Well, I'd suggest you vote Nader;) I don't know all that much about Hagelin, except that his website goes on and on about what a physics supergenius he is. I think Hagelin is probably in the wrong party. The Reform party seems to have coopted Nader's platform against corporate, environmental, and human abuses. Hagelin should probably throw in with the Greens. I think the Green party has a much solid, and mature platform (as opposed to the Reform party "platform" which comes in various conflicting flavors).
Gore has also coopted Nader's platform, speaking out at the convention against big corporations. But we all know both Republicrat candidates are owned by big corporate interests.
The thing I find funniest, is everywhere you go Republicrats are saying "The main thing is: there are clear differences between these candidates", "This election is about two different sets of ideas on the issues", "These two candidates are two distinct choices" - they know themselves that the system is a sham, that the candidates are two facets of the same party, and that it is their burden of proof, through repitition, to subconsciously convince the American population that the candidates are really different and they have a choice that really matters. Hey, you can have any Model-T as long as it's black!!
Ok, fine, nuclear power might not be worse than the already abhorrently ecologically unsound conventional energy sources. So does that mean we should search for different types of equally bad energy sources to feed our rapacious desire and conspicuous consumption of energy?
Call me an idealist, but the problem of the amount of energy we *have* but *waste* is equally as pressing as finding new sources of energy. A more reasonable solution to me would be to foster an environment and culture of respect for energy efficiency. We should be diverting money from funding corporations to exploit finite resources at a faster pace, to funding research and subsidizing alternative energy sources. We'll never get anywhere if we just continue the tactic of scaring people into thinking that we should exploit faster because we're running out.
I'd have to second a previous poster, and say that if you are going to vote *against* Gore, please vote for a third party (I'd persuade you to vote Green, but the Libertarian party also has a sound platform with a different focus, although I disagree with parts). Voting for Bush to spite Gore is like taking money out of the left hand pocket of the Corporate Party and putting it in the right. Either way, they own the government.
IMHO, I think Gore is a slightly less distateful poison than Bush (hence some liberals voting Gore just to spite Bush, the reverse of what you are doing). But why vote for either poison when there are perfectly sound, reasonable third parties? It really is a crime that parties other than the current duopoly are marginalized and silenced (*cough* debates *cough*)...that's not a vibrant democracy, but a stifled and suffocated one.
Given the lukewarm review on ArsTechnica, it just seems that OS X is a frankenstein monster that gained some technical features that the unix crowd have been using for decades while whimsically throwing out a few decades of ui design wisdom that Mac users, and WIMP users in general have become accustomed to. OS X is hardly a Sgt. Pepper (I was around then, but that article does seem a lot like a graphics nut getting gushing over something new and pretty), and it remains to be seen if it will live up to its hype. Personally I hope Apple fixes the problems outlined in the ArsTechnica article. Otherwise it will be just an attention-grabber, but not much to swoon over.
So. I consider myself diametrically opposed to some of the viewpoints and behavior of the Republican party, but I still respect Orrin Hatch for doing a damn fine job taking consumer rights into consideration and not being pushed around by the likes of the RIAA. Not *everything* has to come down to political affiliation you know.
I second this. You know, I don't consider myself a sandal wearing tree-hugging nut, but I do really think it is stupid that environmentalism is considered radical. It really is dumb. Environmental soundness should not be percieved as radical, but should be the *default* modus operandi. It should be taken for granted. What should be seen as radical is the gigantic amount of waste we create and participate in. Every item you use today, think of how much energy it took to create and will take to dispose of that item. Think of where that energy is coming from. Because it's out of sight it's out of mind.
Saying that we have basically ruined this planet so the solution is to go and exploit another is evidence of this mentality. So is Bush's proposal that to "solve" the energy crises, we should go make more oil rigs in Alaska! Instead, of course, of forcing the energy industry to redeem to us our investment in them to create alternative energy solutions. The absurdity! As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The hammer is conventional, limited natural resource-based energy solutions. The nail is our rapacious and wasteful percieved need for such gratuitous energy and resource consumption.
IMHO, everything since TNG has sucked in increasing orders of magnitude, finally reaching the candy-ass soap opera called Voyager. What a piece of crap. They should have at least let Star Trek die with some dignity.
