stay at home naked sniffing farts and eating bacon
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Well, it finally happened. They finally gave Dahir the axe.
It was inevitable, i guess. The last day he worked was perfectly normal. There was no last straw or any sort of drama. Someone he never met in some office somewhere called him up, and told him to go to the local office because, yeah, you’re no longer working there, we might have another position for you, or maybe not. Okay, thanks. The Oaf and i have been warning him for a year, that’s what was going to happen if he kept missing shifts, being late all the time, and not having his credentials straight when the supervisors come knocking.
I know i was talking shit about him recently, but i’m still sad he’s gone. Muna’s leaving on her African voyage tomorrow, and she might be back in a month, or not. So i’m facing months of annoyance, uncertainty, and at worst, a threat to my ongoing photoshoppery. God, i hate these times. The Oaf found a second job, and won’t be working any more overtime there. Milliken quit a few weeks ago. Old Man Clymer is gone. I look around and think, fuck, why am i still here? Because i have no idea what else to do with my life.
And always, always, i think back to the early days, the golden age of late 2008 and most of 2009, when everything was perfect.
Poor Dahir. He called me up the other day, spinning the same old defensive crap. Oh, it was a conspiracy, they were out to get me, i didn’t do anything wrong, it was all their fault. I wish i could slap the shit out of him through the phone. Now i’ll be working with someone worse, and he’ll be trying to find a new job that won’t be as laid-back as this one, because this is the most laid-back job ever. All because of his pissy attitude. Because he’s like Tupac, he doesn’t sell out, soft nigga!
I told Lewis about his departure, and he immediately requested to transfer over here from good old KRH. It’s unlikely, but that would be totally radical. Lewis and i can hang.
Why am i here.
Why am i here.
What happens next.
When.
How much longer.
I hope Muna comes back.
I hope Lewis gets Dahir’s spot.
I hope everything looks better by Labor Day.
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Maybe i see things too negatively. Is it just me? I should just stop reading news articles and listening to the anecdotes of every single person in real life and on the internet. It’s nothing but bad news. It’s starting to seem that no matter what path or occupation you pick, there’s some horrible downside and a hundred people telling you why it would be a bad move…
…office and factory work? Good luck competing against the unemployed people with 20 years of experience. Grad school? Here’s why that’s an overpriced nightmare. Join the army? Look at the horrible things veterans go through. Programming? Outsourced to India. FX artist or animator? Only if you have parents that will let you live with them in Burbank. Get an internship? Work for nothing and then be shown the door.
As far as i can tell from listening to people, the only good jobs these days are medical transcriptionist, hedge fund manager, and being an oil worker in that part of North Dakota that’s going through boom times.
I’m probably way off here.
But then, damn, the first thing i see when i go to Metafilter is this article…
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The Middle Classes Are In Freefall
As Jaron Lanier points out, Kodak once provided 140,000 middle class jobs, and in the smouldering ruins of that companys bankruptcy we have Instagram, with 13 employees. Its an extreme example, in most cases the economic misery is largely confined to young people, with entry-level workers trapped in a cycle of internships, ever-lengthening education, and debt. The result is that young people are not being allowed to grow up. In the 1960s the average first-time house buyer was 24 years old, and as late as 2002 it was 28. The average is now 37. The path to economic selfhood is being stretched by market forces, too many people chasing too few jobs, and a continuation of the status quo is likely to push that lifeboat out even further.
In stripping out inefficiencies and pushing digital goods to near-free prices, the Internet kills middle-class jobs. Digitization has already largely de-monetized academia, film, music, journalism, and lots more besides. More industries will feel the pain, including the legal professions, real estate, insurance, accounting, and the civil service, all of which are built on inefficiency, and all of which will be stripped of jobs in the years to come. As it becomes clear to those with established positions that there are no jobs for their children, theyll push for a more radical solution.
To put this in econometric terms, wages as a share of the economy have been in long term decline and recently hit a new low in the United States. Meanwhile corporate profit margins have hit an all time high. The last few years of economic turmoil has allowed industry to reduce staff numbers and reduce entry-level pay, without reducing capacity. If that trend continues, wealth creation will increasingly be confined to those with capital, and things start to follow a Marxist logic. The middle classes (and their elected representatives) will not let that happen.
