Great piece on Real Sports about the unwillingness of soccer governing boards to take effective action on racism in Europe. Thierry Henry left Arsenal over it.

Those coal plant regulations will be fought not only by the utilities, but also by the railroads. Coal traffic is a big part of their traffic.

SOUNDERS! Seattle! 4-0 Win! First In The League!

Oh and FIFA still corrupt

Graeber:

Suddenly it became possible to see that if there’s a rule, it’s that the more obviously your work benefits others, the less you’re paid for it.

The problem of a world of unlimited leisure is that demand then becomes unlimited. Population, unchecked, would create exponentially large demands on such a system. It's Malthusian, pure and simple...a world with no constraints, only consumption would quickly eat itself.

This Sunday news report makes me want to be Maru.

I want to be Maru.

According to his Wikipedia page, Maru's birthday is May 24, 2007.

My day can only go downhill after watching the cat video. But at least it can go pretty far down.

Never having done any real work in his life, Kid Herz wouldn't understand this, but-

I value work proportionately to the skill required to perform it. A colonial cabinet, handmade and individual to a clients taste, was a thing of beauty that could take hundreds of hours to make. A crappy Chinese DVD player using pirated technology badly done rolls off a factory floor with maybe half an hour of low skill work.

And in all this it is NOT the worker that matters, but the demand for whatever he or she produces. Everything else being equal, I'll have far more more respect for the wage and benefit demands from a high skill worker than a factory drone or burger flipper, obviously. If a man cares so little about his own economic welfare that he won't obtain useful skills to sell, I fail to see why his demands for $15 an hour should elicit anything but derisive laughter, for example.

But if labor is valued less, it's because labor in a mechanized society is less craft and more button pushing.

@12: If you'd ever worked with machines, you'd have a certain respect for "button pushing". But go ahead, keep assuming that things you're unfamiliar with must be easy and barely worth paying people to do.

Thank you President Obama for bringing our soldier home!

@12 - The only thing valued less than the labor in a mechanized world is your point of view.

Oh, don't mind Seattleblahs. He just likes to prattle on. The poor thing doesn't get much human interaction outside of Slog.

Buffet/Berskshire Hathaway is such a paradox. On the one hand, Mid-America Energy is the best of the best in utilities: he took three (?) conventional investor-owned utilities and combined them into a company that is both incredibly innovative from an environmental standpoint, and incredibly customer focused - all while keeping rates low and profits high.

The acquisition of BNSF, on the other hand, had been a disaster. Management seems to be hellbent on maximizing profit on the highline (the original Great Northern mainline) while neglecting maintenance and investment for the duration of the North Dakota oil boom. This could have grave impacts for agricultural production, and the oil they are shipping negates the investments Mid America is making in clean energy.

But I suppose that is the nature of Capitalists.

My friend & I were first on the scene of the double homicide at 29th & S. King after hiding in our car for a couple minutes when we first heard the shots. Sadly, we were too late to do or see anything useful besides help console the very traumatized nearest eyewitness (who himself was a block away when it happened). Two crumpled bodies in the dark street.

Massive police response, many cars, very quick. Helicopter too. And they were respectful to him and us, which was good to see.

Fucking sad situation. I hope the killer is caught.

@13 "there is little demand for anything that they can learn to do?"

Are you arguing that low paid workers are uneducable, or just not bright enough for high wage industries?

So next Sunday: the "Sunday Morning Good News"? Ansel. Ansel?

@12,

I value work proportionately to the skill required to perform it.

That's completely arbitrary. Being a successful server, or hairstylist, or janitor requires skills. If you had no training in any of those you'd probably fail on your first several tries. Same as someone who tried to be a stockbroker with no stockbroking skills. It's relative. Could you make a DVD player? You probably couldn't even make a crappy one. You don't have those skills.

Did you actually read Frank's interview of Graeber?

@22 Not likely but even if it did read the interview Subhumanblues would would willfully remain ignorant of the meaning.

Never underestimate the willfulness of Subhumanblues's drive towards ignorance. Subhumanblues revels in it's ignorance, celibates it, brags about it.

@10

By "leisure" I do not mean being idle or in a state of suspended animation (or laying in a suspended hammock) or the simple retirement of old age.

I mean the leisure that a fully active and intelligent adult might wish to have -- travel, vacations, dining, entertainment.

That costs and it's also very labor intensive.

The more people who want to be served during leisure, subtracts from those performing the leisure services!

Is it me, or does the continuing revelations about government abuses over our privacy rights, are ones that we've already given up to the internet and companies, with hackers thrown in? I don't really see things improving until they're addressed as two sides of the same coin.

@19 Good on you for stepping up.

@11 Floyd Odlum was a major stakeholder in Convair, the company that created the rockets, thus donating for the line item that would be added back in. A man who was strategically selling short for the 1929 crash, and made bank buying up companies at fire sale prices during the last great depression. We actually did this system, where the rich did self interest funded public works. Mark Twain labeled it "The Gilded Age" because in practice it looked shiny on the outside, but it was decaying crap once you got past the veneer.

Not thinking of asking the people and corporations that spurred on and profit from this war of choice to chip in to help soldiers who lost parts of themselves in a war of choice does seems fairly fucked up as well dood.

