Labour Day 2017: The Future of Labour

I booked this day off, and I’m trying not to think of work; I’m not doing that successfully. My weekend was loaded with enough tasks that constitute a full few days of putting chaos to order. Long story short, I was dealing with the results of electrical and steam pressure explosions, plus putting out fires in the floor below me. Add the shooting that happened down the block last Thursday, and it makes me think I'd be safer in Afghanistan. I exaggerate though. The electrical explosion was more like a humongous zap from the power supply in my 10 year old desktop PC, the steam pressure was from a weakened emergency release valve on an old pressure cooker I had, and the fire downstairs was a lapse in judgement from an elderly resident who left the building without shutting her stove off. The shooting, unfortunately, was real. Gang related methinks. I've been fixing everything around here including the kitchen sink, quite literally. The corroded drain fell apart, and on top of salvaging components, hard drives and data from my desktop, I was soldering screwing in and soldering pipes. I'm not really bitter about it all though. It was stuff that I should have done late last year/early this year: things that were already on my to do lists before my arm was injured. I welcomed the escape into doing something more logical and methodical with materials aside from just cooking and writing. 

My thoughts stray to the state I was in around time last year, and remembering the fears that I had about having complications from my surgery, and not recovering fully, with the possibility of rendered to a state where I’d be partially disabled. If this aspect of the past wasn’t enough to bother me, even though I recovered fully from it, thoughts of what the future possibly holds in terms of work and labour in general are sparking in my mind as well. These thoughts were also prompted from me perusing science and tech magazines and periodicals during my down time. Tinkering with and pulling the guts out of my old computer was a prompt too.

I also blame it on a program on CBC radio I was listening to yesterday for getting this all started, which was an interview with a leading intellect and authority about the very real possibilities and global impacts of the further exponential advancement of AI (artificial intelligence), cybernetics, and robotics in sectors the work force, where there are scenarios of human labour being rapidly rendered obsolete due to more efficient computers, the inexhaustibility of machine power, and the increasingly more intricate and variable operations that robots are being designed to perform. It is already making an impact now. White collar jobs are even no longer safe. There is a computerized AI ‘lawyer’ now operating in New York which can review and summarize law matters many times more faster and efficiently than any human attorney. Banks and investment firms are relying on computer algorithms more and on humans less to make many times faster than lightning quick decisions on where and how to invest capital. What does this mean for our economic system based on the need for humans to make an income to consume stuff, the distribution of wealth, and purposeful creation of services and resources to give our currencies value; our sense of welfare and job security based on employability and ridiculous standards of meritocracy, our standard of health and education and how they would radically change, our sociological and psychological well-being, or our remaining services that can’t simply be replaced by microchip loaded black boxes. What role is left for a human where the machine not only replaces the worker, but no longer is in control by a human being because of ever advancing AI? What does that all ultimately mean for whatever progress was made by the Unions and labour movement on behalf of human labourers?

Elon Musk, Stephan Hawking, and other intellects and innovators are already beginning to warn us about unchecked development and advancement of AI, and the approach of the singularity*: the point in our history, where as futurist Ray Kurzweil said, when all computer technology and their networks would be in a state of being fully integrated and able to operate autonomously. This leads to all sorts of scenarios, mostly negative, including the extreme of purposeful AI generated enslavement or extermination of human beings, like the futures in the Matrix or the Terminator movies.

There are too many questions with too many vague and abstract answers to these matters for me to entertain. If there are any positives that I’d like to see happen from the inevitable displacement of people by cybernetics it would be the following:

·         More time on our hands to create purpose in designing and building sustainable communities and environments

·         Less wasted and expended time and energy just for the sake of presenteeism

·         The reassessment of the value of the low-paying, yet intricate and essential jobs that a robot can’t do for people, like assisting sick and disabled people with heavy care needs.

·         Less accidents and injury, because robots replace humans in high risk work environments

·         More time to devote for securing and raising families better, the most essential job, instead of being divided from them all the time with commitments at work

·         A change in school curricula that teaches kids to behave like human beings, instead of preparing them to be just a bunch of hypercompetitive tools to be exploited (or exploiters) as they develop into their adulthood.

·         A radical change in a culture of elitism, with (hopefully) an implementation of UBI (Universal Basis Income) strategy to divide and distribute wealth generated by automatons.

Some of these things are just in the sky, others I’m probably looking upon naively, but whatever the case, I sense a great and massive upheaval in the very near future centred on this very issue. One that I haven’t even scratched the surface of.

*- Ray predicted that the level of technology that would allow this to happen will be available sometime between 2040 -2045, some pundits say it may happen even sooner. Whatever the case, there may be a chance that it will occur in my lifetime, thus there is merit into thinking about such matters and scenarios.

