Living like a Communist

Hanging around at the dacha.

I took a cut in hours at my job. I was only working six hours a day. Then the place cut everyone's hours in half so I'm down to three hours a day, and it's actually kind of nice. I'm not using my free time as wisely as I might, but I've lived within my means for years and am at a stage of life where I don't even like spending money and don't make crazy impulse purchases.

In the Soviet Union, people worked short hours, they had six weeks vacation a year and, as I understand it, they didn't work terribly hard when they were at work. At least this was true during the Brezhnev era. Nobody got fired. In Consumer Capitalism, people are motivated to buy crap they don't need and wouldn't even want if they hadn't been manipulated into it. In Communism, people wanted free time.

Comsumer capitalism, of course, is destroying the world. We have Global Warming which may kill us all. We're in a period of mass extinction and we may be wiped out, too.

There's the theory that the super rich know full well that much of the world will become uninhabitable. The reason they're accumulating so much wealth now, more than they could possibly need or enjoy, is that they want to be sure that they will be in control of whatever parts of the world are still habitable.