Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a RIM technician!

Does anyone really wonder why a lot of the world hates the U.S. and its brand of laissez-faire capitalism more generally? A lot of people claim to, but they seem to miss the more subtle, often cultural cues.

They do get part of it right, in that a large part of it has to do with envy — envy that something as frivolous as "Blackberry Thumb" can be a person's sole reason for visiting a doctor.

If there are any doctors to be had, that is. Because, you know, doctors live just around the street corner everywhere in the world, just like milk and apples come from your local supermarket conglomorate.

Behold, the ridiculously small-minded American excecutive. Your thumb hurts? Boo-hoo. Either work out or stop typing so many useless e-mails! You aren't providing leadership or clarity, you're cluttering the already-saturated information channels of your colleagues.

Also, for those of you that aren't aware, Research In Motion (RIM) are the makers of the Blackberry, which has become ubiquitous in the modern business environment. The title has nothing to do with rimming, though that would make for an extremely amusing title.

"What do you do?"

"Not much, just working as a RIM technician right now, looking to get into something a bit more advanced later on. You know, something that stretches my skills a bit."

" ... I'll bet you are!"

Though it is said that developing world countries are contracting our maladies, so I guess they are going to need a lot of RIM technicians after all.

All this text is making my fingers cramp ... medic!

Walking home from bowling I had a thought: the current Industrial Revolution (e.g., 'modern' society post 1700-ish) is experiencing a condensed form of resource abuse in the same style as agriculture did. The Middle East used to be quite habitable, and there is evidence to suggest intensive farming by humans is a large part of the reason it's so arid today (not universally). Until people thought of things like crop rotation or terraced farming, we were on a path to self-destruction (albeit over a much longer time horizon and with a lot lower public knowledge of the consequences). Industry finds itself in the same predicament today, whether it cares to admit it or not.

My hope/dream is that we can one day find new ways to fully make use of the land, in the same way modern farmers have been able to (and like native Americans used to in their hunting). If we could live in a "carbon neutral" society, whereby we exhausted only those emissions absorbed by plants through photosynthesis, or didn't emit anything beyond negligible emissions at all, that would truly be a great achievement for civilization.