Even Third World Wages Can't Compete Against Automation

Millions of garment workers in Asia can be expected to be made jobless by automation. If even their low wages can't compete there what does that say about the prospects of even high wage level workers here?

Robots are set to take the jobs of millions of Asian workers in the coming years

By Marc Bain

Information Infrastructure and How it is Created and Maintained

The linked piece from The Village Voice here is quite telling on two counts in the context of "Information as Gold."

The main emphasis, in relating New York's new "LinkNYC" WiFi and VOIP kiosks, funded entirely by a linked series of now Google owned companies, is that the big apple is giving big business yet one more, immense, way to collect citizen data; data related not only to link tracking and areas of personal interest, but to very specific physical correlations; something the authors are quite right in being concerned about; especially given how loose the supposed privacy guarantees are shown to be in the piece.

For myself, however, important as the idea of "them knowing more about us than we will ever know about them" is, there is also another issue at stake here: The continual chipping away of the notion that channels of information transfer should be publicly created, and publicly owned, sets of critical infrastructure. The subtext then being that only the commercial sector has the resources, or even the rightful domain of operating such channels.

This started, of course, when the leasing of the "Public's Airwaves" to corporate interests became so automatic, and so broadly encompassing, that it is now no more than vestigial legacy. It then gained momentum when hardline channels moved away from mere analogue phone conversations to the digitization of all things carried on copper or optical cable. The investments in these physical links became ever more the property of the investors as much as the "Common Carrier" links that used to be seen as absolutely in need of public regulation. So now the regulation part is become ever more problematic as the economic power of the holders of these investments grows.

Paul Atreides from the Dune novels made the famous quote: "he who controls the spice controls the universe." He made that comment because the spice, with its effects on perception, had become so essential to how that fictional universe operated; especially for the Spacing Guild and their ability to fold space and make inter solar travel possible.

The analogy is pertinent here precisely because information itself is so vital to not only how we make day to day decisions, but on how we conceive of what is both possible and proper. So much so that altering the quote to "he who controls information flow controls our perceptual universe."

Unfortunately, though, we are still bound by the dictates of an obsolete economic operating system, and it is that system, in making everything a commodity, and thus virtually every interaction, in one form or another, a part of the game of "net gain." So, if there is a cost, and what doesn't these days, then there must be someone willing to pay that cost. If hyper competition, and unbridled thirsts for profit, combined with the ever diminishing worth of human skill as a commodity, are then thrown into the equation, you end up with "Big Money" being the only ones still able to pay for ever more aspects of critical infrastructure. You then need only to keep that process going for a while to get people conditioned to the idea that this is really the way it was always meant to be. This is, in fact, what is now right and proper.

Is there any wonder then why increasing numbers of us have such increasingly divers disconnections from reality (the diversity, of course, coming from what remaining competition there is in both ideas and market shares)?

How Google Is Transforming NYC Payphones Into Data Goldmines

15 diggs villagevoice.com Technology

New York City is erecting new internet monoliths that provide free phone, Wi-Fi, and charging — but all that glitters isn't gold, except for Google.

Floating Airports have to Happen...

...Because we're going to need floating cities as well.

And if you doubt that just ask yourself where all of the displaced millions of people are going to go once sea levels rise to even half of their full potential, given the further melting of polar ice caps.

Floating airports: Could they finally become a reality?

By Miquel Ros, for CNN

Updated 6:36 AM ET, Mon July 4, 2016

An Important Aspect of How the Post Capitalism City State will be Largely Self Supporting

Agricultural composed of enormous amounts of land, as well as the corresponding amounts of water and chemicals to make it viable, have always presented a big problem in my mind as regards the viability of nearly self sufficient city states; assuming, of course, such states being relatively limited in size. New thinking in how to approach the growing of what we need, however, offers ample fodder for alternatives.

This is important not only because of physical limitations, but also because of the desirability to be as efficient as possible in all areas of citizen managed production of whatever basics you might want to consider; especially as one broadens the scope of what constitutes efficiency. You  need only to remember that the alternative I've envisioned for Capitalism is expressed as an effort based economy, as opposed to a cost based economy, to understand why efficiency is important.

As such, you can see why new developments on the agriculture front always give me hope for what will be possible in the future where we are both the managers, and the workers, of our community's production capabilities.

The Future Of Farming Will Involve No Soil, 95% Less Water, And Trippy LED Lights

How Many Times Must Reforms Fail...

...Before we accept the fact that monied influence can't be extricated from government. The only sure way to change the way this always plays out is to change the very nature of the game itself. Not only must we move away from the obsolete economic operating system we have now, we must also change how we govern ourselves. There is simply no other way to go about this.

The lobbying reform that enriched Congress

Nine years after Congress tried to halt the revolving door, the influence industry is larger and filled with former members. This wasn't an accident.

By Isaac Arnsdorf

07/03/16 07:44 AM EDT

Playing a Zero Sum Game with Critical Health Issues

Republican insanity, which is usually no more than the basic insanity of Capitalism taken to new extremes, has found one more issue on which to showcase itself: The Zika virus.

