We are killing the Goose that laid the Golden Eggs

"The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs" by Aesop

A man and his wife had the good fortune to possess a goose which laid a golden egg every day. Lucky though they were, they soon began to think they were not getting rich fast enough, and, imagining the bird must be made of gold inside, they decided to kill it. Then, they thought, they could obtain the whole store of precious metal at once; however, upon cutting the goose open, they found its innards to be like that of any other goose.

Sounds just like the story of our bankers and CEO's. Their greed tore apart the system that had worked and they are "killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg". That Goose was the buying power of 300 million Americans. When the bubble burst and they lost 16 trillion dollars in the stock market and housing meltdown (an average of 50 thousand dollars for every man woman and child)they couldn't keep the Goose alive.

The economy has gone into the tank and we are investing trillions worldwide into quick starting a recovery to return everything back to what it was, but it can't return to what it was because we face two insurmountable problems:

1. Globalization in its present laissez-faire form has undermined the earning power of consumers in America and Western Europe, namely their domestic workforce, while shifting the nation's wealth into the hands of a small favoured elite. With the collapse of the housing bubble there simply isn't enough earning power in the hands of the public to sustain these economies. A handout in terms of tax relief or mortgage support might temporarily put off the damage but greed at the top has seriously crippled the very financial system that made them wealthy in the first place.

2. The American way of life is admired and copied around the world and this small planet can't handle it. The issue here is a progressively deteriorating environment and with it human suffering and dislocation, and eventually the issue of human survival. We simply must reshape how we intend to live and get on with it now.

In short, the system is badly wounded, we can' return to what it was before, and we have only a limited time to fix it.

It's Theft, Feudalism is Back

Ayn Rand: The only social system that fully recognizes individual rights is capitalism. When I say "capitalism," I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics.

the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness or rational self-interest

The disciples of Ayn Rand and laissez-faire capitalism, Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan and Reagan were the culprits who kicked off this mess and for the next 20 years Bush I, Clinton and Bush II ably guided by Greenspan and a dominant Republican congress joined the ride. It was quite a trip with a systemic enrichment of 1% of the population while flattening middle class earnings and reducing the buying power of another 40% of the population. It's what happened in the period leading up to the Great Depression.

I don't know what the outcome is going to be from this meltdown but I can't see a simple turnaround because in America greed has trashed the system and it has to be rebuilt.

We have returned to an 17th century feudal model where the wealth of the nation has gravitated to a small number of powerful people. The reality is that deregulation released those with power from any constraints on their desire to have more. Like the dukes and kings of old they took as much as they could; and if there was more they would take that too.

It's theft when a young hedge fund manager can earn in 10 minutes what the average worker earns in a year or many times the income of a Nobel Prize winner, the President of his country or that of an internationally renowned artist. It's theft when CEOs of merchant banks and hedge funds become overnight billionaires and Presidents of large organizations now average incomes eight hundred times that of an average worker. Forty years ago it was only 30 to 40 times an average workers wages. Its theft when they influence politicians to remove inheritance taxes and promote flat taxes so they and their children can take it all home. It's theft when they hide their ill gotten gains in offshore tax havens (and most do) so that they and their corporations can avoid paying their fare share. And its theft when each year they manage to gain a bigger share. (A 2007 study of the Congressional Office Bureau found the wealth of the richest 1 percent of Americans totalled $16.8 trillion, $2 trillion more than the combined wealth of the lower 90 percent of the population)

Now dumping public funds on financial institutions to flood the market with easy credit again and subsidizing mortgages and car buying avoids the basic issues facing working families and will at best put a temporary halt in the inevitable collapse that is bound to continue. The reality is that the wealth of the nation has been stolen, workers have lost buying power over the past twenty years, and unless that changes another frenzy of credit buying will just repeat the cycle.

America has to rebuild with a different model and I have my doubts they can do it. Too many powerful people have an inbred belief in laissez-faire capitalism and have too much to lose. That means, I believe, despite the good intentions of Obama, it is going to get a lot worse. If Merkel has her way the same will happen in Europe.

