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The Third-Worldization of America: Proceeding Apace

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Lineman_changing_transformerThe electrician and his sidekick were here this morning to install a few outlets at hip height, so I don’t have to crawl painfully on the floor to plug in a vacuum cleaner, a laptop, or a heating pad.

This guy, Dave, has been the electrician of choice for the past 30 years, so we’ve become casual friends. We’re both beginning to enjoy the vicissitudes of old age — he more than me, I’m sure, since he does a lot of physical work. While the two men were working, I was fiddling with installing a new battery-run doorbell (one of the previous Happy Handyman homeowners took out the hard-wired doorbell!), and I remarked that compared with the one I put in eight or ten years ago, it’s a piece of junk. That, of course, kicked off the Going-to-Hell-on-a-Handcart conversation.

Dave remarked that he feels unhappy in the 21st century, because so many changes keep coming so fast. He doesn’t like either the changes or the pace of change.

I said, well, if you’ll recall that’s exactly what our parents said when they got to be our age.

He said, that’s true. But there was a difference between 20th-century change and 21st-century change. In the 20th century, the changes put people to work: people had jobs. The opposite is happening now. Fewer and fewer people have jobs, and those who do don’t have very good jobs. Then he clucked about the stupidity of sending all the decent jobs offshore — and the harm it’s doing to America.

One thing that’s good about having a trade, I said, is that they can’t offshore electrical installation.

That’s true, he said. But the problem is, when people don’t have decent-paying jobs, they can’t afford to have maintenance work and improvements, like installing outlets where you can reach them, done right. So they either don’t do them, or they just jury-rig things to try to keep them going as long as possible.

You’ve been in Mexico, he continued. You’ve seen how the construction and infrastructure are thrown together, just enough to hold it up for a few days. That’s because nobody can afford the material or the skilled labor to do a proper job. They toss things up, they patch things together just so they’ll last until tomorrow. When tomorrow comes, they’ll figure out what to do then.

Well, that kind of thing is happening here more and more. When repairs need to be done, they either don’t get done or they don’t get done right, because people can’t afford to hire an electrician or a plumber. They’re just not earning enough.

Holy sh!t.

I think I’ve talked before about the Third-Worldization of America. As Dave said in passing, the only people who benefit from the changes we’re seeing today are the very wealthy and the upper-level, extravagantly paid executives of huge corporations.

Listen to the workingmen. They’re the people who are on the ground, trying to make a living with American jobs — you could say they’re the canaries in the mine. And in my opinion, they have a clearer, truer view of the health of our country’s economy than does any theoretician in academe or any politician in Washington.

What they have to say will curl your hair.

Image: Lineman installing a new transformer. Dave Pape. Public domain.

This post was included in the Carnival of Wealth at the feisty iconoclast Greg MacFarlane’s site, Control Your Cash. Thanks, Greg! 😉

 

Obamacare Side Effect: Fewer Jobs? Or More Employers?

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Have you been following the Republican far right’s latest misrepresentation about the Affordable Care Act? Twisting a statement in an appendix to a Congressional Budget Office report on the ACA’s progress, the crazies claim the government admits that affordable health care will kill 2 million jobs.

HOLY mackerel! We’re all flying toward Hell on a skateboard!

What the budget office’s authors actually said is that once people no longer have to hold onto a full-time job, willy-nilly, in order to maintain health insurance, about two million American FTE jobs may be vacated by those who retire early or elect to quit working full-time so as to follow more worthwhile pursuits, such as rearing their children, spending their time in volunteer work, becoming self-employed, or simply living slightly less miserable lives.

That is different from the loss of two million jobs. It doesn’t represent the disappearance of jobs. It represents a reduction in the number of people forced to work at a certain type of employment.

As a practical matter, the CBO is probably right in saying that quite a few people will find better things to do with their time than trudging through the rat-race five or six days a week. I can’t even begin to count the number of people I’ve known, over a lifetime in said rat-race, who have said that the only reason they didn’t start their own businesses was that they had to have health insurance and they couldn’t afford it or wouldn’t qualify for it if they weren’t on an employer plan.

