Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Cognitive Dissonance

392 words

Further chapters of the interminable book of things I fail to understand are filled these days. So we’re having a fun economic crisis because some numbers in computers went the wrong way. And apparently this means that people spend less. In particular it means that they spend less on useless crap such as gas guzzling cars. As we all love the environment and are keen to save our wonderful planet, we’ll go and rejoice because of that and start mumbling something incoherent about there being good within the bad, dialectics and all; Right?

Err, wrong, apparently. It seems that the jobs attached to making those cars while avoiding any progress are much more valuable than the planet is. Instead of saying ‘good riddance’ or taking a more cheerful capitalist approach which says that this line of business is at the end and will make for a new, better, one, car manufacturers start moaning and begging. And politicians - particularly those in car country Germany - seem to ‘feel the pain’ instead of being a bit more neutral and shrugging the problem off as one that was foreseen decades ago.


Another item in the paper that baffled me today was that they thought about raising the minimum wage in some sectors and - reliably - companies ‘threatened’ to lay off people. One wonders what kind of ‘jobs’ people will get laid off there if their business model breaks when they have to pay their people a bit more. Do we really want those businesses around here? Or should we be prepared to pay a bit more for those ‘services’.

Somehow the whole ‘services’ ‘industry’ (heck, I’m running out of quotation marks again!) seems such a big scam at their low end. They underpay people and want them to be flexible and all and at the same time they’ll complain about things being too expensive and staff being too unreliable. At least the latter point doesn’t seem overly surprising, people are just trying to be ‘flexible’ on their own terms. And somehow all of these schemes manage to result in the same thing for me, the ‘consumer’: Even worse service for the same price. I still haven’t understood what the advantage of that is. In theory they’d try to improve their service to please their customers.

But I guess I misunderstood that as well.

December 16, 2008, 1:04

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