The Path to Prosperity

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction The fundamental problem with the economy A cost/benefit analysis of economic oppression What it’s like to be poor 7 reasons why minimum wage should be higher 7 ways workers’ rights still need to improve The glass ceiling of higher education The injustice of employee contracts Why do so many small businesses fail?

The housing market is a crime against humanity.

Why Obamacare made me faceplam Professionalism is a straightjacket.

America hates you, America.

The legacy of a billionaire Put a 100% tax on all personal income over $1 billion.

Why suburbia sucks You might be depressed because the system sucks, not because you suck.

It’s the stress stupid Stop treating people like shit and they’ll start giving a fuck.

What’s the difference between expensive wine and cheap wine?

The life of an apple thinner We need to do more to help people get the job they’re suited for.

An argument to nationalize the banks Business changes the world One dollar equals one vote in the economy A sustainable economic model Things I wish people would invent

INTRODUCTION This book is a collection of essays about economics that were originally posted on my website, The Wise Sloth. I’m not an economist, and I don’t have a doctorate degree. I’m a vagrant intellectual who has spent his life living and working at the bottom of an economic system that exploits the poor. The point of this book is to give a voice to the poor workers whose feelings and lives are so rarely even mentioned in professional economic philosophy.

THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM WITH THE ECONOMY The problem with the economy is simple. Workers are paid as little as possible to work as long and as hard as possible while goods and services cost as much as much as possible and are generally made as cheaply as possible and need to be repurchased as often as possible. As a result, the standard business model funnels all of society’s money up to the business owners’ bank accounts. That’s how and why the rich become as rich as possible while the poor become as poor as possible.

This makes life suck as much as possible for as many people as possible, and even though it looks like the economy is doing great when businesses are making money, what you’re really seeing is the economy eating itself alive, like a snake getting fat by eating its own tail. The more money the rich exploit from the poor the less money the majority of the population has to spend. The less people spend the more the economy slows down. The more it slows down the fewer jobs are needed and the higher the unemployment rate rises. The higher the unemployment rate rises the greater demand for jobs there are. The higher demand for jobs there are the less pay, less benefits and longer hours people are willing to accept just to get a pay check.

The inevitable conclusion of this tried-and-failed economic model is a civilization where the workers starve en mass while the rich wallow in luxury until resources have been so mismanaged that the system collapses. Collapse rarely ends with everyone dying though.

Often the mismanaged civilization will plunder a weaker civilization for its resources, but that only delays the collapse. Sometimes the system is corrected by a peasant revolution. Sometimes a civilization with a better managed economy will take over the mismanaged managed one. Sometimes the excess poor will die or leave so that the meager resources allotted to the masses by the rich don't have to stretch so far. Usually though, life simply drags on miserably for generation after generation of the desperate poor who have been raised on the lie that this is how the world works and if you don't like it then you're not grateful for what you've been given and you just need to shut up, man up, work harder and eat cheaper food.

The rarest and most fleeting scenario is the one where politicians peacefully and willfully pass laws that give workers fair claim to a share of the profits they produce and guarantee consumers a fair price on the goods and services they pay for so that as much money as possible is kept in circulation and as many people as possible live as securely and comfortably as possible. The reason this happens so rarely is because the rich always control their nation's government either directly or by proxy. So they influence their governments to resist any legislation that threatens their smash-and-grab economic philosophy.

Even if a sane egalitarian politician could secure a term in a high level position of government they would be unlikely to successfully make any significant change since the system is already designed to be unfair and resist change. The only thing getting closer to the fire is likely to accomplish is getting burnt.

Violent revolutions have been tried before but have failed to produce long term change because they don't fix the root problem. Here's a maxim you can live by: If you have to resort to violence to fix a problem it's because you don't have a real solution.

Here's a more realistic solution. Start businesses that have an equitable profit sharing pay scale and charges fair prices. The best workers will flock to those companies.

Consumers will buy from them because their products are cheaper, and people will want to support them. As these companies grow they'll put the slave-based companies out of business. Once the corrupt companies go bankrupt the corrupt people running them will go bankrupt and won't have the resources to buy influence in government. Then intelligent, sane humanitarian politicians will have a better chance of making significant positive change in government as well.

A COST/BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF ECONOMIC OPPRESSION The benefits of economic oppression are obvious, and they can be summed up in three words: comfort, freedom and legacy. Comfort is obvious. The wealthiest people in the world can enjoy whatever comforts they can imagine. At the snap of a finger they can have things many people would have to work their entire lives for and most people will only ever dream about.

The wealthiest people in the world are the only people who are truly free. They're free to spend their time however they want. They don't have to give their time to anyone, and nobody has the control to tell them what to do for 9 hours a day. They're free to work however, whenever and wherever they want. They're free to travel wherever they want whenever and however they want. Barring going on a shooting spree in a shopping mall they're free to break most laws. Even if they do have charges brought against them they can hire a team of lawyers to bend the law for them so they'll be let go or they might get charged a fee that represents such a miniscule percentage of their wealth that the legal consequences are utterly inconsequential to them.

The wealthiest people in the world have more money than they could spend in their lives, and most of that money is sitting in investment vehicles that will continue to make money after they're dead. So unless their descendants are completely irresponsible they could live comfortable, free lives indefinitely.

The benefits of being wealthy are undeniably desirable. People have been killed for less.

If all you have to do to live that kind of life is sign a piece of paper approving the exploitation of workers you'll never meet who need jobs anyway and are willing to work for slave wages, I doubt many people would pass up the opportunity.

But then there's the cost to consider. Now, I'm not even going to bother exploring the moral arguments against economic exploitation. If you've succeeded in becoming one of the wealthiest people in the world you're either a sociopath who has no conscience and wouldn't be moved by moral arguments or you've already built a wall of excuses to justify your actions. So arguing morality with you would be as futile as arguing with a Christian over the divinity of the Bible.

So let's talk about the empirical, real world costs of economic exploitation starting with comfort. Consider the kings who ruled in the Middle Ages. They squandered their wealth and lived more comfortably than the serfs could ever imagine, and yet the serfs of today live more comfortably than the kings of antiquity could have imagined. The reason we live so much more comfortably is because of technological progress. Technological progress is the result of billions of people all over the world applying their time and education to scientific inquiry. The more people who collaborate on research, the faster it generates results. In fact, the speed of progress increases exponentially as the number of people working on it increases.

If, instead of forcing everyone to devote the bulk of their lives to menial work for just enough money to survive, we devoted our resources to giving as many people as much education and free time as possible we could speed up humanity's technological development exponentially. If we didn't have our priorities so backwards we could easily be living on Mars before Generation X dies of old age.

If we'd never oppressed anyone in the history of mankind we would have probably started building on Mars hundreds of years ago. By now we would have built artificial intelligence and servant robots. If you're a millionaire CEO, there's probably someone who works for your company for barely enough money to survive who would have contributed something that would have significantly improved or saved your life, but you chose to squeeze a few dollars out of their misery instead.

Also, even though wealthy people may be freer than the oppressed, much of their freedom comes at unnecessary cost. For example, a wealthy person could walk through an inner city ghetto safely, but they'd need to hire paramilitary escorts. Wealthy people are free to sleep soundly without fear of burglars, but that's only because they have million dollar security systems and security guards. Wealthy people can bypass the cumbersome and demeaning security measures at airports by flying in their own planes, but why do we need security measures in airports at all? Why do we need locks on our doors? Why do we need bodyguards?

We need security because there are billions of stupid and/or desperate people in the world. The reason there are billions of stupid and/or desperate people in the world instead of billions of intelligent, content, philosophers is because the leaders of the world have designed the system to oppress the majority of the world's population. If we dedicated our resources to helping people instead of oppressing them we wouldn't need to lock our doors or carry guns or have metal detectors at airports and schools. We probably wouldn't even need armies because everybody would have enough and wouldn't need to fight each other. Until that day comes, freedom will always be so expensive that only the wealthy will be able to afford it, and it will always be an unnecessary expense for the rich...an expense that was created by the rich.

It would be so easy for rich people to leave their children a utopian world. All they need to do is treat everyone as equal human beings. Granted, this will come at a cost. The rich wouldn’t be able to horde more money than they could ever possibly spend. They’d still have enough money to live like a king though. So they won't necessarily lose any quality of life. But maybe I'm completely wrong here. Maybe there is some long-term moral and practical benefit I can’t see that makes it worth causing billions of people to suffer so a few people can horde money they’ll never use.

WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE POOR There are a lot of people complaining these days about lazy welfare queens leeching off the government and bankrupting countries. Society doesn’t seem to have much sympathy for anyone on welfare, actually. Even poor people who have minimum wage jobs and don’t qualify for welfare are sneered at by the upper class for not working harder and turning their lives into rags-to-riches stories. When the poor aren’t being sneered at they’re just forgotten. Every morning I watch a few minutes of a morning “news” show, and from the fluffy, feel-good topics they talk about you’d think there wasn’t a single person in the world suffering and the biggest problem facing society is deciding what to buy for Christmas.

The problem with the world isn’t that poor people are all lazy and greedy. The problem is that people who have never been poor have no idea what it’s like to be poor. They can’t even imagine it. So they fill in the blanks with their own experiences and end up convincing themselves that they live in a happy world where the poor enjoy all the luxuries of life without having to work for it and every job is a window of opportunity that leads to the promised land.

That perspective is so far from reality that it constitutes insanity. If rich people with an inaccurate perception of reality run the country it should come as no surprise that income inequality is getting worse. Income inequality is also getting worse because so many poor people are born, live and die in poverty never knowing any other kind of life.

So they become institutionalized and take poverty (and its causes) for granted as the natural way of life.

I’m going to try to dispel some of the confusion and explain what it’s like to be poor and why the world should be talking about poverty more than celebrities and sitcoms.

Every once a while you’ll see someone buying steaks with welfare stamps. That pisses some people off, but hating poor people for buying stakes implies that they don’t deserve to eat good food. That’s heartless, and it misses the point. There’s enough food in the world for everyone to eat well. You should be mad at the system that only lets poor people eat steaks every once and a while, because the rest of the food they eat is the cheapest, most generic processed crap the government will approve for human consumption.

Poor people don’t eat cheap food because they’re too stupid to know it’s unhealthy or they’re too uncivilized to want to eat fresh fish and truffles. They walk past rows of savory food every time they go to the grocery store and stare at it longingly as their stomachs grumble. When they leave the store they pass by aromatic bakeries, cafes and ethnic restaurants and wish they could afford to splurge for a $7 cup of coffee and a salmon quiche. When they do eat at a restaurant their eyes dart immediately to the price and look for the lowest numbers and then decide which of those items they’re going to order. Poor people only order steaks at restaurants but maybe once a year. They won’t

even buy steaks at the grocery store except on special occasions. So if you see a poor person buying stakes with food stamps you should be happy for them that they’re taking a break from eating hot dogs and cereal and getting to eat like a real human being for one day.

It’s especially meaningful when a poor person gets to eat steak, because if their bodies aren’t malnourished from the nutritionless boxes of food they’ve been eating, they’ll be drained from the hard work they have to do. The cruelest lie ever told about the poor is that they don’t work. For every poor person who doesn’t work there’s ten million poor people who work all day every day as fast as they can at dangerous, tedious jobs where they’re permitted as few breaks as possible and are given as few amenities to accommodate them while they spend their entire lives trapped at work.

How do you think food gets from the field to the grocery store all packed up in boxes?

Where do you think all the clothing and gadgets at the mall come from? They’re processed, assembled and stocked by people working all day for barely enough to survive. Every day they’re fighting for survival. Work is a life and death struggle for them, and if they can’t keep up the pace or grovel before their bosses reverently enough they’ll lose their job and die. Everything is always on the line. The stress and anxiety that causes is soul crushing. You can’t spend your life that way without breaking. Something inside you has to die in order to keep going.

Those who do survive will never earn enough time off or money to take vacations. A backyard BBQ is the closest they’ll come to a vacation. If they save their pennies for long enough they might be able to take a trip to a beach resort, but they won’t have enough money to rent jet skis, go scuba diving, get a massage or eat more than one gourmet meal. And they’ll come back home broke and have another few years of unrelenting work before they can take another whirlwind vacation….assuming no unforeseen expenses pop up before then.

Life is disastrous though, and the system is designed to take all your money. You can’t go a month without having to pay some kind of fine, fee or bill. And everything is as expensive as possible, especially health care and car repairs. That’s why insurance exists, but poor people are too poor to afford insurance. So they don’t get to go to the hospital.

If you break your finger you just tape two popsicle sticks around it. When poor people do go to the hospital because they’re bodies are broken and battered from relentless work they have to pay their life savings to get better. If they can’t afford vital medical attention they certainly can’t afford cosmetic ones. Rich people can afford to have wrinkles removed. Poor people can’t afford to have warts removed from the bottom of their feet. Poor people don’t even get to go to the dentist regularly because it would cost too huge of a percentage of their life’s savings.

Poor people might be able to afford preventative health care if they didn’t get taxed so much. When someone with no savings gets paid $1,000 and gets taxed $100 they’re paying 10% of their entire net worth. That’s not just inconvenient, that’s crippling.

That’s the difference between being able to see the dentist or not. Rich people can afford to pay more in taxes and still eat steak every day. Poor people can’t afford the taxes they’ve got.

And poor people don’t get much back from what they put in. They don’t get health care.

They don’t get to go to museums, national parks, airports or take long road trips. Some of them don’t even get covered bus stops. They do get to go to jail for not being able to pay the relentless barrage of fines and fees the police dole out for any conceivable excuse though.

Poor people don’t even get welfare. I walked into a welfare office once and told the case worker that I had no car, no home, no family, no friends, no job and $1,000 in savings.

The case worker told me I didn’t qualify for welfare but if I applied to fifteen jobs and didn’t get hired then I’d get barely enough money to survive if I ate rice and beans every day. However, if I got a job then I wouldn’t get any money. So I’d still be financially destitute until my first pay check. Then I’d continue to be destitute for the foreseeable future while I saved up my pennies by not enjoying any luxuries in life and hoping nothing bad happens to me.

That’s not an extraordinary story. That’s the norm. That’s how much the welfare office helps. It’s not a safety net. It’s a toilet to flush the poor down. Even the welfare office I went to had a lock on the bathroom door. I went to use it, and a security guard told me to go back to my place and sit down. The welfare office won’t even let you use the bathroom. The poor don’t even get that for the taxes they pay.

I don’t know how you get money out of the welfare office, but even if you can, it’s not enough to live a stress-free, fear-free life, and sooner or later you’re going to have to go back to work at an inhumane sweatshop. The only other alternative is turning to a life of crime. Then you’ll have the time and money to live like a real human being… at least, until you go to jail, but at least then you’ll get three meals a day and won’t have to pay utilities or rent. You’ll probably still have to work in an inhumane sweatshop though.

And you’ll still have dangerous neighbors, and you’ll have to address your superiors as “sir/ma’am” and follow orders…. Just like at a real job.

Rich people might be stamping their feet at this point shouting, “If it’s so damn bad being poor then why don’t you just get a degree and/or work harder and pull yourself up!?!” To that I would say, if poor people can’t afford to go the hospital they sure as hell can’t afford a higher education. And it’s impossible for them to work any harder. They’re already pushing the limits of human endurance. A lot of them have two or three jobs. All they do is work and recuperate from work. The problem isn’t that they’re not working.

The problem is that it doesn’t matter how hard they work. The system is designed so that they never get ahead. Sure, there will be a few people who beat the system and go from rags to riches, but that’s the exception. Endless poverty is the norm.

Poverty imprisons you at work. If work paid well enough to save more money than it costs to live then people wouldn’t be poor. The working poor are poor because a predatory economy keeps them chained to work with expenses and debt. Our economy is an atrocity; it runs on human rights abuses. Until this is fixed, none of us are civilized.

The physical and emotional suffering caused by high prices and low wages are shameful enough, but poverty also has a profound spiritual cost. When you have no money you have no freedom. You can’t travel where you want. You can’t quit your job. You can’t pursue hobbies. You can’t be picky about where you live. You can’t afford to take classes or buy books. You can’t do anything but go to and from work. So you spend your life at a place you don’t want to be doing things you don’t want to do for people you don’t like.

But you have no choice. So you do it. All day every day. In the end, all your life amounted to was a tool at a business. You were a machine, bound to follow orders and unable to make decisions for yourself or explore the world and find yourself. You’re not even allowed to express yourself by the clothes you wear since you’ll be forced to wear the uniform your superiors at work order you to wear, and you won’t earn enough money to buy high fashion after work; you’ll shop at thrift stores and wear the faded clothes of people richer and older than you.

Poverty robs the poor of their very identity, dooming them to be unable to give their lives meaning outside of work. Poverty defeats the purpose of sentient life. It kills the poor inside before killing their bodies. There’s no purpose of humanity existing if the rest of our history revolves around oppressing the masses so the rich can live like gods.

The call to action there isn’t to have an apocalypse. The call to action is to build a better economy that isn’t based on inequality.

