Mammon category archive

Transcript here.

(Too true to pass up.)

Hendersonville, N. C., Chick-Fil-A plucks over its employees.

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:

Amazon drivers do the same job as me but are paid half as much. Moreover, Amazon’s low wages have affected the whole industry. Over the last 10 years, package delivery drivers’ wages have fallen by 19% in California, adjusted for inflation. That’s about $12,000 less per year for the average driver. California’s warehouse worker wages have also gone down 3% over the same period.

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.

A THC con.

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.

Afterthought:

In thes new Gilded age, might it be possible that some persons have been allow to accumulate more wealth than is good for them, or for everybody else?

That someone has somehow become a “social media influencer” is no guarantee of credibility. Or integrity.

(Perhaps especially integrity.)

One more time, “social” media isn’t.

After discussing the theory that we are living in some sort of simulation, Jonathan Wolf concedes that most of us are not, but some of us, most notably Elon Musk. Here’s big of his article:

So, I’m fairly confident that most of us are not living in a simulation. I do think Elon Musk has entered his own simulated reality though.

Extremely rich people are often susceptible to the same affliction. We do not live in a pure meritocracy. Some unmeritorious people still get lucky, some very meritorious people get unlucky, and almost everyone is very, very good at certain things while simultaneously being terrible at others. For the extremely wealthy, though, it’s easy to build walls around themselves inside of which they know more about everything than everyone else.

In related news, Chris Williams takes a slightly less charitable view:

This man goes out of the way daily to prove that meritocracy is bunk.

Follow the links to see each writer’s reasoning.

PoliticalProf sees historical precedent for Elon Musk’s arbitrary and capricious antics at Twitter.

Methinks his theory sheds some light on the mindset of the Musk.

Freebie frolics.

Liz Dye comments on the guilty verdict against the Trump Organization for tax fraud. It is delightful reading. A snippet:

The jurors were unconvinced by the Trump Organization’s argument that the 15-year scheme to compensate high-level employees using pre-tax dollars was perpetrated on the company by nefarious executives simply seeking to stiff Uncle Sam and the New York Department of Taxation and Finance out of their rightful share.