2 Demand For Human Labour Is In Long Term Decline
Imagine a point in the future when robots do more of our physical labour, computers do more of our mental labour, and our mechanized-digitized economy is ten times more efficient. We dont need to agree on a date, this could be 2050 or it could be 2500, all we need to agree on is that current trends are likely to continue in the same direction. Between now and then two things can happen, either we do 90% less work, or we demand ten times more goods and services, or a bit of both. The first option requires that we drastically revise downwards our expectations of how much work people do, the second requires that we drastically redistribute purchasing power to consumers.
Weve redefined work in the past, so theres no reason we cant do it again. The concept of a job as something that happens outside the home and for someone else is a largely Victorian creation. Even after it was formalized into an obligation to the market economy, we always accepted that certain people do not have to work. We do not expect infants, the elderly, or the disabled to work, and these categories are relatively fluid. The expectation that children work inside and outside the home has been in steady decline ever since the industrial revolution, while the default retirement age has crept ever later, pushed by governments avoiding a pension crisis and senior employees hanging on to their established social roles. While men were forced out of the home to do paid work, women were kept in the family home to do unpaid work. During the world wars, everyone was expected to work. During a world cup final, almost nobody is expected to work. We regularly change our expectations of who works and how. Forcing the unemployed onto a jobless market on the basis that everybody has to work is at best misguided and at worst cruel.
In 2012 the average working year in South Korea was 2,226 hours, and in the Netherlands it was 1,381 hours, 38% less. You can have a rich, developed economy on relatively little work. If we stop stigmatizing the non-employed, we can stop pushing people into jobs that offer little collective benefit. From telemarketers to chuggers to sign holders to beggars, huge numbers of people are forced to eek out an existence on the fringes of the economy in roles that have almost no marginal economic output.
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….it’s always like that. I just never hear any good stories. Remember all those times you read that one of your heroes just sort of lucked into a lifetime of achievement? How they started at Rolling Stone magazine as a lowly carbon-paper boy and in a few years they were a successful writer and hanging with Led Zeppelin? How they were delivering a pizza to some tech startup people, and they started talking about video games and ten years later they’re designing Warcraft?
Do things like that still happen?
I don’t want to start thinking like my brother. My brother is more pragmatic than i am, and doesn’t look beyond this place. He thinks that seeking any sort of creative job is utterly futile, because nobody has those jobs, because none of his redneck buddies ever heard of anyone doing that. Don’t get ideas above your station, boy.
I’m working an easy night job and drawing freelance art all the time. I don’t drink or gamble or waste a single moment of each day. But he acts as if this, what i’m doing, is the moral equivalent of being a welfare case or a drug addict. It’s shameful, just shameful, not working some miserable job for $16.00/hour.
My brother has that mindset that…. like, that you get to a point in life where you win and everything is settled. Once you have the house, the wife, and the job, then everything halts and you’re finally happy. And while i’m not a sage, i’m pretty sure life doesn’t work that way. Sometimes i’ll jokingly complain about the wacky and lazy people i work with, and he says that it’s my fault for having a shit job, and if i just chose to have a good job, i’d never have to deal with anything bad ever again!
What the fuck. It doesn’t matter who you are, you could be the President or Steve Jobs or fucking Jay-Z, and at the end of the day, you’re still going to want to come home and bitch about the people who tick you off.
It doesn’t end. No one wins. Life is life.
Sigh.
I know i’ve said this all before. But it’s ongoing.
Maybe this is why people unfriend me, because i sound like a sadsack and a broken record. It’s possible.
I CAN FEEL ST. ELMO’S FIRE BURNING IN MEEEEEEE.
^___^
Is there anything else?
Not really.
I’m typing this at work, which is unusual. The sun just came up, and as always, i miss the night.
Mmmm, so hungry. Time for some salmon-and-onion patties with rice and sprouts.