Once Upon a Time (Before Globalization)

Once upon a time there was a big beautiful country with fertile farms that grew and raised almost everything their people ate and factories that made almost everything they needed including their processed food, their clothing, their furniture, their appliances and cars.

The farms needed many workers to tend and harvest the crops and look after the poultry, and cattle, and in the towns the factories needed semi-skilled and skilled workers for production, and workers with trade skills, engineers, clerks and accountants. There were many good jobs to choose from and people could select the job they were best suited for based on their aptitudes and education. And in these fields and factories if you were good enough you could advance to become lead hands, foremen and even the general manager. With passing years as these companies grew and prospered workers, often with the help of unions, were able to gain a share of this wealth with better wages, retirement benefits and health coverage. As the years past and the businesses grew the workers and people benefited and became increasingly secure and satisfied with their lives and committed to where they worked.

Then one day the owners of these businesses got the bright idea that if they shipped all this work far away to countries where people would work for much less and without benefits and where there were no laws governing working conditions, or hours worked, their companies and its owners could earn much more money. No longer would they have to put up with unions and the wage demands of their workers. And the politicians agreed with this and used terms like free trade and globalization to glorify it.

And now with cheap foreign labour the profits of businesses greatly increased and the owners and their bankers greatly prospered. The population of multimillionaires and billionaires increased like dandelions in an unattended field and the result was an unparalleled demand for the things great wealth could buy such as giant yachts, aircraft, toy girls and boys, and many mansions.

The manufacturing plants were now closed, their workers gone and the life in the towns was greatly changed as the plants became silent shells. Many of the workers who were let go were fortunate to find work in the great shopping areas outside the towns where there were vast shopping plazas and box stores selling food and goods from far away countries. The problem was that the work paid far less than what they had been earning before but with two or more family members working long hours and with fewer benefits and belt tightening life carried on. For those who were unable to find work, food stamps kept them from starving

Governments don't like belt tightening because people spend less and this isn't good for the economy. The solution was reducing interest rates and encouraging lenders to offer easy credit terms: no credit check required, nothing down and next to nothing to pay for the first two years. That enabled people on small incomes to start buying again with borrowed money. This money felt just the same as additional tax free income. They bought houses, put big cars in the garage, or in the driveway for the neighbours to see, and filled their houses with the things they always wanted. With all this buying, housing prices continued to rise and the people were borrowing even more against this, and so it went for many years. People came to believe that a good life living off credit would always be this way as they continued to borrow to finance their new life. So the policy worked for a while. Flat or declining earnings for workers but lots of easy money on credit to keep them buying. There was lots of money going around so the community and everyone benefited.

Then one day the loan payments started to come due and many discovered that they didn't have the money and in desperation began walking away from their homes and the many things they had bought on credit. This caused housing prices to start declining rather than growing so people couldn't borrow anymore to meet their obligations. Then everything began to collapse. The banks faced billions in unpaid debts, business performance declined because fewer people were buying, many businesses failed and millions of people became unemployed.

The government, like Mary Mapes Dodge's Little Dutch Boy, kept plugging the holes as best they could with pots of money but unlike the Dutch Boy they didn't succeed because all those good paying jobs on the assembly lines were gone and along with them many of the research, engineering and skilled service jobs. The obvious had happened; without these jobs the country had lost its buying power and the housing bubble couldn't be blown up again.

This formerly great country subsequently went into an economic decline for many years, faced political turmoil, and faded away as an industrial power.

But many years later this  story has a happy ending. The far away countries became very rich and their people prospered. Then one day the owners of their businesses got the same bright idea that if they shipped all this work far away to a country where people would work for much less and without benefits and where there were no laws governing working conditions, minimum wages or hours worked, their companies could earn much more money . No longer would they have to put up with unions and the wage demands of their workers. And the politicians agreed with this and used terms like free trade and globalization to glorify it.

And so, the work came back again to that now poor, but once big beautiful country, and the cycle started all over again.

