Mooocow, I'm afraid you miss the point completely. It's that life shouldn't just be about money! For sure, people are making money out of Wal-Mart. But how much power does the consumer have over what Wal-Mart stock or don't stock? Essentially no power at all, I would say. The Ma and Pa store is not designed to make a whole load of people extremely rich; it's a way for Ma and Pa to have a reasonably comfortable life-style so that they can be free to enjoy the finer things in life. The one criticism I would have of the article is that it centres entirely on the US. Hello there! The rest of the world is sitting here, and it is no different! Take for example, Ireland. It's a country of only 3.5 million people. It has the fastest growing economy in the European Union, and is the LARGEST exporter of software in the world (ahead of the US). People are constantly talking about the "Celtic Tiger". There are more jobs than there are blades of grass, and many of them are as well paid as (or better than) our European and American counterparts. However with all this wealth, people are still very unhappy. Why? Because the only thing they are doing is living to work... we used to be "time-rich, money poor" and now we're "time-poor, money-rich". The quality of life has gone through the floor. Corporate Ireland funds the main political parties (cf Flood and Moriarty Tribunals), particularly the one in government at the moment, and social policy is therefore being dictated to a large extent by that corporatism. A lot of people have loads of money, no time, and the price of housing is enormous, so they can't afford to own their own home. Many people feel they have become slaves of the corporation "Ireland Ltd." At the other end of the scale, there are a significant number of people who have been left behind on this economic wave, who aren't flavour of the month of the IT industry because they do not have the skills, and they have no money and no prospects at all...
Slashdot Mirror
Mooocow, I'm afraid you miss the point completely. It's that life shouldn't just be about money! For sure, people are making money out of Wal-Mart. But how much power does the consumer have over what Wal-Mart stock or don't stock? Essentially no power at all, I would say. The Ma and Pa store is not designed to make a whole load of people extremely rich; it's a way for Ma and Pa to have a reasonably comfortable life-style so that they can be free to enjoy the finer things in life. The one criticism I would have of the article is that it centres entirely on the US. Hello there! The rest of the world is sitting here, and it is no different! Take for example, Ireland. It's a country of only 3.5 million people. It has the fastest growing economy in the European Union, and is the LARGEST exporter of software in the world (ahead of the US). People are constantly talking about the "Celtic Tiger". There are more jobs than there are blades of grass, and many of them are as well paid as (or better than) our European and American counterparts. However with all this wealth, people are still very unhappy. Why? Because the only thing they are doing is living to work... we used to be "time-rich, money poor" and now we're "time-poor, money-rich". The quality of life has gone through the floor. Corporate Ireland funds the main political parties (cf Flood and Moriarty Tribunals), particularly the one in government at the moment, and social policy is therefore being dictated to a large extent by that corporatism. A lot of people have loads of money, no time, and the price of housing is enormous, so they can't afford to own their own home. Many people feel they have become slaves of the corporation "Ireland Ltd." At the other end of the scale, there are a significant number of people who have been left behind on this economic wave, who aren't flavour of the month of the IT industry because they do not have the skills, and they have no money and no prospects at all...