Mammon category archive
The Privatization Scam 0
At the Des Moines Register, Lois Altmaier Crowley exposes the school voucher con. Here’s a bit of her article; follow the link for more.
Privatizing education does not lead to competition that will improve actual learning outcomes for students. Instead, it starts a race to the bottom that crunches school employees’ wages and teacher salaries, leads to hiring of less qualified educators due to turnover, causes costs for oversight (we must check private school start-ups rigorously and often to ensure quality education!), and harms those students whose parents took a chance on the ones that will inevitably fail. Channeling money into private schooling will also be highly inequitable as fewer than half of our counties (Iowa’s–ed.) even have them: Money that could and should be shared across 99 counties would go to less than half of them.
Altmaier does not address this, but I would add that said school voucher con often serves the wishes of those who would replace education with indoctrination.
Driven to Destruction 0
Sam and his crew express a smidgen of skepticism about the hype over self-driving cars.
The Privatization Scam 0
John Geyman explains what “Medicare Advantage” should more properly be described as Medicare Disadvantage.
Here’s one of the reasons he cites; follow the link for the rest.
The Crypto Con 0
By the skin of our teeth, according to David Dayen. A snippet; follow the link for his reasoning.
Via Atrios.
It’s All about the Algorithm , , , 0
, , , and the algorithm is designed, above all else, to be addictive.
Twits Own Twitter 0
By all reports, working at Twitter really stinks since Elon Must took over.
The Crypto Con, Reprise 0
Bradley Murray, writing at Psychology Today Blogs, looks at why so many persons who should have known better–indeed, likely would have known better have they stopped to think for a moment–fell for the scam. I commend his piece to your attention.
Aside:
Some years ago, I listened to a Linux podcast–now podfaded. One of the hosts was all into bitcoin. I saw right-off that it was the most fiat of all fiat currencies, based on and backed by nothing other than believers’ faith, but he actually believed it was real.
(Broken link fixed.)
The Business of America Is Giving Workers the Business, Reprise 0
Hendersonville, N. C., Chick-Fil-A plucks over its employees.
The Business of America Is Giving Workers the Business 0
At the San Francisco Chronicle, a long-time driver for UPS looks at the effects the flood of Amazon’s own delivery drivers has had on his industry. He posits that, in this new Gilded Age, it has not been salutary. A snippet:
Not surprisingly, Amazon’s workers don’t stay very long. The company’s annual turnover rate for warehouse workers is 150%. The company’s business model is to create bad jobs so workers won’t stick around and demand the pay and respect that they deserve.
Farcical Recognition 0
Madison Square Garden Entertainment uses facial recognition to ban a mother from seeing the Rockettes with her daughter because of her day job.
Via C&L, which has commentary.
Facebook Frolics 0
In an interesting twist, the con works only when you click on a link within Facebook. If you try to reach it otherwise, it redirects to another fake website. Snopes theorizes that this was an attempt to make the scam harder to uncover. I submit that it may rather be an indication of the scammers’ opinion of the susceptibility of persons assimilated by the Zuckerborg.
How Far Will Wells-Fargo? 0
Afterthought:
I’m certain that these sorts of shenanigans can be explained by the confluence of old-fangled greed and the new-fangled sophistries of the Chicago school of economics. This led to the poisonous theory that the first responsibility of a business is, not to the health of the business nor to its customers, certainly not to its employees, but to its stockholders. You know, those folks who don’t work there and don’t buy there and certainly don’t rely there, but own a few scraps of paper . . . .
A poisonous corollary led to the notion that it was perfectly okay for predatory “investors” (think hedge funds) to loot and destroy perfectly healthy businesses, so long as the “investors” come out holding bags of looted wealth.
Not that I’m perhaps a wee bit cynical or anything like that . . . .