This world is weird…and getting weirder by the second. Our new government, announced one month after the election (she’ll be right mate) is the result of a fascinating mix of compromise and blackmail. The fact it’s Labour led is a small saving grace but Winston Peters as foreign affairs minister? Really? The Greens have been pushed back a notch and if Peter Dunne says one more thing on TV I’m afraid we’re going to need to institute political assassination. He really does need to just shut up and count himself lucky.
The reserve bank came out with a warning that consumer debt is somewhat out of control and NZ is entering the role of ‘banana republic’ (not their exact words but close enough)…ya think. Interest rates look to be going up again, which for us is sweet as we can’t afford to enter the big games like housing so our money is simply sitting there waiting. I am kind of glad we haven’t been able to do the mortgage thing…I can see only bad times ahead for that in the short term. No surprise though really. Wait for the results of peak oil to really start to hit home…then we’ll no some shit scary pain.
In other news, the garden is starting to look okay, the teaching diploma is coming along and summer looks like it’s desperately trying to make an appearance.
My new pair of shorts have been put on hold at the last minute. I blew out the last needle which puts a damper on things. Hopefully I’ll be able to sort out a new lot tomorrow. The shorts are looking pretty good though. Had a few days at Maruia and Hanmer springs over the weekend. It was nice to get away but I think I’m more tired now than before so the value of it all was dubious.
The garden is not really getting a fair chance this year. Snow and cold winds this late into the year is not particularly good for getting things started and my poor pea seedlings keep getting frozen. Hopefully things settle down soon so the more gentle veges can have a fighting chance. Even the spuds are looking like they are having second thoughts.
With a little help from a friend I have got the interface switching working on the site again. Really stoked to have it back and for the most part it’s working pretty well. Nice to see some of my older styles back in action again. Also nice to see how far I’ve come with this stuff.
Still really tired but have to get back into this teaching diploma again next week and try and complete it as quickly as possible. This term is likely to suck but there you go…I suck as a student.
I think it’s time to start another load of spirits for Xmas.
In the middle of assessment week again following the end of term. Thankfully I started early on this lot and am hoping to finish a bit earlier and have a bit of a holiday. I have mixed feelings about finishing at Hagley, on the one hand I am glad to stop for a while and have a break, on the other I really enjoyed my time there and working with the students. We are heading to Hanmer this weekend for a brief holiday.
I have hit that stage again where I’m really tired and worn out…I always know because I start singing weird combinations of songs to myself. Currently I have a medley of Kiss’ I was made for lovin’ you and Burt Bacharac’s Rain drop’s keep falling on my head. I’m getting a lot of strange looks…luckily I’m too tired to care though should probably start listening to music again and settle my brain down a bit.
We went to a Punk Goth exhibition last night that one of our friends was part of. It was down at Creation and actually pretty cool. I’m not really into the whole goth thing (too much black) but Phil’s stuff was pretty cool. One of the holiday projects I’ve set for myself is to build a new pair of shorts and I’m keen to design a belt to go with them. I’m seeing camo shorts, black pockets and edging, studs, leather, metal utility rings, clips, zips and velcro…in what arrangement I currently have no idea.
Right, enough procrastination, time to get into assessment work.
Not much to say at the moment. Down to the last week on practice and I have been busy sorting out assessment, getting started on my portfolio for the term and generally trying to keep up. My 31st was last week and the weekend was spent in BBQ mode with friends.
We’re being overloaded with election weirdness at the moment. I’m assuming that being a small country we don’t have a huge amount happening on a normal day so elections and Xmas get wound up months in advance. I am also assuming that tomorrow we will be overloaded with the results of the election. There has been an absolutely stupid session of campaigning from all parties pretty much reinforcing that they are all dicks and hardly worth vague attention let alone a vote. In a lovely twist of irony I almost got knocked off my bike by some nutter wielding a ‘Greens’ placard thing on a street corner. I think he was trying get my attention…and I already tend to vote Green. If he’d actually got me I would’ve shown just how un-hippy today’s young Greens are, clocked the shit out of him and then not voted. Odd that the Greens would print off shitloads of plastic (of all things) placards for one-time use only. Kind of seems against the whole point to me but there you go…
On top of that I keep hearing people talking about how they are going to vote strategically like it’s some sort of Survivor episode and missing the point that they have much the same say as everyone else in the country. This will, however be an interesting election as it feels like NZ will be deciding between selfishness and selflessness. I hold no hope considering we have been more and more selfish as a society over the last decade. The “What’s in it for me” voice has become very loud. It will be interesting.
