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The Korean Nine-Person Shovel

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The Environmentalist arm of the Party has long maintained that the civilization has taken a wrong turn when it began to industrialize and develop "efficient," gas-guzzling equipment. The answer, of course, is - and has always been - in the past, especially if you look at all the wonderful government-subsidized research of diverse world cultures.

Here's the latest discovery - an environmentally-friendly, job-creating "Korean Nine-Person Shovel."

Ushanka tip goes to Kevin Tohill, our vigilant reader, who alerted us of THIS INFORMATION, adding that "Not only does this monument to collective inefficiency create shovel-ready jobs at a 9:1 ratio, it comes from some of our most successful communist heroes, the Koreans!"

The Korean Nine-Person Shovel

Westerners traveling to Korea in the late nineteenth century were puzzled by this shovel, which they frequently saw in use on Korean farms. It required between five or nine people to operate, but it seemed to shovel dirt no faster or better than a western-style, one-person shovel. Perhaps the nine-person shovel had some other virtue that wasn't readily apparent.

Pictures found here and here. Text from The Korean Respository (1896).

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Here is a description of it in an old (1896) volume scanned by Google Books, titled "The Korean repository, Volume 3"
THE KOREAN POWER SHOVEL - This interesting invention occupies a front rank among the labor-saving machines of Korea, for it saves from three to five men a vast deal of work. It consists of a long wooden shovel armed with an iron shoe to cut into the earth properly. The handle is about five feet long and is worked (to a certain extent) by the captain of the crew. The ropes, one on each side are attached to the bowl of the shovel, and these are managed by the men who seek to save their labor.

When in operation the captain inserts the iron shod point of the shovel as deep into the earth sometimes as three inches, and then the crew of two or four men give a lusty pull and a shout and away will go a tablespoonful of dirt fully six feet, if not more into the distance. This operation is repeated three or four times and then the weary crew take a recess and refresh themselves with a pipe. It is a beautiful sight to watch a crew working these power shovels, everything is executed with such clocklike regularity, especially the recess. Then the crew sometimes sing in a minor strain, for the Korean day laborer can always be depended on, when putting in time, to do it in as pleasant a manner as possible.

That this implement belongs to the class called labor-saving machines there can be no doubt. It takes five men to do one man's work, but entails no reduction in pay. In fact, the number of its crew can be extended to the limits of the shovel's ropes without risk of a strike among the laborers.

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Imagine this scenario:

  • American Recovery and Reinvestment Act redirects a few billion to make this perfectly collectivist tool.
  • That creates nine times more shovel-ready union jobs in the US.
  • Unemployment is history, along with our dependency on foreign fossil fuels.
  • Obama keeps his presidency and continues to progressivize this country even further.

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With a miracle Korean nine-worker power shovel, this project could have fed nine times more union workers!

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While five men are doing the work of one, those additional four are not free to protest for going hungry under the wise regime of the Korean Dear Leader.

Brilliant!!!!!

That is the very definition of WOЯKЭЯS PAЯADISЭ.

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Uncle Miltie Friedman may or may not have been the first to tell this story:
At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don't understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it's jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
Being a capitalist running dog and all though, we don't like him anyway.

Don't ever insult the shovel.

Or the twenty four + person dump truck............. if you go check out the cover photo for BING.com today only. It's a picture of the mine? at Lijiang China.

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Comrade Loaf -

I believe this is the Bing.com picture you are referring to. Thanks for explaining that this is a twenty four + person dump truck at a Chinese mine. Otherwise I would have thought it's the flow chart of data mining at the Bing.com search engine.

Bing_Chinese_Mine.png

uneducated capitalists are obviously surprised by such flight of kollektive thought. Of course - it is impossible to develop advanced imagination under bourgeoisie opression.
However, this collective shovel is nothing new! It is part of complete toolbox that also includes collective rope, or in case a rope is absent a human chain.


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Perhaps this idea was taken by Microslop [the swiss cheese of software] to develop their high speed 47 button mouse.

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Regrettably, the instructions are very complicated and can only be understood by the Inner Party Elite, but we just don't "do" manual labor.

"When in operation the captain inserts the iron shod point of the shovel as deep into the earth sometimes as three inches, and then the crew of two or four men give a lusty pull and a shout and away will go a tablespoonful of dirt fully six feet, if not more into the distance."

For example, what if some dimwitted prole got the complex order of operations backwards and attempted to fling dirt without having first inserted the iron shod? Absolute chaos would ensue, and then we're on the slippery slope to unregimented behavior which at its worst extreme leads to individualism.

Thus it is necessary to adequately fund our Publik Skools (and no government entity has ever been adequately funded) to teach generations of children from elementary to post graduate school the proper way to insert iron shods and fling dirt.

So, at least the solution is simple. We will require that everybody purchase a shovel and that the Benevolent Government fund two decades of education per prole to ensure that orderliness is maintained. Those who wash out of the program will be required to go about on their hands and knees sweeping dust away from my 78' bronze likeness that adorns the mile long driveway to my humble country dacha.

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In order to build this shovel, we must require the proles to smelt iron ore in their backyards, and to fulfill a regular quota of iron production.


 
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