Europe-Closed on Sunday

"Marie Lewis" wrote in
:



Please note that this does not apply to the UK. Almost all
supermarkets, shopping malls and many, many other stores are open on
Sundays, with the exception of Easter Sunday.


Doesn't apply all that much to Sweden, either.

/Tommy P.

Earl Evleth writes:

Like the US obesity problem?

Food is just as readily available in other developed countries (and even
many undeveloped countries), and yet they do not have the same obesity
problem.

Self-slavery.

That's an oxymoron.

You perhaps don`t know that there is a body of sociological research on this
whole area.

I know that sociology is one of the major pseudo-sciences.

The pleasure of purchasing
a Rolex can be greater than actually having it.

Since a Rolex isn't very useful (it keeps very poor time), that doesn't
surprise me, but that is not a representative case.

I bought a much less expensive (but still expensive) watch that keeps
perfect time, and having it is much more pleasant than buying it.

Thus in "shop while you drop" shopping itself becomes the pleasure
object of consuming not the thing purchased. Those driven to obesity suffer
from the same condition, they eat but eating does not ultimately satisfy
their needs so they eat more.

I'm not sure how you got from 24-hour stores to obesity and "shop while
you drop."

The main advantage of 24-hour stores is that you can shop outside of
your own working hours, which means you don't have to rush to the store
during lunch or just before or after work, and you don't have to take
off work just to buy groceries.

In old-world countries where every store keeps banking hours, just doing
the normal shopping required by daily life is a major problem.

Sometimes they prove to ourselves that we are in control
of ourselves. This is an old fashion puritan concept.

And one best discarded today.

Some people actually find pleasure in saving money,
rarely is it carried out in excess. Maxing out one's credit
card, a common excess, brings pain of some kind.

So does saving money, since money saved is money that one cannot spend.
Given that the only real utility of money comes from spending it, saving
large amounts of money doesn't make a great deal of sense.

Being debt
ridden, not only having to pay it back but also interest can not
be an instant gratification process.

As long as one can increase one's debt load, being debt-ridden is not a
problem. The U.S. government is a perfect example of this: it just goes
further and further into debt, so the magnitude or fact of the debt is
unimportant.

It helps sustain a culture of instant gratification.

Why is that a problem?

Night is a time to sleep, not joining the powers of darkness.

According to whom?

--
Transpose hotmail and mxsmanic in my e-mail address to reach me directly.

Earl Evleth writes:

The labor is of poor quality, many prison workers
are not enthusiastic. The US government contracted some military
wiring done by US prison labor but the reject rate was very high.
There is an ³attitude² problem with prison labor. The Germans
found the same thing with slave labor in WWII.

Involuntary servitude always brings poor quality. People don't do
things well when they hate doing them. This is one reason why an
all-volunteer army is better than an army of conscripts (by at least an
order of magnitude).

--
Transpose hotmail and mxsmanic in my e-mail address to reach me directly.

On 3/04/04 11:21, in article ,
"Mxsmanic" wrote:

This is one reason why an
all-volunteer army is better than an army of conscripts (by at least an
order of magnitude).


Not so sure about that one. DeTocqueville has some words of wisdom on this.


OF DISCIPLINE IN DEMOCRATIC ARMIES

IT is a very common opinion, especially in aristocratic countries, that the
great social equality which prevails in democracies ultimately renders the
private soldier independent of the officer and thus destroys the bond of
discipline. This is a mistake, for there are two kinds of discipline, which
it is important not to confuse.

When the officer is noble and the soldier a serf, one rich, the other poor,
the one educated and strong, the other ignorant and weak, the strictest bond
of obedience may easily be established between the two men. The soldier is
broken in to military discipline, as it were, before he enters the army; or
rather military discipline is nothing but an enhancement of social
servitude. In aristocratic armies the soldier will soon become insensible to
everything but the orders of his superior officers; he acts without
reflection, triumphs without enthusiasm, and dies without complaint. In
this state, he is no longer a man, but he is still a most formidable animal
trained for war.

