The homeschoolers of today are creating the ruling class tomorrow, even as America kills off it’s middle class.
This is my promised column about IBM — the first of several on the topic, all to be delivered this week. The last time I wrote at length about Big Blue was in 2007. I have been asked by readers many times to revisit the subject, something I haven’t wanted to do because it is such a downer. Writing the last time I hoped the situation, once revealed, would improve. But it hasn’t. And so, five years later, I turn to IBM again. The direct impetus for this column is IBM’s internal plan to grow earnings-per-share (EPS) to $20 by 2015. The primary method for accomplishing this feat, according to the plan, will be by reducing US employee head count by 78 percent in that time frame.
The homeschoolers are going to have to re-invent their own economy. From cryptogon:
Since MIT did it with Open Courseware years ago, I suspected that the point of the “free education” offerings was to create a pool of relatively skilled workers in some of the poorest countries in the world. You know, places with open sewers where people sleep on dirt floors… and where lots of these people have Internet access! (The way things are headed, this might refer to parts of the U.S. soon.)
Now that there’s talk about these other schools offering certificates, and, “connecting employers with students,” I think my suspicions are being confirmed.
So, companies will still be hiring people from slums and paying next to nothing for the labor, but, maybe a person who got a certificate in the free computer science curriculum from the College of Knowledge will be selected for a job over someone who doesn’t have a certificate.
In ten or twenty years, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the majority of paid work in companies, that is, work that isn’t done by machines, being done by these “certificate” holders. They’ll live in ever expanding slums, autonomously policed by RoboCops and drones. They’ll have fast Internet and there will be Superbowl commercials about how great all of it is.
I suppose that positive wildcard outcomes are possible from this. Some people will figure out how to start their own businesses with the knowledge they gain from the free online classes. Most, though, will just feel lucky to be able to show up for any paid work at all.
I have no idea what’s going to happen to people who are still attending classes on campus and buying those $200 textbooks. Sure, there will be a few slots somewhere up in the skyscrapers for engineers and managers, but the machine will always, and I mean, ALWAYS, be gunning for them. For most, it’s going to be like the house flippers who couldn’t find a greater fool that one last time as the Ponzi scheme came down. There are millions of people out there with $20K, $50K, $100K or more sunk into worthless degrees… How is that situation going to unwind?
Get busy, boys and girls. Your new career in a building with a suicide net awaits. If you’re lucky.
I don’t offer a lot of advice on here, but I’ll tell you what I’m going to tell my sons. It’s what my dad told me and it has held pretty true:
“If you’re working for someone else, chances are, you’re fucked.”
That said, free products and services usually exist to monetize, in some way, the people who use them. In this case, the goal of the free courses is to create a larger pool of qualified workers to fill a dwindling number of positions, driving labor costs down.
So, if you want to take free courses, go for it. But if you’re thinking that it’s going to give you an edge in the market, remember that the thronging, jobless hordes have the same idea.
I’m not saying to not do it, but through it all, try to think about how you can use what you’re learning to avoid having to show up somewhere to make someone else (or a bunch of stockholders) rich.
The homeschoolers will make use of the free courseware, and invent new things, new ways of living, and create Resilient communities. The destruction of the middle class is going to force us to do so.
That’s some good stuff. Might be a good picture of the future. That’s a very dramatic story from IBM.
Just making a living — struggling to survive, is what the near future is going to be all about. Being an American no longer affords any measure of economic protection. We are as exposed as any Cambodian sweatshop worker, we just don’t realize it yet.
The paradox is that when they do this to us, we will obviously spend less money, reducing profits, tanking the 70% consumer spending US economy, thereby tanking the world economy, and it will be persistent if not permanent. Habits of local food production, local LIQUOR production (homebrewing/home distilling), car sharing, house sharing, and home schooling including online college, is going to massively cut into the lifestyles of Chamber of Commerce corporate liberals and University Marxist professors and administrators.
The White inhabitants of the USA need to become economically hardened. The unemployed shall be put to work digging potatoes and brewing beer and perhaps driving Econoline vans full of car sharers to their jobs (for the people who still have jobs).
Our money will go a lot farther. Someone making 15 an hour will be able to accumulate enough capital in 7 years to buy a rental property for cash.
We will become cohesive. Local politicians will learn to (secretly at first) hew to a new party line, even if they have to continue to pretend to their bosses in DC, they will learn to fear the economically and politically hardened Americans.
