Lab rats work hours long and odd to bring up product. I'll be doing that next week if my first board design for my new job doesn't work perfectly. It probably will, of course, but there are other variables, such as software readiness, that aren't yet certain. Anyway, somewhere along the line, someone thought it would be a good idea to keep a few cabinets stocked with snack food, so people could stay focused on their validation scripts until two in the morning instead of get hungry and, you know, go home.
Facebook provides a very skewed and inaccurate means to monitor the public mood on public matters. Lately there's been a lot of OWS-type stuff. I keep quiet because though I'm obviously in the 99%, I don't think the occupiers have a clue, and I don't want political arguments with my legions of liberal-ish friends.
That's how I see it. Yes, it's ridiculous that the wealthy few who control the money are so much wealthier than the rest of us as compared to two or four or six decades ago. Yes, I've seen all sorts of studies illustrating how we are fucked unless we significantly increase taxation on the upper reaches (and I'm all for it, my concern only being the same as it ever was, that we not undermine incentives for domestic investment). But the occupiers in Manhattan have made their point. Many of the wannabe demonstrations elsewhere have little to no focus and like as not are making big messes nowhere near anyone resembling a real culprit. Where's the beef, and all that, right?
So I went into the lab to check a dimension and decided to look into the snack cabinet. Saw me some jerky and grabbed it. Opened the package. Took a bite.
Man, that shit was awful. Who made this crap? Who eats this crap? Hoping to make some point to do with large corporations, I tried to find out who owns Link Snacks Inc., but to no avail. Might be a family operation for all I know, and good for them. Companies like them aren't the bad guys. Companies like mine aren't, either, particularly.
Someone is, somewhere. Certain investment bankers, etc. I'm happy to see demonstrations, don't get me wrong. I know there are some things to fix, some practices that give capitalism a bad name. The system needs correcting, always has, probably always will. But the physical occupations, after a couple weeks they don't impress me much. Looks good, but unwrap 'em and take a bite, you'll see what I mean.
Wasn't that clever? Don't take me too seriously, now.
ADDENDUM
What helps me get all disrespectful is news such as that Occupy Sacramento is going to sue the city for denying them their 1st Amendment rights, by not letting them stay all night in Cesar Chavez Park. That is, in fact, now the focus: Getting to spend the night. Fucking ridic.
I am the 98%. The protestors are one half of the other 2%.
8 comments:
i c wut u did thar
I will relent and take issue with only one part of this, which is the remark about undermining incentives for domestic investment. What more incentive would they need if they cared at all? There are millions unemployed and they could invest here in the States and start employing people but they don't. And they won't.
Why do they need more incentives?
What these people don't understand is that the country that was the basis for their riches is crumbling around them. Perhaps they don't care because they can always go to China, until that economy, built on quickly, crashes.
There should be corporate tax breaks ONLY for those companies that invest at home and employ Americans. Otherwise, fuck the lot of them, sideways with a file.
Of course, the Republicans will block everything anyway, so I know that's only a pipe dream.
they don't. And they won't.
And why is that? What is their priority? Making money / not losing money, right? So what's wrong with for example a repatriation tax break? Or any other incentive so long as it demonstrably increases domestic payrolls?
A harder problem is the CEO salary thing. I don't know how you solve that and stay within the Constitution.
Not just the CEO thing. There are a pretty large number of people we pay because they are cute or can dunk a football.
I can dunk a donut but I haven't been able to get in on that.
Our friend George Poleczech wrote, over on my blog, "Lots of people think that *money is the root of all evil*; but that's not what the Bible teaches. Look it up. Jesus said The LOVE of money is the root of all evil. There are people on OWS committing that sin who don't have a dime and never will."
I hate litter and mess, but I am glad peeps are demonstrating. It is making the PTB nervous, which is good.
A repatriation tax break is OK with me, if they first demonstrate that they are bringing jobs back to this country.
"Incentives" for corporations just has an echo of "trickle down" economics which demonstrably didn't work. It also sounds a lot like "don't tax the rich because they are the job creators." If that's so, why, in this time of historically low tax rates for the wealthy, are jobs not being created.
We need to be very strict about corporate incentives, subsidies and so forth. They sold get nothing until they start hiring. The government shouldn't take them on faith anymore.
The government shouldn't be giving them shit, not a bail-out, not an incentive, not a subsidy, not a tax break. Nada, not now, not ever.
But that's hand-in-hand with the concept that the government doesn't get to take shit, either, at least nothing that's going as an unearned benefit to anyone else, including welfare, student loans, etc., etc., etc.
In other words, if it's not one of government's legitimate functions of (1) exercising the exclusive power of retaliatory force (police,) (2) resolving contract disputes (courts) and (3) defending the country against external threats of force (military,) it shouldn't be funded.
The death of us isn't going to be capitalism. Free market capitalism is our only hope, in fact.
It's going to be the type of mixed capitalism that we are presently suffering through that is heading toward complete state monopoly/state corporate capitalism (e.g., the old Soviet system.) Government should have zero, repeat ZERO input into the market, much less deciding which companies live or die, or be protected from competition or not.
In the present case, the Republicans are chiefly differentiated from the Democrats by being this ----><---- much further to the right on the deep left side of the economic scale. They are all bad for us. It's just that the Repubs are marginally less horrible, and having them in office gives us extra time - measured in a couple of years or less - before the wheels come off.
If we don't use it to begin to disengage government (it's going to take years) in a big way from practically everything it's presently dicking around in, (not least of which is the economy,) we're fucked. We are almost in too deep now to recover.
This attention too shall pass. You just have to wait for the next shiny bouncing "object" to come along.
Change is long, messy, and illogical. And fixing stuff: art, not just science.
How does David get and keep Goliath's attention, much less make him nervous enough to consider doing something to get the pesky little bugger off his back?
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