T Hobbes, J Locke, JC Rousseau vs Ayn Rand

Dave's Observation
I don't find the usual attribution of the US financial meltdown to greed to be particularly helpful.
By and large people were just trying to maximize their sales, hit their targets or whatever. There is greed there but I don' t know that it expressed itself in a different way than in normal times. One wonders if it is even useful to ascribe a human vice to something like a financial system.

My Response

The word "Greed" clearly reflects the anger and resentment of a public who feel betrayed and exploited by a collapsing financial system. It's true, as you point out, that the people involved were simply maximizing their performance as they have always been inclined to do, but you have to accept that free of constraints, self interest inevitably leads to excesses. This is what has happened.

The belief that dismantling regulations would free the entrepreneurial spirit and thereby benefit humanity has proved to be utterly naive. The philosophers,Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau who profoundly influenced Western thinking and the formation of our governments understood that man is driven by self interest and by necessity had to enter into a social contract with his fellow man to control his behaviour by establishing governments for societies protection.

Ayn Rand took the opposite view that self interest should be the foundation of morality. Since all participants are acting selfishly the market is self correcting. She chose to be blind to the fact you could harm others while pursuing your self interest. The Chicago School and Greenspan were captivated by this ideology and thus the disaster we have today. In short, you need rules of the road to prevent disasters; regulations to restore our confidence in the integrity of the fiscal system

Yes, there is a moral element in all this. A social contract saves us from ourselves and makes for a fairer society. A world run by corporate interests is unlikely to have any collective moral compass.

The neo-conservatives and their Republican friends really believe that no government is good government and by starving tax revenues all public effort to set a social agenda and offer regulatory controls will be starved into extinction. Thus man can again be restored to his "noble savage" state of freedom.

I think the answer to "what does it all mean and what needs to be resolved" will only be found by America shifting politically to the radical left. Leftist values invariably respect intellect and education, and demand a fair redistribution of the nation's wealth through universal health coverage, adequate minimum wage policies, taxation commensurate with earnings, arts subsidies and the list goes on. It is fair to say that this sense of fairness eventually becomes a universal public value and spills over into international relationships.

Would it happily end there? Obviously not. Our world changes, our environment is threatened, in the absence of any weapons agreement the proliferation of atomic weaponry goes on, and our vastly expanded global trade has us tripping over each other. The social contract to manage the pursuit of self interest becomes increasingly a vital global concern. It is now self evident that the US role of "The World's Policeman" by necessity must give way in an increasingly multipolar world.

America can't face its Guilt

Why can't America face its past? The Germans after WWII had to at Nuremburg and today we have a well informed and comparatively enlightened population. Germans recognize their dreadful past and wish never to repeat it. Jacques Chirac publicly attempted the same cleansing in France but unfortunately his successor, Sarkozy, in order to gain favour with Le Penn's extreme right wing voters in the 2007 elections refuted Chiracs claims.

Obama is being condemned by Bill Clinton for supporting his pastor who at one point said "Damn America" for a past that has reaped the problems America faces today. In other words the pastor clearly stated the obvious and what every American needs to understand. Instead we here again observe the flag waving of Hillary and McCain who claim to love America more than Obama does. The US election campaign has truly hit the gutter with most of the press joining in. If Americans fail to come to grips with their sordid past the younger generations will go on making the same mistakes.

I recall that when the shoe bomber was sentenced the judge made the comment, "you hate us because of our freedom" It was a statement much heralded in the US and I received several copies via email "to send it on" No guilt or reflection on the many millions that have suffered in the Middle East, Vietnam, Cambodia and throughout Latin America over the past 100 years through US actions. Just "we love freedom and they hate us for it"

Like the pastor I am stating the obvious to most non Americans and am bewildered by their blindness. Maybe the impeding financial collapse will tear people away from their escapist TV and a majority will put their flags away and actually begin to think. I have my doubts.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Globalization

Power over Wisdom

The Sorcerer's Apprentice - a concert piece by French composer Paul Dukas was originally an ages-old fairy tale that had been interpreted as a poem by Goethe.

