It’s Labor Day weekend. This Monday is the day when we celebrate people extracting meager shares of the profits earned by capital. In North America, where we don’t build housing, when people make more wages for their work, most of it just goes to landlords.
Is it healthy for people over 60 years old to own 62% of a country’s assets? Asking for an America.
We get letters
I always appreciate feedback. No, seriously. Please leave a comment, email me, stalk me at my dad’s place this weekend. I’d love to hear what you think.
On last week’s item about how meaningless this presidential campaign feels, David wrote: “I’m baffled by the show of hands for trump support even if he’s convicted of a crime. This is the party that’s supposed to be tough on crime still, isn’t it? Or are they tough on crime in their own heads - whatever they believe to be a crime?”
I honestly think very few Americans hold any principles or ideologies dearly, and when you hear a conservative talk about “free speech” or a libertarian talk about “free enterprise” or a liberal talk about “racial equity,” you won’t have to push very far to find the limits of their belief. (Just look at Elon’s “free speech” Xitter which has more than doubled the rate at which it complies with government censorship demands.)
When Republicans talk about “crime,” they’re not really talking about lawbreaking. They’re talking about people they find threatening or frightening. They’re not talking about insider trading, public corruption, or stealing national security documents and shoving them in boxes with your golf trophies.
Liberals and conservatives have diverged on the issue of crime for at least as long as I’ve been alive and listening to politicians appeal to people’s instincts. Liberals have generally ascribed crime to desperation, which is itself caused by poverty, inequality, racial discrimination, underinvestment in communities, zoning, and, really, capitalism. In other words, if you want to solve crime, you just have to fix all of society.
Conservatives have generally ascribed crime to criminals. To listen to Republicans talk about crime is to hear them speak of crime as the toil of enemy NPCs, threats to be removed from society. More police, with more permission to act aggressively, and longer prison sentences will “keep criminals off the street.” The only root cause you really hear about is fatherlessness, but that’s outside the scope of pretty much everyone’s idea of government.
You could hear a more recent shift in last week’s Republican debate, where all of the candidates conflated “crime” with border security: crime is people crossing the Mexican border. And the solutions they suggested involved men who carry guns. (DeSantis endorsed extrajudicial executions at the discretion of Border Patrol agents. Cool cool.)
So, is the GOP the party of law and order? No, and they never have been. They’re the party of policing and incarceration, both of which are more industries than actual solutions to anything. (The for-profit prison industry — which is a thing we allow to exist! — contributed over $3M to politicians in 2020, 91% of that to Republicans.)
If Trump were on trial for breaking into an old white couple’s house and stealing their iPad, Republicans may have turned on him. Well, maybe. Probably not. But recruiting fake electors or committing campaign finance fraud or uhhh stealing and storing nuclear secrets right next to where Jeremy’s bar mitzvah is going down — those are just POTUS things.
And hey, according to Fox News, Trump’s mugshot has made him newly “gangsta,” which is definitely a thing people say in 2023. Trump’s the new Tupac. THUG LIFE.
OK, next email. We also got some interesting feedback on the prior week’s newsletter on return-to-work.
“Jill” (fake name) wrote: “In fall 2021 our company returned to work, 5 days a week, at the insistence of our CEO and biggest shareholder. It’s lame because most of my team’s job is just being on the phone with customers all day & I do that better in my kitchen than at a desk surrounded by other people on the phone. So anyhoo a handful of coworkers got to remain remote because they shared doctor’s notes about being immunocompromised, and good for them. The people who had just moved away quit or got laid off. It honestly sucks now. We were working great remotely. My company has been around since the ‘80s and if it were starting now they probably wouldn’t even rent an office for my group, just have us all working from home from day one.”
I also mentioned in that issue that when I took my job at Facebook in 2016, they made it clear to me that I was expected in the office every day. This made Facebook very different from my earlier tech companies, which were pretty fluid about where you worked as long as you showed up in the flesh where and when it was expected. But daily presence was a Zuck thing.
Well, Zuck is Zuck, and an employee of Meta (nee Facebook) leaked that the company is tracking security badges so they can fire people who aren’t coming to the office three days a week. Not two days. Three.
You always gotta take these things less-than-literally, especially when it’s based on a leak, but we’re going to see more “show up or take a hike” memos, especially from tech companies that spent a small-country’s GDP to build magnificent campuses. Come eat your free lunches, Metaserfs.
Return-to-office (RTO) isn’t universal, though. As I covered last time, work-from-home (WFH) has a number of advantages, one of which is that it shifts real estate and building management costs to the employees themselves. And employees certainly don’t seem to mind. Atlassian, a massive enterprise software company, has fully embraced remote work, and even the CEO only comes to the office every three months or so. He appreciates that people have moved to cheaper places where they can have a higher standard of living. How enlightened!
Conversely, Goldman Sachs is pushing their grunts to come to the office five days a week, just as COVID hospitalizations are surging and nobody has had a booster shot in a year. And with good reason: $1.2T in debt on commercial real estate is at risk of default, and that sounds bad for Goldman.
