How Pac-Man Ate Yosemite

According to this twisted, over-wrought, and just plain silly article, video games are destroying national parks:

As people spend more time communing with their televisions and computers, the impact is not just on their health, researchers say. Less time spent outdoors means less contact with nature and, eventually, less interest in conservation and parks.

By studying visits to national and state parks and the issuance of hunting and fishing licenses the researchers documented declines of between 18 percent and 25 percent in various types of outdoor recreation.

The decline, found in both the United States and Japan, appears to have begun in the 1980s and 1990s, the period of rapid growth of video games, they said.

The reality is much more obvious: Americans are overworked.

Collectively, American workers give a whopping 1.6 million years' worth of unused vacation time back to their employers every year. We may like to think of ourselves as charitable, but this is ridiculous.

Even worse, at least 20 percent of us admit to sneaking some work along with us during our paltry vacation time, according to the New York-based Families and Work Institute. The American Management Institute puts the figure at closer to 50 percent. Either way, the trend appears to be increasing. An Intel (Charts) survey last month found that 53 percent of us would like to take laptops on future vacations, mostly so we can sneak a peak at our work email.

It is getting increasingly hard to ignore the fact that the Land of the Free is by no means the Land of Free Time. Americans work more days than anyone else in the industrialized world.

Which means, for starters, that I don't want to hear any more crap about how hard the Japs work. We beat the snot out of them before; that alone speaks volumes about the American work ethic, material resource differences aside.

But there's a much more important little factoid here: the Robber Barons are back. It's taken them a century, but they've found ways around the anti-trust legislation and fair labor laws. They're back at their old tricks, just wearing different expensive Italian suits. From CEOs who raid corporations by destroying their future ability to operate in order to increase short-term stock value, (and thus the CEOs stock options), to political leaders who refuse to enforce immigration laws so that salaries and wages remain well below the profit curve, to the bastardization of middle management into nothing more than mouthpieces for top-down micro-mangers at the board level, corporate America is increasingly calling the shots. And the big unions haven't helped by becoming so corrupt that they've gone full circle.

People feel the need to take their work with them on vacation because they have to stay up to date with the office. If they don't, after two weeks in the Caribbean sun they'll return to find out that "Work Smarter" really means "Work Faster You Lazy Fucking Peon," and they'll be so far behind they'll be demoted or fired for incompetence by the Great and Wise Leaders of the Corporation.

Greed is the primary downfall of capitalism. Unfortunately, it's also what drives it to succeed. Nobody ever said the system was perfect, but it's becoming increasingly apparent that the controls put in place early last century are in many ways no longer effective. Greed will find a way, and the robber barons have greed on retainer.

That means, unfortunately, more government regulation.

The SEC has been investigating stock option abuse by CEOs for several years now. They know what these weasels are doing, but it's not technically illegal -- just unethical and completely amoral, something with which robber barons have no problems, lacking anything resembling a conscience. Eventually, the government will make its recommendation to Congress. The nervous nellies and mouth-breathers on the Left will overreact as they always do, and next thing you know, we're in a recession induced by draconian and poorly-considered legislation. Fun times, those'll be...

As an alternative, we could start tarring-and-feathering CEOs. But somehow I don't think that's going to happen. Which leaves fighting from within. I know how I do that; each of you has to figure out your method. Work for them. Work honestly. But don't let them steal your life from you, because to them that's just one more quantifiable asset, and it's ultimately as disposable as a computer or a phone. Remember this the next time you're tempted to think about work while sipping whiskey on your back porch; they're not worth your increasingly precious free time, let alone your life.