Good grief Jay. You pecked out all that message on a dinky little Blackberry? You must have been trapped with all output [into Blackberry memory] and no input [from cyberspace], hence driven to a frenzy of review, reconsideration, introspection, sleep, REM, resolution and contemplation.
Thank goodness for a little Blackberry to remember all that for you and put it into a form ready to upload to cyberspace when you returned to life.
All while hurtling along in said aluminum [in deference to the American Empire] tube, 10 kilometres high and 1000 kilometres an hour [I am too lazy to convert to the anachronistic American Empire units - empires don't get everything their own way; they adopt some of the mores of their new subjects].
What would your Hakka rice-growing ancestors of 1903 have made of that?
Thanks for the financial review, psychological advice, and report from high in the sky.
< what is the natural trade? The obvious exchange? The evident bargain?
Yes, I remember, for you, QCOM, a patented phragment-photon based pixel currency ...>
Jay, there was a guy called Goedel, who came up with some ideas about self-referential systems. Which, not being a mathematician, I've probably misunderstood. But it's to the effect that being inside a system, is like being inside a black hole. There's no outside. It takes an external agent to change the system. I guess it's like Shrodinger's Cat. It's why we have eyes, ears, taste and touch to change our internal systems - so we take in the external world which provides our internal world.
Well, I'm getting off track here, but mindset and our very DNA lock us in. As you were pointing out in your penultimate paragraph <one of the nine secrets to long happy life is to constantly learn new ways, exercise varied brain paths, try new roads, and experiment with different approaches.> You said it more succinctly than I. I'm just trying to fill in a bit of the 'why is that true?'
From my external to your DNA and mindset point of view, sitting here on a comfy chair, Made in Oz, from Kwila grown somewhere like Indonesia I guess, typing on my Asus notebook super powerful computer, hooked via a RoamAD-provided 802.11b PCMCIA card [which means People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms] to my ADSL supplied system upstairs, with a big table, a huge green umbrella, on one of those fantastic days which make me think there really is a higher being looking after me, with pot of nice Hong Kong supplied [gift from daughter Emily following trip there] green tea, with son sitting beside me texting cousin Charlotte, with sister messaging me on MSN messenger --- oops, low battery..... damn, just like that, life hits a hiccough [hiccup for American Empire viewers - I am not a terrorist...] back soon... damn...
Okay, now discombobulated and lying inside on comfy couch, looking through big windows to the pretty garden, with leaves ..... phone ringing ... sister grumpy that I'm telling her I'm too busy to MSN bing bong her ... she's talking to wife. Okay, back on track here... leaves glistening in the sun with their shiny, clean, epidermal [check dictionary.com to see that that's the right biological term for the waxy layer of cells covering the leaves - thanks cyberspace] reflection of the brilliant sunshine, with pure blue sky, flowers and warmth. The screen is more viewable in the darker indoors, which is some compensation.
You really should see how shiny the leaves, how blue the sky, how bright the sun, how fluffy white the clouds [though none are actually in the sky right now]. There are few countries which have such a water-washed, clean air, bright sky, prolific growth ecology. Anyway, I digress.
My point was that there's a lot of cyberspace happening here right now. With minor glitches and inadequacies still to be resolved, such as flat batteries, slow connections [though ADSL is pretty hot compared with dial up], limited cyberspace brainpower etc, etc, etc... very large business opportunities in cyberspace to make it really work.
You were also cyberspacing away [albeit disconnected in the 1000 km/hr tube].
Gold barely features in what we are, and were, doing, [other than as a topic of discussion - though maybe you had some gold coins in your pocket in case the second coming happens while you're away from your main gold stash]. Gold is just the expression of the desire for wealth, which is not a bad topic of conversation as wealth enables us to do this super-cerfing, on the deck, [or couch in the event of flat battery], in the aluminum tube, or anywhere.
Back to your questions, <what is the natural trade? The obvious exchange? The evident bargain? > You are very aware of my answer as per your next sentence.
Perhaps a better question to put us on the right track, is what is the greatest value missing from people's lives? Do we really, really want another load of gold? Or another couch? Perhaps some more Kwila chairs, or aluminum tubes? Maidens massaging you on a beach in paradise? A cancer cure? Extra telomeres to lengthen our lives? Omniscience? Omnipotence?
The greatest value missing is what we are doing, right here, right now [you will be delayed before you get to here, but 'right now' in the sense that right now, you are reading THIS]. We need more, bigger and better cerfing. Cyberspace writ large. Omnipresent, omniscient, cheap, instantaneous. And definitely with a better battery.
Would you not like to have cyberspace everywhere, with better input so you don't have to peck away at micro keys. With better output, so you don't have to squint at a micro screen. With faster links, so you don't have to wait. And cheaper so you can pay the price.
Gold is a dead lump of metal, going nowhere. An artifact of the past. A cryogenic state while waiting for a better time. An attempt to freeze the present, to wait for a better future to arrive.
Your ultimate sentence denies the value of such a cryogenic state. <Another of the nine secrets is to correctly manage one's financial affairs, resulting in surer gains all along the temporal axis, not just at the end of space and termination of time.>
It's not enough to freeze. Maximum vitality is the way to live. Don't wait for the last of your telomeres to drop off the chain. Reality is now. The future reality is what we create in the present. Freezing the present is not the way to create the future.
Which is not to say cast caution to the winds and throw away present value. Careful selection of investment is the way to create the amazing future of 2103, the inhabitants of which will review 2003 and wonder at the struggle for life in which we lived. As we look back on the barbarism and struggle of 1903.
What we do now, creates the new reality and passes the value on down the decades. It is like planting a forest of trees which take 100 years to mature. We don't get the harvest, but we can sell our shares to the next generation as we need to buy some stuff to travel our temporal trip to telomere termination [which is very cute alliteration].
If we plant some bars of gold in the ground, they will be there in 2103, but they will still only be valued at the normal Aztec vanity price. They won't be a huge forest of new value. They might though have fallen out of fashion as people realize that the age of metal has passed. Metal is a conceptual drama of the industrial revolution. It's over Rover!
Metal was the fascination of an earlier era. For very good reason.
I would not bet too heavily that Generation Y and Z will value gold and stuff as the Aztecs did.
Okay, I'm going to take a break. ...later...
Back on deck, recharged, refueled, sun still shining [occasional flies the only immediate irritant].
Then, even if identifying a great idea, there's the question of value. There's the trick! Aztecs say there is no value better than going cryogenic. An ice age is the ideal. To freeze in time the best idea. Wimps. Their lives will tick away while they wait. Real men will create the future while the Aztecs stay frozen in fear. Self-fulfilling prophecy is the best way to predict the future. The creators are the prophets. The creators get the profits.
That's the sermon of the day,
Mqurice |
