You Can’t Heal What You Can’t Diagnose

I feel a bit sorry for mayors and governors currently trying to deal with a growing pandemic that has nothing to do with medicine. Rather, it is the pandemic of outrage aimed at a prevailing social context that is more obsessed with economic value, rather than the productivity and well-being of the overall population. The outrage may have been triggered by what appears to be deliberate brutality motivated by racism, but that trigger may be part of a larger context in which the very idea of a healthy society has gone by the wayside. I would like to suggest that there are two key aspects of this malady, which are unlikely to be addressed under the current conditions of governance.

One of these is poverty. When one considers how much of the world’s wealth is concentrated in the one percent of the one percent, it should be no surprise at the intimidating magnitude of the number of those than cannot earn a wage sufficient to provide food, clothing, and shelter. Indeed, wealth resides with those that do not have to worry about those three factors. To them productivity is simply a matter of manipulating instruments whose only design is to transform wealth into more wealth. Associating productivity with any particular “product” is irrelevant when the health of an enterprise is measured only by the value of the stock it issues on a major exchange. Until attention is redirected towards both productive workers and satisfied consumers, those that are not part of the one percent of the one percent will be ignored by any excuse for a social contract.

The other aspect is health; and, to some extent, it is related to the circumstances behind poverty and the consequences of those circumstances. During my lifetime I have observed the very idea of health care devolve from a public service to a network of private enterprises, all of which prioritize positions on stock exchanges over the effectiveness of all levels of practitioners and the effective treatment of those served by those practitioners. In other words health care, by virtue of having been industrialized, has become yet another puppet whose strings are pulled by the one percent of the one percent.

The idea of a social contract was originally conceived as a model for the relationship between the individual and the state. However, similar contracts must exist between an individual and those organizations with which that individual must interact. Interaction may involve provisions, employment, or ongoing relationships, such as health maintenance rather than treating maladies after they arise. For the one percent of the one percent, however, any instance of a social contract is nothing other than a fiction of convenience that will “keep the outsiders in their place.” Until countries around the world develop and maintain more equitable approaches to the management of wealth and health, those “outsiders” will continue to wallow in discontent. That discontent will continue to lead to frustration, that frustration will lead to pots that cause damage when they boil over too energetically.

Google Responds with Half a Loaf

Readers may recall Tuesday's post documenting an account in which a post to an anti-Semitic blog received a page rank second only to a Wikipedia article. According to an article by Barbara Ortutay in the Business Report section of this mornings San Francisco Chronicle, Google plans to do something about this. They will deploy a new process under which those reviewing search results will see a flag classifying the article as "upsetting-offensive." Such a flag will also be taken into account in recalculating the ranking of the article.

It would appear that Google has also recognized that such flagging cannot, at least at present, be automated. So the search for articles that need to be flagged will be assigned to human being known as "quality raters." Admirable as this may be, all quality raters will be contractors. In other words Google does not see the work they do as significant enough to assign it to full-time staff. Mind you, we all know about how contractors have become "the new labor force;" but were quality of results is concerned, one would have thought that this would have been a core priority. If it does not, then just what is important to Google these days?

Orchestra Strikes in the Age of “Citizen Journalism”

Following the news about the current strike by the members of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO) reminded me of what it was like being a writer covering concert performances during the last such strike in my home town of San Francisco. That was an occasion when my colleagues and I found ourselves as loose ends, committed to covering concerts that we knew were not going to happen through the writing both previews and reviews. On March 13, 2013, contract negotiations for the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) reached an impasse that led to the musicians going out on strike. As the city’s primary outlet for print journalism, the San Francisco Chronicle did a reasonably admirable job of trying to collect the “basic facts” and align them with how they were being interpreted from both labor and management points of view. Those of us working through the Internet were not so lucky. SFS was quite industrious when it came to putting out press releases. However, because the Communications Department was part of the “back office,” the dispatches we received carried only a single point of view. On the other hand the musicians themselves had to be cautious about saying too much to anyone for fear of jeopardizing any interactions that were still struggling to take place.

