Radio news just now, talking about "job growth" and listing medical as first in their list of where such number goes up is happening.
Now why might we be seeing more need for medical jobs in now our fifth year of pandemic?
Meanwhile, ex-administration official they bring in to talk to the issue, skips right past this; talks about growth in hospitality jobs "after" pandemic "lock-downs".
To explain job openings in 2024.
Because of course he does.
Walked away before segment ended, but 99% confident that despite opening with a gesture toward "growth" in medical jobs, the #NPR "what does this mean for inflation" news person let their guest expert's explanation by way of diversion to the bottom of the list… go unchallenged.
Because of course they would have. This is the fourth estate of #RentierSociety, after all.
Also, notably, second on the list? Oh, look, "government" jobs. Orly? What sort of "government" jobs are those?
Via Labor Dept:
"Health care added 72,000 jobs in March, above the average monthly gain of 60,000 over the prior 12 months. In March, job growth continued in ambulatory health care services (+28,000), hospitals (+27,000), and nursing and residential care facilities (+18,000).
…employment in government increased by 71,000, higher than the average monthly gain of 54,000 over the prior 12 months. Over the month, employment increased in local government (+49,000) and federal government (+9,000). "
Over the past 12 months, healthcare has lead job growth, with three-quarters of a million healthcare jobs added across the industry, at the same time as hospital capacity (staffed beds) has remained stagnantly below 2020 levels:
https://disabled.social/@beadsland/112203071626016864
Followed by local gov't, at over a third of a million jobs added, majority of which were non-education jobs.
Leading non-education jobs in local governments (per 2022 Census): police and hospitals.
So March job growth is healthcare & police. 🤔
Attached: 1 image · Content warning: hospital & ICU capacity trend USpol
This is #RentierSociety.
A country that spends more money per capita on healthcare than comparable countries, with poorer outcomes, including greater premature mortality, wherein a progressively sicker and more disabled population is a #RentBounty harvest of inelastic demand, hires more healthcare workers to extract those rents—and this is lauded by the #KayfabePanto…
While quietly police employment climbs.
But sure, let's talk about growth in hospitality jobs. i.e., bread and circuses. Yay‽
Economy's booming because of all the sickness those of oligarch #classposture get to harvest #RentBounty from!
Huzzah!
Thank Vibe'n that restaurants & entertainment industries also happen to be hiring, or else how would we distract from fact that over one in four new jobs in past year were in healthcare, and another estimated 50 thousand new jobs nationally, at minimum, were newly hired local police?
(~13% of local gov't jobs are police, local gov't jobs increased by 376K in past 12 months.)
If the two premier sources of wage-labor job growth in your vaunted economy are too embarrassing not to skip right over and talk about something else, maybe line goes up ain't the way to organize a society.
The painfully pointed irony of a sickwork—not even legitimately "sickcare", as multiple folk tried to characterize the problem in the decade before our pandemic era—jobs program being called a "healthcare" industry.
Might as well call lumberjacks "climate care workers". (Sorry, was that my cynicism showing?)
Sickworker, here, operates as does farmworker—one who works on the sickness of society, as field to be sown & reaped.
Where diseases are crops.
When #lumpentheory speaks of #conveyancée #classposture under #RentierSociety, this includes all material relations where the individual is rendered as a conduit for extraction of #RentBounty harvest.
Not simply one's landlord—where the rent-bounty relation is made explicit, nor even one's creditors—but also every industry whose existence is predicated on the mere existence of one's body as source of exchange-value, however that exchange-value may originate.
Thus we have the sickwork industry.
On further consideration, have taken notes from etymology to dub such sickwork industry, discussed at length above, with a new term:
⚚ aglithaculture ⚚
Literally, cultivation of affliction.
Here, by way of etymology, also capturing the senses of ableist shame and medical gaslighting.
To differentiate aglithaculture from any claim to medicine, note above use of stylized caduceus—carried by heralds as a ward against profanation or trespass into their domain; yet later associated with alchemy.
Note that symbol used above is unicode alchemical symbol "Staff of Hermes", as distinct from the unicode glyph of the two serpent "Caduceus of Hermes" still often misused by medical establishments in place of the Rod of Asclepius.
One might think hospitals and other facilities are telling on themselves for so regularly using a symbol for commerce where one would expect a symbol for medicine.
Yet the alchemical symbol better speaks to sickworking as a mercurial drawing of wealth from impurity.
Unlike a "healthcare industry", even a "sickcare" industry, ⚚aglithacultural industry is inherently a colonial relation.
To celebrate that job growth is line goes up, when that job growth is lead by sickworking jobs, is akin to celebrating the expansion of agricultural jobs following a homesteading rush.