Winter Solstice Eve 2015 (Chance Rolls)

I have been doing my usual annual round of avoidance of the insanity of shopping the weekend before Christmas routine, and tried to keep this a low-key weekend at home.  It is the Eve of Winter Solstice*, and it seemed like a fine enough reason as any to relax by the fireplace and reflect. Finding it in me to make entries for the past couple months since the election hasn’t been there. There has only been drama-laden news and negativity charging at me from all sides since all the tragic happenings in Paris and San Bernardino, the ongoing debate about the refugee crisis, plus the fear-mongering stupidity abound stemming from creeps on social media to the campaigning in the States. Adding my input or other comments about these salient things one way or another doesn’t make for a course of relief from it all, nor changes the hateful idiocy of others who are making such crises worse.

Someone else who is just as unwilling as I am to get out of

bed on these dim and dark winter mornings.

I’ve been reflecting on the other 354 days of this year that have passed. I suppose 2015 for me will be known as “The Year of the Great Weakening”. I’ve come to face to face with working through a lot of denial about how much of a toll last year’s suffering really took on me, and what kind of impact it has left, and how it still affects me today. I didn’t think it would have amounted to affecting me so chronically. I’m sick of realizing how much it all has physically aged me in such a (relatively) short while: a notable and pronounced loss of resilience. I re-entered work this year with not only lots of upheavals regarding my personal health, but also wading hip deep into problems and challenges affecting not only me, but my co-workers and people I serve, and with my role in the Union. Holiday plans were ruined by fires throughout the summer, more injuries through late summer and fall, and then the other tragedies pouring through the news from late October onward. It hasn’t been what I would call a fun year to say the least.

Sure, there were lots of hard lessons to learn, but I didn’t need the pain, stress, and anguish; I’d benefit more from them if some element of fun or a lighter side was present. That didn’t happen. Life became too serious for my liking; nothing I’d want write about. It has been bad enough that I decided to suspend my more analytical and logical modality of problem solving thinking recently. It has been helpful in guiding out of problems, or at least taming down sparks to prevent bonfires, but there has been nothing that I would call feeling better with a sense of satisfaction or interest in doing so. So, just on a whim while Christmas shopping for others, I thought I would seek out a small inexpensive something that I would identify with as a “lucky charm”** for a more acceptably benign form of exercising superstitious thinking for myself: by consulting some form of oracle. I realized that the perfect sort of rosary objects or gris-gris for me is a set of dice. My threads of “logic” for making them significant totem objects are as follows:

• I like simple and symmetrical geometric shapes; dice have that going for them. It’s a reminder to seek out the most fundamental and simplest solution to a problem first and to take a balanced approach to tackling it.
• Dice are linked to gaming (my favourite dice games are Backgammon and Yahtzee, which I’m becoming addicted to playing online); a reminder to try to find some way to approach a difficult situation by making it entertaining enough to keep it at least interesting to follow through with dealing with it.
• Often my biggest problem is analyzing too much, and slapping down too many options and approaches in my own private sessions of brainstorming. Paralysis by analysis happens too frequently. Dice would be practical tools to help me speed up decision making and to settle on single options.
• Dice are mathematical instruments, which appeals to me when I want to entertain that geeky side of myself. I mentally retreat sometimes into thinking about the world weighed and measured in numbers to help myself be less bored or depressed.

Most importantly, a six sided die is a mnemonic representation of all the dimensions and elements of what depression or boredom is, or their flipside. Boredom = (energy) – (interest) – (attitude) – (knowledge) – (imagination) – (focus). By default of existing, one has a physical mass that works and interacts within the dimension of time. That is Energy (remember E=mc²). Unless you are in a freaking coma, or sick to a point close to dying, the powers that be gifted your conscious self with some physical/mental abilities to use for the waking hours of your day, and the choice of how, or whether or not, to use them for your and/or others’ benefit. How present or absent the other five factors are that play on your energy will dictate how bored you will or will not become. It’s even hard talk about, or write out what boredom is and to somehow make it a subject of serious interest. That is until you see what happens when you add plus signs to all of those variables following energy. Then what you have is its complete opposite: creativity. If you have little or none of those things in that set, you simply have to get real and honestly ask yourself why those variables are depleted, or outright absent, for each or every one of them; that keep you shackled to a mindset of boredom, and impedes your approach to something more creative.

If I were to create an official national holiday marking winter solstice in this land, the celebrations would include a lot of dice based games, candles/lights/fire to brighten things up, and of course drinking. There would be no obligation to exchange gifts; just share good company. Sounds like a good start anyway. Who knows, if Trudeau the Younger ends up legalizing marijuana, the trend might naturally flow to there being a reversion to some more hippie neopagan-esque celebrations that would mirror things like this anyway.

An addendum paragraph to this entry the day after. The question about what my plan for 2016 was brought up to me by a friend over lunch hour. I was lacking in speculation and answers. It may involve more of what rolls of the dice have to tell me. If they break horrid spells of indecision and, if I gain a course of action and commitment from using them, it is all fair game.

*- I always wondered why we haven’t made more generic holidays and celebrations here in this nation for both solstice dates of the year, like they do at least for the Summer Solstice in Scandinavia. We are multicultural society in Canada, and we all live under the same sun. It wouldn't then matter who you were racially, ethnically, culturally, spiritually (or not). It would be somewhat uniting I’d think. I’ll always welcome another statutory holiday.

