The toyota land cruiser is to all cars as X is to set of x. And things about Panama

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Gross Domestic Toughness

There should be a new "econometric" : Gross Domestic Toughness. GDT.

Where I live, people do not contribute much to GDP. Most of the food they produce they consume themselves, and a lot of the work they do could be done in 1/1ooth of the time with modern machinery. However nearly everything they do contributes to what I would like to call the Gross Domestic Toughness. Not sure how the formula would work for this one. One example I can give is this : a John Deer tractor produces exponentially more than 1 guy swinging a machete, but the machete swinger is maintaining the toughness production of the country, and could probably be the crap out of the guy working the tractor.

Helping out a nieghbor build his grass roof hut got me thinking about this. I was walking up this hill carrying about 80 lbs of wet straw to this guys house. My neighbor , aparisio, is going to use the straw for the roof of his hut. It will take him and his family about 50 more trips of hiking this straw up over this mountain about a mile and a half to get the roof done. The hut is no bigger than 15 by 20 feet.

I think the toughness idea came to me when i came to the top of the hill and found two of his brothers sucking down hot sugary coffee like it was Gatorade. they had both beaten me up the hill, carrying a much higher percentage of their malnourished body wieght than i was. After cresting the hill and I doing all i could to set down my straw bale without sprawling out and looking like a total wuss, they gave me this look like " what are you tired for, we eat little mountains like this for breakfast" but instead just handed me a gord of the piping hot coffee, which if sweetened to the point where you can feel it rotting your teeth is a great re hydrator.

any ways, for less than 200 dollars, the fam could throw up a roof in 1/20 th of the time and about 1/10000th of the pain, but then who would make up for the lack of toughness that otherwise would not be added to the economy?

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