jobs and the environmentally friendly world

I'm really getting tired of the excuse that 'we can't go green because it will destroy thousands of jobs', or 'it will change our way of life'. If your car stalls on the train tracks with a train coming toward you, do you stay in it because you can't bear to leave your car? Of course not.

So, first things first. Yes, it will change our way of life. It has to. If our way of life didn't change, then nothing would have changed and we will keep marching down the road to oblivion. But that's actually irrelevant because...life is constantly changing! Many people somehow seem unable to see this. I personally blame religion (especially the Abrahamic ones) because living your life around one ancient book tends to give people the idea that things shouldn't change. Buddhists. on the other hand, see everything as constant change. So do biochemists. Without change there is very literally no life. The biochemistry that gives us life requires flux, change. If the system is at equilibrium (i.e. no net change) the organism is dead. So on a fundamental level change is always happening and is crucially necessary. But so too on a larger scale. Is the world the same as it was last year? five years ago? ten years ago? Was our way of living the same a hundred years ago as it is now. The people who use this argument are intending to imply (without actually saying it) that our way of life will somehow be worse if we live better and more harmoniously with our environment. I suppose, for them, it might since most of the people starting such ideas make their money from destroying the environment.

Now onto my real pet peeve (yes the last argument was just a warm up). Will we lose jobs if we go green. Yes. And no. Once again, this comment is said with the suggestion that we will all be destitute when we stop building gas-guzzlers or stop running coal-fired power plants. That simply isn't true. You know and I know that just because we don't make gas-guzzling cars doesn't mean there won't be cars, they'll just be more fuel efficient--and who is going to build those fuel efficient cars? New technologies, in energy generation, transportation, and others, will require factories and plants of their own. It will mean retraining, at least for some. Although I'm sure in many cases the retraining wouldn't have to be that significant. But if fear of retraining is the only real argument you have against this then I say go live in a cave or get with the age of technology because things are only going to move faster from here on. So going green, in and of itself, will not necessarily cause any net loss of jobs and will open up many more new jobs and industries.

Thus, the only real arguments against shifting to a green society real boil down to laziness or fear of not being in first class on the big business money train. But, if we don't go green either through habits or technology, then we'll be forced to change in ways we never wanted to.

Postman Pat should be fired!

Those of you with young children will likely know what I mean. I often watch Cbeebies on BBC with my young daughter and one of the shows is 'Postman Pat' - now the Special Delivery version. In writing terms, each episode of Postman Pat follows the ' idiot plot ' model. Which is to say that all the characters have to be idiots for the plot to work. And this is precisely what I believe Postman Pat should be fired. Normally, the post suggests to us that a 1% failure rate is very reasonable (that itself is questionable, since they deal in millions of objects and 1% failed delivery amounts to tens of thousands of objects not being delivered...). Regardless of whether we accept the post's claims, the simple fact that Pat screw up his delivery EVERY show warrants a serious look at his work record by his supervisors. His record is made all the worse by the fact that he only has about ten people to deliver to. Yet still he finds ways to lose or mix up their packages--everything from Teddy bears to reels of film. He even lost a cow once. There is no doubt that the people of his district would be better served with a new postman.

DRM: Help! Amazon is robbing my home!

Well, not my home, but, effectively, that of certain people. Let me explain.

If you're at all into the e-reader scene you would have to hiding under a rock not to know about Amazon's Kindle. Originally hailed as a wondrous device and essentially the herald of the true future e-reader, opinions of the new version have done somewhat of a 180. With the company's remote access to the new Kindle, opinions are now more of the mind that the Kindle is the harbinger of true corporate invasiveness. On the chance that you've not heard, while the Kindle allows very convenient access to Amazon's online store from anywhere in the region (U.S. atm), it also allows the company to access your Kindle. And disable it, should they feel the desire. And, apparently, that desire can grow from something as relatively innocuous as returning too many items. Once disabled, you lose access to everything stored on the kindle.

Now, music and movie companies have, for almost a decade now, been trying to convince us that copying a DVD or CD or recording a movie is like stealing it from the store. And the courts agree, which is why movie and music 'piracy' is now illegal in most of the developed world. However, Big Business is trying to eat their cake and sell it too. Somehow, they believe that by selling a product they gain the complete rights over how and when it is used. WRONG. Once we buy the product, it's OURS to do with (legally) as we'd like. If we want to take it apart, that's fine. If we want to sit it on the shelf and admire it, that's fine. If we want to use it constantly, while returning other items that we don't deem to be to our standards, they may not like it, but tough, that's still fine. In parallel with the DVD/CD copying analogy, we have the idea that e-books are still books and still subject to the same rules--be that copyright or ownership. If I buy a book in a store and take it home and put in on my shelf, I don't expect the bookstore to come by a few days later and remove it from my shelf. If they do, I'll call the police. Likewise, if Amazon feels the need to inactivate a legally purchased Kindle, thus preventing access to legally purchased e-books, they have essentially come into the book owner's house and robbed them. And Amazon should be taken to court for every time it happens.

It's time to make big business realize that the street runs both directions.

Aren't hospitals insane?

Does anyone else think the idea of hospitals is criminally insane?

I mean, you bring all the sick people from the surrounding area, all those carrying the worst contagious diseases, and you concentrate them in the same building. You ensure the building is cleaned well to kill all competing microbes so that only the strong pathogens are present. Then you have healthy staff and family visit so they can catch the illnesses and transmit them to the healthy population. It's no wonder we have superbugs evolving in such an environment.

How has such a psychotic system managed to survive until now?

Job Security

I've just realized that, with the world financial crisis and increasing redundancy to machines (let's face it, most jobs could be done faster, cheaper and more reliably by machines) the only place with job security for the average person is as a civil servant (until they take over completely, machines will never encroach on government). Here in England, even as jobs in other sectors are either getting slashed, or getting their pay slashed, the government keeps expanding. The newest fear-created department: National Health Service Department of Flu Resilience. Yeah, whatever.