**- If you want to get judgemental and think that this is all very silly, let me remind you readers that people use such symbols, charms, and trinkets all the time, and it is more common than you wish to acknowledge. It usually comes and is possessed in the form of jewelry. Think about the multibillion dollar industry happening alone just for the sake of procuring an outrageously expensive shiny rock affixed to a ring just to show off and symbolize engagement or marriage. Others get more and extreme and tap ink into their skin permanently to express their totem symbols in tattoo form on impulsive whims (which they may regret later). Surely, my choice is no weirder or more extreme than any of those things.

The Future of This Year and Beyond

I'm kind of down in the dumps again. I was actually looking forward to returning to work this past Monday to keep from stagnating anymore inside. I welcomed it as a definite mark of reaching near recovery. I suppose I was a bit delusional about it. More than one person observing me commented that I'm probably not ready to return yet. A recent sinus infection has been stifling me, and has set me a few squares backward in the recovery game. With this current cold snap, straining myself to breathe the super-chilled -30 to -45 degree air while doing some trips outside has been doing no favours for me either. It has been difficult, and I'm back to gasping for breath, and tiring very easily. This morning, I could barely crawl out of bed; not that there was anything pressing to crawl to and attend to. It was -30 °C this morning with an even more ridiculous wind chill: same as it has been for the past while since the day after New Year's Day.
 
As last year has been a period of pronounced frustrations, stress, and hardships, I haven't bothered to fashion an entry about the year in review of 2014 as I have with other years. It's nothing I want to regale here now. I reviewed back to the beginnings of last year, and the year before that, and noted that there sure hasn't been a good start to any of them. The notable thing that was happening after reviewing those times was a pattern straining myself to be active when I was indeed ailing, or ill with some damn thing. This year I'm going to make it point not to be that stupid again. There was nothing heroic in doing so, and all it has seemed to do was incur and beget more trouble and misery.

The one sensible thing I did at the beginning of the year was to hoard a huge stack of my favourite magazines* from my nearest library. I made a point to list and note all the things of science and technical innovation that I will be hoping and wishing for in the near future. If these things actually come to fruition, it will actually give me some optimism for us a human species.

1. Plastic from Thin Air: It basically involves taking captured industrial/agricultural gases like waste methane and other hydrocarbons, and processing them through a bioreactor, using enzymes to create plastic polymers rather than relying on petroleum by-products to produce them. The petroleum-based plastic productions create pollution; the making of plastics from methane capture reduces greenhouse gas and reduces pollution. Stick that up your ass, Big Oil!
   
    
2. Cleaner and Cheaper Energy Storage: One of the bigger hurdles there is to sell green and renewable energy as viable alternatives to the paradigm we have now is the fact that energy storage of wind/solar energy requires piles and batteries that themselves are made of toxic substances, and are just as taxing to the environment for their production. There is now the Aqueous Hybrid Ion (AHI) battery than relies on salt water based electrolytes to use for that. On top of being non-toxic, it is also relatively cheap and can be set up in a scalable modular fashion, and doesn't risk overheating. It is versatile enough to be used within a home or on the grid.
    
3. Robo-Crabs: This sounds like some sort of exotic super-mutated affliction you might get after visiting in a brothel in Tokyo. Actually, it is a robotic development in Korea where they've made six-legged, ¾ tonne, walking robots that can crawl along the sea bottom of previously unexplored places. They are equipped with such features as 11 cameras, sonar, and a Doppler array that can accurately chart the sea floor and monitor currents. Exploration is all fine and good, but what I would like to see them outfitted for is the ability to do deep sea salvage, and to be able to have some role in cleaning up some of the millions of metric tonnes of toxic junk and contaminants we've already thrown in this world's oceans.
   
    
4. Self-Fueling Ships: One factor of the expense of a shipped product is always the fuel used to transport the car, computer, or other thing-a-ma-doodle from their production centres, like for example in Asia, across the Pacific, and to the ports here. If you checked your globe or atlas lately, the Pacific Ocean is a pretty friggin' huge expanse, and getting stuff across it from point to point gulps up a lot of oil per shipment. What if then something else amazing can happen, like a ship that has its own power generation plant on it that can produce its own fuel right from the seawater itself, not needing to carry along any dirty petroleum? This research and development is happening right now with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, known as it is right now as Electro-chemical Acidification Carbon Capture, and they are making commercial grade fuel this way. The process involves, like making plastic from air as I mentioned earlier, taking carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) and hydrogen, and with a catalytic process, the ship makes its own fuel from that stuff found in the seawater. What I don't know is how the rate of production to the rate of consumption ratio is within such a system. If it allows for a completely self-sufficient system, and can even produce more fuel than it consumes, this would be a revolutionary thing. The potential for this as I see it is:
   1. Less dependence on foreign-oil from unfriendly nations if there is no longer a need to dock at these places halfway around the world to refuel.
   2. A greatly reduced need for military spending, because as it is now with the U.S. Navy at least, the military cost of securing corridors to import oil from regions from the Middle East greatly surpasses the actual value of the oil tanked and shipped through these shipping lanes.**
   3. If the model of this sort of cargo ship is such that there a constantly running plant for making fuel, and a reduced need for actual fuel storage, more space on the ship can be utilized for loading on more cargo, thus there is more logistical efficiency. If the ship somehow has maritime accident where the hull is breached, there is then less stored fuel being dumped back into the sea, thus a lessened risk of an environmental disaster.
   4. The use of harvesting ships/plants with this technology to mass-produce surplus fuel (if possible), so that there is a less energy consumption (more passive way) to glean (renewable) fuel directly from the ocean, instead of environmentally destructive exploration, water diversion/contamination through processes like fracking, and reduced drilling through land and seafloor to get at it.
   5. This technology actually absorbs CO₂ and thus helps to prevent global warming, or at least reduces the carbon footprint.
      
