I'm tired and I'm sore. As I'm getting older, I just feel that my body is getting tighter and less responsive. My eyes really hurt. I'm going to need glasses soon. This near sightedness in one eye is a killer. Too much screen time is killing me. I want to just read my normal physical book, and just rest. It's dawning on me now, as I realise that we're going 10 years into this blog. How the world has changed. Or how little it has. It all tends to go in cycles. I could just go to sleep right now, right at my desk! I'm seriously about ready to pass out. Dark circles under my eyes and everything of the sort!
Who buys houses at auctions? It's a really filthy activity. Setting a minimum price (the reserve), and then seeing the maximum price you can extract from the market. What's worse is that auctions employ psychological tactics to get people to bid over their limits, so they always overextend to outbid other people that they're in 'competition' with. It's always weirded me out that more and more houses tend to get auctioned off. Why the revival? Well because people are greedy. I don't trust the real estate market, and I don't trust real estate agents (they're all shady). This concept of property as an investment instead of somewhere to actually live and thrive, is something that's destroying modern society. It's the harbinger of inherited wealth transferred through generations, which all just goes to reinforce discrimination and unjust causes. You can take that to the bank!
The state of journalism in this town is pretty poor. Despite living in the capital city of the country, we only have one real newspaper that services the town. Everything else is just community papers, or just general puff/advertorial magazines designed to sell you cars and houses, not to inform you about important issues. With the advent of the Internet, more people are turning online for their exclusive news source. This has come at the detriment of circulation figures for this paper - the Times. When profits fall, the idea is to cut costs and all the better journalists were let go. The paper is now basically staffed by fresh university graduates with no real skill or contacts to break the important stories. And that's only an inkling into how democracy died.
Why do people get personal loans? Interest rates are very high (even though at the moment they're supposed to be low), and in the case of credit card repayments or cash advancements, the interest rates are near exorbitant. So why bother taking on such a loan to repay (for the bank's profit) an amount much higher? What could you really need that warrants that kind of loan? If you need something, save for it. Sacrifice, scrounge up and save, and in time you can get it, and not have to have the bank profit off you (and you're better off from a long term perspective). Being in debt to anyone is never good, especially the banks. Then again, I'm not even sure how people outside my circle live. Life is tough, and maybe I don't appreciate that fact enough.
The conservative government floated the idea of introducing a co-payment of $7 AUD to attend GP appointments (for basic doctor services). So if you need to be diagnosed with something, you pay that money (on top of what you'd normally be charged), and then if you need to see a specialist, you'd pay their fees, then you'd come back to the General Practitioner to discuss results, and that's another $7, and the consultation fee again. That's almost $700 (I'd assume to be minimum) for just 3 visits. The cost of health care is ridiculous, considering we consider Australia to be an industrialised and developed nation. And the standard of care isn't even that great! Just go and visit a public hospital anywhere in Australia, and you will think we have not advanced past the 1960s, or the 1970s as a best case scenario. You better hope something complex doesn't happen to you, because the odds of you coming out in better shape are not in your favour. The only decent health care is privately funded, and that cost is way out of reach of the majority of the population. Our health care system is clogged. Unless you're immediately dying, you can spend up to 4-6 hours waiting in an emergency ward, and seeing a specialist can take months. Everyone was up in arms about this co-payment issue, because it places health care even further out of reach of ordinary Australians. I think it's just short sighted policy. The idea was to stop people who have colds and small niggling issues from clogging up the system and leading to better efficiencies (while also leading to a profit for the Government). That sort of makes sense, but what about when poor people or pensioners need to see the doctor? They just won't go, and that's an even worse outcome. If it was means-tested, so that it only impacted those on higher incomes, then we could still have the co-payment to help reduce the strain on the system, while still allowing lower income people to get access to health care.
What does adulthood even mean? Does it mean never playing? Does it mean hard work and no relaxation? Emotional stunting to the point where you have to always have an air of fakeness or two-facedness about you? That you always sacrifice happiness for stability and safety? Why always be told to grow up like it's a good thing? Adults love the status quo, having money, having more than your neighbours. They don't know how to have empathy and engage with others.
