Thank goodness, we are not our crappy backwards ancestors who used to romp through the forest paths on horseback, and walk around on the soft ground of the natural earth surrounded by all sorts of furry animals.
No, we are better than that, we have cut down the trees, and paved the earth. We have done such a good job of sterilizing our planet that some people can wear their shoes right into their house and not even track any soil from the outside.
As we fill up our tanks everyday, and the threat of carbon emissions cooking our planet looms over us, for all the wars and problems Oil causes in our world, I feel this Suicide by Oil shirt is an appropriate one.
I guess if it gets too hot we can all just sit in our car with the air conditioners on to survive.
There is a continually accelerating trend in the world today, although fairly obvious, most people probably haven’t really come to grips with it. The improvements of automated technology have made more and more jobs obsolete, and this is just the beginning. The trend seems to be on an exponential path, and yet the main stream media seems to not make mention of it.
A long time ago, in the era of my grandfather, people were once employed to make the elevator go up and down, and telephone operators were needed to connect you to other people. These days of course other than you pressing some buttons, both the elevators and phones are completely automated. Are you old enough to remember when you used to have to go see a real live human bank teller to get your money out of the bank?
Farming has of course gone through similar transitions, the amount of work done by many dozens of people can now be done faster by a sole driver of one machine, and even that one driver could be replaced by a self driving vehicle these days.
Over the years, most people who used to work on the farm, have moved to the city to get work, no longer do they work to supply society with their needs, but spend most of their waking life creating documents which eventually get stuffed into filing cabinets where no one will ever read them again, or pushing some kind of product on the consumer.
Just as most farming jobs have become obsolete, the same type of thing has been going on with manufacturing jobs, as the robots are improving, the jobs they can do are getting more complex, in fact people are no longer needed in the modern factory at all, with today’s technology entire cars can actually be made by robots via 3D printing.
Though it took a long time to produce the plans for the first car, they can now be print out one after the other, 24 hours a day, with no sick days or holidays. The first car took forty-four hours to print, which may seem like a while, but imagine thousands of 3D printers going at the same time.
You might think that all the manufacturing of 3D printers would be lots of work for humans, however the printers amazingly enough, can replicate themselves, or even make larger or smaller versions of themselves, who then again can scale upwards or downwards.
In theory you can now order a car from a website, and it could then drive itself right to your house to pick you up. No human needed.
Rather than shopping malls, and sales clerks, websites now sell products, and robots can sort and ship them.
Once pretty much all these jobs are taken by robots, then there are of course no need for managers, accountants, bookkeepers, or really any office job at all. The robots just need to be told once what to do, and away they go. Nothing to manage there. The selling, and management of the sales, money transfers, tax and everything else can all be handled by computers.
The old idea was that for every bit of automation we created, from washing machines to vending machines we could all enjoy more free time, that the machines would continually free us from the menial task of daily life and create paradise. However most people these days who do have work, are working harder and longer than ever just to keep a roof over their heads.
As most of the once important blue collar jobs become obsolete, people are being forced to move into white collar positions, but the transition is not easy for many, and they end up soon going broke, which can lead to desperation, and the desperation can lead to crime. Crime of course leads to more crime enforcement, and often jail for many.
Once all the blue collar jobs are gone, most white collar jobs will follow.
It makes me wonder if the people who rule our societies have any sort of long term plan for the future of humanity, it seems to me that they do not. In a very capitalist type of society such as the US, automating all aspects of consumerism may seem like good business sense, in the short term the profits will be immense. However as robotics continue to improve, and as 3D printers keep replicating themselves and are programmed to make more and more things. Who exactly will have a paying job to be able to afford the things they sell?
I have spoken before of my wishes for the future of society, that I believe we should have some sort of new Renaissance, and new era of art, music, entertainment and creativity, but what I didn’t realize is that at that point we were in the middle of a small one, before spring of 2012, many people could actually make a living on the internet, good writers, artists and other sorts of entertainers were able to post things on blogs and social media, which friends would share, people would read them, possibly click on an advertisement along the way, and people were rewarded for their creativity. Things were pretty good back then, however during 2011-2012, things changed, most social media website who’s stocks were publicly traded got bought up by people who had other things in mind, namely directing people to their own news websites and stores, those who resisted found themselves under extreme pressure. The unedited streams of Facebook, Digg and the like became heavily edited, big business hijacked the social media, and search engine results became more Big Business oriented as well. Many popular blogs on publicly hosted blogging networks were quietly deleted by their big business friendly hosts around that time, all the writers work was lost, and many bloggers suddenly found themselves without an income, the blog sharing networks were also of course hurt, most blogging networks suffered great financial losses during this time, some of them lost the ability to use advertising from the large companies who had essentially hijacked the internet at this time, one of the biggest blogging networks of the time Blogger went out of business completely. Most internet based small businesses also disappeared around this time, or soon after.