       
5. The Solar Roadway: It's incredible to think of how much actual space we have dedicated just to drive on and reserve for parking our vehicles, and all the rest of that time that a road surface isn't used it just lies there being exposed to the sun, growing and producing nothing. Why can't we multi-use these roadways and parking lots to serve us with harvesting energy? Think about how many square meters of roadway there is in your general area alone. Well someone has already thought of that and is working on a solution. There is development going on right now for the implementation of photovoltaic cells that collectively act as an actual road surface, that not only collect and covert solar energy, but these cells networked together can potentially do to the following things:
   1. De-icing roads and reducing the need for deploying and powering snow-removal equipment, and less fuel to be used for surface maintenance and applying salt and grit.
   2. You could actually recharge an electric vehicle with passive solar power in the very spot you park, extending the range of your E-car within and throughout the city you are using it in where these are equipped.
   3. Powering Signage, and through a traffic computer network, power LEDs to create messages to apprise motorists of adverse road conditions ahead using the road surface itself.
   4. Animated markings and road warnings that are triggered with foot traffic and the crossing of cattle and larger wildlife like deer. It would protect both the motorist and the wildlife, saving countless lives and many millions of dollars, and spares us all irreparable damage to the natural habitant from the loss of many creatures. The downside is that this might have some Hill-Billy Rednecks being upset and disappointed that there is less road kill to scoop up off the highways for some vittles.
   5. Since the road itself is already based on a network, it can be used as a default pre-existing conduit to conduct and transmit power and use fibre-optics to boost communications/internet connectivity, without extra cost or needing to claim more land to build separate infra-structures for such things.
      
       
6. Improved Virtual Reality Platforms: I've been long hoping for the day that VR technology will become more sophisticated and dynamically interactive, so integrative and vivid to the senses, and most importantly affordable that it will become more practical on a household. I think the amount of unnecessary travel time and costs it will save, there will be no risk of lost luggage when you want to tour the Louvre. I can't even find the right words to pluck the ideas from my imagination as to what will happen with online shopping, architectural design, fully-immersive game experiences, and other alternative virtual lifestyle scenarios. The technology that will help enable this is the new 360fly Camera, which records video in a 360 degree space, and 240 degree up and down field which will make for a completely immersive video experience. I think Facebook will really amp up R&D and make huge strides with this technology this year after settling in with their acquisition of Oculus Rift. Google and Samsung is really. I think I'll be buying stock in this stuff, plus investing in Depends adult diapers, because you'll indeed be needing them after playing around in the more dramatic and vivid scenes with this stuff.
   
    
7. 3D Printing: It's becoming more than just some fad now for model makers and geeky hobbyists fashioning chess sets. A functional electric car has now been 3D printed. For now on a domestic level, if there is anything that isn't strictly material composition dependent around the home, this is going to be a huge game-changer. Homes themselves may soon become 3D printed, as predicted by futurist and social engineer, Jacque Fresco. Using organic matrices, collagen, and living stem cells, the prospect of printing replacement organs is coming closer to a reality.
8. Aerial Drones (UAVs): It is interesting seeing these develop, but they are last on this list because I see them being mostly on the bad side of the double-edged sword of technology if placed in the hands of the common public. For law enforcement, I see them as being valuable tools for surveying accident scenes, and maybe tracking/pursuit of marked criminals, as they are a lot cheaper than helicopters. However, I can also see them being used in questionable and wrongful purposes by law-enforcement, like equipping them with teargas or pepper spray canisters to intimidate or discharge on peaceful protesters. For commercial use, it may be an instantaneous, and as-the-crow-flies way to transport smaller objects, but for now their relatively short range, glitch-fill guidance systems, and their vulnerability to bad weather still makes them a questionable choice to use for a quick and reliable delivery service. I certainly don't see them as being cost effective enough yet for an average company to deploy them. I haven't yet heard of any overwhelming positive feedback about Amazon's trial use of them. They are, however, making big steps into having these things more maneuverable, simplified, and function more autonomously for civilian use, and that's what scares me about them. The ones with the cameras mounted on them make my cringe when I think about all the different ways they could be used intrusively and to violate others' privacy. In the wrong hands, I see them being more dangerous than handguns. They aren't regulated, and there is nothing to stop some terrorist or some other demented, Unibomber-esque type of psycho-bozo out there to equip one with an incendiary or explosive device, or to use it as some other kind of weaponized platform and fly it into God-knows-where. Then again, that already happens with conventional vehicles, however this way though seems just a little more treacherous and insidious because it is capable of an extra vertical axis for destruction, and capable of being maneuvered into previously hard to access places.  