Saint Nicholas was indeed the patron saint of little children, which was brought to the US by the Dutch (they got it from Turkey which to this day still takes pride in its children and actually has a Children's Day holiday).
But he didn't assume the form we know today until the 1930s when Coca Cola used him to pimp their sugar water (which I still vehemently prefer over Pepsi, whose annoying little schizophrenic girl is ten times as worse)
Yeah, but the consumer-binge aspect *was* invented by corporations. For example, that big fat Santa in a red suit that we all associate with Christmas...who invented that? Oh, yeah, the Coca-Cola corporation!
Ours is a corporate fabricated culture...just witness such phenomena as BackStreet Boys and Pokemon.
I'm not talking about cave people here. I'm talking about past civilizations which existed in harmony quite happily for eons. These weren't people who lived in caves and threw stones at rabbits. The Chinese civilization, the Egyption civilization, Mesopotamian civilizations, American civilizations. They people didn't have *all* that hard a life - certainly not in the proportion that people in third world countries have today, largely due to pressures exerted by Western countries. Life was pretty damn good (unless you were a slave I suppose, and even then it's not like wild animals were just roaming around waiting to eat you). Sure, we can say life is good in Western countries due to all this "progress"...but look at the countries we call under developed. That got shafted. On the whole, I think we really need to question where we are actually trying to go. In many cases, for every great new solution and marvel of Western progress we come up with, we come up with many more problems.
I'm willing to bet life expectancy during the industrial age was much lower than in the glory days of, say, the Chinese civilization, or the Mayan civilization, or the Iroquois civilization, or Arab civilizations. Our life expectancies are only now coming back *UP* because we have high tech medicine to fix our broken parts. MOST of modern medicine is reparative, NOT preventative. Do you run your car until it breaks down THEN get everything changed? No, you check your oil, you check your fluids, you get it inspected, etc.
You're right, the Act of Supremecy was passed in 1534, three years before the Pope's Sublimis Deus. Prior to that however, the Henry VII refused to acknowledge Spanish and Portuguese claims to the New World, under the papal bull of 1493. In 1530 Las Casas started writing De Unico Vocationis Modo denouncing violent conversion.
So, yes, Henry didn't create the Church of England directly in response to the Pope's Sublimis Deus. That's a factual mistake on my part. However, England did have previous grievences with Catholic Church for the Pope's partitioning of land, and for the most part everybody ignored Sublimis Deus anyway.
Whether the Moors where driven out by the time Columbus set sail, the point is that Spain desperately needed to refill its coffers to recover from, if not fund, its wars with the Moors.
And I believe the black plaque was still around for a while. At this point Europe had not known life without the plague. That is the mindset I was trying to establish: both centuries of war with the Moors coupled with random and meaningless death, which caused Europe to be very jaded and cynical by the time they discovered the new world.
It still seems we are trying to conquer something.
See, we have this dependency on fossil fuels, and they're quite limited. We're also using them at quite a rate.
Exactly. "Progress"
That is one reason for "progress".. to get into a state where we can once again live in a harmony with nature..
Well if that is the real meaning of progress we sure have been heading in the wrong direction for a long time. Hell, we already *were* living in harmony with nature centuries ago. Since when did we need cell phones and highways and the internet and manmade chemicals to "live in harmony with nature"? In many cases progress is a myth. Is it "progress" to be the richest country in the world, but yet still have a shameful amount poverty, that even Europeans after many wars were able to put themselves back together and do a good job of eliminating?
That said, I wonder whose record is better, the decisions of scientists and engineers who seek to improve social conditions (i.e., the green revolution, anti-biotics, anti-cancer treatments, etc.), or those of self-appointed "analysts" of scientific and technological change?
One thing is for sure, scientists and engineers you describe above certainly have a better record than scientists and engineers who, either out of hunger for profit, or too enraptured in their own discoveries to care about their global impact, foster a mentality of willful ignorance, that enables big corporations to pollute more, gigantic pharmeceutical companies to over-medicate the populace (witness the horrible situation we are in with anti-biotics - originally created by altruistic scientists you describe), or engage in junk science to cover up the real negative effects of many products in our society.
For every scientist and engineer truly seeking to improve social conditions, there are ten times as many lawyers, politicions, and corporate suits taking that work and exploiting it not necessarily for any good, and some scientists and engineers who help them by fostering an attitude that anything new is good.
