jared mccain's nails

I read a while ago about how all wool even in like New Zealand and Scotland or whatever still has to be sent to China to be processed. now I don't know if that just means like cleaning and spinning it into thread or weaving it into cloth, or just cleaning. but I did remember sort of being shocked at oh shit. NO MORE TEXTILE MILLS. They have all of this raw wool but there's no more facilities local to actually process it. All of that got moved offshore and has never come back because it wasn't possible for people to turn a profit unless they were moving production somewhere where the standard of living was lower and there were enough skilled factory workers willing to do that work at what would not be considered a living wage in most supposedly first world nations.

I really really wish that people understood that once manufacturing and finishing goods moved offshore and once we started using factories in East Asia it was never going to come back to the United States because we had no interest in actually running factories and mills and mines and all of those industries that amassed wealth for millionaires in the early 20th century. What we have now are ghost towns, and foreign labor contracts, to keep Walmart's able to sell toasters for $5 each or whatever. That's reality. That's the reality we built and we don't have time travel. We can't go back and change our minds. We literally have to roll back the clock.

And in the 21st century all we've done is outsource more. in 1994, the airline that I worked for was able to get money from the governor to be headquartered in Columbia South Carolina specifically because we were going to build the reservation center there and provide jobs for hundreds of people. It was a small carrier with only I think four planes total, servicing a specific geographic quadrant of the United States.

Jobs like that reservation center? Are ceasing to exist. Customer service representatives are now in India or working from home as contractors (which is how companies save money by avoiding having to pay any kind of overhead, by offloading the cost of the overhead to the actual employees with no compensation. It's not as if they say okay here's the portion of your electricity bill and your cable bill that you are using to do your job 8 to 10 hours a day. Here's the stipend. here's how to get reimbursed for your expenses. there is no stipend. there is no expense account. They know what they can get and how little they can get it for and that's how we have billionaires today.

The only industries where people really talk about this stuff tends to be the automotive industry because when we think of manufacturing for some reason we think of Detroit and cars. but that's because America has chosen to be a car culture. That's the infrastructure that the country chose to invest in: highways. Sure there's a lot of freight that's shifted from one place to another by air or by rail or by sea. But the final deliveries involve trucks and cars. and the companies that manage the logistics and warehousing are very very slow to change once they have decided that they have finished evolving.

Not low cost high frequency rail systems, not robust public transportation systems. Not a competitive airline industry with multiple low cost airlines. now they block murders because the idea of Southwest Airlines competing with Delta on the same even playing field scares a lot of old white guys right down to their socks.

The only way this works is to go back to striving for a healthy middle and lower classes, normalise trade schools, abolishing tipped wages, and paying a living wage. FOR EVERYONE.

And even that America still relies on institutionalised slavery in the form of prison labour and the entire agricultural industry resting on the back of migrant workers.

It's going to require a level playing field that does not allow 1% to exist or an underclass to function.

No more billionaires, no more hoarding wealth, no more mergers and considarions, stronger and better enforced antitrust laws, capping executive salaries for the unspeakably wealthy, and all trades having strong unions to protect workers and ensuring a living wage all the way down to the very bottom of the ladder.

It means looking at all of the places where social programs continue to work and have abolished homelessness and poverty and applying them to more than just a tiny handful of small Scandinavian countries.

And as above have said it requires robust unions and regulators and investing in people instead of the 1% only caring about hoarding profits. It means making life safe for people and the environment and not continuing to treat everything like a resource to be exploited. We have to turn them into renewable resources.

We have to learn or relearn how to manufacture and finishing goods without destroying the planet and ourselves.

No one, *ever*, tried to persuade me to transition.

When I first met her, she used to joke about how her coach said, "I could get more than that out of a pig if I kicked it hard enough," and that was the nicest fucking thing he said. Two decades later, she's like, "Yeah, that man verbally and physically abused all of us for years."

There is at least one football game she played in high school that she simply doesn't remember, because she was a linebacker. She got a concussion. She got up and kept playing... or so she's told. She doesn't remember, because she had a fucking concussion and they let her keep playing.

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