Jay, if I'd bought the Lexus, I'd have enjoyed 18 months of happy motoring and would have avoided the risk of dying without having owned one. We can't take it with us, so we need to spend it one way or another before our gambles and gambols are over.
I did buy a CDMA2000 cyberphone, which displays a great big backlit-in-blue time and date AND enables communication and stuff too. So I don't need a platinum watch. I don't even wear a watch [which in a way makes me miss the good old days when I had things timed to the second, with diaries and Management by Objectives Action Steps etc etc]. But it's nice to indulge ADHD, procrastination and curiosity as the mood happens.
<Why are perfectly ordinary masses talking about using nuclear weapons on unseen enemies, and other equally ordinary crowds battling tanks with almost bare hands? I have no clue. Neither do you.>
Not so Jay. I have all the answers. When they all have a CDMA2000 cyberphone, they'll be happy as Larry and the desire to nuke China, blow up Americans and crash airliners full of people and jetfuel will evaporate like mist on a sunny day. Or, perhaps more like a mirage in an Iraqi desert.
You can see the effects in Korea, where South Korea is rich and happy and getting more so as the country is suffused with that CDMA2000 mystical magic. North Korea is antsy and getting nuke critical mass stuff ready. North Korea can be tamed by the simple expedient of providing cyberspace via CDMA2000 [maybe a bit, or petabit, of WiFi would help too]. It's so easy.
Jay, I've read your post a couple of times. And maybe once more again [while following and reviewing the links you offered].
You are [once upon a time] an engineer. A problem with our ranting here is that it's not quantified so we have 'please define serious problems' and I weasel out of it by saying I'll know them when I see them. We can't quantify the infinite array of variables, zoom out to the boundary conditions, or know for certain the pre-programmed responses of We the Sheeple. Engineering is so much more definite. So we deal in wild generalisations and rules of thumb and approximations in the absence of deterministic causal relationships. Yes, yes, I know about the debt and how it's a bomb and must explode and all that, just like a critical mass of plutonium. But that's an analogy, not suitable for an engineering book.
Here's some engineering:
1900 = 1bn 2000 = 6bn users.erols.com
In 1900, 80% or maybe more, were agricultural human equivalents of draught horses or working in towns supporting the human draught horses. users.erols.com
In 2000, 80% were working in cities supporting cyberspace and CDMA2000 [and related industries].
In 1900, the average IQ was about at a certain level.
In 2000, as observed in the Flynn Effect,http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/FLYNNEFF.html <...Since then, the so-called "Flynn effect" has been confirmed by numerous studies. The same pattern, an average increase of over three IQ points per decade, was found for virtually every type of intelligence test, delivered to virtually every type of group. The pattern applied to some 20 countries for which data were available, including the USA, Canada and different European nations, although the rate increase varied somewhat according to country and type of test. The increase was highest, 20 points per generation (30 years), in Belgium, Holland and Israel, and lowest, 10 points per generation, in Denmark and Sweden. Although the data are limited, it moreover seems that the increase is accelerating. In Holland, for example, scores went up most (over 8 points) for the last measured period, 1972 to 1982. For one type of test, Raven's Progressive Matrices, Flynn found data that spanned a complete century. He concluded that someone who scored among the best 10% a hundred years ago, would nowadays be categorized among the 5% weakest. That means that someone who would be considered bright a century ago, should now be considered a moron! >
That's without cyberspace and Google providing an extra-somatic super turbo-boost to our brainpower now.
So now we have 6 times as many people, with far more brainpower on average, devoting their energies and intellect [with a bit or megabit or petabit of help from umpty million computers thrashing away flat out], to far more useful things than producing rice, wheat, milk, meat and cow poop. Horsepower no longer refers to horses.
Not only that, we have control of fertility so women are choosing to have children rather than lust producing 10 each for those who survive. The relative value of land has also declined so much that the idea of liebensraum is quaint now. There is no need to fight for land to produce food. Around the world, obesity is more of a problem than famine [where hunger is an issue, it's solely due to political MADness and zero to do with limited land].
