Couple things:
1) Was looking over economic reports last night (shut up). Discovered that my puny town of 40k people pulls in about $750m in revenue from sales tax - a quarter of the entire county and about $20m shy of Everett, which has three times the population. Why? We've got a mall, we've got a bunch of shitty chain restaurants, and we've got a bunch of car dealerships. When they talk about the "retail apocalypse" they're not just talking about the death of stores and the jobs that go with them... they're talking about the infrastructure that supports them. I honestly have no idea how a town of 16,000 people rates three anchor department stores in the first place, but if your town could support them once, and now your town can't, y'all are fucked.
2)
- “His mom doesn’t have too much real stuff,” A.J.’s grandmother said.
In the corner of the case, Barbara found a $124 pair of earrings on sale for $31.79. The jewels were cubic zirconia, but the thin metal loops were 10-karat gold.
“A bargain,” she promised. A.J. gave her a thumbs up.
Barbara looked at her watch as she rang them up. She had spent nearly 40 minutes helping them. She knew she wouldn't meet her sales goal today.
Yeah that one hurt, a bit. When my family was tight for money (see: my entire childhood) my elderly, health-decaying dad ended up with a second job at Kaufmann's (now, Macy's). It really sucked barely seeing your dad, and knowing your family was subjected to that type of work. Definitely echoing rd95 with the bleak statement. There's not much else to do in parts of Appalachia, industries died and didn't really come back, and service/insurance/other "white collar" jobs dwindle when there's no economic base propping them up. So, what do you do? You work in the mall, but eventually that closes because people buy online or can't afford to buy anything. Then you end up where we're at now.
Man. That article hit a lot of notes. Retail jobs being second jobs for a lot of people with families. People taking temp jobs in hopes of them leading to something more permanent. The closing of anchor stores in malls leading to the closing of smaller, specialized stores. The community effects of dropping property values. Pretty bleak, all around. Once again, makes me think about this comment I made earlier this morning. That said, I don't know how much diversity you can really get out of a town with only 16,000 people.When they talk about the "retail apocalypse" they're not just talking about the death of stores and the jobs that go with them... they're talking about the infrastructure that supports them. I honestly have no idea how a town of 16,000 people rates three anchor department stores in the first place, but if your town could support them once, and now your town can't, y'all are fucked.
Humans have been moving from the hinterlands to the cities for hundreds of years. It's the natural flow of civilization. That said, what's the Brodeur quote? "Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off?" It's not like everybody woke up one day, sold their holdings at fair market value and hitched a Trailways to prosperity. There's a lot of new ghost towns in the desert Southwest. You drive through them and think about the intentions reflected in the detritus you see, the dreams that died, the plans that changed, the lives that were never the same. I am Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works ye mighty and despair.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of living in big cities. There's a lot of stress that comes with the crowding. That says, when it comes to comparing cities to towns, there's a lot to be said about more abundant resources from schools and hospitals to job options to places to eat and shop and live, provided cost of living is kept in check. Natural movement to the cities strike me overall as healthy for society, though I'll acknowledge there are probably a bunch of caveats that come with dense living but technology slowly and surely seems to be helping in that area. Medicine and hygiene, architecture, etc. I think eventually, it might be better for the environment over all, only because I imagine that the less space we use up in the natural world, the less we conflict with it. I wonder if we as a country put more focus in job re-training and relocation programs, we'd have an easier transition. A lot of the unfilled jobs that are out there are skilled work jobs, such as plumbers and electricians, construction workers, arborists, lock smiths, you name it. The two big problems that I seem to see, at least from my perspective, is that A) a lot of these jobs have financial barriers to entry, even if there are apprentice tracks to get into them and B) a lot of places just don't seem to want to entertain the idea of hiring people past a certain age. Barbara, from the article is already in retirement, but I bet someone half her age wouldn't get a lot of employers giving them a serious look.Humans have been moving from the hinterlands to the cities for hundreds of years.
