From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Thu Jun 29 2000 - 03:19:01 MDT
Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> 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*...
Yes exactly. They get what they settle for. Simple as that. No whining
allowed. If you ain't happy then do something to make yourself happy or
don't. I don't care. I can tell you this- if the teachers all moved out
of the valley the people there would have no trouble raising the $$$
required to start up their own private schools. Who gives a #### about
public schools anyway? I'm sorry but I get tired of people whining about
their own self-induced problems that they refuse to do anything about.
>
> >Will you tell me a bit about censorship in Australia?
>
> Each Australian has an allocated Censor, who attends every movie with you
> and covers your eyes or ears during the disturbing bits. The level of
> disturbance allowed to you has been established by E-meter at puberty. The
> Censors themselves are protected against moral danger by a committee of
> priests, ministers, rabbis and mullahs.
LOL :-)
>
> Ahem.
>
> Actually, I don't know - I don't earn enough to get to the movies much. For
> some reason, neither American nor Aussie publishers are buying young adult
> science fiction at the moment, so I'm going to need to hit the net with my
> stuff and bypass the oligopolies. It's all Harry Potter right now and no
> money left for much else, since fiction is marketed in the same way as
> toothpaste and toilet paper. Makes sense, it's the *market*, it's the
> wonderful wisdom of the *market*... No, of course that's grossly unfair,
> since as everyone here knows, what links the producer and the consumer in
> the West *isn't* `the free market', it's a bottleneck of corrupt little
> pishers (to use Courtney Love's nice recent phrase).
Or it could be that mostly people only want to buy the Harry Potter stuff.
Someone asked me the other day- why is it that the top 40 music is always
sooo lame, no matter what decade you are in? Obviously this is because
the majority of the people out there (think of a Bell curve here) _like_
that music. Hard to believe, but yes it is true. So if you wanna get rich
you are going to have to lower yourself to that level, or else charge a
boatload of $$$ to the few people who want to buy your good stuff. Of
course soon all media will be pirated in digital form so you are going to
likely be SOL anyway. Consider a career change or find a wealthy patron.
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