My new favorite podcast is No Agenda. It's a very off the cuff kind of scatterbrained intelligencer. But it's fundamentally skeptical. At some point in the future, I aim to join the kiretsu and maybe put their bumpersticker on my website. One of their motifs is 'shutup slave!', and it fits very nicely with my theory of the American Peasant.
I have been coming across stories that make the grumpy old man in me stand up an shout 'You lie', but then I think better of it. I roll my eyes with sad recognition of human frailty, stupidity and all that and then I try to conserve my energy by telling my kids about the madness. But they don't read Cobb. So I have you. Therefore I'm thinking about introducing a new category. I'm not sure if I should call it 'This Is Not America' or 'Shutup Slave!'. Neither is perfect, but I'll come up with something.
For the time being, I'll put this one under a punch in the nose. This one being the fact that AT&T is raising its early termination fee to 325 bucks. What? That's double the current fee.
The other bit of slavery being sold in America is debt slavery. It's an old story but here's how I read it, and I may be wrong and elitist and just not recognizing how much people need credit cards, but I doubt it.
It seems to me that too many people want to go to college and get edjumacated. You're basically reserving yourself a cubical and access to the Slice (maybe) but it's really a roll of the dice, especially if you're not in the hardest of the hard sciences. After WW2 and the GI Bill we overpopulated colleges, and I'm not sure that we've done well in all that for the country. I think we've generated a generation of broadminded people who meta-think about too much and focus too little on the business of life. We have people who can talk forever about movies but couldn't explain the operation of a SLR. It is the problem of a huge literate population - I'm making a judgment in observation but the observation is the important thing. Nobody knows what to do with a super literate society with disposable income, except to allow them to take their expectation to the limit. Which is to say, we have turned America into a society of 30 million kings. Sooner or later kings are going to want to be warrior kings or philosopher kings or capitalist kings. So let them have guns, publishing houses and credit cards. We are addicted to upward mobility and hoisting ourselves on the petards of ambition. But did our higher education for the masses prepare us for all that? This is my point, I say the answer is no.
We have created an astonishingly great open society of people with high moral and intellectual standards. We all benefit tremendously by the ease with which we are prepared as a culture to accept the true advances of science and in every area of human knowledge. But only a small fraction of us are capable of actually understanding and working with that advance in knowledge. It's the difference between being able to recognize Beethoven and being able to play Beethoven, between using an iPad and programming one, between possessing a credit card and knowing where credit actually comes from. We are an entitled society.
Like a lot of people, I've had that old discussion about 'sport' vs 'activity'. This is the coolest review of it I ever saw. Download Toughest Sport We all play sports. That's because in our astonishingly great open society we have spare time and we're healthy. And so we have baseball diamonds in our parks and places to play football and basketball and hockey. There are dojos for sparing and gyms for boxing, tennis courts, and ski slopes. We have the entire variety of access to sports and no matter what our physical conditioning, we give it a shot. But how many of us can hit a 90mph fastball? Not many. How many of us can slam a basketball or take a hit from a 300 pound lineman, get up and play again. How many of us could return a serve from Nadal or make par at Pebble Beach? Maybe a good fraction of us could, but the majority of us would be left out. So there is softball, there are courts with 9foot hoops, touch football and par three golf courses all over our nation. There are bunny slopes for us all.
When I worked at City National Bank back when gold was 800 and ounce and jumbo CDs paid 13%, we were in a death spiral of inflation. Volker saved us, I'm told, although I don't know exactly how. What I do know was back around 1980 it was not easy to get an American Express card or any sort of credit card. My bank, and lots of banks, required collateral. Unsecured loans were hard to come by. But nowadays everybody expects to get and use credit cards, not just bunny slope credit, but double black diamond credit. But just because you play sports doesn't mean you play the tough sports and just because you play the tough sports doesn't mean you play on a regulation field with serious rules amongst the big boys. But little kings want to be big kings. And people who pay 17% interest on their credit card debt want to pay 9% interest.
It turns out that most of us don't merit the attention of a real person at a ratings agency. The overwhelming majority of us don't know the name of any real banker. We might know a teller by face, but they can't approve a check worth 1000 bucks let alone your creditworthiness. Instead we're all retail credit customers, and our credit ratings are generated by about three seconds of computer time. We think we deserve better, but that's what we get for shopping our financial services retail.
Now there's some kind of legislation that has been passed this past week giving us some kind of new consumer protection. And people from PriceWaterhouse and IBM and the rest of the Slice will build out some new algorithms and workflows for the banks over the next year or two and make some more money so that you'll get a couple new paragraphs in that fine print you never read when your bank sends you the email. And that's basically like Dad coming down to the sandlot for a few innings to tell the pitcher to throw underhand for little Billy. It doesn't make any of us better players. It doesn't make any of us kings. It just validates our desire to be all that and takes some of the pain away. You now have four strikes before you're out.
All American peasants have an asterisk behind our records. That's not freedom.
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