Instead of talking seriously about what may well become a ticking time bomb of heart breaking tragedy down the road (with babies, and families, dealing with birth defects nobody is aware of yet), they are playing the game of "to spend money there you need to take it from other health programs we don't like."

Heaven forbid that they might actually consider bringing in more revenue by raising taxes; an approach, by the way that would save untold millions in the long run with the potential prevention treatments that stand to be developed (if you can do no more than look at this from the cold perspective of "costs" alone). No, they would take money from planned parenthood, just to name one of their "poison pills," added to make it seem like they trying to present some kind of legislation at all.

The problem, of course, is that taxes are simply another cost that would lower the profits of those who already make huge sums. Just as paying an actual living wage would raise costs and also lower profits; which begs the real question: How much of a profit is reasonable? Even more to the point, how much of profit derived from investments that don't actually create anything (other than more money), as with the various forms of speculation, is reasonable? A reasonable question after all as they are always quick to question the value of wages that are supposedly too high.

The usual response to this, of course, is that return is necessarily a function of whatever the market will bear. When you can have a system that plays both automation, as well as the cheap labor of "free market legislation," against human skill as a commodity, however, you rig the setup from the get go. The result being that not only do ordinary folks resist more taxation (for the simple reason they can barely afford the basics of life in the first place), but those make sure that the commodity of money never falters in its value can smugly claim they don't want any more either. A lovely way to keep a certain kind of symmetry going, even as more people, and more babies, get sick.

Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but Capitalism is where cold is a way of life.

Zika Virus Budget Battle 'No Way to Fight an Epidemic'

by MAGGIE FOX

See Also:

New Zika Studies Reveal Invisible Damage to Babies

by MAGGIE FOX

Capital Flow Only for the Sake of More Capital Flow

This post concerns an article in Nautilus by Bob Henderson about the intricacies of, and dangers inherent in, the networks that handle Credit Default Swaps; something that involves already confusing layers of abstraction in CDS instruments, with even more confusing considerations of how the way the parties involved in these interactions are actually linked with each other; referred to as network topologies. The design of such interactive systems is important because not only can there be significant inefficiencies, but also because bad design can make the system as a whole a great deal more subject to catastrophic failure.

This sort of thing is even more important (with a capital I) because of the unbelievable amounts of capital that are now wrapped up in CDS instruments; as in about $493 Trillion. Whereas total global GDP for 2015 was only $77.9 Trillion.

The issues that Mr. Henderson brings up here are interesting, as well as more than little difficult to follow, because they do point to the complexities of this process, even with new arrangements with "hub and spoke" designs to limit the risk of failures. All of that, however, is not what really concerns me. No... What really gets me shaking my head is why so little discussion is proffered on why such transactions are allowed in the first place.

Money chasing money via various forms of speculation is hardly new of course. Certainly currency speculation has been around for a long time. And then you have futures trading on stocks, which themselves, once money as been received by the issuing institution, are just abstractions of ownership where, unless dividends are issued more than rarely, are also instruments that exist to be speculated on (where the ongoing profits thereof benefit only the speculators directly).

With Credit Default Swaps, however, we have entered a whole new realm of abstracted profit generation, and to appreciate that you have to take a step back and remember how Capitalism first justified itself.

Initially, people who had accumulated capital accepted the risk of putting some portion of it into an entity that would either provide a service, or create a product that the rest of us could purchase; and to to complete the virtuous circle, people were employed in making that service, or product happen, thus providing the spending power to keep the whole thing going.

More and more, however, holders of capital want to lessen risk, and in an ever more competitive, not to mention more volatile financial world, risk becomes a great deal more complicated to assess. As Kevin Phillips has written in "Wealth and Democracy" there has always been an historical tendency of great economic powers to eventually fall into the trap where established wealth no longer desires the taking on of risk with actual productive ventures, and instead turn to paper instruments with which to support itself with. With the advent of electrified experience retrieval, however, and the technological change that has been a part of that, "disruption," as well as uncertainty, are a way of life now far more than they ever were in the past.

Even more confounding, though, is the fact that, through both the insane avoidance of all costs possible, as well as ever increasing automation related to that, a viable middle class is disappearing; providing fewer and fewer consumers able to buy any part of the ever increasing capability to produce that global Capitalism has created now.  Which, of course, adds more instability and uncertainty so why wouldn't a holder of Capital turn to abstracted instruments that don't actually produce anything? And also want to take out insurance policies on those instruments so as to make sure their ass is covered not matter what (supposedly).

And thus do we have the makings of a not so virtuous circle where the only thing that keeps increasing is the counters profiting from the movement of debt instruments from one holder to another, and the fail safe, side bets placed just to make sure. If that isn't insanity for the rest of us I certainly don't know what is.

Can Topology Prevent Another Financial Crash?

New regulations are applying network science to restructure global finance.

BY BOB HENDERSON