So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[LizzieMaine]

For many people, food comes from the supermarket, those who actually produce it have become invisible.

And there's the problem. People don't see what they don't want to see.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Of course, market-economy likes people, cherishing the whole value-chain.

But they don't like, when the people cherish too much and begin to consume too less and the surplus-production is getting more and more and the stock is getting higher and higher.

Hooray to market-economy!

In Germany, we got seemingly no cheap apples, for example. Apples are costing money, here. You think about it and decide to eat two or only one a day.

 

[Fading Fast]

...Hooray to market-economy! ...

Shame the wall came down - seems like you would much prefer the socialist paradise that was East Germany.

I'm surprised when the wall did come down that it wasn't West Germany being absorbed into (and bailed out by) East Germany as the West's market economy is so horrible. ...


Note to moderators, I have repeatedly pointed out these political posts of Trenchfreinds and will gladly not respond when they are removed.

 

[Trenchfriend]

@Fading Fast
What got the term "market-economy" to do with political posts?

 

[Fading Fast]

@Fading Fast
What got the term "market-economy" to do with political posts?

Seriously dude?

Almost every single political argument of our time comes down to market economy vs some form of a collective.

 

[Zombie_61]

When I was in high school the cologne du jour was English Leather. A trifle overstated, at best. The stuff was really powerful.

Years ago one of my immediate supervisors at my job wore a cologne/after shave for which the terms "overstated" and "powerful" are a bit of an understatement. I think he bought it at a local gas station. You'd walk into the office in the morning, and the...I'll be kind and say "aroma"...was unavoidable. And it didn't dissipate much throughout the day. If he used your desk phone you'd almost have to clean the handset with bleach to get rid of the smell, and Heaven help you if you had to use your phone before you could clean it--that stuff stuck to everything like it was napalm.

For many people, food comes from the supermarket, those who actually produce it have become invisible.

I think most people simply don't put any thought into how the products get to the shelves at their local markets. Sure, somewhere in the backs of their minds they know there's some form of process that gets it from there to here, but primarily they're focused on getting their errands done and buying what they need/want for the smallest amount of money.

 

[2jakes]

I once received my neighbor's mail by mistake.
Instead of leaving it on the mailbox for the postman
to make the correction the following day.
I decided to walk over and deliver it in person.

My neighbor is a chain-smoker.

When he opened the front door, a wall of smoke hit me.
My eyes watered and the odor was so heavy I could barely breathe.
And the guy wasn't even smoking at that particular moment.

He started a conversation, but I had to excuse myself by telling him
that I had left Polo & jake alone in the house and would tear up
the place in no time.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Years ago one of my immediate supervisors at my job wore a cologne/after shave for which the terms "overstated" and "powerful" are a bit of an understatement. I think he bought it at a local gas station. You'd walk into the office in the morning, and the...I'll be kind and say "aroma"...was unavoidable. And it didn't dissipate much throughout the day. If he used your desk phone you'd almost have to clean the handset with bleach to get rid of the smell, and Heaven help you if you had to use your phone before you could clean it--that stuff stuck to everything like it was napalm.

Terrible flashback to my radio days, when the station manager would come in surrounded by a toxic green cloud of some kind of Ralph Lauren cologne. It was like being locked in the back of a semitruck containing an entire month's press run of "GQ" magazines from 1989. All the phones in the place reeked of this foul brew, and it got so I kept a can of Lysol in my office to drive off the smell every time he paid me a visit. To top it all off he also wore an aqua sport coat, tassel loafers with no socks, and had a fake tan all year round.

I used to ask for raises from this guy but all I got was a scent.

 

[2jakes]

"I used to ask for raises from this guy...
but all I got was a scent!"

(LizzieMaine Live @ the Fedora Lounge)

 

[MisterCairo]

You think about it and decide to eat two or only one a day.

At least the doctor will stay away...

 

[2jakes]

At least the doctor will stay away...

Some newbies will have no concept of what you posted about doctors making house calls.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

The public image in popular culture of the police and other institutions like banks, government and the armed forces during the Era is interesting. By then, people mostly took their cues from Hollywood and radio. In these, individuals could be bad or corrupt, but institutions were benevolent. A movie might have a cop on the take, a crooked banker or a corrupt politician, but the police, banks and government were good and benevolent. By the end of the movie, the corrupt functionary would be brought to justice by the good cop, the crusading reporter or the virtuous senator. The public were always reassured that the institutions that were supposed to serve them were basically honest. How much the public bought this is open to question. Books and stage plays were much more brutally honest, but these weren't truly mass media.

 

[LizzieMaine]

What's most interesting about a lot of that popular media is that it was compelled by threats of political and economic pressure to serve the interests of Established Authority. Hollywood was largely controlled, thru the person and office of Joseph Ignatius Breen of the MPPDA, by the conservative elements of the Roman Catholic Church, while radio was controlled, thru the system of commercial sponsorship, by the right-wing dominated National Association of Manufacturers. Neither medium was in any way "free" -- both were utterly and completely under the control of extra-legal censorship and required to hew to a particular and specific point of view.

There was also direct government intervention in the way police were portrayed. Beginning in 1932, J. Edgar Hoover of the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation (soon to become the FBI) set up an initiative to directly involve the Bureau in the production of radio programs and movies favorable to a "pro-police" point of view. This began with the "Special Agent Five" segments of the Lucky Strike Hour, and led thru several subsequent radio series, including "G-Men," which later evolved into "Gang Busters," and finally to the "official" FBI radio program "This Is Your FBI." Hoover also didn't hesitate to lean on the producers of radio programs he found personally offensive, ensuring that no producer was willing to take a chance on criticizing the Bureau or any aspect of its operations.

