Sign of the times?

Something different appeared in my mailbox this week. At first glance, I thought it was another instance of Verizon throwing away money trying to lure me into their technological hell, but no—a different megalopoly:

Amazon employs 45,000 Virginians? I thought that HQ2 was not the economic boon that the pols and techbros promised? I can’t imagine. Wait—hourly employees, you say? So I turned it over:

Yeah, no, dawg—that’s a hard nope.

But I wonder what it says about our economy that a company notorious for sweatshop conditions, below-subsistence pay and general disdain for the employees who make the magic happen thinks they can trawl for suckers with expectations of success. It’s not even the holidays.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Great wealth

I’ve been thinking recently about a quote from I You We Them, the 1000pp collection of essays by Dan Gretton on desk killers. (It’s not a history, and Fairfax County Public Library designates it Criminology in the Dewey Decimal system.) Gretton attributes it to Honoré de Balzac:

“The secret to great wealth is a forgotten crime.”

That seems pretty legit to me—on both personal and corporate fields. I’m thinking Standard Oil (predatory monopoly), every steel and railroad company of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (campaigns of terror against workers) and Lloyd’s of London (established to insure ships of the Middle Passage carrying slaves to America). And the fortunes of Kennedys (bootlegging during Prohibition) and Trumps (prostitution, violations of fair housing laws) do not stand up to scrutiny of their early days.

But it turns out that Gretton has misquoted Balzac. The original thought, from Père Goriot, is slightly different:

“Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait.”

Which is to say:

“The secret to great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, because it was properly done.”

This is a little less straightforward, and permissive in a bourgeois kind of way. The “without apparent cause” thing is (to my mind) an unearned free pass: only if the source of the wealth isn’t obvious do we look for the hidden crime? Nah—there are way too many examples of riches coming from the blood, pain and loss of others for me to swallow that.

Now the “crime properly done” thing—that does track. Unexplained wealth coupled with a foundational crime never discovered makes all kinds of sense.

So, if what Balzac is actually saying (and I don’t know the context of Père Goriot) is that huge fortunes are all the result of an original crime, and if you can’t discern the source of some wealth, it’s because the crime was so well executed that people have forgotten it, mais oui.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Yay, capitalism

A couple of weeks ago, there was a power outage in my part of the People’s Republic. It knocked out electricity through at least my cluster, as well as the empty corporate HQ next door. That was on a Monday.

Evidently the outage triggered the backup generator at the building and no one—security guards, electricians, whoever—could figure out how to turn it off. (One story was the manufacturer was out of business and no technicians knew how to get it to shut down.)

I didn’t hear the generator from my house, but one of my neighbors informed me that they were going day and night. I’d stopped walking through the corporate campus when the developers started doing prep work for building 82 three- and four-story townhouses in about two acres, but on the Saturday (six days after it started) I swung by to see what was going on. Here’s what I found:

You could smell the fumes before you could hear the generator, which was actually pretty loud. This frankly looked like a caricature of a 19^th Century Midlands England industrial site.

I noodled around the internet and found two agencies I thought should be informed of this, Fairfax County’s Division of Environmental Health and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. Former was an email, with one of these videos attached; latter was a website that wouldn’t allow me to upload files.

On the Tuesday, I got a call from Sean at Fairfax County to inform me that they don’t handle pollution; that would be the state. Sean said that the state agency would investigate, but so far (a full week later) I’ve heard exactly bupkis from them, which is pretty much what I expected from this lame-ass Confederate-mentality crowd.

Actually, I checked their portal yesterday and discovered that they've closed the case. Because by the time they apparently showed up, "no pollution observed."

Oh—the developers finally figured out how to turn off the generator. Or maybe it ran out of fuel. But at least it’s stopped spewing carcinogens into my back yard.

For now.

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

Talking politics

Since the Tosser-in-Chief, accompanied by his adult family of grifters, is strutting around London and enjoying all the attention of the state visit Brexit Babe Theresa May scuttled over here to offer him in January 2017, it seems like an appropriate time to post about the conversations I had with various people while I was in Dublin and Belfast last month.

I’ll preface this by stating that I know for a fact that there are greedy, racist, misogynistic right-wing nut jobs in Ireland, but I did not run into any of them.

Thank God.

