Jack’s Old & Busted Blog

Overtime. . .
Serfs living under feudalism probably didn’t consider themselves feudalists. It makes no sense, then, that most folks under capitalism consider themselves capitalists. I get so sick of hearing neo-Reaganoids espousing Limbaugh-ish rants about free markets when they are being paid as little as the market will bear for their services. That is the essential dividing line in capitalism, isn’t it? You either own the means of production or you’re working to help someone else own it.

I have no problem with capitalism, where it truly exists. But the so-called “rights” of corporations have pretty much turned the whole concept into a giant stinking cheese. Wherever true capitalism strikes, a Starbucks is lurking around the corner to slit its throat. “Best and highest use,” they call it. Whatever.

The bottom line is that there isn’t much real opportunity left in the post-capitalist world to be your own boss. Most entrepreneurs are only biding time before they are sucked up by a larger company or go public with an IPO. The product is irrelevant, as is the process.

So where is happiness in the post-capitalist world? In a service-based economy, there isn’t much room for satisfaction beyond making sure “fries went with that.” We are all just serfs, with varying degrees of technical competence.

Why I love the Internet. This will give me bad dreams.

The Rapture Index may help you make decisions about spirituality, mainstream or otherwise.

Lots of discussion about “endtimes” these days, but it’s nothing new. Even in the modern era, we’ve had doomsayers. Interesting how a lot of older SciFi deals with periods after some apocalyptic event, whether atomic, economic or cultural.

For the most part, I think people’s infatuation with the subject comes from our inability to migrate — we want a “fresh start,” so our subconscious creates a mythos that supports a hypothetical one.

Hunting/Gathering/Scratching
There is something endemic to the male psyche that drives us to collect/obsess over things. For some guys its baseball cards; for others its watches, art, motorcycles, voodoo fetishes, whatever. The common denominator is that once the obsession is chosen, you’re driven to uncover every bit of information and trivia about the subject. The reason I think this is a “guy thing” is that the majority of newsgroups are dominated by men. Women just don’t post to the wristwatch forum, or to the BMW Motorcycle digest, although we know women make up a huge chunk of web users.

There’s gotta be some explanation for this behavior beyond the simple “too nuch free time” theory. My bet is that it’s a vestigial survival behavior. It was probably beneficial to know quite a lot about wooly mammoths before you go chunking spears at ‘em, or for that matter, exactly what kinds of mushrooms are edible and what kinds make you chunk spears at wooly mammoths. Left with no spears or mushrooms (although alt.mushrooms and alt.spearchunking are no doubt very popular) we have turned our attention to less useful, but totally absorbing, subjects.

I think I’ll add a list of old/current obsessions/links to the page. Motorcycles, watches, coffee, cameras, blogs. . .

Robots made this
One of the few interesting aspects (for me) of web page design is the way the classic battles of underlying form and aesthetic values play out. This came up recently when I was critiqing a a web page with one of my colleagues. The design was pretty good, but once we looked at the code, it was a train wreck (MS Frontpage!).
Now, to the average Josephine, this don’t mean beans; but to high-falutin’ web designers, it takes on more significance. For most of us, the way a website works is only as important as how it is presented. We are evolving away from having to know how web pages are encoded, as simple, and effective, html is giving way to fancier, and busier, ways of delivering content.
Eventually, knowing something about html/web design will be like knowing how to advance the spark on a Model T — trivial and arcane. I look at ready-made publishing tools like Blogger and am amazed that anyone would really care about how this stuff is put together. I guess somebody’s gotta make the donuts.

Commies are coming. . .

Well, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Yes, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Well, you must tell me, baby
How your head feels under somethin’ like that
Under your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat