"zeb haradon" <zebharadon@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >Watched a TV program the other night on the efforts by cleaning and other
> >maintenance staff in Silicon Valley to earn enough to cope with the
> >explosion in rents and other prices in the area. The poor buggers seemed to
> >be working as hard as humanly possible, two jobs cleaning, mother and kids
> >sleeping in the one shockingly expensive room... I guess if you paid them
> >more they'd work *really* hard.
>
> If they were "smart", yes. I put "smart" in quotes because it is too simple
> Another answer is to get a new job. Find out what you want to do, find out
> what skills you need to do that, and attain those skills. Anyone, with rare
> exception, is capable of doing this.
Anyone who's working 12 hours a day, and commuting another 4, because you live
2 hours from work in an area with shoddy public tranportation, all of this
just to make ends meet? And don't forget supporting the kids. Throw in not
knowing the English language well, because you moved here from a country where
jobs are hard to get and even lower-paying than what you have here. So you're
physically exhausted, and hampered by language, and never that well educated
in the first place, and you're supposed to bootstrap yourself into the New
Economy?
And, of course, some people seem to just not be as smart as other people.
Especially in abstract symbolic manipulation. Infinitesimals and Turing
machines weren't part of the evolutionary environment.
Exercise: tie this into the "Extropians and PR" thread.
-xx- Damien X-)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:14:43 MDT