Stevie, my sectarian guide in Belfast, was justifiably proud of the progress made in terms of the civic comity and economic growth since the Good Friday Agreement. I told him that I was really heartened to see the changes since my last visit, but I was concerned about the cataclysm that is Brexit. He was, too. It’s not just the danger that a hard border between Ulster and the Republic could reignite the civil war, especially with all the Faragian hate rhetoric. It’s that pulling out of the Euro Zone and deporting all the European workers who fuel the economy could cripple the economy.

From my own observation, most of the people in service jobs—hotel staff, restaurant servers, retail clerks—were, from their accents, Eastern European, both north and south. In addition, a lot of construction, plumbing, electrical and the like is being done by people from Poland, Rumania, Czechia, Serbia, Estonia and the Slovak Republic. Come Brexit, the ones in Eireann will be fine—they’ll still be working and contributing to the nation. The ones in Ulster—not so much. What do you do when your hospitality industry collapses?

I’m not even going to talk about the National Health Service in Ulster, but they’re screwed royally.

Walking down Dublin’s O’Connell Street, I got to chatting with a Nigerian guy named Favour (yes), who asked if I’d sign a petition Oxfam was putting together on the catastrophe in Yemen. After inquiring where I’d been while in Ireland (“You must go to the country, it is beautiful.”) and how long he’s been there (18 months), we got back to the logistics of the petition. It was going to the Tánaiste (the deputy to the Taoiseach, and hearing Favor use the Irish terms was a treat), “Who’s like your Mike Pence.”

“Well, I hope he’s much better than Mike Pence.”

That brought a wry face.

“But he’s also our Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, so he’s like Rex Tillerson.”

I busted out laughing. “Oh, Tillerson is so last year, hon. At least this week it’s the very robust Mike Pompeo, but who knows for how long?”

Favour was also concerned about the lunacy of Brexit, and the rise of the RWNJs around the world (although he was more tactful in his terminology) who have been emboldened by the slug in the White House.

Then I spent two hours talking with a Twitter acquaintance about the dangers we see ahead. She has two children under the age of 10, whom she’s been able to give a good life partly because of the social support system Ireland has put in place. That would be the kind of social support system that Republicans in the US and Tories in the UK want to dismantle.

As with all my conversations, I prefaced every pronouncement with the disclaimer, “Considering what we in America have let loose on the world, I have no right to claim the moral high ground…” But Theresa May is a self-aggrandizing twit, Nigel Farage is a fascist lunatic and Boris Johnson is the Kleptocrat with a posh accent and apparently undiseased grey matter. Ireland has come so far in the past 30 years, shaking off its religious shackles (the special position of the Catholic Church was written into the Irish constitution in the 1920s; thanks, Dev) and cultivating an educated, innovative, humanistic populace. Reinstituting a hard border with Ulster is part and parcel of the long history of Britain crapping on its neighbors.

And the taxi driver who drove me to Dublin airport flat out said of the stable genius, “If he gets re-elected, I got no sympat’y for yez.” To which I replied, “And you’d be entirely correct.” He wondered how any woman or any person of color could have voted for him. To which I added any serving military or veteran. Or, indeed, any sentient human. He, too, felt that burgeoning racism in Britain is encouraged by the hatemongering emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and amplified by the likes of Farage.

All of this made me sad. As I told Stevie, I’d actually thought we’d made progress here in the States since the days of Sheriff Clark with his cattle prod, Watergate, the Vietnam War—but here we are, like Groundhog Day, living it all over again. Maybe it’s good that the veneer of advancing has been stripped away and we can look at how little we’ve moved forward in reality. And seeing it, we can change it. I hope so.

But it’s going to take a long time and a whole lot of work.

Belles are ringing

Well, I have some extra primo good news to relay—Bennett College, the historically black women’s college in High Point, N.C., announced yesterday that it met its goal of raising $5M by 1 February, so it retains its accreditation.

Yay!

Actually—they blew their goal away and raised $8.2M as of Monday. Financial stability was the one standard they’d failed to meet in December, so they should be good to go for generations to come. More than 11,000 donors contributed, ranging from $5 from some folks to big gifts from musicians, entertainers and others. Churches, sororities and fraternities held fund raisers. The CEO of Papa John’s gave $500,000; High Point University contributed $1M.

