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Michael considered fate at 23:26   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

A few articles recently have me in a tiff and thinking too much and here I am. I'd link them but I'm home, in bed, with my comforter around me and the fan breezing the light ocean air on me. Which means I'm in Laze mode. Which means I will only briefly mention the articles:

1) I think it was mentioned on Slashdot - a bit on the IT business and the global economy and the governments inability to protect the interests of the individual - the citizen - the people - over the corporation. The textile industry was used as an example where no matter union nor strike, it fell and it fell hard to the east and to the south and to the cheaper labour. One can make the arguement that as we move to globalize there will be a natural stabilization period in which there are inequalities and imbalances - well, yah! But it's going to be a long goddamn stabilization period! This isn't an oil-and-water-in-a-jar experiment from 5th grade science.. This is big time and big time takes time. Lots of time. More time than I have.

1 in 2 Billion people live to 116.

Time is what it takes and if you really want to do it you can trace the ideas of globalization back well before _my_ lifetime and yet it's still a new idea and my job is at stake. Do I feel specifically threatened right now, this instant? Personally? No, of course not. But I'm worried about the face of business in this country and I worry about the gutting of the American way of life that is going on right now, here, today.

Once great companies synonymous with words like stability and quality have been replaced by companies that remind us more of fraud and mistrust.. not to mention even more terrifying phrases like cost cutting and ROI.

ROI is about the most evil concept in the whole world. It doesn't take into account the intangibles. You can only get so analytical before you lose sight of the original goals.

Quality product at a reasonable price.

Is that so much to ask?

And this very culture of re-use, re-duce, re-cycle is the very culture that is supporting this fall of the last great empire. First you throw away your coffee cup then you throw away your clothes and pretty soon you're accepting an average car lifetime of three years and you actually expect and accept that your job will be exported to a small child somewhere in india who was lucky enough to get his hands on "Learn Java in 21 Days".

We did it to ourselves.. and we'll do it again.

Intangibles. That's the problem. You just can't get people to grasp the intangibles and it's going to kill this great way of life we have.

People think life is about BBQs and a two car garage and watching fireworks on 4th of July and 2 weeks in August and 11 holidays a year.. and they're dead wrong. We didn't just wake up one morning to this rosy life we lead. We sweat for it. We died for it. We longed for it and worked for it and we put the time in for it.. and luckily we had the vision for it... but people are forgetting, losing sight, losing focus. It's becoming intangible, these ideas of human suffering.

We, the people, We, the country, We the United States of America -

We're wiping out the human condition.

We're wiping out the very engine that carried us to where we are.

But this is no car that we rode in on. This is no truck or bus or train. It is a helicopter - an elevator. We are forgetting to re-fuel the engine. We are forgetting to keep it going.

So much Potential energy.

So little Kinetic energy.

There is only one way to go from here...