It seems to me that in the future most jobs positions will be held by robots.
Again I ask “Who exactly will have a paying job to be able to afford the things they sell?”
Now and then my memory for one reason or another goes back to something that happened to me a couple of decades ago as I was spending seven months backpacking overland and water through India.
The previous day I had booked myself on a slow moving four day boat trip through Kerala’s backwaters from Cochin to Quilon. and at eight AM I was picked up at my hotel by a mini van half full of European travelers. As was most always the case in my time traveling through India, the other foreigners were all very friendly, open, and welcoming to one another. We introduced ourselves as we continued onwards to pick up more travelers.
I find that the harder to travel a country is, the closer fellow adventurers seem to get with one another, maybe it is some sort of survival mechanism, and this part of India was indeed a very hard place to travel in.
As the van continued to pick people up, each new member was happily greeted. At one part during the trip as the van was getting full of people and bags, a couple of us had to move into the back area of the van, behind the last seat on the floor, and the bags were piled up in front of us. Everything was going routinely on schedule until the next pickup at another hotel.
Mistakes Happen
For some reason this middle aged couple who we came to pick up, found the task of giving the bags to the driver and sitting down in their eagerly awaiting seats, too difficult for them. They were very upset about something, I am not sure if they expected a limousine, or helicopter for the price they paid, but they did not seem to be satisfied with the van. They were busy arguing about the money they paid, and that the van was late, not just with the driver but one of the hotel employees as well. I would assume they had the same ticket we all had, with the price of about forty dollars, for the entire four day trip including a place to sleep and the boat, stamped right on the ticket.
They were arguing in English in a North American accent of some sort, and as a good five minutes went by, a small group of locals started to gather around to see what all this noise was about, the couple seemed to be having some sort of meltdown, perhaps traveling in India was too much for them, it is too much for many. This rude couple was even stooping so low as to point out the flaws in the English the people who were trying to serve them were using. In this part of India, English was their third language after Karnatakan and Hindi.
I am amazed at how patient the Indians can be most of the time, in a lot of countries I visited, individuals would have gotten aggressive back at the rude, loud and aggressive foreigners after such an extended period of time, it would have even escalated to violence in most places, but here it was treated with continued patience.
After what I would assume was ten minutes a Danish girl on our bus was the first to lose patience and shouted to them, “Why don’t you just get a refund, and let the rest of us go?!”
Arguing About Forty Dollars For Four Days
I doubt at this point any one of us wanted to spend four days on the boat with these Idiots. The couple quieted down, gave the bags to the driver, and finally got in the van. The bags were taken by the driver to the back of the van, and placed right in front of me…I was shocked…because on these two backpacks, sewn into them, similar to the way I had done myself, were Canadian flags. What embarrassment I felt, how ashamed I was of this.
I kept in mind that they may not be Canadians at all, what I found traveling around Asia in the mid 90s was that most people that claim they are Canadian, once you get to know them are actually Americans draping themselves in our flag thinking they will be more welcomed as they travel, this was the norm at this time, and may still be. Normally this false identity did not bother me because the majority of Americans I was meeting doing this were acting politely enough at the time that I would have welcome them to use our identity.
I shouted to the front of the van “Where in Canada are you guys from?”
The man replied “Vancouver” (this just happens to be my hometown.)
“Oh yeah, where in Vancouver are you from?” I asked them.
They paused for a bit and said “The main part”. “The main part” is not an answer any true Vancouverite would give, we separate Vancouver into either North Van, East Van, The West End, Kits or many other specific parts, and of course most people that say they are from Vancouver are actually from the surrounding suburbs…none of us are from “The Main Part”, highly suspicious. Maybe they could be from Vancouver, I mean Canada is not completely devoid of assholes after all.
I Didn’t Vote For Him
It is not just our southern neighbors who occasionally piggyback on our “honorable” nationality, sometimes posing as us as they traveled, sometimes pushing a Canadian puppet forward into the international media as an attempt bring trust to an agenda so shady they can not simply promote it themselves, but people of other nationalities also try to benefit from our perceived honor, many internet scammers also pretend they are Canadians, for instance most “Canadian Online Pharmacies” are not actually owned by Canadians, nor are they selling Canadian made pharmaceuticals, again they just drape themselves in our flag and pretend to be Canadian. Some international criminals also tend to hire Canadian lawyers to represent them at things such as human rights tribunals hoping that it might help their case. Quite often on internet forums, some people also pretend they are Canadian for some strange reason, particularly during debates on the US medical system, telling either false horror stories of how the Canadian medical system works, or over emphasizing the rare occasions where things do go wrong. Canada’s honorability on the international stage has diminished greatly over the last couple of decades, not just because of the many false Canadians, but also sadly because some of our recent Canadian politicians have not exactly been the best people…we have some things to be ashamed of already without all the fake Canadians to bring us down further.
