I was in business school from 1979-81, just on the cusp of the switch from regional economies to international economies. I don’t think that the revolution in computing power gets enough attention as a driver for the disintegration of local and regional economies.
I am not sure Reagan could have made (waves hands) all of this possible. Public policy can only do so much. Prior to cheap computing, automation and consolidation was expensive—you had to hire armies of clerks, or you had to make a significant investment in “big iron” mainframe systems and then invest in a small army of programmers and systems people to keep it all going.
The kind of intricate, international, “just in time” fragile supply chains that everybody depends on are only possible because of a breathtaking level of cheap data storage and data integration.
I wonder if “just in time” is going to fall out of favor now that supply chains are broken. I’d appreciate your knowledgeable answer. I know people involved with sourcing materials are pulling their hair out.
I don’t have any particular knowledge, but I doubt that there would be a full scale return to keeping inventory. Think of the investment in real estate—you have to have somewhere to put the stuff. That means leasing existing space or buying/constructing. If you have to construct warehouse space that’s expensive and permitting, etc. makes it take longer than it needs to. Then you have to switch your IT system from managing logistics to an inventory management system. Your managers need to have different skill sets.
The best comparison I can think of was 2002–after the World Trade Centers collapsed and Cantor Fitzgerald, who was on the opposite side of a lot of bond transactions, essentially disappeared, investment firms had a scare put into them and I think the regulators (if I remember correctly) made them invest in redundant systems. The one I worked for at the time stood up a second bond trading center in the Midwest. It took over a year to get fully operational. Fast forward to the financial crisis in 2008 and a reshuffling of firms—mergers, bankruptcies, etc. and probably more cloud technology and that center no longer exists.
I think it comes down to risk analysis—Walmart and Target (just as examples) and big manufacturers have to decide which risk they want to live with—a huge capital investment in storage capacity and inventory management, which adds overhead 100% of the time, or the relatively small risk of an external event interrupting their supply chains which would wreak havoc on quarterly or annual results for a specific period of time. My bet is they’ll pick the black swan event vs. ongoing costs.
Look on the bright side—the level of integration we have now is a powerful incentive to avoid picking fights with other countries that you depend on. Everybody needs to play nice in the sandbox for the shareholders to make money. Apparently the only person on the planet that does not understand this is one Donald J. Trump.
I’m thinking of it from the POV of a factory that needs materials to keep the line running.
My dad worked in a factory when things changed. They used to send things from the on-site warehouse and then they began waiting for the shipment to arrive. Sometimes it didn’t and everyone stood around waiting for the materials to arrive.
The marginal cost of that scenario is just a lot lower now. More automation = fewer people standing around. More low end manufacturing overseas. Honestly that may have been a factor in offshoring—it’s kind of inefficient to do assembly halfway around the world from where the components come from.
I do think short of some kind of geopolitical catastrophe like China descending into chaos and war that the widespread re-shoring of manufacturing is a pipe dream. That train has sailed, as my dad used to say.
Sure, but it’s not your dad’s factory. I bet now without unions if parts don’t arrive they just send everybody home and they don’t get paid because they are hourly. And even if they do get paid, paying 100 people isn’t as big a deal as paying 500-1000 people.
Your main argument here, Jenn, is persuasive and makes "bid-net" sense. As you open with your eyes trying to take in news reporting on residential and commercial property businesses, what is missing is any reference you need to make to the Private Equity and Global Capital liquidity and global invester servicing considerations.
