msb-0255 The Wonderful World of Work

msb-0255 The Wonderful World of Work

intro

Feedback comes first, so...

I love work. I could watch it all day.

Apart from that, you've been spared.

Tomorrow, it will have been two years since I started this podcast.

I'm going to treat my wife and myself to a great dinner out.

----

I'm reading "The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science" by "Norman Doidge" ISBN-13: 978-0143113102 and I can tell you that its definitely worth the read.

Within the first 10 pages, I discovered the true mechanism of the "vestibular sense", (We've all got "six" senses, not just the common five of "hearing, sight, taste, touch, and smell",) and got some insight into why MSers' sense of balance is so skewed and "what can be done about it."

I will never look at walking around (or standing at the top of some stairs [and "knowing" that it freaks me out,]) in quite the same way.

I have meditated on this and determined that, yes, my vestibular sensors might be fine (those the three accelerometers [one per axis] mounted in liquid in each ear,) but the "reason" why I tend to get the "wobblies" is that the sensations from the accelerometers is drowned in sclerotic noise. Now that I know that, I can probably do something about it. (Using the neuro-plasticity of my brain to route the signals in such a way [either rerouting or redundantly getting the information] that I will once again be able to balance on one foot.)

This book is "awesome".


---- "WORKING, SWEATING" by: "girls stuff" http://www.9t9.ch/

Feed Forward comes next, so...

This is "your" segment.

Say "your" piece on this segment.

Share with other MSers whatever "you" want to share.

Drop me an email: "charles at MSBPodcast.com"

---- "Living To Work" by: "Jagaver" http://www.jagaver.co.uk/

Feed Me comes third, so...

Do you have a therapy, product, good or service that is of interest to MSers?

Consider advertising on this podcast.

Reminders on this segment only cost $0.03 per reminder per download of an episode. (A $30CPM targeted at MSers.)

It can/should lead to a full ad, in text, audio or video, which costs $3.00 per download.

That sounds expensive until you do the math and realize that if nobody downloads it it costs you nothing, unlike print, where you often can't even get an ad in to the specialized journals, or radio or TV where you'd just be wasting your money with the 0.0833% MSers rate of return. (That's about six times "below" the level of "statistical noise".)

But MSBPodcast is 100% in your market, and you only pay per download of your material.

No play, no pay.

Reach the MSers who would buy your therapy, product, good or service, with-out having to waste your advertising money on anyone who is "not" interested...

Send me an email at: "charles (at) MSBPodcast.com"

---- "Upper Working Class" by: "Tim Ratcliff and Ken Bailey" http://www.westfieldrecording.com/

"Thesis:"

Work has changed several times in the past hundred years.

Our great-grand-parents would scarcely think that what we do is work.

Neither would our grand-parents for the most part.

The nature of mercantile activity has changed in the developed world (and even the developing world [who else is getting these podcasts and/or able to read the blogs?])

Its all part of the evolution of the working class from its origins in the agrarian revolution that saw us changing from hunter-gatherers to farmers. The whole thing was amazingly slow until it hit an inflection point about a hundred and fifty years ago with the British.

(But the problem of work was the same the world over [Mostly, that we all have to do it. Even in Japan. :-])

---- "Workman" by: "Mogura" http://www.camnet.jp/mogura/

"Synthesis:"

Originally mercantile activity was restricted to royalty, signing treaties, (usually spread through oral history when a man's word was his bond,) then it was restricted to a specialized class, the merchant class, (hence the term "mercantile", [the prime ones of which were "bondsmen" {now relegated to something fit only for "Stephanie Plum" ( http://www.amazon.com/One-Money-Stephanie-Plum-Novels/dp/0061009059 ) novels. Except that the entire banking industry and the entire insurance industry is worth $0.00 without bondsmen.)}])

The current system evolved slowly from its ancient origins until the middle of the nineteenth century.

Lets step gingerly over the century that saw the rise and stumble (I won't say fall because they're still around,) of the robber barons and other people whose charities are "still" around.

In the old days, people used to schlep to the corner store. Forget about choice then. Mercantile activity was limited to what a peddler could carry.

Then, the industrial revolution seemed to be dominated by "push" merchandising. You made a product and had a sales force "push" it onto the rubes who would shell out for it. (That's what the sales force saw because they were dealing with middle men who were shelling out the "schekels" in the hopes of selling it themselves.) People were so sick and tired of nothin (that's what they owned)

Then came the postal service.

The "Age of the Catalog" was born.

You dropped a letter with a money order in it to order what ever widget you saw on the page of the catalog and they shipped something very closely approximating it. (You have no idea what advancements in society had to have happened for the bondsmans' trust to spread to the postal institutions and "le commun des mortels". They'd been stuffing their money in their mattresses before then, and the banks were just fatter cats with fatter matresses.)

Then came the telegraph and later the telephone.

Most of the time, a phone book and a phone call used to be enough to get you whatever your heart desired. (Interestingly enough, the spread of the telephone was responsible for enabling more rapid communications over shorter distances.)

Advertising, telling people what you've got to offer, really took off after the introduction of broadcasting

The rules and roles of advertising were fixed back at the early part of the twentieth century. Certain codes of truthfulness were established such that we "could" be aghast at "Winston Smith's" [ http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/index.html ] dilemma at having to wonder how many fingers were indeed being held up by his torturer in the "Ministry of Love".

Of course, this high standard of scientific correctness, and the immutability of evidenciary proof, has always been considered to be inconvenient by politicians and other pond scum who would rather we just believed whatever we were being told, and paid "no attention to the man behind the curtain". [ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032138/ ] Take the spoonful of "snake oil" [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil ] and shut the hell up.

---- "Work" by: "Naughty Jack" http://www.naughtyjack.co.uk/

"Conclusion:"

Then again, there are ancient advertisements, in "Latin, for Janus' sake", to entice people to attend events at the various forums.

Merchandising and advertising have always gone hand and hand. Even before the words existed.

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose..."

----

By the way, I just saw something in the New York Times that gives me hope [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/fashion/31SKIN.html?ref=technology ].

It seems that advertising agencies are starting to notice that Rome is burning around them, (notably that the broadcast media are dying,) and that if they want to survive, they have to move to something else (like blogs and podcasts/video podcasts.)

---- "Dirty Work" by: "Munk" http://www.myspace.com/munk

Outro