A democratic people must despair of ever obtaining from soldiers that blind,
minute, submissive, and invariable obedience which an aristocratic people
may impose on them without difficulty. The state of society does not
prepare them for it, and the nation might be in danger of losing its natural
advantages if it sought artificially to acquire advantages of this
particular kind. Among democratic communities military discipline ought not
to attempt to annihilate the free action of the faculties; all that can be
done by discipline is to direct it. The obedience thus inculcated is less
exact, but it is more eager and more intelligent. It has its root in the
will of him who obeys; it rests not only on his instinct, but on his reason;
and consequently it will often spontaneously become more strict as danger
requires. The discipline of an aristocratic army is apt to be relaxed in
war, because that discipline is founded upon habits, and war disturbs those
habits. The discipline of a democratic army, on the contrary, is
strengthened in sight of the enemy, because every soldier then clearly
perceives that he must be silent and obedient in order to conquer.

The nations that have performed the greatest warlike achievements knew no
other discipline than that which I speak of. Among the ancients none were
admitted into the armies but freemen and citizens, who differed but little
from one another and were accustomed to treat each other as equals. In this
respect it may be said that the armies of antiquity were democratic,
although they came out of the bosom of aristocracy; the consequence was that
in those armies a sort of fraternal familiarity prevailed between the
officers and the men. Plutarch's lives of great commanders furnish
convincing instances of the fact: the soldiers were in the constant habit of
freely addressing their general, and the general listened to and answered
whatever the soldiers had to say; they were kept in order by language and by
example far more than by constraint or punishment; the general was as much
their companion as their chief. I do not know whether the soldiers of Greece
and Rome ever carried the minutiae of military discipline to the same degree
of perfection as the Russians have done, but this did not prevent Alexander
from conquering Asia, and Rome the world.

Earl Evleth wrote:
If you want to shop at 3 AM and someone else wants to keep
his store open at 3 AM, where is the problem?

It helps sustain a culture of instant gratification.

I don't understand this. I put off boring chores like grocery shopping until
3am because there are limited numnbers of other things I can accomplish
then. That's the opposite of instant gratification.

Night is a time to sleep, not joining the powers of darkness.

(A) Says who? And why do we have electric lights then? Especially in the
summertime?

(B) Have I really joined the Dark Side when I buy milk and bread after 6pm?

miguel
--
Hit The Road! Photos and tales from around the world: http://travel.u.nu

Earl Evleth wrote:

Basically, world Capitalism is winning and the
individual is losing in this process. The crisis occurs
when profit margins progressively narrow, more pressures
are made to improve productivity by reducing the labor force
which is poorly paid and in a constant precarious situation.

Have you been reading 'Dilbert' again... ? ;-)

On 3/04/04 13:26, in article ,
"Miguel Cruz" wrote:

Earl Evleth wrote:
If you want to shop at 3 AM and someone else wants to keep
his store open at 3 AM, where is the problem?

It helps sustain a culture of instant gratification.

I don't understand this. I put off boring chores like grocery shopping until
3am because there are limited numnbers of other things I can accomplish
then. That's the opposite of instant gratification.

The idea of getting anything you want at or near the instant you want it
is instant gratification. Planning your activities to do things when
other people wish to be of service is pretty close to the opposite
of instant gratification.


Night is a time to sleep, not joining the powers of darkness.

(A) Says who? And why do we have electric lights then? Especially in the
summertime?

(B) Have I really joined the Dark Side when I buy milk and bread after 6pm?


Night it the natural time for sleep. The sleep-wake cycle is controlled by
sunlight (which is stronger than human light and has a particular spectrum
distribution which is not matched in artifical lighting) which in turns
causes the body to vary its hormone output.

Some people living in northern climates have trouble with the lack of
sunlight, particularly north of the Arctic circle. The reaction is an
increase rate of depression in the population, increased alcoholism and a
higher rate of suicide.

Some people can tolerate sun deprivation well, obviously with the Eskimos
those who did not no longer are in their gene pool.