I'm not either. However, I grew up in the goddamn sticks and the lack of cultural opportunity cut like a knife from about the age of 7 until I got the fuck out. Once I was weaned and independent, the allure of fuck'n'gone hinterlands wasn't lost on me. But the cultural implications of a cosmopolitan area can't be overstated. What do you do on Saturday with your kid when you live in Seattle? You go to the Children's Museum. What do you do on Saturday with your kid when you live in Espanola? You skip rocks on the river. At least, if it hasn't run dry. I'm dragging my ass through this report right now. Retraining is pretty much the crux of their issue. They figure 30% of jobs are fucked by 2030. They also figure if we can retrain everyone within 12 months, we catch a wave of opportunity. If we fail to do so, welcome to Elizabethan squalor. It is not a pretty report but if your job currently consists of gathering information, entering information, processing information or doing repetitive physical tasks, best retrain yourself now.Personally, I'm not a huge fan of living in big cities.
I’m afraid that it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. How do we get from one economy to another without tearing ourselves apart? We already voted for a guy that tweets about the size of his nuclear button. I worry that war is the answer to unanswerable questions. I have an uncle that’s worked odd jobs since losing his at the Detroit News. He voted for Bernie, then Trump. I recall him saying to my family members who are teachers almost 20 years ago, that their time would come.
I think there's a reason we haven't declared war since WWII. When you fight a "war" you fight it to win, and you use any means necessary. When you fight a "police action" you limit your engagement. I had this book on my shelf for most of my teens. I tried reading it a few times. It didn't go well. All this Soviet Military Power foofraw was a front and we all knew it; any military engagement with a power capable of symmetrical response would go nuclear in days. The tearing will be internal. What sort of nationalist campaign can we really foresee? Who could we really throw more troops at than we threw at Iraq? Remember - Hussein had the 4th largest army in the world. We're going to go toe-to-toe with China? We're going to go toe-to-toe with India?
One of the revelations of Doomsday Machine is an expose of the US's plan for nuclear war (SIOP), which from the mid fifites to 1962 was actively hidden from the president and the secretary of defense by the joint chiefs. It called for a first strike, full scale nuclear war that would target every city of at least 25,000 people in the USSR AND CHINA in the event of a "general war" with the Soviet Union (even in the case where China had nothing to do with the conflict). Elsewhere, the term "general war" was defined as "armed conflict with the Soviet Union". For real....any military engagement with a power capable of symmetrical response would go nuclear in days.
It's interesting that this surprises you. Mutually Assured Destruction might have been penned by Kahn but the idea goes back to Nobel and dynamite. We've long suspected that if we have the ability to kill everybody, we'll kill everybody and the threat of that balances things out. Probably says something about my school but for a few years we played a game in social studies in which teams of three were given "nations" with a varying number of nuclear weapons. If you were given none, you might make it through to the end of the game. If you had so much as one, somebody took you out because Jesse hates James. Regardless, once things went hot everybody got their birds in the air so that at least they felt like they gave back.
Apparently, it surprised McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara. It took them some effort to even get a hold of the plan, which the joint chiefs just lied about when Ellsberg tipped Bundy off about it. Upon learning of this plan, they promptly scrapped it...And then McNamara gave a speech about how bad we were going to buttfuck the USSR if we had to, which sent the arms race to 11. It's not so much surprising to learn about MAD. We all know MAD. It's surprising to learn about how much the various branches of the military lied to each other and to the civilian leadership to pad their own budgets, while risking the life of every single living thing on Earth. For example, the Air Force was "estimating" that the USSR had 200-1000 ICBMs in 1961, when it was known to the highest levels of the CIA that the real number was 4. Exactly 4, not "some low number probably less than 10". I also find it surprising how secretive they all were. As Dr. Strangelove asks, "Why didn't you tell us?!" The whole point of a Doomsday Machine is to advertise it, and the Air Force wouldn't even advertise it to the President of America, let alone some random Soviet citizen. I guess it's a testament to how seriously the commanders took the issue (on both sides) that we never had a nuclear exchange. I don't think that Trump gets that. He is too disinterested in the world around him. However, even though he's more bellicose in his rhetoric, he basically has the same policy as every president since Truman: the US is prepared for first use/first strike on anyone in the world for any reason we see fit to for national security. Clinton tried to undermine Obama in '08 when he said he wouldn't use nukes on Iran preemptively. She chided him that that's not how "a president" talks. So when the short-fingered vulgarian tries to take all the ambiguity out of whether the arms race is in fact a dick measuring contest, he's really only doing a more crude job of stating long held US policy. Not sure if that should frighten or relax people.
