Or stuff I'm pissed off about. Like my phone company will list my number free, but unlists it for a price. My insurance company sends me an opt out form for sharing consumer info. If I opt in, I do nothing, if I opt out I must return the form. Fuckers! (yes my tolerance for BS is low at this moment)

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

Answers

Or maybe I should be glad the phone company doesn't tack on a charge for adding my name to the phone book, but somehow I think they get their kickback by making it publicly available to any and all advertisers that put it on their random calling lists. So, believe me, this free service benefits the phone company the most. (NO, I don't know who I am arguing with) (and maybe they do tack on a charge, I don't know for sure)

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

Believe me, they do. They get you one way or another. I have GTE and they are the worst kind of monopoly you've ever seen. They got all these charges (intranet tax, tax on tax...) and when you call to ask they don't even know their head from their ass. They even charge you for 911 service. The next time some fucker breaks in to my house I'm gonna save 45 cents and shoot his ass and bury him out back in my garden. :-)

You know what I do when a company sends me a bill? You know all that junk advertisement that you don't need? Yeah, that free advertisement they send you along with the bill. I stuff it back with my payment and send it to their ass. Next time, I'm including banana peels, coffee grinds, and send them a note with it: "Would you please dispose these for me".

You are not alone...

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

Last year, I received a letter in the mail about changing my electric supply company. Since deregulation, I get those all the time, so I put it aside, intending to shred it with the rest of the junk mail. A consumer report on the news said that this particular mailing had a card that had to be returned, or your electric company would be switched.

I was pissed off for weeks about this, and just thinking about it makes me mad. I get unsolicited mail from a company that is not my electric supplier, and if I don't return the card to this company I have never heard of, they will be my electric company. Yeah. Makes perfect sense to me.

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

When I lived in Berkeley, I had a subscription to the Chronicle. The Chronicle & the Examiner put out a joint Sunday issue, fondly referred to as the Craminer. I kept getting calls from Examiner telemarketers trying to get me to subscribe to their paper. It'd usually go like this:

Telemarketer: All we're charging you for is a subscription to the Craminer; if you buy that, then we'll send you the Examiner all week for free!

Me: Well, I've already got a subscription, so you can just start sending me the Examiner. Thanks!

T: No, no, you need to pay US for the Craminer! Not the Chronicle!

Me: But I want to keep getting the Chronicle!

T: Well, if you want to get the free daily papers, you have to pay us.

Me: Let me get this straight. You want me to pay for a second subscription for a paper I'm already getting so I can get an entire week's work of newspapers that I don't want to read for free?

T: (Usually hangs up around this time.)

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

It's funny when you think about it. We've long since figured out how to fill all of our needs as a society (food, shelter, etc), but the need of Capitalists to make more and more money every quarter (or rather, to find ways to force us to make money for them) gives us these ridiculous situations that make everyone unhappy. Manufactured energy crises, telemarketers bugging us in our homes, charging extra rental fees just because they can, etc.

It's high time we got rid of a system that has this type of crap built into it, and moved towards participatory economics.

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

Okay, David - I followed that link and tried to read the FAQ, but it's so bogged down in pseudo-Marxist rhetoric and internally referenced vocabulary (why why why can't theorists just write in plain English? Forget parecon - I want a world in which I can flog abusers of language) that I gave up. What is this thing, as you understand it, and why is it so cool?

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

Snake. That was my question. The FAQ wasn't much help.

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

Forget parecon - I want a world in which I can flog abusers of language

I see your flog and raise you a swift kick in the boo-tay.

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

Cory: Call the phone company and tell them you have been receiving harrassing calls, they will unlist you for free in that situation.

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

Yeah, I like Mike Albert's ideas but I forget how long it took me to build up a tolerance to his horribly academic writing style (same with Chomsky).

This interview is a bit easier to deal with, although it is still slightly wanky and doesn't really go into much detail.

I think one of the more interestingly illustrated points is as follows: "But let's just consider competition itself, for a minute. Suppose you're organizing a running race and you want to motivate the best outcomes. One way you can organize your race, the way any high powered competitor type would say to do it, is to have some prize money and give most of the prize money to the winner, and a little less for second and third place finishers, and that's it. Then we'll get the best race times.