I love the way people rallied around Bennett. When I heard their history last month I was inspired by the multiple stories of Bennett Belle sisterhood, and I felt I needed to be a part of that community. I’ve spent the last few weeks watching the campaign on Twitter and worrying about whether they’d hit their goal.

And now I’m relieved and proud to be able to say I #StandWithBennett. I had a little slurp of Champagne last night to celebrate. I hope that's okay, on account of them being connected to Methodists and all.

Gratitude Monday: the laborer is worthy of his hire

I don’t know when, exactly, it became Received Wisdom that anyone whose income is derived from salary or wages instead of from investments is a chump. Possibly that started during the Reagan administration, but it certainly has achieved wide circulation in the past 15 years.

We see it all the time in the commoditization of labor in all forms, from bus boys to software engineers, who across the board put in work weeks that would have sent unions out howling on picket lines just 50 years ago. At the lower end, they work two or three jobs to earn a subsistence living; at the upper they risk being replaced by offshored equivalents if they don’t chalk up 60-hour weeks on a regular basis to meet ludicrous schedules.

And all along the way they are ridiculed and demonized as being, at heart, slackers, moochers and unimaginative losers. (If their skin pigmentation contains higher quantities of melanin, then the opprobrium is proportionately greater.) Because if they had any gumption at all, we’re told, they’d have either inherited some wealth, managed hedge funds for obscene fees, or come up with the Next Great Thing (“the Google/Uber/iPhone of [whatever]”) and sold it just after some overhyped IPO and moved on to something else.

In the Valley They Call Silicon, the big dogs all call themselves Serial Entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists fall all over themselves to throw money at them for their next big cookie-cutter thing. The people who do the actual building may or may not make a couple hundred large if they happen to be there when lightning strikes; but they can equally find themselves looking for another job if the serial entrepreneur in a neighboring building’s cookie-cutter thing goes IPO first.

(As for the people who clean the offices, deliver the snacks in the stocked kitchens and drive the corporate commuter buses—they’re all contractors, working for a series of interchangeable vendors with no concern for health, safety or proper accounting practices. The vendors don’t care who the contractors are; the client companies don’t care who the vendors are. All that matters is who’s going to cost the least.)

Because it’s all about the short-term big payoff, not about long-term growth. Only slackers, moochers and unimaginative losers think about long-term commitments; winners aim to take it all. Now.

This being Labor Day, the serial entrepreneurs, investment bankers and trust fund babies are doing whatever they do in their substantial cushion of comfort. The workers are marking the official end of summer, maybe barbecuing or hitting the retail sales. I’m thinking about the generations of men and women who literally put their lives, their subsistence (no fortunes for these folks) and their sacred honor on the line so that workers could receive fair wages for their labor, so that they could perform that labor under safe working conditions and so that they could build pension plans that meant they wouldn’t have to work literally to death.

These were radical notions 150 years ago—the very idea that sharing out some of the proceeds of productivity with its producers was just cray-cray. But those radical notions—and the radical men and women who fought for them—brought the United States to its zenith of innovation and prosperity. When the labor tide rose, so did everyone’s boat.

Sadly, that tide has receded. We are continually being told that American companies cannot compete in the world economy if they have to think about the welfare of their employees. In their minds (as always), welfare = unearned largesse, AKA the dole. No, every penny that doesn’t go to executive compensation must be pinched to the limit by longer hours, tighter budgets and lower taxes. Unless we want all those jobs manufacturing goods and providing remote services to go overseas. This current administration, comprising as it does Goldman Sachs execs, CEOs of oil companies and alt-reich racists and misogynists screaming about turning back the tide of immigration, is only marginally more open about this kind of contempt than Republicans have been since little Newtie’s Contract with America.

I think we’ve hit a situation where a small percentage (say, one percent) of the people have been eying that goose that lays such beautiful golden eggs, and they’re convinced that there’s a simple way to release an immediate gush of gold by applying this cleaver to its neck…

And I’m probably just being contrary when I say that I perceive something flawed in that strategy. But I do not see how an economy can grow if you strangle the buying power of those who actually build it. Just this last week we read so many stories about working stiffs—from cops to hotel housekeepers and bakers—literally risking their lives to show up for work and keep things going for their neighbors and customers in Houston, while the obscenely wealthy sat it out in their multi-million-dollar enclaves. They're chumps, right, Osteen? 

