At 03:51 AM 29/06/00 GMT, Zeb 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
>if they had value of themselves and their well being, and the
>willingness to rationally figure out how to attain goals which would make
>them happy, and then to actually ACT on the results, then they would have
>more money and more happiness.
Dazzling! Then the Oracle offices would never get cleaned, the lavatories
would stink, and all the geniuses in Silicon Valley would die of some vile
gastric lurgy.
>The simplest thing to do would be to move to someplace with lower rent.
>Another answer is to get a new job.
You're not paying attention here, buddy. Really. I'm talking about people
who seem mostly to be migrants, who are doing the traditional heartbreaking
migrant thing of investing their own miserable lives working their arses
off doing the scutwork so their kids can go to school and get training for
those better jobs. (Which might not be there in another couple of decades,
of course.)
Move to somewhere with a lower rent. In the Valley. I love it. They're
already in garages and subdividing their tiny apartments. Be serious.
It's perhaps easier to think this through by looking at the area's school
teachers. They don't get paid enough to rent decent houses in such an
inflated bubble world. Yeah, they could and maybe should move out, en
masse. Let the cyber zillionaires send their kids to computer kindergarten.
Oh, but it's the *market*, it's the *market*...
>Will you tell me a bit about censorship in Australia?
Each Australian has an allocated Censor, who attends every movie with you
and covers your eyes or ears during the disturbing bits. The level of
disturbance allowed to you has been established by E-meter at puberty. The
Censors themselves are protected against moral danger by a committee of
priests, ministers, rabbis and mullahs.
Ahem.
Actually, I don't know - I don't earn enough to get to the movies much. For
some reason, neither American nor Aussie publishers are buying young adult
science fiction at the moment, so I'm going to need to hit the net with my
stuff and bypass the oligopolies. It's all Harry Potter right now and no
money left for much else, since fiction is marketed in the same way as
toothpaste and toilet paper. Makes sense, it's the *market*, it's the
wonderful wisdom of the *market*... No, of course that's grossly unfair,
since as everyone here knows, what links the producer and the consumer in
the West *isn't* `the free market', it's a bottleneck of corrupt little
pishers (to use Courtney Love's nice recent phrase).
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:14:43 MDT