fast times, fast food, fast cash
So this yet another piece of thread that unwound (funny how the word wound can mean 2 things with a totally different sound, see another thought off of a thought which came from.............come to think this body of mine was created from a thought.....oh crap!)
You can see why it takes so long to make a post sometimes!
It is the way my thought process goes its like my thoughts are not arranged in a well ordered grid, I'm not methodical. My thoughts if charted would look like a winding (another one of "those" words) boulevard snaking through the streets and avenues of information sometimes connecting to neighboring sections sometimes forming an overpass from one neighborhood to another going over yet others that are irrelevant to my apparent destination.
OK!
Back to the original post.
We are so used to Money.
The whole concept of currency is unquestioned by most and thought about by very few.
We tend to believe that it's what makes the world go around.
We feel it's what motivates us to go to work each day.
We are told that it's the engine that powers the invention of new things.
I have with most of you out there thought that without the banks and moneywe would have nothing.
Are any of the previous statements true?
Yes and no would be the fair answer.
Few people call it fair they call it fence sitting.
But if you live in Canada as I do you're just being Canadian.
None the less a quiet debate is going on as I write.
Some people are wondering what the world is going to look like in another 20 years.
Lets face it there is a lot of doom and gloom projected out there.
To cover it all,that would be a large undertaking and as stated previously I don't have the discipline needed to stay on track.
No, I want to focus on currency in today's post.
I want to examine the financial/currency system that we in the west have now and what was in the past.
From a young age I had a feeling that the game of life was fixed.
As I got older the terrifying thought came to me that it might be unchangeably so.
I was born in an age where the middle class still had purchasing power.
A time where a tradesman could easily in his working life pay for a house.
As I grew so did the gap between rich and
poor.
In the last 2 decades it hit the fast lane.
Yeah the graph is not easy to decipher but what it shows is a line rising and it represents what a person has to spend and then a calculation is made probably using the top 10 and lowest 10 percent. The coefficient as it gets higher means, since the lowest 10% can't go lower, that the top 10% is getting richer.
Libertarians say this is a normal thing and there should be a gap between "Bill Gates and the janitor".
I agree that there has to be something there to reward the inventors and innovators amongst us.
Those who take man kind forward should be invested with the wealth of their efforts and to this I say yes.
Two things that I would add though would be:
1) It's unlikely for Bill to routinely mop the hallways of Microsoft so a janitor is needed!
2)With laissez-faire capitalism or Libertarianism you end up with a lot of janitors.
3)There generally is no difference in brain function between a janitor and a techie.
4)So I would conclude that the best way for human kind to prosper would be by educating the extra janitors and see if they might invent something.
Or
Divide the pie evenly, the function or process should be rewarded in the context of what the function adds to the end goal and that rather than amount of training needed to perform the function is the focus of reward.
A free post secondary education would be another field leveller
The very thought of a freer education system would make a Libertarian shudder.
Poor Ayn Rand and her followers would puke at the thought.
Which I find incredible because she took full advantage of the communists opening universities to women and took the state supported education.
You might see the reason why the really rich do not support free secondary education, in short they need less competition and someone has to keep the place clean.
I have come to believe that the gears of labor creation are not meshing with the cogs of labor usage. It is a complicated system as it stands and so it is another thread for another day.
Could it be possible that we are focused on a brass ring when we should be focused on the carousel it's self.
Let's take a trip into fantasy Use our imagination to conjure a world
where for some reason all the bankers and money handlers disappeared.
The details of the society and what happened etc is immaterial lets just say that currency and debt was wiped out. One other thing it doesn't happen from a nuclear war or some mass destruction. No by and large everything but money is the same.
So there are the parameters of the scenario.
How would we live?
What would we do, or better what would all of the people who work in financial services do? What would all of the rich folks do?
The only people who would be displaced wholesale would be stock market and finance people. There would be less litigation as a lot of property would have only an intrinsic value rather than a personal value.
With property fairly dealt with there would be little need for a measure of wealth.
I assume we would be looking more for results of our work rather than a token saying that we spent time some where doing something.
If we did not rely on notes to tell us if we did something and instead based success on the intrinsic rather than the extrinsic value of what we do.
Without money we would not employ hundreds of thousands of people whose jobs will become redundant.but whose talent apparent or latent can be applied to great works to move mankind ahead.
