August 21, 2015

Real Time's Bill Maher slammed Americans for being their own worst enemies sometimes when it comes to the acceptance of this new "sharing economy" during his New Rules segment this Friday evening.

Maher started things off by ripping the Olsen twins and their unpaid interns, who as Think Progress noted earlier this month, are suing them:

MAHER: And finally, New Rule, if the Olsen twins can charge fifty five thousand dollars for this handbag, they can't make their interns work for free. That's right. The Olsens, whose company is worth a billion dollars sell this bag, made from the hides of other less successful child stars, for fifty give grand, while they're being sued by forty unpaid interns who are just trying to get minimum wage.

Well, they'd also like their brother Hansel to be released from the fattening cave in the house made of candy (because they look like witches.)

I'm sorry Olsens, but if you sell obscenely overpriced crap for status obsessed suckers and stiff the children who help you, you're not America's little sweethearts anymore. You're Apple.

[...]

Of course, the Olsens are really just a reflection of our post-greed-is-good world, where outrageous income inequality is simply accepted, even by most of the people getting fucked by it -- people who should be in the streets, or in unions, or at least in the voting booth, but are not.

As usual, Americans just find it easier to adapt, and that's how we got what economists now call the "sharing economy." We used to have stores that provided jobs, then commerce went on line. Now we just have aps.

After taking apart the likes of Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Instacart, Luxe and Etsy, and plugging TRSRDeal.com, who will soon be renting Bill's pants for the low, low price of $5.95 a day, Maher asked how American ended up spending sixty years fighting communism and "end up in a barter economy on Craigslist?" And then there's the next big thing, which is humans being replaced by robots and driver-less cars. But as Maher noted, that's not the root cause of the problem.

MAHER:But robots and cars didn't do this. We did it to ourselves, as usual, by worshiping greed. From replacing people with robots, to exploiting interns, from the slave labor we use overseas, to the music everybody steals at home.

We've all become so good at scheming, cheating and venting, raiding, gouging and just plain fucking each other, that we woke up one day with this "sharing economy," where the one thing we're not sharing are the profits.

Somehow they forgot to create an ap for that.

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