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    Friday, January 8th, 2010
    deusdiabolus
         		2:31a
    Thursday, January 7th, 2010
    pomo_village 9:26p
    Hiring for a Constancy of Purpose

    http://blog.postmodernvillage.com/archives/2010/01/08/445

    Since it doesn’t look like my beloved Wichita Eagle is going to publish my editorial along these lines, I take to the neo-pamphleteering that is the Internet.

    Few media commentators have even hinted at the fact that our recent economic troubles are the result of 30 years of decision-making at the corporate level. We didn’t really get into this mess because of the corrupt bankers on Wall Street; rather, their bad behavior was dangerous precisely because the “fundamentals” of our economy are, contrary to what this president and his predecessor have said, pretty seriously messed up.

    The bad blood between management and labor is over a century old, of course, but suffice it to say that corruption in organized labor in the ’60s and ’70s made workers pretty ripe for managerial revenge. This took the form not just of anti-labor legislation under Reagan, but of what we used to call outsourcing, an idea that now goes under the more gussied-up moniker of globalization. It was like the weather, they said, an inevitability, they said: they being market analysts and investment bankers, CEOs and centrist and right-wing politicians, in other words, exactly those people who were likely to see a bump in the prices of their stocks and the near-term profitability of their companies if they got rid of their single biggest expense: the workforce.

    And so it went. American companies dismantled their factories, shipped jobs off to Mexico first, then to China. The investment-class, bankers, and corporate types engorged themselves on the imagined wealth of very really rising stock values. But the market is a story we tell ourselves about value; GE was worth more when it fired workers in the US because the analysts said so, and the analysts believed it to be so because they were paid to believe. They acted as our shamans and we worshiped at their Manolo Blahniks, content in the certainty that we would soon enter a Golden Age of the high-tech “information society” where we’d all be “information” workers.

    Sadly, as the Internet geared up, we found that it made information rather cheap, and so information work wasn’t really going to pay off all that well. But at least we could enter the “service” sector, which did turn out to be high-tech after all: we could sell Chinese-made high-tech goods at Best Buy. Part time. At a fraction of what we used to get paid for unionized factory work.

    Fortunately, Alan Greenspan was around. Nobody understood what he said (think high priest instead of shaman), but he kept credit cheap and that’s what counted. We might not be able to pay it off in a reasonable lifetime, but we sure could rack up the debt, buying all those Chinese-made high-tech wondertools we love so well. Thus our manufacturing economy was turned, over the course of a few short decades, into one that relied for 70% of its value on consumer spending.

    Are we Americans idiots with our money? Sure. But at least when we had real jobs paying genuine wages we could afford to be idiots. The supposed “best and brightest” on Wall Street turned out not to be much smarter than Average Joe: they figured out that with easy credit and all the money that was diverted from defined benefits programs into 410ks, they could leverage huge amounts of money for very risky investments that promised massive returns. And the rest is recent enough history that I need not repeat it here.

    The problem isn’t that these people gambled away all our cash. The problem is that we have nothing with which to replace it but more gambling. We have long since sold all the tools we used to have to actually make things. We are like a carpenter who sold his plane and chisel and saw and blew the proceeds on a trip to the casino. If you are wondering why the “recovery” has been jobless, just think of this man. The Wall Street bailout began by Bush and continued by Obama has simply been like a rich uncle borrowing money from the mob (in this case our biggest creditor, the Chinese) to give to our gambling-addicted carpenter so he can head back to the craps table.

    Gutting America’s manufacturing base wasn’t the weather; it was the result of conscious decisions on the part of some very wealthy and powerful people. It was stupid because the American worker and the American consumer are the same person. The rich got their revenge on labor. But they also their comeuppance and had to be rescued.

    We need not bring back organized labor to solve this problem. If unions disturb you, then forget about them. There’s a much simpler solution, and none other than Henry Ford understood the fundamentals of it. Ford was no friend of labor, but he did realize that if you want a customer base for your new product–the Model T, in his case—the best way to get one was to build one. So he paid his workers $5 a day, enough to able to afford a Model T on the installment plan.