Not only did Qatar bribe FIFA to get the World Cup, but thousands of people are expected to die getting them ready for it. Between that and refusing to move from Russia, despite how horrible Putin's being… just about ready to give up on my favourite sporting event.

Fuck you, FIFA.

Hi treacle, I must be your neighbor, if you live on 29th. I wasn't keen on subjecting the world to my nightwear, so I stayed firmly inside.

@26

However, it is the definition as used by most of the "end of work" futurists and sociologists of the 1960s and 1970s such as Alvin Toffler. The concept back then was called "The Leisure Society" (not to be confused by the post-punk band of the same name).

Leisure in that form was like the adventure from the film "Westworld" where people have so much time and money on their hands, they crave more and more exotic forms of entertainment.

While it's amusing to consider a society of bucolic proles, spending their leisure time lounging at cafes, browsing through annotated editions of Das Kapital, it's also likely that people would want to go on kayaking expeditions.

Both of these are described in this economic definition of leisure.

Term leisure Definition: The portion of time workers and other people spend not being compensated for work performed when they actively engaged in the production of goods and services. In other words, this is the time people sent off the job.

Leisure activities can include resting at home, working around the house (without compensation), engaging in leisure activities (such as weekend sports, watching movies), or even sleeping.

Leisure time pursuits becomes increasingly important for economies as they become more highly developed. As technological advances reduce the amount of time people need to spend working to generate a given level of income, they have more freedom to pursue leisure activities.

Not only does this promote sales of industries that provide leisure related goods (sports, entertainment, etc.) it also triggers an interesting labor-leisure tradeoff and what is termed the backward-bending labor supply curve.

Only in a capitalist society - where a minority of oligarchs are allowed to horde and monopolize the resources needed for humanity's survival, and ordinary citizens only have their labor to trade for an income from which to survive - is mechanization of production and decrease in demand for labor a problem. Our modern society could easily manage to provide all of our needs with the wobbly vision of the 4 day week and 4 hour day. However, the benefits of increased productivity are exclusively taken by the capitalist owners.

@12 what your argument against a reasonable minimum wage ignores is the fact that a wage should not only reflect the value of the skill being performed by a worker, but also the value of the human life asked to toil on your behalf.

@17: No need to capitalize capitalists in your last sentence.

@28 - We were neighbors a year+ ago. But Saturday night we were just visiting friends and just happened to arrive at the moment of. Still, I would be graced to make your acquaintance at some point.

@32 that's hilarious!!! Did lee Raymond put the oil in the ground for Exxon to "earn" his $400M retirement??? Has Jamie dimon or anyone else on Wall Street ever produced a fucking thing in their lives???

@34 most Americans do not get to enjoy our "great wealth" either.

@37 that's all meaningless BS. Income without comparing costs or quality of life is irrelevant. So what if my income provides 10x more fiat currency than someone somewhere else if I still have to spend it all on my rent in a measly little flat. Plus money can't make new old trees, or make polluted air and water clean.

And this is all bedsides the point... Our entire world now operates more or less in a capitalistic manner with tremendous economic inequality... Not because the rich create more wealth, but because they CONTROL more wealth, resources, capital, etc

@32: " I think one of the problems w/ David Graeber's theory is that people who don't have a job usually aren't very happy."

Well, many people who do have jobs are also not very happy. What makes you think it is the lack of a job, in and of itself, that is the root cause of their unhappiness?

I wish that little Ansel Herz's Sunday morning news wrap-up combined an expose on little Ansel Herz's privileged background. He's masquerading as a little lefty, a savior of the working man. If all of you only knew about HIS background of privilege, money and class - he is NOT who he is trying to be.

Watch out for his articles - they are as biased as the bullshit on FOX News. It's time to take down little Ansel Herz.

@42 I'm not interested in purchasing power. I'm interested in human welfare and rights. But I am impressed with your ability to judge my knowledhe of the world based on a few slog posts! you sound pretty special. So please oh wise one, tell us now how the oligarchs create our wealth...

And besides, your chart is bullshit. For example in Mexico the annual income - adjusted for purchasing power as you say (there is no mention of how this is calculated) - is about 3000 per year. My mortgage is about $2k/mo and I am not aware of any renting situation in Seattle under $1k/mo... Am I to understand that Mexicans are unable to afford shelter at least 9 months of the year???

Quit trying to peg me and please again try to explain how the oligarchs have created our wealth.

And yet we rank near the lowest for western nations in health care outcomes. The pharmaceutical industry is just barely catching up with the extra disease created by the toxic effects of our capitalist industrialized world. They mostly only make pills to make money anyhow. Most of the real beneficial research has come from public universities. And did Gates and Allen make Microsoft, or the thousands of contract engineers and programmers? (I wish they would have unionized and extracted a much larger share)

The fact is we live in an abundant world and we are all entitled to share in its abundance. Much of this wealth you speak of in America may look nice on paper. But then when was the last time a standing forest looked good for weyerhauser's earnings? And yet our society rewards the timber Barron who claims our forest for himself, extracts its value and that of our labor for himself, and leaves us with a desolate clear cut that may kill us with a mudslide. This is happening on a global scale. Capitalism and greed are killing us and our planet