Individual.

I don't think it's sensible wishing bad luck on people who will turn out in the end, to be your acquaintances, and just a likely your own relations.

It's foolish!

Dan

Dear diver dan,

Ah Steinbeck.

Cannery Row, my favourite.

"What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals? Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step over the noose while a generation of trapped, poisoned, and trussed-up men scream at them and call them no-goods, come-to-bad-ends, blots-on-the-town, thieves, rascals, bums."

The 'Grapes of Wrath' wasn't very cheery either. But people seemed to handle things better then than they do today. Perhaps it was because they didn't have much anyway; but I think that were better people than we are today.

Grapes of wrath was both a good read and topical, set in an era the like of which today's generation/Scomo have never ever witnessed or coped with?

Explains why post-war Australia went from the third wealthiest nation on earth and a creditor one at that, marked by hitherto unprecedented prosperity/a much more egalitarian society to one that's almost a basket case mired in record exponentially expanding debt! With most of what the old-timers built, sold off to the highest bidder, foreign, debt-laden, tax-avoiding, price-gouging, profit-repatriating, "investor(s)"

Progressive Pat.

We can make and sell our own shoes/clothes here/lots of other stuff!

But not with the old business as usual/paper shuffling, profit demanding middleman! Given the WWW and NBN, totally unnecessary! New industries, that more than compete with the likes of China, will be employee or family-owned and operated co-ops, i.e., cooperative capitalism!

Sell their ordered production/delivered COD directly to the end customer. Via Aust post or any competitive courier.

NB. Co-ops were the only free market, private enterprise, business model, that survived the great depression largely intact. And a historical fact, not opinion!

And because they needed no union representation! Hated almost universally by unions!

And because they automatically excluded the robber baron class, also reviled by extreme exploitative capitalists i.e., the real drones and leaners. So ably represented by the extreme right-wing conservative element

What will decide whether or not these co-ops stand, succeed or fail, will be the tax bill and utilities/water and electricity bills! And a facilitating government that preferences them ahead of all other comers/suppliers!

Just this one production and supply paradigm will, all but compel every one dollar in our own economy to do the work of seven or more! via the usual, flow on, economic factors! And, don't we need just that, right now!

A plan/any tried and tested, successful plan, albeit old school, is better than no plan at all? Other than printing money and throwing it around like confetti/saddling the shrinking cohort of taxpayers with unrepayable debt?
Alan B.

wishing bad luck on people
diver dab,
Come again ?

Individual

Ok, it's like this. Wishing the bad luck of wage reductions onto public servants.
Specify which categorie of public servants do you wish wage reductions on?

You seem to have a hate session on public servants per se I have noticed.

It's my observation re public servants I've been acquainted with through the years, they didn't have it all that good by comparison to private enterprise.

The job for life thing, flew out the window for them many years ago.
Some were simply abused by the system, with innovations that forced them to reapply for their jobs every two years or so, and were thus put through the anxiety of the unknown for god knows what benefit to anyone.

Apart from a few lucky ones, most I knew were on subsistence wages with insignificant superannuation benefits at the end of a very insecure working life.
I think the Government has done an admirable job at screwing its workforce down.

I'm waiting for your evidence to a contrary reality to my observation.

Dan