Ziggurat

01


Logan's Run (film).

Warcraft III.


















The uber-panopticon.

Soylent green.

These are all things that come to mind when reading about Timelinks proposal to cram 1 million people into a carbon-neutral footprint pyramid-like 2.3 km structure that does away with the need for cars, a lawn, a garden, personal space, and privacy.

Ridas Matonis, Managing Director of Timelinks, said: “Ziggurat communities can be almost totally self-sufficient energy-wise. Apart from using steam power in the building we will also employ wind turbine technology to harness natural energy resources.”
...
The concept will also aim at a better quality of life for the inhabitants. Transport throughout the complex would be connected by an integrated 360 degree network (horizontally and vertically) so cars would be redundant. Biometrics would provide security with facial recognition technology.

Oh, dude. My dystopic sci-fi novels are sooo right on. Tom Cruise's version of Minority Report here I come! Whoo-hooo!!

Picture it...you walking down the Zig-hall, and a Zig-scanner reads your retina and instantly cross-checks your identity with the Zig-repository, establishes interests from recent email communications, utterances made in your bathroom, recent purchases from the Zig-store, and a Zig-avatar appears and starts walking next to you, slyly suggesting items or services in which you might be interested...like sponsored listings you see in various search engines.
Instead of DUIs or PI crimes, there'll be Zig-infractions and in order to maintain societal balance, there'll be strict re-education policies in place since there's no space for prison...or maybe there'll be a Penal-Zig?

Excursions to the surrounding pastoral areas would be frowned upon, as the lands would be snatched up by mega-conglomerates, and seeded with powerfully mutated agricultural products that aren't so much healthy, as they are cost-effective, so Zig-officials would want to limit the amount of exposure to zigizens (like 'citizen', but for Ziggurat, sweet!) else the highly condensed populace would vector biological contaminents at a brisk pace.

Nations will collapse, and Zig-States will replace modern continent-oriented governmental paradigms. Alliances with neighboring Ziggurats will be established, and battles will be fought to control water sources as they'll be the sources for both hydro-electric power and for treating 1 million people's worth of excrement per Ziggurat.

Urban centers will collapse and will become vestigages of humanity's triumphs and folly, eventually fallen prey to managed lifestyles.

My new home cheer:
Zig-gu-rat!
It's where it's at!
Zig-gu-rat!
It's where it's at!
[repeat it...or else]

The best place to work isn't Halliburton, but Google isn't bad

According to an online poll taken at the consumerist site, Cheney's baby, Halliburton, actually came in a close second. The winning WORST COMPANY in 2007 was the RIAA. What does the consumerist send the winner? A golden dog turd, of course.
This comes as a bit of a coinky-dink given my post from yesterday. I'm assuming that people are pissed at the constant bombardment of the RIAA on people for downloading music, and attempting to blame them for losing money, when really they should be realizing that they're just pumping out crap, which will earn them just that.

On the flip side, it sounds like Google is the best place to work.

What are some of the perks?

At Google you can do your laundry; drop off your dry cleaning; get an oil change, then have your car washed; work out in the gym; attend subsidized exercise classes; get a massage; study Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish, and French; and ask a personal concierge to arrange dinner reservations. Naturally you can get haircuts onsite. Want to buy a hybrid car? The company will give you $5,000 toward that environmentally friendly end. Care to refer a friend to work at Google? Google would like that too, and it'll give you a $2,000 reward. Just have a new baby? Congratulations! Your employer will reimburse you for up to $500 in takeout food to ease your first four weeks at home. Looking to make new friends? Attend a weekly TGIF party, where there's usually a band playing. Five onsite doctors are available to give you a checkup, free of charge.

It's interesting to note that work environments like this are usually not advertising the work-life balance because when all these amenities become woven into the tapestry of your life, your time at work is your life. Why would you leave? Go home to your wife? Sheesh...she's already hanging out in the parent lounge adjacent to the day-care center. Must be nice when your stock is worth $483 a share. Google is definitely not getting any golden turds.

Needless to say, I'm reminded of a theme present in Margaret Atwood's book, Oryx and Crake, where supercompanies begin to take the place of regional governments, and the sole purpose of existence is to remain affiliated with a firm that can not only employ you, but offer a modicum of safety. Compound the fact that the government seems to be able to provide funding ($624,000,000,000) for a defense budget while cutting education dollars, maybe it won't be long before we see Google start its own K-16 program for employee children, where they work on all things Google from life to death behind a safe partition of glass and mortar.