Second Amazon Hub and Considerations Involving Labor and Housing

draft

Amazon is close to selecting its second hub and cities all over this country are bending over and spreading their cheeks for the privilege of having some employment and tax base which they suppose will come along with the Amazon hub. And indeed there may be some financial benefit to the local communities in certain sectors. No doubt the slaves will have to buy their rations from the designated franchises that are raping them for their undernourishment for example. No doubt there will be disenfranchised and impoverished men and women who will provide sex services to the slightly better off hub worker units. There will be other business opportunities as well.  

Many people believe Atlanta is a front runner in this race because of its developed airport infrastructure, mild weather, and guaranteed hostility to unions and workers rights.  We can be sure that Georgia will use the full range of the law, the police and private thugs to destroy any attempt of the workers to organize.  This makes for a productive business environment.  All of these characteristics are important and no doubt make Atlanta a plausible choice.

But there is one area that is emphasized far too much, and that is the issue of housing. Slaves should have no rights to housing. Slaves should plan on bedding down where they work, and maybe sharing a hose as a shower. It is disgusting and unAmerican to even consider giving the worker anything but a minimum fee. There should be no benefits, no time off, no over time, no health care, no pension, and certainly no housing. These are all leftover concepts from the last century.

When they execavated Caesar Augustus's house in Rome they found a floor filled with about 50 cubicles for the slaves. In our opinion, even that is too good for them and would be an unnecessary drag on shareholder value.

We are more sophisticated today and know better.  Let us hope that Amazon holds the line on these matters and does not give into any sloppy sympathy for the worker-swine.

After all, its a free country.  If they dont want to be a slave for Amazon they can go off and be unemployed somewhere else or just die as far as our government is concerned.  

Thats what America is all about.

US Govt Still Denies Secret Nazi Base in Antarctica Leads to Hollow Earth

When it comes to conspiracy theories, the Nazi's clearly won the war.  Whether it is the secret Nazi mission to the moon, the escape of Adolph and Eva to South America, or the CIA work on the anti-gravity drive reverse engineered from the flying saucer that the Nazi's found when it crashed in Germany, a conspiracy theory with National Socialists immediately has a certain cachet that the others just can not approach.   The Underground Tunnel people and the Chemtrails people must grit their teeth in envy whenever they see the other nutty-boy theories flash a swastika, a graphic design they could never hope to be able to approach or surpass.

But with so many conspiracy theories to choose from, many of them overlapping and/or apparently conflicting, how can we know which theory to lie awake all night worrying about? Can our conspiracy theories work together or must they always be at each other's throats, a zero-sum struggle between mutually exclusive plots to destroy freedom and force us all to get socialized health care?

At Global Wahrman we advocate a unification of many disparate conspiracy theories to incorporate a National Socialist subplot combined with the accusation that the US Government acting through its UFO-hating CIA is trying to hide the truth.  This technique has the promise of taking a run-of-the-mill conspiracy theory and transforming it into a truly rewarding conspiracy theory that covers all the angles.

What attributes would such a maximum conspiracy theory, an uberconspiracytherorem as they might say in German, have?   For my money, its the conspiracy theory that combines the romance of far away and unknown places such as the Antarctic, with the all-season glamour of National Socialism, the hidden in plain sight Hollow Earth, inhabited by incredibly wise and powerful alien races, all hidden by a cover-up by a venal and power-hungry secret society that has taken over the government. The icing on the cake will be some sort of formal, academic paper that tries to pour academic scorn on our theory thus proving that the government is indeed trying to cover things up and suppress the truth.

We have evidence of such a coverup-in-progress with the paper by Summerhayes and Beeching which attempts to debunk the story of a Nazi secret base in Antarctica.

How can these two respectable adults deny that the Antarctic has been used by the National Socialists to create a secret base?   If it weren't true, why do they deny it so adamantly?  What else do they have to hide?   Perhaps the real secret lies in the Nazi base which may turn out to have been built atop the passage to the hollow earth.  Or perhaps instead of an immortal race of benevolent immortals with unlimited sources of energy, we find an ancient city built by an outcast race of elder gods not unrelated to Cthulhu?

Then all we would need to add to that is a secret society whose purpose is to keep the truth and thus the great power it confers to themselves, and we are pretty much all the way there.

I call on Summerhayes and Beeching to come clean about how they were coerced by this secret society and forced to lie about the esoteric knowledge that was revealed to them when they personally explored the abandoned Nazi base so many years ago, a visit that revealed to them an unspeakable horror that even now the world is not ready to hear.

The first three pages of the report

Pretty cool design for the expedition badge

You may read this scandalous suppression of the truth in its entirety here:

https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/attach/49/49783_.pdf

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Articles on Long Term Unemployment and Ageism: You Are Completely Fucked

[rewritten 4/24/2013]

Lets continue our little discussion of unemployment in America with two articles in the online media.

