Liz on "Swell" reflects on "raaou Tahiti", Alternate Brain uses the word "Comeuppance", and what better time to cut funding for the Hurricane Hunters?
Way back when I was in college and dinosaurs walked the avenues of Westwood, California I had a moment of clarity in an anthropology class...
The lecture involved the basic work week of stone age hunter-gatherers and I distinctly remember the fact that the number "15" was mentioned... It got my attention!
At that point in my life, being a full time starving film student and wannabe musician/composer, there were simply not enough hours in the day/week/month for me to earn enough money working several jobs to pay for my school expenses, study, and actually sleep. That said, I was a lot younger in those days and sleep did seem to be something of an elective activity...
So, you might say that in the bad old days of the stone age to find out that the average work week was akin to fifteen hours of labor was something of an eye opener to me... Truth is, it sort of rocked my world. Digging deeper into the whole subject of work weeks and history, one actually sees very quickly that the industrial revolution and its aftermath in regards to what became the norm for labor really was something of a bummer where leisure time was concerned and more than a bit of a con as well.
Even after the bleakest days of the dark ages, your basic baker/farmer/blacksmith only had to work fifteen hours a week to rebuild civilization while providing for his/her family, and I'll be honest, this leaves me with a warm fuzzy feeling... Being that I happen to be living in a world where the only viable future is going to be centered around a shrinking economy and simpler (though not stone age) ways of doing things...
The thing is, history is your friend. It would be no bad thing to read up on it from time to time as otherwise we wind up repeating the same mistakes over and over and over...
FYI... Two excellent books that may be of interest "Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader On Hunter-Gatherer Economics And The Environment" and "Stone Age Economics" are a really good place to start.
Listening to The Mighty, Mighty Bosstones!
So it goes...
Plans Change, Martinique version
1 week ago