Well that, sir, is where I disagree with you. I think a pack of ebola infected monkeys on fire would do a better job as president than any of the corporate clones pimped by the Republican or Democrat party.
I think much of this Cybernetic Totalism is caused by our "western" heritage of eurocentricism and manifest destiny. When Europeans hit the Americas, to them it was their *right*, if not duty (later the Catholic church finally denounced the conquests, to which the king of England responded by simply making his own church;), to conquer and claim the "unused" wilderness inhabited by native "savages" (numbering in the healthy tens of millions, whose cities, architecture, art, literature and governmental forms rivaled many in the Old World). Remember, Europe had been beseiged by the plague, by now for several *centuries*, and the Spanish had been fighting the Moors for as long as anyone could remember. Almost as a primal survival instinct, one can see their worldview as dictating that they conquer the new world. And that they did.
However, this mentality didn't stop at the west coast. The industrial age was upon us, and we were unleashing great new powers, both constructive and destructive. "Progress" was the holy grail. So we continued marching west in science and technology, and I think we are still marching west. I say it over and over again: many (perhaps all?) ancient civilizations existed for eons without a notion of "progress" that we have today...without the notion that what was old is necessarily bad, and anything new is necessarily better. I'm not a luddite, I love this whizbang technology...but we should also more somberly analyze *where* we are actually going and *what* this elusive "progress" is...we may very well be "progressing" ourselves into a corner. Think for a moment, if our technology was frozen in place where it is today...could we live without the "progress" we seem to need so much? For years? For decades? For centuries? I think so. Where is this impetus (besides natural curiosity) coming from?
Sorry to get fruity on you, but I started looking up one, and found several:
"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
"A "No" uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a "Yes" merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble."
"Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up."
- Ghandi
Anyway, the point is you do you have a choice. If you had been watching the recent PBS series, A Force More Powerful, you'd realize that normal people seeking justice CAN make a difference, whether it's a labor unionist in Poland, a minister in Alabama, or a lawyer in India.
Vote Green (or vote Reform, or Libertarian). Vote anything other than status quo. The system won't change itself.
This is one of the things I may slightly disagree with him on. But I agree almost exactly with everything else he says, so it's a little thing to forgive. I wouldn't mind paying a bit of sales tax on my internet purchases to have global social justice.
In today's fast-paced textiles economy, business demands more than ever from the labor force, and sweatshop professionals are feeling the heat. Is your company at risk of driving out its top talent?
By Marianne McGeeparvat, Diane Lee Ho, and Michelle Mbuto
Michael Millervasranjan is a seasoned sweatshop professional who thrives as lead assembler of soccar balls at Camp Jiva Spalding at Calcutta. His job is both challenging and rewarding, and it affords him the flexibility to ensure he has a few hours sleep -- something that's very important to him. But things weren't always so rosy. Like too many sweatshop professionals, Millervasranjan was once a walking zombie.
A few years ago, while employed at a government-run textiles factory, Millervasranjan was working on a sewing process to streamline the company's assembly line. "We were working six and seven days a week, 20 hours a day," he recalls. The overload not only taxed his waking hours, causing a mind-numbing fatigue, it led to a syndrome Millervasranjan dubbed "sleep stitching". "You wake up tired because you were so busy all night working on stitching together garments," he says.
The rollout of the sewing process coincided with Millervasranjan's hard-earned sick leave for hepititus. He was nervous about leaving, concerned that the factory might still be ridden with bugs. Millervasranjan feared the project was another example of ill-conceived planning by his boss, whom Millervasranjan say was out of touch with the working conditions. The boss' cluelessness, Millervasrangan says, typically led him to make promises to company honchos that left the sweatshop workers scrambling to meet impossible deadlines. Millervasranjan took his scheduled leave -- but, as he feared, bugs had prolificly spread in the assembly line. When he returned, he stayed at the job for only six more weeks. The causes of Millervasranjan's job frustration and exhoustion, commonly known as burnout, were unrealistic expactations and over-promises. The result: He quit.
Burnout is nothing new. But the backlash exemplified above may be growing.
Sweatshop work has always been stressful. Projects have short deadlines and implimentation schedules. Sweatshop operations support require 24-by-7 availability. And every new sweatshop paradigm shift brings with it the need for new skills.