So here is a scene I can imagine happening with these innovations, within the next decade, put in the context in a contrasting comparison of the experience of what I went through while shopping recorded in the last entry.
 
Let's say that it is -35° C, like it was on the day of my last entry. You are strongly disinclined to tax yourself and your vehicle to make a shopping trip, so you slip on your VR goggles (#6). Even in -35, the power to run the computer and VR peripherals is banked solar energy stored in the home battery (# 2). You now walk through the virtual showroom, of let's say, IKEA. You find some object, and can you can get a better sense of function and dimensions of objects when you now explore through online shopping. Maybe you'll chat a bit with the fellow consumers/avatars as you shop. If you don't speak each other's language in real life, the VR will compensate and translate the dialogues between you and others simultaneously. As you shop, you could then simply import a sample copy of a virtual object temporarily and place into an exact virtual augmented reproduction of your real living space for a comparison and "feel" before you make up your mind to buy it (the real object to occupy your real space). You even have the option to scale the object larger or smaller, or change the patterns and colours as you see fit. The (real) object's material composition, dimensions, and weight are such that when you decide to buy it, you have the options of A.) to use a drone(#8) to deliver your purchase to you (or to the nearest distribution center with a dronepad at its shipping depot, where then a regular delivery truck service may relay it to you within a day), or B.) have the form plan downloaded directly to your own 3D printer, and for a reduced price that excludes material and shipping, having the object made there at your home, also within a day. You select option B. The plastic filament loaded in your 3D printer to make your salt and pepper shakers, or whatever, is locally produced from a bioreactor stationed at a manure lagoon (#1) at a dairy farm. Speaking of dairy farms, I need in both this scenario and in real life.
 
Your electric (or hybrid) car, or possibly the vehicle that may deliver your milk to you, was being charged by #5, and even though it's -35 outside, the roads are clear and de-iced. The battery in the electric car is a lithium-manganese composite. The manganese was harvested from nodules gathered from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, harvested by Robo-Crabs (#3), and thus have been made much cheaper to manufacture. The operational platform for this mining project was a ship that produced its own fuel (#4). Another such ship that re-supplies it is a modular cargo vessel, a concept by Jacque Fresco, where one module exchanges the manganese nodules for sustenance, meanwhile the other separate and modulated cargo units split off from the "mother ship" which is anchored or stationed at the most logistically ideal launch point for maximum efficiency and economy, and they scatter to deliver, exchange, and return with their particular consignments nearly simultaneously to Manila, Jakarta, Seoul, wherever they are conveniently needed within that region, rather than having that one ship slowly and serially visit and waste precious time loading/unloading and refueling at each separate destination port, spending less time at sea. Each reloaded modular pod ship would then rendezvous and reattach to the mother ship before it collectively returns to its home port.***

It is fun to imagine and speculate how developments like the ones I listed, how combined together and made to work synergistically, and paint a whole picture of what living on this globe could look like. In these few paragraphs alone, I think I just theoretically reduced the world's reliance on petroleum through alternative energy, and reduced and rectified shipping by a grand percentage, as well as cleaned up some greenhouse gas to boot. I hope I live long enough to see such improvements happen.

*- As nice and easy as it is to download things on an e-reader or laptop, I still like and appreciate the old-fashioned method of reading and turning of physical pages. Plus, using the public library is a free pleasure we should never take for granted. The magazines I chose were: Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Make: magazine.
**- Because this is being developed by the US Navy, its first deployment will most likely be destined and claimed for some insidious and low-brow barbaric military utilization, all guised in the name of defense. The proof of how wasteful military spending gets is pretty much self-evident as indicated in this one point here.
*** - It shows how stupid we are in allowing our governments, military, and policy makers to get with destructive power when we've sort of already developed a model for a multiple simultaneous delivery system like this for the function of laser-guided bombs and nuclear warheads (MIRVs), but failed to orchestrate such a system that benefits us as a model for more efficient commercial shipping.

Leaf Cutters and Bitcoin. . .WTF!

It's only two days away from the solstice, and it aches my spirits knowing that so far almost every day off I've had since the first week of May, including today, has been either too cloudy/gloomy, or chilly, or rainy. The downpour this morning prompted the dog and I to go out only far enough for some of her relief essentials during her walk before she quickly dragged me back in; so she could then burrow and crawl back under my bed sheets to find that token warm spot she left. It was tempting for me to do the same thing, and just swear today off as another wasted, lazy, unenjoyable day for this season. Any day during the summer season when I can't start it by enjoying my breakfast and coffee on my balcony in the fresh air and sunshine seems like the beginning of a lousy day. I could have followed the dog's idea, but I have too much on my mind to allow me to rest. I decided to divert myself and escape from all that mental clutter and noise by writing here.