To the shock of the German guy who was sitting beside me on the van floor in the back, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a knife, I then moved it over to the flag on the bag, and as I began to pick out the stitches he smiled and nodded at me, so for the next few minutes as we drove I picked out every last stitch that held that flags on, then took the flags and put them safely in my pocket for later disposal. I didn’t know if they were Canadians or not, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to let them travel the world representing where I come from. They are nothing like the types of people I like to be associated with.
I would assume the rude couple had felt our ill feelings towards them, because after our twenty minute drive to the docks was over, there was relief in the air, as the couple decided not to take the boat trip with us after all, and instead took a taxi off to go spread their misery elsewhere.
People who travel are not only guests in a foreign country, but also representatives of where they come from. Not only were these two spreading to the people of India the idea that Canadians are assholes, but also to all the other foreigners they met. If you do not have any sort of respect for others, as these two did not, please just stay in your own damn country rather than spreading your assholery around the planet, and if they were Canadian after all, which they may have been, then on behave of Canada, I apologize for the assholes we sometimes produce. I just could not let them continue their travels wrapped in my national flag.
The Above Clip Features American Actor Matthew Segal, Wearing A Canadian Flag.
The idea that peace can be brought about by war is about as stupid as thinking that only fire can bring on the cold. Though the end of a war does of course result in peace, before the war began, peace was of course there as well.
Warmongers these days seem to follow the: “This is so stupid, it just might work!”, train of thought. The warfare justification is often twisted into some sort of reverse logic, weapons are given to rebels to create peace, first attacks on foreign soil are called “preemptive strikes”, people defending their homes are called insurgents. Meanwhile the killers on both sides of a conflict think a higher being is exclusively on their side, yet a greater possibility is that any divine power probably dislikes all sides enough to force them into the hellish combat in the first place.
This shirt shows an image of a peace sign made of various weapons of war, this is probably the only time you will actually see weapons creating peace.
It is amazing how something with seemingly so little value, might actually be worth so much.
I want to tell you a short story about something of value that was almost taken from my home recently, I say almost because I caught them putting in their bag as they were getting ready to leave. I am not really sure if I would have seen it again, maybe, but then again maybe not.
I first bought this item out of necessity, I needed it bad enough to get dressed, leave the comfort of my home, take an hour long journey, during which I slightly risked my life as I dodged cars down a kilometer long, busy, narrow road with no sidewalks, before jumping on and off of public transport, where I then scaled six sets of stairs, eventually found and purchased the item, and then needed to repeat the entire semi epic journey back home.
You are probably wondering what this item is, and how much it cost me, it will probably disappoint you when I say what it is somewhere during this paragraph, but what I want you to do at this point is think about all the effort, calories, time, and thankfully not life and limb spent questing for this necessary item. It’s monetary value is worth far less than those things, but then again nothing has more value than time, life and limb. Alas, it was just a lowly mouse pad…My mouse pad, my only mouse pad, it cost me about eight dollars, and has some weak sentimental value since it has been with me for about 6 years now, but most importantly, I need it.
But you see, this is only part of the problem, because if I had not caught her folding it, and putting it in her bag, just think what the future would hold for me when I once again needed my f^@%ing mouse pad. I would of course go looking around the house for it, first in it’s regular place in my laptop bag, and then at some of the other places I may put it time to time when I am too lazy to put it away, maybe on top of a shelf or filing cabinet…then what would happen, I would probably repeat that search another time, and then start working my way through the whole room looking for it, thoroughly, maybe even in some dusty places, and then of course I would probably move onto other rooms… how fun would that be? Eventually after much searching, cursing and scratching of my head, I would likely tire of my quest, but then would probably pick up the searching again sporadically for the next couple of days, because I need the damn thing, and of course I am ABSOLUTELY SURE IT IS IN THE HOUSE SOMEWHERE !!!! ARGGGGGGHHH
After I completely and finally gave up on finding the pad , I would then need to once again repeat my epic travel of over an hour to purchase a replacement, and of course another eight dollars.
You know what she said to me when I caught her…”Oh come on, it’s just a stupid mouse pad.” then she gave me an angry look, as though this item we both needed had no value at all. She also told me she thought I gave it to her. I try to give her the benefit of the doubt that she actually did think I gave it to her, which of course I did not, and would not. Since I need it and all, and she never asked.
I try not to get mad at her, I am pretty sure she is just a bit like the many other people on this earth who don’t take the time to thoroughly think through the consequences of their actions. When she took it out of convenience for herself, she had just never thought of my hard earned ownership, in fact, she probably just never thought of it from my side at all.
I will just let the whole thing go.
Though I feel we both have a very different perspective on the matter of it’s value.
