about decades between crises

Seeing smouldering ashes would have helped us make sense of the dread. Instead, the destruction often remains theoretical. And Tammy really felt the fear with this one, with the encroaching pandemic. Why the difference? She had a lot more to lose now than she did in college when the attack of September 11th happened. Tammy is one of us mercantilists now.

something about "Editors on Editing"

The third edition of Editors on Editing is a collection of somewhat specialized and particular essays about the job of editing. The editor, Gerald Gross, solicited mostly new essays for this edition--this is what is meant by "Completely Revisited" in the subtitle. The only essay I found relevant was "Line Editing, The Art of the Reasonable Suggestion."

about the temp

I am filling in at the front desk this afternoon. A body is needed here. A desk is needed for the body. If someone needs me, they do not belong here.

(posts) a doodle

(or posts) "Career Opportunities" by The Clash

Career Opportunities
 -by The Clash

The offered me the office, offered me the shop
They said I'd better take anything they'd got
Do you wanna make tea at the BBC?
Do you wanna be, do you really wanna be a cop?

Career opportunities are the ones that never knock
Every job they offer you is to keep you out the dock
Career opportunity, the ones that never knock

I hate the army and I hate the R.A.F.
I don't wanna go fighting in the tropical heat
I hate the civil service rules
And I won't open letter bombs for you

Career opportunities are the ones that never knock
Every job they offer you is to keep you out the dock
Career opportunity, the ones that never knock

Bus driver; ambulance man; ticket inspector

They're gonna have to introduce conscription
They're gonna have to take away my prescription
If they wanna get me making toys
If they wanna get me, well, I got no choice

Careers
Careers
Careers

Ain't never gonna knock

Teaching the controversy

We have two theories being proposed to addressed unemployment.

The first is Job Creationism. This theory holds that a motivated elite creates jobs: low taxes motivate the elite to start businesses that will need employees. Jobs come from above.

The second is Job Evolution. This theory says that when conditions are right and the raw materials are there, jobs come: invest in education, infrastructure, and environment-friendly technologies, and jobs will emerge and evolve from within.

About the jobs report

For a couple years now, every month has opened news-wise with reaction to the so-called "jobs report" or "jobs numbers", which indicate whether employment has eeked up, down, or stayed the same. This month's coverage includes the very predictable article "Bleak jobs report spells trouble for Obama re-election" via Reuters. Sure, most of the jobs report-related news refers to its impact on the election (as opposed to its impact on common welfare or anything else). No surprise there--we're going for the story.

More interestingly, the jobs report is a ritual now. For the press and its readers, the numbers stir the election season waters. But that is what you read on the surface. Systematically speaking, the the report is more importantly a function of security. It shows the Labor Department keeping tabs on employment--the extent to which the time of the populace is productively occupied with wealth generation; and through the report we live a shared experience, relating to each other on economic terms, as subjects of the economy, as economic constructs built into the economy--that complicated system of freedom and security-minded, neoliberal artificial market constructions.

Fluctuations are almost reassuring in this sense. The reporter asks, What will the Fed do? The economist answers, What can the Fed do?

Nobody does anything without first consulting the overall trend in the numbers. Has it been going down for six months? or up for six months? This discussion--and here the other mechanisms of security kick in--feeds an even larger discourse on the economy, composes and comprises its truths, truths which are repeated, amplified, and re-enforced via media in the minds of the economic subject. Too much bad news and the economic subject becomes electoral subject and modifies the leadership; and/or leadership modifies rates or removes barriers to commerce or flushes sectors with cash to stimulate commerce; tariffs are raised or lowered; immigration is encouraged or denied and on and on. Fluctuation and its many counter and co-fluctuations are part of a healthy, secured system. After all, there will always be something. What matters to the economic technocrat is not the something but how the various mechanisms of security relate within the "reality" of an economy prone to fluctuate.

(The real mother this time though is Europe, so I hear. And therein lies the way out.)