On a completely unrelated note I have been biking to school every day and have noticed I have developed some bitchin stomach muscles. Cool.
It’s the end of another week and it has ended with a bit of a fizzle really. Almost no students in the class today which was annoying and frustrating – two hours I could have spent doing something else. Turns out we’re not allowed to beat students into attending so I guess they’ll just have to wait until social welfare collapses and they have to pull finger or…starve I guess. Probably 2-3 more years left in the old system yet though so good luck.
The ride home was, unfortunately in the middle of heavy traffic and I keep forgetting how moronic heavy traffic can get. I still haven’t figured out if it’s the process of driving that makes people behave badly or the people themselves. Either way it’s really dangerous riding a bike amongst people who don’t seem to understand that the car doesn’t end right behind their eyeballs…that whacking great lump of metal behind the drivers seat still follows the basic laws of physics and will crush a cyclist quite quickly I imagine.
I thought this was an interesting comment from James Howard Kunstler:
“America consumes one-quarter of the world’s daily production of 84 million barrels of oil. More than half of our share is burned in cars and trucks. In fact, our economy now amounts to little more than running 200 million motor vehicles around the suburban metroplexes in the service of ever more slapped-together McHousing developments, big box stores, and fried chicken huts. That’s our economy. That’s all we do anymore.”
The scale is different I guess but it still freaks me out to think that if you took the numbers and the word America from the start out this could describe damn near any western country. Sad really but nothing home made tequila can’t numb. Brave New World anyone?
Back on practice at Hagley Community College. Two days in so it’s hard to judge how it’s going to go but a couple of things have really started to occur to me about teaching in general: 1) New Zealand has absolutely no idea what it wants and 2) I am getting really sick of learning 3D modelling applications based on the school I’m in. How great would it be to be somewhere that actually valued the skills I already have and built on them? I’m still trying to figure out how a designer with a technical background is teaching under the Arts curriculum…especially after being involved today in a critique of students work. Unfortunately I’m one of those people who can stand in a gallery and say stupid things like, “I don’t know much about art but I know what I like”.
I think I might be tired again…I can always tell because I get angry and start doubting whether I want to a) be a teacher and b) want to live. I also start having a penchant for making lists of things…I am so tired.
I keep noticing that this world is set up for the car, which kinda sucks. So far all the schools I’ve been at have had incredibly complex strategies for car parking but no secure bike stands…and we wonder why we’re all fat bastards.
Time has started flying by again. Well into the special education training and working towards the end of teacher training in general. Life has become a little unbalanced while I get through all this but it seems to be paying off so far and next year should be interesting.
A new batch of spirits has been made up and this time I’ve done some Tequila. With the lemons growing on the tree outside it’s a perfect end to a week really.
Two weeks holiday have come to an end and it’s back to NZGSE on Monday for the third term. It’s taken ages to get into the break and I had a freak out moment in the first week resulting in a trip to Moeraki for a break and to catch up with my parents. More alcohol is on the go and winter is still a freezing bitch. Hope fully next year I can start teaching, earning money and we can look at getting a place of our own. The scooter is still going well though in the break I have been trying to cycle or walk to get some exercise. Petrol prices have gone up again, electricity prices have gone up again, food costs have gone up again…my income has not gone up. I noticed the newspaper had an article about some of this and talked about the problems the poor will have…um…maybe we can replace ‘middle class’ with ‘neo-poor’ or something to make it sound trendier. Then we’ll all want to be it and not complain about cost of living.
Two weeks holiday and I’m still tired…roll on summer and the end of the year.
“We’ll finally get what we want”…words from the latest Telecom advertisement that uses children to show the wonderful gadget filled world that awaits us in a few years time. I don’t think of myself as a cynic, I’m far too idealistic for that but there are some things that just defy reality and this is one of them. There are simply too many problems starting to arise, too many cracks in our system, too many bugs, too many issues for us to ignore. Our system is starting to fall apart. There are simply too many homo sapiens on this finite planet consuming too many resources for the hyper-tech future to be real. I’ve ranted about oil peak issues, global warming, over population, the illusion of western society, the hidden slave labour market, and the over consumption of a few before but tonight that ad has simply pissed me off. Stop using kids to advertise a future that in all likelihood simply won’t exist!
