Linkedin took the trouble to inform me that Frontex is looking to hire an Executive Director.
As far as I know, the ‘marks’ for this kind messages are chosen by some ‘algorithms’. Which are supposedly driven by something called ‘artificial intelligence’.
Which makes me wonder…
Are these algorithms intelligent enough to determine that I have the slightest chance of being selected for this position? That I have the slightest intention of applying for it? Alternatively, dumb enough to bother?!? Or are these algorithms intelligent enough to, for whatever reason, attempt to pull my leg?
‘So you’d better stop trying! Why don’t you just enjoy life as it is?’
‘What about Copernicus? Did he change the world?’
No, he only offered us an ‘alternative’ interpretation of it! It was us, those who had accepted his interpretation, who did the actual change. By acting as if Copernicus’ teachings were true.
‘But Copernicus hadn’t been the first to utter those ideas!’
Indeed! But until Copernicus, the world didn’t actually need that version of the facts. Up until those times, for ‘regular Joe’ it made no actual difference whether the Sun circled around the Earth or the whole shebang moved the other way around. The Sun dawned as advertised and spring always came as it was supposed to. Which circled around who made no difference but for the academics!
Only when ‘regular Joe’ had started to sail around the Earth – and needed to accurately plot the course of his ship on a map, the relative motion between Earth and Sun had become relevant. For those belonging to/living in the ‘real’ world!
For the last 15 last years or so I have pushed myself to understand what was going on around me. Each time I had the impression that I had discovered anything new I was soon disappointed. Very shortly afterwards I most often found out that somebody else had written about the subject. Describing it more or less in the same way as I understood it. Not to mention the fact that the vast majority of the answers I had found had been reached by reading. My quest changed accordingly.
‘Why has this trove of knowledge been left aside for so long?’
Because regular Joe didn’t have any use for it? Until now, that is…
But, surely, the elite should have done something about this! After all, ‘understanding’ – a.k.a. ‘making sense of things’ – is our only reason to be, right?
Not so fast! The elite did something about ‘it’. As I’ve already mentioned, there’s nothing much to add to the things already understood by others and passed along to us from the depths of history. The very fact that all these pieces of information have been carefully preserved by countless generations of scribes and ‘book keepers’ is the living proof that the elite fulfilled its calling. It’s up to us to make good of their dedicated work. For our own sake.
And for that of our children!
So yes, I cannot change the world. Neither can either of you! Alone.
Quite a large number of people are complaining about how hot it is nowadays. So uncomfortably hot that they have to stay indoors until late in the evening.
And no, they are not pensioners. They work from home, earning enough money to be able to have everything delivered to them.
Which reminds me of my first job, right out of university. A big factory building where water almost froze in winter and temperatures rose to 41-42 degrees Celsius in August. Inside that building were, among other ‘run of the mill’ machine-tools, 3 top of the art automated Czech-built lathes. This story goes back to 1986 and happened in communist Romania. The lathes were very precise but couldn’t be used all the time. In winter they stopped working altogether and in summer they faltered. No amount of fine tuning could bring them back to yielding usable parts. It took a few years for the brass to figure-out what was going on. The lathes were designed to work in a ‘controlled environment’. The temperature was supposed to hover between 15 and 25 degrees for the lathes to function normally. Hence the lathes were ‘sheltered’ in an auxiliary building. A shed built inside the factory. And provided with efficient enough ‘temperature control’.
We, the people, had been left on the outside. Outside the shed but still inside the factory…. freezing in winter and sweat-drenched in summer. Still working, because we were sturdier than the top of the line machinery…
This morning I came across a FB post.
This brought about another memory.
Sometime in 1990-1991 I happened to lay my hands on a Newsweek magazine. Or a the Economist… I don’t remember exactly. Anyway… the article I was going to discuss with you was about the hard life endured by the American poor people. And was illustrated with a color picture. I’m going to make a small break here and inform you that in the 1990 Romania colored magazines – let alone glossy, were hard to get by. That picture, taken somewhere in the Bronx, contained a color TV and three pre-teen kids. All of them clad in blue-jeans and wearing ‘sports shoes’. You know, the likes of Puma/Adidas/ you name it. In those times, in Romania, bluejeans or ‘sports-shoes’ could be had mostly on the black market. Where you had to fork out the wage earned in a whole month if you wanted to buy a pair of each. Or you could buy them in a brand store. For twice the price….