What's different today is the acceleration and volume of sweatshop work, driven largely by the bourgeois in rich western countries. The race by multinational global corporate sweatshops and goverment run factories to compete for the textiles, shoes, and cottage industry market has hastened the demand for sweatshop-dependent labor. Also, the sweatshop-product floodgates have opened at many corporations that had products and budgets on hold while year 2000 work was completed.
Exacerbating the situation is an elite bourgeois culture spinning out of control, with wealth-induced psychological problems reaching an all-time high (see sidebar story, "My Gold-Plated SUV Doesn't Make Me Happy Any More"). Also the influx of refugees looking for any job they can find adds its own pressure: Many foreign refugees, accustomed to beatings and random murder, are willing to bear 120 or more hours a week, raising the bar even higher for local sweatshop workers (see sidebar story, "Foreign Refugees Add to the Pressure").
Cumulatively, this grind is fueling a backlash within sweatshop organizations -- at government run factories and, in particular, at corporate sweatshops -- that's manifested in the reduced productivity from sweatshop workers, abrupt career changes, even en masse deaths when an overworked employee bails out and takes along several collegues. Worse yet, disgrunted employees may sabotage products they are working on.
The good news is that companies are tuning in to the increasing stress levels of their sweatshop workers and taking steps to make things better. Of necessity, many sweatshops offer flexible schedules, seperate housing, and task sharing. Savvier ones seek to create a sweatshop culture that espouses mutual respect and shared values, open-curtain communications and mentoring, creativity and fun. Sweatshop workers are gettings savvier too. Many are seeking work situations that fit their lifestyles, such as respect for privacy when using the toilet. And some sweatshop workers who signed on for the breakneck pace and promised riches of sweatshop work, are returning with relief to fasting every other day.
In terms of job stress and stress-related problems, sweatshop workers have plenty of company. An estimated 1 million workers are absent on an average workday because of stress-related complaints, according to the Sweatshop Institute of Stress, a nonprofit organization in Lahore. Job stress is estimated to cost global corporations $300 billion annually, including absenteeism, diminished productivity, employee death, and medical, and postmortem fees.
But sweatshop workers may be contributing more than their share of that amount. At a remote coffee bean field in the Andes, "Hell Week" was the term used to describe the seven days that employees were overworked to get a 100 case shipment out. Boberouli, the field overseer, recalls what the eighty-member indentured servitude team faced as it was gearing up: the regional boss disregarded the reduction in productivity the last winter from 17 deaths due to starvation and extermination of native people by the government, and demanded instead that the sweatshop staff re-architect the system to accommodate 250,000 beans per worker the first day.
That fueled a whirl of 24-hour workdays, panicked psychotic episodes, dinners of stray dogs, and a 3-year-old girl taking the place of her mother who died due to exhaustion.
The upshot? The team made its deadline, but the price paid was both immediate and lasting. The fledgling gourmet coffee company and its slave labor went into the launch stressed and exhausted, damaged by broken field worker relationships and an extra $50,000 in expenses, the overseer said. Shortly thereafter, three workers died mysteriously, and the company was bought out by StarBucks.
Calling sweatshop work a marathon that must be run at a sprinter's pace is both an understatement and faulty, says Elliott HerrMasie, director of the HerrMasie Center, a sweatshop training and indentured-servitude firm. Unlike a marathon, there's no finish line in sweatshops. Projects often come rolling in one after the other, leaving little or no time to regroup. Meanwhile, basic human necessities themselves have tethered sweatshop people to their jobs round-the-clock. "We've changed our definition of what busy is," Says HerrMasie. "Now it's hyper-busy. Everyone's got a needle and thread, a shovel, a jewelry detail."
For S-B Power Toys Co., a toy manufacturer in South East Asia, eight back-to-back projects cost the company three key sweatshop bosses to mutiny, says Mark ApplhansQueDong, director of labor development. The consequence of those "departures": more pressure on remaining bosses. "It puts a burden on everyone," ApplehansQueDong says. "The work still has to get done."
------
Ok, well, you get the point. I hope I didn't offend anyone of any specific nationality, I certainly didn't intend to...I just wanted to make a little reality check here...as we sit in our polycarbonate, ergo-molded productivity environments with our Jolt and ThinkGeek chic, whining about how hard it is to type listen to music and type at keyboards for 10 hours a day, then go home to do the same thing until bedtime.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'd suggest you vote Nader ;) I don't know all that much about Hagelin, except that his website goes on and on about what a physics supergenius he is. I think Hagelin is probably in the wrong party. The Reform party seems to have coopted Nader's platform against corporate, environmental, and human abuses. Hagelin should probably throw in with the Greens. I think the Green party has a much solid, and mature platform (as opposed to the Reform party "platform" which comes in various conflicting flavors).
