The Feast and the Furious

10/03/2013 by J. Nelson

Slower fast food drive-thru times may indicate less of a shit given

With the furious pace of America’s dumbing down, de-skilling, and low-waging, it’s no surprise that drive-thru speed of service is suffering. Yet after catching sight of a pedestrian nursing a chocolate shake, his facial expression as blank as a feeding infant’s, it suddenly becomes critical that I not have to wait too long for my own. The notion now planted, the countdown from image to intake shouldn’t be longer than six minutes, and two have been annoyingly consumed by the two block drive.

When I finally reach the drive-thru, I’m certain that anything beyond four more minutes would be un-American. So the foreign-American up there pulling various levers and pushing little buttons is just going to have to snap it up. But wait! That’s not a compliant brown person at the window: it’s an uppity white kid! What’s he doing here? Oh, right, he’s one of those college grads pushing lower-skilled workers and immigrants even further down the occupational staircase.

No wonder my Jalapeno Chicken Squeezer isn’t already running down my neck-slide! The chow line is slow ’cause Hamilton just doesn’t care. And he’s not some trophy-collecting, millennial foot-dragger, either: he’s as boxed in as the fast food coworkers with whom he stood last month, demanding a bump in the $7.25 federal minimum wage. Read more

EVIL INCARNATE: Lock-up Quotas

09/20/2013 by J. Nelson 1 Comment

Taxpayer penalties for unfilled corporate prison cells are a thing.

In hopes of extending this infographic’s reach (Huffington Post’s smart use of BJS data) I now present the biggest argument for the growing national dialogue on prison reform in America: Lock-up Quotas.

For years, Morgan Stanley, Ameriprize, Barclays, Invesco, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, among others, have invested heavily in for-profit detention. So, if you’re someone who still dismisses incarceration as being for “those people,” perhaps you should follow the money. You see, the same idiots who mistakenly foreclose on people’s homes, may wind up deciding just how long your brother, sister, son or daughter are detained for public drunkenness. Operating at such a competency level, and with occupancy the highest priority for private prisons, all bets will soon be off with regards to who fills those beds.

Sound crazy? Sure it does, but at the rate we’re going it’s not hard to imagine a day when banking institutions and financial investment companies open pop-up prisons like so many Wal-Marts.

Without a complicit criminal justice system, ever more influenced by these financial entities, today’s lock-up quotas wouldn’t be so easily and enthusiastically enforced across the country. Have a look:

Great Struggles in Reading

07/14/2013 by J. Nelson

Apple Inc. is named ringleader in bullying of book readers.

Apple Inc. is no longer just a monster; it’s more like the Eye of Sauron.

US District Judge Denise Côte ruled against Apple Inc. last week, confirming that Apple, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, Macmillan, and News Corp. ganged up on readers to fix e-book prices. Last year, Bad Apple settled a separate antitrust case over e-book price-fixing with the European Commission without admitting any wrongdoing. Here in America, the company maintains the role of iSavior, insisting it was just trying to break Amazon’s control of the publishing industry.

I’ve been watching this story irregularly, as these are unhappy events.

Back in the mid-90s, Apple Inc. was a failing company, so much so that by 1996-97 it was forced to swallow its meager pride and borrow loads of money from Bill Gates and Microsoft to stay afloat. Steve Jobs got $95 million in operating capital by selling $150 million in non-voting Apple stock to Microsoft, and he sweetened the deal with Apple’s silence over allegations that Microsoft had stolen its intellectual property in building Windows. Read more