Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Economy”
Of externalisation
Humans have always sought to externalise themselves: their work force entrusted to animals and then to machinery, their memory entrusted to writing, their computing capacity entrusted to computers, their trust materialised in money, their digestion partly entrusted to cooking, their decision-making power entrusted to rulers, their discernment capacity entrusted to the media, their autonomy entrusted to society.
The primary (agriculture), secondary (industry) and then tertiary (services) sectors saw the population shift from one to the other in this order. What is the quaternary sector that will receive most of the population when the tertiary sector, like its predecessors, no longer needs all the people it now employs?
Thoughts about work 3
I’ve never considered my work as a duty, much less a chore. My vision of this world is undoubtedly distorted by this postulate, and I humbly share it: I believe that no one should be forced to work for a living. Desire seems to me to be a much better driving force than the threat of poverty and exclusion.
Laziness is a common trait. The economy is just an extension of it. In both cases, the aim is to have “more” with “less”. Optimization logically starts with what costs the most. The corollary is that low cost is no incentive to find ways to reduce it.
Vote happens daily
When economy takes over politics, traditional voting acts lose their relevance. Elected governments no longer seem in a position to represent their citizens before investors or debt holders. The former Greek Finance Minister testifies about this.
In this context, acts of purchase or investment have become the new form of voting. This is no longer, however, a citizen’s vote, where every voter has a voice. Purchasing power becomes political power, the distribution of which is certainly not very egalitarian.
Praise for inefficacy
Inefficacy is necessary, it is even salutary.
In the search for efficacy one loses the freedom to try, to invent, to seek, to fail, to create. Taking an interest in other things, amusement, of course reduces efficacy… in the short term. But even in an economic context, and in a broad sense, curiosity is an investment of time, not a loss. It carries the hope of a growth, at least personal, and often collective. Curiosity is most of all what differentiates the human, versatile by nature, from a machine designed to perform efficiently a reduced set of tasks, but which will not bring anything else.
Thoughts about work 2
Over the centuries, increasingly sophisticated tools and machines have advantageously replaced the physical strength of animals and men. The former are no longer raised for labour (ploughing, labour) but for their proteins (milk, eggs, meat). As for the latter, their jobs have shifted from the primary sector (agriculture and livestock) to secondary (industry) and then to tertiary (services). They fled to roles where their bodies were less and less stressed. And to avoid atrophy, we even invented sport.
Thoughts about work 1
Slavery is when one has to work to live. Thus defined, and except to be rentier, most humans are slaves. The master is the money and, collectively, those who distribute it. In order to reduce men to slavery, it was necessary to make them dependent on money (reduce empathy and solidarity), and to ensure that one was the sole supplier (monopoly of central banks).
In France, social advances in recent decades have enabled slaves to be treated fairly well: free time for everyone, 35 hours work week, 5 weeks yearly paid holidays and institutionalized solidarity (unemployment, sickness, retirement). Those good conditions have a cost and they are not being met elsewhere. With free trade being levelled by prices, globalisation will happen at the expense of working conditions.
Of blockchain technology 5-6
5. The cost of storage
Users therefore pay to store their data in the BlockChain. And then, this data is maintained for eternity. Does that make any sense? This means that miners have to bear the cost of this storage indefinitely. In fact they rely on later users to finance them permanently. And as the BlockChain lengthens, they have to store ever more. Depending on upcoming users to ensure the future of storage has some points in common with a Ponzi scheme. If users move away from a given BlockChain, miners stop maintaining it, and the stored data is lost.
Of blockchain technology 3-4
3. The waste of data duplication
Each miner maintains a complete copy of the BlockChain.
If, for example, the BitCoin BlockChain is 1 terabyte (10^12), and there are 100,000 miners, that makes 100 petabytes (10^17). It’s terribly inefficient. I repeat: it is terribly inefficient, terribly inefficient and terribly inefficient. And I only repeated it three times. Adding minors does not increase the capacity of the BlockChain. In reality, a BlockChain would work just as well with a single miner. The remaining 99,999 are technically redundant. We are talking about trust, of course, but a hundred independent miners would be more than enough to guarantee it.
Of blockchain technology 1-2
When I talk about decentralized data storage, my audience inevitably thinks of the BlockChain, and that’s why I want to talk about it here.
The BlockChain is a technology that allows a register to be stored in a decentralised manner and which is very difficult to tamper with. These characteristics are interesting when one seeks to do without a trusted third party for securing records.
In particular, it becomes possible to keep accounts on which a whole monetary system can be built: each entry debits one account and credits another. Cryptomonnaies were the first applications of the BlockChain.
Are economics the next scourge?
PSometimes I wonder if mankind has created, through economics and finance, its own golem.
For centuries, companies have become legal bodies. As such, they have interests and rights, which often conflict to those of natural persons, i.e. citizens. Moreover, they have unrestricted lifespan, which is an immeasurable advantage over any natural person.
The larger a company is, the more independent it becomes from the people who are supposed to run it, and the more it acts in its own interest. However, the interests of a company can be summed up in a single word: profit. Everything else is just a means. And for lack of morality, since morality is a human value, all means are fine.
Of the disadvantages of truth
Truth suffers from two major disadvantages:
- it is often complex and requires effort to be understood, yet few have the intellectual willingness to take an interest in it,
- it is often not overly spectacular in the end, and accessing it does not offer any particular “pleasure”.
Attention is more easily captured by spectacular information that does not need to be significant, not even true. In fact, in an audience-based ecosystem, everything tends to become show, staging, story telling. The average user becomes a lazy observer waiting to be entertained, and less and less a citizen who seeks to be informed.