Depending on other people

[cjsmith]

My shell account at my ISP is currently pretty much unusable because my homedir's disk is full. This happens every few months. They eventually get around to doing housecleaning, but until they do, I'm stuck. In particular: no personal mail. Grr! I hate depending on other people for stuff like this. It means that if someone else is slow or sloppy, I pay a price.

The only alternative to depending on others, though, eventually means mining some ore myself, purifying the copper and the silicon, creating a computer... you get the idea. Plus growing and weaving my own fibers for clothing... Somewhere, I have to find the right place to draw the line.

Speaking of where to draw that line, why is it far more common to create one's own food than to create one's own clothing? There's a huge support infrastructure for that: competing megagrocery chains, Williams-Sonoma, whole industries devoted to making special sauces for the "cook" to heat up and pour... the list goes on. The support infrastructure for sewing, while still biggish, is far smaller. The prevalence of that choice is pretty ingrained in some ways. But cooking for oneself every day takes more time than maintaining a home-sewn wardrobe would take. Food that isn't right is usually merely annoying, just like clothing that isn't right -- except clothing that isn't right annoys for a longer time. Why pick cooking over sewing? Did all that structure grow out of those infrequent cases where food that isn't right can cause serious illness? (All that and we haven't eliminated those cases, either!)

Speaking of sewing, I really need to get my sewing machine overhauled. Depending on other people again... and yes, the fact I have procrastinated this errand has a lot to do with the fact that I don't know whom to trust with the work! :-)

Hey. How come LJ has a mood selection for "exanimate" (WTF?) but not one for something so prosaic as "whiny"? (Or is what I need now the also-nonexistent "rambling"?)

Comments

[deyo.livejournal.com]

You can create an entire formal ensemble in Burma, for 10 cents plus materials, and ship it to America.

If you ship a salmon bisque from Burma, the results are often disappointing. ;)

[gs.livejournal.com]

Alvin Toffler wrote about industry moving from the mass-produced to the customized (probably in "The Third Wave"), but I haven't seen this happen in clothing other than iron-on t-shirt transfers. Economies of scale still seems to be a powerful factor. FatBrain used to publish books on demand for you, but they've been eaten by B&N. I'd love to be able to order a dozen shirts, in the style and fabric I chose, rather than have to settle for what somebody else thinks is the current fashion.

You don't happen to have a phone number or URL for those folk in Burma, do you? I'm not partial to salmon bisque anyway.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I've hoped his predictions would come true, but sadly it may be quite a while. Bummer!