOM | NOV. 15, 2016
Monday, November 14, 2016
The Working Hard Class And...
...What Just Worrying About Jobs Leaves Us With.
This is another juxtaposition of two threads of thought bubbling up through the infosphere now.
On the one hand, as indicated by a piece done in the Harvard Business Review by Joan C. Williams, is the idea that Liberals and Progressives need to understand that the real middle class sees themselves as the Working Hard class. They've grown resentful of elitist professionals because they don't respect people who make their living telling them what to do when those same professionals don't understand the essential work ethic of the traditional working male breadwinner. The don't care about minimum wages for the bottom level of workers, or rights of minorities, or even unions for that matter, because these issues don't have anything to do with providing steady, truly middle income jobs; jobs for people who see themselves as the only ones who understand not only what hard work is, but who live the ethic of disciplined self denial. The people who also admire the rich because they must have had the same ethic in order to get that way.
Then there is the story out of Oklahoma now of just how much effect that waste water dumping back into the oil wells created by fracking have caused. This effect being, of course, the alarming increase of earthquakes that the pressure of waste water dumping has created.
What is interesting here is that we have not only a physical equivalent of what has happened to politics at the national level (earth shaking in its own right), but also the highlighting of a predicament faced by the political leadership there; a leadership, as the article indicates, is owned by the oil companies of Oklahoma. Even with the ground shaking away the infrastructure all around them they are loath to make waves that might upset the benefactors of so many jobs in Oklahoma. Jobs that I am sure have a good number of the white working class. The same folks who admire the rich for giving them jobs in the first place, as well as for whatever supposed efforts they did to get that way.
I would like to propose another class of people. This would be a minority class unfortunately, but they still need to be recognized. These are folks who have come from both the middle, and upper middle class, who are informed (as well as being educated), and have worked very hard to stay that way. Folks like myself, for instance, who worked days to put himself through the first two year college session (so that I could be a better writer, as well as someone who could read history and understand it). Someone who then got a little help (through the old CETA program) with the second stint at a Junior College, but who did so in one year because I already had most of the credits required from my first two years of college; taking on that further education so that I could understand what information processing was all about (getting an Associate of Science degree in Data Processing).
I mention this only to illustrate that people who work at being informed, and trying to understand what is going on around them, work pretty damned hard as well to do so while still keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table; especially in the IT world where ten and twelve hour days, six and seven days a week, can be a regular occurrence. And I mention that because I want to make it clear that folks in the middle do not have an exclusive on any supposed righteousness with a strong work ethic. As well as to suggest that just working hard does not give you a pass on being ignorant of what is going on around you.
This deficiency is important now because ignorance can, and will, kill you. More importantly, it can, and will, kill the planet we live on. The fact of the matter is that just wanting good jobs, and not wanting to rock the boat for those who create those jobs, is simply not going to cut it any more. Whether its lead in your drinking water because municipalities are either too underfunded, and/or too corrupt, because money stays with rich, and usually goes out to keep them that way; or because an industry group has either become too big to fail, or so big they can charge you whatever they want for what you need, for whatever profit they desire; make no mistake. It is your ignorance that empowers them, and which gives them the ability to make you work yourself into the ground for pennies on the hour compared to what they get in return.
And the bottom line for all of this is the economic operating system that allows it. The operating system that became obsolete the minute virtually any skill started to have to compete with machines skilled by electrified data retrieval.
If you want to talk about jobs why don't you try to start imagining that work ought to be oriented around communities actually providing for ourselves; doing the managing and the maintenance, so that we could make our own goods for living. As well as to imagine that we would represent ourselves in deciding policy and laws that we would then vote on. We could do that now precisely because we have the means to use technology in our best interests, balancing personal involvement with automation.
This is another juxtaposition of two threads of thought bubbling up through the infosphere now.