It’s not going to be a “Turner Diaries” scenario; more like a Cultural Revolution catalyzed by the Economic Revolution being inflicted on us. Our response to the Economic Revolution will be economic and cultural/political hardening.
Pierce vs. Kievsky. I’m betting more on Pierce. Investing in lead and knowledge, but esp. in lead.
Majik,
A massive Civil War would certainly be a simpler solution. As the Aryan Nations say, “Violence Solves Everything.”
But I think one should be ready for both. There’s plenty of lead around. I’m sure that if I need more lead, I’ll be able to trade potatoes for it.
“That said, free products and services usually exist to monetize, in some way, the people who use them.”
Agreed. As someone said in relation to Facebook; if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
What is the countdown to Timeline for FB? My husband already has it, involuntarily. I hate it, such a confusing thing to look at. My page is still the older version but I’ve been asked by FB to upgrade it to Timeline before the mandatory implementation. At that point, I think I will be out. I share photos of the kids and some of my less-incendiary thoughts with family (although I think today’s links, same as the ones in my Why Aren’t You Homeschooling post, might turn some of my family members off. They already think I’m nuts and too isolated from reality).
I fastidiously pare down my friends list when I think it is getting out of control – at last count I am down to 63 friends and most of them are family or very close RL friends. I never click on “like” buttons for stores or games or services, and never click on the ads in the sidebar. But FB is becoming another one of those track-my-life things, like a smartphone, which I refuse to get for many reasons – cost of service being the main factor.
Sometimes my husband laughs at me, in a kind way, because he mostly shares my opinions but thinks I’m a bit too gung-ho in my beliefs. I tell him “it’s not paranoia if you’re right.” He can’t argue with that, since he also uses the argument “it’s not racist if it’s the truth.” We won’t give up our internet connection, but the TV is almost never on any longer, and we spend more time with the kids and working outside than “connecting” via artificial means. There is a wealth of knowledge to be gleaned from our cyberspace age, but we have not yet adjusted to its judicious use, for the most part. Part of that is overload. Another part is simple indiscretion – we don’t teach ourselves or our children to be discriminatory in our choices of sources or amusements (discrimination being a dirty word in our lexicon). Like my FB friends, I’ve pared down the sites I read to a few daily check-ins. I really need to put them on my blogroll. It’s likely to be criticized as an echo chamber, but I don’t really care. At this point, I’m open to criticism but if we are really on opposite ends of an issue, there is little you can say that will sway me.
Once upon a time, the “free” USA public education was intended to improve the citizenry and its ability to govern itself. It was never about making money or launching a career. You were on your own for that endeavor.
Learning how to think, and filling your head with the facts and knowledge to think about, while absorbing the accumulated wisdom of the ages is the point of an education. (Why oh why do the fools say, “you need to get educated”? Was the effort entirely wasted? It was.)
IBM. My career trajectory at Big Blue ended that day in 2004 when I complained about hard sell internal spam from Lenovo. I wrote, “Please stop sending me Lenovo ads. I won’t do buisness with Communists, Chinese or otherwise.” I got chewed out by an executive VP six levels over me. He explained that the “transaction” was strategic and essential to IBM’s future. Then he demanded I take a CBT diversity course.
Ah yes, education is the answer for everything.
Great story, Pilgrim! I actually worked at IBM Global Services in Tampa as a contractor in the 1990’s. It was pretty cushy. However, one of the contractors was best buds with the IBM employee (black) who supervised us, and I got on the bad side of the favored contractor. I saw them together around town once, actually. I was rollerblading through St. Pete and I saw contractor and butt buddy IBM employee in a pickup truck together on a Saturday. Of course I reported it to my fellow contractors when the favorite was not there, and they had a good laugh, and then one of them probably snitched. At any rate they got rid of me, and it was right after I saw them together.
We have a Lenovo laptop. IBM went Chinese — I remember hearing about that.
White Americans don’t rate any more. It’s like they hate us. Doesn’t it feel like being the red-headed stepchild. I bet their conversations go something like “Americans are too rich and spoiled and don’t work cheap enough.”
In a certain sense, I agree with them, but when they get what they want, they are goign to find they don’t like it. Strangling the middle class is going to force us all to become (at least) part time peasants, and we will buy less of their SHIT, cutting their profits.
