Tag Archives: economy

Piercing the Corporate Veil, A Study in Bayhem, Bubbles, Box of Pox, and Suddenly Poor

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This entry is part 59 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

The Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case creep and speculation continue.

Now there’s some rumblings among some who are supposedly more law-savvy than I am about this close bond between a corporation’s “religion” and the religion of the people who run it may be an exploitable tear in the corporate veil that protects those who run a corporation from certain financial and legal issues.

If that’s true, then that may be a semi-good thing to come from all of this.

But I’m not sure how that would all play out. It very well may end up being worse all around for everyone.

Of course, it may not matter all that much if the economy as a whole–on a global scale–pops all at once.

There are apparently some rumblings (again, from people who know a lot more about the issue at hand than I do) about how over-valued a lot of things out there in the financial and investment world are. And how little corporations (and actual people with lots of money) are investing in things. Real estate, stocks, bonds, each other… few are seeing a chance for a good return on their investment so they’re just holding on to their money.

And while that’s going on, the various central banks of various nations are, in one way or another, pumping more money into the economy… which is, of course, trickling up into these stockpiles. Because (and the article in today’s stream doesn’t touch on this idea, but it’s a pretty glaring omission) the vast majority of people don’t have investments like what they’re talking about, so all that money can only trickle up to the businesses that own and produce what the people at street level are buying.

With that money “stuck” in the cycle, it seems it’s leaving a bit of a vacuum for those who need it most while, yet again, the rich get richer. But if and when this massive series of bubbles pop, everyone’s going to lose big as everything plummets in value–including those vast storehouses of money.

Kind of terrifying.

About as terrifying as hearing that the CDC misplaced a box of smallpox sometime in the 50s. It’s okay, though… they found it. Sitting in a store room in a lab that’s been used by the FDA for the past 40 or so years.

That just leaves me wondering what the heck else has been misplaced over the decades and never missed.

Then there’s the newest revelations from the Snowden files. Seems the U.S. government did, indeed, have a whole lot of personal communications on hand that they probably shouldn’t have. How do we know? Because Snowden handed a bunch of it over to the Washing Post. So now all the officials who’ve been swearing up and down that their organizations never took and retained anything like these newly revealed documents are saying, effectively, “Okay, yeah, we had those, but they’re different! It was only a minimal violation of those people’s privacy! What Snowden’s doing with them is worse than what we did!”

Yeah, not buying the blame shifting, guys. You’re still the ones who collected it–and have been lying about it. Sure Snowden’s in the wrong, that’s not news. You’re still in more wrong overall.

Anyway, here’s the rest of the feed…

Authenticity, Spooked, For the Love of Villains, Poor Decisions Make the News, and Taking Risks

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This entry is part 40 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

One of the articles today talks about how keeping our kids super safe may actually be doing them more harm than good.

It raised the question in the comment thread of just how much has the world changed since I was a kid? On a macro level, sure, lots of changes–we’ve got no more Soviet Union (and a whole lot of new countries in its place), gay marriage is a real thing now, 3D movies are the norm and not the novelty–but people are still people. How much, and in what ways, has that changed?

The biggest difference I see is the sheer level of paranoia. There was an article a week or so ago that was by a parent who was facing a lot of court costs because her kid and a friend wandered over to a nearby shopping center. They weren’t supposed to, but that’s beside the point. The point was that the person who came across these two reported very capable young girls panicked and, instead of calling the parents to see what was up, called the cops instead. That escalated quickly and has caused no end of trouble.

Forty years ago, I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t have happened.

We’ve become so afraid of everything–especially personal liability–that, in general, we seem to be far too willing to pass things on to someone else (like the cops) in order to avoid having to deal with any real responsibility. This is the same kind of thinking that’s neutered playgrounds (I know I’m not the only one who remembers getting nasty splinters while flying off of a merry-go-round that four other kids were pushing at near sonic speed).