In politics this comes down to what is sometimes called “owning the narrative.” When one side of a negotiation dominates access to the media, it can be very difficult for the other side to establish that it, too, has a narrative. The one thing that we in San Francisco knew was that the musicians did not want to disappoint their audiences. As a result they arranged to commit their own time to giving performances in venues other than Davies Symphony Hall, and writers like myself and some of my colleagues could pitch in to get out the word about when and where such performances would be taking place.

A little over three and a half years have elapsed since the SFS strike was settled after about half a month of time on strike. For those of us viewing the PSO strike from the other side of the country, it would appear that narrative ownership has achieved a more balanced state. PSO has a blog site, but it does not take the objective reader long to realize that the narratives on this blog are coming from management. In this case, however, there is also now a site called Musicians of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Within that site there is a STRIKE UPDATE division, which provides the musicians with the opportunity to present the narratives that they “own.” This means that readers “on the outside” can examine the numbers that have been released on the PSO blog and then read an item-by-item rebuttal from the musicians.

This is fine as far as it goes; but, as any number of philosophers (going all the way back to Socrates) have observed, “understanding” is almost never just a matter of “having the facts.” There are any number of reasons why opposing sides should be developing different narratives; and they cannot be reduced to trivial distinctions between haves and have-nots. The problem is that a fair amount of expertise is required to read either side of the story, not only for its “facts” but also for the implications and consequences that arise if those facts are accepted. Asking someone whose primary interest is in listening to the performance of music in a concert setting to untangle the knots of conflicting narratives is about as absurd as asking a labor negotiator to sit in for the striking concertmaster.

We are thus faced with the classical problem of an Internet that allows us to see more and understand less. Put another way, we, as detached observers, may have more resources that we can consult; but that does not imply that we know what to do with them. All we can do is watch from a distance and try to make sense of it all, possibly with input from those better informed than we are who also happen to have a certain degree of objective detachment. In other words, things are not much different from the way they are when the news sources are trying to report a delicate hostage negotiation. In this case, however, the hostages are the concert-going public.

Our Illiterate News Writers

When it comes to watching local news on television, my wife and I seem to agree that ABC7 News is at least marginally a cut above the other networks. They seem to know how to keep the chatter-to-content ratio under control; and their reporters tend to be pretty good about convincing us that they understand what they are saying. The same, alas, cannot be said about what happens when those reporters create text for ABC7 Web pages.

Last night was a big local news night. A trial harvest of 850 pounds of Dungeness crab was about to be tested, first to determine whether the threat of neurotoxins had passed and second (and more subjectively) to assess quality and determine a fair price for product. Since Dungeness crab is one of my guilty pleasures, I have been following this pretty closely, more through the Web site than by watching television. Imagine, then, my surprise to encounter the sort of lead sentence that used to send the entire staff of The New Yorker into fits of uncontrollable laughter. The reporter was Melanie Woodrow; and, given current work practices, it is reasonable to assume that she typed this herself:

With their lively hoods on the line, crab fishermen are eagerly awaiting the results of a quality test that will determine the price set for crab.

Apparently, Woodrow is more accustomed to writing about fashion (What the well-dressed crabber is wearing?) than about quality of product. This would be a great excuse to joke about what happens when editors are no longer in the loop, but my guess is that neither Woodrow nor any of her colleagues care very much about the blooper that emerged from poor editing.

It's Not Just Infrastructure!

Elizabeth Drew's latest article for The New York Review of Books, "A Country Breaking Down," is a must-read piece, even for those who are already aware of the deterioration of infrastructure across the United States. As a writer whose primary domain is politics, Drew pulls no punches when it comes to presenting that deterioration as a consequence of a governmental system that, for all intents and purposes, is broken with little hope of repair in sight. (Even the supposedly neutral Judiciary branch has gone down the tubes as a result of the Supreme Court's preemptive strike against climate-control efforts.)

Nevertheless, the infrastructure problem is not just one of physical deterioration. It also involves the extent to which our government has decimated the public education system. The point is that the repair of infrastructure can only come about from the skills of workers who know how to repair them. While technology has improved the quality of the tools that can be used, it carries the corollary that skills must now be mental, as well as physical. Furthermore, it means that those involved with repairing the infrastructure need to be skilled managers of information regardless of the physical equipment they will be expected to operate.

