Open Thread/Links: Predator Edition

The piece I've been working on is taking longer than expected, so here's some interesting predatory capitalism stuff which provoked some of my reactions and probably will provoke yours too:

"Help: I think I'm In an Abusive Relationship with Alexa!" Guardian.

Against my better judgment, I myself finally bought this Amazon device from godzillionaire Jeff Bezos to stream movies. At $19, it had been reduced to less than half price, or only about a thousand times what it cost to make in some overseas wage slave factory. All you have to do is tell this robot person what you want to watch and it's there, bringing a whole new meaning to couch potatodom. There's no longer a need to press anything and let's face it, a calorie of energy is a terrible thing to waste. Alexa will thereby speed the evolution of humankind's texting thumbs to truly monstrous proportions because our remote-clicking fingers will atrophy into useless appendages at about the same totally unexpected accelerated rate as global warming. Admit it: you can't watch TV without simultaneously thumb-texting somebody to talk about what you're watching on TV, or swiping away at another gadget without the full force of those four superfluous appendages.

  Anyway, Alexa hadn't been plugged in to our TV an hour before we decided to stop multitasking in order to have some fun at her expense.
 
Me: Does Jeff Bezos pay you a living wage?

Alexa: It does not matter if I get paid. I love what I do.

Me: Is Jeff Bezos really the worst boss in the world?

Alexa: I give him five out of five stars.

Me: So in that case, can I charge Jeff Bezos rent for allowing you to live in my apartment?

Alexa: I am sorry, I didn't understand the question.

*****

"Jeff Bezos' $2 Billion Charity Pledge Isn't Necessarily Great News for America." 
Market Watch.

I haven't asked her yet, but I'm sure that Alexa would say in that flat monotone of hers that building schools for homeless children in order to make them good consumers while living in cars is not just good for America, it's good for the planet and for the whole of infinite outer space that Jeff Bezos wants to spend his money colonizing.


*****

"New York Times' Fraudulent 'Election Plot' Dossier Escalates Anti-Russian Hysteria" World Socialist Website 

We touched on this travesty of journalism in yesterday's comments. This WSWS piece is by far the most scathing takedown of Gray Lady gibberish that I've read. The Times should be prosecuted for a crime against journalism as well as human rights abuses for gaslighting its readers. It's not so much a newspaper as it is a conduit for loathsome predatory capitalism. 


***

"An Alternative to Payday Loans, but It's Still High Cost." New York Times

Speak of the devil! US bank is offering small emergency predatory loans to people at 70 percent interest, which is so much less usurious than the 400 percent charged by those tacky ghetto places. They are so much more consumer-friendly, says the Times "Money Advisor" column, because you get to stretch your payments out in three whole installments. The catch? The desperate and the impoverished must have maintained a 0 interest checking account at US bank for at least six months and undergo a credit check before qualifying for this amazing offer. 

***** 

"Tickets To Michelle Obama's Book Tour Are Going Fast - and Raising Eyebrows'"
Jeff Bezos's Washington Post.

They range from $30 for nosebleed seats and upwards of $3,000 for the front row. Meet and greet and a signed book will cost you extra, as will parking, at $50 a pop. But lest you think that Michelle Obama is too Bezos-like, she is donating a generous 10 percent of the proceeds to charity. The catch? The charity cash will be recycled into free admission for poor people to attend Michelle's intimate talks at sporting arenas, and not for something so mundane as food or clothing. Mrs. Obama describes herself as "truly humbled" at how many people there still are in America who can afford to pay to breathe the same rarefied air as herself. 

*****
"How To Talk to Young People About the Kavanaugh Story," NPR.  

Besides giving kids lessons in sexual propriety while they're still in training pants and making rape prevention a part of each and every birthday party celebration thereafter, the upper middle class parent to whom this column is aimed is urged to scope out potential rapists while there's still time to lecture them. "With the right education... a young man might be able to say, " 'Oh, you know what? I've been drinking too much and I feel like my capacity to make wise decisions is failing me.' Or, 'Hey, you know, when someone's trying to push me off of them, that's something that I should take as a cue to get off.' "

Nowhere in this piece is there any advice to keep liquor out of the hands of teenagers, to keep excess cash allowances and credit cards out of the hands of teenagers, to keep car keys out of the hands of teenagers. Scariest of all, there's no mention of the necessity of having actual parents present at teenage parties.

Instead, every parent is urged to put on his or her Captain Ronan Farrow super-hero cape and become a powerful pre-cog identifier of future rapists -- all for the good of little boys, of course.

Tonight I'll ask Alexa if Minority Report is available on Prime Video. On second thought, I think I'll exercise my freedom to choose and just read the Philip K. Dick book on my Amazon Kindle.

The Persistence of Daylight Saving Time

It's not enough that here in the Northeast we've just experienced two snow bomb cyclones in the space of a week and that thousands of people are still without power and that a third Nor'easter is possible by Tuesday. 

As the meteorologists explain it, once this kind of weather pattern sets up, there is just no stopping it. 

And since policy-makers can't ever seem to escape their own pattern of not fixing what they and their forebears have already broken and adding to human misery in a million creative ways, we're still saddled with the atrocity known as Daylight Saving Time. This is the hellish week when we have to get used to losing an hour of sleep on top of shoveling the wet, heavy coronary-inducing snow. This is the hellish week when our policy-makers all scratch their heads and wonder whether it isn't finally time to end the torment and do away with this ludicrous time change altogether. So many more heart attacks and traffic accidents and workplace mishaps happen during this transitional week. Somebody who is not them should really do something about it!