Gore has also coopted Nader's platform, speaking out at the convention against big corporations. But we all know both Republicrat candidates are owned by big corporate interests.
The thing I find funniest, is everywhere you go Republicrats are saying "The main thing is: there are clear differences between these candidates", "This election is about two different sets of ideas on the issues", "These two candidates are two distinct choices" - they know themselves that the system is a sham, that the candidates are two facets of the same party, and that it is their burden of proof, through repitition, to subconsciously convince the American population that the candidates are really different and they have a choice that really matters. Hey, you can have any Model-T as long as it's black!!
Ok, fine, nuclear power might not be worse than the already abhorrently ecologically unsound conventional energy sources. So does that mean we should search for different types of equally bad energy sources to feed our rapacious desire and conspicuous consumption of energy?
Call me an idealist, but the problem of the amount of energy we *have* but *waste* is equally as pressing as finding new sources of energy. A more reasonable solution to me would be to foster an environment and culture of respect for energy efficiency. We should be diverting money from funding corporations to exploit finite resources at a faster pace, to funding research and subsidizing alternative energy sources. We'll never get anywhere if we just continue the tactic of scaring people into thinking that we should exploit faster because we're running out.
I'd have to second a previous poster, and say that if you are going to vote *against* Gore, please vote for a third party (I'd persuade you to vote Green, but the Libertarian party also has a sound platform with a different focus, although I disagree with parts). Voting for Bush to spite Gore is like taking money out of the left hand pocket of the Corporate Party and putting it in the right. Either way, they own the government.
IMHO, I think Gore is a slightly less distateful poison than Bush (hence some liberals voting Gore just to spite Bush, the reverse of what you are doing). But why vote for either poison when there are perfectly sound, reasonable third parties? It really is a crime that parties other than the current duopoly are marginalized and silenced (*cough* debates *cough*)...that's not a vibrant democracy, but a stifled and suffocated one.
Except most first-posters actually fail in the task, posting 17th, etc.
Ooops...I *wasn't* around then...
Given the lukewarm review on ArsTechnica, it just seems that OS X is a frankenstein monster that gained some technical features that the unix crowd have been using for decades while whimsically throwing out a few decades of ui design wisdom that Mac users, and WIMP users in general have become accustomed to. OS X is hardly a Sgt. Pepper (I was around then, but that article does seem a lot like a graphics nut getting gushing over something new and pretty), and it remains to be seen if it will live up to its hype. Personally I hope Apple fixes the problems outlined in the ArsTechnica article. Otherwise it will be just an attention-grabber, but not much to swoon over.
So. I consider myself diametrically opposed to some of the viewpoints and behavior of the Republican party, but I still respect Orrin Hatch for doing a damn fine job taking consumer rights into consideration and not being pushed around by the likes of the RIAA. Not *everything* has to come down to political affiliation you know.
I second this. You know, I don't consider myself a sandal wearing tree-hugging nut, but I do really think it is stupid that environmentalism is considered radical. It really is dumb. Environmental soundness should not be percieved as radical, but should be the *default* modus operandi. It should be taken for granted. What should be seen as radical is the gigantic amount of waste we create and participate in. Every item you use today, think of how much energy it took to create and will take to dispose of that item. Think of where that energy is coming from. Because it's out of sight it's out of mind.
Saying that we have basically ruined this planet so the solution is to go and exploit another is evidence of this mentality. So is Bush's proposal that to "solve" the energy crises, we should go make more oil rigs in Alaska! Instead, of course, of forcing the energy industry to redeem to us our investment in them to create alternative energy solutions. The absurdity! As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The hammer is conventional, limited natural resource-based energy solutions. The nail is our rapacious and wasteful percieved need for such gratuitous energy and resource consumption.
http://www.adbusters.org/home/
IMHO, everything since TNG has sucked in increasing orders of magnitude, finally reaching the candy-ass soap opera called Voyager. What a piece of crap. They should have at least let Star Trek die with some dignity.
