Schools out back for Summer.

School has started back up again for the Summer session. I really REALLY enjoyed having that month off so it kind of sucks to go back. I’ll be glad when I graduate if I don’t die of old age first. At least the class is somewhat interesting, it’s Contemporary Social Problems. What does that have to do with management? Not much but I’m kind of doing things reversed from normal because other than a few more required classes, everything else is electives that most people take during their first couple years of college. I’ve already made a good dent in it and if I don’t procrastinate I could finish all the work for the class in a couple weeks. That’s a pretty big IF, since I am a notorious procrastinator. It doesn’t look like there’s a final test for this one, just a final project which is like an 8 page paper or something. I remember in high school thinking that a 5 pager was the end of the world and that I could never get enough material to fill it but now I’m like… eh, I can knock that out in a couple hours or so the day it’s due if I really need to.

Finished up book 4, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, written in 1957. That was a big one, and it was a little tough to get through. If I had two words to describe it I would have to say that it would be… capitalist propaganda. I imagine that there were similar things written in the Soviet Union during that time except that it was advocating for communism instead. Honestly, when you look at it from the time period that it was written in it was a good story. It could have been cut down to about a third the size, and cut down on the preachiness quite a bit and it would have been a lot better though. Rand kind of ran some things into the ground a little bit such as the amount of people who turned into sniveling whiners, it wasn’t the amount of people really, it was that every single one of them used the exact same language almost like she cut and pasted the same words from person to person to save time. A little character development from that standpoint would have been nice. Another thing that made the story really disjointed for me was that many different characters would launch into preachy diatribes that would go on and on with no input from other characters who were supposedly standing right there listening. The kicker on this one was one that went on for count em’… 57 pages straight. 8 pages into it he was already repeating himself so I was skipping ahead to find where he would stop talking so I could continue the story. Ridiculous. Basically the book was advocating a Libertarian kind of pure capitalism with no rules and no restrictions by the government, and showed the world collapsing because of communism. While I agree that communism doesn’t work other than in theory, the type of capitalism advocated here also doesn’t work, other than in theory. It doesn’t work for the simple reason that a good chunk of the human population are… well… bad people no matter what system they are in. There are people who will do anything and everything to gain power, wealth, and influence and destroy everything in their path in the process as long as they get what they are looking for. I can understand why many who grew up with this kind of ideology ingrained in them can be so blinded that they can’t see what isn’t working. The truth is that this story is a fairy tale. It even has a capitalist utopia in it for Pete’s sake. Capitalism with no rules results in things like how the economy recently crashed because of too many people chasing the easy money and the oil spill in the gulf because safeguards were ignored to save time and money. Pure communism isn’t the answer either, but neither is pure capitalism. A mixture of both, leaning far more towards the capitalist side with safeguards in place to keep morons from bringing down the roof on everyone’s heads is probably the way to the greatest prosperity for everyone.