Why I don't need you to sell fries to me.

The Quandary of Work, or : Why I don't need you to sell fries to me.

I have a dear friend to whom I speak on a regular basis. We've known each other forever, but haven't been on the same end of the continent for decades. Still, I value his opinion even when we disagree. The other evening we were having one of our typical conversations. “People need jobs” he said “and we need to penalize those companies that take them abroad so our people can have work.” Then he went on about worker productivity and salaries and the dignity of work and the like.

Sounds fine, I guess, but I have a problem with all of this “job” thing. Not that I don't work. I've worked 60 hour weeks for most of my life, generally in businesses that I created. I've spent a lot of early mornings and ridiculously late nights working to make things happen. I've worked myself to the point of falling over more than once. I mean that literally. Work, I can do.

But here's the thing. In my little galley (we're liveaboards, a life that I recommend) I have a stick blender. We do a lot of cooking. We use the thing for making sauces and gravies, for mulching a must for hard ciders when we brew, for whirring up frozen drinks in summers and hot soups in winters. Doing that stuff by hand would be an utter pain. I could do it of course, but why?

My point is: I use the blender so I don't have to do the work. At no time am I thinking about it being an enhancement to my productivity (I'm not cooking for 40, and if I did, they wouldn't fit on the boat). I have the device in order to avoid work, and avoiding bashing my knuckles pounding ice into a slurry is a good thing, I think we can all agree.

From blenders to electric drills to computer word processors to cars to aircraft, we build stuff in order to avoid effort, to keep us from having to do the work, take the risk, spend our limited lifetimes, and exhaust our energies. We do it so that we can turn our attentions to those things we find fulfilling, be it writing or family or hiking or building houses or staring at a turtle.

This isn't new. We've been building dedicated machines to do work for us since the dawn of the industrial revolution, probably since the dawn of humanity.

So the desirability of automation or lessening labor costs isn't the issue. The issue is: who benefits from it? The elimination of labor is a natural result of automation, as machines take over the tasks we once labored to do. I remember 1950's adverts heralding appliances as “ending the drudgery” of housework, and who wouldn't want that?

Now, to the investor class, those for whom “the market” is the only arbiter of labor and productivity (as well as of human worth), the current round of automation based layoffs and job exportation is not only just fine, it's the rightful way things are. There is, of course, historical precedent. The invention of the Jacquard loom in 1804, for example, laid off a lot of weavers (and created a host of anti-automation protests and actions, here see: Luddite). Despite the mass layoffs, the profits for the weaving industry in that era went nowhere but up. Now (having shipped a lot of American jobs to China where the labor is cheaper) companies in China like Foxxcon are laying off thousands of workers as they automate. The already massive industrial profits are headed for record highs (just look at the stock market). The investor class makes more and more as automation decreases costs and increases productivity, and the displaced workers...well...they can just go find another job. The trouble is, the only jobs available, manufacturing (and soon materials handling, programming, clerical work, truck driving, and delivery) being removed, are service jobs, and with a smaller and smaller class being able to afford the services, there is an unavoidable failure built into such a system. It becomes a feudal nightmare, ever feeding of itself, with collapse inevitable.

Which brings me back to my original point. Taking a broader view: turning our labor over to machines is a good thing. It frees us from tedium and drudgery and danger and allows us to seek fulfillment in our lives, be it to immerse ourselves in wildly productive fields which fascinate us or merely to spend our time in introspection, hedonism, or adventure. The “every man must toil” thing not only isn't needed, it isn't practical. I don't need 350 million people trying to sell me fries or clean my windshield. I need new approaches to physics, new music, new artwork, better ways to heal, more beauty. . . The job disruptions of the industrial age led to the creation of political movements including the growth of Socialism, seeking to redress some kind of balance in society.