In the meantime, I am (as always) grateful to the people who fought for the value of labor in real life-and-death struggles for decades in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, and for those who continue that fight in these gig economy times. Mother Jones, Wobblies, resisters and all of you—thank you.

Gratitude Monday: The golden goose

I’m trying to think when, exactly, it became Received Wisdom that anyone whose income is derived from salary or wages instead of from investments is a chump. Possibly that started during the Reagan administration, but it certainly has achieved wide circulation in the past 15 years.

We see it all the time in the commoditization of labor in all forms, from bus boys to software engineers, who across the board put in work weeks that would have sent unions out howling on picket lines just 50 years ago. At the lower end, they work two or three jobs to earn a subsistence living; at the upper they risk being replaced by offshored equivalents if they don’t chalk up 60-hour weeks on a regular basis to meet ludicrous schedules.

And all along the way they are ridiculed and demonized as being, at heart, slackers, moochers and unimaginative losers. Because if they had any gumption at all, we’re told, they’d have either inherited some wealth, managed hedge funds for obscene fees, or come up with the Next Great Thing (“the Google/Uber/iPhone of [whatever]”) and sold it just after some overhyped IPO and moved on to something else.

I mean, here in the Valley They Call Silicon, the big dogs all call themselves Serial Entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists fall all over themselves to throw money at them for their next big cookie-cutter thing. The people who do the actual building may or may not make a couple hundred large if they happen to be there when lightning strikes; but they can equally find themselves looking for another job if the serial entrepreneur in a neighboring building’s cookie-cutter thing goes IPO first.

(As for the people who clean the offices, deliver the snacks in the stocked kitchens and drive the corporate commuter buses—they’re all contractors, working for a series of interchangeable vendors with no concern for health, safety or proper accounting practices. The vendors don’t care who the contractors are; the client companies don’t care who the vendors are. All that matters is who’s going to cost the least.)

Because it’s all about the short-term big payoff, not about long-term growth. Only slackers, moochers and unimaginative losers think about long-term commitments; winners aim to take it all. Now.

This being Labor Day, the serial entrepreneurs, investment bankers and trust fund babies are doing whatever they do in their substantial cushion of comfort. The workers are marking the official end of summer, maybe barbecuing or hitting the retail sales. I’m thinking about the generations of men and women who literally put their lives, their subsistence (no fortunes for these folks) and their sacred honor on the line so that workers could receive fair wages for their labor, so that they could perform that labor under safe working conditions and so that they could build pension plans that meant they wouldn’t have to work literally to death.

These were radical notions 150 years ago—the very idea that sharing out some of the proceeds of productivity with its producers was just cray-cray. But those radical notions—and the radical men and women who fought for them—brought the United States to its zenith of innovation and prosperity. When the labor tide rose, so did everyone’s boat.

Sadly, that tide has receded. We are continually being told that American companies cannot compete in the world economy if they have to think about the welfare of their employees. In their minds (as always), welfare = unearned largesse, AKA the dole. No, every penny that doesn’t go to executive compensation must be pinched to the limit by longer hours, tighter budgets and lower taxes.

I think we’ve hit a situation where a small percentage (say, one percent) of the people have been eying that goose that lays such beautiful golden eggs, and they’re convinced that there’s a simple way to release an immediate gush of gold by applying this cleaver to its neck…

And I’m probably just being contrary when I say that I perceive something flawed in that strategy.

In the meantime, I am (as always) grateful to the people who fought for the value of labor in real life-and-death struggles for decades in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, and for those who continue that fight in these gig economy times. Mother Jones, Wobblies, all of you—thank you.

Capital campaigning

You know, the ways of non-profit fund raisers are just amazing.

I don’t know how my grad school tracked me down, but I get the alumni magazine now, along with various solicitations periodically. (I’ve managed to elude my undergrad crowd.)

And of course, there was that incident when Wake Tech Community College reached out after a couple of decades to invite me to contribute to their endowment, on the basis of a single programming class I took there.

But now it’s the culture vultures.

Back in the 90s, I was a member of the Phillips Collection’s Contemporaries supporters. I like their museum, the membership didn’t cost a whole lot, and it got you into many great events—openings, parties, Thursday evening nibbles and culture mingling. (One of the stand-outs was their 75^th anniversary celebration held at the French Ambassador’s residence. Honestly, I felt like Eliza Doolittle when I got back from that one.)

