<Today I took delivery of my Lexus SUV, a fine piece of machinery that can gobble up dinosaurs at perhaps 15 miles to the gallon. >
Jay, I hope you enjoy that fine piece of machinery. I am still clunking around in my old Camry which does everything it ever did and I ponder the allocation of resource to something as fine but as expensive as Toyota's pre-eminent achievement.
Would I be merely buying a work of art while others are poor and could be hired to invent even better cyberphone technology and It, or DNA engineering?
Is it better to produce something glorious for the democratic middle of the bell curve, including oneself, or waste the resource on an ephemeral piece of hedonistic fluff?
Sitting in a cafe in Remuera, watching the queues of Remuera tractors go by [Lexus SUVs etc], they conflict with some of my basic ideas on how the world should work, or, more accurately, how the world does work. Of what's important and what leads to what. Do I wish to join the queue? These days I find pleasure in walking and riding my cheap little Bug 50cc motorscooter, zipping around town on a sunny day, over footpaths [push the scooter along them], park anywhere, fill 'er up with $3. It's more enjoyable than being in a big tank.
Certainly, the dead dinosaurs are high-priced now and that is what was led to in that instance, by events not necessarily to Mr Middle of the Bell Curve's advantage. Queues of Remuera Tractors are leading somewhere too. I hope a modern French revolution that French inflation and such-like are mere figments of your imagination.
While visiting Rancho Santa Fe in California, I saw a field full of soccer moms and their SUVs [about 80% or even 90% suvs - about 50 of them]. It was an eerie sight somehow. A little enclave of blissfully ignorant successful wealth in a sea of struggle. Little children running around Elysian Fields.
Mqurice
PS: I've been thinking of shorting oil. Buying an SUV is shorting oil! |
