Been a while...

Well its been close to a year since i published anything and suddenly i get this nice comment from some fellow ive never meet saying he enjoyed reading an article of mine!. So, here I am...funny how the world works, one minute your investigatig why on earth anyone in the world would want to sell Kangaroo scrotum accesseroies: (no seriously, http://www.univenter.com/kangaroo.html) and then your on a year old blog site.

So whats new with life. Im unemployed, and happily so, although making ends meet will get difficult...still, for those of you who read how much i technically save riding a bike over driving a car, at least i will be able to avoid working for rather a good deal longer than an average silly car driving person.

Speaking of silly car driving people...i'm going to melbourne next week, first time ever, i hear its fantastic. Full of bike lanes and markets and trams and other sort of socially minded things...what a place.

I really don't know where to start on stuff, theres so much thats happened in a year, so many new insights learned, and it would take me ages to explain them all so that they were put in a useful and coherent strucutre for anyone else to understand.

Heres a thought for you to take home though, there are clear flaws within simple economics in regards to say, work creation. Because there is no distinguishing between work creation for the repair of something, or the creation of something, and whats more, whether that something is of value in itself or not (of course the market is seen to determine). People often say "we have to create this paper mill to create more jobs"..but what about the trees being cut down, how does it factor in? Far be it from me to make people unemployed, rather i think they should be employed in other sectors, like hemp farming for fibre and paper, rather than cutting down heritage forests! Another example, if you want to "Create more work", why not just send me on a rampage, blowing up post boxes and knocking down peoples houses and grafitting on vending machines...that will create a huge mess that will have to be cleaned up, creating "work"...there is no distinction here between work that will push society forward in an ecologically and hence economically sound direction, and just shit that roles aroud in a circle with no guidance other than from those with money who almost never see the true ramifications of their actions. (the owner of niki for instance has firms in indonesia yet he has never been there or seen the working conditions the people must endure). Further more, if you decide to hire me as a mass murderer, sure youre creating "work" for me, so that i can pay my mortgage and childrens school bills or whatever, but how is that work profitable in a larger sense? By and large, in the majority of cases we condemn killing, so much so that we take it out of the market, we say, this thing is far more serious than something the market can lightly through around. Similarly with slavery, that used to be a business! We never experienced market failure and therefore said "theres no profit in trading slaves!" Rather we made a hard law saying, slavery is wrong, therefore we take it OUT of and BEYOND the market realms! That was an ethical judgment. If i recall correctly "the corporation" A fantastic albeit it slightly left wing documentary on the power and problems of corporations mentions this. It can be found for free on youtube at:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FA50FBC214A6CE87

I highly recommend it, even if you don't agree with all of it, it has some very confronting information and good ideas that at least need to be taken into account. Enjoy!