They forgot the lesson of Henry Ford — people need to be able to afford the things they build. But that’s not a bad thing, because they are going to put us back in the conditions that created Henry Ford. Ford came out of the solid American Midwest peasantry. He walked 4 miles to church on Sundays, fixed watches, and when his mother died he left the farm, saying, “I only stayed on the farm because I loved my mother.”
I am seeing the hardy stock come back, like strong shoots in spring. I live in a working class town and I am seeing that not all the kids are slugs playing video games. There are high achievers in athletics and in mind.
Excellent story MW. Big Blue was fagging out openly when I quit in ’05. Damned rainbow posters in every hallway of every IBM facility I saw. (I came via the old PwC Consulting, so I never really had an “office” — 100% travel job. PwC went gay in the 1990s too, for whatever that’s worth.)
People, even us Americans, have trouble answering that charge, “You want too much money, you greedy lazy slobs!”
Well I have an answer. “They” won’t like it but it seems to me it’s an effective mindweapon, mainly because it’s the truth. Consider:
1. We Americans have been in America from the beginning. Elements of my family, indeed of the families of most native New Englanders and New Yorkers, have likewise been here nearly four-hundred years.
SIDEBAR: Keep in mind the Indians did not live in “America” — they had their own name for this land, such as it was populated and claimed by them, depending on their tribe and language. “America” is a European concept named for the European navigator responsible for much of its discovery. And yes, America was indeed dis-covered by the Europeans. Who the devil cares how long Asiatics were here or not here? It did not exist for the European man until Columbus stumbled on it back in ’92. Period. America — the concept and its implementation — always belonged to European man and never to the Red man. What they had was not America. Period.
2. Over those 400 years, our families make significant investments of blood, sweat, toil and tears, building America from primitive wilderness to a home fit for its makers. We had to start from scratch, building communications (meaning road, water and railways, our newspapers and printing capability and the postal system to deliver their ideas far and wide), government, industry, markets, education, morals, religion, all the systems required by a civilization, themselves built on the previous 1,000 years of hard-won lessons from our ancestors who lived on Britain and in Europe. After all, our fathers were not immigrants. They were colonists. There was no “here” here to go to. They — we — had to make it ourselves.
3. Along the way, many of our fathers sacrificed their lives for for industry, agriculture, exploration, and war to further our national project. In a very real sense, America — our future really — was purchased with their life.
How many young men were killed before fathering children? How many children died before manhood? How many of our women died in childbirth or along the frontier? They are our brothers never born.
This is a lot of investing, friends. Done for our specific benefit as their unborn grandchildren. After all, who in sound mind risks or yields life for his own selfish purposes? No one! But a man will risk all for the sake of his children and his children’s children.
What is the Net Present Value of this investment in 2012 dollars? Perhaps it is incalculable. It has got to be in the hundreds of trillions.
Let us then consider the cases of the immigrant and those that exploit them against us.
1. Whatever their motivation, let us stipulate honorable intent for argument’s sake, the fact is every immigrant to America came here to get something. A job. Money. Food. Women. Freedom. Whatever. They came to get something already here.
2. Our government hath decreed that each generation shall start anew, mown down as new grown grass in each morning’s dew, never able to build on the work of his ancestors. Why?
3. Even in the humble poker game, new players are expected to “ante up” to the “pot” — to buy in to the game. No one at the table would dare allow a new hand to enjoin without such payment. Why on earth would they? Poker is not charity. It is business and business opportunities have intrinsic market value.
So how is it that alien foreigners fully expect, and our USA government enforces at the point of a gun, to waltz in to our country America, exploit the very opportunities our ancestors provided us with their life’s blood, without even a token “ante”?
Such an ante would surely measure in the tens of millions of dollars, fairly computed. Yet immigrants have enjoyed a free pass. Why?
Further, we Americans find ourselves in the position of subsidizing the alien, foreign, newcoming “Other” out of our current budgets, extracted in the form of taxation and redis-TRIBUTE-d to the newcomers and their political handlers. Why?
Seen this way, OF COURSE WE NATIVE AMERICANS COST MORE THAN THIRD OR EVEN SECOND WORLD WORKERS.
