Sam Burnham, Curator @C_SamBurnham I was listening to the radio the other day. I do that often. If you've followed this site or our social media accounts, you know I'm a public radio nerd. And I'm not a freeloader, I'm a member. They cover a lot of stories and topics that you'll not see other places, especially on cable TV news. And it is precisely one of those topics that brought about this story. The story was on these new online shopping sites that buy products directly from the manufacturer and offer ridiculously low prices. It's kinda like the old guy with the awesome baseball card booth at the Collinsville Trade Day back in the 80's. Nolan Ryan rookie card for half the Beckett Monthly listed value? Yes sir, I'll take two. But instead of a baby faced version of the Big Tex Express, you're more likely buying a dress, or a smart watch, or a lawnmower part. Here's the catch. Many of the products are manufactured overseas, mostly China. While the Chinese factories can pump out smart watches that cost the same as a regular watch, you wind up breaking even because that's pretty much how it works. Maybe the tan dress you ordered arrives three weeks late and it is hot pink. But maybe you get exactly what you needed and the price is fantastic. But maybe it doesn't work that way at all. Then you have to try to track down some factory in Hunan Province that you can't even pronounce and try to get a refund. And the guy on the other end of the line isn't at all impressed when you sling the "just how big a boy are ya?" line at him. He knows you're not coming to Hunan to put knucklebumps on his forehead. Again, it's a dice roll, a risk, buyer beware. And then it happened. A caller gets through and asks that most asinine of questions. "Is there any proposed regulation of this industry? Will there be any more consumer protections?" Really. They are already in place. It's called go to the store and buy from a person who lives in your town. It's called have a human interaction with a clerk who knows the product and can put it in your hands so you can judge the quality, color, size, condition. It is called common sense and buyer beware. It's called if a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Why is it that everything has to be regulated? Why must the government always be called us in to protect us from our own lack of judgement? Buying online is a gamble and we all know that. Part of the low price is due to a lack of overhead and regulation. If you want a sure thing and decent customer service, you have to pay for it. If you need the government to regulate the online Chinese import market for you, you probably don't need to be out running around unsupervised anyway. That's enough of a rant for now. I just got a new book from...*squints*...Snake Nation. Off to go read some so I can write some more for y'all. Y'all keep it between the ditches.
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Sam Burnham, Curator @C_SamBurnham It’s easy to get caught up in the parts of history that deal with major events and famous people. But just like the present, most of history is made by regular people doing regular things. That brings us to an old cotton mill in Jefferson. In 1899 people began working here, providing for their daily needs, keeping a roof over their heads, keeping food on their table by laboring in Georgia’s massive cotton industry. And now, about 120 years later, people are still using the complex to do just that. In part of the complex you’ll find an antique mall. There are other businesses as well. There also appears to be some more space for future use and development. One particular business operating there is an event space. This is a beautifully restored venue. There are modernized restrooms, plenty of room for a dance floor as well as tables and chairs. There's a bar in one corner. They've added climate control that the workers in the 20th Century would have loved to have. In a space where the workers toiled away, wiping sweat from their brow, you can now attend an elegant party or reception. So thorough is the transition you'd assume the structure was built for these sorts of events. It is an excellent reuse of an old structure that could ver easily have been scrapped and replaced with a more moderns edifice. The best part is that the character of the old building makes a strong contribution to the experience. Old timbers, old brick, and stained concrete flooring offer a little something that new lightweight construction just can't match. This is yet another win that we have found. Not only is the building still around, it is fulfilling it's original purpose albeit in a much different manner. It pays to go for the restoration and preservation route. We definitely give this one a thumbs up. By Sam Burnham, Curator @C_SamBurnham One of the late evening conversations during the Cracker weekend was about the Agrarian Ideals that we hold dear. Of particular note is the economic theory that we wish to espouse. Capitalism is, by far, the best economic system ever conceived in the minds of mankind. The freedom and incentives built into the system make it efficient, competitive, and, most importantly, free. But along with the liberty of capitalism comes a responsibility. While economic markets should not be weighed down with restrictive government regulations, it should still be regulated. But instead of the laws of the land, this economic system should be governed by things far more solemn and forbearing. It is this very regulation that we are missing in our society today. Our inability to implement this one principle is what is causing unemployment, wage stagnation, probably every economic shortfall in this nation today.The only way that free systems can survive is if we maintain them with the principles that must govern them. A system designed to work for good people must be maintained by good people. These principles are driven by the intrinsic value of a human being. This value is not something that can be measured in dollars, rubles, or yen. In fact, if you reduce this value down to a measurable amount of money, you have just destroyed the value entirely. Money is always going to be one of the restrictions that business leaders face when operating. And a budget will always have limits on how much a proprietor can afford to expend in salaries and benefits. But if we address the value of a person in terms of currency alone, we are missing the point. Mechanization and automation are both replacing people in commerce, industry, and agriculture. Banks use automated tellers, stores have self-checkout, factories employ robots, all in the name of lower costs, lower prices, higher profits. But what are the costs? Just the other day I saw a post on Twitter where someone was trying to communicate with their online bank - one of those new things with no branches, just websites. He wasn't getting much service. I had been in my local bank earlier that same day. Upon entering, two tellers greeted me by my first name, then they both greeted my coworker by his first name. They each helped one of us and in less time than it took for that other guy to send a tweet, we had both completed transactions and were on our way back out the front door. It's a human touch, a personal connection. That face-to-face transaction is backed by an interaction in a community, not a glint in a microprocessor. When we cut this human interaction out, no matter how menial we think the task to be, we are taking from someone a chance to provide for themselves. We are taking from ourselves a chance to interact with another person. In doing this we take a bit of the humanity out of our society. We continue the pattern of dehumanizing each other and in doing so, we dehumanize ourselves. In that act of turning "Amy" at the bank into a button on a touchscreen we have made our community a little less valuable. Yes, the bank may have more money because they pay one less person. We may even benefit because the bank can afford to give us a higher yield on an account. But a member of our community lost her job to a machine. There may not be another job for her because of all the other machines coming on line. Then what? What happens once a machine can do our job? A story I heard on NPR this past week was reporting on such technological advances and how these machines will free people up to do "more detailed" or "more important" tasks. But unless we eventually determine what these tasks are and how people learn to do them, all the advancements do is continuously replace people with machines. Another unintended consequence is that we devalue the art of manual labor. There are people who have an innate ability, even the desire, to work with their hands. These are people who don't withdraw from sweat and grime that come from physically handling their work. They don't take issue with being physically tired after an honest day's work. Who are we to determine that these tasks are better off done by machines? We have developed the erroneous, perhaps dangerous, assumption that everyone wants, even needs, to attend college and work in an office, that this is the way to wealth and enlightenment. That's not fair to a group of people who aren't wired that way, people we devalue and demean by suggesting their proclivity toward manual labor makes them somehow less of a human. It is time for us to change. It is time to stop mechanizing or automating every job out there. It is time to return to the idea that the human factor has worth, that the bottom line is not the only value that business has to budget into the cost of operation. We have to once again understand that our human resources are exactly that - human. Until we begin treating people as people, rather than as expenditures, we will continue to live in a dangerous world where people feel like and therefore treat others as liabilities rather than assets, |
Sam B.Historian, self-proclaimed gentleman, agrarian-at-heart, & curator extraordinaire Social MediaCategories
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