Cory: Why creative workers get screwed in labor negotiations (until very recently):

Creative workers are part of a class of workers who suffer from “vocational awe,” the sense that because your job is satisfying and/or worthy, you don’t deserve to get paid for it.

Also:

The attempt to divide-and-rule “knowledge workers” from “industrial workers” is a transparent bid to shatter solidarity and make it easier to abuse and exploit all workers.

And:

A strong, unified labor movement is necessary if America is to save itself from inequality, racism, the climate emergency – the whole polycrisis. The idea that creative workers aren’t workers is bullshit – and so is the lie that all workers are uncreative.

March 5, 1953: The 600-foot-long, 70-foot-wide Marine Angel transited the Chicago River. The freighter had only seven inches of clearance on each side at Van Buren Street, and was the largest ship to ply the river.

Harvey’s Broiler Drive-In and Coffee Shop, Los Angeles, late 50s

The goal now is to attract users by the hundreds of millions, so Facebook is making Threads great for users. And it’s working—Threads is, indeed, a great place.

For now. But soon, Facebook will pivot to wanting revenue from Threads, and so Threads will become great for advertisers and steadily worse for users.

Then once all the advertisers and the users are locked in, Threads will become shitty for everybody but Facebook itself. Enshittification will be complete.

We saw this happen with the Facebook blue app. It happened with Instagram. And it’ll happen with Threads.

Until then, sure, I’ll use Threads. Why not? But I’m not getting settled in.

The first episode at least.

Much comedy. Much fast witty dialogue. Some action-adventure. The clothes are fantastic and very very 80s. Cybill Shepherd is gorgeous. Bruce Willis is handsome, and his suit is sharp. I have always liked double-breasted suits.

I liked “Moonlighting,” but I had trouble getting out of my head to just sit and enjoy it. I kept thinking, “Is Bruce Willis supposed to be charming here? He kind of seems like an asshole. How would the 1985 audience perceive him?”

This morning, I concluded that the 1985 audience would have perceived him exactly as I did, and they too would have wondered whether he was really as big an asshole as he sometimes acted.

This was Willis’s first role of any stature, about two years before “Die Hard.” He was truly an overnight success. Until “Moonlighting” hit he was a bartender and sometime stage actor who had previously done one guest role on (I think) “Miami Vice.” He’s in his 20s here, already starting to lose his hair but still in possession of most of it. And such a babyface. It was a little painful to watch him here, so young, intelligent and fast-talking, knowing that real-life 2023 Bruce Willis is far along in dementia.

The other star, Shepherd, was considered old by 1985 standards. She was 35 then! Heavens! The people of 1985 were idiots; Cybill Shepherd was stunning. Also, she’s great at the witty banter, and—like Lucille Ball—she’s a beautiful actor with no compunction about doing physical comedy that makes her look ridiculous.

On the downside: The show could’ve been better if the villains had any kind of backstory. They are stock 1980s villains. A boss wears a bespoke suit (with a collar pin—nice 80s touch there) and speaks in an educated manner. He has a giant, nonspeaking henchman. Another villain is a punk rocker with bad skin.

The stunts were phony.

The show suffers from having been shot for smaller, lower-resolution TVs of the 1980s. Much of the time I could see Bruce Willis’s makeup slathered on. One of the villains seemed to be a 35-year-old man wearing old-age makeup.

But overall, thumbs up. I’ll keep watching. I think I’ll enjoy it more over time.

I think Julie enjoyed it without reservation. She watched the series when it first aired, but said she’d never seen the first episode.

“Moonlighting” and “Miami Vice” were the two iconic TV series of the 80s. I didn’t watch any primetime TV in that decade; I was a college student in the first part, and then a daily newspaper reporter, and spent my evenings doing other things. 1985, the year “Moonlighting” debuted, was a particularly big year in my life.

I’d never seen “Miami Vice” until relatively recently either. I thought that was fine. Watched one or a couple of episodes, but did not feel compelled to continue.