Quite a large number of people are complaining about how hot it is nowadays.
So uncomfortably hot that they have to stay indoors until late in the evening.

And no, they are not pensioners.
They work from home, earning enough money to be able to have everything delivered to them.

Which reminds me of my first job, right out of university.
A big factory building where water almost froze in winter and temperatures rose to 41-42 degrees Celsius in August.
Inside that building were, among other ‘run of the mill’ machine-tools, 3 top of the art automated Czech-built lathes.
This story goes back to 1986 and happened in communist Romania.
The lathes were very precise but couldn’t be used all the time. In winter they stopped working altogether and in summer they faltered. No amount of fine tuning could bring them back to yielding usable parts.
It took a few years for the brass to figure-out what was going on. The lathes were designed to work in a ‘controlled environment’. The temperature was supposed to hover between 15 and 25 degrees for the lathes to function normally.
Hence the lathes were ‘sheltered’ in an auxiliary building. A shed built inside the factory. And provided with efficient enough ‘temperature control’.

We, the people, had been left on the outside. Outside the shed but still inside the factory…. freezing in winter and sweat-drenched in summer. Still working, because we were sturdier than the top of the line machinery…

This morning I came across a FB post.

This brought about another memory.

Sometime in 1990-1991 I happened to lay my hands on a Newsweek magazine. Or a the Economist… I don’t remember exactly. Anyway… the article I was going to discuss with you was about the hard life endured by the American poor people. And was illustrated with a color picture.
I’m going to make a small break here and inform you that in the 1990 Romania colored magazines – let alone glossy, were hard to get by.
That picture, taken somewhere in the Bronx, contained a color TV and three pre-teen kids. All of them clad in blue-jeans and wearing ‘sports shoes’. You know, the likes of Puma/Adidas/ you name it.
In those times, in Romania, bluejeans or ‘sports-shoes’ could be had mostly on the black market. Where you had to fork out the wage earned in a whole month if you wanted to buy a pair of each. Or you could buy them in a brand store. For twice the price….

You see, the communist regimes have crumbled because the leaders had lost contact with reality.
The brass in the factory where I had started working couldn’t figure out – nor really cared about, the reason for which those lathes didn’t work properly.
And didn’t care about the fact that the workers had a very hard life. On the factory floor and outside its premises.

The liberal-democratic and capitalist regime has created huge opportunities. People used to live incomparably better there than in the rest of the world. And continue to do so.
On the other hand, in many of the ‘affluent’ countries people have lost contact with each other. The haves have no idea about how the poor live. Nor the poor have any idea about what it means to be rich.

We live in different worlds. In different realities.

Each of us on their own ‘tin roof’.

The problem being that all of them are becoming increasingly ‘hot’.
And I’m not thinking ‘global warming’ now…

Communism had crumbled because the rulers couldn’t understand what was going on. Couldn’t react efficient enough to changes brought about by normal evolution. Because the rulers had gradually lost contact with reality. Which inevitably happens in all authoritarian settings.

We are currently living in different realities. In ‘bubbles’. For now, these bubble still have something in common. We are still able to talk to each other. Sometimes we have a hard time understanding what the other has to say – or don’t really care, but the dialog is still possible.

I’m afraid of the day when the dialog will no longer be possible.

The guys in the pan are so obsessed about the taxes they have to fork out that they actually don’t pay attention to anything else.
The guys attempting to collect those taxes are so obsessed about what they want to do with the money that they actually don’t pay attention to anything else.

Meanwhile, the world is growing apart. The bubbles lose contact with each other. And with the hard core reality…

The cats can always jump down from the roof. Whenever it grows too hot or too cold.
Where are those two frogs going to jump when things will become uncomfortable?