Even through my limited teaching experience I am seeing kids who think they can achieve without hard work, get a cruisey job that earns 60k a year without effort and an almost non-existant education. If that fails they can always come up with a hit single or “focus on their sports”. Reality check….without the socialist system that supports ‘victims’ they will simply starve to death. The number of countries with a financial social system is restricted to the rich western societies and is a privilege, not a right. When shit gets hard people stop supporting a community of slackers. I stil believe that for the majority that will never be a problem, that’s why I say I’m an idealist, but I’m increasingly beginning to question that as a future certainty. I hope I’m wrong, I sincerely hope I’m wrong.
Time is slipping by very quickly at the moment. Being on practice at a school ends up being all about teaching and planning in an almost endless cycle. This was depressing for a while but is now, as I get to know the kids and school better, starting to be quite exciting.
The scooter is serving me well now that I have somewhere to park it at school and is proving surprisingly nippy around the streets. It is also perfect for irriating SUV drivers. Big enough that they can’t ignore it and just slow enough to hold them to the speed limit….and boy, do they get pissed. It’s excellent.
I was interviewed by Massey University this week as part of some government interest in ‘young’ entrepreneurs in New Zealand. I was just happy to be called ‘young’ but having someone ask me my opinion on NZ business was just too much….and yes, I did get manage to rag on the baby boomers as well. Bonus.
My first load of wash for distilling spirits is taking a while to ferment. I think it blew it’s load too quickly at the start due to a high temperature and then ran out of go. It is certainly slowing down so I am starting to prepare bottles and reading the instructions on using the distiller.
My scooter is back in action. The puncture caused some issues with the back wheel but it’s all sorted now and I have learned a lot more about how wheels work…I’m so special. Rode it into grad school today and felt the joy one more time.
It’s research time at school and I am wading through Ministry of Education policy documents and trying to understand how they affect people in the education system. It’s almost interesting. Still, relevant information is relevant information I guess.
I managed to dig over the vege garden in the weekend and start preparing it for the next season. Have moved some plants in doors to see if I can extend their growing season a bit. Seems to work well for things like chillis. Also wired up the bonsai and got them into some semblance of shape. Two came up well and the third, a little maple has a bit of growing to do before it takes on the shape I’m imagining. Between us we should get it into a nice tree.
Dang if I didn’t get a puncture in the rear wheel of my scooter. An inch and half of rusty nail went in while I was happily doing 45 km/h. Life got exciting for a few seconds as I came to a screaming halt. Spent the day getting the rear wheel off, changing the tube and getting the wheel back on again. Learned a lot about how the panels come off and which ones don’t need to come off to change the rear wheel. All very exciting.
In general, the garden got made into salad by a freak hailstorm over the weekend and the ginger beer has been bottled.
I was thinking, in the rambling sort of way that I do, recently that the Western economy works a lot like our old 5th form certificate exams used to. Stripping away all the crap and bureaucracy, essentially a certain percentage of students would fail the exams, a certain percentage would pass and a certain percentage would excel. Sounds like life to me, except that the curve on which students passed or failed was fixed and false. Even if you passed you could still fail if you fell on the wrong side of the curve and you could pass even if you technically had failed. It was a crap system and anyone who argues with NCEA should look back without the rose tinted beer goggles.
What does this have to do with western economics…well, according to my brain, we all need some basics to live – food, water and shelter. Without one of these things everything go very bad for the individual (and subsequently the community they live in). On top of this we arbitrarily set laws around the standards you have to live within, eg. thou shalt not live in a cardboard box, thou shalt not drink cruddy water loaded with heavy metals etc. All good so far, we have a standardised curve where the majority can happily live, some get shafted and some live in ridiculous luxury (yay for us). The problem, as I see it is when that curve shifts in the downwards direction. With 5th form certificate if too many people got enough marks to pass the exam the curve effectively moved down to fail some of them. I’m sure there was a great reason for doing this, some idea about ensuring all exams were equal and fair to all students – which of course means some students must fail regardless of how hard they worked. In an exam situation the effect is localised to a lot of pissed off (or really happy) students but what happens when the ‘social’ curve moves? What happens when living costs increase beyond the incomes of the majority?
