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17th October 2004

Brother Lawrence and ebooks

This post was about Brother Lawrence but I somehow managed to delete it. I’ll try and ressurrect it later today.

Sorry.



Categories : Religion | 0 Comments

17th October 2004

Change and prices

It’s amazing the way the price of electronics has taken a nose-dive over the last couple of years. It seems like a really recent thing but everything from computers to TVs to DVD players now costs half what it did 18 months ago, if not less. Today we bought a 34cm colour TV with remote control for $129. And I’ve seen DVD players selling for as little as $39 - it’s crazy. Surely they can’t be making much of a profit on these things. Probably there’s some poor workers slaving away for 10c an hour in some third world country making these things. Aside from that it means that increasingly the average family in Australia can afford more and more technological luxuries. We were just discussing Laser Discs, which were the cool video format of the mid 90s, however they remained almost exclusively the province of a niche of high end users, never really cracking the mainstream. Yet now the superior video and sound of DVD has become cheap and almost ubiquitous in family homes. The overall level of affluence amongst people today is incredible - blue collar workers have comforts and luxuries that similar people would never have dreamt of in the 60s or 70s. We truly are the most prosperous society the world has ever known - which makes it all the more sad that people throughout the world and even in our own country still live in squalor. Now I’ve gone and made myself feel guilty about buying that TV.

[Current Music: George Harrison - My Sweet Lord]



Categories : Thought | 0 Comments

17th October 2004

Change and production

I wrote a while back about the increasing pace of change in the world, to the fact that nothing remains stable for very long any more, compared to older times. Here’s something I read today that looks on the effect of this on employees and the marketplace :

“employees must in addition worry about the consequences of the pressure put on companies to introduce new and better products into the marketplace. For long stretches of history, the life cycle of goods and services exceeded those of the human beings who produced and consumed them. In Japan, the kimono and jinbaori went unchanged for four hundred years. In China, people were still wearing in the eighteenth century exactly what their ancestors had worn in the sixteenth. Between 1300 and 1600, plough design did not alter across northern Europe. Such stability of production must have given artisans and labourers a reassuring sense that their work would outlive them. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, however, product life cycles have been sharply attenuated, and the trend has shaken workers’ confidence in the long-term integrity of their careers.”

~ Alain deBotton - Status Anxiety
[Current Music: Hillsongs Australia - Evermore]



Categories : Thought | 0 Comments