You see, the communist regimes have crumbled because the leaders had lost contact with reality. The brass in the factory where I had started working couldn’t figure out – nor really cared about, the reason for which those lathes didn’t work properly. And didn’t care about the fact that the workers had a very hard life. On the factory floor and outside its premises.
The liberal-democratic and capitalist regime has created huge opportunities. People used to live incomparably better there than in the rest of the world. And continue to do so. On the other hand, in many of the ‘affluent’ countries people have lost contact with each other. The haves have no idea about how the poor live. Nor the poor have any idea about what it means to be rich.
We live in different worlds. In different realities.
Each of us on their own ‘tin roof’.
The problem being that all of them are becoming increasingly ‘hot’. And I’m not thinking ‘global warming’ now…
Communism had crumbled because the rulers couldn’t understand what was going on. Couldn’t react efficient enough to changes brought about by normal evolution. Because the rulers had gradually lost contact with reality. Which inevitably happens in all authoritarian settings.
We are currently living in different realities. In ‘bubbles’. For now, these bubble still have something in common. We are still able to talk to each other. Sometimes we have a hard time understanding what the other has to say – or don’t really care, but the dialog is still possible.
I’m afraid of the day when the dialog will no longer be possible.
The guys in the pan are so obsessed about the taxes they have to fork out that they actually don’t pay attention to anything else. The guys attempting to collect those taxes are so obsessed about what they want to do with the money that they actually don’t pay attention to anything else.
Meanwhile, the world is growing apart. The bubbles lose contact with each other. And with the hard core reality…
The cats can always jump down from the roof. Whenever it grows too hot or too cold. Where are those two frogs going to jump when things will become uncomfortable?
The common sense definition for an inflationary situation is ‘when too much money chase an inherently limited amount of goods and services’.
The ‘limited amount of goods and services’ part is easy. We live on a finite planet, we have a limited capacity to transform whatever resources we are able to identify into usable goods and services … so… OK, we can always identify new resources and build new capacity but we cannot do any of this ‘on the spot’. We need time. And, even more importantly, we need to put ourselves to it!
Then ‘who does the chasing’? After all, money is ‘inert’. It doesn’t do anything if let alone in a drawer. On under the mattress… In reality, we – buyers and investors, are the true ‘inflationary agents’. ‘But it would be completely stupid to sit on a pile of money when inflation rages! You have to buy something otherwise you’ll loose a lot of value! At least, you need to invest that money…’ This is one of the best examples of a self-fulfilling prophecy! Indeed. Buying or investing during an inflationary bout is the reasonable thing to do! Yet we need to understand that our actions will, temporarily, exacerbate the very inflation we are trying to ‘tame’.
After a while, economy had become ‘complicated’ enough to demand ‘paper money’. The amount of goods and services produced had become so large – and insufficient bullion was added to the money pool, that prices would have had to shrink if the balance was to be maintained. Unsustainable! Nobody would have bought anything and everybody would have jealously guarded their precious money while waiting for the prices to fall further. This process is known as ‘deflation’ and is considered even more malign than a decent amount of inflation. We have to note at this point that ‘paper money’ had been made possible by the advent of the ‘nation’. This is a rather complicated discussion, for the present purpose it’s enough for me to mention that ‘paper money’ being accepted as ‘tender’ means that the general population has enough trust in the issuer of the bills. That the individual user of the paper money trusts/believes he is part of ‘something bigger’. In those times, it was the issuer of paper money who practically controlled the amount of money which existed on the market.