Well, it’s been almost 20 years since I was known to them, but blow me if a couple of weeks ago there didn’t appear in my queue this come-on from their development department, inviting me to give them boatloads of money.

It’s entirely conceivable—well, it’s obvious—that I used that email account at some point in communicating with them. But I assure you that, if so, it hasn’t been for a good eight years. So what’s just amazing is that all of a sudden they’ve done some harrowing of their once-and-future supporters and come up with moi and bunged this over to me.

Sadly, it’s going to have the same outcome as the billet-doux from Wake Tech, although for different reasons. But at least they’ve only expended a few electrons in the attempt.

Gallant effort, though.

Tweeting for dollars

If you’re on the Twitters-dot-com, you’ll have noticed their craptastic new revenue-generating capability: “promoted” tweets.

For whatever amount of money (look it up if you care; I don’t), you can have one of your tweets appear in some algorithm-determined number of people’s timelines, whether or not they follow you. (Apparently you can pay to have them appear for a long time, because I’ve seen some that originated last year. Don’t they understand that tweets, like fish, go off after a few days?) Basically, it’s like TV commercials, because they interrupt the flow of the nonsense you already have signed up to get, by virtue of following people.

Actually, it’s like TV commercials from the last century, precisely because they show up in the timelines of people who have neither need for nor interest in your product, and all you do is piss them off. (Like high school kids and garage bands being offered great deals on Siemens infrastructure or call center solutions.)

And Twitter is exactly the platform for people to express their pissed-offedness.

For example: this promoted tweet from Grey Goose, inviting folks to “engage” with these ESPY awards. (Yeah, right—no idea, and no desire to investigate.) So between the product and the honoree, we struck gold with the first two responses.

Then there was this one from…well, dunno, really. The White House? The Conference on Aging? The Society for Honoring Lots of Stuff?

Again, the first two responses are just stellar.

Twitter is obviously making money off this crap, so it’s not going to stop. In the meantime, as I’m blocking the hell out of these twits, I do enjoy watching the pushback.

God's hobby

Yeah, alright, you knew I’d have some questions about the SCOTUS Hobby Lobby decision. The majority ruling said it has limited application, but as near as I can tell, it’s actually opening such a sack of snakes that it’s going to keep several thousand law firms in Testonis for decades.

Not to mention filling campaign coffers for Congressmorons of every political stripe.

Because first of all, the decision (as written by Justice Samuel Alito) speaks of “closely-held corporations” as essentially humanoid and being entitled to run their business on the values of their closely-held owners, including claiming exception to Federal law by reason of closely-held religious conviction.

But you know—they’re talking about Christian religious convictions, because the Hobby Lobby owners were objecting to providing insurance coverage for several types of contraception that they believe (and it is belief, because scientific definitions pretty much refute their notions) these devices and medications are abortifacients. And they oppose abortions.

Well, maybe that’s indeed a limited application, because outside some parts of Pakistan and Africa where Islamist extremists have been murdering medical teams trying to vaccinate people against polio, it really has been only Christians who seem to object to 21^st Century health practices. Actually, they’re objecting to 20^th Century health practices.

(Although I imagine there are many aspects of sharia law that appeal to our Baptist Taliban, so there may be some accommodation down the road.)

I’m kind of spitballing here, that the Hobby Lobby crowd are getting their guidance in these matters directly from the Almighty, Who has somewhere decreed that these forms of contraception are somehow in violation of…well, the will of God.

So I therefore find it really interesting that Hobby Lobby (and therefore presumably God) is totally down with vasectomies. Oh—and Viagra.

Well, what’s up (um) with that? Because I’d have thought that erectile dysfunction was pretty much God’s way of telling you your shagging days are over. And therefore taking anything for it is interfering in God’s will. Big time.

(I worry that the God of Hobby Lobby seems overly concerned with a voyeur's view of women's sexual activities. Like some omnipresent-but-not-omniscient omnipotent-yet-impotent Hugh Hefner. Am I the only person creeped out by that?)

Or what about antibiotics? They screw with biological destiny, don’t they? They kill off little lives in their millions; how come they’re okay? Oh, only human life in its most rudimentary cellular form is of concern? Okay.