So simplistic I know, for we would have to deal with real property and religions of all sorts including the consumer cult.
Really without money driving the decisions of industry you would have fewer "new" cell phones, cars etc and the diversion of those resources freely would transform the world nearly over night.
In 1999 nokia sold approx.53 million phones to china alone, the number expected to reach 135 billion by 2015 every person in China will at that point own one. The consumer machine cannot stop there because the stock holders have to eat too and to that end they blow a huge wad of resources on design teams to come up with a new phone every year or more. Lets compound that by adding the companies who will make market inroads legal or not into China. So there will nearly always be an excess of product. Far more than what is needed. The amount of superfluous inventory is astounding and it is something that is truly killing us along with bad design or no design and inferior manufacturing. I use the phrase
Competitive Waste.
It's effects are manifest in some perhaps abstract ways but it can all be put under the heading of wasted resources.
Whether it be inventory overload or the wave of health and wellness issues that are directly linked to the competition for
Money...Wealth...Customers. The price paid for the thrill of competition is large in both the immediate sense and in long term environmental and social cost.
The argument comes back to the first part of this piece.
How can mankind keep up the process of invention which has brought us to this technical pinnacle which we now sit on.
Invention
a word we use very little these days and unbridled competition is in part responsible and is a reflection of the problem with strict corporatism. It turns out that it is far cheaper to innovate than to invent, so the Bill Gates of our age can re-package and innovate by incorporating systems.
This is all wonderful but does it set mankind ahead or Microsoft?
I'm not out to attack this man or any other but the question remains could more resources be streamed into raw research not to solely profit the corporation but to be used for the furtherance of mankind it's self.
Of course this is all a fantasy that could never happen.
The idea of inventions being public domain is too frightening, one needs to look no further than the internet today and you see the corporatocracy drawing the battle lines.
I realize that there is an amazing amount of cash generated by the internet but it has remained largely anarchistic, till now.
The best I can hope for vis a vis currency is that it becomes sovereign and is not traded as a commodity in short we go from a debit to a credit financial system.
Remembering that Jesus ran the money traders off and Gandhi said "Trust no man who makes profit from nothing"
We live in a world that is largely consumed with consuming, it's fast times and fast cash and in part two it's one of those abstract manifestations of corporate competition fast food.
You can see why it takes so long to make a post sometimes!
It is the way my thought process goes its like my thoughts are not arranged in a well ordered grid, I'm not methodical. My thoughts if charted would look like a winding (another one of "those" words) boulevard snaking through the streets and avenues of information sometimes connecting to neighboring sections sometimes forming an overpass from one neighborhood to another going over yet others that are irrelevant to my apparent destination.
OK!
Back to the original post.
We are so used to Money.
The whole concept of currency is unquestioned by most and thought about by very few.
We tend to believe that it's what makes the world go around.
We feel it's what motivates us to go to work each day.
We are told that it's the engine that powers the invention of new things.
I have with most of you out there thought that without the banks and moneywe would have nothing.
Are any of the previous statements true?
Yes and no would be the fair answer.
Few people call it fair they call it fence sitting.
But if you live in Canada as I do you're just being Canadian.
None the less a quiet debate is going on as I write.
Some people are wondering what the world is going to look like in another 20 years.
Lets face it there is a lot of doom and gloom projected out there.
To cover it all,that would be a large undertaking and as stated previously I don't have the discipline needed to stay on track.
No, I want to focus on currency in today's post.
From a young age I had a feeling that the game of life was fixed.
As I got older the terrifying thought came to me that it might be unchangeably so.
 |
| Me and my Mom |
I was born in an age where the middle class still had purchasing power.
A time where a tradesman could easily in his working life pay for a house.
As I grew so did the gap between rich and
poor.
In the last 2 decades it hit the fast lane.
Yeah the graph is not easy to decipher but what it shows is a line rising and it represents what a person has to spend and then a calculation is made probably using the top 10 and lowest 10 percent. The coefficient as it gets higher means, since the lowest 10% can't go lower, that the top 10% is getting richer.
Libertarians say this is a normal thing and there should be a gap between "Bill Gates and the janitor".
I agree that there has to be something there to reward the inventors and innovators amongst us.
Those who take man kind forward should be invested with the wealth of their efforts and to this I say yes.
Two things that I would add though would be:
1) It's unlikely for Bill to routinely mop the hallways of Microsoft so a janitor is needed!