7 REASONS WHY MINIMUM WAGE SHOULD BE HIGHER 1. It requires specialized skills/attributes One way high wage earners justify their pay is by saying that not everybody could do their job. So since their skill is so rare then they deserve to be paid more. This point of view overlooks the fact that not everybody can do hard labor. If you took the CEO of a big restaurant chain and made them work in one of their restaurants’ kitchens for three months they’d all fail. Even out of the general public, there’s a significant percentage of people who don’t have the strength or patience to do the jobs minimum wage earners do.

Go ask any kitchen staff, road crew, farm crew, or retail worker about people they’ve seen work at their job for a week and then burn out from exhaustion or didn’t have the mental fortitude to do their jobs. Those who pass the test will always be able to look each other in the eye and know they had the metal to make it while so many others didn’t. But even though minimum wage earners have attributes and skills just as rare any upper middle class job. Their pay checks don’t reflect this.

2. Compensation for pace Think of an office romance drama series like Mad Men or a series about lawyers like Suits or just the show The Office. Imagine if the characters ran as fast as they could everywhere they went, and where ever they went they were always very busy with their hands, and they were always racing the clock while pacing themselves so they could last the day. And somebody was always yelling at them and threatening them. It would be funny if it wasn’t true.

The longer and faster you have to work the more you have to commit your total life’s attention on what you’re doing. Some people have slow paced jobs where they can day dream all day, call their friends and family and take long lunches while getting paid very, very well. A lawyer would charge you more for his services if he had to devote his total attention to your case and work as hard as he could none stop for three months straight.

But field hands, cooks at chain restaurants and warehouse staff don’t get paid any extra for how totally they have to devote themselves to their jobs.

3. Compensation for inevitable injuries If you do anything as fast as you can for nine hours a day for a lifetime you’re going to hurt yourself. Just lifting files or typing will give you crippling hand aches in old age.

Lifting heavy bags and boxes will take its toll immediately. When you do minimum wage it’s not a matter of if you’ll develop some kind of health problem, it’s a matter of which one you’ll get. And since millions of minimum wage jobs involve handling poisonous material, a lot of people are guaranteed to die from work related illnesses.

It’s bad enough that people are dying from work related injuries, but they’re suffering here and now in very real, very graphic ways. Any fry cook can tell you a few stories about burns and cuts they’ve seen kitchen staff get. There are millions of people in the world who have stitch marks on their bodies from on the job injuries they got while working for minimum wage, but they don’t get any compensation. Their employers don’t even offer them health care. If you asked the employer why, they would probably tell you that the accident was the employee’s fault. Even if that were true, these injuries are statistical inevitabilities. If you put 90 million human beings in kitchens around the world working as fast as they can all day for three months cooking over hot stoves, slinging boiling liquids and chopping things with sharp knives, you’re going to end up with millions of injuries. You can repeat the experiment as many times as you want, there will always be injuries. So going to work is like playing the lottery. You might be one of the unlucky ones who fate has doomed. And when that inevitable day comes for some man, woman or child, their employer will probably find some valid excuse for why they don’t have help the person who won the doom lottery inherent in minimum wage work.

4. Compensation for degradation of off duty time A lawyer would charge you a premium if he had to work all day every day as fast as he can for three months. A lawyer would probably raise that fee after a week after he realizes that working that hard and that long doesn’t leave you any energy to enjoy your free time after work, and in fact, he was probably spending all his evenings just trying to recuperate from the day’s work while prepping himself for another day of marathon work tomorrow. I’m sure a lawyer could write a fantastic explanation of why they should be compensated extra if their professional work degrades the quality of their personal time. So far no lawyer has done minimum wage workers the favor of writing an explanation of why they deserve extra compensation for not being able to fully enjoy their free time.

If a lawyer worked as fast as possible for three months he could pamper himself all along the way with good meals, healthy snacks, massages and a big vacation at the end. Minimum wage earners can’t afford any of that. They don’t get to stop at cafes on the way to work. They have a hard time getting sick days, let alone vacation days. And for them, it’s not just three months. It’s their fate in life. That’s why poor people drink and smoke so much. Their life is fucked. There’s no hope for them. In hopeless times humans tend to turn to religion or hedonism for relief. If minimum wage earners got paid more I predict you would see a decrease in religion and hedonism. Think about that.

Minimum wage jobs are so miserable they force people to turn to God or slow, euphoric suicide to cope. That’s morally fucked up. That’s an atrocity. That’s the kind of thing that generations from now, our descendants will look back on us and say, “Damn, that generation was stupid and backwards. I’m sure glad we’re not that shamefully stupid and cruel now.” So how about we not be that stupid and cruel now? How about we compensate minimum wage earners for losing their personal lives. Better yet, let’s not take away their personal lives to begin with.

5. Compensation for humiliation Some lawyers get to pick and choose their clients and their price. If a prospective client insults the lawyer or is obviously going to be a pain in the ass to deal with, the lawyer could charge the client extra to make it worth his time. Minimum wage earners get yelled at constantly by bosses and customers. Everyone is allowed to tear them down and use them as punching bags, and the minimum wage earner has to just stand there, wearing a demeaning company uniform and endure emotional and sometimes physical abuse from the people they have to spend almost every day of their life with.

There’s been a lot of research done on the topic of classical conditioning and bullying. If you insult someone and humiliate them every day, they’re going suffer. It’s immoral to do that to somebody. It’s downright sadistic to do that to somebody and then tell them that they have to come back every day for the foreseeable future and endure the same emotional abuse while smiling and pretending like it’s the happiest day of their life, and if they can’t maintain constant perfect bearing they’ll be thrown out into the streets to starve and die in the rain. That’s as messed up as the plot to The Human Centipede 2.

If you’re going to have to spend your life eating other people’s shit you should get some kind of compensation for that. Better yet, maybe we should stop sewing retail employee’s mouths to the customer’s asses or giving bosses god-like authority to bully employees.

6. Compensation for investment of labor You can’t build a company with capital. Investors who provide employers with startup capital expect a return on their investment, and everyone agrees that this is entirely reasonable. However, you can’t build a company without labor either, and the workers who invest the irreplaceable seconds of their lives at work don’t get dividends. They just get the lowest pay check legally allowable and a kick in the ass the day they quit, get fired, their contract ends, the company goes bankrupt or gets bought out.

If you invest a few thousand dollars in a company at the right time you can get millions of dollars in return. You can invest a few thousand hours of your life in a company, and you won’t even get a thank you card. You have to be a complete sociopath to think that’s okay.

7. It’s the decent thing to do Why should we pay minimum wage workers more? Because it’s the decent thing to do.

That’s why. That’s all that should have to be said. Everybody knows it would make minimum wage workers’ lives better if they worked shorter hours and were paid a higher percentage of company profits. It would make people happier, and we would live in a happier society. That’s what the world is supposed to be like. Are we not good people? At least, don’t we want to be good people? Well… let’s be good to the people holding up the pillars of our economy.

Even if you’re a complete sociopath who doesn’t care about anybody else but yourself and you look at the world through a cold, calculating perspective, you should still want to raise the minimum wage, because the empirical cost/benefit analysis of economic oppression didn’t add up.

7 WAYS WORKERS’ RIGHTS STILL NEED TO IMPROVE I know it's considered responsible to accept things as they are. I know it's considered mature and strong to take the problems the world throws at you without complaint and just push through them. I know that docilely submitting to authority is considered a virtue and anyone who "has a problem with authority" is considered childish.

I understand these things, but I still can't help but wonder how the world could be better.

The immature, weak, ungrateful little brat in me has identified 7 ways I believe workers’ rights are still drastically below the standards of basic humanity dignity and equality.

1. Workers should get paid what they're worth. Most of the workers at the place I work get paid minimum wage, but the work we do generates millions of dollars of profit for our company every year. The people who generated that money only see a fraction of it. They eat like shit because they can't afford real food. They drink to forget their shitty lives, and they've accepted that they're going to live shitty, hard working lives forever.

The top 2 or 3 people in company live in mansions, do very little work and smile all day, every day.

This describes most companies. The standard business model is based on a modern version of slavery that allows the masters to exploit their workers with plausible deniability. The end result is unmistakable though. The masters make all the money for controlling the means of production while the people running the economy get paid nothing and waste their lives in humiliating servitude.

I know all the excuses for why we should live under corporate slavery, and I don't buy them. If we ever hope to live in utopia or even just be decent human beings we need to figure out a way to share profits equitably within companies using a better system than supply and demand (which really just amounts to, "screw whoever you can however you can whenever you can").

2. Workers should not have to take shit from customers. Workers aren't allowed to verbally abuse their bosses. Parents aren't allowed to verbally abuse their children. Teachers aren't allowed to verbally abuse their students. You can't verbally abuse a random person on the street without fear of repercussions. Everyone is protected from verbal abuse except customer service workers. Customers can bitch out customer service workers as hurtfully as they want and the customer service representative has to submit to it. If they demand to be treated with the basic level of human dignity everyone else is afforded under the law they'll be labeled insubordinate and get fired.

I have no idea how/why my parent's generation allowed this to happen, but if its' wrong to verbally abuse people directly then it's blatantly a violation of basic human dignity for a company to force its workers to submit to verbal abuse from customers. Customer

service representatives need the law to protect them from verbal abuse and give them the right to tell assholes to go fuck themselves.

3. Freedom of expression. I don't know how/why my parent's generation let professionalism get to the maniacal level it's gotten to, but this problem should have been acknowledge and ended a long time ago. People should be allowed to dress themselves however they want. Nobody should have the power over another person to tell them what to wear. Basic human rights don't get any more basic than that. Being forced to wear uniforms or even conform to certain standards of appearance is humiliating, degrading and oppressive. If we want to live in a free society we can be proud of the very least we can do for our children is let them dress themselves how they want and quit forcing them to conform their identities to the soulless, exploitive standards of professionalism.

4. Stop drug testing. Nobody with any intelligence thinks drug testing really accomplishes anything productive. People who use drugs aren't bad. Most people who use drugs don't use them at work. The purpose of drug tests is defeated by allowing people to drink alcohol. If there's a legal way to get high, does it really matter which way you get high? No. And most high paying jobs don't drug test. Politicians don't get drug tested. CEOs don't get drug tested. Important people don't get drug tested because important people use drugs, and it doesn't matter. The only thing drug testing accomplishes is making life harder for people whose lives already suck so bad that the only realistic chance they have at any form of happiness is through ingesting chemicals. Help their lives suck less by ending the practice of drug testing or drug test everybody.

5. Employers shouldn't get a carte blanche on contracts. Workers are exploited, stolen from, abused, humiliated, forced to live in fear and fired with complete disregard for their dignity because people need jobs to eat. This means employers can put anything they want in their contracts and people have to agree to it to get a job. Then when the company wants to abuse their workers they can say, "But you agreed to this.

See you signed your contract."

Of course we signed the contract. We need to eat. So we had to concede to your extortionate demands. Workers should be protected from this kind of unethical treatment by the law.

6. Shorter work weeks. What are we doing here people? The year 2000 has come and gone. We're living in the age of technology. There's no reason to work 9+ hour days 5+ days a week. All we're doing is lining our masters' pockets with thicker pads of money.

We're wasting our lives at work, and it's making us miserable, stressed and volatile. This is so pointless a child can see it. We should be working 7 hour days 4 days a week. You know what will happen if we do? Everyone will be happier. That's it. So why aren't we doing it already?

7. Create 1 national job board. People can't find jobs because networking is more important than skills. The "good old boy" system is out dated and detrimental to the national economy. We should get rid of the millions of avenues business have to advertise jobs and force them all to post on one federally funded job board. That way everyone will have access to every job opportunity.

THE GLASS CEILING OF HIGHER EDUCATION Poverty doesn't exist because the poor are lazy. Poverty exists because the rich are greedy. Even still though, it is possible to escape poverty...for some. The book, "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" does an almost comical job of pointing this out. The "rich dad" is a greedy business tycoon who underpays and overworks his employees while simultaneously mocking their willingness to be taken advantage of and claiming to value them like family. The author criticizes the rich dad for this early in the book, but the rich dad responds by basically saying, "Don't blame me. You need to work smarter, harder, invest and exploit tax havens and loop holes." The author agrees with the rich dad and completely drops the fact that it is the rich dad's fault that his employees are doomed to a life of wage slavery.

Having said that, let's ignore the fact that the rich have become rich through systematic economic oppression. Let's talk about how some people still manage to climb the economic ladder even in this oppressive environment. If you're born into a wealthy family then you pretty much have to try to become poor. If your family is wealthy then you can live off the interest and dividends of their investments indefinitely without lifting a finger. If you do want to work then you can use your family's wealth to go to a good private school and then move on to a prestigious university all the while unhindered by the stress, shame and fear of making ends meet. In the end you can use your family's affluent business connections and references to secure a fantastic, high paying job where you get to take two hour lunches and retire with full benefits.

If you don't have rich parents then biggest obstacle between you and a good job that pays a living wage with full benefits is a college education. The other options are to start your own business, go to a trade school (which will only open low level doors for a few people) or hone a lucrative job skill on your own free time like web development, programming, singing, sports, acting or writing (to name a few). But if you want to climb the corporate ladder or get a good government job (and that's where most of the jobs are) then you need a college degree. If you don't have a college degree then no matter how smart, qualified or responsible you are there will always be a glass ceiling preventing you from moving above entry-level work that rarely pays a living wage or provides full benefits such as medical care. You'll also get the bare minimum amount of time off while being held to higher standards of accountability than those above you.

It's oversimplified to the point of being wrong to say, "If you work hard enough you can become wealthy." It's more accurate to say, "If you get a college degree then you can have a secure life." But the glaring catch-22 that the bear picture above ignores is that it costs tens of thousands of dollars to get a college degree from a low quality university, and you still have to pay your rent, utilities, transportation, food and medical bills while you're going to school. If everyone could afford this then the playing field would be level, and we would have a strong case to criticize those who didn't climb the corporate ladder.

But there are millions of people in America and billions of people in the world born into households that simply don't have the money to pay for a college education because no

matter how hard the parents work their boss will never give them enough money to send their children to school.

The counter-argument is that financial aid and loans are available to everyone. So the money is available to you, and if you don't take it then you have no one else to blame.

This argument ignores the harsh reality of poverty. Many people don't qualify for financial aid for a number of reasons. Some people can't afford to take 4 years off of work to study because they need to take care of their struggling family. Some people don't even know about the options available to them because they live in a crippling environment that goes out of its way to cripple them instead of empower them. Some people are too intimidated by the dizzying bureaucracy you have to navigate to "take advantage" of these options. There are a million nuanced reasons why it might be impractical for someone to use financial aid and student loans to pay for college.

Even if there weren't real world social issues preventing people from doing so, the cost of education rises faster than inflation and government aid can keep up. So these options aren't that effective anyway. And it's a self-defeating argument to say, "You can go into a half a lifetime of debt in order to make a living wage. So you have no room to complain about not having any money." Really? Is that the best we can offer our children and our neighbors? The situation has gotten so desperate that students at the University of California have proposed that it would be better to charge a percentage of income after graduation instead of paying upfront fees. It's a sad day in our history where indentured servitude looks good. That doesn't support the myth that America is a land of opportunity for everyone.

Everything I've said so far assumes that you're even smart enough to finish college. The fact of the matter is that a lot of people aren't. Some of those people may have high mechanical aptitudes (for example) but are hopelessly lost in mathematics. In America you have to pass Algebra or you're not getting a college degree. It doesn't matter that you'll never use Algebra. You still have to pass it if you want to make a living wage.

Some of you may be asking, what's the big deal? Isn't the point of a college education to prove that you're smart enough to deserve a higher pay check? Theoretically, yes, but take a step back and look at the big picture. Since college education places a glass ceiling on your career opportunities in America the effect is that if you're not smart enough to jump through all the hoops of a college curriculum then you don't deserve to make a living wage. So only the smartest people in America deserve to be treated like human beings? If that's the moral precedent we're setting then we're monsters.

A college degree doesn't even guarantee you're smart anyway. Some of the dumbest people I've ever met have had college degrees because they excelled at being able to bullshit their way through papers without retaining any information or learning to think critically, and if the purpose of a college education were to weed out the smartest and most deserving then we wouldn't lay out the red carpet for athletes to ride through college on scholarships and reduced academic standards.

College education in the form that it exists in America today doesn't serve the lofty purpose of elevating the most deserving. It has become a tool of systematic economic oppression. It elevates the rich and it puts a very real, very firm glass ceiling over the heads of the poor and academically-disinclined who are nonetheless full of potential in their own ways and deserving of a fairer share of the profits they'll earn for whatever company they end up sacrifice their infinitely valuable lives working for.

The measure of a man is not the degree on his wall. The measure of a man is the blood in his veins, the breath in his lungs and the (divine?) spark of consciousness in his brain.

Yet we treat those without a college degree like animals and make quirky internet memes mocking them for being in the position we've held them in against their will. If you hate welfare so passionately then you should hate the glass ceiling of higher education with equal intensity.

