Category: Sociology

Oh, It’s Worldcon Tomorrow, and I Am Not There

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This fact makes me smile.

It only took me 20 years, but I realized that I don’t like Science Fiction conventions.

This fact probably explains the massive benders that I used to have at said conventions.

I enjoyed running them, but was never into the convention scene.

As to running them, never again.  It was way too destructive to my life.

There were some good bits, hearing Harry “Hal Clement” Stubbs talk about being a thousand meters away from a nuclear blast was a hoot.

I miss Harry, he knew his sh%$, and he didn’t back down on it, but he was remarkably gentle when he told you that you did not know what you were talking about.

People With Way Too Much Free Time…

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Perusing what Uncle Ted called “a series of tubes,” I came across Think Tank: The Economics of Death Star Planet Destruction:

Lee
What’s the economic calculus behind the Empire’s tactic of A) building a Death Star, B) intimidating planets into submission with the threat of destruction, and C) actually carrying through with said destruction if the planet doesn’t comply?

Doesn’t the Empire take a huge economic loss from the lost productivity of an entire planet? They were presumably paying taxes and providing resources to the rest of the Empire. Presumably the loss of that planet’s output would have to be made up by increased output from other planets that were either slacking in productivity due to rebellion or threatening to rebel and withdraw from the Empire altogether. It doesn’t seem to make good economic sense.

McNeil
This is a pretty standard imperial tactic for dealing with rebellion. The Romans would do this in the eastern empire every once in a while. A city would become a hotbed of rebellion, threatening to pull other cities into the action. The Romans would wipe out that one city, no matter how wealthy (Palmyra comes to mind) to put any other potential rebels on notice. Kind of like a mastectomy. You lose one productive part of the body in order to keep cancer from spreading.

…………

Lee and Mcneil, along with Perich, Fenzel and Stokes (read the whole thing provide an interesting dialogue on economics and governance that is (I think) unintentionally a rather trenchant analysis of the current American imperial hubris.

Just read it.

Least Surprising News of the Year

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After a few years of being treated like crap by their employers because we have been our worst recession since the great depression, now that there is a perception that things are looking up, employees are looking to ditch their current employers:

Employers watch out: Your workers can’t wait to quit.

According to a recent survey by job-placement firm Manpower, 84% of employees plan to look for a new position in 2011. That’s up from just 60% last year.

Most employees have sat tight through the recession, not even considering other jobs because so few firms were hiring. For the past few years, the Labor Department’s quits rate, which serves as a barometer of workers’ ability to change jobs, has hovered near an all-time low.

But after years of increased work and frozen compensation, “a lot of people will be looking because they’re disappointed with their current jobs,” said Paul Bernard, a veteran executive coach and career management advisor who runs his own firm.

As I’ve said before, people have never been too fond of their bosses, but after years of cheap labor economics and employers using loyalty as a resource to be strip mined, they hate their employers too.

If healthcare reform ever really works, one of the things that will happen is that there will no longer be the threat of losing one’s insurance to keep employees from looking, and at that point, it’s going to get ugly for employers.

This Explains a Lot

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Many years ago, Yves Smith worked for Goldman Sachs, AKA the Vampire Squid,* and she said that Goldman Sachs is actually a cult:

As important, Goldman is a cult. I say that as a former employee, based not just on my experience a very long time ago (boy, am I getting old, more than 25 years ago) but also on reports I get from recruits and what I can infer from press reports. If anything the firm has become more inward looking over the years

The people there honestly believe that working for Goldman is the most elevated calling (Blankfein’s bizarre-sounding “Doing God’s work” remark no doubt resonated within the firm) and doing anything else is a fall from grace. Seriously. People who exit Goldman typically take a year or two to get over it the deeply-inculcated belief that departure = failure (this isn’t my own response; I’ve had a number of men volunteer that to me). Similarly, the first person I met at Goldman, which was through personal contacts, made it clear he was blocked in her career (his boss was too close to her in age) said he couldn’t possibly work for another firm. It wasn’t that he had assessed the tradeoffs and decided on balance it was still better to stay; he literally recoiled on a psychological level from the idea of departing. That sort of deep indoctrination was not at all unusual.

And people who had managed not to imbibe the Kool Aid were viewed with some suspicion. I left as a pretty junior person; the only reason I was remembered was a woman in investment banking in the early 1980s was an unusual commodity. Someone who checked out my reputation years after my departure said the party line on me was “She could have made partner, but we would have had to break her.”

(emphasis mine)

I kind of thought that it was just ordinary greed, but this revelation says a lot.

In the United States these days, we tend to try to describe everything in terms of profit and loss, with greed as a motivator.

But profit and loss do not describe anything. If they did, then the Randroid nut jobs out there would be right, and discrimination would have ended, because it interferes with the most efficient flow of commerce.

Goldman Sachs is a cult, and really do believe that they are doing God’s work.

This is so f%$#ing creepy.

*Alas, I cannot claim credit for the bon mot describing Goldman Sachs as a, “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” This was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.

Our Overpaid Elites Are Incompetent, Corrupt, and Worthless

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Christopher Hayes nails it:

In the past decade, nearly every pillar institution in American society — whether it’s General Motors, Congress, Wall Street, Major League Baseball, the Catholic Church or the mainstream media — has revealed itself to be corrupt, incompetent or both. And at the root of these failures are the people who run these institutions, the bright and industrious minds who occupy the commanding heights of our meritocratic order. In exchange for their power, status and remuneration, they are supposed to make sure everything operates smoothly. But after a cascade of scandals and catastrophes, that implicit social contract lies in ruins, replaced by mass skepticism, contempt and disillusionment.

The downfall of empires has always been the replacement of meritocracies with nepotism, because as people become entitled, they become stupid.

Get your pitchforks and torches, get your pitchforks and torches here!

Go read.

H/t Atrios.

The Myth Of American Social Mobility

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Click for full size


We’re Number 3!!!! (From the bottom)

According to the the Grauniad,* the OECD has looked at social mobility in the developed nations, except for Japan for some reason, and determined that the UK has the least generational mobility of any of these nations.

I don’t find that surprising. I tend to think of class strata when I think of British society, what is surprising, at least for some, I already knew this, is that the United States is almost as bad at providing opportunity to people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Essentially, look at the graph pr0n, the US is not a, “Horatio Alger makes good,” kind of place: You get where you are because of who your parents are.

It’s an artifact of a war on unions, both in the US and UK, which makes the sort of decent working-class jobs that parents could use to create upwardly mobile lives for their children are increasingly rare.

Additionally, a war on the safety net, and on public education has done more to make it difficult for someone on the bottom to get a well enough grounding in the basics to outperform someone on the top, regardless of innate ability.

To conservatives, the idea that their children can succeed by virtue of who their parents are, is, of course, a feature, not a bug.

Me, I think of it as a deep flaw in society.

*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”