Some more engineering. Destruction of the Twin Towers and associate buildings, along with 3000 people barely registers on the world's property ledger and is down below New Zealand in the significant figures stakes in global population. Say there were 5,005,000,000 people before the Twin Towers destruction, in the hour that it took them to collapse and kill 3000 people, there were about 3,600 born around the world [60 per minute x 60 minutes in the hour]. So, the world's population increased during the destruction. New Zealand's 4 million [1000 x the number in the Twin Towers] only changes the 4th significant figure of the 5.005 billion people.
The WAT is similarly trivial. The Iraqi war is nothing in the grand scheme of things. 300 USA soldiers killed is near-zero = 1:1,000,000 Check out WWII or Vietnam or any other war worth the name. Counting the Iraqis, the numbers are only in the order of the massacre at Srebenica. Include Afghanistan and Israel and Palestine and we barely get a quorum.
Here is an excellent man-made megadeath reference, compliments of Google of course, not my own amazing brainpower users.erols.com
I know we are supposed to worry about CO2 now that the Malthusian population explosion is turning to a globally stable population, or one of rapid decline, [swapping quality for quantity is no bad thing in my book - I'll take a Pentium instead of my old 286 any time], but CO2 increase is a good thing in my book. Plants love it and I love plants. They make my life good and protect me and feed me, not to mention everyone else, from earthworms to brontosaurus [if we clone some old bones].
I know we are supposed to worry about debt, but I can't. Debt belongs to the 7 dwarves marching off to the mine to work, singing "I owe! I owe! It's off to work we go." I know that when I had debt, it was because I needed things and wanted them "now" [such as a house] and was prepared to commit to working like a beaver to pay the loan back. Now that I don't need stuff, I don't have debt. So debt is an indicator that people want stuff and are willing to work, which is good. The more they owe, the more they'll work and produce, which is what an economy is [leaving aside the nasty and unfun WAT component of GDP].
Corporate debt is similar and means that they think they have got some great ideas which will return big profits and it's worth carrying debt to get access to the opportunities. Some of the debt is of course the Worldcom type but a bit of market clearing deals with them.
Enron, Worldcom and other duds made quite a thud, but they are disappearing into history. Added up, the duds' thuds were small compared with the roar and thrum of the likes of QUALCOMM, Microsoft, Oracle, Toyota, BP, Samsung, Nokia, ebay, Verizon, not to mention China's looming shadow. The thuds were like a pin dropping compared with the mayhem and vast global unemployment leading to war following the 1929 collapse, with which many compare the current malaise. Unemployment is still under 10%. Compared with the global economy, the thuds were akin to the Twin Tower destruction = very spectacular and great for the news media, but in the context of the thunder of Earth's economic engine, they'd be somewhere in the 4th significant figure.
Then there was the Biotelecosmictechdot.com Y2K irrational exuberance which has similarly come down with a thud. Quite a large thud at that, and maybe in the second significant figure [or third, as small business makes up the great bulk of economic activity] of Earth's market capitalisation. But thanks to our great and wondrous and beknighted [not benighted] Uncle Al KBE, the financial system flexed, creaked, but absorbed the load. Over three years into the decommissioning of wealth fantasy and conversion of Sudden Wealth Syndrome into Sudden Poverty Syndrome, the great majority of people have adapted as they would to the loss of their nearest and dearest relatives after a period of a couple of years or three. Still sad, still feeling the loss, but with acceptance and resignation and having moved on with life.
Okay, [a day in interrupted progress], this post is now long enough. So, I'll stop.
I hope there was a message in there.
Mqurice
EDIT>>> A quick review and I think it can be summarized as:
1.....Things are great and getting greater quickly.
2.....What, Me Worry? [Don't worry, be happy]. |
