// Living The Epic 2.0 Week 1//

Four days of 1+ mile walks, reduced intake and all I did was maintain. +0/-0 lb Time to step the walks back up to 3 miles.

// I just had a thought, and per 21st century rules, I must share it with everyone in my social circle://

I have learned these two things recently:

FACT: Eating red meat increases your likelyhood of a premature death.

FACT: Having 350 orgasms a year increases your lifespan by four years!

So … if I eat a steak and then follow it immediately by *ahem*…does that cancel each other out or do I need to double the ratio one way or another? Just a thought. Is there some kind of math that one could do to give me a steaks/sex ratio that would still come up with bonus lives? Go at it, internets.

// Our High Horse//

I think we have some lofty moral standards and we aren’t afraid to share them, and when we see other people not adhering to them, chastise them from our high moral horse.

Here’s where my problem with that comes in:

If you’re down for Cause XYZ, be that. Don’t be the person who supports a cause by telling others they’re assholes for not supporting it. That’s the same type of BS that makes people hate religious types that go around telling people that they’re going to hell because they’re not the same religion.

I commented on a post regarding Apple’s child labor practices some time back, saying that I didn’t care, because I didn’t go out of my way to buy Apple products, going so far as to consciously avoid them and tell others that they’re bad products (In my opinion they are overpriced, under-featured, and fail too much). I was made to be the asshole because I wasn’t appalled at their practices, and that I didn’t instantly become outraged at their actions. One person even said that they were glad that I didn’t have my own kids because of my clear apathy towards all children.

Here’s the hard truth, the american production industry is in high majority outsourced to China and other countries with lower wage standards. We do this because at the end of the day, all a CEO can do is look at the bottom line: How much money have I made this company. For the same reason you might go to Dunkin Donuts instead of Starbucks, the CEO of a major corporation takes the manufacturing of his product and sends it to another country, making his production cost a fraction of what it had been, and making his bottom line profit much higher. It is a logical, financially sound, and corporate-minded move. Now, that is hardly the properly moral action, because as the foreign owner, he has no direct influence in the factories that will be making the products. He’s got a company of 10-100K employees to maintain, so he assigns someone else to manage production. That someone needs to manage all aspects of the production, from parts acquisition to final product, so he assigns someone to be the foreign contractor representative. Now -THAT- guy, he’s got to watch seven factories in various parts of a foreign country, or sometimes even various countries, so he hires six other guys to each watch a factory and report back to him, and he’ll report back up to the boss.

So that makes six—let’s call them inspectors, one foreign contractor rep, one production manager, and the CEO. (AND that’s probably a severely dumbed down chain)

The first part to look at is that those six inspectors, probably locals, are human. Outside of their jobs they have lives that come with responsibilities, problems, and mistakes. Maybe one of them has a new baby that he can’t afford, one’s got a drug habbit, one has two mistresses and a wife, and maybe one’s got a gambling problem. So four out of those six guys now have reasons they need extra money. Now imagine that the four factories they’re watching aren’t quite on the up-and-up. So the guys who own the factories slip them a few hundred bucks, and they keep their mouth shut.

So now MR foreign contractor rep gets clean reports from six factories, and he makes sure that his factory is a tight ship. so all he can do is report back home that all is well on the eastern front. Back home, the Production Manager has a thousand other things going on, maybe the final assembly line isn’t as efficient as it could be, so he sees “all is well on the eastern front” and thanks his lucky stars that something is going right for him. He works 80 hour weeks to make sure that the rest of the operation is tip-top, and reports to the CEO that the product will launch on time, and in proper quantity. The CEO sees that, does the math, and thanks his lucky stars that the employees can be paid and that nobody has to be laid off.

So at the end of the day little Billy gets his 32GB SchmuckPod, and loves his parents for getting him something that all the other kids have, even though he’s only ten (That’s a different rant). The parents feel like they’ve done well as parents, and don’t understand why when Billy turns 16 and they can’t afford a car for him, he runs away because he hates them because they never get him anything.

Nobody asks how that SchmuckPod was made, because everybody has their own problems.

Outside of that chain, we as the epitome of moral standards and actions, find out that four of Crapple’s factories are using child labor or don’t pay their employees, or are no more than glorified sweat shops, and we get up in arms. We chastise everyone that buys a SchmuckPod or Crapple products, and we thank GOD that the “MONSTERS” who don’t care about those poor foreign children don’t have kids of their own, because who knows how they might treat them. And we make all these hateful remarks on our computers, which are by large also outsourced, and more than likely have flaws somewhere along their production chain as well. But we don’t think about that,  we think about those awful bastards who don’t care that Crapple is letting these things happen.

Think about that.

Our corporations only act in the way that is allowed by the laws in our country. If you want change, vote.

Vote your conscience, a friend of mine says. Don’t vote for someone on the ballot because they’re the best of the worst, or vote red or blue because that’s what you’ve always done. Look at everybody, with intense scrutiny, and remember that you’re voting for someone to represent -YOU-.