The era of cheap labour is over. There will soon be children alive who don’t remember the McDonald’s serving counter.
Those uncertain seconds as you decided which till to queue at, that nervous wait as the last Big Mac got snatched before your server could grab it. The whole frenetic, nylon-clad performance is being replaced by touchscreens. You take a ticket, scan your contactless card and wait. The food giant plans to roll out the screens at the vast majority of its UK stores.
Change the World. In 1978, the year that I graduated from high school, in Palo Alto, the name Silicon Valley was not in use beyond a small group of tech cognoscenti.
Apple Computer had incorporated the previous year, releasing the first popular personal computer, the Apple II. The major technology companies made electronics hardware, and on the way to school I rode my bike through the Stanford Industrial Park, past the offices of Hewlett-Packard, Varian, and Xerox PARC. The neighborhoods of the Santa Clara Valley were dotted with cheap, modern, one-story houses—called Eichlers, after the builder Joseph Eichler—with glass walls, open floor plans, and flat-roofed carports. (Steve Jobs grew up in an imitation Eichler, called a Likeler.)
Red Innovation. The new edition of Jacobin, focusing on technology and politics, is out now.
Four-issue subscriptions start at only $19. The technological dynamism of capitalism has always been a powerful argument in its defense. But one of its secrets is that at the heart of this change we find neither bold entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, nor established firms. Investments pushing the frontiers of scientific knowledge are just too risky. The advances sought may not be forthcoming. The NGO-ization of resistance. Posted On 04 Sep 2014 By Arundhati Roy.
A hazard facing mass movements is the NGO-ization of resistance. It will be easy to twist what I’m about to say into an indictment of all NGOs. That would be a falsehood. In the murky waters of fake NGOs set up or to siphon off grant money or as tax dodges (in states like Bihar, they are given as dowry), of course, there are NGOs doing valuable work. Evo Morales has proved that socialism doesn’t damage economies. The socialist Evo Morales, who yesterday was re-elected to serve a third term as president of Bolivia, has long been cast as a figure of fun by the media in the global north.
Much like the now deceased Hugo Chávez, Morales is often depicted as a buffoonish populist whose flamboyant denouncements of the United States belie his incompetence. And so, reports of his landslide win inevitably focused on his announcement that it was “a victory for anti-imperialism”, as though anti-US sentiment is the only thing Morales has given to Bolivia in his eight years in government. The Rise of Philanthro-capitalism. Late last winter at Vancouver’s Maritime Labour Centre, city councillor Geoff Meggs spoke at the launch of a regional union-backed social justice organization called the Metro Vancouver Alliance.
Meggs is a long-time anchor of the British Columbia labour movement. In the 1980s, he was the editor of the fishers’ union newspaper and the personal editor for the legendary Canadian communist Ben Swankey. In the ’90s, he was a high-level adviser in the B.C. NDP government. And in the 2000s, he migrated, with many of his contemporaries, into civic politics where he helped build Vision Vancouver, the labour-supported party that has held city hall for two terms and appears set to take a third this November. Minister looking at making it harder for sick and disabled to claim benefits. Iain Duncan Smith is examining how to make it harder for sick and disabled people to claim benefits, according to leaked documents from the Department of Work and Pensions.
The documents show civil servants advised the work and pensions secretary that he would not legally be able to introduce secondary legislation – which does not need a parliamentary vote – in order to give jobcentre staff more powers to make employment and support allowance (ESA) claimants undergo further tasks to prove they are trying as hard as possible to get back into work. The powers being discussed in the seven pages of official guidance – addressed to Duncan Smith – also include forcing sick and disabled people to take up offers of work. If those with serious but time-limited health conditions refuse the offer, DWP staff would then have the power to strip them of their benefits. The paper says the DWP can get sick and disabled people to undertake "CV writing, attend a training course or do work experience". This is why you wear your seat belt, folks. Good Guy Head Coach. The wealthy 'make mistakes', the poor go to jail.
I knew him as "Mr one-glove".
The origins of his nickname were cloudy, but had to do with his legendary stinginess. He had just lost his company close to $1bn betting on mortgages. That company, facing massive losses from him and other traders, had only staved off bankruptcy because of the grace of the government. Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you. Life for the medieval peasant was certainly no picnic.
His life was shadowed by fear of famine, disease and bursts of warfare. His diet and personal hygiene left much to be desired. 5 Wildly Offensive Comments and Actions by Rich Jerks. August 23, 2013 | Like this article?
Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. “The poor we shall always have with us,” said the Bible, and lately there are more of the poor than ever—over 50 million at last count. But that doesn’t stop wealthy Americans from saying things that reek of insensitivity and callousness toward those less fortunate than themselves, which nowadays is pretty much everybody. Stop blaming technology for high unemployment! Jobs are returning with depressing slowness, and most of the new jobs pay less than the jobs that were lost in the Great Recession. Economic determinists — fatalists, really — assume that globalization and technological change must now condemn a large portion of the American workforce to under-unemployment and stagnant wages, while rewarding those with the best eductions and connections with ever higher wages and wealth.
And therefore that the only way to get good jobs back and avoid widening inequality is to withdraw from the global economy and become neo-Luddites, destroying the new labor-saving technologies. That’s dead wrong. Economic isolationism and neo-Ludditism would reduce everyone’s living standards. The Poundland principle: the only thing to gain from unskilled labour is a wage. Some young people do the grand tour between finishing compulsory education and the start of adult responsibility. A bit of backpacking round Europe. Getting off your tits on a south-east Asian beach. Sinking a few wells for the benefit of a Chilean village. All fine and mind-expanding experiences, none of which I did.
My personal grand tour plumbed the depths of the UK economy. Asylum has become Theresa May's cruel private fiefdom. The first person I met on section 4 asylum support lived in Stockton-on-Tees, with her daughter who was nearly two. I hadn't heard of the Azure card, or any of the mean-minded hassles that went along with it – that your benefits, such as they are, come in vouchers rather than cash, so you can't get a bus or make a phone call, can't post a letter or buy a pint of milk from your corner shop. You have to be housed three miles from a shop that takes your Azure card; that can mean a six-mile walk every time you want to buy something. She lived in a hostel, where her baby was constantly ill, and so were all the other babies, and an ambulance pulled up outside at least once a week.
Her English was so fluent, and her qualifications so varied, and her manner so dispassionate and composed, that it was easy to forget she was an actual case study. From welfare to wages, women fight back against the uncaring market. It's almost unbearable to wake up to a world in which the welfare state that has defended us from the worst excesses of the market is being destroyed. The only way to hold on to the last vestiges of entitlement, and even reverse defeats, is to fight like hell. Bereaved but determined families pursuing those who neglected vulnerable patients in Staffordshire had to do a massive piece of organising before the deaths of hundreds were looked into. (Other suspect hospitals are emerging.) Parents of children needing heart surgery organised against closure of the Leeds heart unit and won a court judgment.