Non-governmental police organizations also involved themselves in radio programming. In December 1931, a storyline on the serial "Amos 'n' Andy" involved an accusation of murder against the African-American character Amos, and his brutal, racially-raw interrogation by police was portrayed on air over two successive episodes. The National Association of Chiefs of Police immediately threatened the sponsor, the Pepsodent Company of Chicago, with "consequences," and the performers were immediately called in by the sponsor and told to lay off. Word got around about that incident, and other producers learned to step warily around any portrayal of police in anything but a positive way.

Even something as ephemeral as comic strips were under strict ideological control. The two largest newspaper syndicates -- Hearst's King Features and the McCormick-owned Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News Syndicate -- were controlled by individuals well-known for their hard-right-wing point of view, and it's no coincidence that such characters as Dick Tracy were portrayed as incorruptible, and their enemies as freakish avatars of pure evil. Tracy had no interest in what socio-economic factors might cause a man with a perfectly flat cranium to turn to crime -- that kind of stuff was for Commies and eggheads.

Quite a large number of books and articles were published, especially during the mid-to-late 1930s, exposing these manipulations, and these were widely read and distributed in progressive circles. But even these critiques were crushed into silence during the war era, when the Office of War Information made it its business to ensure that any sort of media criticism of "the American Way Of Life" was suppressed in the name of wartime unity and patriotism.

 

[ChiTownScion]

^^^^^^
Growing up it was... "think of all the starving kids in other countries"...

I always felt like saying..."they can have my plate"

But I knew better.

In my early youth it was "the starving kids in Europe" that would have given their right arm for half of a PBJ sandwich which I was guilt-ed into choking down. (I do remember at age four telling my dad that if they'd send me the arm, I'd send 'em the sandwich. That was the tender time in life when such comments from a kid were greeted with amusement for being precocious rather than indignation for a lil' smart ass.)

Reality hit in grade school when I met kids from Europe who had told me that they actually ate quite well in the Old Country. By then it had morphed into "the starving kids in Asia." Suppose that I tended to lump them all as among "the pagan babies" that our grade school nuns would shake down for our nickels and dimes for the mission fund.... but I can't prove it by citing authority.

 

[sheeplady]

I don't think my grandfather ever bought "Officer Friendly." My grandfather had many faults, however; I don't fault him his childhood or the impressions he gained during it. I cannot imagine a person of good conscience severely beating a child for stealing food or coal if they were hungry or cold. My grandmother, whose parents' barn was burnt down by the FBI (and/or the state troopers), didn't care for them either.

Growing up I knew better than to waste food. A few times I snuck bloated and/or rusty cans into school to throw them out because I feared we'd be made to eat their contents, and I'd been taught in school "if in doubt, throw it out." I got in severe trouble once when I was caught; but I still did it because my home ec teacher put the fear of botulism in me.

 

[tonyb]

Terrible flashback to my radio days, when the station manager would come in surrounded by a toxic green cloud of some kind of Ralph Lauren cologne. It was like being locked in the back of a semitruck containing an entire month's press run of "GQ" magazines from 1989. All the phones in the place reeked of this foul brew, and it got so I kept a can of Lysol in my office to drive off the smell every time he paid me a visit. To top it all off he also wore an aqua sport coat, tassel loafers with no socks, and had a fake tan all year round.

I used to ask for raises from this guy but all I got was a scent.

A likely candidate for high elected office?

 

[tonyb]

Seriously dude?

Almost every single political argument of our time comes down to market economy vs some form of a collective.

Consider what gets lost in translation, man. I don't think our German friend is quite so doctrinaire as he might seem at times to us native English speakers.

Me, I'm wary of anyone wedded to most any ideology. True believers scare me, mostly because their devotion blinds them to the shortcomings of their ideology, whatever that ideology might be. They all have their shortcomings, after all. If history has taught us anything, it is that.

 

[vitanola]

Seriously dude?

Almost every single political argument of our time comes down to market economy vs some form of a collective.

That's primarily true in Austria, I think...

Now to seriously treat the question for our German friend; the unfettered market economy has been recognized to be very effective indeed at producing goods and services, but is by some considered to be necessarily neither efficient nor fair in the distribution of its largess.

Collectives, on the other hand, are seen to be effective equal distribution systems, but are oft believed by some to be most efficient in the equal distribution of misery. Either system can be taken, It is believed, to a noxious extreme.

In the US we have always favored the MIXED economy, primarily a market economy, but with a (ostensibly) reasonably robust social safety net to ameliorate the misery which oft accompanies the efficiencies of the market ("Collective" institutions, all). These "collectivist" institutions have tended to take the place of the "Moral Sentiments" which Smith believed must undergird the workings of his "Invisible Hand".

"Politics" is where the lean toward Market or Collective is decided. This is not precisely true in Germany, I think, and so I suspect that our vision of "Market v. Collective" as a principal political point is rather lost to those who live on the Continent.

 

[vitanola]

Consider what gets lost in translation, man. I don't think our German friend is quite so doctrinaire as he might seem at times to us native English speakers.

Me, I'm wary of anyone wedded to most any ideology. True believers scare me, mostly because their devotion blinds them to the shortcomings of their ideology, whatever that ideology might be. They all have their shortcomings, after all. If history has taught us anything, it is that.

Amen, Brother!

 

[GHT]

When I was in high school the cologne du jour was English Leather. A trifle overstated, at best. The stuff was really powerful.

At my school, English Leather was the whiff you got in the headmasters office. It came from the inch thick, foot long, leather strap that he meted out corporal punishment with.

In New York City, if you tried that, depending on the neighborhood and the roll of the dice - you might not live to see tomorrow.

In London, it's the favourite cry from the Cabbie behind you, if you are not away from the lights like some F1 driver. "Oi! Ain't there a colour there that you like?