Then as now, the answer is, of course, to let those who have toiled share in the productivity of the machines that freed them from that toil. It means decoupling income from the work of the individual and replacing its source with the productivity of the machine that replaced it. Those who are driven to find riches will always find a way to do so, but there's no reason the rest of us must suffer and struggle and starve because of it.

To be sure, if we institute a scheme like Universal Basic Income or the like, some small number of people will choose to sit on their asses for the rest of their lives, and I'm okay with that (those are unlikely to be very productive employees anyway). But humans are restless creatures, and most will find something to do, something for which people will praise them, something that will increase their social capital, because that's how we're wired.

What I'm Not okay with is a world full of windshield washers and fries sellers, scrabbling about in poverty and desperation so that a tiny number of us can live in unimaginable wealth. My friend across the country, moving as he does in corporate boardrooms, is still very much wedded to the “job” mantra, but having worked all my life, I've come to a different conclusion: Let the machines do the work. Let the rest of us get on with the business of being human.

The New Paradoxes of Defense

George says Hi.

In 1599 the English swordmaster George Silver published a work called “The Paradoxes of Defense.” Part analysis, part rant, the work had one major target for his ire: the Rapier. For those of you not history buffs ( or Renfair geeks like myself)  the rapier is a sword; a particularly long, thin one, and in the late 1500's it became a kind of deadly fad as a tool for dueling. Like an example? Go re-read Shakespeare's “Romeo and Juliet.” Those are rapiers leaving teenage blood all over the stage. Silver's point about the weapon was singular: the long, narrow blade was deadly in attack and difficult to stop, but, because of its length and fragility, it was virtually useless in defense. It could kill your opponent, but could do almost nothing to keep you from being killed. The winners in such contests tended to be difficult to distinguish from the losers, and the public death toll, particularly among the young, became alarming.

It occurred to me the other day, in the midst of the March for Our Lives and our national discussion of guns, that firearms are rather like the rapier. They are lethal in attack, but there is absolutely nothing you can do with a gun that will have any effect on an incoming bullet. Like the rapier, they are useless in defense. There is nothing they can do to protect you, and while attacking an attacker (long a military dictatum in cases of ambush) may lessen the damage, only being proactive and attacking first could possibly render you any semblance of “safe” with a gun.

This makes somewhat problematic one of the main solutions posed to our recent epidemic of school shootings by the NRA and gun aficionados (often dubbed “ammosexuals” their opponents); the idea that arming large numbers of school personnel--teachers, janitors, coaches—will somehow protect the children by getting the “bad guy.” How do you protect with something that has no ability to shield? By their nature, school shootings are an ambush, they occur as a surprise, so your valiant defenders, leaving their classrooms and lunchrooms and presumably leaving their charges behind to engage the villain, will not, by the very nature of the event, get off the first shot. And given that even trained police only have a hit rate of about 18% in live fire situations, the potential for collateral damage—that being bunched up groups of terrified children—is very high. We risk, still deep in George Silver's “Paradox,” placing our school students in the midst of firefights, all in the name of protecting them. Clearly, the only way to prevent this scenario—and the shooting itself—is to be somehow proactive about the attacker.

In Silver's day, the reaction of government was proactive and unequivocal. Like Shakespeare's Prince in the play, they acted. Fed up with the carnage, the wearing of the rapier was banned in numerous cities, and dueling itself was made illegal. Sword lengths were regulated (particularly in Spain, where the fad was rampant), or they were simply banned within city limits. Those who broke the ban were punished, the weapons confiscated, and the combination of law and outraged public opinion allowed reason to be reinstated, and the death toll faded.

In our day, being proactive may mean a number of things. Certainly, a rational ban on high capacity magazines, controlling the widespread ownership of military grade semiautomatic weapons, and ending the easy acquisition of such weapons by the dangerous and incompetent are reasonable actions that might be taken. However, the idea that flooding our schools with more guns in the name of protection is as ludicrous in our time as flooding the streets with rapiers as a way to end dueling would have been in the 16^th Century. Teachers and those who support their work, by their nature, have nurturence and protection as a focus of their lives. Their job as shields for our children should never be altered to make them shock troops on their behalf. Let us take actions before the fact to keep it that way.

