At your service!

On quite a number of occasions, my father has expressed his surprise at how people earn money these days, in contrast to the old days when he was an active participant in the labor economy.  Back then the work products were a lot more tangible.  Farmers grew crops. Miners dug stuff. Workers made widgets.

His favorite way of expressing the change that he and all of us try to understand is "now, everybody is a consultant."

While that is an exaggeration, of course, it is true that even in the old country there has been a tremendous change in the percentage of labor in anything but agriculture, mining, and manufacturing.  There are consultants. Beauty parlors. Investment managers.  And that other comment that father makes: "if they are not consultants, they are all doing software."

If that is the story in the old country, it is even more dramatic here in the US.  However, listening to trump and his 63 million voters, one would believe that everybody is in farming or mining or making widgets in factories.  While facts do not matter to these minions, the rest of us care.

 “goods-producing” jobs like logging, mining, construction and manufacturing accounted for only 20.5 million jobs last month, in a nation with 148 million total positions.

Where do the overwhelming majority work then?  In the service sector.

If you have a mental model in which the only valuable jobs involve making steel or mining coal, it’s easy to lose sight of some of the middle-income jobs that are more common in the 21st-century service economy. Examples include the blackjack dealer in a Las Vegas casino, the nurse at a hospital renowned for its cancer treatments, the audio technician on a movie set, the engineer who advises companies worldwide on the best way to extract oil.

trump and his fellow idiots want to make America great again by trying to bring back those logging, mining, construction, and manufacturing jobs that will only fade more into the future?  What a bunch of morons!  "Fucking morons," to quote the now ousted Secretary of State, Wayne Tracker.

Services make a lot of money for the US.

The biggest is travel, which accounted for $204 billion last year. This is an area that the president should know well. When a Canadian couple stays in a Trump hotel in New York, the money they spend counts as a service export.
The next biggest category is “charges for the use of intellectual property,” a category that includes foreigners who pay to watch movies or music made in the United States, as well as licenses of patents and trademarks.
Other big ones include financial services, insurance, telecommunications and information technology, and a wide range of engineering and other consulting services.

If trump really cared for the average, forgotten, people, he should talk more about the plight of fast food workers than pretending to care about the coal mine workers.

Who am I kidding; the narcissist in the Oval Office cares for nobody but himself!

Deal with your own shit!

Some of us knew that it was only a matter of time.  It finally happened.

We have to deal with our own crap--it is no longer somebody else's problem!

"We" as in even right here in Eugene: "On Thursday, the reverberations of China’s tough stance reached Sam Miller, owner of Lane Apex."

What does Lane Apex do?  "picks up curbside commingled recyclables such as plastics, unsorted paper, cardboard and metal cans from homes in Eugene."

What has this got to do with China?

China, by far the world’s biggest importer and re­processor of recyclables, has put the United States on notice that this fall and early next year, it will begin turning away all but the most pristine used plastics and unsorted waste paper.

Of course, it is not merely Eugene:

With China’s looming ban, the entire West Coast system for sorting and shipping off recyclables is beginning to slow down, as the industry realizes it may not be able to get rid of the stuff

Back in 1987, when I was new to this country, one of the interesting stories for me was about the barge from New York that was on the sea and for thousands of miles--the gar-barge.  The awesomely rich geographic areas have always used poorer ones as their dumping grounds.  China used to be one of those poorer areas.  Not anymore.  It is now an economic and political power in the world.  And it is no longer interested in other people's garbage.

“It could have a negative impact on recycling in general, as the system has relied on China for so long now,” said Brent Bell, vice president of recycling for Waste Management, the largest waste-service provider in the U.S. If the Chinese market is no-longer available, some experts question whether U.S. municipal recycling programs can remain viable, or if many of the products now considered “recyclable” will be reclassified as garbage bound for landfills.

How did this export of garbage to China come about?