Wrong! For banks to be able to ‘create’ new money, they have to extent credit! For new money to be created in this way, somebody must walk into a bank with a business proposition. That somebody might want to buy a house, a car or whatever else. Or that somebody might want to start a business. If that somebody convinces the bank that they is solvent or that their idea is worthy enough, then and only then new money is created! Money doesn’t appear out of the blue! It is born out of trust. That somebody not only trusts themselves but they are convincing enough to determine the banker to extend that much needed credit!
But wait! We’ve developed yet another mechanism which churns out money. The stock market. After developing the business started with the loaned money, the somebody we’ve been talking about above decides to make an IPO. To sell part of his business to investors. To monetize his initial investment. Depending on the moment chosen for the IPO – and the economic data in the prospect, the IPO can be a huge success. For ‘somebody’ and for the early buyers. You see, each time the price of the stock goes higher, new money is created. Based more on the ‘market’s expectations’ than anything else…
‘But people who put their money on the financial markets are rational agents! They are experts in their field…’
Yeah, right… You’re talking about the experts who had put together the collateralized debt obligations debacle… And many others. Too many others… Also, you’re talking about the experts who had bought those papers! Who had trusted the expertise of the first batch of ‘specialists’!
Thinkers, from Freud to Kahneman and Ariely, have proven than humans are very good at rationalizing and less so at being truly rational. That for a market to behave in a reasonable manner, it must preserve its freedom. That it must be free from ‘bullies’ – individual agents who muster a lot of ‘clout’, and free from any mania.
The 1637 Dutch Tulip Mania is a very good example of what might happen when a market gets obsessed with something. When too many people – not even a majority, forget about the fact that economy (oikonomia) is about making ends meet and that getting rich may be a nice consequence but is a terrible goal.
‘OK, nice try. But what about inflation?’
We have an inherently limited amount of goods and services. A relentless mechanism which churns out money. Meanwhile, some of us obsess about their need to conserve the money denominated portion of their stashed away fortunes.
Inflation is nothing but another mechanism. Which re-balances the market. Piece-meal – adjusting for daily changes, in normal times. When things evolve ‘freely’. Suddenly when the market – the people who ‘man’ the market, find out about ‘the dark side of the moon’.
Regardless of their ‘ignorance’, these dudes had somehow managed to put together a constitution which served well for more than 250 years. It was under the guidance of this Constitution that the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” have been welcomed. It was under the guidance of this Constitution that the “homeless, tempest-tost” have found the inspiration to learn about atoms, to heal disease, to unearth – and understand, dinosaurs, to master the light-bulb witchcraft… and to build machine guns!
Darwin was also a ‘rich dude’. He didn’t have to ‘work’ to make ends meet. It would have been enough for him to follow in his father’s footsteps and he would have led a plentiful life. He had chosen instead to embark in a lifelong quest for knowledge…
OK, his theory was far from perfect! Yet his breakthrough did put us on the right track!
I could go on for ever. There are innumerable examples of instances when people have punched above their weight. And came out with wonderful results. Not only for them but mostly for us!
For us, to stand on their shoulders.
Are we up to the task?
Are we able to appreciate the US Constitution for its true value? Are we able to understand, once and for all, that Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” is about way more than ‘the survival of the fittest’?
According to Ernst Mayr, evolution is about the ‘demise of the unfit‘. Which is a way more ‘inclusive’ reading of Darwin’s theory than that which ‘promotes’ the ‘survival of the fittest’.
Thurgood Marshall’s ancestors had been slaves. That was how the US constitution was read in those times. And I’m sure that at least some of his fellow Justices’ ancestors had been slave owners.
Yet under the US Constitution the members of the 1973 Scotus had found it in them to sit together and read the principles minted by the Founding Fathers in a manner wide enough to encompass the women’s right to decide about their bodies. And every individual’s right to privacy. To a privacy ‘wider’ than that expressly formulated in the Constitution and in the XIV-th Amendment.
Fast forward to 2022. To when ‘survival of the fittest’ has almost been replaced by ‘the winner takes it all’. To when a far more inclusive Scotus has determined that abortion is something which should be legislated by each state. That a woman’s right to determine what happens to/with her body can be influenced by somebody else’s opinion.