This is where Nicholas Carr's chicken about Google making us stupid comes home to roost in full force. As I have previously observed, Google has made us, at the very least, downright lazy when it comes to reading and comprehending, simply because (and this is one of Carr's points), Google "predigests" content to make its search capability more efficient for users. The result is that many workers, desk workers as well as physical workers, understand the world only through how it is seen through some form of computer-based display. I was painfully aware of this yesterday when I discovered that the USPS Call Center could not tell me where a package that had been late in delivery was, simply because the Call Center agent's computer did not have access to that information. (It did not even have access to the location of postal facilities in San Francisco.) Until we can restore a work force that is capable of the most rudimentary forms of thinking through problems, neither project budgets nor an influx of powerful tools of all sizes will get us very far in restoring our country's infrastructure.

Will We Survive in a World Without Work?

I see that life is once again trying to imitate art with an international project to alter the trajectory of any asteroid that might crash into our planet. Since anything is possible in a space of infinite possibilities, these researchers have, supposedly, done some mathematics to determine a "mean time to Armageddon" (to cite the title of the movie behind this project). We could then compare that duration with the mean time to the time when life would be unlivable on this planet through either failure to control the dangers of climate change or, worse yet, failure to provide conditions for a life worth living.

Think about that latter option. The idea of gainful employment for all was already being dismantled through the joint efforts of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Long after Regan was out of office, his former economic adviser David Stockman was declaring on National Public Radio the end of salaried employment. Everyone whole be doing piecework. Stockman did not say anything about how living from one job to the next was fraught with insecurity, not to mention the possibility of financial support when health care was involved.

Yet Stockman's prognostication seems to have been an accurate call. Today's generation of youth still believe that they will not be able to compete in the job market without a college education. Yet they cannot reconcile that proposition with the likelihood that such an education will leave them with a debt that, thanks to the changes in the world of work, may not be paid off over the course of a lifetime.

Have we really managed to create a global society in which only the rich are likely to survive? If so, will they continue to survive if their only talent is one of pushing around bits that reinforce fictions of convenience about financial worth? People do not care very much about "asteroid Armageddon," because they do not see it happening during their lifetimes. We used to say the same thing about climate control; but those chickens seem to be coming to roost on the schedule predicted by scientists whose work was dismissed as "only a theory." Add to that a global social class in which the very idea of working hard for a secure decent wage is now obsolete; and the question of whether the planet is worth saving may be more than idle academic philosophy.

Does "Nimbler" Mean "Better?"

One gets the impression that Jack Dorsey returned to the Chief Executive Officer position at Twitter because someone (probably the heavy-duty investors acting as a collective) felt that the company needed a good hatchet man. In this case the hatchet will lop off 336 jobs, constituting 8% of the workforce. Given that unemployment is still a major problem, that amounts to a mighty hatchet.

One sentence from Dorsey's statement about the layoffs stuck in my craw:

We feel strongly that Engineering will move much faster with a smaller and nimbler team, while remaining the biggest percentage of our workforce.

This is very much the newspeak of the world that the Internet has made. My guess that all of us are now encountering software coming from "a smaller and nimbler team." What we notice most is that it is more error-prone. It is the latest generation of the old Microsoft motto: "Get it out as soon as possible and fix it later." It is also the latest example of what happens when pleasing the shareholders is more important than pleasing the customers.

Thinking Out-of-the-Box About Greece

These days the phrase "thinking out of the box" has been so over-used (and usually abused at the same time) that it is little more than a worthless cliché. Nevertheless, it is clear that "old school establishment" thinking by those who control the world's wealth is making conditions in Greece worse, rather than better, while, at the same time, trying to reduce the refugee problem permeating Europe to a case of muddling through at its most ineffective. Meanwhile, Greece has to contend with a flood of those refugees arriving faster than they are departing.

Why not view them as a resource, rather than a problem? Instead of talking about bail-out funds, why not institute a development fund that bean-counters would see as an attractive opportunity for investment. The money could be used to bring life back to those businesses that used to thrive in Greece and probably, at the same time, allow a new generation of business to take root in the country. Properly planned, employment would come not only to all those Greeks living from hand to mouth but also to refugees, who left their home countries because conditions and/or opportunities for work were no longer viable. Properly finances and managed, Greece could become the sort of melting pot for the 21st century that the United States was for much of the 20th.