2)With laissez-faire capitalism or Libertarianism you end up with a lot of janitors.
3)There generally is no difference in brain function between a janitor and a techie.
4)So I would conclude that the best way for human kind to prosper would be by educating the extra janitors and see if they might invent something.
Or
Divide the pie evenly, the function or process should be rewarded in the context of what the function adds to the end goal and that rather than amount of training needed to perform the function is the focus of reward.
 |
| Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum aka Ayn Rand |
A free post secondary education would be another field leveller
The very thought of a freer education system would make a Libertarian shudder.
Poor Ayn Rand and her followers would puke at the thought.
Which I find incredible because she took full advantage of the communists opening universities to women and took the state supported education.
You might see the reason why the really rich do not support free secondary education, in short they need less competition and someone has to keep the place clean.
I have come to believe that the gears of labor creation are not meshing with the cogs of labor usage. It is a complicated system as it stands and so it is another thread for another day.
Could it be possible that we are focused on a brass ring when we should be focused on the carousel it's self.
Let's take a trip into fantasy Use our imagination to conjure a world
where for some reason all the bankers and money handlers disappeared.
The details of the society and what happened etc is immaterial lets just say that currency and debt was wiped out. One other thing it doesn't happen from a nuclear war or some mass destruction. No by and large everything but money is the same.
So there are the parameters of the scenario.
How would we live?
What would we do, or better what would all of the people who work in financial services do? What would all of the rich folks do?
The only people who would be displaced wholesale would be stock market and finance people. There would be less litigation as a lot of property would have only an intrinsic value rather than a personal value.
With property fairly dealt with there would be little need for a measure of wealth.
I assume we would be looking more for results of our work rather than a token saying that we spent time some where doing something.
If we did not rely on notes to tell us if we did something and instead based success on the intrinsic rather than the extrinsic value of what we do.
Without money we would not employ hundreds of thousands of people whose jobs will become redundant.but whose talent apparent or latent can be applied to great works to move mankind ahead.
So simplistic I know, for we would have to deal with real property and religions of all sorts including the consumer cult.
Really without money driving the decisions of industry you would have fewer "new" cell phones, cars etc and the diversion of those resources freely would transform the world nearly over night.
 |
| there ya go Nokia a no charge product placement |
In 1999 nokia sold approx.53 million phones to china alone, the number expected to reach 135 billion by 2015 every person in China will at that point own one. The consumer machine cannot stop there because the stock holders have to eat too and to that end they blow a huge wad of resources on design teams to come up with a new phone every year or more. Lets compound that by adding the companies who will make market inroads legal or not into China. So there will nearly always be an excess of product. Far more than what is needed. The amount of superfluous inventory is astounding and it is something that is truly killing us along with bad design or no design and inferior manufacturing. I use the phrase
Competitive Waste.
It's effects are manifest in some perhaps abstract ways but it can all be put under the heading of wasted resources.
Whether it be inventory overload or the wave of health and wellness issues that are directly linked to the competition for
Money...Wealth...Customers. The price paid for the thrill of competition is large in both the immediate sense and in long term environmental and social cost.
The argument comes back to the first part of this piece.
How can mankind keep up the process of invention which has brought us to this technical pinnacle which we now sit on.
Invention
a word we use very little these days and unbridled competition is in part responsible and is a reflection of the problem with strict corporatism. It turns out that it is far cheaper to innovate than to invent, so the Bill Gates of our age can re-package and innovate by incorporating systems.
This is all wonderful but does it set mankind ahead or Microsoft?
I'm not out to attack this man or any other but the question remains could more resources be streamed into raw research not to solely profit the corporation but to be used for the furtherance of mankind it's self.
Of course this is all a fantasy that could never happen.
The idea of inventions being public domain is too frightening, one needs to look no further than the internet today and you see the corporatocracy drawing the battle lines.
I realize that there is an amazing amount of cash generated by the internet but it has remained largely anarchistic, till now.
The best I can hope for vis a vis currency is that it becomes sovereign and is not traded as a commodity in short we go from a debit to a credit financial system.
Remembering that Jesus ran the money traders off and Gandhi said "Trust no man who makes profit from nothing"
We live in a world that is largely consumed with consuming, it's fast times and fast cash and in part two it's one of those abstract manifestations of corporate competition fast food.
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