THE INJUSTICE OF EMPLOYEE CONTRACTS I got a new job recently doing back-breaking farm labor, which is great, because it means I’m not going to starve (yet), but my excitement was dampened a little bit when I read my contract, which makes the following statements: 

“You will not be entitled to sick leave, bereavement leave or annual leave, paid public holidays, parental leave, overtime or any other paid leave. As you are a casual employee, you will have no right to any compensation for redundancy.”



“Breaks: An unpaid break of 30 minutes (longer by agreement) and a paid break of 10 minutes taken at or about the midpoint of the morning and afternoon.”



“As a casual employee your wages are based solely on the hours worked or the amount of work completed on each assignment and you are not entitled to remuneration when you are not working on an assignment.”



“Notification of termination to the employer of 5 days is required. If insufficient notice is given by the employee they shall forfeit payment of five days as compensation to the company.”



“The use of mobile phones and personal music devices during working hours is prohibited.”

I “agreed” to these conditions and signed my work contract because I need to work in order to survive. Unfortunately, this job only pays enough to survive. It doesn’t pay enough for me to eat well and have any fun in my free time or cover health care or retirement. It certainly doesn’t pay enough to take care of a family, but I don't have a family to take care of. So that last bit doesn't apply to me.

I’m not complaining about my contract because I can’t just suck it up and deal with it.

I’m complaining because the conditions stated above would never appear in a C.E.O.’s contract. In fact, they would never appear in most college graduates’ contracts. So why were they in mine? More importantly, why are these conditions allowed to be in anybody’s contract? These conditions appeared in my contract because I’m doing a job that’s almost exclusively done by migrant aliens. The people who do migrant farm labor can’t afford to stand up for themselves. So governments allow them to be taken advantage of, and nobody else complains.

You could argue that anyone who agrees to a work contract has no room to complain about the conditions they agreed to, but that attitude values semantics over human life.

You could also say that if you don’t like the terms of the contract you can just get another job, but if it were so easy to get another job nobody would do migrant farm labor or entry-level service work. The reality of the world that we live in is that millions (if not billions) of people must agree to substandard contracts or die. The economy we’ve created for our children is a cruel place, and if you want to survive you’re going to

have to agree to working conditions you don’t agree with. The only question is how inhumane those conditions are.

While you’re voting for your next politician, take a moment to acknowledge that they’re not going to do anything about unfair contracts. They’re going to keep allowing the rich to exploit the most poor and needy members of society, and they’re going to stand by silently while the media calls the poorest and neediest members of society “entitled.”

And the next time you eat any food from the grocery store, stop and acknowledge that it was almost certainly harvested and processed by people who are perpetually working themselves to death with no hope of saving for a better future so you can have cheaper vegetables and farmers can buy a bigger house… and you don’t care.

But the next time you sign a work contract that says you waive your rights to vacation time, realistic wages, benefits or legal protection, stop and acknowledge that you’ve already silently consented to the exploitation of everyone poorer than you. So you don’t have any room to complain. By the categorical imperative you’ve already set, the value of human life is determined by how high much leverage one has over other people’s lives.

WHY DO SO MANY SMALL BUSINESSES FAIL? I keep seeing politicians come on the television and say they're going to fix the economy, create jobs and raise wages. I’ve been listening to the same promises my entire adulthood while simultaneously staring at a fundamental flaw in the economy that no politician is talking about. If they do talk about it, it's just long enough to acknowledge a problem exists before changing the conversation back to meaningless talking points.

The problem is that it's really, really, really, really hard to start a small business. Over half of all small businesses fail within their first year. Politicians have said that much, but they never sink their teeth into why. People don't fail at businesses because it's so hard to provide someone else a product or service and then take their money from them.

The hardest part about running a small business, the part that trips so many people up, is that the government will send you to jail and fine you into poverty if you can't flawlessly navigate 10,000 miles of legal bureaucracy.

If you want to succeed in business you basically need an associate's degree in business or an equivalent amount of independent study. If you don't believe me then read any introductory level entrepreneur book. Then get your tax number, file your small business name, write a business plan, and pick a piece of accounting software to help you organize your taxes.

Some rich businessman out there is reading this shouting, "That's how business is done!

If you can't do that much then you're too stupid to be in business!" The thing about that is, it doesn't have to be so hard to start a business. Our predecessors just went out of their way to make it that hard. I'm sure they had good intentions and reasons that sounded reasonable on paper, but the end result is they've created a very narrow bottleneck to owning/operating a small, private business that excludes the poor and uneducated.

I don't know or care if there's a conspiracy theory behind this or if it's just the cumulative effect of millions of stupid decisions. I just care that the deck has been stacked against the poor and uneducated. If all humans are equal then all humans should have an equal chance at an education and owning their own business. Even if a human is stupid...why would we punish them for that? And if all they're trying to do is sell oranges on the side of the road, why do we need to bring mindbending bureaucracy into their life at all?

The reason why is because the American tax code assume that every transaction which could possibly be taxed must be tracked and taxed.

I believe that assumption does more harm than good, and I base that opinion on the fact that every night the news says the economy is terrible. The reason it's terrible is because we're doing something terribly wrong. Obviously, the economy has more problems than just this, but I suspect that as long as we keep assuming that every transaction which

could possibly be taxed must be tracked and taxed then the economy will continue to be terrible, especially for the poorest, most uneducated human beings living on earth.

Other than possibly "Tiger Mom," I've never heard of a book on success or leadership that advocates micromanaging. In fact, everything I've ever read said it's the most stifling, soul-destroying approach you can take to accomplish anything. So...if we apply that same principle to the tax code, it points to the conclusion that maybe we should lighten the fuck up on the tax code.

If people can make money they're going to spend it. It's going to get caught in the tax net somewhere. If people just didn't have to file anything or pay any taxes for business that make less than (for example) $10,000 per year then people will have the breathing room to establish their small businesses before leaping into the realm of completely retarded bureaucracy. That wouldn't threaten big businesses' effective monopolies. It would just give human beings some breathing room.

If the I.R.S. ever wanted to help the nation out a little more they could automatically assign everyone with a business tax id number and generic business license so nobody has to apply for anything when they start operating their small business. They just operate under the codes they were born with.

If the I.R.S. ever wanted to help the nation out a little more they could automate their personal income tax system a little better. Maybe the smart folks at N.A.S.A. can help them. If N.A.S.A. can figure out how to land a cyborg on Mars remotely they can probably figure out a way to automate everyone's yearly income taxes so we don't all get sent calculus riddles by snail mail that we have to pay a seasonal accountant $300 to solve just so they can tell us a random amount we have to pay on top of that.

THE HOUSING MARKET IS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY The legal process of buying a house has been made so complicated that you have to hire a licensed professional who has taken a course on real estate laws to help you buy your home. During the process of buying a house your real estate agent will introduce you to a long line of fees that you won't understand, don't agree with, and in many cases, are completely unnecessary. You'll be forced to lock in an interest rate that changes daily for no other reason than it can. By the time you close the deal on your house you'll have signed so many papers your hand will hurt.

The justification for all of this is to protect you, but after all the charges have been tallied up, your 30 year mortgage will cost you twice the price your house was advertised at, but you won't know that until after your charismatic real estate agent has made your head spin with 300 pages of legal jargon and schmoozed you into signing your future away so they can get their cut of the closing costs.

The justification for charging you twice what your house is worth is because the bank takes a risk. That excuse is overdramatized to the point of being a lie. In fact, the more your bank overcharges you and the less upfront it is about those charges the more likely you are to default on your loan. Your lending institution will also deflect the blame by saying a lot of the cost is taxes, which only proves the government is complicit in overcharging you for your house. The government doesn't have to tax you to death on your home. It doesn't have to make it hard for your family to own your own house. They just do it because that's the way it’s always been done, and the reason it's always been done like that it because there's money to be made in it.

The immediate consequences of this system are obvious: home buyers get screwed out of their money and are set up to default on their loans, but the problem is worse than that. Since there's so much money to be made selling overpriced houses to suckers, the rich (who can build houses cheaply or buy existing ones with cash so they don't get screwed on a 30 year mortgage) have a lot of incentive to buy up as much land as they can and build houses as cheaply as possible. This results in cities full of dilapidated houses that require constant repairs being sold at astronomical prices.

If it weren’t so easy to screw over the little guy, property values wouldn’t be so inflated.

If property values weren’t so inflated people could afford to pay off their houses and wouldn't default on their loans. Then lending institutions would not go bankrupt, and governments wouldn’t have to “bail out” lending institutions.

But the system is designed to screw over the little guy, and that causes housing bubbles, which result in millions of people losing their homes and even more never being able to buy one in the first place. And even after the American tax payers bailed out the lending institutions that screwed them in the first place...the process of buying a house is still exactly the same as it was before. The little guy is still getting systematically ripped off in

the exact same ways, and the consequences will continue to remain the same until the fundamentals of the housing market are changed.

If the government was the sole lending institution through which all property purchases were financed it could set low, stable interest rates and eliminate all the predatory fees banks throw into the process just because they can. If the government collected the interest on housing loans it wouldn't need to impose such oppressive property taxes on home owners. Those taxes could be slashed or eliminated, increasing the working class's ability to pay off their mortgages. Real estate agents could still assist home buyers, but they should have a fixed wage set, say $1000 per house. Period. This is a generous sum of money for what’s often less than a week's worth of work, and it doesn't incentivize overpricing houses to pump up the realtor’s commission. Building codes should have higher standards. This won't lower the cost to buy a house, but it will lower the cost to maintain a house, which will increase the likelihood that a home buyer will be able to pay off their mortgage in the long run.

Finally, how much land does one person need? Why does one person need to own 10,000 acres? The more land one person owns the less land there is for everyone else.

You can argue that everyone has a right to own as much land as they want, but when there's no land left for the poor, the effect is the same as denying the poor the right to own land. If a law were put in place limiting the amount of land someone can own or the frequency with which they could flip their property it would prevent housing bubbles.

This would kill the big business surrounding the housing market, but that business needs to be killed. It doesn't benefit society in any way. It's a drain on society, and when you consider that every dollar a home buyer spends on their mortgage is equal to time spent at work, you ultimately pay for your house with your life. As it stands, the exploitative nature of the housing market steals people's short, irreplaceable lives. I won't hesitate to say that it's a crime against humanity. If all of this money weren't tied up in the fake fees business it could be released into the economy to stimulate actual businesses that have a real world benefit to humanity.

But your dearly beloved politicians aren't talking about that, and they're not going to, and you should be asking why.

WHY OBAMACARE MADE ME FACEPLAM Before I begin trying to explain why I face-palmed at Obamacare, I want to send out a big, sarcastic congratulations to all the professionally paid right wing, conservative political analysts who spent the past year or so screaming about how evil and socialist Obamacare is and how it’s going to bankrupt the country and end civilization as we know it. Yes, there are legitimate problems with Obamacare, but America never really had a chance to have a logical, objective conversation about what those problems are or how they could be rectified because the whole debate was hijacked by shock jocks who wound down the clock blindly raging about how Obama is the demon spawn of Hitler and Stalin. All intelligent opposition to Obamacare has been drowned out by white noise that effectively allowed Obamacare to pass without any risk of facing any real opposition.

The way I see it, Fox News deserves as much credit for passing Obamacare as Obama does. For that, every conservative pundit who has called Obama a socialist in the past year wins a double face palm.

So what’s the problem with Obamacare, anyway? The problem is that it doesn't address the root cause of why health care in America is unaffordable. The problem is health insurance companies, but it shouldn't surprise you to hear me say that. Everyone in the world outside of Washington D.C. and the Fox News headquarters already knows that.

If you need the concept played out for you then watch “The Rain Maker.” That’s not an academic source, but it does illustrate how commonly accepted it is that health care in America is unattainable for many people because of insurance companies. I’m not a big Michael Moore fan, but you should watch “Sicko” if you haven’t. It breaks the concept down in a way that’s impossible to miss. If you want to investigate this yourself, ask any American who has a "preexisting condition" or any doctor. They will tell you that health insurance is the problem.

There's a very simple reason why health insurance companies are the problem. It's because health insurance companies don’t exist to help people. They exist to make a profit, and they try to make as much profit as possible by charging the highest rates possible while paying out as little money as possible. Since you don’t have to build insurance in a factory or pay to have it shipped to the consumer, it’s the perfect product.

It’s basically free money. That’s why Warren Buffett is such a fan of buying insurance companies. It’s just unabated theft from the consumer’s pocket.

Auto insurance artificially inflates the cost of auto repairs, and medical insurance artificially inflates the cost of medical care. And if you can’t pay the inflated costs of medical insurance then you can’t get health care…even though it would have been affordable without the intervention of the insurance companies…who are supposed to exist to help you get health care.

Obamacare says that the way to fix the problem that the insurance companies are perpetuating is to require everyone to buy insurance. That’s like telling villagers who

keep getting attacked by wolves that you can stop the wolves from eating a few people by forcing everyone to line up and let the wolves take a bite out of everyone.

Granted, there are some provisions in the 900+ pages of Obamacare that try to reign in how much profit insurance companies get to keep, but if the Dodd-Frank bill has taught us anything, it’s that wealthy companies can neuter legislation (in part or in whole) at will as it suits them. So I don't expect any part of Obamacare that stands between insurance companies and their profit margin to last for three more election cycles.

Even if I am just being paranoid and Obamacare doesn’t turn into a werewolf in sheep’s clothing, it still doesn’t take the consumer out of the wolf’s mouth in the first place.

What it does do is set another precedent that the government can make up whatever tax it wants and force everyone to have to pay it whether they like it or not. Yesterday we were forced to buy car insurance. Today we’re forced to buy health insurance. Tomorrow who knows what we’ll be forced to pay. Maybe it’ll be life insurance or fire insurance or renter’s insurance.

And if we can be punished in any way whatsoever for not buying mandated car or health insurance then we’ve set a precedent where the American people can be slapped on the wrist for whatever the government decides. And in fact, that’s always been the case.

We’re just so used to it we take it for granted. The more things the government tells us we have to do the more invasive of laws we’ll accept. Obamacare isn’t the apocalypse, but it’s a tiny step in the direction of a dystopian police state. I admit that it’s such a small step in that direction that to even call it a small step is overdramatic sensationalism, but when you add it up with getting fined for jaywalking, having to allow security guards to fondle your genitals at the airport, getting spied on and all the other little violations of personal liberty the government tells you that you have to put up with they all add up to a well paved road to a shitty place you don’t want to be.

And for all Obama’s campaign promises about hope and change, look what Obamacare has given the American people: A gigantic pile of bureaucratic regulations that nobody even understands. I used to not be able to afford to get a wart removed from my hand.

Now I need a law degree to figure out how to get a wart removed from my hand. When people said they wanted change they didn’t mean they wanted life to be more complicated.

I don’t want to have to figure out which insurance plan best fits my needs. The insurance plan that best fits my needs is the one that doesn’t confuse me so emasculatingly that I don’t realize I’m getting fucked in the ass.

You don’t need 900 pages to solve the problem of health insurance. Profit is the problem.

And it’s not like insurance companies need profit to fund research and design and improve product quality. All insurance companies do is take money and give money.

The best product is the one that costs the least and has the highest return. When

insurance companies exist to make a profit it’s literally impossible for them to offer the cheapest product with the highest return.

I wish Obama was a socialist. I don’t necessarily want America to socialize health care, but I wish it would socialize the health insurance industry because even if a socialized health insurance industry charged the highest price possible for the lowest return on investment then at least all the profit would be going to the government who could use it to subsidize health care instead of all that money going to an old, fat white guy’s bank account so he can buy a new private island. But if America socialized the health insurance industry it could actually charge an affordable price for a generous return, and it could subsidize unemployed people’s health care with the profits the health insurance industry generated instead of having to create new taxes for that. It’d probably even have money left over too. No American would ever have to fill out another health insurance form ever again, and everybody would get health care without bankrupting the country.

But that’s never going to happen as long as big business controls the government. As long as elected politicians’ hands are tied behind their backs by golden handcuffs that their campaign contributors hold the key to then the only change Americans can ever expect are more taxes, fines and bureaucracy...just like we got with Obamacare.

PROFESSIONALISM IS A STRAIGHTJACKET The dictionary doesn't have a good definition of professionalism. So I submitted my own to Urban Dictionary: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=professionalism Professionalism: any business practice in which happiness is sacrificed for success.

Think about any behavior that constitutes professionalism: wearing business suits, ties, leather shoes, addressing people with formal speech, prostrating yourself before abusive customers, sitting upright in your chair, etc. None of these behaviors are necessarily things you'd choose to do on your free time. In your free time you wear comfortable clothing, speak naturally and honestly, stand up for yourself, lounge around comfortably, etc.

Professionalism is an unnatural set of behaviors forced upon you by someone else to improve their company's image at the expense of your freedom and comfort.

Professionalism ties your hands behind your back and prevents you from living how you want to...just like a straitjacket. Not only is this inhumane, but it's philosophically selfdefeating.

Why does your job exist? What does your business provide society and why? Why does our economy exist in the first place? Obviously, it's all about making money, but what is the ultimate goal of making money? Two things: survival and happiness. The whole point of working or even having this gigantic, intricate, thriving economy is to streamline the hunting/gathering/tool making process so that we don't have to spend our lives in the fields fighting for survival.