When the Rapture hit capitalism
Here’s a story about return-to-office that I cut for length a couple weeks: In the summer of 2021, my climatetech startup went hunting for new space in San Francisco. This experience was highly unsettling. We kept visiting offices that had been suddenly abandoned in March 2020, when a lot of employees went home on a Friday and literally never came back. It was like the Rapture happened, but only office workers went to Heaven, except for the damned who got Left Behind.
Laptops and monitors had been running for over a year. Fridges were full of expired beer and snacks. Hoodies were still hanging on chairbacks, bobbleheads and rubber ducky collections still intact on desktops.
Each office we visited was like a new discovery of an ancient culture, their totems and evidence of rituals scattered about their village. A calamity had taken this strange society in a hurry, leaving behind the material culture of lives no longer experienced.
The space we ended up renting used to house a mysterious biotech company, literally called “MYSTERY.” They left all manner of jokes and project plans on the white boards. I can’t bring myself to erase any of them, lest the space be tormented by corporate spirits, probably complaining that this haunting could have been an email.
Who will be Trump’s running mate?
This is maybe the only unpredictable 2024 campaign development that will happen outside a courtroom. Trump is going to need to pick a running mate. Who do you think it’s going to be?
VPOTUS is a famously watery dud of a job, and Pence had arguably the worst time of it of any VP in modern memory. After toiling for four years as Trump’s loyal janitor, his boss rewarded him by trying to get him killed. Who wants next?
After he was first elected, Trump built his administration around some establishment Republicans, a few semi-respectable outsiders, and also some purely corrupt garbage people. (Remember Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke?) By Year 3 it was grifters and grafters all the way down. He installed a criminal scammer as acting Attorney General and some dude named Chad Wolf to run Homeland Security, entirely because his name was Chad Wolf. Now seemingly everyone from his former administration is either under indictment or a criminal witness, and if they didn’t stick around long enough to get charged, they’re one of his Enemies of the People. Serving Trump is like working for the mob — there are only a few ways out, and you won’t like most of them.
So who’s going to show up to work for Trump, having observed what happened to everyone else who tried? Maybe a true believer like MTG or a cynic like Jim Jordan or Vivek Ramaswamy? Nah, they’d overshadow the Boss. He needs someone dull who’ll commit to going on Meet the Press to defend whatever demonic thing he’s trying to do, and is also willing to take the risk that they might be held accountable for laws they broke on their boss’s behalf.
Which leaves us with this simple question: Which one of his children will he choose? (Cue Succession theme.)
The internet laughs at mentally ill people
OK, I’m going to write something about mental health and illness. It’s a sensitive topic, and I’m not an expert on this, so I want to pre-apologize if I misuse any words or come across as stigmatizing when I’m trying to be empathetic. Please tell me if I blew it.
(Exhale.)
A few weeks ago, a video shot on an airplane went viral. I won’t link it here for reasons that will become obvious, but you might have seen it.
While waiting to pull back from the gate, a woman had stood up and rushed to the front of the plane, demanding to get off. Her reasoning? She was doubting the existence of someone else in her row. She pointed at the person she believed to be a simulation of some kind. “That motherfucker back there isn’t real.”
This video spread everywhere, usually with an assortment of “look at this crazy b— 🤣🤣🤣” type commentary. Tabloid media picked it up, then revealed her name, her employer, even the value of her house. The NY Post covered her like she’d firebombed a 90-year-old pizza joint on Staten Island and was also dating Pete Davidson.
When we all first saw the video, it was clear what we were actually looking at: a woman having a mental health crisis while confined with hundreds of bored strangers. But she wasn’t even really a human to the millions of people who saw the video — she was an amusing and scary NPC who was acting up on a plane.
OK, it may seem like I’m on a high horse, but it’s really a mule on stilts. My initial reaction to this video was also 🤭, because accusing someone of being “not real” is very funny. The heightened absurdity of her words was why it went more viral than other videos of people having mental health episodes on airplanes. It also played into the “crisis of passengers behaving badly on planes” narrative that never seems to die.
Mental illness is common and routine, and yet it’s still devastating. You’ve likely had friends or family members suffer through it, and maybe harm themselves or others in the process. I myself have seen friends survive mental health episodes just in the last year. It hurts to know that one or both may already be streaming on TikTok or Xitter without their consent, doing something socially unacceptable they can’t understand.
Many Karen videos, Waffle House fight videos, and freeway outburst videos are actually mental health episodes. (Yes, and some are just people being assholes.) When combined with racism, classism, or antisocial vibes, they become part of a broader national narrative. In our minds, we’re not laughing at a person so much at sneering at a society that’s broken or has lost something, but really, we’re laughing at a person, maybe a person who’s going through some psychosis we can’t even comprehend.
The “crazy plane lady” recently re-emerged to apologize and express her embarrassment, but also to explain herself. For most, it was just another appearance from a person we’ll keep ridiculing for as long as it’s funny to us.
But her apology maybe made some of us feel bad for a moment. The real test is how we, each of us, react to the next “crazy 🤣😮😭” video.
Have a good Labor Day, y’all. It’s a holiday, so don’t work for free.