Gas prices here are at $1.51 a gallon for 87 octane unleaded. That's a full $0.20 over the normal high. Grife. People are starting to consider buying motorcycles and scooters to save on gasoline prices. Why are gas prices so high? Well, world-wide production is at something like 65 million barrels of crude a (day, I think it was). World-wide consumption is 67 million barrels in the same time period. The reason gas prices are so high is oil companies are having to scrabble about, using their reserves and such, to make up the remaining 2 million. Of course, pretty soon, Mexico or some other non-OPEC country is going to go "fuck it, we need the money" and start pumping out more oil to make up the difference. Apparently even OPEC are considering this.
Or, alternately, we could quit driving those irrelevant pickup trucks and S.U.V.'s which a lot of people who don't, technically speaking, ever haul things or go off road are driving. You know who you are, you two-parking-space hogging, gas-guzzling, 30-dollar-tab-pushing goombahs! Aherm. Anyway. The whole principle of the S.U.V. (I'm sure there are perfectly nice S.U.V. drivers out there, such as anyone who reads this journal and happens to drive one) irritates me. Hey! Let's make a vehicle that's not quite a car, not quite a truck, to get around federal emissions and mileage regulations! It's brilliant! If S.U.V.'s were made to obey the same fscking laws that every other car has to abide by, they'd shrivel up and die a well-deserved death. Nothing, nothing at all that they provide as a benefit to their drivers can possibly outweigh the fact that they're fscking well cheating like bastards and getting away with it.
Irritating thing of the day: Ordering a new 56k USB modem, having it arrive, noting with joy the "$40 mail-in rebate!" sticker on the front, noting with extreme displeasure the "Expires 12/31/99!" note on the actual mail-in form. Grrr.
Amusing thing of the day: Warren Ellis , extremely surly comic book writer extraordinaire, has his own web site, filled with great surl, as well as a pseudo-journal of his adventures in life, surl and comic book writing, plus the occasional rant or posted script or outline posted for kicks. That's entertainment for you.
Maybe some day I should post, for kicks, a list of all the sites I check on a regular basis. This would also save me having to always type the cursed things into Lynx in the morning when I go a-surfing. Maybe. Maybe not.
Lunch today was half a blackened grouper sandwich, a large number of "cajun fries", and fried bits-o-pickle dipped in honey mustard, tartarish sauce. I almost missed out on this due to my co-workers being slack and not coming to remind me that they were going out to lunch, but, being a surly type, I cottoned to their departure and tracked them down. They're just too slack to come way back into the dungeon where I work and tell me, I guess. I'd thought I had them properly trained, too...
And, the last quickie, there's something nifty called Ananova which is a smart agent of sorts that will read your news and other stuff. It is, naturally, a green-haired girl. Using descriptive tags that tell it what kind of thing it's reading, it's - her, rather, expression and mode of speaking will apparently change to reflect the content that is being gone over. What I want to see, of course, is 'skins' for this. This technology won't be mature until we can have our news read by a cat-girl every morning.
So.
Once again, a kid has gotten his grubby little hands on a gun and killed another kid. This is, I'll note, why I would rather gnaw off my own arms than have to raise a kid in These United States. If you're going to put yourself at risk, you should at least do it for an educational system that is worth more than the change in my pockets. But we digress.
Now, this is obviously a Bad Thing. But, really, the kid lived in a freaking crack house. A place where money, sex and drugs routinely changed hands. A place that was literally coming apart at the seams (of course, it's not like crack houses are particularly well-maintained facets of neighborhood life). The fact that he ended up accidentally offing someone is... completely unsurprising!
What put him there? Well, obviously, his father, who apparently at some point remarked "Yeah, my kid lives in a crack house." People like that ought to be turned into ground moron and fed to the pigs. At least then they'd be contributing something to our society. But broader. We (in the general sense) put him there. By allowing the down-- I mean right-sizing of corporate America, the paring back of production that's based in the U.S., that creates tons-o-poverty. By allowing the school system to be progressively more fscked, more delusional, a place where the badly-paid teach the dis-interested with a curriculum banged out by a small number of monkeys in a locked room, hurling hardened feces randomly at a giant-sized type-writer and then re-written by a committee composed entirely of morons. By running the War On Drugs so as to create the whole drug sub-culture, and antagonize the very people we're supposed to be saving.
Notice I did not mention guns.
It's tragic that someone got shot, but even if the impossible happened and Alien Space Bats descended from the sky to grant unto us magical powers to destroy every gun in America, that still wouldn't change the underlying situation. It just means kids get to die and have their lives fucked up in different ways. Until you address the underlying causes and situations that cause people to become fucked up (and, admittedly, tighten up the gun situation a bit. I mean, really.) you're not going to change a whole lot.
Unfortunately, the root causes aren't going to change. People aren't going to become less sociopathic than they are currently, only more. Eventually the bubble is going to pop. I mean, the New Economy is running on mega mergers and fscking imaginary money right now. Money is, admittedly, always a consensual hallucination, but now we're dropping acid to imagine it instead of merely ignoring reality a little. Eventually we're going to sober up, and then we'll really be deep in it.
Enormous profits are bad. They're something that should be sought, but never achieved. Enormous profits mean that things are being pared back, that people are becoming increasingly delusional, that probably productivew workers are being laid off in order to squeeze out those extra few cents per share that the infantile, crack-addled share-holders squeal for like spoiled children.
Companies are getting away with a lot of extremely un-fun things; merging into ludicrously massive mega-corporations and hurling certain sectors of workers out of their doors; that should never be allowed, and they're only getting away with it because the "economy's so strong". Yeah, whatever. Even if this is true, we're going to find ourselves in rather dire straits when eventually people wake up from their little Internet stock dream. That's when we'll all look at the hideous, Frankensteinian monster that we've gotten into bed with and realize we've just caught a particularly nasty disease from it and we're going to die.
Well, either that, or it'll be peaches and cream forever. Um. One of the two, really.
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