In other words, our economy has grown out of the desire to be happier. Any yet we defeat the whole purpose by imposing unnatural standards of professionalism that eliminate people's freedom and creative expression. So if your company enforces strict standards of professionalism and makes a lot of money, and even if it makes its customers happy, it defeats the purpose of its existence by making its workers less happy than they could be if they were allowed their basic human rights.

If you ever see a company that has very strict standards of professionalism you automatically know that that company’s C.E.Os don’t care about their workers’ rights, dignity or comfort. For a dollar they’d gladly put their workers in a straitjacket and tell them to like it.

AMERICA HATES YOU, AMERICA Every business in America wants you to feel like you're wanted, invited, valued. But you're not. Only your money is. In fact, businesses here treat you like shit. They give you the lowest quality crap possible and charge you the most horrific price for it. That's not what you do for your friends. That's what you do for people you have to do business with but don't really want to. So you give them the "fuck you" price to make dealing with their aggravating asses tolerable enough to deal with. The Statue of Liberty has a plaque with a bunch of grandiose words about "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, blah blah blah…" It's a lie. America doesn't want you. America only wants the rich. If you've got money in your pockets you'll get the red carpet rolled out for you. If you ain't got shit then you need to fuck off or we'll call the cops on you. And guess what, most people ain't got shit. The system is designed to keep you from ever getting anything other than debt and an IPod. Supposing you manage to acquire the major necessities of life like a house and a car you'll still have to pay taxes on them for no reason other than the fact that the government can force you to.

Americans, face it. America hates you. You're the kid in the clique who everybody else in embarrassed of, and the only reason they keep you around is because they know they can take advantage of you. And anytime you have your back turned they're talking shit about what a douche bag sucker you are.

This isn't just about business either. Consider this quote: "You can understand and relate to most people better if you look at them – no matter how old or impressive they may be – as if they are children. For most of us never really grow up or mature all that much – we simply grow taller. O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always were, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales." ~Leo Rosten 99% of the people you know are children. They may be old, but they're still children, and they still think and act like children. Children are fucking evil. They're petty, sadistic, selfish little bastards. We overlook this in people under 18 years old because we say they're too young to understand complex morals, but 99% of the population never grows up, and they keep acting like that the rest of their lives…only we don't criticize people over 18 years old for acting like summumabitches. We just try to get out of their way.

In the end the only way to avoid being abused by the children around you is to make a shit load of money. On one hand, this is a positive arrangement. It forces (emphasis on "forces") people to work harder and stimulate the economy in general. On the other hand, unless you work for yourself, working means being a slave. Americans talk a big talk about being free, but unless you work for yourself you're a slave. Some slaves get

more out of being a slave, but we're all slaves nonetheless. I'm not saying this as a funny play on words. I'm dead serious. We're slaves. Slaves. Slaves. Slaves. Slaves. Slaves.

Period. Just because you have the freedom to choose whose slave you're going to be doesn't make you free.

Being a slave means suffering indignity. We've all watched "Roots" and other slave movies and thought to ourselves, "Wow. It sure was degrading for those slaves to have to call their owners, "master" and follow their every order no matter how degrading, absurd, or backbreaking. Well what the fuck do you think you do at work every day? You call your boss "sir" or "ma'am" even though you hate their guts just like slaves of olden days. You wear the uniforms they force you to just like the slaves of olden days. You bust your ass and work overtime just like the slaves of olden days. You do stupid shit that you hate, resent, and know won't work just because the people with more power than common sense told you had to do or else. How do you figure you're not a slave? I can't come up with any justification to explain how we're free.

So here's the situation we're in. Nobody cares about you. Everyone wants to take advantage of you, which they do by making you a slave and brainwashing you into consenting to it and even accepting it as the natural order and even liking it.

Given these facts, if you want to be a real human being complete with dignity, freedom, and the chance to refine yourself without the interference of the slave master your best bet is to get as far away from people as you can. Move into the woods, build a cabin, and don't come out for anything except more beer and red meat. Shit. Start a commune with the few real adults you know. Socialism doesn't work on the large scale, but a few people working together to build something better for themselves does work. It's called synergy, the same force that empowers small businesses to thrive.

Personally, the idea of staying in the mainstream workplace the rest of my life is tantamount to shoving needles into my balls, taint, toenails, fingernails, and throat every day for the rest of my life. As such I want to run away from that horror as soon as possible.

Granted, escaping the world we live in today will inevitably mean giving up some of the luxuries we've become accustomed to. Oh fucking well. Luxuries like IPods haven't really done anything for us except help us escape from the fact that our lives suck shit.

So really, giving up those "luxuries" really just means giving up the crutches we use to enable ourselves to cope with the tragedy of our miserable, enslaved, ostracized, degrading lives. No loss there. At any rate, humans throughout history were able to make it and enjoy life without unnecessary luxuries. So why should we be any different today? Hell, they probably enjoyed life more, because they were working for themselves, and everything they did directly benefited them. Cavemen didn't have to work at jobs they hated supporting someone else. And when they got old they died with dignity instead of stressing over pennies to pay to keep themselves alive in a degrading state of suspended animation needing someone else to wipe their asses for them and feed them.

You just died when your life was no longer meaningful. When you put it like that it actually sounds merciful. In fact, the more I think about it the more I respect Hunter S. Thompson for killing himself when he felt he was at the end of his game.

Anyway, the moral of the story is the system we live in sucks ass. Anyone who can and is willing would be better off getting out of it. This necessitates living like every average person throughout history lived. Oh well. It's probably more natural and rewarding anyway.

If you think my solution to the problem is conspiratorial and excessive, don't worry.

There's another solution that will allow you to keep your IPod, Escalade, Gucci hand bag, and whatever other crap you think you need. You can change the system. But I have no advice for how to do that unless you're a billionaire.

THE LEGACY OF A BILLIONAIRE Steve Jobs, founder and CEO of Apple, died recently, and the internet has been flooded with eulogies and praises to/about him. If he'd been a member of the Catholic Church I swear they'd give him posthumous sainthood, and I'm not surprised by this at all. When Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Warren Buffet die they'll get the same treatment. Even Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers will get some kind of glowing recommendation letter to Heaven from someone.

I'm not saying that all this praise is completely undeserved. Steve Jobs (and every other billionaire out there) put a lot of mental and physical effort into building companies that provides useful products to humanity. I respect that, but that's only half the truth. It's misleading and unethical to only acknowledge the high points of any billionaire's career, and the fact that we do praise billionaires so eagerly and consistently is a sign of deeper flaw in society that desperately needs to be addressed and rectified.

You can become a millionaire by working hard, but there isn’t enough time, energy or opportunity in one person’s life to become a billionaire through hard work. The only way you become a billionaire is by underpaying your workers and over charging your customers (or owning stock in companies that underpay their workers and over charge their customers). So the only way to become a billionaire is to steal. The way you do that may be legal, but it’s still stealing. Steve Jobs may have been a technological visionary, but the cold, hard fact of the matter is he was a thief. I can respect the work that he did do, but I can't respect him for the unreasonable, unnecessary mountains of cash he skimmed off the sweat shop slaves who built and sold Apple products.

Why did Steve Jobs deserve 8 billion dollars, no limit on his lunch breaks and 1000 heart felt eulogies but the people who build IPods apparently don't even deserve to be treated like human beings? You could ask the same question about any billionaire, but almost nobody ever does. So we keep rewarding robber barons and keep punishing hard working poor people.

We can all agree that Steve Jobs deserves some recognition for his company's product, but almost nobody ever talks about how much money Steve Jobs deserved for each IPod he sold. He wouldn't have died with 8 billion dollars if the cost of an IPod reflected its production value. I'm not saying Steve Jobs should have sold his products at-cost. I'm raising the question of how high you can mark up the cost of goods and services before it becomes unethical. If you mark it up high enough to accumulate 8 billion dollars without being guilty of price gouging then how much money do you have to horde before your ethics become questionable? How about 68 billion dollars?

As it stands, the generally accepted answer to that question is that there is no limit. The more money you horde the bigger of a hero you are. Furthermore, the blame doesn't lay on the CEO for overcharging for products. The blame lies on the customer for willingly

paying whatever the advertised price is. There is some truth to that, but again, that's only half the truth.

Steve Jobs knew there was no logical reason for his customers (many of whom were poor) to pay the price he wanted to charge for IPods. So he created one of the most successful advertising campaigns ever that framed the IPod as a status symbol first and an electronic gadget second. In other words, Steve Jobs has already gone down in history as a visionary business leader for orchestrating a propaganda campaign that exploited his customers' mental weakness to swindle them out of more money. That's not admirable. That's dishonest and cruel, but he gets praise for it from so many people because the entire economy operates under the assumption that if you can be swindled then you deserve to be swindled. It's probably more correct to say that if you can be swindled you should be swindled.

This isn't how a utopia operates. This is how a dystopia operates. This philosophy creates poverty, which in turn creates misery and crime. That is part of Steve Job's legacy, and whatever good things he did don't change that fact.

It's worth noting that Steve Jobs did give some money to charity, though every old granny in the world who puts a dollar in a collection plate at church gives a higher percentage of their income to charity than Steve Jobs did. I don't want to sound ungrateful or discourage billionaires from giving to charity, but at the same time I can't give them too much street credit when they're giving away money they were never going to spend anyway. They didn't lose anything by giving to charity, but they got a lot out of it in the form of a generous reputation and generous tax breaks. At any rate, if you have billions of dollars to give away, why not just cut out the middle man and leave that money with either your workers, customers or both? Does it justify burning your workers and customers if you're nice to other people?

I haven't heard any news about Steve Jobs giving leaving all of his money to charity after his death, but other billionaires have contrived a reputation as saints for making that claim. I don't believe billionaires deserve praise for that either because it's tantamount to cruising down the street in a stretch Hummer limousine drinking a glass of $10,000 wine and shouting at homeless people through the sun roof, "You'll get my money when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!" I fail to see the honor in that sacrifice....not that Steve Jobs was even that generous.

PUT A 100% TAX ON ALL PERSONAL INCOME OVER $1 BILLION My entire life I've been hearing politicians, political commentators and angry old men sitting on their front porches arguing about how much the rich should be taxed. After all these years it seems like there hasn’t been any progress made towards a common consensus. For what it's worth, here's my take on the issue.

The big argument against raising taxes on the rich is that the less taxes the rich pay (and thus, the more money they take home) the more incentive they'll have to work hard and create jobs whereas if we tax the rich heavily then they will have no motivation to grow their businesses as those heavy taxes would effectively punish them for being successful.

Thousands of articles, speeches, papers and books have been written picking this idea apart and going round and round in circles about it, but every one I've read has missed a fundamental concept.

You become a millionaire by working hard. However, there isn't enough time, energy or opportunity in one person's life to become a billionaire through hard work. The only way you become a billionaire is by underpaying your workers and over charging for your products (or owning stock in companies that underpay their workers and over charge their customers). So the only way to become a billionaire is to steal. The way you do that may be legal, but it's still stealing.

You want to fix the economy? Put a 100% tax on individual's income over $1billion. No human being needs more than $1billion, and if you made it impossible to make more than $1billion then you will eliminate the incentive for anyone to try. This won't stop people from working harder. It will just stop people from exploiting their workers and their customers or cutting jobs to maximize profit.

Plus, you could use those billions of tax dollars you've liberated from the greedy to stimulate the economy by creating new businesses. Think about it. If you want to create jobs and stimulate the economy...then create jobs. The government should sell "one of every product." If the government used the money it requisitioned from the rich to start businesses it could regulate those businesses and make sure its employees got paid a fair percentage of the profit their work generates. The government could guarantee its workers are treated with more dignity than McDonalds treats it workers. The government could guarantee the quality and safety of its products, and this would stimulate competition with the rest of the private companies.

Best of all, if government sold one of every product then the extra profit those businesses generate could go directly to paying for public programs instead of paying for a CEO's new yacht that he bought in a foreign country. If the government made enough money off the goods and products it sold we could eliminate the need for many of the taxes and fees we pay. If nothing else, we could subsidize health care or give our teachers raises or invest in free education.

Do you believe America is a welfare state? Then instead of giving money away to the poor, clear out every other floor of the projects and replace those apartments with offices and pay for it with the stolen money the government has taken back from the ultra-wealthy. Give everyone in the projects jobs right there in the projects. That will eliminate the excuse of not being able to find a job, and it will eliminate the need for the poor to buy cars and gas to travel across town to demeaning jobs that pay demeaning wages.

Americans are raised on the idea that working like a slave without complaining and hording money are hallmarks of virtue, but the reality is that some people don't want to work like slaves nor do they want a lot of money. If the government opened businesses that didn't set Asian sweatshop work quotas and paid their workers okay wages with lifetime job security, a lot of individuals who would have otherwise turned to a life of crime to support their unambitious lifestyle would gravitate to these jobs...where they would be happy and not bother anyone. But billionaires bent on squeezing every last minute and thus every last dollar out of their employees would never set up this business model, nor do they care if the abusive work ethic they mandate drives people to a life of crime. That's not their problem. The government could do it though, but they'd need capital to set these low-profit businesses up, and right now the billionaires are stealing the nation's wealth and bankrupting the country, crippling the government's ability to create a reasonable safety net for the poorest of the poor.

WHY SUBURBIA SUCKS I've been working on this theory that suburbia has a glass ceiling of happiness.

Psychologists have pretty well documented the aesthetic effect of your surroundings on your mental state. McDonalds is painted bright colors to make you move faster. Prisons are painted dull colors to make you apathetic. Suburbia is pretty drab. Driving around suburbia the impression you get is one of mediocrity and sameness. You don't get the sense of wonder and awe you get at the top of a mountain or in a cathedral. It's a little thing, but the fact remains, there's a limit to the amount of joy you're going to receive from the aesthetics of suburbia.

Similar is the fact that psychologists have noticed that prolonged time in sensory deprivation will yield a withdrawn and catatonic mental state. In suburbia, where we sit in our climate controlled houses, drive the same route over and over to our climate controlled offices where we sit in climate controlled cubicles we're basically living in a sort of sensory deprivation chamber. This can only have a dulling effect on our minds.

In addition to lack of sensory stimulus you're also not going to experience a wide variety of life situations. Unless you work really hard to break up your routine, every day of the week is likely to be indistinguishable from any other day of the week any year of your life.

You can actually live on autopilot and never think and still get through your life. Spend enough time in suburbia, and you're likely to start noticing that you don't notice your drive to work anymore. You just get to work and realize, "I don't remember driving here." Suburbia zones you out that bad.

While it's admirable that life in suburbia offers luxuries and comforts unheard of even to royalty in the Middle Ages, when life becomes so rote with so little variation you're eventually left with no frame of reference to judge the highs and lows. You lose your orientation of happiness and experience happiness vertigo. As a result minor inconveniences in your life can seem like the end of the world and small pleasures can seem euphoric. But the latter statement is no justification for happiness vertigo because that lifestyle is chaotic, unreliable, and ultimately stressful.

Most importantly probably is the lack of opportunity for want fulfillment, which is essential for happiness. Suburbia kills your opportunity to fulfill your wants in two ways.

First, the fact that your basic survival needs are fulfilled misleads you into thinking that you have everything you should want. You feel guilty if you ask for more, which dissuades you from asking more of life. Even if you do have ambition, suburbia is unlikely to fulfill it. You'll have to drive a long way out of suburbia to get to the business district and sit through stressful traffic getting to any place you might express yourself or grow. Given that you're a slave to your job and family you might not have that much time to do that anyway.

And if you can get to a venue where you can express yourself or grow you're going to have to pay for it, and life in suburbia doesn't leave much money for want fulfillment.

Utilities, rent, mortgages, insurance, car payments, credit card bills, cable, internet, cell phones, etc. will bury you in debt. I didn't say, "can bury you in debt." I said, "will."

Suburbia is designed to drain your wealth, which limits your options, and cancels out the sense of security that is suburbia's greatest advantage.

Everything about suburbia is designed (intentionally or incidentally) to normalize life into unbroken, numbing, lukewarm blandness. Sure, you'll be insulated from the atrocities of the ghetto or third world countries, but it'll be nearly impossible to experience self-actualization in suburbia as well.

What do we do about it? Get out of suburbia. There are little things you can do within suburbia to spice up life a bit, but ultimately you're just fighting the tide.

If you are going to stay in suburbia (you might not have much of a choice) at least you can take solace in the fact that you're not happier because there's something inherently wrong with you. You've just hit the glass ceiling.

YOU MIGHT BE DEPRESSED BECAUSE THE SYSTEM SUCKS, NOT BECAUSE YOU SUCK The current mental health profession generally accepts that suffering from high anxiety or depression is a sign of bad mental health and can/should be treated with drugs and extensive optimism training. Drugs and blind optimism have their place, but the root of much of the anxiety and depression in the world is caused by the fact that much of "the system" is insane, and if you're a logical, reasonable person, then the contradictions and abuses inherent in the system will drive you to anxiety and depression. Consider the following points: 

Work places have totalitarian control over your life while you're at work, and America has one of the largest prison populations in the world, but we're told we live in the land of the free.

