Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 04:52:45PM -0400, childers.paula AT epamail.epa.gov 
wrote:
> Shop your job, folks. Shop your job. And shop your community, and your
> values. Or pretty soon, you won't be able to.

I do that already - that's why I buy a lot of things online, but eat at
local restaurants. I like having universes of information and
commodities at my fingertips, I loathe shopping, and like to eat good
food. So I put my money where my job, and my tastes, are, too.

What any of this has to do with Wal-Mart, I have no idea, but I loathe
Wal-Mart, too. But I shop at Lowe's, too. Does that make me a bad
person? I don't think so. It's better organized than Home Depot, and
they have more stuff that I want in one place, and they are generally
pretty helpful. I shopped at Ferguson's on Hillsboro for a while, for
the "local" reason you cite, and they seldom had what I needed. They
closed soon after, though I don't know why. I go to Briggs hardware from
time to time, when I want something nice that I know they won't have at
Lowe's. But I'm not going to suffer through a bad meal just because the
people who own it might live nearby; I guess I'm just lucky that I find
most chain restaurant food tasteless, and like local stuff like
Char-Grill and Cooper's and Neomonde, et al.

I heard a woman on NPR the other day, talking about "free trade" and how
it was stealing food from her children's mouths. She said she went through
her house, looking for something that had been made in the USA, and after
an hour, she and her children gave up looking. 

The irony, I am sure, was utterly lost on her, because she then went on
to blame "corporate greed" for the fact that her kids wouldn't be able
to grow up to slave away in a factory. I think the specific example she
used was "making calculators". I almost wet myself laughing, thinking
about how high she must have set her sights - if the possibility that
her kids wouldn't be able to grow up to be wage slaves, making insanely
cheap mass market commodities - had her all in a tizzy.

I don't know about you, but I /like/ the fact that I don't have to live
like my great-great grandparents did. I've worked factory jobs and done
carpentry and so on; it's dull, for the most part, it's hard work, and I
worked my butt off to make sure I didn't ever have to go back to being a
$4.35/hour wage slave. I've carried gas-powered weedwhackers until my
arms were numb. I've unloaded trucks full of joists and trusses and had
one dropped on my head (it glanced off, for those who thought they
finally had an explanation for the Way I Am ;) and I've shoveled shit
and tried to cut my fingers off with chop saws and so on and so on. I
carried 80lb boxes of steering shaft components to and fro and stamped
numbers into them so they could tell what batch the bad ones came from.
I pumped gas and LP in winter, with subzero wind chills. I still have
scars from all of these jobs.

I like computers a /lot/ better.

If I had kids, I'd be /cheering/ that they might be able to work cushy
office jobs instead of coming home with grease and rusty splinters under
their fingernails every night, or working with numb hands from the
vibrations and impact of grass trimmers and punch presses, or whatever.
"Hey, lady", I yelled at the radio, "make sure your kids learn something
in school!"

I'm sure this will be calmly received and interpreted as "Steve wants
the Chinese to suffer these things while we all lose our jobs", but I
did my best, I suppose. 

-- 
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Book publishing is second only to furniture delivery in slowness. -b. schneier