Does unnatural light replace the sunlight? Good question, I have for years
given it thought. I have not seen a lot of work on this. If you google
"depression unnatural light" you'll get 28000 hits, I have not gone over
them. The human eye has a tremendous range of light intensity sensitivities
and our irises open and close in response. Plants need a certain absolute
amount of light of certain frequencies to do their photosynthesis. If you
bring an outdoor plant inside, it will die in short order. We individually
do feel a big intensity difference, but plants do and we may also but
only in our hormone output.

Next, man is not naturally nocturnal and we have throughout time been
fearful of the dark, crowding as cavemen around a fire to gain protection
and warmth from the darknss and its dangers. Walking the streets at
night in some cities or areas of the world is still more dangerous
than at night.

So for a variety of reasons, night is for sleeping and hiding under
the covers!

Listen for your inner self and you might hear it.

Earl

***

as one example (I found after writing the above, take the
cancer-light theory with a grain of salt, however)

http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stori...htm#transcript


Light Pollution
Thursday, 16 October*2003*


Modern living is causing a plague of breast cancer in the Western world.
Scientists don¹t know all the reasons why, but researchers in America are
investigating a disturbing possibility. Perhaps artificial lighting can
cause breast cancer.

The human body is adapted to a world where there were 8 to 14 hours of
complete darkness each night. But in modern life complete darkness is very
rare. We live in cities that are brightly lit 24 hours a day; some of us
even sleep with streetlights right outside our windows. And shift workers
have to sleep when the sun is up.

All this unnatural light interferes with the body¹s melatonin cycle, which
in turn might upset the estrogen balance, and cause breast cancer.

Evidence for this is a recent large study at Harvard University, where a
researcher found that shift workers were indeed more likely to get breast
cancer.

And scientists in Philadelphia think they¹ve discovered the way light
affects the body¹s hormones. They¹ve uncovered a special receptor in the
eyes that has nothing to do with vision but picks up light. They¹ve even
pinpointed the particular colour of light that could be most likely to cause
breast cancer * blue light at night. They suggest we minimise exposure to
this.


Reporter/Producer: Graham Phillips
Researcher: Paul Grocott

Story Contacts:
Dr George Brainard *Email
Jefferson Medical College
1020 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19107-5587
Ph: + 1 215-955-6000


Dr Eva Schernhammer *Email
Epidemiologist
Harvard Medical School

Following up to Mxsmanic

Which people? The staff?

Most of us are staff for part of the day, and customers for the rest.

exactly!
--
Mike Reid
"Art is the lie that reveals the truth" P.Picasso
Walk-Photo-Wasdale-Thames- Walk-eat-drink-London "http://www.fellwalk.co.uk" -- you can email us@ this site
Eat-walk-Spain "http://www.fell-walker.co.uk" -- dontuse@ all, it's a spamtrap

Following up to Mxsmanic

"shop while
you drop."

isn't it "until"?
--
Mike Reid
"Art is the lie that reveals the truth" P.Picasso
Walk-Photo-Wasdale-Thames- Walk-eat-drink-London "http://www.fellwalk.co.uk" -- you can email us@ this site
Eat-walk-Spain "http://www.fell-walker.co.uk" -- dontuse@ all, it's a spamtrap

"Earl Evleth" wrote
| "Mxsmanic" wrote:
| Many people in prison are employed; from what I've heard,
| it's a significant part of the Texas workforce. I guess
| something had to replace all those black slaves.
| Many a truth made in jest.
| In France there are insufficient work opportunities in the
| prison. Not everybody who wishes to work is able to.

I've heard that a significant part of the American attitude to prison work
is that the prison system should not be an economic burden on society, which
I agree with to a large extent. I think in Britain it's cheaper to send a
child to public school than it is to keep him in prison.

I read earlier this morning that convicts in Pentonville were short of work
after 9/11. They replace the foam earpads on Virgin Atlantic in-flight
headsets and there was less demand for that as passenger numbers fell. They
were paid GBP 2.50 per week for the work (I don't know how many hours) which
I think they spend mostly in the prison 'canteen' on chocolate and tobacco.

Owain