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All day long the television and radio churn out commercials encouraging us to buy wasteful junk, and then we're told that if we buy that junk we're irresponsible and destroying the environment.

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It's fashionable to get drunk. It's unconscionable to get high.

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If you feed your family poison over the course of several years until they die you can get the death penalty. If you run a tobacco company that poisons millions of people over several years until they die you get a golden parachute.

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The stock market is designed to fund companies at the expense of the investors, but when investors lose their money in the system that was designed to take their money the investors are told they were foolish with their money.

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Houses cost twice what they're worth and are so confusing to buy you have to hire someone to help you navigate the paperwork, and we blame the people who got tricked into buying houses that cost twice as much as advertised for the mortgage crisis.

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A higher education is necessary to earn a living wage, but if you can't afford a college education you're told the reason you're not earning a living wage because is because you're lazy and worthless.

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People are killing each other over which mythology is the most loving.

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We're taught that slavery is unconscionable, but almost all of our clothes and household goods are made by slaves in sweatshops.

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Poor people work the longest hours at the hardest jobs, but we're told they're poor because they're lazy.

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America spends half its federal budget on the industrial war complex to protect freedom, but America is the largest exporter of war and has the highest prison population.

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Janitors have to take drug tests, but political leaders don’t. In fact, they have diplomatic immunity.

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Police cars are designed to look intimidating, but they have the words, "To protect and serve" printed on the sides.

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Shows like Southpark and The Sopranos come with warning labels that say, “For mature audiences only.”

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A man can take of his shirt in public, but women are told their chests are immoral.

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Bribery is called lobbying, and propaganda is called advertisement.

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When goods in a store are only sold at a 1000 percent mark-up instead of a 1200 percent mark-up we're told they're on "sale."

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Banks call their investors "valued customers" but they charge you with fees for everything possible, even for not having enough money.

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We're told there's no cruel and unusual punishment for breaking laws in the West, but going to jail is almost a guaranteed sentence to get beaten and raped.

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The tax laws are so complicated you have to pay someone else to do them for you, and if you can't pay your taxes then you can go to jail, but we're told if you can't pay your taxes or you fill them out wrong you're considered a criminal.

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Work places use performance quotas to push workers to the limits of human endurance, and if that stresses you out you're told it's because you don't have a positive enough attitude.

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Self-help books and religious books offer ineffective, fantasy-based solutions to real world problems, and when they don't work you're told it's because you didn't believe in them enough or try hard enough.

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Fox News is considered "news."

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We're charged the highest possible cost for goods and services while being paid the lowest possible wages for our work, and we're told that wealth trickles down and that supply and demand justifies our exploitation as necessary.

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The celebrities we're encouraged to emulate churn out mindless, idiotic, formulaic art. People who actually take stances on important issues are told they take life too seriously and should lighten up. And we wonder why the world isn't improving.



We're raised from childhood to believe that romance and wealth are the most important goals in life, and when we spend our whole lives chasing them only to find out they don't work in life like they do in the movies we're told we were childish for believing what we were taught on television.

I could go on, but you get the point. Western society is a labyrinth of smoke, mirrors, contradictions, misdirection and dead ends. The lies and falsehoods are so ingrained in our society that you can't escape them. If you even begin to wake up to the reality of how

un-user-friendly society is it will cause you deep anxiety and depression, and when that happens you'll be told by the television, your boss, your co-workers, your political leaders, your mental health professions, your religious (mis)leaders and maybe even your friends and family that there's something wrong with you. And just like the military you'll be pressured to conform to their twisted mind-set or be rejected and even punished by the brainwashed individuals who have given up the quest for sanity and have given in to the status quo.

Anxiety and depression can be signs of mental health when the rest of the world around you is insane. If you don't experience anxiety and depression then you should be very, very worried, because that means you probably aren't paying attention or asking the right questions, and that’s not mentally healthy.

IT’S THE STRESS, STUPID Every time I turn on the news I hear more bad news. It might be hyperbolic to say that humanity is sliding towards an apocalypse, but there are plenty of statistics and examples to build a case that the world is not as it should be. Divorce rates are hovering around 50%. Shooting sprees and terrorist attacks are fashionable. Depression, unemployment, homelessness, drop-out rates, road rage, domestic violence, excessive consumer consumption and drug abuse are epidemic, and all of these problems are happening in first world countries.

Every time I turn on the news I hear more excuses for why these social ills are happening, and at this point I've heard it all: violent video games, angry music, the waning of religion, insanity, laziness and personal irresponsibility. Undoubtedly you could point out even more causes for the world’s problems.

If you made a list of society's problems and then made a list of all the causes of those problems and then tried to find common denominators across all of them you’ll find a few common denominators. Aside from bad parenting, the biggest common denominator you’re likely to find (in this author’s admittedly editorial opinion) is stress, and you can put this theory to the test. Take any individual who snapped and caused some terrible catastrophe in society, and I guarantee you’ll find that person was crushed with stress; the only question is where the stress was coming from.

I’m not saying that everyone who does everything bad should be allowed to just write off their actions as the by-product of stress. If individuals have even the tiniest sliver of free will then we have an obligation to personal responsibility, but even if everyone is responsible for their actions, the fact remains that society as a whole has a responsibility to the individual. So the call to action here isn’t to let the individual off the hook for its responsibility to the whole. The call to action is to not let the whole off the hook for its responsibility to the individual.

As it stands, the institutions humans have created to serve the whole have not achieved their mission. On the contrary, the institutions humans have created to serve the whole are stressing individuals to the breaking point for the benefit of the leaders who claim to serve the whole.

Take for example the high domestic violence and divorce rates. Regardless of whether or not you believe in the sanctity of marriage (as defined by the culture you were raised in), the fact remains that families are fighting and falling apart in record numbers. So what causes families to fight? The biggest cause is money problems. People in debt are more worried and stressed out about the future than people without debt. People in debt have less disposable income to alleviate stress than people with no debt. People in debt have to work longer hours and have less time and disposable income to allocate to upgrade training that would get them a better job that pays more and helps them get out of debt.

Families who are in debt are constantly walking a tightrope, and every time they fail at anything the consequences are catastrophic. Even if you can walk that tightrope, you can only go through life with a gun held to your head for so long before the stress wears you down and makes you impatient and grumpy. If you stay impatient and grumpy for too long you forget life was ever any other way, and after you’ve accumulated a lifetime of memories of being impatient and grumpy then your memories shape how you see reality for the rest of the time you have to live.

If you’re living under the crushing shadow of debt and you’ve made a few mistakes in your life then the powers that be are going to beat the shit out of you and throw you out into the streets without a blanket. Go to any super-max prison and you’ll find that the majority of prisoners there had the most mind-shatteringly abusive childhoods possible.

If you go to any federal prison you’ll find adults who have received as many body-blows from society as they’ve given back. If you go to any juvenile detention center you’ll find bunks full of neglected children who were told their entire lives they were bad seeds who’d never amount to anything. The standard solution to society’s problems isn’t to beat and abandon anyone who fails at anything; any psychologist can tell you that’s a recipe for failure, not reform.

There are so few institutions in place that actually reform “failures” that everyone who is actually “responsible” has no hope of ever living in a world where crime is rare. Nor does nobody expect crime to drop to unnoticeable levels. We’ve accepted stress as the norm, and we carry that stress with us everywhere we go because we can never fully let our guards down.

In some ways the prospect of succeeding in life is more stressful than the prospect of failing. At least with failing there’s an early end, and it relieves the pressure of working for 60 years at a job that treats you like a commodity by paying you as little as possible, working you as long as possible and giving you as few breaks or benefits the entire time.

You certainly can’t hope for a pension anymore. So society has the added stress of not even knowing if there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. That’s a dire position to place people in, because hope is a prerequisite for happiness.

College graduates might be able to eventually get promoted into a position with a pension, but everyone else has little chance of ever making a living wage, and there are so many people without college degrees that businesses who hire entry-level work know they can work their employees to the breaking point, throw them away and hire a new, unbroken kid to replace them every few months. That means, thanks to institutions invented by smart, rich people, most of the poor, dumb people are expected to let themselves be used as disposable punching bags, and since that’s the only career path open to them, that means it would be financially irresponsible of them to not let themselves be used as disposable punching bags.

When you tell someone they deserve to be treated like a disposable punching bag and then them treat them like one and convince them that they’ll always be a disposable

punching bag… they get really stressed out, because they know their lives have value; it's just irresponsible for them to expect to be treated like it. So they're forced to use cognitive dissonance to justify their own mistreatment to themselves, and cognitive dissonance and dehumanization are both very stressful. To make matters worse, when you stress out and beat down dumb people, they find dumb solutions to cope with the abuse and hopelessness you’re heaping on them. That’s bad for everyone, and when you punish dumb people for being dumb, then you create a downward spiral.

And that’s the world we live in. Most of the problems going on around you are caused by the stress of how inhumanely smart people have designed the social institutions we’ve created to help us fulfill our potential. As long as those institutions remain unchanged society will continue on the downward spiral of stress. So the next time you hear someone ask why people are so unhappy and volatile even in the most white-washed neighborhoods, tell them, “It’s the stress, stupid.”

What can we do to solve these problems? Well, the good news is they’ve already all been solved by people smarter than you or I. The only problem there is that smart people don’t run the world. Rich people, who are profiting hands over fist by stressing out everyone else, run the world and make the rules. And rule number one is that the rich must get richer at all costs.

Money is power, and the poor don’t have any money. The only power they do have is their numbers. The world isn’t going to change until the poor stop waiting for a corrupt politicians to save them and stop fighting each other over the scraps that fall from the rich’s plate and work together to find solutions to the problems that are causing them the most stress.

STOP TREATING PEOPLE LIKE SHIT AND THEY’LL START GIVING A FUCK If the baby boomers are correct in labeling Generation X and Y as lazy, aimless, apathetic, disrespectful and not giving a shit it's because the baby boomers have treated Generation X and Y like shit their entire lives.

From the moment a child is born in the West he's automatically considered a second class citizen relative to adults by law. Children don’t have the same rights and freedoms as adults do. Putting aside the argument of whether this is philosophically justifiable, consider the psychological impact that has on children. During their formative years of development, when children are forming the perception of reality they'll use through the rest of their lives, they take it for granted that they're second class citizens. Children are even legally allowed to be beaten during that time frame in their life. Children who are hit enough tend to develop battered person syndrome, and somewhere in the world right now there's a group of kids somewhere having a bragging competition over whose parents or siblings beat them the worst.

When children go to school they're forced to address adults with higher titles than them as if they were in a military cult, and nonconformity is punished swiftly and harshly.

And each school has its own rule book that imposes a whole new level of rules on children and is effectively law to the students; school rule books are effectively comparable to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), and like the UCMJ, school rule books tend to have a lot of absurd, random, pointless rules that serve no productive use other than to get the people who live under them used to following rules and fearing punishment for nonconformity.

For the first eighteen years of their lives children endure a brutal, haphazard gauntlet of tests and assignments at school that judge their worth as a human being, and when they don't perform well they get smacked on the nose hard, and the worse they do the harder they get smacked. Children who do endure the beatings and pass the tests are told that when they graduate they'll get go to an even harder school with harsher punishments and more tempting distractions, but they'll have to go into half a lifetime of debt in order to do it, and once they graduate they'll get to go sit in an office cubicle that is effectively a sensory deprivation chamber where they'll endure another lifetime of belittling, absurd rules, minimal pay, absolutely zero company loyalty, constant tests to determine their worth as a human being and indefinite punishment for nonconformity. And in order to get one of these jobs they'll have to sign a contract that waives a significant amount of their legal rights away effectively putting them under a private version of the UCMJ. The baby boomers understand all this. They've seen Office Space. They know there's at least a little truth to Fight Club. They've read Dilbert. They know what kind of a life their children have in store for them. They know the best most of them have to look forward to is being a faceless servant in a droll, stressful, ungrateful, disrespectful, lying, cheating corporate world. Generation X won’t get a pension, because the Baby Boomers

destroyed all the unions, and Generation X won’t get social security, because the Baby Boomers will have bankrupted that long before Generation X retires. The Baby Boomers have systematically destroyed any hope of their children achieving the American Dream, and yet Baby Boomers act surprised when the younger generation doesn't give a shit.

The Baby Boomers went out of their way to raise their children in a series of Skinner Boxes that rigorously conditioned them to not give a shit and then set them up to spend the rest of their lives in an environment that doesn't give a shit about them. That's why young people don't give a shit.

Stop treating them like shit and they'll start giving a fuck. And stop accusing young people for having an underserved sense of entitlement when they complain about being treated like an inferior species.

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EXPENSIVE WINE AND CHEAP WINE? Expensive wines aren’t made from some rare super grape, and cheap wines aren’t made from inferior grapes. There’s no single factor that makes premium, expensive wine different from nasty, cheap wine, and each vineyard has a slightly different method to growing grapes and turning them into wine. So you can’t make too many generalizations about the wine making process, but what you’re about to read is generally true enough to give you a good idea of how wine is made.

The biggest difference between good wine and bad wine isn’t age. There’s wine that sells for $100 as soon as it comes off the assembly line, and it’s grown from the same grapes that the same vineyard sells for $9 a bottle. The big difference in quality comes from how those grapes were treated during the growing process.

At the beginning of the growing process every vine is treated the same. They’re planted in long, straight rows. A wooden post as tall as a grown man sticks out of the ground between every four or five plants. There’s also a wooden post at either end of every row.

Three or four metal wires run perpendicularly between/along the posts. The reason those posts and wires are there is because grape vines aren’t trees. They’re vines.

Obviously. So left on their own they’ll just fall to the ground and grow in the dirt, but that would ruin the grapes. So workers have to come through the rows of grape plants and tie them to the bottom wire when the grape plants are tall enough to reach. Then, as the vines get taller and bushier they’ll naturally grab onto the higher wires if their shoots happen to touch them, but a lot of the shoots just fall back down to the ground. So at some point human beings have to walk down every row in the vineyard and pick up all the low hanging vines and tuck them up through the wires.

This doesn’t just keep the vines out of the dirt. It also gives the leaves maximum exposure to sunlight, and since grapes tend to grow towards the bottom of vines and not the tops that means when the vines are stretched upwards then most of the grape clusters will grow conveniently along the bottom wire where they can be picked without having to dig through tangled vines. There’s still work to be done before the grapes are picked though, and how that work is done will determine whether the grapes will yield premium or cheap wine.

The leaves on the grape plants need sunlight to nourish the grapes, but the leaves cover the grapes, and the grapes also need direct exposure to sunlight to ripen properly. So the leaves around the grapes need to be removed from the vines, but you need to take off as few leaves as possible, and you need to remove those leaves without damaging the grapes. There are at least three ways to do this: Some vineyards use sheep. If you put sheep in a vineyard when the grapes are young and sour the sheep will avoid eating them, but they’ll eat all the leaves around the grapes, and since the rest of the vines and leaves are too high for the sheep to reach they pick off

just about the right amount of leaves. Inevitably though, the sheep will end up damaging a few grapes and possibly eating too many leaves.

If 100 rows of vines in a vineyard are reserved for making cheap wine then a farmer can just drive a tall, skinny tractor up and down the rows that sucks or blows all the leaves off. It’s a cheap and quick method, but it damages the grapes, which is fine if your customers are so desperate to get drunk that they don’t care if they have to drink rancid vinegar to temporarily erase a lifetime of memories of abuse and abandonment.

If your customers demand consistent, premium quality wine then the leaves need to be plucked off delicately. The only thing in the universe capable of performing this precision task is a human being. So they're sent into the vineyards to spend all day, every day in green, roofless hallways shuffling sideways analyzing the bottoms of these walls looking for leaves that cover up the grapes and pulling them off while being careful not to bump the grapes or remove too many leaves. If the animate, sentient, bipedal autonomous cosmic supercomputers (aka people) don’t do the job properly then a grumpy old farmer will come along behind them and yell at them and threaten to fire them. Since there are no trees or roofs in a massive vineyard there’s no escape from the midday heat. You’re trapped there baking helplessly like a fish in and oven. When it’s hot like that tempers can get hot. The farmer is allowed to let his temper out; the workers aren’t.

It doesn’t sound difficult to spend 9 hours walking sideways pulling leaves off of vines, and it’s true that there are more difficult jobs in the world, but leaf plucking is a unique form of torture, as every job on a vineyard is in its own way. The leaves grow just low enough that an average sized person has to bend over slightly to grab them. This doesn’t hurt if you do it once, but if you do it for 50 hours a week you’ll be in agony. That’s a fact.

Once your back starts hurting from bending forward you can switch to bending your knees so it looks like you’re doing the limbo dance, except instead of going under the wall you go sideways…forever. Eventually that’s going to hurt too. When that happens you can just fall down on your knees and pick out the leaves at chest height. If you’ve lost the will to get back up you can waddle sideways on your knees and/or crawl down a whole row that way, but you don’t have knee pads. So your knees get beat up on the rocks and twigs. And the ground is covered in a thousand doses of weed killer. So you don’t want what’s down there to get into the cuts, scrapes and blisters in your hands and knees.