    We need to do something similar but on a national scale. I propose a relatively simple piece of legislation: make it law that if you want to sell a product in the United States you must employ a number of Americans proportionate to your sales. They wouldn’t have to be manufacturing workers; they could be designers or engineers, salespeople or repairmen, but they must be Americans. This law would pertain to both US and foreign companies. No one doing substantial business here would be off the hook: if you want to sell here, you must hire here, period.

    Obviously, very small and boutique producers would be exceptions. A guy building custom kayaks in his garage in Finland need not hire any Americans if he wants to sell a few here. But then, he’ll be no threat to the Coleman company’s canoe business.

    Naturally, fiscal conservatives will howl that this is a protectionist measure, government interference in the natural workings of the market, a dangerous manipulation, and so and so forth. But then, wasn’t all the union-busting of the ’80s at the behest of the corporate classes government interference? Wasn’t the creation of a massive and risky market in derivatives a manipulation? Wasn’t all that packaging of “globalization” and the “information society” to a desperate workforce manipulation? Isn’t even the idea that the investors are “job creators” when they are busy outsourcing and downsizing and laying off also a manipulation?

    More to the point, the free-market fundamentalists have had thirty years to prove their case, that letting them run the economy will lead to unprecedented wealth for all Americans. They have failed to make that argument work in the real world.

    Is it protectionist? That I freely allow. But it is no more protectionist than what the Chinese do when they insist that they won’t buy Boeing’s 787 unless a certain portion of the plane is made in China. Since it has become fashionable to hold the Chinese up as paragons of the virtues of globalization, let’s at least be on par with them in terms of protecting what we worked so hard after World War Two to achieve.

    A more damning counter-argument is that my proposal would push American companies offshore permanently, that they would just set up shop in Dubai or Hong Kong for good. If they are really that disloyal, let them go. Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s former company, already has. Arguably, the real money to be made isn’t in the US anymore but in emerging economies like China and India. Perhaps so. But those economies still rely on ours as the place to sell all the junk we used to make. The Chinese hold so much of our debt not just because they want a certain amount of geopolitical leverage with us but also to shore up their own most lucrative market.

    Besides, the parsimony that follows centuries of hardship isn’t going to be wiped out overnight. Asians are savers in ways we haven’t been since the wake of The Great Depression. The Chinese and other Asian people are also infused with Confucian values that honor prudence and fiscal restraint. Even tried-and-true Madison Avenue tactics won’t make these emerging market buyers go into debt to buy the latest consumer goods the way Americans already do. By making companies that sell here hire here, we would, like Ford, effectively be underwriting a line of credit to the American people, one we work and produce for and that’s based on something real, not one floated on a credit card application and a prayer to High Priest Greenspan.

    But it would have an ancillary effect: low-risk investors and banks could reserve some of their money for businesses that would have a solid customer base and that actually made things. They would not feel forced into derivatives and collateralized debt obligations in order to keep up with the market or hedge against its uncertainties. And then perhaps those of us who actually save our money might be rewarded for it instead of being punished with interest rates below the rate of inflation.

    Rather than being a radical law, this one would create a foundation for those values that conservatives claim to hold dear: hard work, personal initiative, prudence, patriotism. These values are only meaningful if they are allowed to flourish, if we can create a system in which they are rewarded rather than punished, in which they are not ridiculed as the follies of the overly-cautious but as the best practices of the economically wise.

    news
    [ theljstaff ]
         		1:10p
    State of the Goat 2009

    It's been a momentous 12 months here at LiveJournal. We crossed a capital T at Ten years young. And, like most precocious pubescents, we celebrated turning double digits by publishing our first book! Needless to say, we've experienced some major changes, both inside and out. Before we recap, we'd like to thank you for bearing with us as we've struggled through ungainly growth spurts, identity pangs, and, yes, the occasional blemish. We hope you'll continue to stand by us: We're gaining wisdom with maturity.