If these dreams now can be made to come to pass, will that actually cause the loss of umpty-umpteen gerjillion jobs?

Consider: Jane quits her job because she’s tired of working for the Man and she thinks she has a better idea. She starts a cleaning business. Within a year, she employs five cleaning staff and an admin to answer the phone. A year later, she’s regularly contracting with an exterminator and a painter, and she’s hired an accountant.

Her old job back at Avaricious Industries, Inc., may or may not be replaced with two part-time positions devoid of benefits. But in the process, she has created jobs for nine people, three of them self-employed in businesses that also create jobs for workers.

Okay: Annabelle, the lazy bum, just goes home and takes care of her kids, thereby creating…nothing? Nevvermind that one graduates from Johns Hopkins medical school and becomes a cancer researcher, another grows up to be a nuclear physicist, and the third goes to Africa to lead an NGO and, at the age of 63, wins a Nobel Peace Prize. As a woman and “just a housewife,” Anabelle’s obviously a drag on society.

So if for every two workers who quit a job, one of them founds an enterprise that ends up employing, on average, five other workers, it would seem that a “loss” of 2 million FTE employees should result in a net gain of five million new jobs.

New lies, anyone?

Gluten-free, Meat-free, INCREDIBLY Delicious!

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Finally beginning to unwind, after two or three stress-inducing weeks, aggravated by the fact that this week the ditzy annoying chores just don’t seem to want to  let go of me!

Monday, I thought Aaaahhhh! A whole day to myself in which to do MY thing!

Well. No. Meet with client half the day.

Tuesday, I thought Aaaaahhh! A whole day to myself in which to do MY thing!

Not quite. Add up billable hours, having been unforgivably lâche about keeping track of time and charges. Documenting $1500 worth of my time consumes five hours of unpaid time. Nice.

Quarrel with annoyoing Semi-Demi-Ex-Boyfriend and in doing so announce there’s no way I’m spending Thursday evening with him and current New Girlfriend, so there and leave me alone.

Observe that blood pressure is hovering in the lower stratosphere.

Wednesday, I thought Aaaaahhh! A whole day to myself in which to do MY thing!

Uh huh. Run from pillar to post. Deal with Yard Dude, who announces he’s showing up right this minute with a ton and a half of quarter-minus gravel and wishes to spread it. Supervise this. Race to choir, not having cooked the dog meat I carelessly left out on the counter. Cook dog meat upon returning around 9:15 p.m., while working on new version of maps to send to graphic artist for novel.

(YES!! NOVEL!)

Learn that Sunday is pick-a-puppy day in Wittman. Explain to breeder that Sunday is not good: choir all morning, and then a huge full-choir Evensong chivaree requiring elaborate rehearsal to which we are asked to bring enough potluck to feed 23 guest choir members. I will not have time to make the two-hour round-trip between here and Wittman between the end of Sunday morning service and the 4:00 p.m. choir call. Too bad, says she: you want dibs on the pup, you show up Monday. Otherwise you can drag in on the 15th. God damn.

Overcook meat while doing English-major graphic artistry. Write long explanation of what I thought I was trying to do and how I screwed it up, addressed to a guy who thinks in three dimensions, not in the long straight railroad-track lines of the highly verbal. Pray to god he has some idea what my excuse is. Fall into the sack at 11 p.m.

Thursday, roll out of the sack at 5:30 a.m.. Absolutely positively do NOT think Aaaaahhh! A whole day to myself in which to do MY thing!

Don’t. Be. Ridiculous.

Fly to Scottsdale with business associate, there to chair networking group meeting. We stop by Sprouts on the way home, my having inspired her with the story of … yes, indeed: the most INCREDIBLY DELICIOUS, MEAT-FREE, GLUTEN-FREE all-in-one hot dish that I invented last week and that, as we carpooled eastward, I realized I could take to the potluck on Sunday — in a slow cooker.