I get the sense that you've never worked for the government. You've definitely never been around nuclear weapons and their progenitors. The A-12 became the SR-71 because Curtiss LeMay didn't like the idea of the CIA having an air force so when the Bay of Pigs needed mapping and intelligence in order to succeed, LeMay let Bissell twist in the wind. This led to Bissell getting sacked for the failure of the Bay of Pigs, which led to all aviation landing squarely in LeMay's lap, where he could name Bissell's pet project after his pet project (the B-70) thereby cementing himself as Lord of the Skies. Meanwhile, McNamara came up with the idea of "launch codes" while LeMay countered with the idea of "Launch codes are all 1s" because whose missiles? My missiles. if you're a tactician, a nuclear weapon is a gambit that is never intended to be used. It's a chess piece on an abstract board. If you're a general, a nuclear weapon is a physical object that takes up space and needs care and feeding. Project down the chain of command as far as it goes. It's their world, you just live in it. Somewhere out there is a set of articles about the laptops with classified information that were sold down in the Valley for meth but "los alamos missing laptops" gives you results from 1999, 2000, 2002, 2006, 2007 and 2009. Thing of it is? Once you're actually face-to-face with the thing, it becomes real at least. I bought a desk (really a 3-phase-wired ESD workbench) out of Boeing Surplus back when there was such a thing; in one of the drawers was the manual for final QAQC on the detonation circuits for the SRAM II nuclear warhead.. I probably shouldn't have been able to grab that. It was probably classified (it didn't say so). but just seeing the damn manual made things really real for me and I grew up with people whose daddies machined explosives to go inside the damn things. Here's the thing. If the CIA knows that the USSR has four missiles, and Eisenhower knows that the USSR has four missiles (he did), and the Air Force "estimates" that the USSR has 200-1000 ICBMs, then the CIA and the President know that the Air Force has no viable intelligence collection ability. Further, since it was the Air Force that leaked it to the Kennedy Campaign, you know that any intelligence you share with the Air Force is going to become public domain. Thus, the Air Force gets frozen out and decides "whose nukes my nukes." So long as they don't decide to go to war on their own, you have a dysfunctional but functional deterrent. We're going to have to trade books. I'm cranking through Pearl Harbor in the Toland book and he makes it pretty clear that Pearl was basically a textbook case of incompetence on both sides; if we'd bothered to read our intelligence the attacks never would have happened and if the Japanese didn't suck so hard at warmaking we would have been finished off in 1941. In my dotage, I've come to the conclusion that if we didn't blow ourselves up, it's not because we benefit from miracles. It's because however tenuous and risky the solution was, it happened to be good enough. I don't think Trump matters. I think the assembled braintrust of the United States government would never let a vain and incurious businessman anywhere near the levers of power if they thought he could do any real damage. I think ours is a self-stabilizing bureaucracy. I think it was around the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis that people pointed out how close we got to armageddon and made the observation that if the Bush administration had been in power we'd all be living in Bartertown by now. I've come around to thinking that if the Bush administration had been in power back then we would have had a crisis that played to their strengths, not Kennedy's. Bay of Pigs wouldn't have been a bunch of expats, for example. It would have been the 101st Airborne.The hard drives were missing for 11 days last June but were later found behind a photocopier. The removable hard drives, which are about the size of a small wallet, contained information on classified procedures required to disarm a nuclear weapon in the event of an accident or terrorist incident. They are required to be stored in a secure vault and are normally subject to strict accountability procedures.