Two things that piss me off about our capitalist culture (this is a partial list):

People who don’t pay what they owe.
Inflated reviews.

Let’s start with the first. My wife was part of the Open Spaces biennial in Kansas City. She was promised payment for her work. Of course, the organizers promised payment to many artists without having raised the funds to pay the artists. Now that the show is over and the fundraising did not meets its goal, the artists all get haircuts. Tanya has yet to find out how much hers is, but suffice it to say, it will not be what she was promised.

What happened to her is no different that what goes on in capitalism every day. Look no further that Donald Trump. As a developer, Trump is famous for not paying his subcontractors (though he is hardly alone). I have been around business and construction long enough to know that a lot people on the lower tier get shat on. It is what capitalism is about — not paying what you owe is a way of cutting expenses.

Where we are at with capitalism is that productivity is high enough that supply is always greater than demand. The only way things get built is to artificially pump up demand. We do this by offering tax abatements, refunds, creative financing and by fucking our subs. In the case of Open Spaces, the subs happen to be artists. I suspect the organizers got paid off the top.

Now comes the rub — most of the artists won’t speak out because they think it will prevent them from getting something in the future. I bet Trump has dangled the next big project in front of a recently fucked sub before.

As for the second, I wrote a review on AirBnB today. I gave her five stars ,which is the only acceptable rating. Anything else is a failure.. I know, I gave a guy four stars once and pissed him off. On-line reviews could be meaningful, but the standard are so skewed toward five stars so that average and above gets five and shitty gets less If I were truly honest this place would have been 3-4 stars. It was clean, the house rules were slightly excessive. Tanya thought the hot water wasn’t hot enough, though I never experienced a problem. In short, it was fine, but not extraordinary. I don’t think that’s worth five stars, but I need to be in line with how others rate and that makes it five stars.