I have just finished the book Nice Work written by David Lodge. In the book we are following two persons with different lifestyles, Vic Wilcox and Robyn Penrose. It’s the very different characteristics of the main characters that make the book interesting. Vic is working as Managing Director at an industrial factory and Robyn is an English lecturer on a university, and she has a very feministic ideology.

These two people meeting in a project where Robyn should ‘shadow’ Vic in his work once a week. At first the relation is strict formally, but it develops to some thing else; love. I thing the book describes how it many times are in the real life. People meet some one that they first don’t think is attractive but as time go and they learn to know and understand the person, feelings come up.

The book has a happy ending; Vic and Robyn go to gather and became a couple. Love overcome Robyn’s feministic view, Vic’s pragmatic attitude and the fact that he was married when Vic and Robyn met each other. I would probably never have read this book if I didn’t had to because of the English course. Not because the book is bad, it is actually a nice book, but because I never prioritize this kinds of books. I read economic books, political magazines and detective novels. But I would certainly recommend this book to any one.

Over and out.

I have watched an anti-consumption propaganda video called “the story of stuff”. In this video Annie Leonard’s tells a story about where stuffs come from and where they go after we have consumed them. The main reason behind the video seems to be to make people aware of the effect of consumption.

I agree with Annie that we can’t go on like we do to day, but I don’t agree with her on how to fix things. The video and Annie tells us to consume less, and that argument is used by many environmental-fundamentalists and by the political left wing. But I think that is a wrong way to attack the problem.
The problem is not the mechanism of the market-economy and the solution is not to make people stop consume or to forbid counties and companies to trade. That would only shrink the world-economy and make people poorer. Few would accept that.

The challenge is to make the production sustainable and many steps are taken in that direction, for example the Kyoto-protocol. The technological development should be one of the reasons why we don’t need to go back to stone age to save the planet.

Snooping bosses

I have read an article called “snooping bosses”. The article describes two cases where the employers want to snoop on their employees. One case is about checking the web sites that the employees visit during work-time, and the other case is more advanced to check where the employee’s physical position is, so that they can’t lie about being home and sick when they are on a holiday.

The issue about if a boss or a company should be allowed to snoop and if so, how much they should be allowed to snoop is interesting. I don’t think that there is a one way to answer that question. It depends on what kind of a job it is and what the employer and the employed have agreed on. If the company fore an example have a policy witch limit the number of web sites that are okay fore the personal visit, and that this is clear for the employees, then should it be okay for the boss to actually check out that the workers don’t surf into inappropriate sites.

But sooner or later there must be a stop where it’s no longer acceptable to insult the personal integrity. Fore the most people I think that this line is the spare-time. What I do during my spare-time is my issue, as long as I’m not responsible fore the safety of the nation or something like that.