I was at an asian grocers in the Marrickville metro this morning and the woman in front of me was heard to say "$2 for each lime? I'll only take one then, I'm very precious about my money". Good to see some common sense.
As far as costs of living, I think lots of valid points have been raised but a few have been neglected. Most folks seem blind to how ****ing good we've got it. So just a few refreshers that, despite the apparently high costs of living in Australia, things aren't so bad.
For starters, the phone I carry around in my pocket which gives me INSTANT ACCESS TO THE ENTIRE SUM OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE and puts me in contact with most of the world for mere cents provides better information access and communication than the president of the USA had a couple of decades ago. And the cost? Spread over the 4 years I've owned the phone, under $2 a day.
And here, are some quotes (and page #s) from a brilliant book entitled 'Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think':
If anyone is interested in the book (highly recommended): http://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think/dp/1451614217
As far as costs of living, I think lots of valid points have been raised but a few have been neglected. Most folks seem blind to how ****ing good we've got it. So just a few refreshers that, despite the apparently high costs of living in Australia, things aren't so bad.
For starters, the phone I carry around in my pocket which gives me INSTANT ACCESS TO THE ENTIRE SUM OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE and puts me in contact with most of the world for mere cents provides better information access and communication than the president of the USA had a couple of decades ago. And the cost? Spread over the 4 years I've owned the phone, under $2 a day.
And here, are some quotes (and page #s) from a brilliant book entitled 'Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think':
Light is a fabulous example. In England, artificial lighting was twenty thousand times more expensive circa AD 1300 than it is today. 865
Today [light] will cost less than a half a second of your working time if you are on the average wage: half a second of work for an hour of light! Had you been using a kerosene lamp in the 1880s, you would have had to work for 15 minutes to get the same amount of light. A tallow candle in the 1800s: over six hours’ work. And to get that much light from a sesame-oil lamp in Babylon in 1750 BC would have cost you more than fifty hours 868
In the 1800s, going from Boston to Chicago via stagecoach took two weeks’ time and a month’s wages. Today it takes two hours and a day’s wage. 877
But the vast majority of people are much better fed, much better sheltered, much better entertained, much better protected against disease and much more likely to live to old age than their ancestors have ever been. 885
The availability of almost everything a person could want has been going rapidly upward for two hundred years and erratically upward for ten thousand years before that: years of life span, mouthfuls of clean water, lungfuls of clean air, hours of privacy, means of traveling faster than you can run, ways of communicating farther than you can shout. 887
If anyone is interested in the book (highly recommended): http://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think/dp/1451614217