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Showing posts with the label tilting at windmills

Post-industrial societal decay

  Picture this: a broken-down wind turbine marooned in a semi-arid, cold South Australian desert, with rain slanting down like a cosmic joke. Once a symbol of innovation and progress, it's now a hulking testament to stalled dreams. And isn't that just the perfect metaphor for the Australian Dream? We were all promised a slice of the pie, a fair go, a home with a bit of a garden, maybe even a white picket fence if you were into that sort of thing. But now it feels like the dream's been yanked out from under us, leaving us all standing around like that useless wind turbine—broken, rusting, and utterly bewildered as the rain pours down. This disintegration isn't just about the fading hopes of home ownership or a cushy retirement. No, it runs deeper, right to the heart of what once bound us together. Class solidarity, the good old notion that we're all in this together, seems to have crumbled like a sandcastle in a storm. Maybe it's the endless grind of casualisatio...

Work for a large company is like getting on a train. Are you going 60 mph or is the train going 60 mph and you're just sitting still?

Windmill at the Spring Festival. Royal Botanical Gardens, Hobart. October 2011. Theme Thursday again, and this week I am in a "railing against" mood. You see, I currently hold the controversial opinion that there are too many gizmos and GADGETs these days. It used to be that the most advanced gadget you'd see at a meeting was the humble retractable pencil. Then overhead projectors got a foothold. As they died out, along came the laptop and with it the dreaded PowerPoint. Alongside this bloated behemoth you will now find your audience (that's how I view meetings, d'you wanna make something of it?) came the mobile phone, the I-Pod, the I-Pad, the touch pad maxi pad taxi pad plus-double-plus-plus. There are the coffee machines on the way in. Fax machines on the way out. The boom gate in the parking bay and the pay-as-you-go before you can go machine. There are the octopus phones and the video-conference gear that never works and the stapler that never works and the ...