Unless you own your own small business, that’s what you are — creating output for your massa, and your massa gives you an increasingly tiny part of what you produce as your wages. And if you are your own small business, even there you may be a sharecropper — as Montag pointed out, the typical franchise agreement puts you into basically the same position as the sharecroppers of yore, where you buy your seed from the company store, where you work is owned by Massa, your debts are owed to Massa, and if you’re good, then Massa will let you stay and let you keep a percentage of what you produce.
And even if you aren’t a franchisee, you’re pretty much reduced to being mammals in the age of dinosaurs, eking out a pitiable living on whatever morsels drop out of the corners of the gaping maw of the dinosaurs as they feed upon the body public, and wishing for a meteor. But meteors don’t happen often, and the modern-day Massas seem remarkably resilient. The sharecropping system in the South lasted for about 90 years. Think about that for a while. Ninety. Years. Ninety years a serf on Massa’s estate, able to switch to a different Massa if you wished, but they all pretty much were about the same in the end.
So enough of that. Now I want to talk about another thing: Peak Stupid. Peak Stupid is that point at which the stupid in the nation gets so bad that the giant suck of stupid passes the event horizon and implodes into a black hole of suck. So here’s three points on our road to Peak Stupid:
Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department reminds people that Facebook being down is not cause to call 911.
Words elude me.
Cops break into car to save helpless not-at-all-lifelike baby doll. Because, you know, hot day. Car. Baby not breathing. Except baby was fucking plastic, and rather obviously so. Not noted is whether the cops tried to give mouth-to-mouth to the “baby” to get it breathing again…
Texas police officer / firearms instructor manages to shoot his own hand while giving firearms lesson. These are our “good guys with guns”. I feel safer. Yeah.
Peak stupid. I eagerly await the gaping maw of the event horizon, because it surely cannot be far away.
– Badtux the Serfin’ USA Penguin
That’s a harsh way to describe employees. I decided to work for a big company because I don’t like marketing and schmoozing and I’m not good at them. So I have someone who does them for me. I call her “boss”, but that doesn’t cost me anything. (Actually, it annoys the hell out of her when I call her that.) I want to build models. I want to make numbers sing and dance. And I get to do those with minimal interruption.
That said, the rest of your points are right. My wife owns her own business and holy crap does the tax code love her for it. Any married couple should definitely have one small businessman. One person contributes stability, while the other swings for the fences and tries to get rich.
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I just follow the numbers. Employees get an increasingly smaller part of the output they produce, employers get an increasingly larger part of the output their employees produce, to the point where big companies are sitting on a trillion dollar pile of cash that they have no idea what to do with. That’s Massa squeezing his sharecroppers. Serfin’ USA, dude.
I’ve worked for small companies most of my life because I, too, don’t like marketing and schmoozing and all that. (Ran my own business for a while, but discovered it wasn’t what I wanted to do). But being a mammal in a time of dinosaurs means a constant scramble for each little morsel and crumb that manages to escape from the corner of the gaping maw of the dinosaurs, so none of them are still in business except of course for my current employer but who knows how long that’s going to be?
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Peak stupid. Love the term. I’m just not sure we’ve reached it yet giving the current state of the republican voter.
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The Derp is strong in this Nation. Peak Stupid is not yet observable, and quite possibly, will not be known until well after the fact. I did 20 with Uncle Sugar, but that did not prepare me for the ‘real world’ of work. There was a bunch of suck while I served, but we were working together.
One employer seemed to be in a constant state of flux – going from privately owned, to taken over by a foreign corporation, to the corporation being bought out by an investment company, and brought private. In the 6+ years I was there, resources have not quite been there for smooth operations – just barely enough to get the job done and move on to the next crisis.
Too old to strike off on my own (got mortgage when I got out, and trying to make up lost time), and while the job market is recovering, I’m old, and not exactly what some employers are looking for – cheap and dumb.
I’ll welcome the black hole of suck, as long as it transports most (if not all) of the (R) yahoos in Congress, and puts ’em in the mirror universe.
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