What if instead of chasing this dream of a 1950s style manufacturing economy (hello, automation!) we tried making existing service industry jobs better?

There is no law that service industry jobs have to be terrible. They could be dignified and well paying.

— Angie Schmitt🚶‍♀️ (@schmangee) September 2, 2021

Indeed! And in many countries those jobs are just as Angie says. McDonald’s line workers in Denmark, for instance, make around $20 per hour, have six weeks vacation per year and excellent government-provided health care.

And contrary to what you’ve read a Big Mac in Denmark is only about 10% more than it is in the US. It can be done and it should be done.

Australia Traded Away Too Much Liberty. How long can a democracy maintain emergency restrictions and still call itself a free country?

Up to now one of Earth’s freest societies, Australia has become a hermit continent. How long can a country maintain emergency restrictions on its citizens’ lives while still calling itself a liberal democracy?

Australia has been testing the limits.

Before 2020, the idea of Australia all but forbidding its citizens from leaving the country, a restriction associated with Communist regimes, was unthinkable. Today, it is a widely accepted policy.

Yeah, Australia has flown totally off the rails. I had hoped to go there one day but I am guessing that will not be possible within any shorter timeframe than 5-7 years, if ever. Such is life.

Darwin Award, group selection edition https://t.co/xKHBr24MpF

— Nils Gilman (@nils_gilman) September 3, 2021

Look at these mooks! I love it. I mean, what can you do but laugh at this level of heinous jackassery? The Republicans definitely need to gerrymander as a lot of their supporters won’t be able to vote anymore because they will be dead (either from Covid or bleach/ivermectin overdoses).

I think Olivia Rodrigo is absurdly talented, but apart from that fact this video is worth watching because it says a lot about how Gen Z sees and experiences the world. I know, scientists attempt to convince you that there are no generational differences but obviously that’s 100% complete horseshit. (Why they want to perpetrate that con, I have not quite figured out yet but think about it frequently.)

Unlike a lot of artists, especially ones so young (she is 18), Olivia writes or co-writes her own songs so this more a real voice of someone of her generation, unlike Lorde’s output post Pure Heroine which were mainly a bunch of songs written by a mid-30s dude — and that’s exactly what those songs sounded like.

The video is making tons of sly references all over the place. I’m too tired now to write about them all, but I really like what the director and Olivia is doing there. The song and video of course is not only objecting to what the world wants someone like Olivia to be, but it is implicitly recognizing that in capitalism the rebellion against the system is also used for capitalistic exploitation and marketing, with no escape possible or even imaginable.

Thus, she (and the video) is walloping us with our submission to this system and its inescapability. We are all in this together (she’s saying), but does it matter, does it mean anything, if we are all trapped with no exit?