OK, back to week in. Gym this morning was off, I suppose a combination of shule desessioning and the holy day yesterday. The introduction of a early (0430? – for most) class seems to be keeping the educationalists and weight bouncers distracted and at least they are quiet except when filing through the gym to the reserved room when they are epitomes of loudness, rudeness, and all that is evil about exercise bogs. Besides that only the dedicated seniors doing cardio approved stuff – we are too old for these silly classes. Just get the work done and move on.
Speaking of moving on, I see [Link] that MegaHard has joined Canonical, Gnome, and Apple in adopting a tile GUI absent of real eye candy. Now we have a majority of desk box users who have reason to feel betrayed and abandoned. The only thing satisfying about this is that it strongly indicates that MegaHard is in dire straits. The most frightening thing is that if MegaHard falls will it take the desktop marketplace down with it? Never mind that this is all oriented towards the smart(?) phone/tablet marketplace. Will it compromise using computers to do real work for those of us who are not only concerned with distracting our attention spans from productive effort?
This brings to consideration the multiple aspects of work. Why do we have a Listerine, love-hate relationship with work? Why is it at once both the thing that most defines us and the thing we hate the most (at least most of the time?) Whatever happened to the Puritan (guilt and religion) work ethic? Did it get lost along with civility, manners, and altruism in the onrush of hedonism? Did the combination of Vietnam and the race to Luna exhaust us as a society? How did the Hippie rejection of Capitalism turn into the Consumerist slavery to Capitalism that seems to define our society today?
Certainly that is the definition of society today. People driven to have stuff which drives them to go into debt for a diploma they do not need (in most cases) that assures they have to take a job they will detest so they can go further into debt for the latest electronic gizmo that is functionally indistinguishable from the last five they bought, none of which have worn out but all contributing to their dissatisfaction and dissolution? And why, as the lotalty of organization to employee has disappeared has organization’s demands for employee loyalty increased exponentially? Can we no longer have either an arm’s length job or an existence outside wage slavery?
I think how happy I am not to be young and forced to work at what lacks fun. It was bad enough in my heyday when I had to do lots of things I detested some of the time to do what I enjoyed the rest of the time. Now too many only have the former which takes all of the time.
Some days it seems an extinction event might be a mitzvah.
