02-11-2022, 02:00 AM
(02-10-2022, 09:23 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: Just a friendly reminder that it would be hard to imagine today's womanhood being able to put up with returning to what in its heyday was known as the Suzy Homemaker role. Most of today's women are too well educated for that, and for them the idea of going back to Suzy Homemaker seems comparable to returning to the days when women couldn't vote.
The dirty little secret of life was that many women worked. Slave women certainly worked, often doing back-breaking field work. Small farms depended on women doing the food-processing... and when farm families were typically large the women did much cooking and childcare that obviously wasn't paid. It was certainly necessary. Poor women worked in factories or did domestic work if recent immigrants, often under harsh conditions. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed 146 workers, mostly women or even girls (two of the dead were 14 years old) in 1915, then almost entirely Italian or Jewish immigrants, illustrates how things were for the working class just over a century ago. People were not doing such work for expressing themselves. That was middle class, and there was little middle class in America in those days.
Quote:As far as an era in which changes can be made, they can be done in any turning. In the era of hiatus and regression there were vast changes in both technology and philosophies, I will admit not all for the better. One key area where the regression comes in is in the area of workers' rights. We should move form at-will employment to a just cause model. But will we? There doesn't seem to be that kind of consensus despite some movement such as Fight for 15. Amazon has become a near monopoly by treating their workers as livestock at best, vermin at worst.
Big Business does what it can get away with. If it could get away with debt-bondage it would. We had huge regression in workers' rights in the 1980's. Strikes became riskier. More states enacted Right-to-Work (for much less, as union people call them) laws. As for Amazon being the baddie, it exploits the demise of brick-and-mortar stores such as Tower Records and Shakespeare, Beethoven & Company that had large selections of recorded music. (I will stick to that area because I am a a music lover and know the business reasonably well as a customer). Keeping a huge selection in the hope that it will attract an impulse buyer is not without its cost. When people were flush with cash for making impulse purchases it was possible to put the merchandise within an easy drive of people. Now not so many people are flush with cash. With Amazon it does not matter whether the customer is in Boston if the customer is in Philadelphia.
I see Amazon replicating what Sears-Roebuck did with mail-order in 1887 with the Internet instead of the mails for soliciting sales.
Quote:Where fossil fuels is concerned, one poster recently stated that we might first need to abandon the car culture. Not to long ago I read where in only about 12 percent of the US can one get by fairly well without a car. If you are anywhere within "the other 88" you will have significant difficulties. And besides, the nature of the spread out landscape makes is not cost effective to run public transit in said areas.
Just to keep housing costs down, Americans will need to accept, and builders will need to build, high-density housing. High-density housing is the norm in Japan and South Korea, but it is infamous in the more rowdy culture that is America (especially among the poor) for becoming dreadful slums. As it is, landlords wax fat on a housing shortage, and you can expect them to resist any solution to housing other than the usual way of the monopolist or near-monopolist: gouging. For something to be most profitable, people must be priced out of it -- especially if it is a necessity. Urban landlords are the only well-heeled right-wing elite in many cities, and they may be more effective in getting their way than their political representation would suggest in giant cities. A hint: Donald Trump has been above all else a landlord.
Quote:The pandemic has hastened the idea of putting innovative ways of working to the test, most notably remote works paces sans a physical office. Such flexibility might even result in more folks being determined to follow through on a plan or project and do a great job. We also can achieve greater work-life balance if we work to work smarter not harder.
For me, part of a work-life balance is that I do not need to live in a community in which a landlord takes 70% of my after-tax income.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.