My brain, reasoned that if my living costs go up I will raise my prices accordingly to suit. My price increase affects a small group of people as a living cost increase. Add all of our costs into this and all of the people who get affected and suddenly you have some chaos. If the cost of housing, clothing and food go up and we increasingly use our waterways to generate electricity etc what happens to the basic needs of people and what happens to those who can no longer afford the basic needs (within those arbitrary laws we set on the standards). I have watched house/rent prices rocket over the last 3-4 years, food has started creeping up, petrol has gone insane (for good reason) and I have watched people start to get into financial trouble with it all (not counting those who believe living in debt is an acceptable way to live). With all this in my head and the very strong feeling that we are all living a life that we simply can’t afford I can’t help but wonder if our ‘reality’ is fast diverging from the real world reality. It just doesn’t feel sustainable in any sense. I have always had an uneasy feeling that for capitialsim to work a certain percentage of people have to miss out. We’re legally not allowed to use slaves but deep down we all know that we still use them somewhere.
I find myself increasingly bartering with people as the financial economy no longer provides a correct value system for the things I do for people. I trade home brew for grapes, I trade web sites for jerseys, I swap vegetables for wine and it all feels a lot better. $400 of web design is nothing in the hand financially but if I can get a warm jersey out of it then it’s worthwhile. I guess it’s too much to hope that greed slows down and people start to realise we live on a tiny set of islands and that the only people we are shafting are ourselves. There’s only 4 million of us so it seems a bit weird that we live like a population of 40 million. The end result can’t be good but it shows no sign of slowing down.
I told you this was a rambling thought.
My first term of teacher training has come to an end so it’s holiday time now. The teaching practice went well and the assessment week consisted mainly of getting a portfolio of work together and writing various bits and pieces about teaching, practice and working with students. Seemed an awful lot of cross-indexing for a few days there but it got done and handed in. I’m not really used to this whole ‘being graded’ concept any more but writing reflective articles I can do with my eyes closed so it balanced out.
I am back at the College of Computing for two afternoons this week to lend a hand with the game design course they are running. Yesterday was lots of fun and working with the younger age group is a good experience. There’s nothing like teaching something to learn it so I’m picking up lots of interesting ideas for my game as well.
The scooter is still a joy and is now, officially, my kind of vehicle. It’s silver, it’s electric, it plugs into the wall socket when I get home and it beats petrol hands-down on all around coolness. I’m finding it’s a nice speed to move through a city and I’m actually seeing things I haven’t seen before. It is a joy to ride.
I am still not very good at being on holiday but at least I have some energy to work on the garden and start preparing for next seasons growing. We got a lot out of the garden this year and the various fruit trees are starting to get established in their pots so we should start getting more fruit next year. The home brew draught is ready for drinking so we’ll crack that open soon for a taste. The ginger beer is still happily bubbling away and smells alright so it can carry on.
Wow, are we really such a nation of precious twats? A politician says some silly (though possibly heartfelt) comments about his colleagues and our media goes up in arms about insult and disappointment in hearing such remarks. In a nation filled to the brim with similarly eloquently put comments about work colleagues every day it seems a bit rich really. We’re either a bored nation or an anal one.
It occurs to be me that we live in an island nation but don’t have an island culture. How did we stuff that one up? We have nowhere to go, there’s only 4 million of us and quite frankly no one really cares that we’re down here unless we let them make movies here for cheap. Why don’t we take advantage of our country and potential lifestyle instead of trying to be the latest city dwelling morons. Maybe we should all start slowing down a bit.
On a lighter note I now have my electric scooter registered and have finally been out for a ride on it. It was truly excellent and the stupid grin I had still hasn’t quite subsided.
This is the last week of this teaching practice at the College and it’s starting to wind down a bit. Looking forward to a break now.
My electric scooter arrived in the weekend and I managed to get it registered today. Bit of a mission but now it’s all ready to go. Just have to find some time to attach the plates and we’ll be away.
Fuck today. I have resorted to sitting watching a rerun of Friends, listening to punk music, drinking whisky, thinking about the lessons I am teaching tomorrow and wondering why I give a crap. To top it all off nothing particularly wrong happened today and it’s all me. A better version of me might say “A bad day, harden up and get over it”….the me today has decided to soak in some weird sort of depression. I have no idea where my friends are and no one is answering the phone. Fuck today.