You may recall Walt Disney’s version in Fantasia

where Mickey Mouse is the mischievous apprentice-magician to the Sorcerer, Yen Sid (Disney spelled backwards) assigns Mickey the task of filling a large vat with water that requires using buckets to collect it from an outdoor fountain. Yen Sid then departs leaving Mickey to the task. He is soon bored and by putting on Yen Sid’s magical hat uses his powers to put arms and legs on a broomstick and commands it to fetch the water. Mickey sits back and proudly waves his arms like conductor as he watches the broomstick merrily going back and forth with overflowing buckets. Mickey falls asleep and dreams of controlling the clouds, the planets and the universe. Mickey suddenly awakes with water crashes over him in the flooded room. Mickey doesn’t know how to command the broomstick to stop. In desperation he smashes the broomstick into many pieces. They come alive and now he has an army merrily carrying water and a swirling flood threatens to drown everything. The story has a happy ending when the Sorcerer returns and put an end to the flood

The lesson? Don’t start what you don’t know how to finish or know your limits. The story illustrates the dangers of power over wisdom.

Globalization is a replay of this story with many thousands of tiny apprentices turned loose to use their magical powers. The only problem is that we don’t have the Sorcerer or Wizard that can tell them when to stop. Like Mickey they dream about their power and lead their little assigned activities to expand and grow. They have no idea where it will end.

One billion people in the world at the beginning of the 20th century have now become seven billion at the beginning of this century and there isn’t much room any more for the animal kingdom. In another 100 years at this rate there will be standing room only and the wild animals will be gone. In the meantime our tiny apprentices will build more of everything, strip the land of our forests and voraciously dig into the earth’s crust to extract whatever remains to in order to satisfy their ambition and to supply the needs and wants of this ever increasing and demanding human army. Temperatures will rise, the coastlines will flood people from their homes and the mountain glaciers will disappear thus drying up the fertile valleys below that feed millions of people. In a world of scarcity people will flee increasingly uninhabitable lands. Tiny apprentices in political roles will rally their citizens to gain control of a portion of this unstoppable momentum and wars will be inevitably fought over what remains.

There is a lot of wisdom out there but who can stop the tiny apprentices?

Maybe we have to hope for a Sorcerer to arrive before it is too late.

Scary Bible Quotes Applied to the Law

I've just read Scary Bible Quotes http://home.earthlink.net/~owl233/biblequotes.htm

To all those Christian fundamentalists out there who believe the ancient scriptures show the way just imagine if our legal system and foreign policies applied these quotes. This LORD sure is bloodthirsty. 

 

Leviticus 20:9

If anyone curses his father or mother he must be put to death. Wow! this one is a dandy. When I was a kid my mom used to wash out my mouth with soap and water when I said those words, and that was bad enough. It would certainly reduce the kid population if parents got serious about this. It would take quite a legal system to draw up the rules and I don't envy the role the police would have to play. Not sure how many kids would be left.

Leviticus 20:10

If a man commits adultery with another man's wife - with the wife of a neighbour - both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death. This sure gives a lot of power to betrayed spouses. This is going to put a lot of people to death and here again the courts and police must carry a heavy burden. And how if the death penalty is applied, is the offended party going to get any alimony? Also I am not sure what the punishment is if the adulterer is caught with a single woman.
I must say that the Muslim Shira laws are much better because I understand that they only the adulteress is stoned to death and the man gets off the hook.

Leviticus 20:13

If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death. Well, this will put an end to the gay community. Hopefully there might be a few exemptions for some creative people like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Leonard Bernstein and maybe a good politician like Barney Frank.

Deuteronomy 22:10-1

If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the girl's virginity can be found she shall be brought to the door of her father's house and there the men of the town shall stone her to death. There needs to be some rewording of this because single moms raise a lot of kids now. I wonder what the role of the police will be in all this. Are they spectators? And who cleans up after? And my understanding is that there aren't too many virgins left any more so this law will get really nasty to apply.