    Stuff you liked

    • Back in February, we placed a call for entries for our ten-year anniversary anthology in [info]lj_turns10. In December (less than a year later!), we officially announced the publication of Live Journal: The First Decade. Featuring an inspired collection of writing, photographs, and artwork from the pages of LiveJournal history, the book has been selected by Blurb.com as a top staff pick! We are proud to have played host to so much talent over the years, and we thank our contributors for sharing their extraordinary work.
    • We all love quirky surprises, but not when it comes to managing our account settings. This year we streamlined settings into one central account management area. No more pouring through FAQs to figure out how to control privacy settings, modify notifications, adjust mobile settings, or update contact information!
    • Being users ourselves, we realize our own mothers couldn't find us on LiveJournal based on our usernames and userpics alone (*heaves heavy sigh of relief*). But since there are times when we actually want to be found, we created a search tool--Find Your Friends--to help locate people by email address (it's in the Friends drop-down menu).
    • Spam counter-attack: The war against vicious malware and spambots reigns eternal, but we've been making serious inroads to ensure your online security. We've established new protocols, such as requiring email address validations. We've grown more savvy about ferreting out suspicious behavior. We've added features, like whitelisting, to help you protect your communities. Our valiant (i.e., overworked) spam avengers (a/k/a the LiveJournal ops team) are standing on red alert so you can sleep safely at night.
    • After an intensive beta, we launched My Guests at the end of the year, which lets you see who's been hanging around your journal. A number of you have even discovered secret admirers (not all of whom are creepy)!
    • Last, but by no means least, we want to thank our volunteers for providing invaluable support and feedback. Their Herculean efforts enable us to answer your questions more efficiently, identify spammers, reduce abuse, and deliver better features (through tireless testing). On behalf of the staff and the larger LiveJournal community, we are truly grateful for their diligence, intelligence, loyalty, and passion.

    You got your fix

    • We recently debugged a number of the oustanding issues with the rich text editor so your entries look great regardless of whether you know html. You can read more about text editors here.
    • In response to user demand, we brought back international voice posting. For more info on voice posting, read here.
    • At long last, we revived TxtLJ with Verizon. For more info on TxtLJ, check out the FAQ.

    Paid features you enjoyed

    • In December, we introduced My Stats, which provides detailed data on who's been viewing your entries as well as statistics on commenting, RSS requests, friending history, and more. Despite a few early glitches, the response has been extremely favorable.
    • This year, we launched and improved Notes (i.e., the feature formerly known as Alias), which lets you add private comments on friends and commenters (it's in the Profile drop-down menu). This way you won't be caught red-faced when you strain to remember details about that wonderful LiveJournal friend who sent you a birthday vGift. For more info, read the FAQ.
    • When we first announced View friends pages by date, we thought it would be a quiet, minor enhancement. The rave reaction floored us, which made us all very happy. We gave it a fine tuning in February of 2009, so it's even better!
    • How embarrassing! It appears pingbacks have gone back to the shop for service. We’ll keep you posted. We didn't know just much you liked pingbacks until it went in for service. It's back and, judging by your irritation when it wasn't available, this is good news. FYI, pingbacks send instant notifications (via screened comments) whenever someone links to one of your entries on LiveJournal. For more info, read this entry in [info]paidmembers or check out the FAQ.

    Mixed reviews

    • The search is still on. Some of you have reported getting more comprehensive results for keyword searches using the new Yandex search engine and like the ability to search within content categories (like entries or comments). Others have not been satisfied with the relevancy of search results. Please be patient. We're still tweaking this product.
    • This past December, we wanted to try out a new holiday promotion. Given the crap economy, we decided to offer our Paid/Permanent users a stack of $10 coupons to send to Basic/Plus users for paid account upgrades. We hoped you would like it. And some of you did, but many were disappointed that we didn't offer Give More as well. We want to thank you so much for letting us know. Your input will help us plan better in the future. Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users can continue to send out coupons through January 15th. Coupons can be redeemed through January 31, 2010.
    • We were pretty excited about Your Journal Your Money, which allows Paid/Permanent users to earn extra cash by displaying Google ads to Basic/Plus and logged out users. A number of you tried it. Some of you really like it. Others, not so much. (Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users who do not participate in this program will not view ads on journals. Participants will see ads on their own journal, but won't see them on other journals unless they specifically opt in.) For additional details, visit here.
    • We relaunched m.livejournal.com, our mobile app. While it offers a nicer UI and enhanced functionality, some of you think we can do better on load times. Like most of us, it's a work in progress. You can customize your mobile settings here. For more info, please read the FAQ.