Another reason you don’t want to get down on your hands and knees is because it looks like you’re worshiping at an altar, and metaphorically you are. Some Hasidic Jews in Jerusalem spend fifty hours a week standing in front of the Wailing Wall muttering to themselves. That’s hard core devotion; when those Jews look back on their lives and all they see is that wall in front of them, they’ll be able to say they seriously devoted their life to their beliefs. We live in a big, beautiful world in the middle of a mind blowing galaxy floating in a mysteriously elegant universe bigger than your imagination. Every day is a chance for an adventure. A chance to grow, to fall in love, to be moved. Every

day is a blank slate, another chance to experience life to its fullest. So if you look back on your life and all you see are days and days and days of standing with your nose to a wall, that was a genuine, priceless sacrifice. If you’re only standing in front of the wall because it’s what you have to do to eat and survive another day to stand in front of that cursed wall again then you don’t want to give that goddamned wall the pleasure of seeing you down on your knees in front of it. So sometimes you stay off your knees and choose between bending your knees or your back for the rest of the day.

After the leaves are plucked and all the grapes are exposed along the bottom of the rows you can walk along them and see where bunches of grapes are growing at odd angles and smashing into each other. You’ll find other bunches are growing on tiny, leafless branches that won’t be able to nourish the grapes to ripeness. Sometimes there are just too many grapes. If you remove all these extra grapes then the remaining ones will grow plump and sweet. If you don’t remove these extra grapes you’ll still get some good bunches, but you’ll also get a lot of sour bunches. If your customers don’t care that your wine tastes like stale headache in a bottle you can just drive a tractor down the row and bump all the grapes off and mash them together to make bottom shelf hobo wine.

If your customer expects wine so pure that it doesn’t give them a headache then millions of people all over the world need to pour into their local vineyards and sacrifice the days of their youth (and/or their “golden years”) in purgatory staring at bunches of grapes, studying them, counting them, thinking about how and why to remove them. It’s kind of like Tetris. It’s not that hard of a game if you do it slowly, but if you do it for fifty hours a week you’ll go insane. When you close your eyes you’ll see Tetris shapes, and you’ll dream about them chasing you… unless your back is in too much pain to let you sleep or you’re too exhausted from crawling in the sun for the past month to be able to dream. A popular remedy for grape madness is alcohol, but vineyard laborers will never drink the wine from the grapes they’re tending because they’ll never be able to afford it.

Once the plucking and snipping is done then all those ripe, juicy grapes will look like a free gourmet buffet to birds. If you’ve already invested months of wages into having your grape vines groomed then you can’t afford to give your crop away to the birds. If you’re making cheap wine you might be able to afford to lose a few grapes, but if you’re making premium wine you need total security. One way you can keep birds away is by buying an air gun that’s hooked up to a tank and makes a loud blast that sounds like a gunshot every minute or so. But that doesn’t keep all the birds away all the time. Since it’s not cost effective to build a glass roof over a thousand acre vineyard, the next best thing you can do is send workers back into the wailing walls and cover the plants with nets.

Until someone invents an efficient way to put nets over plants workers will have to spend the best days of their irreplaceable lives rolling gigantic spools of nets down rows 50+ yards long in the premium section of most vineyards. Each row will have two nets, one on either side. Then two people, one on either side, will take their net and lift it over the plant where they’ll take a little plastic clip (like the ones that hold bread bags closed) and clip the two nets together. They’ll also need to bend over and reach underneath the

green wall to grab the net hanging on the other side so they can pin them together underneath so birds can’t fly up through the bottom of the net. A lot of care needs to be taken to make sure the vines are wrapped up so tight that a bird the size of a cell phone can’t get in, and you can be sure they’ll try. So the workers need to end up putting five to nine clips above and below every plant. They’ll have to use more clips to patch up the holes that have inevitably been ripped in net. In nine hours they’ll go through thousands of clips. So they have to carry a big pouch full with them. It takes a lot of thought and attention to detail to clip the nets together properly. It also takes a strong back, but if you’ve been working in a vineyard for very long you’ve already got a pretty strong back.

Even with a strong back you’re still going to go home with sore muscles every day, especially if you’re getting paid by how fast you work. As a general rule vineyard workers get paid as little as possible and get as few benefits or breaks as the law will allow in whatever country a vineyard happens to be in, and some places are worse than others.

Sometimes, instead of getting minimum wage, farmers will have the workers play their own version of the Hunger Games. In this version the contestants get paid a few cents for every plant they pluck, trim and/or cover with nets. Whoever pushes themselves the farthest past the brink of human endurance and takes the least amount of breaks and cuts the most corners will be rewarded with slightly more than minimum wage.

Everybody else will get less than minimum wage, and I guess that’s the point. The only people who really win these Hunger Games are the vineyard owner, who wins a new mansion, and the rich people who drink pretentiously expensive wine; they win a sweet taste in their mouth for a few minutes.

You could say the vineyard workers win a job, but it’s the job of a disposable slave. You would have to be completely morally bankrupt to call the work vineyard laborers do for they pay they receive a good opportunity. It’s not an opportunity. It’s a trap. It’s a waste of life.

This raises an interesting question. Who would willingly agree to this trap? Who would take seasonal work that pays as little as possible leaving you jobless halfway through the year with as little money as possible? There are all types, and most of them are more or less homeless. That’s why they can move with the season, and that’s why they’re desperate enough to put up with being treated like an animal.

You could say, “Yeah, but at least they’re getting paid.” The thing about that is, vineyards are making enough money for the owners to buy mansions and sports cars. If there’s that much money left over after operating costs then there’s enough money to pay the workers enough to see the dentist. If vineyards truly aren’t profitable enough to pay its workers more than slave wages then that means premium means wine can only ever exist in a society where income inequality is so bad that the poor are desperate enough to accept being treated and paid like disposable slaves.

Either way, the main ingredient that goes into making premium wine (and which is largely missing in cheap wine) is the tears of the poor. The main ingredient that goes into making cheap wine (and which is largely missing in premium wine) is pollution.

THE LIFE OF AN APPLE THINNER I arrive at an apple orchard at 6:30am Monday through Saturday. My body hurts even though (or possibly because) I get 10-12 hours of sleep a night. I have to. I can’t stay awake, because I’m always so exhausted from work the previous day. I used to start work at 7:00am, but my work crew and I agreed it would be best to get to work thirty minutes earlier so we could work thirty minutes less under the hot sun. So it’s cool and there’s dew on the ground when I get out of the van I pay $5 a day to ride to work in.

I put my backpack full of water bottles and snacks next to a row of apple trees. Then I slather SPF 30 suntan lotion on my face, arms and legs. I put sports tape around my thumbs and pointer fingers to cover the dirty scars around my cuticles where branches have gouged them. I put on a big, floppy hiking hat, and I start picking excess apples off of my row of trees and throwing them on the ground.

Apple trees are strange trees. Some of the branches hang like octopus arms, and some grow at crooked Tetris angles up, down, left, right. Sometimes when I’m weaving my way through them I pretend like I’m a Shaolin martial arts master, and I make chopping and blocking motions with my arms to move them aside. I don’t get too into it though, because I need to conserve my energy. Sometimes I pretend I’m a treasure hunter digging through an impenetrable wall of branches looking for treasure…but I’ve never found any treasure. So far all I’ve found is apples… and pain.

Apples grow on the branches in clusters sort of like grapes. Clusters sizes range from 2 to 20. Each tree has hundreds of clusters. My goal is to pick the apples out of those clusters until each cluster contains one or two apples and those clusters are spaced far enough apart to give the remaining apples room to grow. For reasons nobody has explained to me, different apple trees require different sizes of clusters. Also, the tops of the trees need to be picked thinner than the bottoms of the trees; that’s to prevent the heavy apples from breaking the budding branches.

The whole reason apple trees are thinned is because the remaining apples on the tree will get bigger and juicer. Small apples taste bad, and consumers want big, pretty apples anyway. So the trees have to get thinned, and this job can’t be automated. It has to be done by human hands. Unfortunately for the farmers, nobody wants to do this job, because it’s really quite terrible. This is how terrible it is. Child protective service would take away your children if you made your children do a week’s worth of apple thinning for breaking one of your rules. It’s bad enough to be child abuse, but it’s worse than that because it breaks full grown men and women.

Apple thinning doesn’t require any heavy lifting (though apple picking does), but neither does cross country jogging. Apple thinning is a physical, intellectual and emotional endurance contest. Before you even touch an apple tree you have to study it like an artist reassessing a work of art. You identify the flaws in the art, decide on a plan of action and execute your plan. Then you repeat that process all day for nine hours. Playing your

favorite video game for nine hours a day every day would be torturous. Picking apples is like playing a boxing game on a Nintendo Wee all day, every day… in the hot sun.

When you walk up to the tree and start snapping off all the excess apples with your thumb and forefinger you have to navigate your way around the branches (like a Shaolin Monk). This requires bending over, reaching overhead and getting on your knees. You always have to carry a big, shiny aluminum (or a cast iron) ladder with you, because after you’ve picked all the apples from one side of the tree that you can reach standing on the ground you climb up the ladder and get the apples on top of the tree. When you're on top of your ladder you can see out all over the orchard district. It’s surreal up there. All you see are rows of green trees all the way to the horizon. Hobbit hills and windmills are the only other thing between you and the big blue, blazing sky. Each orchard is surrounded by a thick line of coniferous trees cut to look like giant hedges.

They keep the wind from blowing through the orchard and making the apples smack together and bruise. So there’s never more than a light breeze on the ground, but sometimes you’ll find a cool breeze when you climb to the top of your ladder. Feeling that breeze and looking out over a sea of parallel green waves you feel like you’re outside of the world. It’s a unique experience that I’m glad I’ve had.

But the serenity is spoiled by the fact that you have to thin a straight row of 200 trees in 9 hours in the hot sun while your body is undernourished because you’re barely paid more than minimum wage and can only afford to buy processed food. Even with a healthy diet, repeating the same yoga stretches for 9 hours per day every day will over strain and hurt your muscles. You certainly wouldn’t want to do 9 hours of ladder yoga in the blazing hot sun. If you attempted that iron-yoga challenge your body would need more than ten minutes of rest in the morning, a thirty minute break for lunch and another ten minute break in the afternoon, but that’s all the breaks apple thinners and pickers get. Most apple thinners even cut that short because they’re so desperate to pick more apples and make even slightly more than minimum wage.

Nobody stands behind you and watches you all day. So you can take as many breaks from your ladder yoga as you want, but you have to weigh the value of listening to your body and taking a break against the fact that you have no money, and you get paid by how many trees you thin. So if you push yourself beyond your breaking point and sustain that level of exertion for three to six weeks then you can make enough money to live off of for two months until apple picking starts. If you can’t maintain that pace you’ll be fired anyway.

You don’t want to get fired, because you need to eat, and you don’t want to be homeless.

Plus, if you impress your boss then in two months’ time you can come back and do the same job over again, except instead of ripping off tiny apples and tossing them carelessly on the ground you pick the full grown apples and place them delicately in a huge bucket hanging across your chest. Once your bucket is back-breakingly full you climb down your ladder, walk to a plastic bin somewhere down your row, kneel down and pull two strings on either side of your chest bucket, which opens the bottom of the bucket letting

the apples tumble out into the plastic bin (just like cherry picking). Then you stand back up and go fill your bucket again for 9 hours in the hot sun. You can make better money apple picking than you can apple thinning. So you definitely don’t want to miss that.

Apple thinning and apple picking would only be mildly excruciating if it weren’t for the ladder. Modern, aluminum ladders are light (as far as 8 foot tall ladders go), but I shudder at the thought of somebody’s grandparents and great grandparents doing these jobs with iron and wooden ladders. If you’re having a hard time imagining what that would be like, put an A-frame ladder in your back yard next Saturday, and make a goal out of picking up that ladder 200 times at regular intervals over 9 hours and moving it to another part of your backyard and climbing to the top and doing yoga… in the hot sun.

Your back will hate you for it…forever, possibly. If you carry stress balls with you the entire 9 hours and squeeze them constantly then by the end of the day your hands will swell and keep you awake at night throbbing in pain, and you’ll have a good idea of what the people who pick the apples in your kitchen go through to survive.

If you do anything outside all day, inevitably you’ll get sunburnt. You could cover up when apple thinning, but the more you cover up the hotter and heavier you’ll be. For men it’s best to wear light shoes and shorts. I’ve seen female apple thinners wearing nothing but bikinis. One of the perks of the job. Another perk of apple thinning is that you can smoke while you work. That perk is undermined by the fact that, if your orchard has a bathroom at all, it’s too far away to go to. You could lose five or eight dollars worth of working time just by walking all the way to the bathroom and back once. So wash the apples you buy from the store. There’s a good chance they were fondled by calloused, burnt, scratched, suntan lotion-slathered, pee-splattered hands. Most of the apples sold at big grocery stores were also sprayed multiple times with pesticides, insecticides and other chemicals you’ve never heard of through the course of their lives.

When you thin or pick apples the dust from the dried poisons rubs off onto your palms until they’re black. It gets into your scratches; it falls in your eyes. You breathe it in. It rubs off of your fingers onto your sandwich at lunch and on to your hand-rolled cigarettes. The farmer assures you it’s harmless poison, but you know you’re going to die of cancer now someday. So you don’t feel as bad about smoking anymore. One of the perks of the job.

You have to find good things to think of when apple thinning. You have to think of something for 9 hours. Something has to keep your body moving forward repeating an action that every muscle in your body and every ounce of common sense is telling you to stop. Of course, what keeps you moving is that you’ve got no place else to go, and if you can’t endure this Chinese torture method then you die of starvation.

So you pick and pick and pick and pick and pick. You try not to think about how mindnumbingly boring it is to just pick pick pick pick all day long. But it’s hard not to think about it when it’s all you do, and there’s never any change in the routine. Every tree looks more or less the same, and after you’ve done enough trees you’ve seen all the

variations of cluster sizes and locations. Eventually it all blurs into one long, timeless moment. The seconds pass like glaciers. Anytime you look to your left or your right all you see are identical rows of apples. There’s no goal you can work towards. There are no checkpoints you can reach where you get to do something different. There’s just no end in sight. It’s pushing a boulder up a hill all day just to push it back up after you finish.

But instead of climbing a hill you climb a ladder and instead of a big boulder it’s little apples. The same little apples everywhere. When you close your eyes you see apples.

When you dream, you dream about a wall of apples falling on top of you. Sometimes you want to just run the orchard maniacally shouting, “APPLES!... APPLES! APPLES!” Sometimes you want to ball up into a fetal position against a tree trunk and mumble, “applesapplesapples.”

It helps if you listen to music. I shudder to think of somebody’s grandparents and great grandparents apple thinning with no music or aluminum ladders. Even if you listen to music you end up listening to the same songs over and over again until you hate them.

I’ll never be able to listen to Pink Floyd again. The apple orchard took that from me.

Now I find it helps to listen to techno music, because it’s fast, and there aren’t idiotic words pounding in your skull all day. I also like listening to foreign music, because I can’t understand the words, and that helps me zone out. A Slovenian I work with gave me some music, and I’ve been listening to Oda Gudeki by MI2 lately. It makes me smile, and I’m going to be sad when I’ve listened to it so many times I hate it. Sometimes I sing the chorus of “The Lemon Tree” song except I change the lyrics to “apple trees” instead of “lemon tree.” My taste in music would drive some people insane if they had to listen to it all day, as theirs would me. You have to figure out what works for you and hope you have that kind of music available. One thing is for sure, if you listen to slow, sad music it will slow you down and sap your will to go on.

Sometimes you can’t stand the music anymore and you just have to turn it off and try to enjoy the absolute silence of the apple field. Sometimes your music player breaks or runs out of batteries or doesn’t exist and you have to endure nine hours of almost total silence every day without the benefit of music to help you forget that you exist. Then you’re alone with your thoughts. It’s like being in solitary confinement, except you’re forced to do excruciating yoga outside as you wrestle with your thoughts. It can be quite revelatory, and if you’ve got any fight in you, fighting apple trees will wear it out of you.

Apple thinning would be a good way to get the fight out of juvenile delinquents. Well, that or it’ll teach them that hard work only pays barely enough to survive and selling drugs is a lot easier and more lucrative. And if you get caught selling drugs and go to jail, at least you won’t have to work in an apple orchard. So… life could be worse.

It was inevitable that some apple thinner out there has and will use drugs at work to speed them up or help them forget where they are, and inevitably somebody is going to fall off their ladder, especially when it’s cold, windy and/or rainy. Of course, the farmer who owns the orchards will do as little as possible to attend to their workers’ medical needs. After all, if farmers cared about their workers’ health then they wouldn’t work them past the limits of human endurance to begin with.

Even if you have a strong mind and good music, everybody breaks a little eventually.

You can’t keep up 9 hours of constant mind-numbing yoga torture forever. Every once a while you have to just sit down (even if it’s not break time yet) and curse your life, the apples, the farmer, God and yourself for getting you into this fuck-awful situation.