Please watch this 2019 completed documentary from Sweden and US leading academic specialists on global migratory housing patterns\labor markets; PUSH (the documentary film) now going on 4 years since its release without a major theater and\or educational institutional film release, no repertory theater marketing and no appearances on either U.S. or nordic nations & EU broadcast News\Public Affairs streaming platforms. Think of the millions of dollars that are paid from public or non-profit NGO funds to the Executive Producers & Decision-makers at so-called agencies such as ProPublica or the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ):
"While the Sandler Foundation provided ProPublica with significant financial support, it also has received funding from the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Atlantic Philanthropies.[16] ProPublica and the Knight Foundation have various connections. For example, Paul Steiger, executive chairman of ProPublica, is a trustee of the Knight Foundation.[17] In like manner, Alberto Ibarguen, the president and CEO of the Knight Foundation is on the board of ProPublica.[18] ProPublica, along with other major news outlets, received grant funding from Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX.[19]"
"ProPublica has attracted attention for the salaries it pays its employees.[20][21]"
"In 2008, Paul Steiger, the editor of ProPublica, received a salary of $570,000.[22] Steiger was formerly the managing editor at The Wall Street Journal, where his total compensation (including options[22]) was double that at ProPublica.[23] Steiger's stated strategy is to use a Wall Street Journal pay model to attract journalistic talent.[24]"
"In 2010, eight ProPublica employees made more than $160,000, including managing editor Stephen Engelberg ($343,463) and the highest-paid reporter, Dafna Linzer, formerly of the Washington Post ($205,445).[25]"
See if you can find any J-School faculty assessments of these salary structures of the Golden Rolodex of Journalism's Executive Decisionmakers and especially the broadcast Public Interest Private Financed News & Public Affairs programming, billing and ad agency appraised worth:
NORMALIZED HOMELESSNESS IS NOT ONLY A US NON-NEWS-WORTHY STORY for mainstream print and broadcast journalism & Public Affairs programming. Try CBC and U. of Tube coverage of the street carnage north of US in our '51st State' of Canada & Indigenous Territories from Yukon across the Arctic and Nunavut circles:
We need to follow and track all this money sloshing around global Wealth Management Portfolios and the national dumping grounds for the redirected investor capital.
Meanwhile the Finance Mgrs of Private Equity funds could stage manage their own off-shore dumping grounds of investment capital at the expense of housing stocks.
All structured and leveraged to use the SCARE CITY dba SCARCITY scenario of Global Housing Crises after decades of delayed or killed municipal subsidized housing complex construction starts. Delays and construction scheduling lags tied up in municipal, county, state and federal funding streams that could extend up to 5 or more years that created the skyrocketed spiral of HOUSING COSTS and monetary INFLATION (especially to working class & distressed surge of Social Welfare need.
This backstage bid-net to off-set the global SHORTAGE OF AVAILABLE AFFORDABLE HOUSING PRESSURE THAT HELPED SEND THE VALUATIONS OF ANY RESIDENTIAL CONSTRUCTION GREENLIGHTED BY SPECULATIVE HIGH FINANCE SKYROCKETING ON PRIVATE INVESTMENT BOOKS OF OFTEN VACANT & OFF-MARKET, NEVER OCCUPIED RESIDENTIAL UNITS used as Private Equity Speculation Urban Housing Market integrated Bait & Lures):
Listen to Saskia Sassen, the Columbia University Detective Columbo along with her colleague the Nobel Prize Economist at Columbia U., Joseph Stiglitz 2 of the main talking heads of tracking housing investment markets and the countervailing flows of migrant labor and international migratory labor housing surpluses\crisis deficiencies:
"Some excerpts from the documentary "PUSH" (2019) (full doc @ "Push | TVO Docs" on YouTube)"
"Exploring why people cannot be allowed to live in cities... The high cost of housing and global investment funds that push people to poverty and strip them of a fundamental human right." Narrated by former UN Special Rapporteur on Global Housing Crisis, Leilani Farha:
"This website is now an archive. Leilani Farha’s tenure as UN Special Rapporteur ended on April 30th, 2020. You can follow her work in her new role as Global Director of The Shift at www.maketheshift.org "
"Leilani Farha
United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing (June 2014 - April 2020)
Leilani brings a dynamic energy to the role of UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing; energy she will need to reach her goal of prompting and facilitating an international paradigm shift in how housing is approached."
"Producers (Sweden with the film in English language 2019 nationally\2021 global distribution of documentary to theatrical and streaming broadcaster markets): Fredrik Gertten, Margarete Jangard "
This absolutely tracks the implications of data systems and near instantaneous logistical communication are huge in terms of how quickly the shift from regional to global were able to happen.
Having lived though all of the ups and downs of the U.S. economy since tricky Dick Nixon, I'm well aware of what's coming. There's no stopping it now. All we can do is hang on as bests as we can as the economy heads for the river rapids and hope there's no big water fall down river somewhere.
So many people are going to wake up someday soon and go, 'What happened?" Most of them Trump voters. This has been coming for decades and Donny boy is just a symptom of the culmination of decades of bad ideas for the working class.
The only thing that trickles down is hate and bigotry. Thanks for this excellent piece, Michelle. It’s depressing af but somehow comforting to me when people call it like it is. I appreciate you.
Same. I have two kids in this mess, one in his first year of college, the other finishing her sophomore year of high school. I barely know what to do with myself trying to figure out what’s in front of us and how to keep them safe or any of us safe, really. Smh Michelle.