George was right.

Is It Time for a People's Crypto-Currency?

Watching the amazing ups and downs of the CryptoCurrencies over this last week (driven, I think, in part by an understanding that the unstable fiat currencies run by the nation states are largely controlled by large banking and investors) has been sobering.  Even the likes of Goldman-Sachs have said that investment in them is a better and more secure bet than speculating in gold.  People have become overnight millionaires or overnight paupers, businesses have added the more well known of the Cryptos to the pallet of currencies they'll accept online or at the counter, and the nation states have, in general, struggled as to how to respond to these international, uncontrollable, and largely untraceable currencies.  The Cryptos have become in recent weeks the thing that we were always told they would never be:  Real.

Given that, and given that we're right on the edge of the blockchain revolution, maybe it's time:  Time that We, the People, us huddled masses yearning to breathe free, us guys, used that opportunity to create something decent, a way around the dominated economic system to which we all seem enslaved.  Something incorporating some of the best elements of social financing like Universal Basic Income, but minimizing the vulnerability to manipulation and monopoly, something like that.  None of this is rocket surgery, so to speak.  The blockchain programming that underlies most all of the CryptoCurrencies is available free to anyone on the web, and any programmer with a decent knowledge of C++ and yen to do so can make the modifications necessary.

Here's how I think it could work:  We create a People's Crypto (let's call it, since I'm an Egotist, Mungobucks for the moment).  You download a unique wallet similar to the ones used for Bitcoin and Litecoin and the rest.  Here's the difference, though.  Instead of the blocks being "mined", at the beginning of every month, your account is automatically charged with 1000 Mungobucks.  You don't have to do anything.  January 1, you look at your account, and there they are.  You are free to spend them on anything you wish:  food, rent, videogames, hookers, great literature, base literature, (or, of course, any of my books) education for your kids, tools for your new startups, single bottles of REALLY expensive wine, it's all up to you.  Here's the catch:  at the end of the month, the Mungobucks expire.  You can't roll them over.  You can't sit on them, you can't save them, and they can't be used for any financial investment or institution, because those entities can't own wallets for them.

But If I buy your poetry chap for a Mungobuck, something wonderful happens.  When it's transferred to your wallet, it gets another month of life, another 30 days added to it's lifespan, and in that time you can spend it on whatever you wish.  Spend it on a new bicycle and, voila, the bike vendor's account is credited with new Mungobucks, and those new bucks enter their account with 30 days of usefullness.  The money MUST be spent, must be circulated, or it dies.  The currency is created automatically (just as current fiat currencies are created by public expenditures) and destroyed by time (just as the current fiat currencies are destroyed, if you buy Modern Monetary Theory, by taxes).

It would spur entrepreneurism, it would fund art and education and child care and any number of positive things attributed to UBI, but without government interference or corporate dominance by financials.  Might people set up multiple accounts to get multiple charges of Mungobucks?  Probably, though it would be fairly easy to make that complicated and difficult.  As long as it wasn't pandemic, it wouldn't matter.  Would people accept them as currency?  They'd be insane not to.  Since I have them and YOU have them, why would we not both accept them for food or work or goods?

 It would also do a great deal to address the gap between the elites and the rest of us financially, making it possible for human beings to simply live without selling themselves into slavery to do so. Now,  there are doubtless a billion things of which I've not thought.  There are probably a hundred pitfalls and potential failings (as well as an equal amount of potential successes and advantages) that I haven't seen, but one thing is, to me, certain:  The current economic system, run as it is by the biggest players and the richest accounts on Earth, has ceased to serve the bulk of humanity adequately.  Maybe, just maybe, the democratization of the currency system can go some distance in ameliorating that.

Besides, it would be fun to watch the big boys scramble for once.

M