On the one hand, as indicated by a piece done in the Harvard Business Review by Joan C. Williams, is the idea that Liberals and Progressives need to understand that the real middle class sees themselves as the Working Hard class. They've grown resentful of elitist professionals because they don't respect people who make their living telling them what to do when those same professionals don't understand the essential work ethic of the traditional working male breadwinner. The don't care about minimum wages for the bottom level of workers, or rights of minorities, or even unions for that matter, because these issues don't have anything to do with providing steady, truly middle income jobs; jobs for people who see themselves as the only ones who understand not only what hard work is, but who live the ethic of disciplined self denial. The people who also admire the rich because they must have had the same ethic in order to get that way.
Then there is the story out of Oklahoma now of just how much effect that waste water dumping back into the oil wells created by fracking have caused. This effect being, of course, the alarming increase of earthquakes that the pressure of waste water dumping has created.
What is interesting here is that we have not only a physical equivalent of what has happened to politics at the national level (earth shaking in its own right), but also the highlighting of a predicament faced by the political leadership there; a leadership, as the article indicates, is owned by the oil companies of Oklahoma. Even with the ground shaking away the infrastructure all around them they are loath to make waves that might upset the benefactors of so many jobs in Oklahoma. Jobs that I am sure have a good number of the white working class. The same folks who admire the rich for giving them jobs in the first place, as well as for whatever supposed efforts they did to get that way.
I would like to propose another class of people. This would be a minority class unfortunately, but they still need to be recognized. These are folks who have come from both the middle, and upper middle class, who are informed (as well as being educated), and have worked very hard to stay that way. Folks like myself, for instance, who worked days to put himself through the first two year college session (so that I could be a better writer, as well as someone who could read history and understand it). Someone who then got a little help (through the old CETA program) with the second stint at a Junior College, but who did so in one year because I already had most of the credits required from my first two years of college; taking on that further education so that I could understand what information processing was all about (getting an Associate of Science degree in Data Processing).
I mention this only to illustrate that people who work at being informed, and trying to understand what is going on around them, work pretty damned hard as well to do so while still keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table; especially in the IT world where ten and twelve hour days, six and seven days a week, can be a regular occurrence. And I mention that because I want to make it clear that folks in the middle do not have an exclusive on any supposed righteousness with a strong work ethic. As well as to suggest that just working hard does not give you a pass on being ignorant of what is going on around you.
This deficiency is important now because ignorance can, and will, kill you. More importantly, it can, and will, kill the planet we live on. The fact of the matter is that just wanting good jobs, and not wanting to rock the boat for those who create those jobs, is simply not going to cut it any more. Whether its lead in your drinking water because municipalities are either too underfunded, and/or too corrupt, because money stays with rich, and usually goes out to keep them that way; or because an industry group has either become too big to fail, or so big they can charge you whatever they want for what you need, for whatever profit they desire; make no mistake. It is your ignorance that empowers them, and which gives them the ability to make you work yourself into the ground for pennies on the hour compared to what they get in return.
And the bottom line for all of this is the economic operating system that allows it. The operating system that became obsolete the minute virtually any skill started to have to compete with machines skilled by electrified data retrieval.
If you want to talk about jobs why don't you try to start imagining that work ought to be oriented around communities actually providing for ourselves; doing the managing and the maintenance, so that we could make our own goods for living. As well as to imagine that we would represent ourselves in deciding policy and laws that we would then vote on. We could do that now precisely because we have the means to use technology in our best interests, balancing personal involvement with automation.
What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class
NOVEMBER 10, 2016
Oil And Gas Industry Ensnarled in Spate of Oklahoma Earthquakes
Saturday, November 12, 2016
The Soul Searching Within The Side That Lost
The link below to the PBS NewsHour segment with Shields and Brooks on looking into what ought to be faced now by those who had the rug pulled out from under them with Trump's win is telling. Both long established participants of the now much maligned "media" went to great lengths to indicated that, however much you felt of the deep ugliness of the Trump campaign, there should be questions that have to be asked of why so many white working class voters went with him despite all of the foul things he seemed to represent. As well as to say that, whatever the reservations you had, the process resulted in Trump winning and that, above all else, the process has to be respected.
