So much for "Go with God..."

Maybe it's just me, but if I were God and needed to call my faithful followers to my side I might just be considerate enough to take them in their sleep.  I mean, isn't God supposed to PROTECT you from horrible things like this crash?  A church van blew a tire and flipped on the New York State Thruway.  Read here... Church bus crash  I sure hope it didn't have a "Jesus is my co-pilot" bumper sticker.  Oh well, maybe some day the uber religious will realize that random is the word of the day when it comes to life.  Bad things happen to good people, even righteous church going folk, and bad people sometimes live their whole lives without ever being punished, live good lives and die peacefully.  It's the way the world works.  God, if he exists at all, doesn't intervene.  Obviously.

And on the subject of crashing, something that's just plain STUPID...

 Every time I see one of these "smart" cars I think how I'll never get into one.  I know it sports an inner framework capable of handling quite an impact, but still there's no denying the odds that it will be crushed like a bug, as in the picture, flattened in a sandwich style front and rear accident, or go rolling off into the distance like a bowling ball, shattering every bone of its occupants as it does so.  Here's a video that shows both its strengths and weaknesses.  In my opinion the weaknesses are just too scary.  Not to mention just riding in the damn thing.  I wonder if there was a reason they didn't put crash test dummies in it?  Smart car crash test

 

Nothing to Hyde...

Brian and Dan, good points on the last post.  It's been a big topic for me over the years, and you may have noticed that I was pretty much just providing opinions to subjects that may not be problems when the world finally unites and works together, but they clearly are now.  My concern is that jobs are disappearing now that there are no replacements for.  There will always be a need for jobs for high school and college kids, and slower or less educated adults.  Should most retail stores ever go fully automated, should all fast food chains ever fully automate, where are these people going to turn?  They don't have the luxury of just going somewhere else.  There are some jobs that are ideally suited to the young and less educated.  They CANNOT be given to machines.  Simple fact, automation takes jobs off the market.  Jobs that don't NEED to go away.  The economy is fragile enough without losing the potential influx of spending from these people.  They have always contributed to the economy and if they lose their paychecks, it affects the rest of us.  What's more important, big businesses cutting costs to enhance profits for the gluttonous corporate greedheads, or allowing jobs to remain for those that need them?

I don't know if anyone reading this has played Sim City, a video game that does a really good job of showing you how delicate the balance is between population, commercial areas, and housing are, much less trying to keep utilities going, hospitals, police, etc.  It's a really good game just for fun but it's also educational.  I know that if my population went too high, everything had to change to accommodate it.  Luckily I could just expand certain areas with a couple clicks and speed up time to see the results.  I could tell what was working and what wasn't pretty quickly.  I recommend anyone who thinks that there either isn't a problem out there today or that the problem is easy to fix find the latest version of Sim City and play it.

Let's consider our friend Hyde up there.  Drugs... imagine if drugs were legalized.  Forget about having this guy in various forms just about everywhere, the dealers would suddenly find themselves in need of legitemate income.  Do you really think there would be jobs for them?  All of them?  I don't.  Not even the smart ones.  My observations come from over 40 years of time spent looking at the changes.  I remember how the streets looked in the 60's, how the markets looked, I  remember the mall by where I lived.  I remember that the mall wasn't elbow to elbow with people walking every direction.  It was so much more calm and civilized.  I remember the changes into the 70's, then on through the 80's, 90's, 00's.  That's five decades of observations.  I can't even stand how malls are these days.  So claustrophobic, stuck in a sea of people.  It's like a zombie movie without the horrible smell and threat of being devoured.  Oh wait, no... come to think of it, it's exactly like a zombie movie.  When I look at the big picture of how things have changed, I think it's easy to see a pattern.  For me it's not so much a numbers thing but a feeling, and a downright powerful feeling at that. 

Remember, Tuesday is Soylent Green day...