I watch these kids every day learning how to operate in a World I firmly believe won’t exist for much longer and I find myself struggling with that idea.Endless advertisements about the latest gadget and the newest fashion and I find myself thinking it’s all a load of crap from a dedicated group of right plonkers. Fuck today and tomorrow.
I watch the evidence about global warming and find I can put them to one side. I watch the evidence about peak oil and I find it harder to put aside. I look at people rushing to god knows where to do something supposedly important and risking other people’s lives to do so and I remember we live on a small island…where are they going with such haste and risk? I watch the changes in our society and the way people interact compared with ten years ago and have trouble putting that aside. Combined all these things seem to add up to something considerable. Fuck today.
I am knackered…but at least I’m finally in front of classes and teaching (using a rather liberal definition). Writing lessons and unit plans has taken up a lot of my time but the kids at the school are great and I’m having a ball. It’s still rough getting up early, forcing food down my throat and biking into town but it’s starting to feel worthwhile. It’ll be interesting to see how long that lasts.
The main story in the paper today was about the declining home ownership in New Zealand. Apparently there’s been a drop in first time buyers over the last ten years….well, no shit Sherlock (see Word: 18 November, 2004). I would go further and say a lot of that would have occurred over the last five years, oddly enough in the middle of a housing boom built on the back of booming immigration. Welcome to reality, foreigners leave when things start going bad and you get left with the locals you just shafted. It will not be pretty.
Petrol prices have gone up in the form of a government tax and predictions are in place for an increase from the oil companies in the near future. Again, none of this should be coming as a surprise as the warnings have been there for a long time now. Time to wake up people or it’s going to get real bad, real quick.
I am hanging out for Easter now and a holiday in Nelson. We don’t know where we’re staying and I don’t really care. A tent and a beer would be fine by me.
It’s been a busy few weeks with no real view to slacking off any time soon which, to put it bluntly, is quite a lifestyle change for me. After three years of my own schedule my body rebelled heavily at being forced up every morning, having food slammed into it and then being shunted off to work. The rebellion is slowly being quelled but it’s taking time. Next week we are in a high school doing the teaching thing. Should be good.
The weekends are now dedicated to cleaning up, doing dishes and making sure that garden doesn’t wither away. So far so good and to be up at 7:30 on a Saturday morning is an experience I haven’t had for a while. It’s quite nice. I’m also keen to get another batch of beer down soon and want to have a go at alcoholic ginger beer to see what happens. It’s still all good.
It’s all about learning to be a teacher at the moment. All day, every day I seem to be planning for lessons, studying for a test, reading through material from the day or passing out in bed. It’s good to be busy and there appears to be method to the madness but this is quite the ride. Mornings are currently spent teaching literacy at Breen’s intermediate – my little girl is wonderful and certainly keeps me trying to plan interesting things to do. Tomorrow is our first major teaching session so hopefully all goes well.
The garden is still doing well, despite a little bit of neglect and this weird heat we are getting.
One week to go before teachers college starts up. Looking forward to it despite (or maybe because of) the wide range of commentary from the people around me. Typically teachers tend to be cynical with everyone else ranging between encouraging and confused. We live in a very strange world.
The weekend was quite productive as I got my first lot of beer bottled and the garden got a gentle overhaul. C’s parents were in town so was nice to catch up with them. Also managed to whack through a large amount of Grand Theft Auto so all in all a good time.
This week is currently looking a bit empty but I guess there’s nothing unusual about that really. Might go and beat up the garden again.
With a slow work load at the moment I’m taking the opportunity to clean up the garden and get back into screen printing. I have had the printing table ready for months now and the screen was set up even further back but now it’s all been put to use with some pretty good results. Have started getting ideas for some new designs so will get into setting them up as soon as and see how they look. I’d love to get a new screen set up as the old designs are starting to get a bit, well, old.
My foray into the world of beer brewing has begun with mixed results. I think it’s working but really have no idea other than looking at the hydrometer tests. Gives me something to look at as I pass through the living room though I guess.
With the majority of my time this year going into the teacher training I have decided to focus my web design time on Drivechain and other products that will eventually generate passive income. I think I enjoy working on product development more and tend to work more with people I know and trust so it’s a nicer, more flexible option. It’ll be interesting to see how that pans out.
The side effect of setting your girlfriend up with Skype (very instant messaging) and having some spare time means that the oven is now sparkly clean.
