Stuff If you look around you you will see what we technical types call stuff. Stuff comes in two flavours , stuff that occurs naturally, such as trees and rocks, and stuff that is man made,usually from said trees and rocks. There is a common meme going around at the moment that we should be living on natural stuff and not despoiling the planet and raping the Earth. Thats OK. You just point out to me the 95% of the population you wish to either kill or let die. That applies not only to good old Australia but to the whole damn world. If we wish to live like animals, or Hunter Gatherers as our anthropology friends would say, the earth has a carrying capacity for humans of about 5% of our current population. The agricultural revolution,the idea of growing crops and breeding livestock,took off about 10,000 years ago and forever changed mankind. Civilizations arose roughly from that time,due to the food surplus caused by agriculture. Progress was slow and unsteady after that,sometimes civilization was on a knife-edge. Major deal-changers were printing and the concept of democracy. If you look at the figures,(Landes,Maddison et al) this slow progress changed abruptly with the advent of the industrial revolution. The substitution of human or animal power by the far more efficient steam engine and its successors forever put slavery on the trash heap of history where it belonged. The easier manufacture of clothing and other items ,ie stuff, meant that ordinary people,that is normal folk like you and me, could afford more and better stuff in ever-increasing amounts as society changed .. As regards milestones of culture such as ,say, Shakespeare ,the great poets,the renaissance etc,that had zero effect on the common man (folk like you and me) until we had the benefits of the industrial revolution. The average blue collar worker today has resources and a lifestyle that royalty and other parasites couldnt even dream of in the past. Anyhoo,to return to the present. If stuff is going to be made of wood,Id rather that it came from Australia,to provide jobs for Australians,and where the resource will be managed responsibly and not just plundered as it is in third-world kleptocracies. The same applies to mineral resources. To re-cap...there never was a time when we lived at one with nature in a mythical hobbit world. The advantages of modern society flow downwards so that the lowest feral in Australia has access to life-saving medicine. There used to be sayings about biting the hand that feeds you, or killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Thats roughly where technology stands today. Maybe before re-posting thick headed crap about Abbott being the Antichrist plundering our forests,it may be well to actually have a bit of a think. If you wish to complain about the evils of modern technology,please dont do that by messaging with your mobile phone while driving in your SUV to the airport,theres something hypocritical about that .
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 11:26:23 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015