Well, what if you’re prescribed antibiotics because you have some kind of sexually-transmitted disease? Seems to me that curing the clap ought to be a clear no-no, because good Christians, engaging in “legitimate” sex (c.f., Todd Akin, R-Mo., and “legitimate rape”) surely would not be visited with an STD, right? So any kind of, you know, condition of questionable provenance is going to be on the non-coverage list.

And how long after that comes stoning adulterous women, honor killings and bride burnings? Because those are all deeply-held religious values also.

Another modest proposal

Oh, dear, oh, dear—evidently the House of Windsor’s house is not at all in order. Queen Elizabeth II has overspent on household maintenance, and she’s down to her last £1MM in reserves. (Question: Couldn’t she just check between the sofa cushions? Gotta be a few million quid there—she must have a lotta sofas, no?)

Horrors!

And even with the profligacy, royal residences are said to be in poor condition, and HM needs more dosh to attend to the deficiencies.

The parliamentary report recommends that the Queen (well, her minions, really) should do more in the way of cost-cutting—by which they actually mean “lay off employees”, keeping the public sector (well, I dunno—is the Royal Household considered “public”? Oh, never mind) in line with private sector strategies of not bothering with improvements or innovations when you can just sack the staff.

It actually used the phrase “do more with less”, which has to eat the Royal Lunch.

There’s also a recommendation to increase revenues, and one suggestion was that Buckingham Palace should be opened to more paying visitors during times when HM is not in residence.

Well, let an American product manager who has no qualms about thinking outside the box propose they go a couple of steps further. I’m talking Bucks House B&B. This is not even an untried idea—the French have done it with one of the sub-palaces at Versailles.

Of course, they’re probably serving better food, but still.

Really—there are all kinds of tourists with more money than brains who’d pay premium prices to spend a night at the palace and shoot out selfies at a rate of knots. And I’m sure there are plenty of spare bedrooms that could be dusted off and hawked on hotels.com or Room 77.

Although—I’m wondering how many of the bedrooms have en-suite bathrooms? How would said tourists feel about paying £700 per night for a single bed and a loo down the corridor shared with yahoos from Utah, Uganda and Uzbekistan?

Then there’s the breakfast of cornflakes and cold toast under the beady stare of HM’s serving staff. (Well, more likely underemployed yoofs brought in on zero-hour contracts and tricked out in livery to look like the real thing. But they’ll be trained to get the snoot effect down.) What the hell—charge extra if they want an actual meal—it’s the palace, for heaven’s sakes; you could get away with £65 for the full English, including VAT.

Yeah, I know—they’d have to worry about folks nicking the towels or the spoons. Although, look—you’ve got their credit card details; just tack on £35 per spoon and £100 per towel. You can really revenue-spin the hell out of this. And you’d keep the linen and cutlery factories going, so a bonus on the employment front.

(Unless, of course said factories are in Bangladesh. Um.)

Okay—we do have to work out some details, including shaping HM’s head about the concept of sharing. It seems she was pretty cheesed off by police on patrol eating the palace peanuts. And we know this because she marked the level in the bowls of nuts around the place (yes, with her own royal hands and an imperial Magic Marker) and then let it be known that she was not amused.

But look—package up said peanuts in two-ounce packets stamped “By Appointment to the Queen” and sell ‘em for £5 a pop. It’s all good.

And, Windsors—you’re welcome.

Order in the House

I hate to start out the new year on a downer, but if one is at all concerned about the economy, one can’t help but wish it were possible to take a gigantic fire hose to the House and Senate and wash all the occupants and their staff (and, while I’m at it, all the lobbyists) out of the Capitol and…somewhere. Anywhere—I don’t care,

How about over a cliff?

And why is it that whenever I hear the name Eric Cantor, the one word that immediately leaps to mind is “pissant”?

The folks who made "friend" a verb

While you’re trying frantically to click the “Buy” button to get in on Facebook’s IPO today, you might want to multi-task, and read this “Letter from Mark Zuckerberg”, by Andy Borowitz.

Really—nothing to add. I invest my money in wine futures. And not too much in the future, if you catch my drift. Like—only as far as it takes me to get the cork out of the bottle.

We’ll see who does better in the end.

Workers of the world strike back

Well—this is timely. In my post Tuesday about how companies turn to crowdsourcing for creative work, particularly design and what they call “content” (meaning, you know, words that tell their story), I did not touch on one dirty little fact.

