I'm finding this e-mail exchange much more interesting than any 
discussion I've had with my neighbours. I'd like to continue it over a 
drink, but to do that we'd have to travel. I think it's liberating to 
be able to choose who to talk to and who to spend time with, not have a 
social circle forced on you by where you happen to live. 

>Owen said:
"Pre-industrial society centered around the village - not the workplace - and had a heck of a lot more social contact and interaction."
A friend of mine made a film in the Amazon. He said that it was the 
most tedious experience of his life. He spent an entire day watching some one shell nuts. The nut sheller didn't say a word. He wasn't being 
rude - he just had nothing much to say. Shelling nuts was pretty much his life.  I think that's what Marx meant by rural idiocy.

Owen on home working:
"And the part about "very difficult to manage" - that is what I meant in the original post about massaging the bosses' egos.
Decentralization means loss of control - but invariably leads to 
increases in productivity, because individual initiative generally
turns out to be much better at innovation than sharing "effective 
working practices."

Simply not true. Bosses like not to have to deal with lots of staff - 
hence outsourcing. And I am often fighting (losing) battles against 
dictating every part of what staff do in their job, but there are 
better and worse methods that should be shared, and there is a practical necessity for some common standards. (My phrase, sharing 
working practices was intended as a bit tongue in cheek, but there is a serious point underlying it.) This list is an interesting example of how hard remote communication can be. Some posts are grossly rude to 
other participants. I suspect that this is not because the respondents 
are rude people, but because it's easy to forget that there is a person 
at the end of the e-mail.

None of what you say evades my original questions.  If there isn't 
actually a crisis, then chill out.  If there is, then small steps 
towards fuel conservation will  make only a small difference to the environment, but will have a catastrophic impact on our standard of 
living.  And that's not idle speculation.

James Greenstein


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