I sense now more than ever, after being so cooped up because of the dreariness and rain, how desperately I'm missing and being estranged from traveling, and just freely being able to walk around in nature and being bedazzled by brand new places. I realize that it's been more than a year since I just simply went fishing. I spent much of my evening last night in my armchair exploring destinations and favourable lodgings in Bing Travel and AirBnB. I also studied and tried to make sense of some literature on Bitcoin* and other digital crypto-currency movements that are happening, and all the unique options, securities, and freedoms they are allegedly supposed to allow when booking online and traveling abroad. More comments about that down the page.

With the setting being so gloomy and dreary for this time of the year, outside it seems almost too green. Normally, that wouldn't ever be a complaint from me around here (It's certainly better than when it gets too grey and white around here), but with the absence of sun, there has also been a sparseness of any flowers and blooms, making it look barren in another special way. Walking down the street under the canopy of thickly-leaved elms in the gloom and rain, I was struck with a special memory: of the insect nature, of all things.
 
More specifically, the verdant trees and the early day gloom triggered and took my wanderlust stricken mind back to a time when I was trekking through the rain forest, along some jungle trail that cut through some foothills near the coast when I spent time in South America**. On that excursion, something caught my eye on the trail. At the first flashing glance I had of the movement, it struck me that there was a little reddish-brown and green snake crossing the path slowly. However, on closer inspection with a clearer view, I discovered that it was really a dense column of ants carrying bits of fresh leaves on their backs. They looked like little surfers heading towards some beach carrying along their little green longboards, all in unison at a perfectly synchronized rate of marching in one direction to make them all look like one organism. This was my first encounter with leaf-cutter ants.
 
As strangely interesting and fascinating as they were to me at the time, I still didn't hold them in any special regard in the grander scheme of things that were happening in and beyond that jungle. I had enough of my own challenges I was going through in trying to adapt to that environment and the social scene of the nation I was in back then. However, later on I did gain some perspective of this creature's role in the interdependent symbiosis of that particular ecosystem. It turns out that this seemingly insignificant ant and its bizarre behaviour is greatly responsible for being a balancing component for keeping an entire forest system alive.

Most of us, who appreciate biology, are already familiar with the intricate role of honeybees, who work symbiotically as nature's reproductive postal workers/surrogate penises for flowering plants. The leaf-cutter ants are just as critical as an element of a life support system in a rain forest. The leaf-cutter ants act as a soil conservationist, habitat builder, gardener, and farmer. The leaf-cutters trim the leaves from select trees in the upper parts of the forest canopy. The consequence of billions of them trimming away these leaves is that it allows more sunlight to penetrate onto the forest floor so other smaller species of plants below can then photosynthesize and survive, and hence introducing more food and habitat, allowing more animal species to thrive in the middle and lower parts of the forest matrix. The ants take the fresh leaves back to their colony, where they are used not to directly feed the ants, but to nourish a specific type of fungus which is grown on the cut leaves. The fungi consuming the leaves is actually what the ants and their larvae feed on. The fungi also work in a copacetic union with other microbes to then accelerate the decomposition of the leaves which greatly helps to replenish nutrients and minerals the rapidly depleted/leeched topsoil on the rain forest floor. It's an intricate and sensitive system that has cycled for millions of years. Even though the ants have an important and integral role in it, they are not its most dominant force nor its weakest link. The system they interact in, without any one dominating power, is self-sustaining, interdependent and completely de-centralized. I reviewed this process, because it was supposedly important to know before I could try to get the gist of what the Bitcoin author was trying to explain.

By coincidence, the author of this Bitcoin book was trying to explain its workings by trying to use the life dynamics of these particular ants as an example. I was eager at first for the comparison, since I was indeed awestruck by them when I first saw them working, and I thought the author could actually somehow use these very same creatures as a relatable, comprehensible, and meaningful example to me to posit his analogy to the workings of Bitcoin. His leaf-cutter ant metaphor involved the establishing and creating a functional new digital currency, where there is no real direct intervention or regulation by any one national government authority on settling on what the value and potential transaction opportunities/limits can be for this type of crypto-currency, and the actual bottom-of-the-pyramid users generate and control this self-sustaining transaction system instead. Did you understand any of that? Who knew that social insect behaviour and digital currency macro-economics were so much alike? I sure didn't, and do you know what . . . I STILL F*&^%ING DON'T!!! I feel like my time was wasted now for reviewing something so bizarre, and I failed to anchor any of this crap to a workable concept that's meaningful to me. I confess that I'm no stranger to at least trying to study and attempt to understand some pretty wild esoteric ideas in a lot of fields, but the one that makes me want to gouge out my own eyes when I glance upon it is the subject of economics, and the words of people who think they have all the answers about it, and can't produce an intelligible and tangible example to explain so abstract. I don't know what qualifications you need to write a textbook explaining economics which now include more abstract computer coding for transactions and more esoteric tech-lingo, but after reading this stuff, I think it involves going to whatever school it was that Nostradamus went to, or whatever one the crazy old bastard who wrote the book Revelation did. I only got to wondering afterward about what it was, and much of it that he had actually smoked from some bong while he wrote that stuff. I don't intend to bash the guy who wrote this book too harshly: he did openly declare that it was his raw, unfinished copy, meant for more editing. I'll give him some great credit for daring to do his best to make describable a technical phenomenon that is itself changing very quickly in leaps and bounds as app development for it gets enhanced. It's still all gobbledegook to me. The comparison to Nature's ecology with human economics doesn't help me much either. I tend to think that Nature didn't account for human stupidity and human greed in her design, which the real workings of human economics is full of. Look how she is suffering now because of it. As a result, his example became nullified for me. Trying to follow any economic trend or related news just disturbs me, I can even see the result of doing it reflected by the quality of my own writing now. Rambling and discordant; lacking of a real central theme: just as I find regular discussions about the dynamics, theories, and policies in this field.