For decades, the market for recycling exports has benefited thanks to the massive U.S.-China trade deficit. With more container ships arriving on U.S. shores then heading the other way, shippers were desperate for anything they could find for the return trip.
“And the thing they chose was scrap materials,” Moore told Bloomberg BNA. “Because of discounts the shipping companies offered, it ended up being cheaper to send that stuff to China than to process it here.”

Let's see.  China makes a whole bunch of stuff, while polluting its air, water, and land, and while treating its people like shit.  We buy the stuff that we really do not need, and generate a whole lot of recyclable trash.  But, we don't want to pay for the processing of the recyclables.  We put them in the empty containers and sent them to China.  Now, it is time to pay the piper!

Meanwhile, we have shifted to online shopping because, well, we don't have enough time to spend on Facbook and Instagram and whatever else and, therefore, we can't be bothered to go to the store round the corner to get a roll of toilet paper.  We place orders online, and they are delivered with a whole lot of packing materials.

“Online retailers like Amazon still need cardboard boxes and most comes from China,” said Jakob Rindegren, the recycling policy adviser of the U.K. association.
One corrugated box retailer on the online shopping site Taobao reached by Reuters, said the price of cardboard boxes had nearly doubled since the end of August to 8.8 yuan ($1.33) each.

As I wrote in this post on recycling, two years ago--almost to the very date:

I am especially drawn to issues like this because we are forced to think through the complications and question our own preferred ideas on how to make this world a better place for tomorrow.  A constant examination, a Socratic questioning, in which there is no sacred cow, so to speak.

The solution to all these is simple, right?  Consume less, and take care of your own shit!             

Every place I go, I think of you ... sad!

It feels like an eternity.  But, it has been only a week since the new POTUS was sworn in.

As much as I try to get away from the topic of the POTUS and his party, it is everywhere.  The headline grabbing stories are always related to the POTUS, be it at The Economist or the Chronicle of Higher Education or the NY Times.

But then, such are the kinds of developments in one week.  A mere week.

Even at Scientific American!

Nearly 3,000 academics, including 13 Nobel laureates, have signed a petition denouncing an executive order signed by President Donald Trump that bars people from seven Muslim-majority nations from entering the US.

I tell ya, it is difficult to read anything else anywhere it seems.

Even if one thinks that higher education is, well, insignificant, the businessman POTUS should surely know that it is one heck of an industry--after all, he tried to get into the action with a fake university, remember?  Unlike his university diploma mill, the signatories' institutions are real universities with plenty of hyphenated-Americans who are not white Christians.  Which is why, for instance:

Meanwhile, the executive order has already had a chilling effect in academia. On Friday evening, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s international scholars department advised students from the seven affected nations to postpone any international travel for fear they might not be able to return to the US.

I think about the small and medium sized colleges where foreign students bring lots of money.  Higher education is one valuable export.  Thanks to those students, the local communities also flourish.  I would think that this executive order will quickly translate into a death-knell for many colleges and their towns, similar to what happened at Pocatello, Idaho, after the intense violence--words and actions--from the townspeople against Muslims.  And that Idaho situation was when this POTUS was merely a candidate!  Now, the university is reeling from a red budget:

A decline in enrollment by Middle Eastern students in the past few years has left Idaho State University with a $12 million shortfall, President Arthur Vailas told legislative budget writers Tuesday.
“We are one of the many schools in the United States that had a significant impact on the change in policies of student scholarships from the Middle East,” Vailas told the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee. “It’s a 35 percent decline, and of course that’s going to impact revenue.

The hate-filled people didn't think about such developments!  In terms of number of students:

A university official told the Times that cuts in scholarships from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait would mean no Middle Eastern freshmen would arrive in Pocatello this fall, cutting enrollment by more than 250, on top of 100 Saudi students who already had chosen to leave. 

I would imagine that foreign students are carefully looking at the map of the US and figuring out the blue state versus red state politics.  As one Saudi female student--whom I met while traveling--found out, Oregon is a welcoming state true to its blue-politics, in contrast to the red-state politics that forced her out of Idaho.

Hmmm ... there is that old saying, right? Oh yeah, you can catch a lot more flies with honey than with vinegar!