So it’s like this: Eggplant, lots of onion, and incredible packaged tomatoes.

Pomi strained tomatoesFirst off, if you can, get your hands on some boxed tomatoes by an outfit called Pomí. The Sprouts here has taken to carrying these products. They’re expensive, they’re worth every penny. If you can find them, just buy the best canned tomatoes you can find, preferably low-salt (good luck with that! 😉 ). Then the basic stuff you’ll need is a nice fresh eggplant or two, a good onion, a clove or two of garlic, a sprinkle of feta cheese, and maybe some carrots or celery. Or both. Other stuff is optional: flavorings, extra veggies like spinach or kale, and whatEVER.

You need:

• Eggplant
• Onion
• Garlic
• Powdered cumin
• Dried herbs (I used herbes de Provence, but fines herbes or just about any other flavor you like will be fine)
• Carrots
• Celery, if desired
• Anise, if desired
• And the like, if desired
• Mushrooms, if desired
• Salt & pepper
• Feta cheese
• Olive oil

Slice the eggplant length-wise into pieces about 1/2 to 1 inch thick. Sprinkle each side of the slices with salt. Take a rack out of the oven and set it across the kitchen sink. Place the salted eggplant slices on the rack and let sit for 1/2 hour to an hour or so, depending on your mood and schedule.

Roughly chop an onion and chop a couple cloves of garlic. Pour a little olive oil in a wide frying pan and gently cook the onion over low-medium heat until it’s soft and beginning to caramelize. As the onion is cooking, also add cut-up carrot, celery, or other aromatic vegetables. Flavor to taste with cumin and herbs. Add the garlic toward the end of this process.

Then rinse the salt off the eggplant slices; dry well with paper towels or a clean kitchen towel.

Preheat the oven to about 350 degrees.

Remove the onion and veggies from the pan. Add a little more olive oil. Again over l0w-medium heat, gently brown the eggplant slices, two or three at the time, until they’re nice and brown on both sides. Remove the eggplants from the pan.

Place a layer of about half the sauteed aromatic vegetables in the bottom of the pan. Lay the eggplant slices over this. Pour about half the tomatoes over them. Top with the rest of the aromatics and the remainder of the canned tomatoes. Sprinkle the top with feta cheese. Bake in a medium-hot oven (about 350 to 375 degrees) for about 20 to 20 minutes, until heated through.

This really is delicious. If you have a no-dairy eater, you can serve the feta on the side instead of baking it into the dish. Should satisfy the most picky eaters at your table!

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Read. The. Statements!

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The credit union’s bill-pay system is set up to pay the monthly Cox telecommunications bill in two chunks: a slab from The Copyeditor’s Desk to pay the (alleged) high-speed Internet connection, vital to doing business, and the rest from personal checking to cover the land line and the various indescribable bullshit the company uses to jack up its prices. It emits these transactions automatically, without my having to do anything special to make that happen.

This morning I opened the statement that came in last night’s mail. (That’s right: in the abysmal straits to which the U.S. Post Office has sunk, mail here is often delivered after dark.) Lo! It was ten bucks more than the total allotted monthly payment!

Dayum!

Annoying close comparison between last month’s bill and this month’s bill revealed that, for no discernible reason, Cox had ratcheted up the price of the Internet connection by a little over nine bucks.

Note, however, that they did nothing to ratchet up the speed of their interminably tardy “high-speed” service.

Ah, well.

So I called and, once connected to a human (only took about 10 minutes…), asked for an explanation.

Right away, without even any whining or caviling from me, the youthful-sounding man on the other end offered a $10 “discount,” good for a year.

Welp, it doesn’t solve the ultimate problem. But it’ll save me $120 in 2014.

Better than a hit on the head.

I sure do wish cell phones came with unlimited extensions, the way land lines do. Actually, somewhere I heard of a service that allows you to have your cell phone ring on a land line, thereby converting your land-line phones to de facto extensions. But alas, I’m afraid you prob’ly still have to pay for the land-line service to pull that stunt off.

