Avoiding Commodity Status

After reading an article about vanishing rural Kansas, “Rural Kansas Is Dying. I drove 1,800 miles to find out why," and Kansas farmers’ insistence on sticking with commodity products (GMO wheat and corn) that have strong world competition, high production costs, low return on investment, cause damage to their production capabilities (soil), and can be grown profitably anywhere in the world, I got to thinking about that human tendency to become a commodity out of mental laziness. I have been a critic of tip-based jobs for my whole life. Partially, that is because I grew up in a place and time when tipping was something you did for exceptional service, not just because someone managed to do their job competently. When someone offered to “tip” me for work I had done, I always assumed they were being insulting; as if I am too dumb to know what my work is worth. Kansas has been betting on receiving tips and economic support from successful states and urban areas for 150 years and it is not going well. A recent look at house prices and the flood of homes for sale in almost all parts of western Kansas is almost shocking. Clearly, people are abandoning the state as fast as possible and trying to escape with, at least, a pittance of their home investments.

Today, of course, customers are expected to tip everything from waitstaff to home improvement contractors. The justification for the first group is because "in some states waiters and waitresses only make $2.13 an hour before tips. The majority of these servers also receive no benefits of any kind.” That is a pretty weird justification, since people doing those jobs knew that was the case before they aimed themselves at doing a job that could and likely will be automated with some pretty remedial robotics. Being a waiter is the posterchild for a commodity job: a job that could be filled competently by practically any warm body on the planet; including dogs and monkeys. There are a raft of jobs like that and a lot more that have been obsoleted in the last 100 years. You will never find a tip-based job being classified as “essential.” 

This is nothing new. Low skill workers have been a commodity for all of history. The American West is full of stories about how housing for horses was substantially better than the housing for cowboys, because horses were more expensive and harder to train than cowboys. The men who built the railways were notoriously throwaways. When I was a kid, working at Dodge City’s Boothill Museum, I compulsively read the newspapers stored in the museum’s basement. I will always remember an 1800’s report of a train derailment a few miles outside of Dodge. The report read something like, “A freight train derailed outside of town on Monday. There were no injuries. Six rail cars overturned and two had to be destroyed. Three work mules, a dozen head of cattle, two horses, and four Orientals were killed in the incident.” (I doubt that “Orientals” was capitalized in the original article.) I was 13 when I read that newspaper and the story stuck with me for the rest of my life. The AMC series, “Hell on Wheels,” brought that memory back multiple times through out the series. Pretty much any war movie should remind you of the high personal cost of being little more than a body to throw at the “enemy.” Being a commodity is being at the bottom of the employment barrel. 

I used to tell my music production students, “The only infinite resources in the universe are hydrogen, stupid people, cute girls (and boys), and great guitar players (and singers, etc). If those are the qualities you’re counting on getting through life with, good luck.” Today, corporations are discovering how many people they can do without and many people who imagined they were essential have learned otherwise. Likewise, as Trump continues to destroy the US economy, world influence, and the dollar millions of US citizens are going to learn that “service economy” we’ve been so proud of for the last 40 years is non-essential. In fact, the USA has very likely put itself in a position of being discovered to be non-essential to the world’s economy and stability. 

Scary stuff, for all of us. 

After the 2016 election, I had a variety of numskulls tell me that the reason they voted for Trump was “I’m tired of everybody else doing better than me.” Once the $600 federal Unemployment Cares Act expires, all of those commodity workers are going to be living off of their states’ rapidly depleting Unemployment Insurance fund. Some states are close to bankrupt now. There are 40-some million people on Unemployment now. Over 100,000 US businesses are gone forever. Millions of jobs are not coming back. The people who are going to be most hurt by all of this are the people who thought they were hurting others by voting for Trump. Sympathy for those people, from the people still working and those who thought far enough ahead to have obtained skills and essential occupations, is likely to be non-existent.  

Eventually, commodity workers will be replaced by various forms of automation. That started with manufacturing, which is now at least half-robotic and heading toward 90% in the next 20 years. Mining is one of the industries that people often think of as manual, but that hasn’t been for two decades. Those “coal jobs” Trump jabbered about were never going to be filled by uneducated, unskilled goobers wearing hard hats, but those were the people who were betting on Trump. That’s why he “loves the uneducated”: they are gullible enough to think he cares enough about them to help them. He not only doesn’t, he can’t. The only “help” available to any of us is education, training, and that process is never-ending for an entire working career. People unable to keep up are going to find that “everyone else” is doing better than them on an exponential basis from here out.

Wishing for a “Plandemic”

One of the local wingnuts on a Facebook group keeps calling the coronavirus “a plandemic.” She, of course, is an idiot like everyone clueless enough to call themselves “conservatives” when they are radically right wing and as uneducated and stupid as an empty Starbucks cup; maybe a cup with a mouthful of used Skoal staining the bottom. The last time she babbled some “plandemic” drivel, I asked her if she knew anyone smart enough to bake a cake without using a mix. Then, I went on to tell her that “I actually do know a couple of people who work in gene manipulation and that if they were inclined to design a virus that would do some damage it wouldn’t have a paltry 5% fatality rate. What would be the point? Do you seriously think you or the rest of the Trumpanzees or even Trump and his corrupt band of mobsters are important enough to set off this international disaster?” I haven’t heard back from her yet, but I’m sure when I do the response will be . . . memorable and hilarious.

That got me to thinking about a story I’ve put off finishing for more than 20 years. My story was ab out an FDA/CDC investigator chasing down a GMO that might be causing world reproduction rates to crash. My experiences in the US medical device industry put me on to the idea in the late 90’s and, as usual, I got about 2/3 of the way through the book and got bored with myself.

My variation on that idea is that the novel coronavirus was engineered, but it was not engineered to be a killer but as a reproductive system attack. The large number of people under-40 who get this virus are asymptomatic, which is what gave me the idea. If a virus was engineered to be asymptomatic but to sterilize as many people as possible, COVID-19 might be pretty similar to how that would work out. However, without significant testing it might not have been apparent to the designers that it would kill so many seniors and other people with “underlying conditions.” There wouldn’t be a real opportunity to do such a test, in fact. The entire design might have been laboratory-based and until the first half-million or so were infected, it’s possible that the designers could have thought this could have been under-the-WHO radar until it was wide-spread.

I am not sure who the protagonist(s) or the antagonist(s) would be in this story. I have found that my interest in writing long fiction is zilch. I guess I don’t have the attention span or tolerance for what remains of the publishing industry or even the miniscule reading public. It seems like the kind of thing Robin Cook used to do, but there is no market for “selling ideas” in fiction. The work is what is worth the money, not the basic ideas.