Voting With My Work

There is a will in my world, not at all clear, but I think of significant power, and I have been exercising it my whole life. I have at times been a software engineer. I have also been a janitor, a computer lab test engineer, a fisherman in Alaska, an apartment manager, and a class A truck driver. There are some things I don't like doing, but I like to try to do things that help my community, my family, and the ethical workings of things around me. As such, if there is one thing that makes me not want to do anything extensively productive nor empowering to large money or resource holders, it is unethical holders of power. I am sure a very large portion of workers in the economy feel this way, and instinctively react to bad players and destructive policies in uncountable ways, in ranges from obvious to intangible. For me, right now, I am trying to do things that only explicitly help or convey resources to my community, and only to those who really need it. My perception is that present powers are doing everything they can to rob and/or imperceptibly accumulate economic Pareto rent from every possible situation, that the entire economic network is constantly being manipulated to maximize such takings, and that both democratic empowerment, and personal health are suffering from these.

I don't delude myself that any given defineable side of any dichotomy is in all ways better or worse than another, but protracted wealth right now represents peril in ways that are clearly NOT making good contributions to healthy equilibrium. Standard understanding of market economics would drive one to expect this, as the more potential labor targets there are, and the more things can be done without same, both of which are protracted in number right now, the more price of labor will be in the toilet. In fact, arguably, right now people getting paid what they can get has much more to do with social acceptability, and the ability to live in some minimal situation and survive, than it does with raw bang for buck for a worker. Low wages are tolerated by those that work because they can get little else, while these being higher than need be are tolerated by those paying because they don't want to be bothered with their employees living across the street in railyards and coming to work smelly. What is being bought is the work situation as much as the product. But even these are seeing downward pressure on wages. Meanwhile, It costs much more for a good apartment than most can earn in a month to pay for it, and food is that much again. I don't see how many survive.

From the birds eye view, humans are tearing up the planet. People insist on driving all around in weighty exoskeletons with bouncy wheels and strapping in positionings which seem more set to help evolve to stabilizing half-pupated arthropods than maintaining the health of bipedal chordates. The average travel during a day uses some 10 to 100 times the calories needed by the native organism alone, and you add up all the hive-like infrastructure to allow all this travel, you wonder when this bloom of short term energy consumption will need to end, especially when you realize the average fossil fuel calorie for each native food calorie that these creatures eat is something like 20 to 1. Then the entirey of this society deludes itself into thinking that conversion of some staple food calories to fuel these exoskeletal recreations is somehow a great trade, even though at times each such calorie needs almost one calorie of fossil fuel itself. Clearly arithmetic is not a strong point in these decisions.

But, given this network designed to eliminate the energy available in this bloom as quickly as possible is clearly succeeding at an almost maximized pace, one wonders what reaction managers of the thing should engage. Some would excuse the very accumulation via ignorance as a necessary cannibalism of this unwieldy overpopulation whose allegedly natural destruction will be the only thing that "saves us". Unfortunately, evidence makes it plain that, not only are the large resource holders the most guilty of engaging the protracted acceleration, and massively guilty of incredible over-consumption themselves, but the main thing then have used to maintain these projects has been ignorance and mendacity, not helpful information. This is not a good inheritance, and in fact makes these big players, apparently, the best and most efficient candidates for destruction in any plan for mitigation.