Culture vulture, rowrrr!

I’ve had a couple of really lousy days, so I’m due for a little uplifting. And here comes Classic Art.

But with cats.

Butterscotch tabbies.

Tabbies of Substance. Tabbies Rubens would love.

I feel better.

Pass me the akavit

Word came yesterday that Saab has moved another step closer to being history.

This may not mean much to you, but it really makes me sad. I’ve had Saabs for a little over 12 years, and I love them. Turbos, you understand.

When I moved to the UK I had to pick a company car. (One of the best benefits of working there at the time: almost everyone except secretaries and maybe janitors got company cars, with petrol cards. Meaning: no car payments, no insurance premiums, no $50 at a whack filling up the fuel tank.) Many of my colleagues had BMWs, but I wasn’t that impressed with the BMW I had as a temp car.

Someone suggested a Saab, so I hied me down to the Saab dealer in Newport, Wales, to try one out. Unlike my experience in the US, they let me take one out for a day so I could take it to the Tesco’s and down the pub. But I felt it had no scoot to it.

I mentioned that to the leasing manager and he replied, “I think Madam would prefer a turbo version.”

Well, he was right. All I had to do was rev up the on-ramp to the eastbound M4, feeling my back slam into the seat and I was sold.

On behalf of my employer, of course.

He thought I was nuts insisting on a sunroof (“Madam, this is the UK!”), but I loved driving that car. Even in France, where I was a left-hand brain driving a right-hand car in a left-hand environment. (I had only one incident where I lost my bearings and swung into the wrong lane, but that was in Bayeux coming off a highway and there wasn’t anyone around to be in danger. Not even a cow.)

When I got back to the US rather precipitously (thanks to a corporation that shut down its ex-pat program because it was suddenly much cheaper to do without us) I had just about a month before I needed to buy a new car. My choices were Celica (which I’d owned before going overseas) and…well, the only other thing I knew was Saab. An American car wasn’t in the picture, primarily because they didn’t make manual transmissions.

But in the three years I’d been abroad the Celica had got much smaller and costlier, so I ended up going with the Saab coupe. Couldn’t get the red one I wanted, but I squeaked by with a silver one, turbo, sunroof. Everything I wanted except the color.

And Selkie has been a great car for the past ten years (less a month). Aside from dying on the ramp between I-495 onto the Reston Toll Road on my way back from the Maryland Renaissance Faire in 2002, regular maintenance, a battery and four tires at one time or another, he’s given me nearly 73K miles of driving pleasure.

(And even at that incident, there was a plus. I got towed into the dealership in Falls Church on a Saturday afternoon, where the fellow behind the desk was talking in French to someone on his mobile phone. When he was done and registering my repair situation, I asked—en Français—where he was from. La Côte d’Ivoire. Dunno whether it was the Français-parler-ing, but he gave me a blue 9-5 convertible as the loaner for the few days it took to get my car repaired.)

But Saab, Saab—poor Saab hasn’t done well under GM and since. The mechanic where I take Selkie now, Swedish Auto Factory, has now added Subaru to their marque. When I pointed out that “Subaru” isn’t really a Viking name, the owner shrugged—they need to plan ahead.

I really hope they find another investor to keep the company afloat. In another five years or so I’ll need a new car.

Jag är så ledsen

Web dictionary

Dunno how edifying this will be, but it purports to be a repository of Internet slang and acronyms.

Its definition of FTA is just all wrong and it has For the Ultimate Win (FTUW), but not For the Win (FTW).

But worst of all, it’s missing WTF, which is an acronym (usually accompanied by multiple question marks and possibly an exclamation point or two) you use pretty much every day out there in Webland.

Laborers: not worthy of their hire

As part of its Labor Day reporting, NPR tells us that if you want job security, being a software engineer  is your stairway to heaven.

In their story the founder of an app-development company whines about wishing he could get away with paying half the salaries he does, and having to “make the workplaces as fun as possible”.

Here are some of the things I find wrong with this story:

The notion that being a developer brings security in our current workplace is completely fallacious. Here in the Valley They Call Silicon  there are thousands of them (and QA and SDEs and tech writers and program managers) among the long-term unemployed. Of those that are working, a sizeable number are not Full Time Employees (FTEs) of a tech company, they’re contractors being paid much less than they used to and not getting benefits like health coverage, retirement contributions or bonuses for successful project completion.

In fact, I’d call them the “long-term exploited”. But you won’t find them in this article

The folks who do seem to be doing well in the industry are the tens of thousands of South Asians over here on H1B visas, or—even better—those still in India or China at tech centers where the local corporations can get software developed at costs far below what they pay even the contractors here. Nowhere in this story is this class of employee mentioned

You’ll also notice that the whinging about the workplace having to resemble a frat house is indicative that the only candidates deemed attractive are those in their 20s, who are naïve enough to think of beer in the fridge and a Foosball table as valid replacements for decent healthcare insurance or a retirement plan instead of the cheap bread and circuses that they are. Clearly companies that lay out the snacks and games are not looking for techies who have relationships outside the office and would like time away to enjoy them—you know, anyone who’s passed the age of 35 and wants more out of life than code.

Again—the reporter hasn’t brought up this element in his report.