Sham marriage. That's the ticket. Hey, it worked for my parents.
Saint Nicholas was indeed the patron saint of little children, which was brought to the US by the Dutch (they got it from Turkey which to this day still takes pride in its children and actually has a Children's Day holiday).
But he didn't assume the form we know today until the 1930s when Coca Cola used him to pimp their sugar water (which I still vehemently prefer over Pepsi, whose annoying little schizophrenic girl is ten times as worse)
Yeah, but the consumer-binge aspect *was* invented by corporations. For example, that big fat Santa in a red suit that we all associate with Christmas...who invented that? Oh, yeah, the Coca-Cola corporation!
Ours is a corporate fabricated culture...just witness such phenomena as BackStreet Boys and Pokemon.
I'm not talking about cave people here. I'm talking about past civilizations which existed in harmony quite happily for eons. These weren't people who lived in caves and threw stones at rabbits. The Chinese civilization, the Egyption civilization, Mesopotamian civilizations, American civilizations. They people didn't have *all* that hard a life - certainly not in the proportion that people in third world countries have today, largely due to pressures exerted by Western countries. Life was pretty damn good (unless you were a slave I suppose, and even then it's not like wild animals were just roaming around waiting to eat you). Sure, we can say life is good in Western countries due to all this "progress"...but look at the countries we call under developed. That got shafted. On the whole, I think we really need to question where we are actually trying to go. In many cases, for every great new solution and marvel of Western progress we come up with, we come up with many more problems.
I'm willing to bet life expectancy during the industrial age was much lower than in the glory days of, say, the Chinese civilization, or the Mayan civilization, or the Iroquois civilization, or Arab civilizations. Our life expectancies are only now coming back *UP* because we have high tech medicine to fix our broken parts. MOST of modern medicine is reparative, NOT preventative. Do you run your car until it breaks down THEN get everything changed? No, you check your oil, you check your fluids, you get it inspected, etc.
Dammit...I told them to fix that karma cap...
You're right, the Act of Supremecy was passed in 1534, three years before the Pope's Sublimis Deus. Prior to that however, the Henry VII refused to acknowledge Spanish and Portuguese claims to the New World, under the papal bull of 1493. In 1530 Las Casas started writing De Unico Vocationis Modo denouncing violent conversion.
So, yes, Henry didn't create the Church of England directly in response to the Pope's Sublimis Deus. That's a factual mistake on my part. However, England did have previous grievences with Catholic Church for the Pope's partitioning of land, and for the most part everybody ignored Sublimis Deus anyway.
Whether the Moors where driven out by the time Columbus set sail, the point is that Spain desperately needed to refill its coffers to recover from, if not fund, its wars with the Moors.
And I believe the black plaque was still around for a while. At this point Europe had not known life without the plague. That is the mindset I was trying to establish: both centuries of war with the Moors coupled with random and meaningless death, which caused Europe to be very jaded and cynical by the time they discovered the new world.
It still seems we are trying to conquer something.
Exactly. "Progress"
Well if that is the real meaning of progress we sure have been heading in the wrong direction for a long time. Hell, we already *were* living in harmony with nature centuries ago. Since when did we need cell phones and highways and the internet and manmade chemicals to "live in harmony with nature"? In many cases progress is a myth. Is it "progress" to be the richest country in the world, but yet still have a shameful amount poverty, that even Europeans after many wars were able to put themselves back together and do a good job of eliminating?
One thing is for sure, scientists and engineers you describe above certainly have a better record than scientists and engineers who, either out of hunger for profit, or too enraptured in their own discoveries to care about their global impact, foster a mentality of willful ignorance, that enables big corporations to pollute more, gigantic pharmeceutical companies to over-medicate the populace (witness the horrible situation we are in with anti-biotics - originally created by altruistic scientists you describe), or engage in junk science to cover up the real negative effects of many products in our society.
For every scientist and engineer truly seeking to improve social conditions, there are ten times as many lawyers, politicions, and corporate suits taking that work and exploiting it not necessarily for any good, and some scientists and engineers who help them by fostering an attitude that anything new is good.
Well that, sir, is where I disagree with you. I think a pack of ebola infected monkeys on fire would do a better job as president than any of the corporate clones pimped by the Republican or Democrat party.
