The Commoditization of Everything

God help you if you need a job in America. The days where you applied for an open job position and then learned if you were hired or not are long gone. In its place is a step by step journey through online form purgatory and an eventual descent into digital limbo. My theory, that deserves more research, is that every step in the employment process has been commoditized or turned into a money-making enterprise. I me an that in the old days you would go to a job location and speak to a HR associate who would give you an application. The HR associate worked for the company hiring and they were actually interested in filling the job opening. That is no longer the case because of the ridiculous regulations involved in Human Resources became a career in itself, a full-time job with complicated details that overwhelmed a normal HR department. The company got sick of keeping up with all the insurance/medical/workmans comp/drug screening/payroll that they outsourced that side of the business to HR management firms that manage employees for other companies. This has been a trend for at least 20 years and confirmed by the fact the biggest employers are temp agencies. Temp agencies actually have no jobs, they do nothing, except they manage the HR department. That's all they do. They pimp their brothel of employees (bums sleeping in their lobby) to real companies. Temp agencies manage employees and deal with payroll and hiring and firing and sick leave and insurance and all the tedious bullshit that a respectable company like Apple or Ford does manage on their own. But smaller engineering firms and construction companies can not handle the turnover of temp employees so they outsource that to temp agencies. I'm not sure what these people process since the application is online and I have become my own data entry tech, but let's assume they do some fact checking and calling my references. It's simple and caused by tumor-like growth in the HR regulation department. No one is to blame, but let me tell you what this causes.

Because each step in the hiring process has been outsourced and I am beginning to suspect that the outsourced companies that are responsible for the HR department are now actually sub-outsourcing further elements of their responsibilities, every step in the process now makes someone a little bit of money...but doesn't end up with a person being hired because that's totally separate from their objective. It's like the high-risk mortgage commodities market except in the form of job applications. I don't know much about the mortgage meltdown of 2008 but I know folks were making money off of flim-flam and that is what is happening with the temp agency market. Let me defend this theory in case someone out there with the ethics of Mickey Mouse wants to make some money....

Deep thoughts

U know what the difference is between individual people belonging "officially" to individual nations and individual people belonging to one united citizenship of Earth?  Paperwork. A bunch of forms with your name on them processed until someone says you belong to another country. It's pitiful. Nationality is defined by paperwork and an obsession over invisible geographic lines.

Also, conversations about frivolous emotional irrelevant events are useless. Your health is the most important thing you will deal with followed by the health of people close to you. That's where the majority of our conversations should focus. The obsession with emotional triggers is blatant manipulation by crazed affiliate marketing websites. They merely studied Nazi propaganda techniques and Bernays-ian psychological manipulation and applied that to their content so an audience would be trapped in a happy/sad cycle. Ponderous. Focus on your health, ignore 90% of every media source, cultivate a trade/skill, financially support businesses you have close affiliation with. That's it.

B Goode

Another song from the Parking Lot Sessions. This time a slow cover of the popular blues tune about an illiterate guitarist from Louisiana. Johnny B Good by Chuck Berry

Sangria Blues

I made it easier for all my fans in the UAE to make this your screensaver.

The Sangria Blues is yet another song inspired by living in the Walmart Parking lot. I just now notice that I can see the Walmart sign over my left shoulder. classic. As I have proposed, we are all living in the 'Walmart Parking lot', but only I live in the official Walmart Parking lot. But do not deceive yourself that you live outside the parking lot. No, it's a big lot. And the junkies and nickle prostitutes, the worn car parts and flea dogs and puppies and abused diaper pails are your neighbors. Some people park in a distant space, and some people park near the Walmart door, but everyone is in the parking lot, bathed by the blue neon sign. Sangria is in the wine section, near the Dairy fridges. There are two architectural layouts of Walmarts. One has the dairy and wine on the right hand of the store, and the other has the dairy and wine on the left hand. I like the 'gender neutral' bathrooms in the back because I can sponge bath my ass crack in private there. Enjoy the song and remember to turn the light off on your way out. If my guitar sounds odd it is because this is my old Seagull that I glued the bridge back on with a hacksaw, and when I put a set of light strings on I found the G string was missing from some long distant patch job. And I had given away the original full set to a traveling band of gutter punks destined for New Orleans...so I had to take a bus into the Alamo district to find a spare 23 gauge string to complete the set. The guitar sounds good enough for the Sangria and Walmart parking lot crowd.

Drubk and disorderly

The details are fucked. A man saod he would kill everyone in taco town. "Where is my shit?" This taco town in the place to b tonight. I am going to stay until the massacre and then live blog it with bilingual annotations. Snake skin boots and ego roots.

Oggy, watching the drama unfold as police, white trash and Taco town employees fight like rats over a piece of greasy fried chicken.