Which is an aside.

The PF take-away: Always open every statement, no matter how routine it looks, and read it. And when confronted with something new, annoying, or bizarre: Question Authority!

Loafing

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My goodness, it’s nice to be able to loaf in the sack until after the sun comes up! All of the paying work got done toward the end of last week. And now the house is cleaned (and cleaned again), the bookkeeping done, and the mountain of paper shoveled off the desk.

Peace!

Cassie the Corgi has been blowing her coat for the past month, an activity that did not help the predicament caused by my failing to clean house for two months. Vast quantities of dog dunes have been shoveled up and dumped in the trash; the floors vacuumed, mopped, and steam-mopped; the sheets washed and pillowcases ironed; the bathrooms cleaned; the kitchen cleaned; the caked-on grease scoured off the stove; the nonfunctional stove burner repaired. YES!

What could be better?

It looks like the magazine writing course will not make. An enrollment of twelve is required to make it go. A week or so ago eight students had signed up, but since then a couple have withdrawn, and only six remain. And that’ll be fine — I can do without having to wrangle two online courses this semester. The Eng. 102 section will take up the slack if the writing course doesn’t materialize; otherwise income from said wanna-be Writers with a Capital W will come under the heading of “pure gravy.”

At any rate, until such time as I can believe that section will fly, I’m not putting in any more unpaid hours in course prep. LOAF!

Today’s income-inequality rant at The New York Times holds forth on the alleged upward skew of consumer spending — theoretically, as the rich get richer, fewer mass-market appliances and low-end restaurant meals are getting bought, presumably because the rich are getting a whole lot richer and the rest of us are getting a whole lot poorer. “Those consumers who have capital like real estate and stocks and are in the top 20 percent are feeling pretty good,” the reporter quotes a Price-Waterhouse-Coopers exec.

No kidding? If you count the savings drawdown and the Social Security and the teaching income as “earnings,” I’m in the top 50 percent, and I’m feeling pretty good.

O’course, that’s not counting the outrageous amounts the investments earned over the past several months, during the recent rabid bull market. Add  just three months of those proceeds into the AGI and you push me into the top 25 percent of US earners. Precious little of that is coming into reach of American Express and its retailer customers, of course — it’s banked against old age. Nor is it to be imagined that those are real figures: I think of that kind of thing as pretend money, easy come-easy go, poker chips on the craps table.

But for the nonce, at least, having made the 2014 drawdown before the hot air started to seep out of the stock market, I’m feeling moderately confident. In 2014, there should be plenty to live on, even if the current spate of outrageous unplanned expenses continues for several more months. Now, 2015 may be a different story. But we’ll get to that when we get to it.

At any rate, this year, thanks to the chair having come up with the online 102 section and my having volunteered serendipitously to take a summer section, teaching income will be more than normal even in the absence of this spring’s maga-writing course.

How on earth does that man do it? He seems to just BE there, every time I need a new way to earn a chunk of money. This has happened time after time. Someone upstairs must have appointed the guy to be my guardian angel.

So…what to do today?

1. Bill the two major clients, a project that will take a while since I haven’t kept up with billing.
2. Update the imaginary map for the novel and ship that off to the artist.
3. Organize the cookbook recipes in a sane sequence.
4. Delete images from Word recipe files; track down the jpegs and save them to a new subdirectory with numbered filenames that will make them appear in the order in which they need to be inserted in the layout.
5. Call the vet; arrange appointment to inspect new pup (just a month or so to go!) and get new shots for Cassie.
6. Figure out a way to ask the vet about how to feed real food to a pup, or when to start.
7. Go for a dog-and-human walk.
8. If any time remains, continue chapter 1 of the novel’s sequel.

Huh. I suppose this means I’m going to have to get up and do something, eh?

Staying on Top of Things

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Growing into a wise old grizzled old bestower of the culture’s lore has its privileges. And it has its drawbacks.