I think much of this Cybernetic Totalism is caused by our "western" heritage of eurocentricism and manifest destiny. When Europeans hit the Americas, to them it was their *right*, if not duty (later the Catholic church finally denounced the conquests, to which the king of England responded by simply making his own church ;), to conquer and claim the "unused" wilderness inhabited by native "savages" (numbering in the healthy tens of millions, whose cities, architecture, art, literature and governmental forms rivaled many in the Old World). Remember, Europe had been beseiged by the plague, by now for several *centuries*, and the Spanish had been fighting the Moors for as long as anyone could remember. Almost as a primal survival instinct, one can see their worldview as dictating that they conquer the new world. And that they did.
However, this mentality didn't stop at the west coast. The industrial age was upon us, and we were unleashing great new powers, both constructive and destructive. "Progress" was the holy grail. So we continued marching west in science and technology, and I think we are still marching west. I say it over and over again: many (perhaps all?) ancient civilizations existed for eons without a notion of "progress" that we have today...without the notion that what was old is necessarily bad, and anything new is necessarily better. I'm not a luddite, I love this whizbang technology...but we should also more somberly analyze *where* we are actually going and *what* this elusive "progress" is...we may very well be "progressing" ourselves into a corner. Think for a moment, if our technology was frozen in place where it is today...could we live without the "progress" we seem to need so much? For years? For decades? For centuries? I think so. Where is this impetus (besides natural curiosity) coming from?
I know, the first thing I thought when I saw the marionette video, was "how ironic".
I wonder how those guys from "Making the Band" will fare. I mean, they can't even *pretend* not to be totally fabricated.
Sorry to get fruity on you, but I started looking up one, and found several:
"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
"A "No" uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a "Yes" merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble."
"Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up."
- Ghandi
Anyway, the point is you do you have a choice. If you had been watching the recent PBS series, A Force More Powerful, you'd realize that normal people seeking justice CAN make a difference, whether it's a labor unionist in Poland, a minister in Alabama, or a lawyer in India.
Vote Green (or vote Reform, or Libertarian). Vote anything other than status quo. The system won't change itself.
This is one of the things I may slightly disagree with him on. But I agree almost exactly with everything else he says, so it's a little thing to forgive. I wouldn't mind paying a bit of sales tax on my internet purchases to have global social justice.
SweatShopWeek.com
Backlash
In today's fast-paced textiles economy, business demands more than ever from the labor force, and sweatshop professionals are feeling the heat. Is your company at risk of driving out its top talent?
By Marianne McGeeparvat, Diane Lee Ho, and Michelle Mbuto
Michael Millervasranjan is a seasoned sweatshop professional who thrives as lead assembler of soccar balls at Camp Jiva Spalding at Calcutta. His job is both challenging and rewarding, and it affords him the flexibility to ensure he has a few hours sleep -- something that's very important to him. But things weren't always so rosy. Like too many sweatshop professionals, Millervasranjan was once a walking zombie.
A few years ago, while employed at a government-run textiles factory, Millervasranjan was working on a sewing process to streamline the company's assembly line. "We were working six and seven days a week, 20 hours a day," he recalls. The overload not only taxed his waking hours, causing a mind-numbing fatigue, it led to a syndrome Millervasranjan dubbed "sleep stitching". "You wake up tired because you were so busy all night working on stitching together garments," he says.
The rollout of the sewing process coincided with Millervasranjan's hard-earned sick leave for hepititus. He was nervous about leaving, concerned that the factory might still be ridden with bugs. Millervasranjan feared the project was another example of ill-conceived planning by his boss, whom Millervasranjan say was out of touch with the working conditions. The boss' cluelessness, Millervasrangan says, typically led him to make promises to company honchos that left the sweatshop workers scrambling to meet impossible deadlines. Millervasranjan took his scheduled leave -- but, as he feared, bugs had prolificly spread in the assembly line. When he returned, he stayed at the job for only six more weeks. The causes of Millervasranjan's job frustration and exhoustion, commonly known as burnout, were unrealistic expactations and over-promises. The result: He quit.
Burnout is nothing new. But the backlash exemplified above may be growing.
Sweatshop work has always been stressful. Projects have short deadlines and implimentation schedules. Sweatshop operations support require 24-by-7 availability. And every new sweatshop paradigm shift brings with it the need for new skills.