Perhaps the problem with this proposed solution is that it could result in Greece becoming a new economic competitor; and "established money" is more worried about that outcome than about the pending failure of Greece to sustain itself as a country.

Blinded by Rose-Colored Glasses

Last night Jason Hiner filed a story on ZDNet that served up enough Kool-Aid to last the entire month. His title was "When robots eliminate jobs, humans will find better things to do;" I suppose the best way to describe it is that excessive focus on work as little more than a schedule of tasks has led to a complete disregard of the many roles that the workers play, regardless of the area in which they are earning a living (or trying to do so). Probably because his own reading never extends beyond the Web pages of ZDNet, there are clear signs that he has never read any analyses about the role that work, simply as an activity, plays is establishing human well-being.

On the other hand, it is hard to pick up a newspaper these days and avoid reports of a rise in sociopathic behavior that can be traced back to not only desperate economic straits but an absence of both gainful and meaningful employment for those hit hardest by that economic meltdown we continue to bowdlerize as a "recession." Without flaunting a bias for rhyme, I would suggest that, rather than an economic recovery, we have entered an "Age of Rage." That rage found an ironic means of expression recently when a robot deployed on a project of hitchhiking across the United States was assaulted, meaning that most of the structure was trashed and the head was removed. (Think of the conclusion of Easy Rider happening shortly into the first reel.) According to Trent Moore's account on blastr this morning, the perpetrators have not yet been found. Once they are identified, I suggest that Hiner have a meeting with them in a small room with the doors locked!

The Harley Recall: Bad News and Good News

The latest bad news from Detroit is that Harley-Davidson is recalling 185,000 motorcycles made in 2014 and 2015. The problem is that the saddlebag can come loose and fall off of the bike. It is unclear how many times Harley has issued such a recall, but my guess is that there have not been many. It would not surprise me if Harley had a better manufacturing record than Cadillac. So this may be yet another case of skilled labor just not being what it used to be, at least where quality control is concerned.

On the other hand, Harley detected the problem through analysis of warranty claims. This is definitely good news. Because, apparently, there have been no reports of crashes or injuries due to this defect. In other words, unlike some of the automobile companies (and not just the American ones), the folks at Harley believe in closing the barn door before the horse has been stolen (and then filing their own insurance claim on the stolen horse). Harley seems to be a company that still believes that the customer is more important than the shareholder.

The fact is that the company had a rough past, particularly when Japanese bikes were on the rise. However, they managed to rise above that mess. One reason is that many of their customers are "true believers." Apparently, they want to make sure that they believe in their customers as strongly as their customers believe in them. How many Chief Executive Officers of publicly-traded corporations can make that claim with a straight face? (Harley does not always keep a straight face, by the way. Their ticker code on the New York Stock Exchange is HOG!)

Depending on Defective Software

My recent "Confluence of 'Glitches'" piece suggested that the sorts of systems failures that have recently plagued institutions as large as United Airlines and the New York Stock Exchange may be traced back to a major nosedive in what, when I was both teaching and research computer science, used to be called "software quality." Indeed, it has been so long since I have encountered that phrase that I have to wonder whether or not it still has any currency in current software engineering practices. The fact is that our day-to-day life is more and more dependent on software embedded in the devices and systems that we now use heavily. This is no longer a question of OS X software not being as good as it used to be. Within the last 48 hours I had an encounter with a security guard dealing with screen freeze on his cell phone. I have a Blu-ray player that keeps telling me to wait while it upgrades its software; and even after that "improvement" it still freezes on some Blu-ray discs. Comcast recently decided to implement a "smarter" HDMI interface, which has now been upgraded to make it worse than it was when I first used an HDMI connector. To add insult to injury, OS X Firefox can no longer display Blogspot pages with the utility bar at the top of the screen!

Recently, the Business section of the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about the rise of "coding boot camps" in the Bay Area. This was a corporate-based response to the observation that coding talent is not what it used to be. Still, there is it worth asking just what sort of training those boot camps are providing? Could it be that software has gone down the tubes due to a competitive environment in which fast delivery is more important than product reliability? (After all, Microsoft conditioned us to expect that all software needs periodic updating.) Is this a sign of just how badly we are at the mercy of technology that no longer works according to plan?