And in that vein both veteran writers took pains to acknowledge the fact that those very same white working voters had real issues they felt the elites weren't taking seriously any more; which of course fall back mostly to the bedrock economic issues that have been given lip service by both parties for decades now, but for which little remedy has actually come forth.
A lot of this then comes back to how, as David Brooks indicated, people who know words can engage with people not quite so gifted; doing so in a way that is not condescending, or as Mark Shields indicated, in a way that avoids resorting to the rhetoric of labels such as "racists," which drops "an atomic bomb," as it were, on any further dialogue being possible.
There is truth to this certainly, but there is also truth in the fact that severely misinformed people, especially as it relates to issues of power, as regards to who and how, are simply going to be ripe for being taken advantage of. And it doesn't have to be a Trump who will do this as virtually all of the winners for this high office, for the last three decades at least, have promised so much, and have actually delivered so little.
Another view of trying to engage misinformed folks comes from the work of sociologist Arlie Hochschild; especially with her book "Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger And Mourning on the American Right" (see here, and here) This was a work where she tried to take off the typical prejudices of a Liberal and engage some folks on a personal level. And in doing that one of this things she encountered was this "deep story" metaphorical view these folks had of what has been wrong with American life; a view seen as where good folks stand in a kind of line, working hard, waiting for their turn at the "American dream," but where minorities, and immigrants, seem to be getting preferential treatment and, in a sense, get to cut into the line ahead of them. She also encountered a very deep mistrust of government not only because of the seeming preferential treatment, but also because of their own experience of having state government let them down so often; particularly in handling the industrial pollution that was killing so many of them (in Louisiana), as well as not providing very well for education or other basic services.
What is interesting for me in this combined view of American life is how it expresses both an astonishing passivity towards accepting how things are around you (as if simply working hard at a job and keeping your mouth shut otherwise would give you what you wanted), but also an ignorance of how any group get's its grievances heard and addressed.
Minorities such as blacks were not given a cut into some imagined line for the injustice they suffered. They organized, protested, and generally shook the status quo up, often at great cost in life and limb in the process, to make their plight known and understood (as did the early efforts to organize labor did to eliminate sweatshops, child labor, and wages little better than slavery). Just as they also went to considerable lengths to educated themselves on just how things worked in practical terms, and how they could use that knowledge to better express their plight and make the system realize the rightness of it.
From my point of view it is hard to sympathise with people who don't understand that their state government doesn't work worth shit precisely because they have let the big petrochemical industries, the ones they think are doing them a favor in providing jobs, have their way in virtually owning that local government; so much so that they can pollute as they please; as well as to say that these same local governments have so little resource to accomplish anything because those same big companies get away with paying so little in taxes.
One then has to ask the question: What will follow when the truth of Mr. Trump's con becomes clear? You need only consider just how disillusioned liberals and Progressives were, given Obama's initial rhetoric and promises to make real change happen, and how little came of that, to see that these working class whites are in for a very rude awakening. Whereupon the follow up question must be asked. What will any of the groups involved here ask of themselves about what should be done; the whites, minorities, immigrants, the media, Liberals, Conservatives, or Progressives. Administration after administration and very little of what is at the bottom line of power is addressed. Very little of it can be talked about it at all precisely because message of any kind now gets drowned out within the mind numbing cacophony of hard sell for profit, or some advantage within the system that makes profit king.
The fact of the matter, in my view, is that the system we're all trying to talk in, as well as to change, has made all such efforts virtually impossible because (see here) of the structural realities now in place, as well as the ingrained power that comes from that structure. Unless we can begin to question all of the fundamental assumptions that keep that structure going we are doomed to keep on repeating this process of slickly packaged promise ending up with a great deal of buyer's remorse.
Shields and Brooks on a ‘political earthquake’ and how America can move forward
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