WE BEAR THE FULLY BURDENED COST OF 400 YEARS’ CAPITAL INVESTMENT, RETAINED EARNINGS NEVER DISTRIBUTED BUT CONTINUALLY REINVESTED TO THE COMPANY OF THE USA TO BUILD FOR OUR OWN POSTERITY’S WELL BEING AND HAPPINESS.
Throw in the expense of our modern mortgages and student loan peonage additional to our imposed tax burden and it is simply impossible — under our present rules — to “work for less”.
In my case, I require a full $6,000 per month simply to pay the mortgage, the student loans, the taxes, the insurance and the transportation expenses that allow me to earn that money in the first place. I won’t see a dime of GAAP “income” until far north of $150,000 in wages — and the IRS has a unique definition of income that is suspiciously identical to what the rest of the world calls “revenue”.
Yet that Indian in his mud hut village with broadband outside Bangalore — what is his cost basis for his American investment? Why he never made such an investment. His educational investment? Get real! ZERO. House? He’s 24 what house? What wife? What kids? How about military defense of his motherland? HAHAHAHA! Uncle Sam takes care of that, chump.
Seen this way, I get pretty fucking pissed off at the vibrancy and color of cheap and easy immigration, don’t you?
Honestly, I don’t understand why we haven’t burned TPTB to the ground generations ago, but that’s just me and I guess I’m some kind of nativist Patriot extremist. Damned right — going back a long time before 1776 at that.
Pilgrim,
You are making an Argumentum ad aequitam, or an “appeal to fairness.” (don’t know if that’s correct Latin) This is an argument we need to make to our own. However, don’t imagine for a New York minute that the ruling elites care about fairness. They revel in fucking us over hard. It’s class warfare and ethnic revenge — like Revenge of the Nerds, Back to School and Caddyshack all wrapped up in one.
The C of CC has come out with a groundbreaking article about why Asians own every convenience store and gas station.
As Americans fall out of the middle class, we need to publicize this, becuase it’s a niche that’s being greedily consumed by foreigners while Americans literally go hungry. We need to publicize these laws — maybe even make flyers and videos about them. This is something that can go viral.
Yeah man, MW, actually preaching to the choir on that. Here’s a little taqqiya for you:
A buddy of mine is a practicing independent psychologist. Good man. God-fearing Episcopalian – no mean feat these days. SAR etc. Took his PhD at Penn. Shares our moral sensibilities but comes at it from the #OWS/HuffPo mindset. Sees it as a matter of fixing broken souls, crushed by our present circumstances but blaming themselves for their failure. A lot of his peeps are big shots.
Lately, we’ve been talking a lot about actionable methods to fill the leadership void among Americans.
A lot of the trouble he adduces to the elimination of our American mythology and of course the hijacking of our institutions, especially the church, who work to undermine us for several reasons none of which “part of the original bargain”.
You and he would finish each others’ thoughts with respect to “localities” taking care of themselves, making the corporate capitalist model irrelevant to their lives.
For him it all comes down to the artificial indenture of the mind — accepting responsibility personally for the actions of the decision making and ruling class which were made without any input from us. He goes on to examine the applicability of rendering unto Caesar and unto God respectively as a means of psychologically separating the two realms and living to tell the tale. (I hope I am not completely destroying his thesis in this very poor retelling of it.)
Bottom line? “This is the age of getting things done” or as Lucas and Kasdan put it, “Not talk, do.” (Hey, we should take pointers wherever we find them.)
Nice anecdote, Pilgrim.
We need to start a nativist convenience store chain.
“Honestly, I don’t understand why we haven’t burned TPTB to the ground generations ago, but that’s just me and I guess I’m some kind of nativist Patriot extremist. Damned right — going back a long time before 1776 at that.”
TPTB came over with you on the Mayflower; they bought your forefathers here as indentured servants of whom only half survived; TPTB were here with their royal land charters; and, if you lived on THEIR land, you were a corporate citizen – a hireling.
True in the American south, maybe even for NY Dutch.
Epic fail for the Mayflower Pilgrims. Epic fail for my Huguenot ancestors who happened to be aristocrats. Epic fail for the Puritans.
If you are going to salvage this civilization, you must start with our truth — not the Marxist Melting Pot critique as you paraphrase it above. Sometimes, it’s like reading Soviet era propaganda to read the hatred and half-truths on these WN boards.
He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future. Bolshevism prevailed in the USA. Heavy sigh. We Americans? We’ll just start over again as we always have.
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