2003-09-22 14:33![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
digitaldiscipline
digitaldisciplineTwo letters from Salon.com regarding the whole automated-checkout thing struck me as worth yammering about today.
First, there was Oswald Neimon's comment that, I'm a 41-year-old technologist. I now work in a tiny computer store for $8.75 an hour. It's the only job I could get after being laid off my IT director job two years ago. My rent takes up two-thirds of my pay.
Yet I write a technology column for the local newspaper. I do it for clippings. Seems that doesn't pay, either.
Preach it, brother Oswald. I'm in marginally better shape, since I'm getting the princely sum of $10 an hour for my time as World's Ugliest Secretary [thus relegating my half of the rent to half a paycheck, with the other half going toward the car payment], and the moonlighting that's begun to trickle in from the fliers I've put up around the apartment complex, offering up my PC expertise for house calls is a sporadic bit of extra cash. It's far from the three PC's a week I'd hypothetically need to sell to meet my current income, but every little bit helps.
Then there was this, from Anca Mosoiu: The as-yet-unsolved paradox is that technology breaks apart physical "meat-communities," allowing us to flee to gated communities where we don't have to actually interact with people who are not on the same intellectual/educational track as us.
Maybe rich folks can do this. I sure can't. I was closest to this scenario when I was a $7.50 an hour editoral assistant in a herd of 20 other [BA degrees being de rigeur for the job], most of us out in the 'burbs. Even when I was a tech monkey, while the workplace was fairly homogeneous, the town sure wasn't, unless you want to call "rural jackass" as an "intellectual/educational track" that only a subset of my corworkers fit well, and I didn't fit at all.
Anca has apparently never considered that rich folks might live in cities - for all the hellish shortcomings and funky benefits of life in Brooklyn, a three-block afternoon walk in any direction would expose you to at least three languages that aren't English.
I posit that Anca took Neal Stephenson's fictional burbclaves (from Snow Crash) to heart here. The gated community I reside in bears zero resemblance to the rich folks' one down the road [which, from cursory inspection, is rather ethnically eclectic], or even the moderately-well-off one around the corner [which is mostly, to hear long-time residents tell it, currently falling to disrepair because of a surge of settlement-money residents that are no longer capable of living beyond their means - in New York, we were beseiged by male impotence commercials, here, it's debt consolidation and "sell your timeshare for CASH" ads that dominate outside of prime time].
My complex? Military, mostly, and a lot of, well, everybody else. There's a lot of Spanish spoken here, a lot of ebonics, a smattering of various asian dialects. . . . you know, a fairly representative cross-section of the whole country's $15-to-40k income population.
I suspect that the only technology that's pulling me away from these "meat communities" is my 'net connection, because I can hunt you bastards down and shake you until you talk. *grin* Or at least powerstaple you to a barstool so you'll have to listen.
First, there was Oswald Neimon's comment that, I'm a 41-year-old technologist. I now work in a tiny computer store for $8.75 an hour. It's the only job I could get after being laid off my IT director job two years ago. My rent takes up two-thirds of my pay.
Yet I write a technology column for the local newspaper. I do it for clippings. Seems that doesn't pay, either.
Preach it, brother Oswald. I'm in marginally better shape, since I'm getting the princely sum of $10 an hour for my time as World's Ugliest Secretary [thus relegating my half of the rent to half a paycheck, with the other half going toward the car payment], and the moonlighting that's begun to trickle in from the fliers I've put up around the apartment complex, offering up my PC expertise for house calls is a sporadic bit of extra cash. It's far from the three PC's a week I'd hypothetically need to sell to meet my current income, but every little bit helps.
Then there was this, from Anca Mosoiu: The as-yet-unsolved paradox is that technology breaks apart physical "meat-communities," allowing us to flee to gated communities where we don't have to actually interact with people who are not on the same intellectual/educational track as us.
Maybe rich folks can do this. I sure can't. I was closest to this scenario when I was a $7.50 an hour editoral assistant in a herd of 20 other [BA degrees being de rigeur for the job], most of us out in the 'burbs. Even when I was a tech monkey, while the workplace was fairly homogeneous, the town sure wasn't, unless you want to call "rural jackass" as an "intellectual/educational track" that only a subset of my corworkers fit well, and I didn't fit at all.
Anca has apparently never considered that rich folks might live in cities - for all the hellish shortcomings and funky benefits of life in Brooklyn, a three-block afternoon walk in any direction would expose you to at least three languages that aren't English.
I posit that Anca took Neal Stephenson's fictional burbclaves (from Snow Crash) to heart here. The gated community I reside in bears zero resemblance to the rich folks' one down the road [which, from cursory inspection, is rather ethnically eclectic], or even the moderately-well-off one around the corner [which is mostly, to hear long-time residents tell it, currently falling to disrepair because of a surge of settlement-money residents that are no longer capable of living beyond their means - in New York, we were beseiged by male impotence commercials, here, it's debt consolidation and "sell your timeshare for CASH" ads that dominate outside of prime time].
My complex? Military, mostly, and a lot of, well, everybody else. There's a lot of Spanish spoken here, a lot of ebonics, a smattering of various asian dialects. . . . you know, a fairly representative cross-section of the whole country's $15-to-40k income population.
I suspect that the only technology that's pulling me away from these "meat communities" is my 'net connection, because I can hunt you bastards down and shake you until you talk. *grin* Or at least powerstaple you to a barstool so you'll have to listen.