Sometimes you work for an ignorant country farmer who has been doing backbreaking work all his life and owns a giant country home surrounded by orchards full of disposable slaves making him richer. The only thing standing between the farmer and more money is the physical and mental limitations and pay expectations of his workers.

So some farmers pay their workers less money per tree than is fair. Some farmers degrade and harass underperforming workers and fire workers after they’re burnt out so he can bring in a fresh crop of (hopefully more desperate) workers who are willing to put up with lower pay and worse treatment. Sometimes you end up working for farmers who smile to your face and bring you water and even buy you a little beer and thank you for sacrificing your body, mind and the irreplaceable moments of your life to make him richer while you’re spending the prime of your life in a death race scraping by with one foot in the gutter. Sometimes you get lucky like that.

A wiser man than myself once said, “The harder you work, the luckier you get.” Another man once said, “Life doesn’t suck because you’re unlucky. Life sucks because you’re a dumbass.” (paraphrased) There’s a lot of truth to both of those statements. I work with an ex-con who can’t get a “real” job because of his criminal record. Some people would say he’s sleeping in the bed he made. I can recognize without being told that I, myself, am working in an apple field because I screwed up. I took some joy in the first two weeks of pain by telling myself I deserved to be there, that I was paying penance for screwing up. So don’t feel any sympathy for me or my ex-con friend. But feel sympathy for the billions of other people in the world who’s are spending their live in orchards, fields, kitchens, warehouses, factories and offices even though they never screwed up. They’ve been doing what they were supposed to: working. Working at degrading, inhumane jobs and doing a great job of it. They just don’t get to keep enough of the profits from their work to achieve stability in their lives because their bosses (the job creators) want a bigger house and longer vacations.

More than sympathy for the oppressed, we should all feel ashamed every time we walk into the fruits and vegetables section of our local grocery stores, because everything you see there has blood on it, literally and figuratively. And apparently that’s not important enough to motivate us to demand better pay, shorter work hours and more profit sharing for workers. It should also motivate us to reassess our standard business practices to identify and rectify the flaws that cause all business owners to feel pressured to pay their workers as little as possible to make ends meet. The call to action isn’t to throw rotten apples at orchard owners. The call to action is to replace our economy with a more sustainable, more humane model. I don’t personally know how to design a utopian economy, but I’d sure like to live in a monastery-styled one.

WE NEED TO DO MORE TO HELP PEOPLE GET THE JOB THEY’RE SUITED FOR In order for our economy to function at its highest potential everybody needs to do the job they’re most suited to. In order for our world to move closer towards Utopia we need our economy to operate at its highest potential, but our education system and standard business model does more to stop people from getting the right job than it does to help them.

It’s not standard practice for schools to administer professional personality and aptitude tests to children once let alone doing longitudinal studies on the student body. Children are just judged by whether or not their good at math, science, history, and arts. Then they’re given a piece of paper that says they’re either dumb, average or smart, and then they get thrown to the wolves.

Kids who are either rich or happen to be smart in the right ways get to go to university where they’re pushed to the breaking point intellectually and financially. Half the classes they’ll take will be completely random, and their professors will take great liberties with what/how they teach. Students will learn how to cite essays and regurgitate technical terms. The students who do the best will be the ones who stop asking questions and give their superiors what they want.

Once they graduate they’ll get a piece of paper that says they’re a higher form of life than people who only have a high school diploma. With that ticket through the glass ceiling they’ll enter management jobs where they’ll be tasked with whipping poor, uneducated people to work harder and make their employer richer.

The poor, uncredentialized workers who are turning the cogs of the economy will have to take whatever job they can, and it won’t be doing something they enjoy. They’ll have to give maximum effort for minimum wage, and every time they quit their job to go find a better one they start back at the bottom of the pecking order, and their resume will look more and more unprofessional.

Our economy isn’t designed to put people in the right jobs. It’s designed to make the rich richer and to keep the poor, poor. We have the tools and reasons to make sure people get into the right jobs. We just need to prioritize people over profits.

Here are a few steps we could take to help people get into the right jobs: Free education The glass ceiling of higher education is probably the greatest obstacle to a smoothfunctioning economy. We have the technology to provide free online education to the entire world for a fraction of the cost of our current, predatory higher education system.

We just don’t have the funding to fulfill the potential of online education. You can help fund it though, and every little bit helps.

Longitudinal personality/aptitude testing We can’t help people get where they are if we don’t know what they’re capable of. We’d know if we asked everyone, and if we kept testing them we could track where they’re going and then point them in that direction. If they take a job that doesn’t fit their personality profile we could warn them that they might be happier somewhere else.

Civilian AFPC The United States Air Force has an office called the AFPC (Air Force Personnel Center).

Every airman that joins the Air Force gets a file there. It includes all their military training records, job performance reviews and records of awards and reprimands. It’s a cradle to grave tracking system that helps the military keep track of its members and get them to where they need to be. The civilian sector doesn’t have an equivalent office, but if it did it could help people get to where they need to be.

Central job board There are millions of job boards in America alone. This literally makes it impossible to search all the job openings in the country. If there were one central job board the entire economy would be open to everyone.

Apprenticeships/mentorships The glass ceiling of higher education splits the work force into castes separated by levels of management. The standard way to make more money is to move up in management.

This forces the best and brightest workers to stop working and start micromanaging slaves. This is inefficient and unfair on a thousand levels. People wouldn’t need expensive credentials to get good jobs if employers hired workers under an apprenticeship program similar to how the military takes people off the street and grooms them through short educational courses and on the job training. If the best and brightest workers could keep getting pay raises without having to change jobs they could keep doing what they want and what they’re best at.

On-site housing People leave jobs they love and take ones they hate because they need as much money as possible to survive since they have to pay as much as possible for everything they buy.

The biggest expense in life is rent/mortgages. If workers didn’t have to worry about paying to keep a roof over their head they would be free to work for lower paying (but more fulfilling) jobs. If every business were required to offer free on-site housing for its workers then everyone would be free from the yoke of the land lord. This would free employees to choose the career that suits them.

AN ARGUMENT TO NATIONALIZE THE BANKS If all the banks and lending institutions in America were owned by the American government then none of them could fail, and we’d never need to spend $800 billion to bail them out. If you nationalize the Federal Reserve as well the government could print its own money without having to borrow and pay for it. This is what Canada does, and they're not paying billions of tax payers' dollars on interest for their own money.

Those ideas aren't new. Most economists with two cents worth of knowledge in their heads know that's what we should do, and the only reason we haven't is because of corruption.

Now, here's the big addition to these ideas that'll help turn America around. Make it a rule that the American Bank doesn't charge interest for its loans. Every one of them is interest free.

This will accomplish a lot of great things. First of all, when you spend money on something you give your money to that company, and then that company can use the profit to grow and provide more advanced services. When you give your money to a bank the bank can grow. Well, what the hell is a bank going to do when it grows? It doesn't do anything for the economy except give out more money, which the government could do for free. So when we give money to private banks we're basically throwing it away. It doesn't add anything to the economy. If we didn't have to pay private banks all our money in interest we could be giving that money to companies that do things like make solar power and improve those useful technologies and services.

Also, if we don't have to pay interest then loans will be much less likely to default, and then we won't have financial meltdowns caused by massive amounts of defaulted loans.

Plus, the American Bank wouldn't be pressured to require extremely high monthly payments, which will help people pay off their loans, resulting in even less defaulted loans. And all of this money will go back into stimulating the economy, and the things we buy will be taxed, which will help the government, which helps you.

And the best part is, your burdens will be lighter, and therefore you'll be happier. I got an awesome home loan at 4.8% That's less than most people pay, but by the time I pay off my house (30 years from now) I'll have paid twice as much as it's worth in interest and fees. That means my life is going to suck for the next 30 years, and I'll have spent a giant portion of what should have gone to my retirement on a house because our banking system is predatory even when it's at its best. That fucking sucks. Why do I live in a country that has streamlined the process of fucking over its citizens and rewarding the corrupt and greedy? I can't imagine a good justification to keep that system alive. I also can't imagine any of our politicians doing anything to fix it or bring about this much needed CHANGE.

The only argument against this that I can think of is that it could be corrupted. Well, the system we have right now is completely and utterly corrupt. So...

BUSINESS CHANGES THE WORLD Who's to say if the world is in a good shape or a bad shape right now? We all are. Even though we all come from different backgrounds and have different experiences that have taught us different lessons about the state of the world, all of our perceptions are valid, even if they contradict each other. We grew up in separate, unique environments. Some of us were born into better lives, but most of us were born into worse lives. If you think that's a pessimistic thing to say then look up the global poverty and crime rates. It's a statistical fact that most of the human beings alive today are living very hard, unjust lives.

The only people who live really good lives right now are the rich. Everyone else from the upper middle class to the lowest of the lower class has it bad; it's just a matter of degrees.

Anytime anyone complains about their living conditions they're shot down by optimists telling them, "You should be thankful for what you have. You could be starving and getting gang rapped just before you're thrown into a bonfire in Darfur." And to be fair, that's true. Most of us could have it a lot worse, and we do have a lot to be thankful for.

However, if every level of disparity is accepted under the auspice that "it could be worse," then we end up enabling every level of disparity.

When things happen to people that are too horrible to write off as whining, we find other reasons to write them off, and if we can’t excuse away a human right atrocity we just pretend it doesn't exist or doesn't matter.

The entire world is like one of the small German villages outside the Jewish concentration camps. We all know that just past the city limits people are being systematically deprived, tortured and murdered. The difference between us and them is that the atrocities are happening across your country’s border, not your city’s.

Excusing all the world's problems away by saying, "It's not that bad." misses the point.

The point is that it could be better…for everyone. It should be better for everyone. We have the technology and resources to live in a very awesome world. In fact, we've had the technology and the resources for quite a while. If we had done as much as possible to help as many people as possible achieve their potential since 1980, we would all have flying cars and cute semi-intelligent robot servants by now. And we would most likely be in the initial stages of colonizing either Mars or the moon. If you don't believe me, ask Stephen Hawking. He’ll back me up.

But instead of doing that we've driven history to the point where there's a continent sized patch of garbage in the Pacific ocean, the American Gulf coast is ruined, people are dying of radiation and food poisoning, natural disasters are leaving bodies in the streets, the mines that provide us our resources are collapsing (killing the workers and cutting off everyone else's supply of raw material), more and more of our budgets are going to putting peaceful people in jail for the crime of being different or for not filling out the right forms or paying the right fees. Our news stations lie to us and we know it but

accept it. We worship moronic celebrities and try to emulate their stupidity. We view intelligence as a bad thing. Our schools are crumbling. Our teachers are taking the blame for the rest of society's failures. We're actually talking about teaching mythology as science in public schools. We're doping ourselves up with government-approved mind-numbing pacification pills, building our houses with poison and bullying each other at work. We treat "lower" ranking workers like second class citizens. We're stealing from the poor, killing the planet and ourselves. And the whole time we're playing video games, watching television, fussing with our cell phones, surfing the internet and laughing at dick and fart jokes, LOL cats, canned cliff hangers and unrealistic love stories.

To be fair, I might not have to worry about being executed in a ditch tomorrow, but I bust my ass at work, and I barely have any money left to myself after I've paid the bills (that I know are inflated). My life is hard, but there are illegal immigrants all over the world working three times as hard as I do for three times as little while getting belittled by conservative shock jocks. Those men, women and children's lives are hard, but their lives aren't as hard as the refugees living in tent cities hoping someone will send a truck full of rice so their dying family can survive another day, but their lives aren't as hard as the people who died in the next tent over. But all of our problems are valid. They're all real, and they all matter.

So instead of bickering about who has it worse and how thankful we should all be for what we have, how about we all focus on what we all could have if we worked together to give ourselves the opportunities and resources the world never gave us (or the person next to us, or the person 1, or 5, or 10, or 100, or 1,000, or 5,000 miles away).?

It's simple game theory. We all have the most to gain by working together. I know that sounds a little Communist, but isn't it also exactly what the founders of the United States of America advocated? And regardless of who said it or why, isn't it an obvious truth? We all have the most to gain by working together.

Yet we're not doing that. Instead we’re fighting each other tooth and nail in a dog-eatdog rat race. We're treating everyone like our enemies. We're cutting everyone's throats, stabbing everyone in the back or turning a blind eye to each other’s’ problems (sometimes in the name of optimism). And look where it's got us. People are building bunkers preparing for the apocalypse. Nobody questions whether there will be another war, just how soon it'll happen.

So the world’s going to hell in a hand basket because everyone is acting stupid and mistreating each other even though the people we’re discriminating against are the only people in the universe who can help us build the most advanced world possible. We all have our excuses, but in the end, no matter how justified those excuses are, the end result is still that if we don’t work together we can’t build the most advanced world possible.

So the question is this, “What are you going to do?” Of course, we’ve all been asked that before. In fact, a lot of us have been asking ourselves that question a lot. The only problem is that we don’t know what we can do. Sure, we can vote, but how much potential progress has that turned into reality in the past 60 years? Where’s it gotten us?

It’s gotten us to where we are today. We’ve given billions to charity, but half of that gets siphoned off to “administrative expenses,” stolen or mismanaged. There’s a question as to whether the money that does make it to the intended recipients helps them more than it enables a brutal cycle of dependency.

The question of “what we can do” is a complicated one because the truth of the matter is that we don’t have as much power as we like to tell ourselves. Truth is most of us barely have the power to take care of our own lives. Truth is a lot of us don’t even have that much power. So how can we be expected to save the poor when we’re relatively poor ourselves and can’t even save ourselves?

Well, ask yourself, how did the people with all the power today get all their power? They bought it. Money represents anything money can buy, including power. In fact, the only way to get power is to buy it. Sure, you can take power with force, but force costs money.

You can win power through popularity, but popularity costs money. No matter how you cut the cake, money is power.

If you want to change the world then you need power. If you want power then you need money to buy it. If you want money you need to make it. And you don’t need to do anything illegal, violent or terroristic to make money. In fact, the best way to make money is to start a legal business. That’s how all the most powerful people in the world today came to power; they started a legal business and made their money right on the store shelves in plain view of the entire public, and that wouldn’t have hurt or killed anyone if they hadn’t gotten greedy. Somewhere along the line they lost sight of the fact that we all have the most to gain by helping the most amount of people as much as possible over the long haul. Then they decided to help themselves to as much as possible as quickly as possible, and they sold the rest of us out and exploited us to make that happen.

The most lucrative (and thus most potentially powerful) way to change our lives is to follow the example of the people who took our lives from us. We need to start our own legal businesses because that’s where we stand to make the most money. The more money we make the more we can build a sustainable lifestyle that reduces our dependency on the archaic and inhumane systems that we have to reluctantly serve today. The less dependent we become on the systems that prey on the poor the weaker those systems will become.

Even if you didn’t own a share of the system, wouldn’t you want a system in place that didn’t own (or have any interest in ever owning) you? If any part of this idea appeals to you, I can promise you that the system with the most power will always be the system with the most money. The system with the most money will always be the system that

sells the most goods and/or services. If you want to have any power over the environment you live in, you have to own a share or be an employee of (or be in the good graces of) the system that sells the most goods and/or services.

You only have as much control over your life as you have over your environment. In the world we live in, the amount of control you have over your environment is relative to the percentage of the wealth you own within that environment. When you look at the entire globe as a finite environment it looks to me like people’s lives suck because they don’t have enough control over their environment, and the main reason they don’t have control over the environments they live in is because the people with all the money (and thus power) are exploiting their positions of power to force the poor to work under worse conditions for less pay so the rich and powerful can have more money and more power.

Even if there’s not any bizarre Illuminati conspiracy theory (which I honestly don’t believe there is), there’s still no denying that the rich are screwing over the poor. In fact, you can look it up in any intro level economics text book. The backbone for our economy is based on the idea that businesses need to pay as little as possible to produce goods and services that they sell for as much as possible. The idea is that you have the most to gain by screwing the most amount of people for as much as possible. If you don’t believe me, go fill out a loan application at your nearest bank.

I’m not saying it’s the only way or the end-all best way for the poor (and/or the relatively poor) to take control of our environments (and thus our own lives), but as best as I can tell from where I’m standing, the best bet we have to make our dreams come true is to start our own perfectly legal businesses and earn more money than the bastards who are making our lives suck more than they have to.

If we want to control our environments (and thus our lives) we need to own our own businesses and reduce our personal expenses. We can kill two birds with one stone by living in our offices. That way we won’t have to buy our own homes. We won’t have to commute. We won’t have to pay for repairs to our property out of our own pocket. And any fun and luxurious amenities we wanted in our house we could bill to the company and call an “office improvement.” And we wouldn’t have to hide it because we would own the company and get to decide what the company’s profits are spent on. It wouldn’t be illegal or immoral in any way.

Think about it. You could spend your life working and financing someone else who is going to use that money to pamper themselves and hold your head down farther or you could start your own business and spend your life working and financing your own security without having to hold anyone else’s head down. The only thing you would have to do is exactly what you already do. Just instead of doing it for a greedy wanker, do it for yourself and share the wealth with your fellow workers equitably.

