May 21, 2003
The other day I was standing on the subway platform watching a surveyer at work. He was your standard union worker with a huge beer belly, a mustache, and filthy clothing. He had one of those devices mounted on top of a tripod (if you know what they're called, please email me) that is used to calculate the distance (using a lazer) between it and a given subject. They're also used to figure out the slope from where that tripod is, and where another one is, within the same line of site - if you live in NYC, I'm sure you've seen these devices.
Anyway, so he used a can of spray paint to make a circle around each leg of the tripod, and then measured (with a tape measure - not using a plumb-bob) the distance from a marker on the side of the device, to the floor. You can imagine that the tape measure wasn't straight, and as such, wasn't very accurate. Furthermore, this guy is relying on his vision, and ability to accurately describe the distance between the 1/16th of an inch and 1/8th. For those of you who think I'm nuts, one of the uses of these devices is also to calculate how much the ground has settled, and if beams are moving, etc... (general structural integrity). If something's moved 1/8th of an inch, that could be significant. To top it all off, he pulled out a note pad from his back pocket, took out a pencil, and wrote down the measurement. All I could think to my self at this point is that not only did he take a remarkably long amount of time to do this, and not only did he take inaccurate measurements, but now he's Hand Writing the measurements onto PAPER!
So what do I foresee happening next? The information is input by someone else into a computer... but this person (if they're like the data-input people at HBO) doesn't input the correct numbers - either because they can't read this guys hand writing, or because they're just stupid. End result - in a few weeks or months, when someone else goes back to survey, they get incorrect data from the first survey, and they either start over, or just ignore the whole thing all together.
So as I boarded the subway driven by people - which also drove me nuts - although I do find a modecum of solace in the fact that we finally have a computer dictating what stop we're at, and which one is coming - in the clearest way possible (something I've been pondering for the past 12 years (I'm 23 years old)... I couldn't stop thinking about an idea that my friend Lon mentioned to me a few days earlier.
He came up with this idea that in the future, everything will be free - primarily because we will find some way to make energy for free, and the machines that are powered by the free energy will do much of the jobs that unionites hold today (like build entire buildings, etc...) so labor will be free, and these same machines will also deliver the goods to us, so delivery will be free, and we will genetically engineer everything so that tomatoes will have a shelf life of a year, and won't get damaged when hit. Furthermore, we will also develop better recycling techniques, as well as make materials that are indestructible... etc... you get the point. Anyway, it got me stuck on this surveyer in the Subway. I couldn't get past thinking that a machine could replace this guy for a tiny fraction of the cost, and do an infinitely better job than this guy could ever aspire to do - on a basic level, because of his physical limitations, on a higher level, because there's nothing a machine won't eventually be able to do - this guy is very limited.
This then got me on another track - someone mentioned the other day that they thought that the middle class is a creation of mutinational corporations. That these companies, like mine, keep many people employed, and in the middle class, not because they need them, but because having the middle class helps to avoid class warfare. The lower class have something to look up to that's not too far away from where they are, and the middle class have something to aspire to as well. Personally I don't agree. I think that the middle class has been generated by the opportunities afforded to people in America, that aren't available anywhere else. No other country in the world has a middle class like ours... To be completed later
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