A Confluence of "Glitches?"

It is not often that I agree with the FBI, particularly after Director James Comey's fumbling Congressional testimony on why his agency should have access to all encrypted communications. However, his response to three major computer outages (United Airlines, the New York Stock Exchange, and The Wall Street Journal) taking place all on the same day was the right one. Those who investigate criminal acts cannot afford to be "big believers in coincidence."

Indeed, this may be one of those cases in which investigators have to exercise the full scope of imagination to come up with a wide variety of qualitatively different hypotheses. One should be able then to assess systematically each hypothesis. Some will be easy to eliminate, while others will require more intense scrutiny and investigation. (The very question, "What will it take to refute this hypothesis?" can be a valuable driver for deciding the directions investigation should take.)

Even the hypothesis that this was, indeed, a confluence of accidents needs to compete with the other hypotheses. The point is that confluence is not necessarily a matter of coincidence. In this case, for example, it may simply be the result of the general decline in software quality, regardless of the particularly function being served by the software. In other words things went south for United Airlines, the New York Stock Exchange, and The Wall Street Journal for the same reason that they keep going south for OS X with increasing frequency.

Rage Against the Technology

Those who get high on the Kool-Aid of disruptive technologies are usually too stoned to realize that, if not properly managed, disruption can result in an eruption of violence. This is what happened when 2800 Parisian taxi drivers went on strike to protest against UberPop. As one can read in Hugo Leenhardt's report for ABC News, things got really ugly; and, as is usually the case in war, the ugliness infected both sides. So, while Uber cars were vandalized, it appears that one Uber driver decided to deal with a cabbie blocking his way by running over the guy. What makes things all the more depressing is that the French government had already declared UberPop to be illegal, banned due to unfair competitive practices. As a result Paris has discovered something that any American city with a plethora of bike riders aggressively competing with motorists on city streets has known all along: A practice is only illegal if legality is sustained through enforcement. Clearly, such enforcement did not not take place "with all deliberate speed" in Paris. This led to the usual problem with vigilante justice: offended parties taking the law into their own hands, usually with violent results.

It is unclear that there is a way out of this mess. The fact is that technology evangelists have managed to disrupt the world of governance while pursuing an agenda that seems to have involved disrupting the world of work. The primary consequence is that all of us are living in a world in which goods are more likely to be defective and services are less likely to be reliable. It is hard to imagine our arriving at a closer approximation to the apocalyptic world that E. M. Forster envisaged in "The Machine Stops." Unfortunately, one of the services that has been disrupted beyond recognition is education. Thus, while in Forster's world people just got more tolerant of an increasing number of flaws, we now seem to be creating a new generation too stupid to realize that those flaws even exist.

BBC Joins Those Seeking an "Apple Reality Check"

As I discovered from all the time I spent on discussion groups trying to resolve the many problems that arose with the upgrade to Yosemite, I am far from alone in complaining that Apple's house is far from in order, particularly where OS X is concerned. Still it was gratifying to find the BBC adding its voice (albeit an anonymous one) to the protests. Yesterday, the Technology division of Newsbeat responded to the latest new-product show here in San Francisco with an article trying to address why Apple was not fixing existing problems rather than coming up with new cool stuff to shove down our throats. Is this a policy decision that can be traced all the way to the top of the managerial food chain, or does it come from a slightly lower level while Tim Cook goes around "being a personality" with little clue about what is going on in the development and maintenance of his own products? Inquiring minds (not to mention shareholders) would like to know!

Addendum: After I wrote the story, BBC News broke the story about a general software failure in Apple operations that affected iTunes, App Store, and iCloud. It could not have come at a better time. This is not so much a matter of Schadenfreude as it is one of painful nostalgia for days when you could count on Apple when all of the alternatives left far to much to be desired. For my own work activities, I am constrained by the fact that Examiner.com requires the use of either Firefox or Chrome when I submit my articles. I cannot say that I have very much confidence in Chrome yet for either software or hardware. I suppose I might be able to work on Firefox on a Linux machine, but I am not sure how well it supports iTunes. I could care less about the download service they provide, but I have dug myself a hole by using them to index music I have downloaded from other sources. I have never felt that my personal work practices were sufficiently modest that they would not be hard to satisfy, but now it feels like Brünnhilde has finished building her funeral pyre and is about to put a match to it!