What's different today is the acceleration and volume of sweatshop work, driven largely by the bourgeois in rich western countries. The race by multinational global corporate sweatshops and goverment run factories to compete for the textiles, shoes, and cottage industry market has hastened the demand for sweatshop-dependent labor. Also, the sweatshop-product floodgates have opened at many corporations that had products and budgets on hold while year 2000 work was completed.
Exacerbating the situation is an elite bourgeois culture spinning out of control, with wealth-induced psychological problems reaching an all-time high (see sidebar story, "My Gold-Plated SUV Doesn't Make Me Happy Any More"). Also the influx of refugees looking for any job they can find adds its own pressure: Many foreign refugees, accustomed to beatings and random murder, are willing to bear 120 or more hours a week, raising the bar even higher for local sweatshop workers (see sidebar story, "Foreign Refugees Add to the Pressure").
Cumulatively, this grind is fueling a backlash within sweatshop organizations -- at government run factories and, in particular, at corporate sweatshops -- that's manifested in the reduced productivity from sweatshop workers, abrupt career changes, even en masse deaths when an overworked employee bails out and takes along several collegues. Worse yet, disgrunted employees may sabotage products they are working on.
The good news is that companies are tuning in to the increasing stress levels of their sweatshop workers and taking steps to make things better. Of necessity, many sweatshops offer flexible schedules, seperate housing, and task sharing. Savvier ones seek to create a sweatshop culture that espouses mutual respect and shared values, open-curtain communications and mentoring, creativity and fun. Sweatshop workers are gettings savvier too. Many are seeking work situations that fit their lifestyles, such as respect for privacy when using the toilet. And some sweatshop workers who signed on for the breakneck pace and promised riches of sweatshop work, are returning with relief to fasting every other day.
In terms of job stress and stress-related problems, sweatshop workers have plenty of company. An estimated 1 million workers are absent on an average workday because of stress-related complaints, according to the Sweatshop Institute of Stress, a nonprofit organization in Lahore. Job stress is estimated to cost global corporations $300 billion annually, including absenteeism, diminished productivity, employee death, and medical, and postmortem fees.
But sweatshop workers may be contributing more than their share of that amount. At a remote coffee bean field in the Andes, "Hell Week" was the term used to describe the seven days that employees were overworked to get a 100 case shipment out. Boberouli, the field overseer, recalls what the eighty-member indentured servitude team faced as it was gearing up: the regional boss disregarded the reduction in productivity the last winter from 17 deaths due to starvation and extermination of native people by the government, and demanded instead that the sweatshop staff re-architect the system to accommodate 250,000 beans per worker the first day.
That fueled a whirl of 24-hour workdays, panicked psychotic episodes, dinners of stray dogs, and a 3-year-old girl taking the place of her mother who died due to exhaustion.
The upshot? The team made its deadline, but the price paid was both immediate and lasting. The fledgling gourmet coffee company and its slave labor went into the launch stressed and exhausted, damaged by broken field worker relationships and an extra $50,000 in expenses, the overseer said. Shortly thereafter, three workers died mysteriously, and the company was bought out by StarBucks.
Calling sweatshop work a marathon that must be run at a sprinter's pace is both an understatement and faulty, says Elliott HerrMasie, director of the HerrMasie Center, a sweatshop training and indentured-servitude firm. Unlike a marathon, there's no finish line in sweatshops. Projects often come rolling in one after the other, leaving little or no time to regroup. Meanwhile, basic human necessities themselves have tethered sweatshop people to their jobs round-the-clock. "We've changed our definition of what busy is," Says HerrMasie. "Now it's hyper-busy. Everyone's got a needle and thread, a shovel, a jewelry detail."
For S-B Power Toys Co., a toy manufacturer in South East Asia, eight back-to-back projects cost the company three key sweatshop bosses to mutiny, says Mark ApplhansQueDong, director of labor development. The consequence of those "departures": more pressure on remaining bosses. "It puts a burden on everyone," ApplehansQueDong says. "The work still has to get done."
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Ok, well, you get the point. I hope I didn't offend anyone of any specific nationality, I certainly didn't intend to...I just wanted to make a little reality check here...as we sit in our polycarbonate, ergo-molded productivity environments with our Jolt and ThinkGeek chic, whining about how hard it is to type listen to music and type at keyboards for 10 hours a day, then go home to do the same thing until bedtime.