I’m really disappointed that NPR put out such a sloppy, one-dimensional and slanted piece on a subjects as important as this.

Labor & capital

On Labor Day it’s appropriate to turn our thoughts to the current employment environment; maybe consider what it says about our society as a whole.

That’s because (although these days it demarks the official End of Summer and draws the line beyond which community swimming pools on the East Coast are closed and white shoes across the country must be put in the back of the closet), Labor Day is supposed to be about, you know, labor. As in the laborers who transmute land into crops transported to city markets in vehicles built by other workers over highways laid and maintained by construction crews, and bought by the folks who clean the houses, serve the meals, tailor the clothes, landscape the gardens, install the alarm systems, reroof the mansions and fight the fires for the Boardroom Set.

Labor Day was first observed 5 September 1882 in New York and became an official national holiday 12 years later in the wake of the nationwide Pullman Strike, during which federal authorities acting in behalf of the Pullman Palace Car Company shot strikers, killing 13 and wounding another 57. They chose the New York unions’ date in September over the international workers’ day of 1 May to distance us from that whole foreign socialism thing.

Note that the day is founded in labor’s blood spilled by management violence. Nothing to do with fashion choices; it was as serious as the issues underlying the Declaration of Independence: All men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. You can cavil that by “all men” the Founding Fathers weren’t thinking beyond white males of the planter-merchant classes; i.e., Capital; but the framework they forged was stronger and larger than the vocabulary and is scalable (as we say in software and networking these days) to a great degree.

Plus—we hold these truths to be self-evident.

Well, it’s been a rocky old ride for the labor movement, which to a considerable extent fueled America’s post-war (WWII—it was in all the media) prosperity far beyond the factory floor: raising the workplace pay, environmental and safety standards for laborers in the fields and offices, too; driving both the production and consumption of everything from houses to microchips; and providing the economic security that enables exploration and innovation. They didn’t do this on their own; but in demanding their share of the recognition and recompense for this economic pie, they expanded it.

It was that whole notion that the laborer is worthy of his hire.

I’m not saying that the unions that represented a lot of these workers didn’t become as arrogant and myopic as the management they fought for more than a century, because they did. In the past couple of decades they misread industrial and consumption trends every bit as much as the corporate clowns. I think the technical term used by economists is “screw the pooch”, which they did royally.

And they managed to become the go-to boys for all blame—no matter what the area (real estate collapse, bank failures, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, El Niño, erectile dysfunction), there’s some politician who’s going to point the finger at unions. And as corporations extort tax cuts from governments at all levels while simultaneously off-shoring jobs, paying ever larger executive bonuses, filling the campaign funds of politicians at all levels and giving their shareholders the appearance of financial success—as this is going on, the working stiff (in coveralls, white collar or tee-shirt and jeans) takes home smaller paychecks and worries about when the next round of layoffs will be announced.

If s/he has a job, that is. Fourteen million of us don’t.

So, on Labor Day 2011, what’s the latest?

In Wausau, Wisc., the organizers of the town’s Labor Day parade—a coalition of 30 local unions—announced that they were banning Republican pols from marching. That’s on account of the hard-line anti-union stance the ’Pubs have been taking, most recently in the Wisconsin state legislature when they took away the right to collective bargaining from public service employees. (Meaning essentially that if you’re a teacher, a DMV tester, a firefighter or a snowplow operator you have no ability to band together to negotiate the terms of your employment contract or conditions.)

Now, slashing the femoral artery of state public sector unions and then expecting to prance down Main Street in an event celebrating the contributions of workers to the country is a prime example of both the arrogance and disconnect of our elected representatives. It’s also an example of how one may smile and smile and be a villain.

But of course when the banning announcement hit the media, the pols involved couldn’t move for fear of tripping over their quivering lower lips at the utter, inconceivable injustice of being disinvited to an occasion where they could (for hardly any expense out of their corporately-funded campaign coffers) meet and greet the people they have to pretend to represent. You’d have thought they’d been told they could never again borrow a company’s G4 to fly to Venice on a fact-finding mission to study the glassmaking and pasta industries.

So, earlier last week the unions reversed their decision and announced they’d let the little babies in. Well, they let them in because the town mayor told the unions that if they didn’t invite all the kids in the class to their party, there would be no cupcakes.

Personally, I’m interested in seeing what kind of reception these egregious egos get from the people of a strongly union town. I want to know if they actually have the cojones to show up after all their whining.

By way of contrast, it’s interesting to note this Labor Day that 25 of the top-100 highest paid CEOs in the country raked in more than their corporations paid in taxes last year. It’s actually another mark of corporate arrogance and disconnect from the concept of the civitas—you know, the shared responsibility inherent in the social contract of communities. Clearly the only community these people understand is a gated one.

Given the political climate that surrounds us from Congress on down (although frankly I don’t know how you can really go down from Congress), I wouldn’t be surprised to find that next year Andy Borowitz’s “report” that Labor Day has been outsourced to China turns out to be true.

As for me, while I’m thinking about the men and women of the labor movement who did so much for us, and I’m glad to have the time off, I’m painfully cognizant of the fact that as a contractor I’m not getting paid for this day.