ONE DOLLAR EQUALS ONE VOTE IN THE ECONOMY The term, "Free Market" is defined as, "an economic system in which prices and wages are determined by unrestricted competition between businesses, without government regulation or fear of monopolies."

The American economy is not strictly a free market. There's a lot of regulation that goes on, but by and large the general population determines what's sold and how much it's sold for via supply and demand. If we don't want something that's offered we won't buy it, and then business offering it will cease to exist. If we want something we'll buy it, and the more we want it the more we'll pay for it.

The more money we spend on a certain product or service the more money that business will make. Thus, the more money that business will have to reinvest into making that product or service better. As investors see us spending our money in certain places they'll start more business to fill that need. That drives up competition and forces each business in that field to make even better products for potentially lower, more competitive prices.

There's no ballot box where we deposit our voting slips and determine what we want businesses to sell us, but there are cash registers and dollars. A free market is a democracy where we vote with our dollars, and we suck at voting. If we took all the money we spent on sports over the past 30 years and invested all of that money into energy we'd all be riding around in flying cars right now. If we took all the money we spent on designer clothes in the past 30 years and invested it in public transportation there'd be no traffic. If we took all the money we spent on movies and invested it in housing there'd be no homelessness. We've done a good job of voting on computers at least. For every other dumbass decision, there's Master Card.

As we watch banks collapse and the economy go to shit we hear a lot of talk about the role regulation and deregulation of business practices has played, and it's all very confusing. We're all looking for someone to point the finger at. We need a scapegoat, and I have no doubt that one will be found for us. It won't solve our problems, but it'll make us feel better, because we won't have to point the fingers at ourselves. We won't have to admit that gas prices are so high because we voted for it by buying Hummers.

We won't have to admit that the reason so many mortgages have defaulted is because we voted on mass-produced houses we couldn't afford in unsustainable suburbs. The reason we're worrying about whether or not we'll have the basic necessities of life when we retire is because we didn't vote on them. We voted on Pepsi, Prada, Persian rugs, IPods, Hollywood, Harley Davidson, Marlboro, Ikea, and Viagra.

There are a lot of corporate douche bags and incompetent politicians out there who have done a lot of unethical things to bankrupt the economy, but we shouldn't forget that we voted in all of these mistakes with our dollars, and we should take responsibility for it and feel ashamed. However, that won't do us any good unless we use that shame to vote

wiser in the future. Don't waste your money. Spend responsibly on the things that matter, and the things that matter will improve. Not wasting your money on things you don't need will also allow you to save money to give you a cushion when things go bad.

Then, the shit will never hit the fan.

A SUSTAINABLE ECONOMIC MODEL In this blog I explained why we need to replace the standard predatory capitalist (i.e. business is war and war is hell) economic model with a more egalitarian model, and in another blog I further explained the long term consequences of continuing business as usual. This raises the question, how do we do that? The answer is surprisingly simple.

Now, what I'm about to propose isn't the only answer, but it's a powerful one.

The current standard business modal is to lease an existing office building that's plastered inside and out with toxic chemicals that prolong the life of the building. You suck water and power from the city utility grid, and you hire workers from all over town who commute to and from work every day to the severe detriment of their health and morale. You pay your workers as little as possible. You make up for the lack of incentive to excel by setting high work quotas, threatening to fire them," hiring expensive and superfluous middle management teams to crack the whip and brainwash them into believing willful slavery is maturity.

Under this system, even if your business turns a profit, you still lose by destroying the environment, wasting resources and making your workers' lives miserable. You can begin to fix this problem by redesigning the office building itself. You can build a cheap, sturdy office building off the grid where land is cheap using the following design:

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3 This architectural model minimizes building expenses, which frees up capital to equip it with solar panels and its own water collection/treatment systems. This will eliminate

utility bills in the future. The building will also be strong enough to survive any natural disaster, and it's fireproof.

The main benefit of this model though is that it provides living quarters for the workers.

Plus, it can be easily expanded by adding additional rings for more offices and condos.

By bringing the workers' houses directly into the business you eliminate the need for commutes, which will improve worker health and morale. It allows workers to have more flexible work hours and eliminate response time in case there's an emergency at work. It also facilitates a tight-knit team mentality without having to resort to psychological manipulation. It also gives your workers financial security as it eliminates the need to pay rent and transportation costs. It also gives the workers a feeling of attachment with their business, which will motivate them to work harder without a boss cracking a whip at them.

Instead of paying your workers the lowest amount possible within the limits of supply and demand, simply give them a generous percentage of the company's profits. Reserve a portion of the company's profits to go towards improving the building with better amenities like hot tubs, gardens, extra storage space, better kitchens, etc. Finally, give the workers ownership of their condo upon retirement. This will give your workers a vested interest in the success of the company without having to bully them. This eliminates the need for middle management whose primary job is to monitor worker performance and build paper trails leading to termination or promotion. Your workers won't need to back-stab each other as they vie for promotion, and you won't lose your best workers to management. They can simply get on with doing their job, mentoring each other and motivating each other. Best of all, your workers will have minimal motivation to quit and find a higher paying job with better benefits elsewhere. This will eliminate constantly training new employees.

If your company does well, which it should, and grows to employ thousands of employees you'll incidentally create a major social organization with all the economic might of its members backing it. Then organizing your friends, family and coworkers to take political action is simply a matter of sending a company-wide E-mail. And you won't have to worry about unionizing because the entire business will already be unionized. And the CEO won't have to worry about exploiting the workers to build his mansion because the office is the mansion and all the workers will get to use it.

This business model is suited for any type of business from warehouse distribution to computer programming to assembly line production to publishing houses to farmers in third world countries. It can even be used as an intellectual monastery where resident intellectuals (or intellectuals on sabbatical) can complete their life's works. Writers can work as a team to quickly produce quality literature and share the profits without relying on the outdated publishing industry that hordes writers' profits and stifles innovation.

THINGS I WISH PEOPLE WOULD INVENT Below is a list of things I wish people would invent. If you want to steal any of these ideas, feel free. Just make the damn things so I can buy or borrow them. I'll be adding more items to this list as I think of them.

Toilet seats with pedals that lift the seat.

How the hell has this not been mass produced yet? There was even an 11 year old American kid who invented one in like 2007 and made national news. But we still don't have them, and women are still sitting in piss. Every woman in the world would make the men in her house buy these. Somebody become a billionaire mass producing these, please. I'll do a commercial for free. I'm serious.

It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to invent a toilet pedal, and you don't have to invent a whole new toilet. Just build an attachment that connects to existing toilets. A clan of engineering students could build them in their garage and sell them at frat parties for beer money and sex. Every day millions of people press a pedal at the base of their trash can to lift the lid to throw garbage in. Move that pedal into the bathroom and have it lift the toilet seat. Why aren't the people who make pedal-operated trash cans making money off of this?

(Update: It turns out you can actually buy these, but only on Amazon as far as I know, and at the time of writing this, Amazon doesn't have any in stock, and some of the comments from people who have used it say that it doesn't lift the seat up all the way. So, if you could solve that design flaw you could easily establish yourself as the market leader in the growing toilet pedal market. Somebody is going to get rich improving on an existing product. It could be you.)

Choose your own adventure story building software The technology exists to build elaborate databases easily in a day. Tons of specialized text editing software has been invented to help authors organize novels. There's even a lot of freeware that does all of these things. What doesn't exist is a program that walks you through the stages of a story and answer a series of questions than then generate a story as well structured as an episode of The Twilight Zone. The plot templates exist.

The right people just haven't gotten together yet, but they will.

Thick clothing with ambitious technological gadgets sewn into them Technology has reached the point where this is possible. There's no reason we shouldn't all be walking around like Inspector Gadget with retractable propellers in our hats. I should be able to shoot Nerf bullets out of my coat sleeve. Women should be able to shoot mace out of theirs. Everybody loved Data's quirky, wearable gadgets in The Goonies. We would have bought completely impractical Walkman-sized clothing

gadgets then, and we're still waiting for an IPhone wrist watch. Shoes have had great success putting zippers, pockets, inflatable soles, lights and wheels into them. Run with that. If you can imagine cools ways to put gadgets onto super heroes, then just think of your customers as super heroes and pimp their clothes accordingly. When I shout, "PANTS ACTIVATE!" I want something to happen. I want two-way speakers in my collar and a HUD that flips down from the brim of my hat. I don't care what it does. I don't care if shows me Google Maps, my heart rate or it just makes everything look all psychedelic. I'll buy one pretty much no matter what.

Our pocket books are as deep as your imagination. Someday someone is going to design a motorcycle jacket that, instead of having padding in the back has some kind of electronic gadget the size of a Manta Ray in it. If you're as big as a professional wrestler then you should be really upset. You could sew pounds of inconspicuous gadgets into your jacket. I wonder who the first major clothing brand is going to make the Swiss Army Knife of leather jackets and become associated with extra-utilitarian clothing. By rights it should be the Swiss Army Knife company, but... we'll see.

The ultimate James Bond pimp cane You can fit a lot of gadgets into clothing, but some devices just won't fit comfortable in a jacket. You can fit a lot of slim gadgets into even a conservative-sized cane with a solid hull.... especially if you don't try to fit a gun or a knife inside. Other than a laser pointer, a single Nerf bullet, a squirt gun, and a Swiss army knife, I don't need any weapons in my cane. I could use a two-way speakers, battery, lighter, USB drive, breath spray, flashlight, projector and IPod 5 in my pimp cane though. The technology exists to build the ultimate pimp cane, but apparently we're just not pimp enough to yet.

Sustainable Eco Office Neighborhoods The suburbs are unsustainable and inhumane. They're destroying the planet and making us miserable. It's like Jacque Fresco said, "This shit's got to go." Hell, Jacque Fresco even drew up all the plans for a sustainable replacement for suburbia. I'm not intimately familiar with his political views, and I don't give a damn what he thinks people would/should behave like in a Utopian society. I just want his damn house. I wish he would spend the millions of dollars he's made off of advertising them on building them by now. And I don't know why everyone else hasn't stolen his ideas and made billions of dollars off them yet either.

I don't even need anything as fancy as The Venus Project. When I was a kid I lived three blocks from the actual projects. The outside of my house doesn't have to sparkle. All I need are sandbag walls, concrete floors, basic utilities and a green house. If you built one big enough you could put bedrooms and offices in it. Then you wouldn't have to leave your house to get to work or the grocery store. I guess there are people who wouldn't want to live in that kind of environment, but if the number of drug addicts and Emo kids living in suburbia is any indication of how frustrating and unfulfilling living in

the suburbs is, I'd say it's a moral imperative to try something different. Point in fact, suburbia is unsustainable. It's not a matter of if it will collapse but when. Sooner or later we're going to be forced to try something different. So why not get rich doing the right thing that everybody is waiting to happen... right now? I'd do it myself, but I barely got enough money to build a sandwich.

If you're having a hard time imagining what I'm talking about, let me draw you a picture: Occupy LOL Street: A Brave New Village Intellectual Monastery Designs What I'm Going to do When I'm Rich Floating island communities We have cruise ships, submarines and aircraft carriers that can stay at sea for months at a time and sustain hundreds of crew members. Those are expensive as hell because they're designed to get from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible in as much style as possible. I want to move out to sea and never come back. So I don't need a floating vessel that goes anywhere. And I don't need style. I'm used to austerity, and I think minimalism is aesthetically pleasing anyway. I'll trade all the cannons and chandeliers for a garden. To fulfill my needs the island doesn't need to be anything more than a really, huge floating drum with a garden on the top and an anchor on the bottom. That'd be real easy to make. You could make one out of cement using a cast cheaper than it costs to build a 5 bedroom house. And yes, concrete floats.

Rich people like to live on boats. There'd be an instant market for luxury floating drum islands. You could even make floating camp grounds and hotel chains to test the market first. And the best part about it is you don't have to buy land. I don't know why Kim Dotcom isn't hosting MegaUpload in a floating fortress in the middle of the Pacific Ocean or why Pablo Escobar wasn't throwing a permanent Mardi Gras on a massive tract of floating resort islands or why every hotel in Waikiki doesn't sell their property and build twice as many rooms off the coast of Hawaii. Or why the Red Cross isn't building sustainable flotillas for refugees where they can live safely and sustainable while the warlords in their home country figure out what to do after all their farmers leave for greener pastures at sea.

If you're having a hard time imagining what I'm talking about, let me draw you a picture: How to Build a Trailer House Boat Occupy LOL Street: The Freedom Flotilla

Monk and Punk: Book 2 Social media for reasonably smart people What do the Usenet, MySpace, Facebook, Digg, and Reddit all have in common? They started out appealing to people of above average intelligence. Since communities of above-average intelligence were collaborating in ways they'd never been able to before, they formed great, productive communities. As word spread about what great and useful resources and communities were, their popularity exploded. Then stupid people flooded the communities and lowered the bar intellectually until the bottom just fell out. Then all the smart people moved on to the next piece of innovative technology to get their information and socialization from before the Neanderthals catch up to them. At any rate, there's too damn many stupid people flooding the big social media sites and ruining the experience. Customers want to get all their aggregated news and social media needs from one site. And they want the community they share the site with to be reasonably intelligent. There should be sites like Reddit (expect with user profiles like MySpace) that find a way to weed out the stupid. Here are two ideas how: 

Have the site analyze users' temporary internet files to calculate the user's IQ. If it sees that you've been looking at nothing but teen pop star sites and online video games then it won't let you post comments.



Give guest users almost unlimited access to the site, but in order to post comments you have to register, and in order to register you have to pass an intelligence test that asks questions about history, world politics, science, culture, technology, etc. Users can't post comments if they can't pass the competency exam.

One website to rule them all I go to Reddit to get most of my news, because it's the only place that offers most of the world's news in a convenient layout. I go to Facebook to get all my online correspondence, because that's where everybody is at, and there's where all the tools are.

The only other site I need to go to on a regular basis is Wordpress to do my blogging.

But back when MySpace was the premier social media site I was able to do my blogging there because MySpace had a powerful blogging tool with a thriving writing community.

If Facebook offered blogging I'd spent a third more time on Facebook. If Facebook had a blogging platform, crowd-sourced news, a robust comment/karma tracking system, Email and cloud storage then I'd never go to any other site unless I needed to buy something. If you're using Google Chrome, then you don't ever even need to visit a web page with a search engine on it. So the perfect site doesn't even need an external search engine as long as it has a link to download a browser like Google Chrome.

I'm just saying, the first person to combine the functionalities of Facebook, MySpace, Reddit, and Wordpress into one site is going to become a billionaire. To this you reply,

hey, Google + can do all that. To that I would reply, apparently not well enough, since nobody uses it.

Laser/Sonar walking sticks for the blind Blind people carry walking sticks so they can tell what's directly in front of them, but they need to know how far the next wall is before they get there. Blind people often have friends and family tell them how many steps they'll have to take to get to reach the edge of an unfamiliar environment like a restaurant. You can solve this problem by putting a laser or sonar device into the handle of a blind person's cane. When you press a button on the cane it'll measure the distance between you and a wall or object you're facing.

Then the cane tells the user how far the object is. The cane could have a speaker in it that beeps the number of steps or it could say it in a sexy British voice. You could even have the cane transmit the distance to a hearing aid device so the distance just gets whispered into their ear. Or the handle could just vibrate once for every step.

An 8 bit virtual office I want a fun virtual office, and I can build one in Second Life, but I don't need or want to use the software or bandwidth that would require. Graphically, all I need in a virtual office is an environment like Final Fantasy 1 or Dragon Quest. I need a game like Farmville, except instead of wasting time I can walk around a fully functioning virtual office where I can interact with other real users in real time.

A whole genre of music big enough to warrant its own radio station of techno music played solely by orchestras and designed to facilitate thinking This is another no-brainer that has been done before. Moby played with a full orchestra.

Metallica played with a full orchestra. It was awesome. There's nothing wrong with listening to regular classical music played by orchestras. Young people just don't. If symphonies would get off their high horse in their ivory tower and stop telling their customers what they're supposed to consider refined music and give them what they want...a lot more musicians would have jobs.

If this kind of music were made under the supervision of professional psychologists, they could make kick ass future-retro techno that caters to creative thinking. This wouldn't just make the people responsible for it a lot of money, but it could potentially make the world smarter.

Pop music with the words muffled I ain't gonna lie. If a Katy Perry song comes on the radio when I'm driving I'm likely to roll up my windows and turn up the volume until I come to a stop light or I'm about to let one of my friends in the car. That music is designed to be hypnotic, and it works on me half the time. The only problem is, listening to Katy Perry and other pop stars drone

on about the most banal, anti-intellectual brain rot makes me want to stab my ears with pencils. I'd buy damn near every pop album that came out if the words were sung in a different language that I couldn't understand or they were just electronically altered so the words sound like a raspy ghost (a sweet, sexy, raspy ghost). The only reason I listen to pop music on my headphones anyway is because I'm trying to drown out the sound of how much the city sucks. If everything pop singers say is just white noise anyway, then just give me the white noise without the insultingly stupid dialogue.