Are we going backwards? Darwin gave us Evolution. We use his theory as a theoretical justification for why some people are ‘more equal’ than the others. The ‘rich dudes’ had given us the Constitution. As a protection against abuse. As a shield for us to use whenever the momentarily powerful attempt to rule our lives. And some of our contemporaries use it as a Trojan horse. To open the door for very oppressive pieces of legislation.
How was this possible?!?
Both sides of the ‘divide’ have lost their ‘perspective’. Their focus. The Constitution, which used to be the mortar which has given coherence to the entire building, has become a ‘bone of contention’. Evolution – which made us what we are today, has become a cuss.
Can’t argue with Sowell… he’s right, right? As usual!
But there’s problem! For me, at least…
According to Orwell, there are people who refuse to acknowledge the truth. Which doesn’t bother the truth, of course. But it bothers us…
If there are people who refuse to acknowledge the truth, then truth isn’t self evident. There isn’t an immediate and direct ‘relation’ between not acknowledging the truth and ‘retribution’.
And for good reason! Truth is extremely elusive. And complex. Impossible to find, actually.
All we can lay our hands on is ‘relative’ truth. A truth we have all labored to find and which continues to remain ‘incomplete’. Against our best efforts! And which, from time to time, is found to be completely false.
Remember how so many of our ancestors were convinced that the Sun was circling around the Earth? Which Earth used to be flat?
Which Flat Earth brings us back to Sowell. I basically agree with him.
“If you want to help somebody, tell them the truth. If you want to help yourself, tell them what they want to hear…”
But do I know what the truth of the matter really is? Do I actually know what they really want to hear? And what if/when they find out? My strategy?
That I was telling them what they wanted to hear in order to help myself?
Sowell didn’t mean this as an ‘advice’? Only as a warning?
Well, I don’t dispute his intentions. Only the underlining assumption. That truth is accessible.
That we can reach it! And manipulate it according to our wishes….
And, if you pay enough attention, the cartoon capitalists represent nothing but the reprehensible side of real life capitalism.
The ‘fat man smoking a cigar in a greasy suit while counting $$$ peeled of the sweated back of his workers’ checks on all counts. On all counts defining ‘real-life capitalism’…
Besides all which have already been said about them, they is also an entrepreneur, risking their money, working crazy hours to build their version of a business, providing work for others – at a price, helping their team – whichever that might be…
I have no way of knowing what the creator of the meme actually wanted to convey through it. All I know is what I make of it.
The ‘Austrian’ will eventually fall. Not only that nobody can stay in the saddle for ever but the guy uses only one hand to steer his bike. And the fact that he doesn’t use a helmet is the second proof that he doesn’t care much for safety. For his safety… At his age, he should have known better!
Hard to argue with Mises – the quintessential Austrian economist, if I remember right. Specially since I grew up under a communist regime. Where laissez faire was absent and where the government was inept and immoral. Which regime, like all other authoritarian/totalitarian regimes in history, had crumpled under it’s own weight.
But wait! Countries which use laissez faire had long ago invented the necessary mitigation mechanisms. The unlucky entrepreneurs can declare bankruptcy and start all over. The fraudulent entrepreneurs – well, many of them, go to prison. While the inept and immoral governments get booted. Democratically!
My point being that laissez faire works better if there’s a safety net in place. And that people should trust their government. But also keep it on a very short leash!
Conspiracy theorists are absolutely convinced that they are the true critical thinkers…
That their critique of how things works on the face of the Earth is the only reasonable one!
Then what? Sheeple and conspiracy theorists are nothing but the very same thing? Each of them on the other ‘side’ of the dividing mirror? The surface on which the conspiracy theory dew has been craftily etched? To blurr the vision of all those attempting to look through?
After all, what’s the difference between sheeple – those who follow the official narrative and consider the ‘alternative’ to be wrong, and the conspiracy theorists? Those who consider theirs to be the true version and the ‘official version’ a misleading lie?
Each of them exercise their right and ability to doubt. To look for alternatives. And to discard the alternatives they deem to be implausible!
