Jay, I only comment because you make so very few language mistakes in your rants. It's a popular one these days. I think people like the word obverse. They like disparate too; it gives an air of intelligence and sophistication. dictionary.reference.com
In this instance, I think you meant averse. <I really doubt that events will come to war in any sense of the word, though I am not obverse to see some war scare in the financial market indices, because crisis is a partner, volatility is a friend, and the lonely path is the right way.>
Once upon a time, I was a typing checker in the British Department of Environment. It was all women in the typing pool except for this guy who would type flat out, never make a mistake and correct mistakes he found in the hand-written material. It was very boring checking his typing but a mistake was like a precious jewel. Thanks for the precious jewel and "obverse" at that. What a find! No - I do not purport to have any skill at English so don't bother pointing out my mistakes, which I know there are screeds of. Which is immediately, if I understand it correctly, a mistake to do with ending a sentence with a preposition or something. No, I don't know what a preposition is. Even if I look in the dictionary, I won't know what they mean. I think all English teachers should be drowned at birth - they caused me misery at school and were going to fail me because I just didn't get it.
But what an amazing productivity improvement cyberspace has made to the world. All those typing pool people will have real jobs now and people's [or peoples', whichever is correct] pixilated pontifications are pixelated instantly and delivered immediately to the recipient [or immediately delivered to the recipient, whichever is correct]. Even as recently as the 1980s, I had to hand write memos, letters and stuff, walk down the hall to Aggie [who did the typing for my boss and a few of us], wait 3 days for her to do the boss's stuff first, go through it and make corrections, take it back for her to retype it without mistakes, wait a couple of days for that process, photocopy it, put it in an envelope. Then it would take a week or two to get to New Zealand or the USA or wherever it was going. Then, a couple of weeks later or a month, a reply would come in. We did have telexes for urgent things, but they were very inconvenient. Fax machines were some relief to when they came in. But data bases were still impossible. There was simply no access to mountains of R&D information. Not without a very bureaucratic process to find it and arrange for it to be delivered, which wasn't worth doing.
Good grief, when I actually write it out, I'd forgotten what a vast improvement there has been. Umpty millions or even billions of people must have been freed from such processes. The hordes swarming into cities in China won't be wasting time in drafting, redrafting, typing and retyping and waiting, waiting, waiting.
Instead of a few million doing really productive, creative work, supported by a huge cast of process people, there are now billions with time lags near zero. Things are certainly hotting up. The whole thing is like disparate pieces of uranium [yes, I know it's the wrong usage, but it makes it look clever] getting together, working together and going critical. Uncle Al KBE, the elastoquidynamic economic engineer is keeping the neutron-absorbing rods positioned just so to avoid an untoward China syndrome.
It's running hot and the power output is fantastic. There is rapidly increasing power output as more and more fuel is added to the process. It's as though uranium is attracted magnetically to the reactor core and eventually all uranium on Earth will be sucked in.
One vast cyberspace elastoquidynamic furnace, powering the planet and stuff launched into space.
6 billion power units, all churning away. Not to mention the increasing numbers of almost autonomous processors which perform various tasks. Heck, you can log on to cyberspace and be beaten in chess, by It. Chess was once upon a time a game that computers could never win at because it was supposed to be the quintessence of intelligence. Now Kasparov is doing well to get a draw. Factories produce cars with robots, needing only to be pointed in the right direction by humans.
With quantum computing getting going, "thinking" will no longer be the preserve of people. Machines will do the heavy lifting in that regard. The industrial revolution was to a large extent about machines doing the heavy lifting that our muscles used to do. They did it fast, they did it in bulk and they never got tired. Now, machines are taking over from our brains. The typing pools are empty. The pixelation process has replaced them and a lot more besides. Money is pixelated, not printed. Unfortunately, the pixelation process doesn't prevent pixilated plans, so there is plenty of room for improvement yet. Note, pixilated has a very different meaning from pixelated dictionary.reference.com
Mqurice
PS: Meanwhile, back in the jungle, the dollar is NOT doing very well against the Aztecs or the Cyberspacoids.
Q499 G406 There is a big vote against The Fed and Uncle Al KBE, Elastoquidynamic Engineer Extraordinaire [EEE]. Betting against the Fed. Hmmm... I've heard of that expression before somewhere. Note that the Aztecs are running well behind. They see the writing on the cyberspace wall.
In NZ, we are going shopping. Things are cheap with the US$ down from 39c to 65c. Almost halved in the last couple of years. Amazing. Salespeople who get a price advantage of 5% can sell mountains of stuff. Let alone 50%. Our Kiwi$ has doubled in value against the US$. "Made in China" is priced in US$ for the international market, so we are really going to buy stuff. But it won't be long before the exporters are whining like a fleet of Koreans paying CDMA royalties and the economy turns down in NZ. It's going gang-busters at the moment though. |
