h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"It will unjustly deprive children of their honest livelihood and would drive them and their families into the workhouse."

"Working from a young age is good and develops useful and industrious habits, and is much better than letting children wander around in idleness."

"The entire mining industry will collapse if it isn't allowed to use child labour."

Those are some of the reactions to the first report into child labour, instigated by the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury and published in 1842. And he only wanted to limit the amount a child could work to ten hours a day. Does any of it sound familiar?

The modern equivalent is the mantra trotted out by anyone with business interests whenever the idea of paying a fair wage, or implementing anything that's going make things better for the workers, like a safe working environment, or any kind of new regulation is put forward - "This will mean job losses and/or higher prices".

And then there's that other mantra that, it seems, no politician can make any kind of utterance nowadays without including - hard-working.

We've moved on significantly in the past 200 years, and yet the same attitudes, albeit modified by modern times and mores, are still there in the minds of people who see unfettered free-market capitalism as the only thing that matters, and it often feels to me as if we've slipped back to pre-Victorian practices in the way workers are treated now, with cost-cutting the be-all and end-all, spreadsheets more important than employees' welfare, squeezing everything that can be squeezed out of workers who are seen as little more than another piece of expendable machinery rather than actual human beings, zero-hours contracts, businesses paying their workers so little that they have to depend on government handouts to make ends meet (or the charity of their fellow workers), and at the same time the government coming up with schemes to have unemployed people working in shops and factories to earn their benefits (which they'll lose if they don't do it), as a publicly subsidised workforce for companies who are, essentially, getting labour for free, paid for by you and me.

yes, Brother Gosho, I completely agree.

Ah yes, remember how the minimum wage was going to have every business owner in the country in destitution?

On this morning's Engines of Our Ingenuity John Leinhard talked about a man who designed New York's Central Park and also did a study on the effects of slavery. He looked not only at the obvious cruelty of slavery, but also the economic effects. One point he made was that by having an unpaid workforce, you keep the wages which would otherwise be earned, which would be used to buy goods and services, out of the economy. For the motivations for slavery, he suggested the human desire for dominance and control as a strong factor. If it airs on your NPR station give it a listen. If not you can find a transcript and audio link here tomorrow.


http://www.uh.edu/engines

(Damn it! I'm discovering some bugs on my tablet since I've upgraded to android 5.0 Lollipop. Or maybe it's just the last update for my keyboard app. If I backspace over a space, it autofills the last word typed. And worse, I can't paste text now.)

Well, this is interesting. 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' a children's hymn first published in 1848, has a verse three which goes like this:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.

And which isn't included in my copy of Hymns Ancient and Modern (yes, I'm a fervent atheist, but there are some good toons in there). Apparently that's a common thing these days because of its endorsement of the accepted class system of the time, one which seems to be staging a comeback, or at the very least a backlash as it perceives a threat to its existence. After all, any cornered animal will lash out.

it's included in my latest OU philosophy text book - parallel with the Monty Python version (and includes that verse)

The title of this thread instigated some synchronicity for me, part of the lattice o' coincidence, the old baader-meinhoff effect.

I was going to comment how some words and phrases I've seen written, but never knowingly heard pronounced. Sinecure was one such phrase. I first learned it in high school on a written vocabulary quiz. I finally learned how to pronounce it maybe 15-20 years later.

"Plus ça change" is another I've seen used here and there but wasn't sure how to pronounce. I could take a guess. Anyway, as I mentioned I was thinking about commenting on this today, but didn't bother.

Well, tonight I decided to watch The Grande Budapest Hotel and learned how it's pronounced (I guessed correctly). I looked it up to make sure I understood it from context.

Plate of Shrimp and all that.

And just to cross-reference another conversation, I thought that said 'lettuce o' coincidence'

I'm sure we have had this thread before some where?
Oh Well...
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Needs a proper Gallic shrug to do it justice really.

We're really crossing the streams, err, I mean threads.

We're risking total protonic reversal.

I think we've invented a new total perspective vortex!

Think of the licensing possibilities This time next year we could all be millionaires

I'm currently contemplating a "garlic shrug".

*Waits for annotated instructions on how to do the garlic shrug*

Is that anything like the Harlem Shake?

Sort of... but it's much less enthusiastic and rather more aromatic.