As I recall, it was Daddy Bush, who coined the term New World Order and Henry Kissinger who sketched the outline and the Clintons and Madeline Albright filled in the blanks and called it NAFTA.
Hi, Michelle. One of the reasons Reagonomics took over was because by the late 1970s, the destruction to the manufacturing infrastructure of many European and Asian nations during World War II had ended, those countries were recovering and becoming economically productive again, and the U.S. no longer had the type of economic dominance it once did. So, the capitalists ceased tolerating good jobs with high pay and heavy regulations on businesses that made life easier for many working class people, and which had created a robust middle class between the late 1940s and late 1970s.
Let's be honest, this was first felt during the Carter administration, who began with the union-busting and deregulation craze. This led to a recession, the first of several big let-downs to the working class by the Democrats, who began morphing into corporate-controlled entities just like the Republicans. This led to a Republican administration that continued the corporate policies, to be followed by a Democrat administration that did the same, to be followed by a Republican administration that did the same, rinse and repeat.
As I've said before, the working class, and the Left in particular, need to give up on the Duopoly entirely. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats care about the working class, they are all owned by the same 0.1% of the robber barons, and we need to stop getting emotionally hooked on one or the other with a type of "team sport" mentality or based on one espousing "social values" that resonates with us. Both do nothing for us economically, and we need to accept that, abandon them, and form our own movement.
My local friend, who has a small coffee roasting business, is closing shop. All his coffees are imported, of course. Outside of Hawaii, we don’t have any US place to grow it. But replacement repair parts for roasters (which wear out from heat fatigue) come from China…good luck getting those, and they’re not made here, and won’t be either. Alas, my delicious local source is going away.
I highly recommend everyone read a very short book (74 pages) called "Manna". It was written over 13 years ago and it does a good job telling us the future, or what the future could be. It is written as a fictional story of one man's experience with the change in society due to automation. He provides a good future and a bad future. You can decide which one is in the cards for us. You can read it free here, "https://milweesci.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/2/4/13247648/mannapdf.pdf"
Thanks for the link. I'm reading this. Dystopian stuff is fascinating to me; however, it upsets others. What happens in this book, (at least the first half), is entirely possible today. The conditions are right.
An Amazon employee I know describes her distribution center as VERY MUCH like the workplace in "Manna". She always seems exhausted.
I spent the majority of my work career in allied healthcare. When I started, it seemed like it was more about caring for individuals. Whether that was so or not…there were vast inequities in western medicine that were built in from centuries ago…very likely not. You worked your way up from treating poor patients and gradually built a practice of “patrons” who supported your practice. But there was a vast shift when private equity started seeing the big money in healthcare. Enter the capitalists and bean counters. Care became counting minutes, writing care plans, documenting whatever shit could be counted…. Now it’s evolved in to how many “touches” a claim process can put on a claim. Yeah, sometimes you are an individual, as long as you have some monetary resources (that haven’t withered away and totally devalued). We’re on the road back to the “piss prophet” physicians in training of 300 years ago.
Hi, Michelle. I would highly recommend that you watch Gary’s Economics on You Tube. He clearly explains the mess we are in today. He is from London and is a bit sweary, but he was a trader in the City and made a fortune before realising how skewed the stakes are. In the UK Thatcherism and Reaganism were the beginning of the slow slide downwards for us but the wealthy reaped the benefits. I take it you have read the Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein? That was eye opening as well. Thank you for all the work you put into your articles ❤️
I struggle with videos and podcasts too but find I can actually listen to them better if I am also playing a mindless game on my iPad, like Candy Crush, Sudoku or a word search. Otherwise I just get bored and, like you, I stop concentrating. With Gary’s videos, you don’t actually have to watch them, you can mostly just listen. Hope you find the book helpful 😘
I can’t do video games either! What happens is I end up scrolling Medium or Substack or just retreating into my own brain and then realize, “Wait, there was a video, wasn’t there?”
I was in business school from 1979-81, just on the cusp of the switch from regional economies to international economies. I don’t think that the revolution in computing power gets enough attention as a driver for the disintegration of local and regional economies.
I am not sure Reagan could have made (waves hands) all of this possible. Public policy can only do so much. Prior to cheap computing, automation and consolidation was expensive—you had to hire armies of clerks, or you had to make a significant investment in “big iron” mainframe systems and then invest in a small army of programmers and systems people to keep it all going.
The kind of intricate, international, “just in time” fragile supply chains that everybody depends on are only possible because of a breathtaking level of cheap data storage and data integration.