Well, perhaps dirtier, seeing as to how it’s dirty enough that corporations (and, actually, federal agencies) go to great lengths to extract the lowest possible price from their creative vendors.

(In the case of the feds, they actually have the chutzpah to open “design contests”, inviting designers to spend scores of hours designing departmental logos for risible “prize money” and the glory of being able to say that you designed the logo. E.g., Department of Interior last year put out the call for a new logo; total available: $1000. You should have heard the discussions on my various tech downloads on that when some woman posted the “great opportunity” to the list. Professional design guilds estimated that the job was worth $20K-$50K, approximately the amount of money the GSA paid for one breakfast at their recent taxpayer-funded Vegas bacchanal. One large wouldn’t even have bought cocktail napkins for one of their many team-building activities.)

Okay, so as if expecting people with years of training and experience, not to mention God-given talent to provide you with highly creative, professional branding material, that’s going to tell your corporate story at a single glance, for a fee that amounts to an hourly rate below minimum wage isn’t enough of a Scrooge for you, client companies often…just don’t even pay the niggardly amount they agreed to.

It’s appallingly easy to screw designers, developers and “content” creators. Take their work and just stop replying to their emails or taking their calls. And as for writing a check—fuggedaboutit.

For most of us, the only recourse is bad client ratings on the crowdsourcing site and small claims court. But here’s a designer who took the street-justice route. Here's what you see if you go to the offending website:

Evidently the client is in financial straits and there’s no one around to try to take back the site. Their difficulties are so great that perhaps they never will.

But it’s a lovely site to see someone from the corporate “job creators” class named and shamed.

Power to the people!

Workers of the world

Today being International Labor Day, I’m going to tell you about a recent experience trying to get a logo designed for an organization I’m helping out.

It’s a really great group, dedicated to helping the unemployed find jobs by connecting them with people who know people in companies all over the Bay Area. I volunteered to be product manager and to lead the revamping of their website, because—although they call their connections concept Networking 3.0—their website harkens back to Web 0.5.

Maybe even Web 0.25.

I won’t even tell you their URL. It’s that bad.

(The current functionality isn’t much better, either, although the executive director keeps referring to the features as “apps”. They’re not “apps”; they’re lists of members, of companies and jobs, with some links you can click on.)

But I digress.

As part of actually making this outfit look what I call “web real”—like a viable, professional entity that has both gravitas and technological credibility—I created a full-on design specification, with positioning, organizational background, use cases, etc. I also finally persuaded the ED that we need a logo. We can’t get the site actually designed & built until we have some sort of brand around which to, you know, design it.

This being a non-profit, our original email blast for a pro bono designer didn’t net anyone. And we have two events to attend this weekend, so the production of a logo became a priority. The ED therefore opened an account on elance, posted an excerpt from my design spec and then handed it over to me to deal with.

Within 12 hours we had 16 proposals, and here’s where the issue of international labor came in.

I already had issues with the idea of crowdsourcing, because it essentially reduces every commission to a freefall to the lowest bid. For a while I was part of Guru, a similar site; but I realized that if I put forth a bid that was fair compensation for the talent and level of expertise I bring to the job, I’d always be underbid.  I wasn’t being outrageous, either; I was estimating the amount of time a job would take and what I would get if I worked at an agency to do it.

Sites like these pit creative vendors against competitors in third-world countries who will always underbid. And for many, many “clients”, getting something for next-to-nothing is the most important consideration. (Like people buying air travel tickets who’ll go with the carrier that’s $5 less. The result being that airlines compete for the lowest airfare and the lousiest service. Or the entire Wal-Mart business model.)

Keep in mind that, by my estimate, designing a logo will take a minimum of four hours of work: absorbing what the client’s business is all about, their market, their ethos, their competitors, etc., developing appropriate colors (in our case, since we don’t already have them), designing several possibilities; getting client feedback; editing the designs; and finalizing. It took me eight hours to go through the 16 vendors’ listings, look at the work they’ve done before, start sifting them out and supplying the winners with information about our organization.

We got bids from designers in the US, Pakistan, Mexico, Yemen, Colombia, Argentina, Trinidad/Tobago, Bulgaria and the UK. The highest was $383.56; the lowest, $45.

