Etiquette



DP Etiquette

First rule: Don't be a jackass.

Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.

Thursday, December 5, 2019

Taylorism Returns: Life under the algorithm, how a relentless speedup is reshaping the working class

I'm only putting up three paragraphs from this article off The New Republic, as I don't want to cause any copyright headaches.  This is a long, detailed article and is well worth your time.  It is a review of two recent books on this gig economy Victorian redux narrative.

In her new book, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane, Guendelsberger re-creates a version of Barbara Ehrenreich’s famous experiment in Nickel and Dimed. Guendelsberger, a reporter for the alt-weekly Philadelphia City Paper until it was sold off and shut down in 2015, went undercover at three low-wage workplaces: an Amazon warehouse in Indiana, a call center in North Carolina, and a McDonald’s in San Francisco. Whereas Ehrenreich’s main discovery was that there still existed an exploited working class—a controversial point in the late 1990s and early 2000s—Guendelsberger takes inequality and exploitation as given, asking instead what these jobs are doing to the millions who work them.


In her first job, at an Amazon “fulfillment center,” Guendelsberger finds a regime that is Taylor’s “vision incarnate.” (One co-worker, sensing Taylor’s ghost, theorizes that Amazon is “a sociological experiment on how far a corporation can push people.”) Guendelsberger, a “picker,” is made to carry on her waist a scanner gun, which monitors her location, tells her the precise item among the hundreds of thousands in the warehouse that she is to go pluck from the shelves, its location, and how much time she has to do it. A sliding bar counts down as seconds go by, haranguing her. When she’s identified the shelf in the vast facility, dug through the bin, and scanned the item, the next one appears right away. 


Seen from Guendelsberger’s point of view, America’s working class is quivering in stress and fear, hurting from torn-up feet, and all covered in honey mustard. The economic miseries inflicted on working-class people are bad enough, but here Guendelsberger has identified something deeper and arguably worse: “Chronic stress drains people’s empathy, patience, and tolerance for new things.” We’ve been brutalized, bullied, and baited into being trained work-animals and not even afforded a corresponding pay bump. No wonder our society fell apart.


https://newrepublic.com/article/155666/life-algorithm

Here's a videoclip of relevance from PBS Newshour:


An inside look at injury rates in Amazon warehouses

https://www.pbs.org/video/prime-risk-1574896564/

I really do not know why the formatting is all over the place, nor how to correct it.  My apologies.






Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Summary of the Ukraine Issue

A 3 minute video accurately summarizes the House fact findings in the first phase of the impeachment inquiry. The summary is less than 100 words long and is a description of the section headings in the ~300 page House document.


The 3-minute video is here: https://youtu.be/Tk2ABtEzcXQ

The House report can be read here.

Congressional republicans continue to reject this as untrue, unfair, a hoax, nothing impeachable and/or mostly lies, with the facts mostly not being facts or evidence of anything impeachable. Elsewhere in the same broadcast, Maddow showed videos of Lindsey Graham speaking about impeachment in 1999 and in 2019 regarding impeachment. Graham has evolved from saying impeachment is about cleansing the office of the presidency and no laws need to be broken to impeach a president, while also complaining that senators need to listen to facts before deciding. Now, Graham considers the current matter nothing of concern and he will not even read witness testimony because he believes the impeachment process is s sham.

Another term for that kind of evolution in thinking is called partisan hypocrisy.





Monday, December 2, 2019

Marketing Unproven Medical Treatments

The Washington Post reports on a growing industry that uses hardball marketing tactics to patients with terminal diseases. The industry sells stem cell treatments for progressive lung disorders, Parkinson's disease and other untreatable diseases. Because the patients are desperate, they fall prey to the sales pitches. The sales tactics include telling patients how they can raise the needed money, e.g., fundraising on GoFundMe. None of the treatments have been proven safe and effective by the FDA. Some people spend all of their remaining money for these treatments.

It is hard to imagine why such businesses are allowed to operate legally. It is bad enough that useless treatments and products such as nutritional supplements and homeopathy products are legal. These stem cell treatments are worse because they falsely claim to treat serious diseases. Nutritional supplements and homeopathy products all must carry a warning label stating that the product has not been shown to treat or improve any disease or symptom.

One of these fake medicine companies, the Lung Health Institute, doesn't show that disclaimer on its website. The only disclaimer is innocuous and in small print, “Each patient is different. Results may vary.”


Indeed, results will vary. They will vary from failure to failure coupled with bankruptcy and homelessness.

What is government for?
One can ask about the role of government here. It is clear that government isn’t concerned about companies selling fake treatments to sick people. In this instance, the role of government is mostly to protect companies and their business interests. Patient welfare is of little apparent concern although these companies presumably cannot poison their patients under current law. This is the face of modern anti-government conservative and populist ideology. 

Question: Is it irrational or incorrect to assert that, for this industry, the role of government is to protect companies and their business interests more than protecting consumer from health treatment scams?