As Liboiron tells us, pollution is colonialism. Goes back as far as public health laws about how far from the colonial fort to dump human waste. Aglithaculture thrives on colonial sanitation.
You just had to remind me NPR has a comedy quiz show, didn't you?
Roommate was still listening to such on kitchen radio in 2022, until this canned opening was read with as much defensive sneering as could be mustered:
"The following program was taped before an audience of real live people."
Just imagine the purposeful emphasis on those last three words.
Anyway, had to ask roommate not to pollute our common space with their toxicity after that.
But yeah, Iraq Wars were ad campaigns.
This is me laughing, darkly.
No, mine is the laugh of one who knows they won't survive to see the so-called friend's head on the block, but can nonetheless contemplate such a future from the vantage of those they came for before those for whom first they came.
@beadsland TBF, that live audience note came after a couple of years in which the show was produced in-studio / over Zoom / Skype / whatever without and audience Because Covid. Lest we forget.
And that said, I'd soured on WWDTM quite a while before that based on its general inanity.
As for NPR's news programming: I've recently begun listening to WGBH's "The World" again after a hiatus of a decade or more, and one of my realisations is that my mind handles that programme far better than it does NPR's current mainstream news magazines (e.g., Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, etc.).
So far as I can tell, The World's magic is twofold:
What I'd long since noticed listening to a live NPR affiliate broadcast (both local and sampled from various Internet streams from around the US) is that it seems like about half the time I join a broadcast it's running a sponsorship spot, that is, the promo percentage seems to be approaching 50%, and that much of the programming is live, *which means that all the fussy shit and inconsistency which an editing process drops on the cutting room floor intrudes into the on-the-air segment.
When editing a segment, a reporter and whatever support staff assemble a finished product out of multiple segments of audio and commentary. This means that editing to length happens before an item goes on air. That speech tics get edited out. That it's not necessary to chase the guest(s) off the air in the last minute or so of a segment. And that the reporter, if they're any good at all, can take a stream-of-consciousness discussion and edit it to a consistent narrative.
(That last can be problematic if the narrative is itself constructed. In the better cases, however, a reporter is uncovering a true thread. It's still something you want to watch.)
NPR began its switch to live, and multi-location broadcast origin, following 9/11, when the network realised that its dependence on a single broadcast studio (in Washington, DC) put it at risk of being knocked off-air in a catastrophe ... or violent attack. And there was a desire to make the news magazines more responsive to late-breaking developments. There's something to be said for both points. But how the network has approached both points greatly weakens the overall product in ways that simply tire my brain. Increased reliance on corporate sponsorship puts a further degradation on the net product.
Anyhow, that's my experience, and I'd be really interested in how other people feel comparing NPR (or programming such as the BBC which in many ways has evolved similarly) vs. The World's approach.
I'm aware of some non-English programming which seems to more closely resemble pre-2001 NPR production, particularly Deutschlandfunk.
Oh, I know.
And they knew their audience knew. Hence the very pointed tone of the delivery of that line.
The emphasis was placed just so—to communicate that they were judging anyone who might be worried by those words.
And likewise, that emphasis communicated, to those in the audience who would likewise disdain anyone still taking precautions, that they and the speaker were of same mind.
The delivery of that line was a very enunciated choice.
Performatively sour intent.
Moreover, and with respect to the rest of your analysis of production quality, that line was canned. A pre-recorded message at beginning of every episode.
Honestly, lack or production and dominance of sponsorship are things that would concern me only if their messaging weren't so consistently reinscriptions of consensus reality in deference to liberal sensibilities.
If anything, better production would, if done proficiently, allow them to make those commitments less obvious.
Am a 70s child: grew up with banality of "was filmed in front of a live studio audience" opening TV shows of the era.
Yes, those line readings weren't following what we all have experienced and continue to experience. Nonetheless, the model for doing that line reading, to simply emulate the bromide of what came before, was right there.
They could have communicated normalcy. Which yes, myself would judge… but that would be on me, not the speaker.
They chose oratory violence.
@cy That strikes me as an ... uncharitable reading.
Particularly as the previous announcement, also recorded had been (IIRC): "This episode was recorded in front of an audience of ... no one." Indicating that it was not live, and the laughter was canned.
Again, of all things to hold against NPR, this is extraordinarily petty.
There's a reason actors practice line readings by redoing them again and again, placing emphasis differently.
Because it matters.
You discuss production values above. Again, there was a model for how to do this line reading. Production comes out of an entire history of professional praxis, of how these things have been done by all the productions that came before.
To situate that line reading only in relation to the line reading it immediately replaced… is ahistorical.
"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.
Cy
Bc Clarity Carlton-Martin
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