Taught my class. While I didn't care for this group, I did receive some thank yous and compliments on the way out. Made it worth my time. Still don't like them. Left the client around 4 and got to the hotel at 5. 13 miles. One hour. Fuck this traffic.
Got my stuff together, ate my leftover food, and finished watching Westworld. REALLY enjoyed it. Can't wait for season 2. I realized they drop a lot of hints about things if you are paying attention. Really well done.
I forgot to post this yesterday but felt it was still important enough to write down and share. You're welcome to comment on it or share it as you'd like.
I am getting so tired of these people complaining about people “stealing jobs”. Especially when those people are unskilled, uneducated, self described “working class folks”. Let’s look at two scenarios; first we have the manual labor aspect and low-paying jobs. The farm hands, the day laborers, the fast food worker, the cashier at the grocery store - all of these are the typical type of employment we expect to see go to someone who doesn’t have a great deal of skills but can be taught to perform a task. These are the jobs that are supposedly being ‘stolen’ according to [white] Americans. Okay. Maybe. The real question is would you do this job? Would you do it for the pay being offered? For the conditions being presented? Would you work in the field for 9-10 hours a day for $5 an hour? Resoundingly the answer will be no. You want healthcare. You want breaks and lunches. You want a ‘fair’ wage. Well, if the corporations do that, then the cost of goods will increase in part. Not greatly. I won’t take the side of companies. I think most of them are soul stealing entities led by evil beings from another planet. I mean, there can’t be any other explanation for their behavior. They have to be part of an alien race bent on enslaving the human race. No decent human being would treat another the way they do, right?
All joking aside, this is the root of the issue - company greed. The company seeks to maximize profits for themselves and their shareholders. That is the job of a company. No matter how altruistic we want to be, this is their job. Make money. What gets lost in translation is they hear Make Money at All Costs and Damn the Consequences. That’s another thing entirely. But that’s their mission statement and their goal. To achieve that goal, they cut corners. They hire undocumented workers. They relax safety regulations. They roll back laws designed to protect the aforementioned ‘working class’. And part of that is hiring someone who has ‘stolen’ your job. Now what to do? “There’s no work!! I can’t find a job!” you lament. Au contraire. The problem is you. Not the job market. And 25 CEOs of manufacturing companies flat out told lord dampnut this to his face the other day. The straight up said we have jobs. WE NEED PEOPLE. But the catch is we need people with skills. We have plenty of jobs in manufacturing. For people who are up to date. For people who aren’t afraid of technology. They need younger workers with at least some community college education. They need people who can take direction, who have up to date skill sets, who aren’t going to die tomorrow. The sixty year old steel mill worker is the problem. Not the industry. Not the company. The stubborn I refuse to learn anything new worker is at fault in this situation. Want a job? Open a fucking book. Learn to use a computer for something more than spamming everyone with the evils of how Obama wants you to have a death panel. Grow the fuck up and move forward. Because until you do? No, there aren’t any jobs for you. Sorry. Unless you are willing to do one of two things; either fight back and force companies to not get away with the shit I talked about before (work conditions, pay conditions, et al) or apply for that job the undocumented worker “stole” from you and do it the same way they do. Those are your two choices. There is no middle ground. Okay, three choices - educate, fight, succumb.
If we want to talk about a real immigration problem, let’s talk about what happens in the technical, bio-technical, electronic, and similar fields. Here we do have a situation where people are ‘stealing’ jobs if you will. No one talks about it because its not about people crossing deserts. These people fly in on regular flights, land in airports, show some papers, and get jobs. I am talking about the overuse of H1-B visas. These are way too prevalent in our society and modern industries. Thousands of jobs could in fact be filled by American workers. College educated, intelligent, hard working people. Instead they go to people from India, China, Eastern Europe. Why? Same as the other ones - company greed. It’s cheaper to higher 10 Indian workers as contractors, not give them health insurance, and kick them to the curb when a project is done versus keeping an employee, training them, giving them a decent set of benefits, and creating a pleasant work environment. I see this every day. It’s such a short-sighted mentality. You might have met the immediate goal, but at what long term cost? One of my main clients deals with this on a constant basis. Every time I go to work on a new piece of their infrastructure I ask “who built this?” and the answer is always the same - some contractor 10 years ago. Are they still here he asks already knowing the answer. Of course not.
In both situations, who’s really to blame? The worker? No. Regardless of status, education and the like, the onus overall is not always the burden of the worker. Because it all comes down to the damn corporations. We are the United Corporate States of Capitalistic America. In short “Greed is Good”. As long as we accept this as our pledge of allegiance, there is no hope. There is no change. We sign NDAs and accept terms of use without reading them. We let flashlight applications access our contacts and emails so the data can be scraped and sold. Don’t believe me? Go look at the advanced permissions of every application on your phone. I would bet confidently that at least 60% are accessing things they have no need or right to access. But you allowed it. You let them when you agreed to their terms of service. Why did I leave Facebook and Instagram? In part because of this. There was no reason why these applications were scraping as much of my data as they were. I read this morning there’s an issue cropping up in the sex worker trade - Facebook is using the phone GPS to identify when someone is in close range of another FB user and suggesting them as friends. Meaning your John now knows your real name, your friends, your interests, your address in some cases because an app decided your privacy wasn’t worth anything.
Why do they do it? Money. Always about fucking money. More money. More money than you can spend in a lifetime. More money for you to hoard. More money to withhold from the peons whose backs you broke to get it. Need more data to sell you more product to make more money. Have you ever imagined how the world would be if we never left the barter system? If instead of creating this fake monetary system we placed value on real commodity of labor and accomplishment? Hey, I wrote this book and you can have it if you fix my fence. I can fix your car if you can show me how to cook this meal. People would earn what they have. Not steal it. Not lie for it. Not cheat for it. Not destroy lives for it. Would we have all the innovation and same things that allow me to be typing this right now? I don’t know. I also don’t know if that’s not such a bad thing either. Instead of invention and creation for the sole purpose of monetizing it, maybe, just maybe, we would have products and services whose purpose was truly the benefit and growth of the human race. Ask Tesla how that worked out. Ask Tucker. We squash and kill that which we don’t understand. A 10% increase in defense spending is being proposed. 54 BILLION dollars. Let that sink in. 54 billion. What could that money do for healthcare? Education? Training the workers back up in paragraph one? No, we want to rape and pillage human benefit programs like the EPA to create bombs. This is why a 70 year old man, a 70 year old angry racist misogynistic, homo/transphobic, xenophobe, should not be leading this country. Because him and the ones like him know the best way to money is war. War is profit. War is good for bank accounts. Not so good for the people. Ask the people of Alepo. Oh wait. You can’t. They’re dead. Yeah, war is great - for business.
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