One of the latter is that you take to change less and less as you devolve further into the wisdom of maturity. That’s another way of saying you get to a point where you can’t stand it when people change things up on you!!!!

Argha.

All of which is to lead in to the tale of yesterday’s trip to downtown Phoenix, a place I’ve managed to stay out of for a good long time. Once again this year, I agreed to participate in a mock trial for the County Prosecutor’s office, a device used to train young lawyers and an activity that’s a bit of a hoot.

However, they changed the venue from the seedy offices where one would expect a prosecutor to reside to the courtroom set-ups at a proprietary law school that occupies many floors of a new highrise downtown. And in doing so, they changed parking garages, too.

Holy sh!t.

Parking garages now share space with things like…oh, a bowling alley. I had one hell of a time finding the entrance to the parking cave, causing me to have to navigate and renavigate the frenzied, spaghetti-like maze of one-way streets that they’ve installed downtown. What a mess!

I’d elected to go down Central Avenue because you can’t turn left off Seventh and Seventh during the rush hour. Though I thought the reverse lane ended somewhere north of downtown, I wasn’t sure where and didn’t want to go right, right, and right to turn left to get to the promised parking garage.

Everyone else had the same idea: Central was a commuter’s nightmare even north of where the accursed train turns onto that formerly beautiful urban boulevard. The train not only has massively uglified what was once the only really pretty street in central Phoenix, it’s made a horror show of driving.

Finally I had to cut off a few of my fellow homicidal drivers and slam my way into a right-turn lane so I could go west to Seventh Avenue, which was virtually empty because everyone was on Central. On Seventh I cruised downtown without a problem, but by then I’d turned a 20-minute drive into a 40-minute drive.

So I was late by the time I hit downtown, and then it took forever to find the parking garage with its well-disguised entrances.

Fortunately I wasn’t the only one — others also straggled in even later, having encountered the same mess.

Part of the problem is age — one adjusts to change with increasing difficulty as time passes — and part is CHANGE. The city and its grasping developers have transformed our formerly down-at-the-heels downtown, largely for the better.

What used to be a nature conservancy for drug addicts, alcoholics, and the homeless mentally ill has turned into a vibrant, active, busy central-city core. New high-rises now dominate the skyline, and old historic high-rise buildings — now mid-rises in the new landscape — have been elegantly restored. The place is buzzing with activity.

Problem is, the centerpiece of this redevelopment, a large, expensive, and ugly stadium, took up so much space that they had to reroute a couple of main drags and turn a bunch of two-way streets into one-ways, with no discernible logic or good sense.

Adding to the mystification, the damn train has made an unholy mess of the roads and traffic lights a half-mile in either direction of the rails. Timed lights have gone away, so you sit through two or three red signals to get past an intersection, and you never know which way you can turn and what lane you can safely enter. Bizarre arrows are painted in lanes directing you out of this or that lane, for no apparent reason; these are sometimes ignored and often senseless. Literally I have seen intersections with signs reading

NO LEFT TURN
NO RIGHT TURN
DO NOT ENTER

As you can imagine, then, a drive to a downtown destination makes for a confusing, unpleasant trip.

Adding to the confusion is that what’s in my head as  I think of the downtown map is the grid I knew when I worked down there in my 20s. That was a long, long time ago. Today’s map is a whole lot different. And i. don’t. like. it.

So we see how incumbent it is upon the aging city dweller to bloody keep up with the changes in her or his city!

I think what I’m gunna do, while the weather’s still nice, is get on the train at AJ’s, attired in some costume with comfortable shoes, and ride downtown. Then I’m going to get off the train at Washington or Jefferson, with a Mapquest printout in hand, and spend two or three hours just walking around.

This, I hope, will revise the internal map of the place. And it’ll be a good way to get the day’s exercise.

Images:

Downtown Phoenix at night. JCordova. Public domain.
Exquisite train stop in downtown Phoenix. 2008. Ixnayonthetimmay. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.