There was a world once... I was there, I can prove it!  There's just too damn many people out there, and it's making it really difficult for the rest of us.  I'll tell you, I'd eat the Green by the fistful if it meant that the world's population would take a bit of a dive. We've got two main problems that nobody seems to be doing anything about.  First, there seems to be absolutely no limit to automation.  All I need to get me fuming is to walk into a store with those "self checkout" lanes.  These lanes aren't going to destroy us, but what they do is remind us constantly of the fact that the more people we have showing up on this planet, the the more jobs seem to be disappearing.  And I'm not hearing anyone getting all fired up about it, pun intended.  At least nobody who will be heard, so for now it's just me going off for my tiny band of faithful readers.  Automation comes in a lot of forms, and it's not always a machine taking the job of a person or even many people like those video rental machines that probably replace an entire video store.  Automation also comes in the form of huge stores that make it impossible for small family based retail stores to compete, sending them out of business.  Next thing you know, a man who owned a cookware and appliance store for 30 years can't compete and ends up going out of business and working as a bagger in the supermarket.  If this keeps up, eventually machines will be doing most of our work and we'll have a planet full of jobless people with nothing to do but stand around and watch them.  Next time you see one of those self-checkout lanes, don't use it and if you're in the right frame of mind, do like I do and let fly to anyone who'll listen why you won't.

The second problem is that people just can't control themselves when it comes to pumping out the kids.  One would think that considering the unemployment rate and the state of the economy for the past few years, people might just decide to take it upon themselves to help be part of the solution.  Look at the big picture and voluntarily hold back on having four or five kids.  But hey, it's a free country!  It's the United States of America!  We do what we want here!  It's amazing to see a new school being built, then seeing it open, and then see all the "portable" classrooms showing up in the parking lot.  Evidently it's not even possible to predict the increases in population of a particular area in the time it takes to build a school.  One of the big problems as far as our overpopulation problem started in my opinion when fertility drugs left the realm of a last resort for a couple who had tried everything else and still remained childless, to the realm of casual use by practically anyone who just can't seem to get pregnant anymore, despite having 3 children already.  It's almost become a recreational thing.  Ok, so we're in our 40's, we have three kids already but they're pretty grown, wouldn't it be nice to have a baby again?  Ok, so they try and try, nothing.  Guess what, nature says you're done!  But no, just take the fertility meds, and poof you're pregnant, and guess what, with triplets!  Congratulations, you just put another nail in the planet's coffin.  Or three.  Forget that in addition to the huge percentage that have multiples, the risk of autism is shocking as well.  But forget all that, just go ahead and think of yourself.  Forget the future, forget the planet, forget the big picture, forget how selfish you're being.  That last one seems to be what a lot of us specialize in these days.

It's just a matter of time, I doubt very much that anything is going to change.  As long as businesses keep automating to lower their costs despite the cost to society, as long as people and businesses continue to do things because they can without stopping to think if they should, and as long as living in a "free" country continues to be interpreted as "I can do whatever I want", it's only a matter of time.  The scoops are on their way.  The scoops are on their way.

We're all gonna die...

Ok, what a nice way to end the weekend, the threat of impending death looming over our heads like some big horrible looming thing.  Gotta love hurricane season, a chance for the news stations to really beef up their ratings by presenting us with these killer storms when they're still about two weeks out.  I've lived here in south Florida since 1986 and in that time only two real big storms have hit the area, Andrew in '92 and Wilma just a few years ago, in '05.  It's nice to have interesting things happening out there, but people get too worked up about it.  During both storms I was part of, the convenience stores were open every day.  In fact, Wilma hit my area dead on, ripped roofs off everywhere, including mine, tore trees down, destroyed sidewalks, roads, power lines, and the Kwik-E-Mart right down the street was open the day of the hurricane, and every day after.  There's nothing funnier than going to the store when there's a hurricane coming, seeing people rushing around grabbing everything in sight with that kill or be killed look on their face.  Cans!  Water!  Batteries!  Hah!  I swear, people don't realize that just because a storm hits doesn't mean that the're not going to see drinkable water for a week.  Plus the fact that going a few days without being stuffed full of food isn't going to kill them.  Getting all worked up over this is just plain... abby-normal!  :D