Between the two subjects of the ants and crypto-currency economic practice and theory, one had me a bit enthralled and interested; the other put me to sleep in my armchair. Hint: I didn't wake up with drool rolling down my chin, as if coming out of a coma, after reading about the ants. The subject of economics, especially as it is today, is all too cryptic, complicated, boring and nonsensical for me. It's all loaded with a bunch of cold and prickly theories which have more to do with making hyper-competitive businesses and corruptive governments flourish, and less to do with satisfying the real and current needs of the human condition. Google defines it as: the branch of knowledge concerned with the production, consumption, and transfer of wealth. It sounds sweet and simple, but it's a little too general, and it also has too much wiggle room to allow for doing perverse, greedy, and unethical things as options to gain wealth. My personal simplest, yet exact, definition of economics (or at least as to how I try to apply it in my own life) is: the knowledge, practice, and study of managing and transferring given resources, assets, energy and time in a responsible, practical, effective, efficient, and ethical manner. The inclusion of the words "responsible" and "ethical" alone to the definition of economics shows you just how screwed up this world is when brought to light in the way we are living in under today's current actual economic system realities (or I should say tyrannies). My idea of what economics should mean doesn't jibe well with that used by most of the rest of the world. Maybe that's why I've been a poor student of it, or maybe I'm just pragmatic, and don't want to really waste time learning any more about a convention that really hasn't been working well for us to begin with. 

When it comes to Bitcoin, I can see now how those in power in institutions that are too archaic to readily adapt to this (like most governments) being really scared of it, along with those who are without technical savvy. Black market activity is not as easy to do with Bitcoin as people think it is, so those who are trying to sidestep accountability and transparency will have even more difficulty doing it as the technology evolves. Those digits still leave trails. I wonder what other propaganda wars/changes will ensue as it becomes more established. Boning up on some knowledge of Bitcoin is something not I'm really doing out of real interest; I'm just regarding as a necessary labour/evil because I might someday be forced to use it and comply with its terms; plus I may at the very least need to learn how to avoid being screwed over by it.

If we already avail ourselves to use some sort shopper's card for collecting 'points' for discounts and freebies from our favourite retailers, a casino card, or some means for collecting Air Miles® or any facsimile thereof, we are already resorting to de facto alternative forms of digital currency with an arbitrarily assigned value. So, why should we really be surprised, or feel so threatened that such a thing is Bitcoin has come along? We already seem to not mind too much about blindly feeding our personal information and data about our shopping and consumption habits for the fungus that is the market researcher to gather and exploit whenever we use such points cards. Using Bitcoin may actually lessen some of this sort of intrusion. The threatening thing I suppose is that it's a lot more abstract and more technical than other forms of payment that we use, but that's the way money has already been constantly evolving through the decades and centuries. Money, in any form, will always be used in corruptive ways so long as greed, waste, and stupidity in people exist. People might actually have to try to be a little less ignorant, and make an effort to actually tune into markets, and learn how to read candlestick charts and conversion tables to protect their interests as this digital convergence with money happens. I can see how that is intimidating for some, especially those who just want simple. All I know is that: a. there will be a huge powershift that will arise from this, and b. that for now I'll be studying the degree of convenience, security, and volatility of the Bitcoin system a little more before I commit to changing my dollars to binary digits in a QR code.
    
*-The weird and seemingly unrelated imagery on one of the EPUB books I was reading about Bitcoin also no doubt compounded the thought-triggering (it was a picture of a leaf-cutter ant).
**- Cue in me mimicking David Attenborough's voice and accent here . . .
 

The Future(s) That Didn't Come

"To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." - R. Buckminster Fuller

Ever since last week, as the comic con geeks and sci-fi nerds were celebrating Star Wars day around the globe (May the Fourth be with you), I've been dwelling on the not-so-fiction based topics centred around the future and human society. I got to thinking about the ideas I had formulated back in the days of my youth about what I imagined the future (this present) would be like. Helping a friend re-organize and add fixtures to her garage over this weekend drew me to thinking about and the subject of the futuristic architecture and living space again; put into the context of the stuff of what I had envisioned decades ago in my teen years.