A new year and a slightly new direction. I have decided to go for a diploma in teaching this year with the aim of teaching at secondary schools if all goes well. ZYPE continues and with any luck we’ll get Drivechain some momentum so it can continue without my direct involvement long term. Should be an interesting year.
In the meantime I am playing Grand Theft Auto – San Andreas. Excellent game that eats up time at a phenomenal rate. The garden needed some attention after getting back from Christmas down south but it seems to be under control now. This wet, warm weather has been great for growing.
It seems to me that there are quite a few things that will have, and in some cases are having a large impact on our lives that are all converging to a point in the not too distant future. These things are beginning to make me very nervous and I have mentioned most of them before. The biggies: Peak oil, global warming, rampant consumerism. All three make me sound like a raving lunatic and are real party killers but none-the-less all three are making me nervous. Oil is an obvious issue, without it our lovely wealthy lifestyles go down the crapper. Everything we do relies on oil in some form. Global warming is, interestingly, a related problem and seems to be causing problems already. Consumerism has also led us down the dodgey path of ever increasing living costs and personal debt. Apparently to be debt free these days is a rarity and I notice the money lenders all now have pretty flashy logos and TV advertisements.
Why am I worried. All three of these issues have two things in common: intelligent, knowledgeable people who typically are not prone to panic are starting to panic and fire off warnings and the timeframes on each are vague. Global warming seems to have been used in the media before as a bit of a hippy issue but now we’re getting real warnings about climate change (and after this summer I’m thinking we’re starting to see it), peak oil trends are there for everyone to see and when the reserve bank releases a warning about debt it pays to listen.
The timeframes are vague, in that it’s uncertain when these issues will blow (if nothing else it’s no longer a case of ‘if’ but ‘when’). The problem there is that despite the enormity of these issues they are easy to ignore or write off as the rantings of a lunatic (or hippy). So be it I guess but I’m seeing a house of cards and a strong wind starting to blow.
On another slightly related note, we had a meal last night made up primarily of vegetables from our garden. It was fantastic.
What a lovely spell of weather we are having. There is nothing more joyful than the caress of a hundred mile an hour nor-wester, the feeling of happiness as your eyeballs dry out within ten seconds of walking outside and the constant pleasure of watching your garden try and survive drought conditions. Aaaah…summer in Christchurch, ’tis the angry season.
For ZYPE it’s now a gentle downhill to Christmas and a long awaited break away from the city. I will be wending my merry way down to Moeraki to see my parentsand basically do nothing more than read, eat and watch the ocean. Woe betide anyone who gets in the way of that downhill coast towards happiness.
It’s apparently still blowing out there…
Up in Auckland yesterday talking to tutors about XML and ‘how to make it all work’. I don’t think they cared very much. In the words of one of them “Why bother when you can do all the same sort of things in php?”. Touche. Why bother using CSS when you can use tables, why bother using the web when you can use paper. It was good to catch up with a friend there though.
On another topic, the more people I talk to around my age about houses and the purchasing of houses the more I’m seeing a definite edge of despondency and almost desperation. This is not because we are pathetic whimps when faced with the idea of a mortgage, this is a generation after all who on average has $20,000 each of student debt. I handle thousands of dollars each month in my business, large numbers aren’t a problem but income and perceived value are.House prices are currently so high we can’t even play the game. A bank will lend us a maximum of $180,000 at the moment (and that’s really pushing us) in a market where house prices average around $220,000…um, I was never great at arithmetic but something doesn’t add up there. Real income (taking into account the cost of living) has supposedly gone up about 3-4% over the last 15-20 years while I’m looking at houses that in 2001 where valued at $150,000 now valued at $240,000. Something’s not right there and I am still not sure how a property can increase in value by 60-70% over three years. The other problem here is that if, as I keep being told by old farts, house prices never come down, then we have a generation who will be forced to rent most of their lives.
Is that a problem? On the face of it, no, but people who rent typically don’t get heavily involved in their community, don’t settle down, have kids etc and if rental property prices increase with demand (which they do when more people are renting) then we face the prospect of having a large percentage of your population with no certainty of a home at all. Communities don’t happen without people and there’s a point where the basic human requirements need to be met or we tend to see somewhat antisocial behaviour. Along with issues like global warming, peak oil, rampant consumerism and deficit spending this one requires a big picture view in a society that values immediacy, hedonism and greed. Personally I wonder if we’re not all screwed.