This is our global economy in a nutshell—corporations are doing this on a grand scale, offshoring jobs (and tax payments) to places where they can pay workers a pittance and not worry their heads about safe working conditions and extraneous stuff like that. And I was essentially being asked to participate in this in a very personal way.

Made me very, very uneasy. And not just because on something like this I prefer to sit down across a table from someone to tell the story and answer questions.

In the end, I chose two designers, one with a bid of $170 and the other at $80. Both from the USA. I filled out detailed questionnaires about our organization Friday morning; both replied that they had enough information to produce designs. I’ll get initial output from one today, from the other tomorrow.

I worry, though. I worry that without the actual human contact (not even a phone call—strenglich verboten in the elance model) my questionnaire answers don’t give the full idea of what this organization does so it can be represented in a logo. I worry that I’ve helped support a system that turns everything into a sweatshop. I worry that I’ll get useless designs back and we won’t have anything for the two job fairs this weekend—so I’ll have a crappy web site and no logo to give job seekers any confidence in our ability to help them.

I worry that the Internet, instead of opening real opportunity, just reduces everything to the lowest common denominator.

Calculated to bring you down

A writer for Slate has come up with a Mitt Romney comparison calculator. It’s an algorithm that uses Romney’s income for 2010 (based on the tax returns he finally made public) and calculates how long it would take the Republican candidate to “earn” whatever you made that year.

Then it tells you how long it would take you (at your income level) to amass what he does in a year.

If you’re not depressed when you start out, you are when you’re done.

Black day in the stores

Black Friday has descended upon us, as it does every year on this day.

As you may know, Black Friday traditionally marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. It’s the day after Thanksgiving Thursday and is also the turning point for American retailers—the day that they move from the red to the black in their account ledgers.

(First of all, I don’t get that—how is it possible that businesses can run in the red for almost 11 months year after year, and still stay in, you know, business? Without being airlines, I mean?)

That “official start” part of it has been blurring for years—you see Christmas (or “Holiday”, if you prefer; but—let’s face it—all that red, green, gold and silver stuff really doesn’t connote any other celebration I can think of) displays in shops cropping up at the end of September. And this year I noticed my first Christmas-themed TV commercial on the afternoon of Halloween.

But I’ve observed a couple of things about Black Friday this time around.

The Friday thing is really morphing into Thursday—you know, Thanksgiving.

For some time retailers have announced the holiday shopping season with early store openings and “doorbuster” sales—prices for leader items that are insanely low but only last for the first two hours a store is open on the Friday. (They’re designed to bring in shopping swarms whipped to a spending frenzy resembling the ardor of sports fans. And they work, producing mobs with the sensibilities of an English football mob.) Those “early” openings have crept back around the clock: 6 a.m.; 5 a.m.; 3 a.m. But until last year no one had the chutzpah to violate the Truly American Holiday.

That’s when Toys R Us broke the sacrosanct barrier and opened at 2200 on Thanksgiving.

This year TRU opened at 2100 on Thursday, beating out Walmart by an hour. Kohl’s, Best Buy and Macy’s opened at midnight. Sears appears to be the Poky Little Puppy, holding out until 0400 today.

(I see that Kmart were open from 0600 to 2100 yesterday. But they've been doing that for some time. Not that it appears to have helped their bottom line.)

And, of course, those who couldn’t wait until even Thursday evening have been finding “specials” online from these and other retailers. Amazon has got into the act big time this year.

Moreover, while the retail trade referred to it as Black Friday, the day’s offerings used to be universally advertised as “after-Thanksgiving” sales. This year they’re calling a spade a, well—you know. In both print and broadcast, businesses are touting Black Friday sales. I give you Walmart, Kohl’s, Best Buy & Macy’s by way of example.

I suppose those who favor transparency in business may view this as a positive step—no attempt at playing this as anything but what it is, retailers’ desperate campaign to push merchandise to make up for months of misreading both the economy and consumers’ minds. Not even “holiday” or “post-Thanksgiving”; just “show us the money”. “And do it now.”

I am curious about how Americans feel about spending out this year, given the global economy and the fact that our elected officials on their best day are useless (as opposed to pernicious, which is what they are most of the time). Unless you’re a corporate executive or hedge fund manager, you’re either unemployed or worried that your job could be cut at any moment. How good do the deals have to be to get you to bail out the big box stores the way we did the banks and auto companies?

No matter what you call the day or when it starts?