As today’s article says, it’s in those unstructured (and unsupervised) times of play that kids really start to figure things out for themselves. They learn self control. They learn how to work with others. They learn that trying to stand on the top of the jungle gym probably isn’t a good idea (as they bounce down among the bars). Yeah, we’d go home bruised, and sometimes there’d be a broken bone, but we’d heal and not be likely to make the same mistakes again.

But I grew up in the era of the Satanic Panic and Stranger Danger. Both things that, in retrospect were blown so far out of proportion (the first never having a shred of actual evidence to support it, the second being provably wrong as most “danger” comes from family and friends of the family). That planted the seed of fear in us. As we’ve grown up, and, in some cases begun raising families of our own, that fear seems to have sprouted and begun to strangle all the unstructured play time in the name of “being safe.”

Surely we won’t know for another few years (maybe decades) exactly what the ultimate result of helicopter parents and over-planned childhoods will bring… but I have a feeling we’re not at all going to be happy with what we see.

My Generation, Celebrity Humor, Cute Overload, World Goth Day, Jobs, and Job Numbers

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This entry is part 33 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

As Gen X hits its collective mid-life crisis, we wade through a country that’s undergoing a political crisis. More extreme views appear to the left and right of a seemingly silent (and often bewildered) center.

That polarization causes wild swings–accentuated by whatever will bring the media the most eyeballs or ears–causes more of a feeling of instability (regardless of actual stability) than most are comfortable with. That feeling of instability further causes more polarization as each side becomes more and more reactionary in order to counter the escalating maneuverings of the other.

And my generation (Gen X, for those who haven’t been paying attention) is kind of at the middle of it all. In general, we’ve long been disillusioned when it comes to politics. We know they’re not pretty, that they’re often petty, and seem to almost always ignore sensibility. Even though we went out and “rocked the vote” way back when, we didn’t really get the long term results we hoped for.

Just like everything else in our lives.

But that hasn’t stopped us from just moving forward.

We’re used to being disappointed.  Or being disappointments. Either way, the effect is the same. We often keep to ourselves, bide our time while the water is rough (which is sometimes more hard work than is readily visible), and hope for that day when the skies clear up and we can actually accomplish the big things we’ve always wanted to do.

Thing is, the weather never seems to clear up.

And now… now we find that half of our own lives are gone.

We’ve worked harder than most seem to realize. Quietly, for the most part. But we’ve had a lot of that work destroyed before we could make use of it. So we have little to show for it.

And now… now just finding work is a long-term, full-time, unpaid job. Is it any wonder people are just giving up?

We were raised by the first TV generation and have been soaking in media hype and marketing messages for our entire lives. Celebrity leaves as bad a taste in our mouths as politics does… and half the time the two are closely intertwined, anyway.

Half of our lives are gone and, yeah, we’re likely kind of bitter about it.

But that doesn’t stop us from continuing to move onward.

That’s the only thing we’ve ever known: that the horizon is where we should be.

And it’s always just a wee bit farther out.

Sometimes it’s obscured by a haze (of politics, of entertainment, of hype)… but we’ve been trained to know the general direction, regardless.

We move, always. Slowly at times. And we’re getting old and want to rest.

If only we really knew how.

Some stuff from the weekend and more

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This entry is part 11 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

I’m running exceptionally later than planned tonight.

In between doing stuff at work during the day and up until about ten minutes before I’m typing this, I’ve been involved, on and off, in two completely awesome discussions over in my FB stream. One’s been about faith, religion, and atheists, the other has been on people trapped in low-paying (minimum wage) fast-food jobs.

And I’ve also been working on getting some promo stuff lined up for this year’s Taste the World in Fenton Village event (which is happening on May 4).

Over the weekend, I spent a lot of time at the second annual Awesome Con. I didn’t take a lot of picture, but other people did… some of them are in the feed rundown below. Mostly, I just had a great time being surrounded by fantastically creative and energetic people who were deeply involved with things they absolutely love doing. It was a good and refreshing change from the daily grind.

But, now I’m way over due to go to sleep for the extra early meeting I have on Tuesday. Soooo… here, here’s a bunch of stuff to scroll through.