I wasn't very hopeful in those formative years that we would ever survive as a society, or that I would even survive to adulthood given that the media was always reporting on the sabre-rattling between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations, spelling out that the Cold War was going to turn hot any second with little or no warning. It was depressing knowing that the most radical advancements in technology then always seemed to be in the hands of the military, which made it feel even more like the race toward Armageddon seem inevitable. There was more than one teacher I had tuned into reminding us of all that gloomy business. I got into reading magazines like Omni*, Popular Science, and Popular Mechanics when I was about twelve or thirteen, more to escape that fear than anything: to turn toward looking into some sort of future that didn't involve some sort of annihilation. Back then, I was actively being a 'futurist': actively speculating what the future technologies and society would be like if we survived, or altogether managed to avoid such destruction. I'm, of course, thankful that events occurred where the scenario of being reduced to a pile of ashes or stricken with the lingering torturous suffering of radioactive fallout never happened, but sadly, neither did the better future that I was preparing for come to fruition either. The forecasted future(s) of technical innovation and social evolution that was to provide enough for every citizen on this planet to live comfortably with an abundance of energy and material resources for physical and societal well-being never came, nor is development coming quickly enough for such possibilities. It's great to see that for the most part, we have been able to stamp out and hamper hard-core global Communism to allow ingenuity, technology and efficiency to thrive. Now all what we have to do is stamp out and hamper hard-core global Capitalism and religious theocracies, and the respective crushing poverty, oppression and ignorance it brings to billions. All these radical systems I mentioned do nothing good for the ecology and environment of this planet.

I was very intrigued back then by the work and writings of Richard Buckminster Fuller. He was such a brilliant man. He got me turned on to his version and vision of applied geodesic geometry, the concept of tensegrity, and synergetics. Also, it was he who got me absolutely hating my geometry class in high school at the time, which seemed in comparison so backward, so primitive, so dull with all the in-class recitation, and rote learning of proofs that we would never have practical use for in the real world. There was nothing creative about it; learning from a teacher who didn't do much more than regurgitate from an antiquated textbook from the 1950's. Each minute in that class felt like a step backward into some sort of intellectual retardation. I dropped it. To do that for an entire school year was hell to me.

Today, I'm very disappointed to see that geodesic dome designs aren't more commonplace for being used as self-sufficient homes, or at the very least ones that are used as greenhouses for local sustainable food growth to avoid the cost of shipping. I'm upset that there still isn't a pan-global hydro line network, lines across the Bering Strait to make a Trans-Siberian/Trans-Manchurian hydro line that switches energy from one continent to another at times when low night time use occurs the surplus production gets diverted to the other side of the globe when and where the need is high during their respective daytime hours, thus making the use of that water powering turbines more effectively and efficiently, thus relying less on other more destructive and wasteful power production. It angers me that South Korea and China have more Mag-Lev bullet trains than this continent, a supposedly more technically advanced one. As a citizen of Earth, I'm pissed off that there is money galore to peck into pristine spots on the Earth to access oil and natural gas with methods that contaminate and pollute the water, but isn't yet an established infrastructure for a cleaner hydrogen economy.

The one established trend that I'm glad was predicted correctly by Becky Fuller and is the phenomena he coined as "ephemeralization" or dMass: the trend of being able to do more with less energy and material** and resources. Think of the mass of material that a smart phone has been able to do away with as computing memory capacity with a given amount of chip-space gets ever more faster and powerful as it falls within concordance with Moore's Law. I attached a You Tube video which gets the point across better than I can.

Another great thinker I respect is Jacque Fresco who was a peer to Bucky Fuller, the founder and creator of the Venus Project. He is a (yet) living contemporary architect and social engineer for resource-based synergistic systems.

 

 

In regards to having a better future all comes down to being a depressing realization that lot of great systemic things have not come to fruition because they fly directly into the face of people who are stupid, greedy, incapable of using common sense, and can't fathom what a paradigm of interdependence looks like, and the ideas are supressed because of some institutional propaganda, promotion of omni-ignorance and pervasive poverty in places; not allowing a better systems to get a toe hold to begin with. I'm still lost in wondering if I should be hopeful for a better future or not.

Buckminster Fuller would be rolling over in his grave if he knew that the average schmuck with a cellphone or tablet, something that has manifold times the computing power that was used to put a man on the moon, is using an obscene amount of time doing nothing more with it than trying to reach a next level of Candy Crush instead of using an app or apps to actually make a difference in their lives.

*- Omni was a futuristic magazine, but unfortunately, it itself didn't have a future. It stopped publication in the early 90's. However, I heard rumours that it may be revived in a digital edition. Omni is an interesting title, because as it relates to Fuller, it was frequently used as a prefix by him in a lot of his visionary writings.

**- Bucky would argue that there really is no such thing as solid "material", but rather "energy-events".