Random Thoughts
I’m sitting here waiting for the call to pick up my car from the mechanics where it is having the clutch fixed. I put the job off as long as I could but I barely made it home from work last time so I had to book it in.
It’s amazing how impatient people can be. The clutch problem meant I couldn’t take off from the lights very fast as the engine would rev but the car wouldn’t go. I had to nurse it along so I’d be traveling maybe 10 or 20 kph for some time before the car would pick up some speed and let me move into another gear.
People were getting so cross with me but I couldn’t help it. The first time someone beeped at me I tried to move faster and all that happened is the car stalled.
Next time you get stuck behind some old lady who is driving really slow spare a thought for me and give her the benefit of the doubt will you. Maybe her clutch is shot too.
So that’s another 650 dollars gone. If I had all the money I have spent on repairing this car I could buy a much newer one but with any luck this should be the last of it. There isn’t much left to repair now so I am hoping it will only need maintaining after this.
In other news I finally caved in to social pressure and joined Face book where I am growing a fairy garden to help save the rain forest and battling some guy named Rodger who keeps buying my picture in “Owned”. Owned is another save the world thing.
You buy and sell peoples pictures with virtual money called “lunch money” which you make playing games. You can use it the way Rodger is, to buy my picture – grrrr, or use it to save the world. You can buy grains of rice to feed the hungry, purchase square inches of blankets for the homeless, buy calories of food to feed animals in need and so on.
I was donating every cent I made in the games to save the world but now I have to keep buying my picture back as I can’t bring myself to let some guy named Rodger, or any guy for that matter, “own” me.
I don’t know why the idea bothers me hehehe. It just does. I’m not sure how me playing games can translate into real cash for the owners of the games to spend saving the world but it seems to. The people running the games donate to the causes depending on how much virtual money the players give.
I have seven friends in Face book and all of them are members of my family. I’m not convinced the place is safe as I have already had a trojan turn up on my computer. I’m not sure where it came from tho as I went to some other sites which could have done the deed as well so I will just stay wary.
In world news I note the rich have skimmed so much off the top that the economy has collapsed. Now governments are rushing in to top things up using taxpayers money so the rich don’t have to suffer too much. What a farce. They claim it’s to protect the poor but the real winners will be the rich. If they really want to help the poor why don’t they just stop slugging our savings with taxes?
I have a savings account. I got talked into opening one when I went for a loan to help me move house. I have nothing much in it so far because I plan to close it as soon as they take money from it. If they don’t charge me any fees or taxes, which they haven’t so far, I will use it to start trying to save money but I am not letting them tax my income more than once by having more than one account otherwise.
It seems my decision to get rid of all my debts was an excellent one. Too bad I haven’t been able to stay debt free but the five grand loan won’t be as hard to clear as a new car loan or a house mortgage so that is comforting.
It’s also comforting to know my job, counselling suicidal people, is unlikely to become redundant. In a perfect world there would be no need for me but this is far from a perfect world and depression is growing. Life is getting harder to enjoy and easier to abandon and I don’t see that changing for the better any time soon.
The only real question is whether the economy will get so strapped for cash that the government will stop supporting services that do not benefit the rich.
Ahh the smell of cynicism – shame on me.
Here is why I blame the rich for the current economic crisis.
In the beginning people traded real things and there was no cash so I would trade my vegetables for someone else’s horse for example.
Things were fine then people started inventing things that cost a lot more than a single vegie patch could cover so they decided to make one item the basis for the economy. That item was gold. I could trade my vegies for a sliver of gold and, when I had enough slivers, I could trade them for a horse drawn carriage.
To make it easier to carry the slivers they turned them into coins of a particular size, weight and value and away the economy went.
The government of each country collected gold and added it to their treasury and, in time, they persuaded us to hand over our slivers, nuggets and coins in return for pieces of paper stamped with the value of the gold we had given them.
In time all the gold, except what the rich had turned into jewelery, found its way into the government treasury and people traded government “IOU’s” instead.
The government, in its infinite greedy wisdom, decided to print as many IOU’s as they felt they needed and gamble on the fact that we would not all want to cash them in for gold at the same time.
I’m sure it didn’t take long for them to make the law that ensures we can never demand our gold back anyway so we got stuck with the bits of paper and we got used to it.
The years rolled by and the gold was found and handed over to the treasury who printed more IOU’s making the country richer but then the gold dried up. It’s pretty rare to find any these days so what we have is pretty much it.
Some people found ways to get more of the government IOU’s than the rest of us and they used it to buy what little gold the government had not been able to confiscate.
That gold comes in the form of jewelery and other luxury items.
Now the rest of us have entered a time when the veil of bullshit has ripped and it is clear there is not enough gold to cover all the IOU’s that are in circulation.
Panic strikes, wall street crumbles, people suffer but the rich are OK because they have their gold safely hidden in their jewelery.
The government takes money from taxes to persuade people the IOU’s are good while the rich take whatever IOU’s they have and buy more gold.
The rich have their own treasuries and jumping in with taxpayers money to stabilise the economy is merely ensuring they do not have to part with any of their gold to keep themselves living the good life. It’s just going to allow them to skim yet more off the top!
That’s the way I see it anyway but, to be fair, I have absolutely no training in economics so I could be wrong hehehe.