Exodus 35:2

For six days, work is to be done, but the seventh day shall be your holy day, a Sabbath of rest to the LORD. Whoever does any work on it must be put to death. Well there goes Sunday shopping! Walmarts and the Big Box stores will be in trouble. Same goes for the flea markets. And how will this law apply to those who practice the Sabbath on other days of the week?

Deuteronomy 7:1-2

When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations . . . then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. This sounds like what George Bush and Dick Cheney did to Iraq.

Deuteronomy20:10-17

When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. . . . This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby. This is quite a foreign policy!! We are obviously making some progress in Iraq and the men and women can certainly be used as cheap labour which fits in with the goals of Globalization. Problem is we are killing too many men because they won't give up and you know what the Lord says about that. Not so sure however what we can do with the kids. As for the livestock, why pay for it if this law is on our side and we can get it for free. Everthing else I guess would include the art we have already plundered

However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them as the Lord your God has commanded you. Well the Americans tried this in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not so sure this foreign policy should apply any more. Maybe the British, French and Dutch felt this way about their empires at one time and how the USA still feels about Central America and Cuba. Atomic warfare could help the Lord to make this work. .

Ephesians 5:22-24

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Saviour. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Men will really like this but it is going to be a really hard law to enforce. Women are going to get very mad. The Lord is going to have an uphill fight to pull this one off.

1 Peter 2:13

Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every authority instituted among men. Dictators, and armies have always liked this one. Now corporations, politicians, the people who hand out parking tickets, and school teachers will like this too. No more messy protest movements and demonstrations.

Jesus, on His Second Coming

Matthew 24:29-34

[T]he sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken. . . . They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory. . . . I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. [Emphasis added.]
Lately global warming is causing storms like this. As for the 'Son of Man' Wikipedia doesn't know who this is so we will just have to watch the clouds 

Matthew16:27-28

For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what he has done. I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom

I don't know who this Son of Man is but I suspect this is going to be THE BIG EVENT. They say when this happens that the chosen few will rise up from whatever they are doing - through the roof of their car or from the dining table, the bath tub and even making love - and zoom up bodily into heaven while the rest of us will perish in the fiery end.

How it will end for Human Life

Environmental Scientists are telling us that we are polluting this world at an ever increasing rate and we have about 10 years left to alter these trends before much of this earth in the following years to come will become uninhabitable. Polar and glacial ice will melt away, the seas will rise and our coastal cities will be submerged, storms will ravage our lands and tropical regions will lose their fertility as the mountain streams running off the glaciers will dry up. Populations will desperately flee to regions where the soil remains fertile. Governments will be unable to prevent this unplanned migration. Increasingly scarce resources such as arable land, oil, water and minerals will be fought over thus ensuring an escalation of world conflict.
Just finished an interesting book by P.D.James entitled “The Children of Men” The story begins in 2021 in England. Worldwide men became sterile in 1995 and as the story begins the final generation has just turned 25. In another 60 years the human race will have disappeared, the cathedrals, libraries and factories will become silent and the animal kingdom will carry on. I will not tell you how the story ends but it got me thinking about how it affects our pollution problem. Forests and fields would cover the land, the air would become sweet again, lakes and rivers would fill, and the animal kingdom would repopulate. Unfortunately no human would be around to appreciate it but it clearly would present a solution to our pollution problem.
A less drastic solution would require leaders of major nations enforcing draconian policies that would drastically alter how we travel, how we live, what we eat and produce and what we dispose of. Leaders need public support and that means making popular policies and decisions that fit into a four year electable time frame. The time frame doesn’t fit even with the modest Kyoto plan, a fair predictor of how the environmental challenge will unfold.
In the PD James story a dying population doesn’t care about the future on this earth because there is no future. They live a futile life simply waiting for the end. Their goal is simply to hang on to what they have and to collect more as generations die off and leave their possessions behind. Presumably the last person alive will own everything, albeit in a cleaner world..
In the real world I think most of us in our own way do care about the future.. Why do we care? Clearly because we see life as a continuum from past to future generations; we will die but our family and others will carry on in the future. The problem is we are inexpert individuals preoccupied with the here and now. In the absence of visionary leaders a disaster is inevitable.
Maybe the religious fundamentalists have it right. At some point the end will abruptly come.. As an agnostic I have my doubts however about the Rapture when those born again Christians who have already died will have their bodies restored, ascend through the air, and meet Jesus in the sky. This supposedly will be followed by a mass migration of the born-again who are currently living. It will be quite an event. Mom will disappear from the bathtub, people from their automobiles, some will disappear from the dinner table and lovers from the bedroom and rise up through the roof and through the air. Babies are innocent so maybe they will rise too.
Presumably the rest of us, including my dog, will wave good bye before Jesus returns on a horse leading an army who will exterminate most of the earth's population in a massive genocide. It will be numerically the largest mass extermination of humans in history. Certainly this represents another solution to global warming. but it isn’t the loving Jesus I read about.

