Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
So use the time you save from going to the corner store to chat with your neighbor.
If the price is less, it's possibly because Amazon is the conduit for Wall St investors to subsidize your drinking, but it's more likely that it's cheaper to sell stuff without covering the costs of leaving it at retail locations for a while before it's bought.
OTOH, the new technology enables new community through internet chat boards and the like. You don't have be a Timmy to point out that the communications there become rich in their own weird way.
The people I know who have becoming coaches should not be coaching anyone until they can fix their own lives.
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I think where you are leading with most of your arguments is that technology will eventually deliver for us the 15 hour work week promised by John Maynard Keynes.
I wish that were true. I think it actually might become true, but not likely within our lifetimes. The folly in that prediction is, like so many other economic predictions, it assumes rational actors. Humans are so stupid that we have let the technology drive us to work even more, rather than simplify our lives.
There is also this thing we have in the west called the “Protestant work ethic.“ we think the only reason we are here is to be endlessly productive, and that working around the clock is some sort of virtue. Rather than look at the time we can gift ourselves through use of technology, we are having a meltdown about losing unproductive jobs.
I love the idea of a 15 hour work week, but I don’t think the rest of our society, or our consumer economy, can quickly adjust to it. Stated more simply, we are going to have to find busywork to keep the masses occupied for a couple more generations, or shit is going to get very weird.