But look how this really works. Imagine that one person is really fast and can win the race relatively easily. Do she have an incentive to run as fast as she can? Not at all. Instead, at great cost, you've given her an incentive to run just fast enough to win and no faster. And what about the person who is going to come in fourth, fifth, eighth, or twentieth? They have no incentive whatsoever. As soon as they see they're out of the money, as far as competitive incentive is concerned, they might as well walk over the finish line. But suppose we say we're going to reward everybody in line with their previous efforts. If you run as well as you've done in the past, we'll give you this baseline amount. If you do better, we'll give you more of a payoff in proportion to the improvement. So if you work harder, and your effort is greater, you'll get more. We're not going to give more to whoever finishes first just for winning. We're going to give more for doing better than you've done before. If you think about that, you'll see that the overall speed of the whole assembly of people in the race is going to be greater in the second case than in the usual approach. Each runner has an incentive to go as fast as she can, regardless of how fast anyone else goes. In fact, simple-minded competition is not so efficient after all. It is good for the few who win, but it isn't good for the overall productivity of the whole group. Does rewarding those at the top tremendously and those below barely at all elicit production? Well, yes, you can have a society with industry and output that functions that way. We've got that all around us. So it works in that sense. Especially if you're willing to use military power throughout the rest of the world to rip off riches to make up for inefficiencies. But could we do much better? Yes. It's just that in my way of doing better, you have to have equity, and the people at the top are much more concerned to prevent equity than to maximize productivity. "

I'd do more to try to describe it myself but I'm still studying it. I've long been an advocate of syndicalism (workers taking over the means of production and running them as an independent collective), but I think from what I know of parecon it fills in some of the holes in syndicalist theory. What I end up with will probably be a fusion of the two.

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

I wish more theorists would write like they do over at x-entertainment.

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

David, your example of paying all the runners based on their improvement from a previous performance sounds like the piecework nightmares I remember reading strikers in the 1920s complaining about; since they were paid on their improvement, pretty soon they were working at a rate that caused injury and total exhaustion in the effort to constantly improve. And the counter-effect was that once workers figured it out, they began by working, really, really, REALLY slowly to start with, so they never reached a point where they risked really extending themselves. Which would seem to be a bad idea, from the perspective of production I mean, as well. Or have I misunderstood?

(God, now I'm having flashbacks to my miserable childhood jobs picking berries all summer. I need to lie down and remember that I like my job, now.)

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

Rewarding for improvement translates to penalizing anybody who was working at their best to begin with.

It's kind of like they're talking about doing in San Diego with energy prices -- if your consumption goes down, you get a discount. What if you already were conserving, and can't reduce further? No discount. If you were previously an energy hog, though, and stir yourself to turn off a few lights, you'll be rewarded. (Don't know if this actually went through, or if there's some baseline usage level taken into consideration, but I know that this idea was at least batted around.)

At some level, absolute performance must be considered -- not just 'improvement.' If you're doing the best you can, you can't keep improving indefinitely, and it would piss me off to be rewarded less for, say, consistently excellent job performance, than somebody else who started off as a big-time slacker and started to get their act together a little. It probably *would* improve the average, or the performance of the masses, but it screws the people working hard to begin with.

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

To make parecon work, it seems you'd hafta outlaw unions.

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001

Ugh, I hadn't even thought of the "piecework" connection. I thought it was a good point against the idea that "winner take all" is the only - or best - way to run a system.

Unfortunately, this is a problem of taking something out of context... or rather taking it IN the context of the Capitalist system in which we live, where it's perfectly rational to perform on- the-job sabotage, because you benefit more from that than you do from doing a good job at the outset.

Looks like I need to finish up my reading on parecon and write a good, holistic, and most importantly HUMAN READABLE article on how it would (theoretically) work.

And Rudie, I think the idea of parecon is that workers would be the ones making decisions, which would eliminate the need for unions (thought I would never, ever support a system where people could not organize together for change).

-- Anonymous, July 10, 2001

As I understand it, unions are not about people grouping together for change. Unions are about people grouping together to make sure the unscrupulous capitalist doesn't pay so much attention to the bottom line that he forgets about the people who allow him to have one in the first place.

Unions remind both sides what it means to give a fair day's work for a fair day's wage.

-- Anonymous, July 10, 2001