Valuing the Goods

I am not quite sure what to make of J. Bradford DeLong's essay "Making Do With More," which I read on the Facts & Arts Web site. He begins with the premise that "just three out of ten workers are needed to produce the deliver the goods we consume." He accounts for the other seven as follows:

The rest of us spend our time planning what to make, deciding where to install the things we have made, performing personal services, talking to each other, and keeping track of what is being done, so that we can figure out what needs to be done next.

He then wonders why we are not all bathing in prosperity.

Like many he attributes the problem to changes brought on by the information age. He argues that we are no longer producing goods that are either rival or excludible (terms which he defines clearly). Such goods are hard to value; and, in the absence of what he calls "true value," we have become a society of "techno-plutocrats and their service-sector serfs." Whether or not this is the sort of serfdom that Friedrich Hayek had in mind, DeLong's analysis gives one pause.

Nevertheless, he may have overlooked the fact that serfdom is not confined to the service sector. Increased reliance on high-technology equipment means that those three out of ten workers are also little more than serfs. If they are not mindless, then they are still passive for more time than they are active. The question is whether or not this state of degraded mindfulness has had an impact on what is being produced. It strikes me that there is a need to investigate whether the goods now being produced and delivered are now really shoddier than they used to be or whether the consequences of their being shoddier just happen to be greater (as in that cockpit door that locked out the pilot). Either way, we may need to own up to the fact that the information age has given us a world in which not only are fewer people doing work to which value can be attached but also they are not doing it very well.

The Latest Round of Ignoring History

Last week the Facts & Arts Web site ran, "A Greek Morality Tale," an analysis by Joseph E. Stiglitz of the damaging effects of austerity that was almost painful to read. Unfortunately, much of the pain came from the conclusion:

One hopes that those who understand the economics of debt and austerity, and who believe in democracy and humane values, will prevail.

Ironically, the leading beneficiary of the sort of judgment that Stiglitz counsels is Germany, through the planned recovery it experienced following the Second World War. Unfortunately, Germany is now the leading "austerity hawk."

Actually, Stieglitz himself does not take Germany to task. Rather, he lays the blame on what he calls the "troika" of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. These are all institutions of the rich and mighty getting richer and mightier than they are in narrowing that enormous gulf between extreme wealthy and abject poverty. In such organizations "humane values" are no longer part of the mindset. The days when the filthy rich could cleanse their souls, so to speak, through philanthropy are long gone; and no one of any import seems to regret their passing.

Meanwhile unemployment has reached crisis proportions in just about every corner of the world. As I wrote back in 2011, this has become the age of "youth without future," brought upon by those whose incessant fixation with the immediacy of the "bottom line" has led to a willful ignorance of history. Is it any wonder that such youth, feeling abandoned by those who should know better, are attracted to the lure of extremists, most of whom can only be counted upon to make matters worse?

If it Ain't One Thing …

I have been braced for the fact that the move to Yosemite on my MacBook Pro would be unpleasant, but I have to confess that I was unprepared for the quantum leap in unpleasantness that I would face. The bottom line is that Yosemite is such a mess that, for the most part, Apple's own Help Desk staff are powerless to be of much assistance. In this brave new world the only assistance comes from discussion groups, and the best ones are the ones not based on Apple Web sites. Thus, when I had to contend with an installation that hung after only 50% of the new system had loaded, I discovered that I learned most of what I needed to know by reading discussion groups while waiting on hold. My telephone connection went through right about when I figured out what I had to do, which means that, at least, I was able to verify the validity of my actions before taking them (with a guy who could barely articulate his words clearly, possibly as a result of battle fatigue). Since then I have had to contend with folder management taking over my entire machine and a Java inconsistency that interfered with my using a piece of software vital for my Examiner.com activities. The latest had to do with iTunes starting spontaneously, leading my wife to ask why she was hearing music coming from the computer room while I was out of our condo.