I was reading an interesting article in the Guardian, and on another online crowd-sourced news site about how governments stay in power. Like I mentioned earlier, things tend to work in cycles. Early last century there was fear about the Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, the Communists, the Russians. This fear gets whipped up by the government and gets the uneducated populace into hysteria about it. This has a massive bearing on things like elections, as both sides fight to say they can control the imaginary threat. Whoever has the most draconian tactics generally wins power. Conservative ones win extra points, because they're good at highlighting the 'perils' of minorities, as well as the poor. We're now seeing that point with Islam and Muslims. People think multiculturalism doesn't work because they're sick of seeing enclaves of ethnic people, and they don't like people who speak other languages, or they find it hard to pronounce names they're not used to. They don't like seeing women wearing hijabs or burqas because it means they can't gaze upon them to tell whether they're attractive enough to rate. Everything is defined by their 'otherness' - as in 'why can't they be more like us' and because they're not me "I don't like it". I get it, radicalisation is a problem, but what do you want everyone else to do about it? It's like they expect people to be putting themselves in danger to go overseas and personally thwart any terrorist actions. They think religion itself is a harbinger of violence (that is very debatable, and is not restricted to any one religion), but here's the kicker: Islam, like Judaism is not centralised in the way that Christianity is. You can't throw 65 million dollars at the issue (like our government is doing) and expect things to happen. No one person speaks for the religion, so funding mosques and Imams and whatever is not going to work, because that that want to radicalise or want to be radicalised will find their own way. But how can that be stopped? Unless you can get inside someone's head and get them to actually change a thought, Inception style, then it's not possible. People need to get out there and experience things. Not just visit Europe and make huge judgement calls because they think they're all cultured now. Let me remind you, if you're one of these vocal idiots out there right now, history will prove you wrong, just like it has with any other paranoid, scared party out there from the past.
2 and a half hours to go! This has been a great post though. Readership is up! I think my writing has gotten better. I can collect my thoughts now. I can organise my prose better. Ahh the network at work is down, and I can't access anything! I guess all I can do is keep writing. I really encourage everyone to travel. Save up and go somewhere new, some place you've never been. You have to step outside your comfort zone at some point. See how the rest of the world lives, and it'll put your place on the map into perspective. If you get in a plane and fly above a continent, you see how arbitrary and silly things like country boundaries are. They are meaningless. We are all on the same blue ball just floating in space. You get that feeling of interconnectedness.
Damn, I had something good and important to say, but I've now forgotten my point. Oh well. My recall isn't up unfortunately! There's a lot to learn, but no chances are ever taken. It's never as easy as you may think. It's all going down somewhere. It's all being accounted for. But to who? Or to what? If there's nothing in the end, it's a zero sum game. And then what? Nothing really links society together except for two things, life and death. Everyone will die, if you exist, you live. That's it, besides that, no 2 people will have the exact same experience ever. So why isn't this recognised more often? It's the great leveller. The great equaliser. From our first ancestor to our last, that will be it. It will never change, unless we tap into immortality, and then what? That's just a ridiculous grey area. Wow, this post is huge! Not a bad effort at all. But now I'm bored and don't have anything more to say.
Is there focus that I just don't have? Why can't I ask the question? Why can't they just be answered? Why isn't there any assistance? I remember back in High School (or maybe it was Primary School) where I wrote about a third world country I had visited. I travelled pretty widely with my parents and co. and there were some parts of the country that were very modern and developing quickly. I mentioned that particular bit in my report, and I didn't get a good mark for that report, because the teacher crossed it out and put a question mark next to that particular point. What? How would he know? He's never visited there! What a hunk of baloney! Fuck you, Mr. Thomas, I hope you're dead!
Still nothing working! Terrible! How am I supposed to get anything done?? Oh well, I'm sure I can be productive in other ways.
Better get to it! It's been good.
Joaquin out.