My Strawberries and Globalization

perfect strawberry

I have a garden in southern France where I grow fruit and vegetables. The sun is hot where I live and to use my strawberries as an example, when they reach my table fresh from the garden they are fragrant and with an unmatched rich and sweet flavour. Small producers in our area sell similar locally grown strawberries in the market square.

No flavour

The supermarkets like Carrefour, Walmart’s and others don’t buy these strawberries of course and sell larger and beautifully shaped red strawberries that they have purchased at the lowest possible price from some distant country. It’s part of globalization. If the cheapest price is from large greenhouses in Southern Spain, California or an oligarch's estate in Brazil, then this is where they will buy them. They are undoubtedly genetically modified, chemically treated and harvested early to avoid any blemish and to withstand the long voyage to markets. If it is bigger than a normal strawberry they even paste a label on it. I suspect the store buyer is given a bonus if he finds a lower price somewhere else. The problem with this is that they don’t taste like strawberries!!!.
Perfectly shaped and unblemished tomatoes from California taste like red and slightly sour cucumbers in Toronto, apricots unlike our juicy local variety arrive dry and tasteless – but they are cheaper ! Let’s face it, locally grown fruit and vegetable tastes better and I think that has something to do with the quality of life. The global experts don’t know how to measure this, and probably most of them are rich enough to not care anyway because they can go to their gourmet shops.
If we carry this globalization argument further France should logically give up growing everything because there is always somewhere in the world where the local currency is depressed plus large landowners assisted by generous World Bank loans can hire penny labour and harvest more cheaply. The economists in Brussels and writers for business publications who are devoted to globalization believe this is a good thing. They obviously accept that traditional farmers in France and throughout Europe should give up their land, or sell it off for golf courses, and migrate to the cities to take up modest labour where it is available.
Let me see if I can understand what global advocates are saying. By freeing up markets from any government imposed constraints the capacity to generate wealth will be greatly enhanced. This will occur because companies will be free to invest, buy and sell wherever it is most profitable and this will support the growth of mega businesses and mega farms that will be more profitable. The question is; profitable for whom ? I guess it is the handful of oligarchs in most third world countries who control most of the land and who pay pennies to their workers, plus additional profits for the World Bank, transportation companies, and the mega retailers like Walmarts and Carrefour. To many buyers this makes sense since the wages in the areas where Walmarts and Carrefour exists are depressed and the buyer can partly benefit from lower prices. It is like going there to shoot yourself or your neighbour in the foot.
Getting back to strawberries, an article in LeMonde today claims that strawberries from China vs from Perigod in France requires 20 times more fuel to get it to market. It goes on to say that farm produce shipped thousands of miles by ship, rail and trucks for the cheapest price has become a major factor in rising CO2 gas emissions in the atmosphere. Destroy the planet but get a better price ! It’s something to think about.
In conclusion I don’t really understand all this enthusiasm for Globalization, and as I originally stated, locally grown strawberries taste so much better. I guess I’ll follow the seasons and buy locally. Saving a few farms and eating well makes it worthwhile.