biffvernon wrote:...replacing men and shovels with a mechanical digger, while it may save a lot of sweat, does actually use more energy. The oil consumed by the machine has more Joules than the food eaten by the men.
Shane MacGowan wrote:
The canals and the bridges, the embankments and cuts,
They blasted and dug with their sweat and their guts
They never drank water but whiskey by pints
And the shanty towns rang with their songs and their fights.
Navigator, navigator rise up and be strong
The morning is here and there's work to be done.
Take your pick and your shovel and the bold dynamite
For to shift a few tons of this earthly delight
Yes to shift a few tons of this earthly delight.
They died in their hundreds with no sign to mark where
Save the brass in the pocket of the entrepreneur.
By landslide and rockblast they got buried so deep
That in death if not life they'll have peace while they sleep.
Navigator, navigator rise up and be strong
The morning is here and there's work to be done.
Take your pick and your shovel and the bold dynamite
For to shift a few tons of this earthly delight
Yes to shift a few tons of this earthly delight.
Their mark on this land is still seen and still laid
The way for a commerce where vast fortunes were made
The supply of an empire where the sun never set
Which is now deep in darkness, but the railway's there yet.
Navigator, navigator rise up and be strong
The morning is here and there's work to be done.
Take your pick and your shovel and the bold dynamite
For to shift a few tons of this earthly delight
Yes to shift a few tons of this earthly delight.
From the greatest album of all time...and perhaps fitting for a thread about the end of capitalism.
vtsnowedin wrote:
Why aren't we? You think that type of work is not still being done.
No, I think you misunderstood. Of course that sort of work is still being done! I think that Ralph's point was that replacing men and shovels with a mechanical digger, while it may save a lot of sweat, does actually use more energy. The oil consumed by the machine has more Joules than the food eaten by the men.
But my point was that this is not the sort of automation that Paul Mason is writing about.
(We had a CAT digger like that digging the trenches for our ground source heat pump a couple of months ago. Awesome thing.)
I think your miscalculating the energy required to do the work by muscle power. You must feed the men (and their families) for months to get their two or three yards of dirt dug out and lifted up out of the trench each day . Your shoring must be built in place of pieces that can be man handled. Man holes must be cast in place by a crew shoveling sand, stone, and cement into a cement mixer, rather then precast and set into the hole in sections weighing six tons or more. The stone bedding must be screened out of a gravel bank by hand instead of coming from a crusher at the ledge quarry. The sand blanket over the pipe must be loaded and hauled to the site from it's nearest source. The one they are trucking it from is six miles away. The spoiles dirt displaced by the stone bedding and sand blanket must be wheel barrowed off the site to a waste area and on and on.
Now granted they had their own fuel truck sitting in the yard and pumped a couple hundred gallons into the machines and pumps every day but it was energy well spent.
You may well be right, vt, I'm not arguing about it! It was Ralph's point. And, as i said, Paul Mason is talking about something else.
Actually, thinking about what you've just written, I guess if there were no machines we might design the job in a different way. Much of your jobs list arises because the machines exist. Without the machines we would devise a different way to live happily. What was that pipe in the trench for?
biffvernon wrote:You may well be right, vt, I'm not arguing about it! It was Ralph's point. And, as i said, Paul Mason is talking about something else.
Actually, thinking about what you've just written, I guess if there were no machines we might design the job in a different way. Much of your jobs list arises because the machines exist. Without the machines we would devise a different way to live happily. What was that pipe in the trench for?
It is a municipal sewer collection pipe that serves the factories on that street. Everything from a commercial laundry to an factory making pulleys for the auto industry and a Dialysis clinic. They need the upgrade from the 1975 system which is at capacity before any expansions or additional hook ups can be permitted.
johnhemming2 wrote:To some extent why musicians should not be thought to be any better at politics than anyone else.
The song is not about politics.
Some musicians are better at music than other musicians. MacGowan is the greatest living writer of folk songs.
I didn't know MacGowan wrote songs, though why shouldn't he of course?
Phil Gaston wrote Navigator.
I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker
biffvernon wrote:It's a good job they've got a big digger then.
Just trying to think what pulleys are used for the in the auto industry. I don't think my car has any.
One on the water pump, one on the alternator, one on the power steering pump, one on the AC compressor, The one on the end of the crank shaft that turns the serpentine belt that turns all of those.
