Tag: capitalism

Slaveholders also developed an equivalence unit called “the prime field hand.” They assigned certain capabilities to the prime hand, such as expected production per day. Workers were measured against this standard and given values such as “half hand” and “quarter hand.” Owners used these units as benchmarks across plantations. If one slaveholder reported that he had 13 hands who were the equivalent of 10 prime hands, other slaveholders would have known exactly what that meant in terms of production.

Caitlin Rosenthal, Plantations Practiced Modern Management, Harvard Business Review, September 2013 (via inthenoosphere)

Bernie is not a socialist. He is a social democrat, like so many European
politicians (with a bit more integrity perhaps).

And Trump is not a fascist. He is a power-hungry autocratic narcissist,
like Chavez, Putin and Peron.

I hate it when people throw around labels they don’t understand.
I grew up in a socialist – and autocratic – country, and I know.

Bernie is likely to slow down our transition from capitalism into
corpocracy, though unlikely to be any more successful at reversing it than Obama was. Getting to nominate 3 Supreme Court justices could go a long way though.

Trump is likely to get us into a global war, thus guaranteeing that corpocracy never happens, since humans would never have a global civilization again.

But now we’ve reached the point where the choice is no longer between
Bernie and Trump, but between Hillary and Trump.

It may be inconvenient for many, but this is just how it is.

Amazon: where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves

That NYT article/expose that everyone’s talking about makes Amazon look so similar to my old company. But there are many differences, in how we had a network of support, and how everyone was actively encouraged to help one another (at least early on). 

I hope Amazon’s way of measuring every metric of their employees and squeezing everything out of them until they burn out is not the future of the workplace in this country. The scathing reaction among people who invest in or run tech companies, however, is predictable, and not at all encouraging.

We have a friend who just moved to Seattle to work for Amazon. Very worried about her. There are many other ways to be creative and to make a difference. Friends should not let friends work for Amazon.