BWare

But currently it’s both.  Art imitates life imitates art.  I used to work at Initech, and I went to grad school to get away from it.  But it’s universal.  Apparently inescapable.  Even managers who used to be techies who have watched the movie will still become Lumbergh because they can’t fucking think of anything better to do.

The US is deploying a $1B missile defense system, primarily to Alaska, which has at best a 50% success record (bad news if you’re missile with a huge radar generator attached heading from a known direction at a known time), to shoot down missiles from North Korea, which can’t reach the US and can’t possibly have missile-launchable nukes attached.

Those Star Wars Buck Turgidsons must have gotten an erection when KJU started rattling his empty saber again. The missiles won’t even be deployed til 2017, so even if they were effective, they wouldn’t be useful for this “crisis”.

But the missiles are very useful for deploying $1B of funds which might have otherwise been sequestered.

Though you’d never know it this time of year around here.

As it turns out, there are about 10% more people on disability in 2013 after the greatest recession since the 30s than there were in 1995. And most of that is due to simple demographics – it’s the boomers. Big shock. But by all means, if you want yet more people on disability, raise the retirement age to 67.

So Chana Joffe-Walt has discovered that, if you work backbreaking menial jobs all your life, and have little to no education [1], it's likely that when that backbreaking job actually breaks your back [2], you will not have the education to go get a desk job. Furthermore, in large parts of the country, especially the rural parts, there simply are no desk jobs.

Chana Joffe-Walt is shocked, shocked, by this! The whole hour-long episode is basically her revelation that much of the country relies on hard physical labor to get by! And that physical labor is hard! That the whole transformation of the economy from manufacturing and farm labor to service and tech has left those are either not suited or unable to get a college degree in a deep dark hole. That the half of the population with an IQ less than 100 might not be able to get a high-tech job, or there might be people who don't want to. Or people who don't want to rip up their families and move all over the country chasing non-existent jobs, and probably don't have the resources to do so in any case. If you're living from pay check (or disability check) to check, paying first, last and deposit on an apartment in a new city might simply not be possible.

The amazing thing is that a large fraction of these people still vote Republican.

And here's another story for CJW – raising the retirement age to 67 might work if you have one of them desk jobs, but if you're working at a fish plant or a factory or a farm or as a janitor, then working another two years is not something to be looked forward to, but rather two more years tacked onto your sentence. It's hard fucking work. I work hard, but it's not the same, and any CEO who tells you that they work harder than everyone else to get their salary needs to spend a couple of weeks digging ditches.

Me, I grew up on a farm/ranch, and that was hard enough that I paid my way through school doing construction. Building houses was way easier. There was no way I was going to spend my life doing either of those. I spent enough time shagging plywood that I could tell that doing it age 50 was going to be no fun. And at age 50, my back feels those eight sheets of plywood every time I stand up, even though I stopped when I was a hale 22.

I also knew that there were people who did tougher jobs than me. My dad tried to use his children as migrant workers, and we lasted about a day hoeing weeds by hand, going up and down the mile-long rows, chopping weeds (he had the field cropdusted at the same time, using the active ingredient in Agent Orange, so there's that). Handling irrigation pipe, driving tractors, digging ditches, shagging plywood – all way easier than being a field hand.

This is yet another reason NPR will never get a dime from me. Those folks need to get out more.

[1] Not least because you quit school to take one of those backbreaking menial jobs in order to help support your family.

[2] Of course, that backbreaking hourly job didn't have benefits.