I wonder if “just in time” is going to fall out of favor now that supply chains are broken. I’d appreciate your knowledgeable answer. I know people involved with sourcing materials are pulling their hair out.
I don’t have any particular knowledge, but I doubt that there would be a full scale return to keeping inventory. Think of the investment in real estate—you have to have somewhere to put the stuff. That means leasing existing space or buying/constructing. If you have to construct warehouse space that’s expensive and permitting, etc. makes it take longer than it needs to. Then you have to switch your IT system from managing logistics to an inventory management system. Your managers need to have different skill sets.
The best comparison I can think of was 2002–after the World Trade Centers collapsed and Cantor Fitzgerald, who was on the opposite side of a lot of bond transactions, essentially disappeared, investment firms had a scare put into them and I think the regulators (if I remember correctly) made them invest in redundant systems. The one I worked for at the time stood up a second bond trading center in the Midwest. It took over a year to get fully operational. Fast forward to the financial crisis in 2008 and a reshuffling of firms—mergers, bankruptcies, etc. and probably more cloud technology and that center no longer exists.
I think it comes down to risk analysis—Walmart and Target (just as examples) and big manufacturers have to decide which risk they want to live with—a huge capital investment in storage capacity and inventory management, which adds overhead 100% of the time, or the relatively small risk of an external event interrupting their supply chains which would wreak havoc on quarterly or annual results for a specific period of time. My bet is they’ll pick the black swan event vs. ongoing costs.
Look on the bright side—the level of integration we have now is a powerful incentive to avoid picking fights with other countries that you depend on. Everybody needs to play nice in the sandbox for the shareholders to make money. Apparently the only person on the planet that does not understand this is one Donald J. Trump.
I’m thinking of it from the POV of a factory that needs materials to keep the line running.
My dad worked in a factory when things changed. They used to send things from the on-site warehouse and then they began waiting for the shipment to arrive. Sometimes it didn’t and everyone stood around waiting for the materials to arrive.
The marginal cost of that scenario is just a lot lower now. More automation = fewer people standing around. More low end manufacturing overseas. Honestly that may have been a factor in offshoring—it’s kind of inefficient to do assembly halfway around the world from where the components come from.
I do think short of some kind of geopolitical catastrophe like China descending into chaos and war that the widespread re-shoring of manufacturing is a pipe dream. That train has sailed, as my dad used to say.
Eh, don’t write off manufacturing. Where I live, it’s booming.
Sure, but it’s not your dad’s factory. I bet now without unions if parts don’t arrive they just send everybody home and they don’t get paid because they are hourly. And even if they do get paid, paying 100 people isn’t as big a deal as paying 500-1000 people.
Your main argument here, Jenn, is persuasive and makes "bid-net" sense. As you open with your eyes trying to take in news reporting on residential and commercial property businesses, what is missing is any reference you need to make to the Private Equity and Global Capital liquidity and global invester servicing considerations.
Please watch this 2019 completed documentary from Sweden and US leading academic specialists on global migratory housing patterns\labor markets; PUSH (the documentary film) now going on 4 years since its release without a major theater and\or educational institutional film release, no repertory theater marketing and no appearances on either U.S. or nordic nations & EU broadcast News\Public Affairs streaming platforms. Think of the millions of dollars that are paid from public or non-profit NGO funds to the Executive Producers & Decision-makers at so-called agencies such as ProPublica or the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica#:~:text=ProPublica%20has%20attracted%20attention%20for%20the%20salaries,(including%20options)%20was%20double%20that%20at%20ProPublica.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica
"Funding:"
"While the Sandler Foundation provided ProPublica with significant financial support, it also has received funding from the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Atlantic Philanthropies.[16] ProPublica and the Knight Foundation have various connections. For example, Paul Steiger, executive chairman of ProPublica, is a trustee of the Knight Foundation.[17] In like manner, Alberto Ibarguen, the president and CEO of the Knight Foundation is on the board of ProPublica.[18] ProPublica, along with other major news outlets, received grant funding from Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX.[19]"
"ProPublica has attracted attention for the salaries it pays its employees.[20][21]"
"In 2008, Paul Steiger, the editor of ProPublica, received a salary of $570,000.[22] Steiger was formerly the managing editor at The Wall Street Journal, where his total compensation (including options[22]) was double that at ProPublica.[23] Steiger's stated strategy is to use a Wall Street Journal pay model to attract journalistic talent.[24]"
"In 2010, eight ProPublica employees made more than $160,000, including managing editor Stephen Engelberg ($343,463) and the highest-paid reporter, Dafna Linzer, formerly of the Washington Post ($205,445).[25]"
See if you can find any J-School faculty assessments of these salary structures of the Golden Rolodex of Journalism's Executive Decisionmakers and especially the broadcast Public Interest Private Financed News & Public Affairs programming, billing and ad agency appraised worth:
NORMALIZED HOMELESSNESS IS NOT ONLY A US NON-NEWS-WORTHY STORY for mainstream print and broadcast journalism & Public Affairs programming. Try CBC and U. of Tube coverage of the street carnage north of US in our '51st State' of Canada & Indigenous Territories from Yukon across the Arctic and Nunavut circles:
We need to follow and track all this money sloshing around global Wealth Management Portfolios and the national dumping grounds for the redirected investor capital.
