I think I read the Fountainhead in Jr. High after seeing the movie on TV. Haven't seen it since so I suspect the film left out an important subplot. And being all of say fourteen I kind of missed absorbing in the book. When the so called hero's girlfriend turns him down? He rapes her. All she needed was a good shagging and she immediately falls under his spell. His building doesn't get built according to his dreams so he rapes it. Excuse me. Blows it up.
Ok. I'm a logger's kid. Before dad was a logger he was a farm kid. Every summer the kids worked the harvest. Farm by farm. Sort of sexist by our outlook now. The boys worked the fields and the girls helped feed them. Ten cents a day extra if you took the teams home with you and brought them back in the morning fed, curried, harnessed and ready to hitch up. Note. Dad's best friend got put on the end of the line. He was a leftie. No farmer could do all the work on his/her own.
Dad was a logger before the field went to heavy mechanization. Self loading trucks, smaller crews. Partly because it was getting harder to get crews and because even now logging is one of the most dangerous jobs in the country. To be safe a crew depends on each other. Can't do it on your own.
Sidenote: Workman's comp insurance premiums are figured on lost time accidents. I don't know how it's figured now but when dad was working a work related death was an automatic TEN THOUSAND HOURS. A fairly small company in western Oregon company lost four men in a landslide one day. The company got out of the cutting side of the business, contracted it out and still ran the mills.
I am getting somewhere with this. I tried Atlas Shrugged. I think I got about half way through and tried my usual cheat. Jump to the last couple of chapters just to see how the damned book turns out. I got about half way through Galt's "manifesto" and took the book back to the library. She was a crappy writer, her characters were cardboard. And as a kid who watched her father try to keep going, and then get tossed on the trash heap when his body finally got too hurt to go on I found her so called philosophy totslly unbelievable. Damn it. My sisters, especially the youngest, never knew dad when he wasn't hurting.
Only people who work in offices with degrees in management or economics can pretend that we have any control over events more than a few years down the road. That you can make an investment plant that will guarantee much of anything for more than a few years is a pipe dream. You get hurt on the job, there's the recession from hell, there's a pandemic and those plans go out the window. Mismanage the response from the top and it get a hundred times worse.
Throw in Rand desciples with an individual who shouldn't be trusted to take care of a gerbil much less a country and well, here we are. Heck I wouldn't let the Current Occupant look after a pet rock much less a living thing. Does anyone in that family have a pet? I know the boys like killing things.
Someone joked on the FB entry where I found this that the kid should stick to comics or porn. Actualluy as far as I'm concerned Rand's philosophy is a form of pornography that justifies economic exploitation in plae of sexual exploitation. Everything has a price. The water we drink. the air we breathe, the food we need to survive. Yes there are costs but the US has a peculiar form of socialism. The profits are privatized while the costs in destroyed lives, pollution, soil loss, climate change are dumped on the shoulders of the taxpayers.
All of a sudden this is looking like at least a two parter because I have a bit of a horror story on the back burner,
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