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People don't want to work.

Actually, that sounds like a reasonable statement to me. I suspect that if we were to stop paying people for their work, that very very few would actually show up. People work to earn a living, and successful people are those who are willing to work hard at it, and charge well for it. But working multiple minimum wage jobs with few if any benefits is hardly about making a living. You are wasting time and killing yourself in the process; sometimes literally.

I also have no interest in embracing change. Civilization moved away from normadic existence ages ago and I see little to be gained by returning to it. Change means starting over at the beginning and getting absolutely nowhere. I noticed that most of those preaching about change have seldom seem to have experienced a real dislocation.

But, if embracing change is absolutely the way of the future, then by all means lets do it. I suggest we hold a national lottery every month, put everyones name in a hat, and assign everyone by the luck of the draw. That could be fun; you can spend a month as the CEO of a fortune 500 company and earn a cool million, and the subsequent month cleaning out the mens room at your local Burger King at minumum wage. Somehow I suspect that that is not the kind of change people want us to embrace. When we talk about embracing change it means that we want someone else to work at one low grade job, only to be "changed" to yet another equally unfulling post. As for ourselves, we seem quite willing to kiss our bosses bottoms and do everything we can to shield ourselves from change.

We are not experiencing a problem in work ethic, nor is our work force plagued by an unwillingness to grow; but, we do have a shortfall in meaningful jobs, and a corporate culture that is doing a disaterous job of managing its human resources. We have gone from hiring the best to hiring the cheapest, and if it shows well on the bottom line of the income statement, it shows poorly in the quality of the products we are producing. If all we can produce is junk, then we certainly need to produce it ever more cheaply to sell it.

It is a good thing that many people are day trading, since the future is beginning to look very shaky.