The first article discusses the discrimination against those who have been unemployed for a while and to that I would add to those who have chosen a non-traditional career track in any way.  Woe unto them because they are doomed. 

The second discusses ageism in the technical fields. I do not agree with everything that the author says about why companies do this, but I do agree with the general thrust of his article. I do not agree that there is nothing to be done about it, however. That I completely reject.  But I do agree with the fundamental premise, that being over 35 or so means you are a bad person and should be rejected and or destroyed.  Certainly all our employment law supports that principle.  

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/15/rand_ghayad_on_long_term_unemployment_the_long_term_unemployed_are_discriminated.html

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130422020049-8451-the-tech-industry-s-darkest-secret-it-s-all-about-age

Discrimination of any form is very hard to relate to unless you have experienced it.   And of course paranoia can play its role.  Did you not get the job because of your skin color, or because they just hate your face and want you to die?    This is even more true when dealing with very stupid people, such as people in the entertainment industry, where you often run into people who are anti-semitic but are not actually educated enough to realize that is what is going on.

One thing you do not have to worry about in most circumstances involving technology or the motion picture industry is the fear that you might intimidate them by using big words.  This is not as much of a problem as it used to be because in the current manifestation and economic climate they are not going to talk to you anyway, or take you seriously, or consider you for the position.  If they did consider you seriously then they might talk to you and then they might hate you because you used big words, but realistically that is not going to happen.

In fact, the whole job application process is not designed for experienced or intelligent people.  If you are one of those two categories, dont bother.  You are just wasting your time, and everyone knows it.  That is why when you tell people you are looking for work, and they tell you to look at the web site, what they are really saying is that you should go fuck yourself and die.

Long Term Unemployed:

Ageism:

We will discuss both of these in later posts.

Apology, Academy, When?

So I presume that the Academy is going to apologize to Bill Westenhofer and the Computer Graphics community in general for cutting Bill off at the awards.  In their apology, they should include a statement from Bill which has what it is he was going to say, which was presumably to thank R&H and wish them the best outcome of their current crisis.

And Ang Lee will apologize for not thanking R&H and the artists who made his award possible.

I must say that they are to be congratulated for taking a bad situation and making it worse for themselves.  I have seen this once or twice before.  Its as if the people with the power want to make sure that the little people organize, because they really don't care if they do or they don't.  I think they are correct, nothing will change.  But it is fun to see the effects people wake up and see how screwed they are.  Its only taken them 20 years or so.

[draft, I have to run go apply for food stamps to eat, so I will return to this later]

Anecdotes about Unions from the Early Days of Computer Graphics

The recent disturbances in the force involving visual effects and computer animation people protesting their lot in life is a good thing I think. I may feel that some of it is misdirected, and some of the goals and beliefs are incorrect or unachievable, but I have no doubt that the workers must organize in order to look after their interests. Even if they do not achieve their goals, they are guaranteed to not achieve them if they do not organize.

Many of us, myself included, have strong mixed feelings about unions. There are several reasons for this in my case, including coming from a white collar, intellectual family where unions were seen as good things, but for the blue collar worker. I am not sure that that association (union with blue collar) is either fair or correct, however, but it is something for me to overcome.

The second reason I never appreciated the need for a workers union or force is because I was treated so damned well early on in my career. The University of California at first and the RAND Corporation second, were very fair and good to me. Thus I had false expectations for the future.

I want to describe two events from the Robert Abel period, because I think they are relevant to this whole discussion.

Although I was only involved in computer graphics R&D, I deliberately chose working at Abel's in order to pick up what I could of other special effects filmmaking technique. So, I would hang around the camera department, and talk to Tom Barron over at Image G and so forth. From time to time, Abel's would have a big shoot on a stage and one day they were shooting a 7UP job with Bob Abel directing and Randy Roberts the art director. It was a big front projection shoot, Bob was on a crane and I was watching. I remember hearing an assistant whisper into Bob's ear "Meal penalties, Bob! Meal penalties!"

I later figured out that this meant something along the lines of "if you don't stop and let people have a lunch break by 4PM in the afternoon, then the production will have to pay everyone extra". In other words, Bob, the obsessive perfectionist, would not have stopped for lunch unless someone put a gun to his head, or his wallet.

The second thing that I saw, as we moved raster graphics into production at Robert Abel & Associates was how producers would move elements that could have been produced any number of ways into the 3D department. Why? Because if people worked 12 or 16 hour days in 3D, it did not cost them any more. 3D was on a fixed hourly rate, a certain number of hours a week. But if they did it in a department that was involved with a union (even if there were special deals with the union as there were), then people had to get paid more.

Oh, I thought as I watched. That's interesting. You mean you are willing to burn people out and damage their lives to save a few bucks? And the answer to that question, was "Yes, absolutely, we have no ethics whatsoever". Oh. Ok. Thanks.