Anyhow, I think I'm a Communist.

Okay, maybe not really. In theory, however, I do like the sound of communism, everyone working for the good of everyone and all that. Sounds nice. In practical application though, it seems to breed overpowered, self serving governments and extremely heavy chandeliers** (for the explanation of the chandelier part, see the end of this posting). So I don't know, maybe I'm a socialist instead. I still haven't done that political research I was mentioning and politics isn't really where I was going with the above title anyhow. It was more along the lines of economics.

I was hanging out with my older brother the other weekend. We had just cooked up some steaks on the grill, and we were watching that movie "Million Dollar Baby". It seemed like a real good flick for the first hour. I don't know how it ends because I couldn't stick around and watch the whole thing. I had shcool work that couldn't wait. As I've mentioned before, I'm a pretty busy person between working forty hours a week and taking 12 credits. My brother, being a physician's assisstant, is also pretty busy. Come to think of it, I hardly know anyone that doesn't either work two jobs, work a ridiculous amount of hours at one job, or work and go to school. There's even an example in my College Math 1 book that includes a graph showing how the average American work week has been increasing for the past 50 years or so. We're up to an average of somewhere around 55 working hours a week, according to this book. The kick in the ass to me is, with all this technology at our disposale which produces more goods and processes more information with less effort, shouldn't we be working less than ever? But no, the opposite takes place, and we work harder and become more efficient so we can...... work harder still and become even more efficient! It's nuts, is there any end to all this producitivity, any final goal to it? We only live once, should we really be spending a majority of our time working our asses off, all so Bill Gates or some other corporate fuck can buy themselves another yacht? There has to be better a way. What that better way is, I don't know. That's what we have supercomputers for. I hope that somewhere out there, there is a brilliant economist or two at work trying to find a way to stop all this madness before it gets too out of hand. Right now, the modified free market economy is the only way things seem to work themselves out correctly, if you could call our current state working things out correctly. Truth be told, I enjoy being ridiculously busy, granted that at least one of my endeavors of productivity is something I enjoy, which right now is the case (I love what I'm in school for). I just don't want things to get out of hand. The next thing you know, they'll be inventing a new kind of drug that has the stay-awake power of crystal meth without all the nasty side effects so we can do away with this whole sleep thing that seems to be getting in everyone's way (doctors and corporate executives would love it).

**About the chandelier thing... for those of you who never had this economics lesson, one of the problems of communism is that the government controls the production of goods to a large degree. The government can be wrong in their estimates, for one thing, and for another, it just seems to breed all kinds of complications. In communist Russia, for example, the government would measure the production of chandeliers by weight instead of per unit or anything like that. Needless to say, this was a bad idea. To meet the metric ton quota they had to fill, companies would just make heavier chandeliers, and Russian chandeliers were known for their propensity to come crashing down for quite some time. So if you want to insult someone's mother, just say, "Yo mama's so fat, she's heavier than a Russian chandelier", and whoever you're insulting will probably just look you at funny.