There has been word in the technology news that Tesla has been recruiting Apple hardware talent. I hope they are not doing the same for software. The idea of cars out there on the roads running software written by the folks that brought the world Yosemite makes my blood run cold.

Negligence, Malice, and the Serious Listener

Back when I tended to post more regularly to this site, I had an almost morbid fascination about how, in our brave new world of "working smarter," it was getting harder to distinguish malice from negligence. However, that distinction was rearing its head long before people started hating their jobs because they felt as if they were being made to work dumber, rather than smarter, and, accordingly, getting paid less for what they were doing. Barbara Garson saw that distinction coming through the rise of technology longer before anyone else did when she wrote The Electronic Sweatshop. This afternoon I found myself musing on how Columbia managed to take such an antagonistic stance towards serious listeners when, in fact, everything was probably just due to dimwitted negligence.

My favorite example is Igor Stravinsky 1882-1971, what was supposed to be a "luxury item" collection of Igor Stravinsky's long history of making recordings for Columbia. This was a monster collection of twelve volumes, most consisting of a single CD with some having more. These were accompanied by a booklet whose contents had absolutely no relationship to the contents of all of those CDs, consisting, instead, of a glorified photo album.

Stravinsky was, of course, a prolific composer. However, it would appear that no one at Columbia every thought that someone who liked Stravinsky's music might actually want to search for a particular composition as being just the right thing to listen to at the time. It turns out that the genre that suffered the most in this regard was the concerto. The fifth volume of the set is a single CD called Concertos, but it has only two of them: the concerto for piano and winds and the violin concerto. It also has the capriccio for piano and orchestra and the set of five pieces that Stravinsky called "movements." To this day I am not sure I have tracked down the other concertos. However, I know that the "Dumbarton Oaks" concerto and the D major concerto for string orchestra (the "Basel Concerto") are in the six volume (Miniature Masterpieces) and the "Ebony Concerto" (Stravinsky's jazz concerto) and the concerto for two solo pianos are part of the seventh volume (Chamber Music & Historical Recordings). I suppose that one of these days I shall have to create my own index, just to check to see if I missed anything!

Long-time readers know that this is far from my only beef with Columbia. I have, in the past, picked on the mess they made of many of their jazz releases. Since that time, I have read and reflected on Robin D. G. Kelley's Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, where I discovered that Columbia could make just as much of a mess in their relationship with jazz performers as they managed to do with jazz listeners.

Of course debating about negligence or malice may be the wrong approach to thinking about the situation. After all, back in the days of the studio system, Hollywood seemed to have a reliable reputation for attracting some of America's best writers, chewing them into a pulp, and then spitting them out like a worthless piece of gum. Perhaps Columbia was just conducting "business as usual" based on what the big boys in Hollywood were doing.

Insurance Companies Expose the Oxymoron of the "Sharing Economy"

According to a story in the Business Report section of the San Francisco Chronicle, State Farm, Geico, and Allstate all agree on one thing: If you offer to drive a friend home from work because his car is in the shop, you are covered by your insurance policy. If you drive for Lyft or Uber, you are no longer covered, because you are now a livery service. The difference points out the underlying oxymoron that evangelists for the "sharing economy" are either too stupid to realize or too devious to share. When you offer resources with a friend without expecting compensation, you are sharing. As soon as money enters the picture, sharing stops and economic considerations begin. The fact that this inconvenient truth seems to have escaped the notice of so many members of the Municipal and County governments of San Francisco is either amusing or shocking, depending on your point of view. The fact that technology evangelists continue to wreak so much havoc on what is left of the everyday reality of our social world is nothing short of downright depressing.

A Bizarre Coincidence?

At the beginning of this week, the Business Report section of the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about a more concerted effort to train women to write code for software systems. I assume we were all supposed to take this as a positive step towards building up a new workforce of skilled labor. Today's paper, however, ran what is practically a parallel story. The only difference is that this time the trainees are inmates at San Quentin State Prison. Then there was a story last month about teaching coding to kindergarteners. Is there some subtext here about the nature of the job itself or about how the job is viewed when one bumps up from labor to management?