After a long and chilly dry spell that threatened to break some record, the rain came down like it had something to prove. For the most part, this wasn't the usual hazy drizzle that this region is accustomed to but actual drops of water, the kind of rain you can hear on the roof or the window.

But today was also very dim, like the consciousness of a person caught in the middle of rising to the light of reality from the dark dreams of sleep. The consciousness of November 22, 2022 never left the dusk between the two worlds; the one entirely in your head, and the other entirely outside of it—I'm not an idealist. The night never really left the day. The mind never really broke with the flickering shades of slumber. The real remained diminished. Now night has returned, and the ground will become as mushy as our minds. 

This is not Gene Balk's strongest work. But that does not mean it has no value. Seattle's data king (and I mean that) points out the local neighborhoods with the most tech workers with the aim of showing the neighborhoods likely to be hit hardest by "tech layoffs," the latest market craze. But this is not the real story.

What we are witnessing right now is nothing short of a battle in heaven: capitalist versus captains. Losing a job as a tech worker is not the same as losing a job to the union-busting designs of Starbucks. Service workers are not in the same economic league as tech workers. The former are subject to measurability; the latter, not so much. The only mistake the Marxist theorists Hardt and Negri made about the crisis of measurability in the 21st century was this: it's not happening on earth but in heaven.

The battle in heaven is about imposing measurability on tech workers. Without measurability, tech pay cannot be forced downward and squeezed into a unit of time. The billionaires have beaten service workers to a pulp—indeed, that's why they are billionaires. The tech workers must become like the rest. They need to be on the clock. Here's the clock they're building at Google:

...due to pressure from an activist hedge fund, adverse market conditions and a need to cut costs, Google plans to implement a type of stack ranking and performance improvement plan that could ease out 10,000 employees. If employees are rated as poor performers, they could be shown the door. Additionally, the new performance system could use the ratings to avoid paying bonuses and stock grants.

Let's use this phat cooking lesson to transition from local to national/international news:

GOP, I have bad news for you on this. You are never going to win it. The longer you drag this bad student loan business out, the more Dark Brandon's powers grow.

Speaking of Dark Brandon, is he more stylish than the whole of Seattle? True, it doesn't take much effort to find yourself in such a position.  

Today in the globalization of Trump: "More than three weeks after losing a reelection bid, President Jair Bolsonaro [aka Tropical Trump] ... demanded the electoral authority to annul votes cast on most of Brazil’s electronic voting machines." Why? Because of a computer bug that "independent experts say ... doesn’t affect the reliability of results." Bolsonaro is, of course, too late to change the course of the election. But he could, like his master, make serious bank by pressing the election denial button over and over and over. 

Let's end PM with a piece of music that says everything about and captures the beauty of the dreary dimness and rain of today. Here is Loscil's "Fern and Robin." But before listening to the track, read my 2004 review of Loscil's album, First Narrows.

I want to begin by making it clear that Loscil, the Vancouver, BC producer Scott Morgan, has yet to release an album that I dislike or have only listened to once. He is a very dependable artist. But overall, his masterpiece for me (and the album I return to again and again) is certainly 2004's First Narrows. Indeed, I call it one of the top or defining works of the region, up there with Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau. The bridge that gave its name to a major film studio, Lions Gate Bridge (unofficial), also gave its name, First Narrows Bridge (official), to an ambient work that feels as a effortless, as melancholy as the dark blue (and often cloud-covered) mountains that surround Seattle’s more beautiful sister, Vancouver.

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