Posted on 11/14/2003 9:42:50 AM PST by em2vn
A gallon-sized jar of whole pickles is something to behold. The jar is the size of a small aquarium. The fat green pickles, floating in swampy juice, look reptilian, their shapes exaggerated by the glass. It weighs 12 pounds, too big to carry with one hand. The gallon jar of pickles is a display of abundance and excess; it is entrancing, and also vaguely unsettling. This is the product that Wal-Mart fell in love with: Vlasic's gallon jar of pickles.
(Excerpt) Read more at fastcompany.com ...
No need to brag about it. We can tell from your posts that you're slooow.
That's true --- one time I was Christmas shopping and looking for shirts and sweaters --- I told the clerks I was looking for all-cotten and made in America ---- some of the more expensive stores couldn't help me at all --- but JC Penneys did have what I was looking for.
If you want to pay more somewhere else for the same thing I pay less for at Wal-Mart, go ahead.
From now on, no matter how many new "jobs" are created, it will always be cheaper to have a robot or a Third World quasi-slave do them; the days of working for a living are drawing to a close.
With the end of employment, the so-called capitalist system (i.e. that economic system in which the majority of people own no property, and instead receive wages in exchange for their labor) will fall. The elimination of high-paying wage labor will destroy the middle classes. As the production of goods and essential services becomes more and more automated/slave-laborized, the social strata will undergo a tectonic shift. In time, the post-capitalist world will come into being: a top class consisting of creative types, professionals, and those who own and control the robots (both electronic and biological) that turn raw materials into wealth — and a vast mob on the bottom consisting of everyone else. (A third class – Soldiers — will exist to protect the Top Class from the Bottom Class, at least until the Top Class figures out how to neutralize the threat from the Bottom by drugs, electronic mind control, or some form of eco-friendly mass murder. At that point the Soldier Class will either overthrow the effete Top Class and assume their position (a la Zardoz), or will be disposed of by the Top Class via whatever means the Bottoms were eliminated.)
The X factor in this equation is human nature. People are not simply going to sit and starve. All is well as long as the masses have some form of income (either from the dole or from subsistence labor) and can buy the cheap consumer products they need to tranquilize themselves. Once this cycle is interrupted, however, watch out! Absent some foolproof form of mind control, the nascent Bottom Class will revolt long before the Tops have the means to dispose of them. At that point the Bottoms will most likely seize the means of production and institute some form of bleak Gunpoint Socialism. The end of civilization as we know it would follow in short order, as squabbling warlords began to fight over pieces of an ever-shrinking pie. The human race would survive, but only after God knows how many years of brutal warfare — first with nukes, then with bombs and machine guns, then swords, then bows and arrows. In time, only tribes of hunter-gatherers would remain among the heaps of rotting circuitry and rusting cars.
Or not. Perhaps God will once again bring forth a Great Man, a Charlemagne, a man of will and ferocity tempered by an ironclad devotion to the Cross, a great king that will remake the world by force of will and his sword arm, and institute by decree a new global feudalism — a new holy empire. This man might in time decree some sort of steady-state economy where te ownership of the wealth-producing machines is vested in the Crown, and where the levels of technology and wealth are frozen at some arbitrary point for everyone in the world. The meek shall then inherit the Earth: with everyone provided for at a reasonable level by the magic machines, those whose ambition, creativity, and desires transcend the norms decreed by the Sovereign will become exiles, leaving Earth behind to build their own fortunes among the stars.
Or perhaps the Lord will return before either eventuality comes to pass.
That's how I see it. I am almost certainly wrong about it all. But one thing is certain: neither capitalism nor socialism will be the final economic state of mankind on this finite, fecund Earth.
As always, God's will be done.
Pardon my french, but you're FOS on this one friend (you've obviously just been born and never owned the carburator-based mechanically-based ignition system (they called them "points") equipped crap in the 60's that Detroit used to grind out) ...
It's not class envy anymore than what our Founding Fathers had when they decided we would not be ruled by an Aristocracy --- there was a whole American Revolution over the desire to have a free society that would lead to a mostly middle class ---- imagine they even put phrases like "in the eyes of God, all men are created equal" --- that wasn't just put there for the hell of it.
Besides, I cannot see a single connection between your statement and anything I have said.
- They fail, on a regular basis (my *own* personnel experience - in traffic - several times) *and*
- don't provide variable dwell times as computerized (or even simple analog computers'/transistorized systems can do) - this can translate into either lower emissions *or* higher performance (GO WITH a **dual point** system perhaps) ...
- they can become contaminated with foreign substances and temporarily 'fail' (not work) compared to a 'reluctor' (magnetic sensor pickup) system.
I've got/had several vehicles with over 100,000 miles - heck - 130,000 miles! with no (knock on wood) electronic/ignitions failures (and one of those JUST passed the required -gack- state emisison test!)
I don't see the advantage in the expensive new things
SINCE that's your observation I can't call it simply call it 'BS' - BUT I'll bet you don't depend on a coal fired boiler in the winter NOR do you buy ice or store ice from the winter to use through the summer ...
Just because YOU never mastered the simple task of doing your own tune-ups is no reason to demonize the technology as "crap". Sheeesh, at least it was possible to do your own work back then. Nowadays, they make it dam* near impossible to even access the oil filter.
WHAT an idiot - HOW do you THINK I became FAMILIAR with these components!
Geesh ...
Later on - I put a "CD Ignition Kit" (Delta MArk-10 B I think, I may still have it) on that bucket of bolts.
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