Meanwhile the Finance Mgrs of Private Equity funds could stage manage their own off-shore dumping grounds of investment capital at the expense of housing stocks.
All structured and leveraged to use the SCARE CITY dba SCARCITY scenario of Global Housing Crises after decades of delayed or killed municipal subsidized housing complex construction starts. Delays and construction scheduling lags tied up in municipal, county, state and federal funding streams that could extend up to 5 or more years that created the skyrocketed spiral of HOUSING COSTS and monetary INFLATION (especially to working class & distressed surge of Social Welfare need.
This backstage bid-net to off-set the global SHORTAGE OF AVAILABLE AFFORDABLE HOUSING PRESSURE THAT HELPED SEND THE VALUATIONS OF ANY RESIDENTIAL CONSTRUCTION GREENLIGHTED BY SPECULATIVE HIGH FINANCE SKYROCKETING ON PRIVATE INVESTMENT BOOKS OF OFTEN VACANT & OFF-MARKET, NEVER OCCUPIED RESIDENTIAL UNITS used as Private Equity Speculation Urban Housing Market integrated Bait & Lures):
Listen to Saskia Sassen, the Columbia University Detective Columbo along with her colleague the Nobel Prize Economist at Columbia U., Joseph Stiglitz 2 of the main talking heads of tracking housing investment markets and the countervailing flows of migrant labor and international migratory labor housing surpluses\crisis deficiencies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6juSABUfnUg
PUSH - ( some excerpts from the documentary )
Tiktaks Point of View
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"Some excerpts from the documentary "PUSH" (2019) (full doc @ "Push | TVO Docs" on YouTube)"
"Exploring why people cannot be allowed to live in cities... The high cost of housing and global investment funds that push people to poverty and strip them of a fundamental human right." Narrated by former UN Special Rapporteur on Global Housing Crisis, Leilani Farha:
http://www.unhousingrapp.org/about-us
"This website is now an archive. Leilani Farha’s tenure as UN Special Rapporteur ended on April 30th, 2020. You can follow her work in her new role as Global Director of The Shift at www.maketheshift.org "
"Leilani Farha
United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing (June 2014 - April 2020)
Leilani brings a dynamic energy to the role of UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing; energy she will need to reach her goal of prompting and facilitating an international paradigm shift in how housing is approached."
"Producers (Sweden with the film in English language 2019 nationally\2021 global distribution of documentary to theatrical and streaming broadcaster markets): Fredrik Gertten, Margarete Jangard "
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters, Code Shifters, PsalmSong Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of Atone-ment Seekers)
Media Discussion List\Looksee
This absolutely tracks the implications of data systems and near instantaneous logistical communication are huge in terms of how quickly the shift from regional to global were able to happen.
Having lived though all of the ups and downs of the U.S. economy since tricky Dick Nixon, I'm well aware of what's coming. There's no stopping it now. All we can do is hang on as bests as we can as the economy heads for the river rapids and hope there's no big water fall down river somewhere.
So many people are going to wake up someday soon and go, 'What happened?" Most of them Trump voters. This has been coming for decades and Donny boy is just a symptom of the culmination of decades of bad ideas for the working class.
The only thing that trickles down is hate and bigotry. Thanks for this excellent piece, Michelle. It’s depressing af but somehow comforting to me when people call it like it is. I appreciate you.
Thank you for reading. I’m living this situation, as are millions of us, and I’m pretty concerned.
Same. I have two kids in this mess, one in his first year of college, the other finishing her sophomore year of high school. I barely know what to do with myself trying to figure out what’s in front of us and how to keep them safe or any of us safe, really. Smh Michelle.
As I recall, it was Daddy Bush, who coined the term New World Order and Henry Kissinger who sketched the outline and the Clintons and Madeline Albright filled in the blanks and called it NAFTA.