Most conspiracy theories have already been proven as having been bogus? With the current ones waiting in line?
This, I’m afraid, is the moment for me to remind you that science is wrong by definition. That all scientific theories are, by definition, falsifiable. That the scientific community is convinced that all knowledge is maybe not completely wrong but definitely incomplete! Hence there’s a lot of room out there for conspiracy theories to thrive!
‘OK. I can follow your arguments. Or, more exactly, I can follow your logic…. But I still believe you’re wrong. Conspiracy theories ARE bogus!’
Let me put it differently. Both the official narratives and the conspiracy theories are fueled by the same human need. By our need for consistency! Human mind has a hard time processing cognitive dissonances. Pieces of information which contradict each-other. Hence we need a ‘script’. A meta explanation for ‘everything’. A way to discharge the tensions produced by the conflicting pieces of information which assault our attention.
‘And why some people choose to become sheeple – to buy into the official version of things, while others remain conspiracy theorists for life?’
You’ve just set aside the vast majority. Those people who are explicitly or implicitly aware that both the official version and the conspiracy theories are at least incomplete. And sometimes promoted by people with ‘ulterior motives’. People who have a deeper creed. Many times of a religious nature but not necessarily. People who have too many on their heads, mostly worries, so are no longer ‘available’ for ‘petty things’. As for conspiracy theories being bogus… I just mentioned how science works. Whenever a theory is judged to be plausible by the peers involved, it becomes the official narrative. All other competing theories become bogus. But all those earnestly involved in the process are convinced that sooner or later the official narrative will be proven if not wrong, then at least incomplete!
‘Then what about ‘critical thinking’? Is it good or not? And you haven’t answered my question!’
Critical thinking is a tool! And as all other tools, it becomes good or bad only in the hands of the person who yields it!
The most important thing about critical thinking is that we must remain critical relative to our own opinions! Open to whatever new evidence happens to cross our path! Sometimes the evidence which comes first might be misleading. Or false. We might reach the wrong conclusion. If we cling to the already reached conclusion we might be wrong. It is absolutely understandable – admitting an error is hard, but still wrong. That’s why some people remain sheeple while others cling to their beloved conspiracy theories.
You see, the true definition for sheeple is not ‘those who believe the official version’. Far from it! The real sheeple continue to pay lip service to the official version long after fresh evidence prove the official version has been ‘incomplete’!
These people no longer communicate. As in no longer care to understand what the other has to say… Mind you, not ‘agree with’, just understand. Just develop a ‘mere’ understanding of what the other feels/thinks/has to say about a subject.
The consequence?
Both sides have become so focused on contradicting each-other on no matter what subject that both of them have lost the ability/exercise to look for the real issue.
The Ukrainians have enough AK-47s. They don’t have any use for any AR-15s. What they need is howitzers. And HIMARSs! As for the 2nd amendment…
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”
Given the Ukrainian experience, should we read the 2nd Amendment in such a manner that ordinary people would be able to keep and bear howitzers? Or HIMARSs?
Or should we focus our attention on the notion of ‘a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State’…? Meaning that without a well kept and well trained Army, the State, any state, would soon loose its sovereignty?
After all, the Ukrainians fight, together, against an invader. They cooperate in order to defend their State. Meanwhile, many of those clamoring about the 2nd Amendment are more preoccupied about using their guns to defend their individual freedom against the State than about cooperating with their fellow citizens towards defending the State against any aggression.
Counter-protesters Kenya Stevens, left, of District Heights, Md., Steve Tidwell, of Arlington, Va., and a protester who asked not to be named, shout their support for gun rights across from a protest of gun control advocates next to Realco Gun Shop in District Heights, Md., on Tuesday, Aug. 28, 2007. The protest of gun control advocates was part of the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr.’s National Day of Protest. The gun store, located very near the border with Washington, is a large source of guns used in crimes in the nation’s capital, according to District officials. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
In these circumstances, am I allowed to remind you that Putin – the guy who had initiated/ordered the invasion of Ukraine, is a “genius”?!? According to Trump…
nicichiarasa 