Mom Wanted A Chauffeured Rolls
Or at least used to joke that she did.
“When you boys are older,” she would tell my brother and me, “that’s what I want you to get me.”
We’d laugh; and I did once get her a pretty expensive model.
But are you kidding me? A real Rolls costs $366,000 plus tax. Plus a fortune to garage, insure, and maintain.
And a chauffeur’s salary and benefits? Yikes! (And what do you do when the chauffeur is sick or on vacation or wants a day off? Or when you travel?)
My mother never got her car-and-driver.
But I’ve scrimped and saved . . . and now I have one on call 24/7.
And it will soon be cheaper, because no driver — or gasoline — will be required. And little insurance (driverless cars will rarely crash).
This is why you have to do two things:
1. Find an hour to watch Tony Seba’s talk on the coming clean energy disruption. It’s already 18 months old, so none of this is new — you know some of this stuff, for sure — but I’d be amazed if it doesn’t grab you.
We are alive at the climactic moment for the species — 10 or 20 years being barely a moment in the context of 10,000 human generations — when we’ll either figure out how to live together in the undreamed of prosperity technology is making possible . . . or else hurtle off the rails, done in by either that technology or by ourselves.
2. Read Part 3 of Andrew Yang’s afore-recommended The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future. Parts 1 and 2 explain why there will soon be almost no jobs, at least of the sort we have today. Part 3 begins a robust and pretty wonderful discussion of what to do about that.
One way to look at the ever-accelerating onrush of technology is with fear. But it’s a lot more fun to look at the future with excitement . . . identifying the huge challenges and changes that loom and devising ways to live happily ever after.
Quote of the Day
The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
~Wilhelm StekelSearch
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