Monday, September 1, 2008
Driving around yesterday, I was listening to NPR on the car radio, and there was a lot of talk about preparations in N.O. and Texas for Gustav. The consensus was that evacuation was pretty much complete this time. They said that "People seem to be a lot more worried about Gustav than they were about Katrina."
I thought about that statement a long time.
There's something wrong with that thinking. It's like they forgot two centuries of history. They forgot what actually happened three years ago.
The folks of New Orleans have been through hurricanes before, some even bigger than Katrina. (Even I have been through a hurricane in Biloxi, as a child. When the eye passed over, my mother opened the house door and quickly slammed it shut again because the street was full of snakes. I remember that part. Which has nothing to do with this. Sorry.)
New Orleans would have survived the wind and rain of Katrina as well as they'd survived all the others. They know how to do it. It wasn't the direct effect of the hurricane that hurt them. It was the bursting of the levees.
So, I don't believe they're "a lot more worried about Gustav than they were about Katrina." I think they trust the levees less. They've lost faith.
That's a significant difference.
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Also on NPR, someone was talking about how the GNP is up, and that's supposed to be good. Higher productivity. But is it really? I wish I could remember who was talking about it. I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention, but there were a few things that struck me. (Hmmm. Maybe it wasn't NPR today. Maybe it was PBS yesterday. Maybe I should pay more attention to my life.)
We work hard to make money. We want money to buy things. We make more things so we can make more money so we can buy more things. The things we make have to be sold, or nobody gets any money. So we are sold things. We buy things things we are sold (where "sold" means being convinced we must have them).
It expands - a circle, a cycle, that gets bigger and bigger.
In the end, by working harder to make more things so we can buy more things---
---We are trading our leisure for things.
That's what "GNP is up" means - that we've traded away more leisure.
This is good?
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I found out why the fuel oil company send out the offer letter with so little time to respond.
If I hadn't been sick, fuzzy in the head, they wouldn't have gotten away with the trick.
They didn't want people to have the time to the research. If I hadn't been whacked, I'd have researched it before responding. It's what I do. I can't believe I didn't.
I looked it up yesterday.
Turns out the local average current retail price of fuel oil is about $.80 CHEAPER per gallon than the lowest price they offered. So they're going to contract with their supplier for 800 gallons of oil for me at the current wholesale price, which is less than the retail price, and then sell it to me for their usual markup PLUS $.80 more.
NOT a good deal for me.
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