Hi, Michelle. One of the reasons Reagonomics took over was because by the late 1970s, the destruction to the manufacturing infrastructure of many European and Asian nations during World War II had ended, those countries were recovering and becoming economically productive again, and the U.S. no longer had the type of economic dominance it once did. So, the capitalists ceased tolerating good jobs with high pay and heavy regulations on businesses that made life easier for many working class people, and which had created a robust middle class between the late 1940s and late 1970s.
Let's be honest, this was first felt during the Carter administration, who began with the union-busting and deregulation craze. This led to a recession, the first of several big let-downs to the working class by the Democrats, who began morphing into corporate-controlled entities just like the Republicans. This led to a Republican administration that continued the corporate policies, to be followed by a Democrat administration that did the same, to be followed by a Republican administration that did the same, rinse and repeat.
As I've said before, the working class, and the Left in particular, need to give up on the Duopoly entirely. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats care about the working class, they are all owned by the same 0.1% of the robber barons, and we need to stop getting emotionally hooked on one or the other with a type of "team sport" mentality or based on one espousing "social values" that resonates with us. Both do nothing for us economically, and we need to accept that, abandon them, and form our own movement.
My local friend, who has a small coffee roasting business, is closing shop. All his coffees are imported, of course. Outside of Hawaii, we don’t have any US place to grow it. But replacement repair parts for roasters (which wear out from heat fatigue) come from China…good luck getting those, and they’re not made here, and won’t be either. Alas, my delicious local source is going away.
I highly recommend everyone read a very short book (74 pages) called "Manna". It was written over 13 years ago and it does a good job telling us the future, or what the future could be. It is written as a fictional story of one man's experience with the change in society due to automation. He provides a good future and a bad future. You can decide which one is in the cards for us. You can read it free here, "https://milweesci.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/2/4/13247648/mannapdf.pdf"
Thanks for the link. I'm reading this. Dystopian stuff is fascinating to me; however, it upsets others. What happens in this book, (at least the first half), is entirely possible today. The conditions are right.
An Amazon employee I know describes her distribution center as VERY MUCH like the workplace in "Manna". She always seems exhausted.
I spent the majority of my work career in allied healthcare. When I started, it seemed like it was more about caring for individuals. Whether that was so or not…there were vast inequities in western medicine that were built in from centuries ago…very likely not. You worked your way up from treating poor patients and gradually built a practice of “patrons” who supported your practice. But there was a vast shift when private equity started seeing the big money in healthcare. Enter the capitalists and bean counters. Care became counting minutes, writing care plans, documenting whatever shit could be counted…. Now it’s evolved in to how many “touches” a claim process can put on a claim. Yeah, sometimes you are an individual, as long as you have some monetary resources (that haven’t withered away and totally devalued). We’re on the road back to the “piss prophet” physicians in training of 300 years ago.
Hi, Michelle. I would highly recommend that you watch Gary’s Economics on You Tube. He clearly explains the mess we are in today. He is from London and is a bit sweary, but he was a trader in the City and made a fortune before realising how skewed the stakes are. In the UK Thatcherism and Reaganism were the beginning of the slow slide downwards for us but the wealthy reaped the benefits. I take it you have read the Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein? That was eye opening as well. Thank you for all the work you put into your articles ❤️
He doesn’t have transcripts on his videos but he has written a book.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trading-Game-Sunday-Times-bestseller/dp/1802062734/ref=asc_df_1802062734?mcid=cb754731d271384abec9a0b55e9ddbbb&th=1&psc=1&hvocijid=9369980489015929372-1802062734-&hvexpln=74&tag=googshopuk-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=696285193871&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=9369980489015929372&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1007201&hvtargid=pla-2281435177098&psc=1&gad_source=1
Hope that helps, Michelle.
By the way, my late husband used to use the phrase “pick yourself up in two buckets” rather than the bootstrap one. It still makes me chuckle.
Thank you!
My problem with videos is about seven seconds in I realize I’m not paying attention.
I struggle with videos and podcasts too but find I can actually listen to them better if I am also playing a mindless game on my iPad, like Candy Crush, Sudoku or a word search. Otherwise I just get bored and, like you, I stop concentrating. With Gary’s videos, you don’t actually have to watch them, you can mostly just listen. Hope you find the book helpful 😘
I can’t do video games either! What happens is I end up scrolling Medium or Substack or just retreating into my own brain and then realize, “Wait, there was a video, wasn’t there?”
Do you know if he offers a text option? I just can’t handle videos. I absorb by reading.