    Missing Inaction

    • We shudder to bring up the neon purple elephant squatting on our heads, but, yes, we didn't give you those a la carte userpics. We've been making radical improvements to our backend in order to support them. But no excuses. We know you want them. We cringe every time you mention them. We're sorry we dropped the ball on this, and we promise to do our best to get them to you in 2010.

    Stumbling points

    • Back in early August, we experienced outages related to a series of DDoS attacks. We are proud to report that we were down a total of one hour over the course of a few days. We thank our heroic ops guys for getting us up sooner and more consistently than any of our less fortunate social networking friends. We apologize for leaving you temporarily stranded.
    • A couple of months back, we offered a free, unrestricted vGift, which induced a snowflake cookie avalanche. This resulted in backed up/delayed notifications, which, in turn, led us to reboot systems, rendering scrapbooks unavailable. It took a while to shovel free. Apologies for the inconvenience. We learned a valuable lesson that should keep us calamity-free in the future (fingers crossed while knocking on wood).
    • That darn Best Buy ad. First off, we're sorry about the audio auto-play (we got it turned off as quickly as possible). While it's true that we'll continue to show this type of ad to accounts that normally see them (never to Paid/Permanent accounts), we'll make sure the sound defaults to off moving forward. We promise to do our very best to keep ads to a minimum on LiveJournal, while keeping a roof over Frank's head.

    Full steam ahead!

    As we plunge headfirst into the next decade, we want to take a moment to look back and thank all of our employees, both past and present, who have worked so hard to create our unique and magical universe. We couldn't have made it this far without you: Your contributions brighten our path everyday. We also want to extend our heartfelt appreciation to each and every one of you. Whether you've been around for ten days or ten years, your humor, intelligence, talent, and creativity are what makes this the most vibrant global community on the Internet (the best place on the Web, in our humble opinion). Here's hoping that 2010 will be the greatest year yet! We thank you for joining us as we embark upon another glorious decade of LiveJournal history!

    ammutbite
         		1:30p
    ammutbite
         		9:10a
    deusdiabolus
         		3:42a
    Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
    deusdiabolus
         		4:12p
    Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
    deusdiabolus
         		8:56a
    deusdiabolus
         		8:53a
    Monday, January 4th, 2010
    bigbrother2084
         		7:37p
    Well, I've never been with such a negative person... this is turning into a third job. This weather is making everybody negative though. Dare I say?
    drownedinink
         		4:24p
    ammutbite
         		4:10p
    deusdiabolus
         		1:12p
    pomo_village 5:07p
    The Fool’s Errand of the Security State

    http://blog.postmodernvillage.com/archives/2010/01/04/437

    The Christmas attempt to take down an American airliner and the following and predictable obsession with security is simply another reminder of how far we are from “defeating” the terrorists.

    More pat-downs and high-tech scanners won’t do a thing; as long as there are sufficient numbers of people who are upset with Western foreign policy, a few of them will be motivated to randomly kill Westerners.

    So here’s an idea: stop doing things that piss off the terrorists.

    Of course, it’s not as simple as it sounds, but neither is building an ever-more invasive security regime. The difference between the two is that the former works and the latter does not.

    And if anyone seriously believes that this would be somehow “coddling” terrorists or “negotiating” with them, consider that the terrorists may actually have a legitimate beef with us. That they choose an illegitimate means to redress their grievances is immaterial to their claims.

    We know this process works because the British used it successfully to disarm the IRA. Granted, it took them a century of “troubles” to figure this out, but the violence in Northern Ireland has considerably declined since the Brits started listening to and taking seriously Sinn Fein’s complaints.

    By not listening to the Afghans, Saudis, Yemenis, Pakistanis and so forth who are angry at us, we merely prove their case: that we don’t view them as fully human, as enough like us to have genuine thoughts and feelings. Thus we doom ourselves to another forty years or more of terrorism.

    Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
    deusdiabolus
         		5:08p
    deusdiabolus
         		2:59p
    deusdiabolus
         		2:44p
    deusdiabolus
         		12:22a
    deusdiabolus
         		12:04a
    Saturday, January 2nd, 2010
    ammutbite
         		3:24p
    Thursday, December 31st, 2009
    ammutbite
         		1:48a
    Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
    bigbrother2084
         		4:07p
    drownedinink
         		2:15a
    i watch movies
     So I've been spending my holiday vacation trying to live life like tomorrow may be my last day, wandering aimlessly in the wilderness, meeting new people from so many different walks of life, finding the miraculous within the mundane...aw, just kidding, I've been spending a lot of time just watching movies! Here are just the ones I want to comment on:

    Halloween II (Remake) - I really need to just stop watching Rob Zombie movies, because they never fail to frustrate me to my breaking point. It's not because they're awful, but because Rob has such a fantastic eye for visuals and an encyclopedic knowledge of pre-1980 trash cinema, but somehow he keeps missing the je ne sais quoi of what makes gory slashers and the like work on the most fundamental level. For someone who obviously has a love for off-Hollywood horror films of the '60s and '70s, his films seem to have more in common with the most recent generation of slashers, with their deliberately disposable asshole characters and emphasis on shocks over atmosphere, than with the type of classics and klassics he constantly reveres.

    But it is true that Malcolm McDowell and his interpretation of Dr. Loomis does go a long way toward salvaging the film.

    Coraline - I finally got around to seeing this and, while I expected I'd enjoy it on some level, I honestly think I'd declare this a classic. The one element that impressed me right off the bat is how it's such a rare thing to have a movie with a child protagonist that comes across as authentic. I've seen reviewers comment on how hard it is find Hollywood movies with child protagonists who actually swear and the like after the mid-'80s, and I think it's almost as hard to find cinematic kids who are allowed to be smart and kind of bratty. Besides that, I thought it was one of the better films with computer animation that I've seen this side of Pixar and that it avoided the pitfalls of trying to be "goth-cute." Above all it just seemed to have that perfect synthesis of visuals and story.

    Up - Again, visuals, story, beautifully combined. And, yes, there were at least two scenes that made me tear up.

    Whatever Works - I'm not much of a fan of Woody Allen, not because I don't enjoy or appreciate his films but because for whatever reason I just never felt compelled to immerse myself in his works. But I was really curious to see a Woody Allen movie starring Larry David and to see if it is possible for someone who grew up in rural Virginia to die from a New York Jew overdose. Well, I survived, and it was really interesting to watch, since it was basically a light comedy for Huffington Post readers. Without giving too much away, it's a complete inversion of the old Hollywood "effete urban liberals are changed for the better when exposed to authentic small town/rural values", and as such it works pretty well. And it works because the film never lets David's character not be at least a little ridiculous. Maybe people used to Allen's famous classics will be disappointed, but it was a unique, fun little film (especially if you do have the Huffington Post as a bookmark on your web browser, but even if you, like me, once in a while feel like a hick trying to break into Bohemia).

    Theater of Blood - Okay, if you like Vincent Price at all, you must see this film. It's basically The Abominable Doctor Phibes, this time with Price playing a vengeful actor who kills theater critics in ways echoing murder scenes from Shakespeare's plays. And, in my opinion, it is exactly as much fun as it sounds. Honestly this should have somehow been the sequel to Dr. Phibes instead of the lackluster Dr. Phibes Rises Again.
    Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
    deusdiabolus
         		11:49p
    drownedinink
         		6:49p
    our crappy decade
     Wonkette presents the Top 100 Things of this Rotten Decade. My own favorites:

    #98: Joe Lieberman never got to be Vice President.

    #94: Sarah Palin didn’t get to be vice president, and had to “give back” all those fancy clothes.

    #82: Even though it’s probably Too Late, all kinds of Hippie-Earth-Lover stuff like solar and wind power, pesticide-free food and casual lesbianism became Mainstream.

    #77: No matter what stupid embarrassing fad you briefly embraced in decades past, it “came back into style” during the ’00s, so you don’t have to feel so fucking stupid anymore, because look at that asshole ….

    #75: Ron Paul.

    #74: The Ron Paul Blimp.

    #73: Tea Party, Teabaggers, etc.

    #71: There is basically video of whatever you think of, on the YouTube or one of its pornographic equivalents.

    66: Michael Chertoff didn’t get a chance to kill you and eat your heart.
    [ << Previous 25 ]
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