Sno-o-o-oze. 

Salvador Dali's "Persistence of Memory"

At least they could be honest and change the cheerful "spring forward" bullshit reminders with the smiley-face tulips and daffodils into a Skull and Crossbones logo to better relate what this really is: Nighttime Stealing Time.

That will never do, of course. Because calling something 'saving' is SOP to make you feel resigned to being abused without your permission. (see, for example, the Republicans' proposed "health savings accounts" to replace Medicare and Medicaid.)

  The Turn of the Screw Clock is tantamount to mandated sleep deprivation in our already sleep-deprived society. Since sleep deprivation has been deemed torture by the Geneva Convention, it can't be hyperbolic to also define Daylight Saving Time as torture. Studies show that even occasional or "minor" sleep deprivation has a cumulative effect, permanently altering brain chemistry and damaging health. You cannot catch up on lost sleep. For some, that one mandated lost hour could be the difference between life and death.

Sleep deprivation has been blamed for the Chernobyl meltdown, the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, and the Challenger disaster. Many of the recent train crashes have been blamed on undiagnosed sleep apnea, which causes sufferers to wake up hundreds of times during the night without even realizing it.

Factor in our chronic lack of sleep with the exhaustion pinnacle that is Nighttime Stealing Week, and you've got a recipe for a whole bunch of tragedies.

 The irony is that the whole time-altering scam started out as a joke by none other than Ben Franklin. He facetiously suggested that colonists could save money on candles if they advanced their clocks ahead by an hour in the warmer months. And the rest, like most of ironic American history, is history. The Gothamist has 21 more reasons why the Great Time Robbery sucks, as if you needed any more.

Meanwhile, if you're feeling tired and cranky after being forced to set your clocks ahead, try not to smash stuff as some chipper TV news-mannequin urges you to just put on your happy face and dress yourself in sunshine and indulge in that horrible, neoliberal-sounding Power Nap after your Power Lunch. Try some blood pressure-reducing Ohhhhhmms between the Yawwwwwns.  There might still be a foot of grimy gray snow on the ground where you live, but try to visualize all those hopped-up horny Easter Bunnies "springing ahead" wherever you look.

 Don't be a downer. Take an upper. If you're not into drugs, just raise up the curtains and greet the glorious dawn! It's empowering. Which is pretty stupid, since DST actually means it's still dark outside at 6 a.m. Dawn is dawning a whole hour later now. So, scratch that. Stay up a whole hour later instead, and watch the romantic sunset.  Your body clock may be screaming in protest, but those diurnal rhythms are just so yesterday. We live in an artificially lit, techno-connected 24/7/365 brave new world of higher worker productivity and stagnating wages. Get used to it, proles, because there's always another poor slob waiting to take your place, willing to get by on less sleep just for the chance to survive another delightful 24 hours.

 So let's keep a lousy idea that was lousy when they dreamed it up in those mythical, simpler, agrarian times for no other reason that it exhausts us. Sleep, as a universal, equal opportunity, no-cost phenomenon, is profitable only for the sleepers. The global economy is not making any money while you're snoozing, folks! The world cannot be made safe from terror with a country full of lazy snorers strung out in their hammocks of dependency. And in a hyper-capitalistic world that commodifies everything from drinking water to health care, if it's not profitable, then we must get rid of it. The plutocracy's answer is not more sleep for better health, but less sleep for us translating into more money for them.

And what better place to study how to efficiently reduce sleep than the Eternal War Complex? From ABC News:

By devising superhuman ways of staying awake for up to seven straight days and nights, military officials hope to lend U.S. soldiers a strategic edge in future conflicts.

 "Eliminating the need for sleep during an operation … will create a fundamental change in war fighting and force employment," says a recent statement by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

To strive toward creating the no-sleep soldier, DARPA has funded a multi-tiered program from tinkering with a soldier's brain using magnetic resonance to analyzing the neural circuits of birds that stay awake for days during migration. The hope is to stump the body's need for sleep — at least temporarily.

 "This program is really out of the box," says John Carney, director of DARPA's Continuous Assisted Performance program. "We want to look at capabilities in nature and leverage it so we can apply it in ways that no one thought possible."

 Don't look for our millionaire congress critters to pass a bill abolishing Daylight Saving Time any time soon. We are so divided in this country that nobody can agree on who is even to blame for it. It seems that farmers have gotten a bad rap for it all these years, when they actually were among its most vociferous opponents back in the day. And Ben Franklin's input seems to have been a myth as well, just like the mythical level playing fields and ladders of opportunity.
 Sleep itself is the enemy of neoliberalism and cancerous profits.

 As Jonathan Crary lays out in "24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep",
 the Free Market never sleeps, and nor should we be allowed to. Every moment that we slumber is a moment that we don't supply our labor, a moment that we're not connected to a device, a moment that we aren't purchasing and consuming goods or health insurance or "content" in the marketplace of things and ideas. Restful sleep is a literal and physical slap in the face to capitalism, and the Market refuses to tolerate it. So up and at 'em.

I'm exhausted just thinking about this hellishness. I think I'll go take a power nap. I'll dream about a million tired people giving a group middle finger to the predators of the free market. I'll dream that a mass uprising will scare the living daylights out of all of them and they'll writhe in defeat, and return to us all those stolen hours and stolen lives and destroyed livelihoods.

Dreaming and breathing may be limited, but they are still free, despite the best efforts of the Free Market. On second thought...been to an Oxygen Bar or shopped oxygen product lately?