Category Archives: society

Preparing for “poverty”

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Small house in Sims 3

With bedrooms and a second bathroom in the basement, this house in Sims 3 has room for a small family to live very comfortably. Having huge expanses of floor is not something most people will get used to in the near future, if things continue their current course. The bookshelves may also disappear, and the computer be replaced with tablets. Not sure about the mailbox.

For decades now, we who live in the rich world have assumed that we would become richer or richer. OK, perhaps not all of us, but nearly so. Americans have been more accepting of the fact that a society that creates winners must also create losers; here in Europe, we have largely pretended that this only applied to substance abusers. The ordinary Joe and Jane would be better and better off for each passing years, and their children even more so, world without end.

There was a vague sense of guilt because most of the world — the so-called “third world” — seemed lost forever in abject poverty. But that’s what happens when they try to rule themselves, and if it was our parents’ fault, it certainly wasn’t ours, and anyway they supplied us with cheap raw materials so it wasn’t all bad.

While we looked the other way, the developing world actually developed. OK, there are still some few nations mired in unspeakable poverty, usually in a state of war or civil war. But most of the human population isn’t living like that anymore. They still have a long way before they are as wealthy as us, but they are catching up rapidly.

Now the Chinese can do almost all that we can do, only cheaper. And people are understandably getting nervous, when their privileges start to come into question. It is not just theory, either: The income of a single working American is not much different from 20 years ago, and sliding downward. For a while the family wealth increased because both man and wife was working for pay; then it increased because you sold the same houses to each other for ever higher prices. Now that illusion too is broken; people hope that the government will be able to do something, perhaps by confiscating the wealth of the super-rich. But even if you took it all, you would only be able to hold the government debt steady for about a year. There just aren’t that many super-rich, and if you try to sell their stuff all at once you won’t get much for it.

The time may be drawing to a close when we could eat T-bone steak each day and the Chinese ate mostly rice. The steak and the rice are going to be more evenly distributed, so it seems. Not just with the Chinese, but India, Brazil, Indonesia and Nigeria are all huge nations who want their part of the world’s resources. At least the Indians don’t eat cattle… well, most of them don’t. But you get the point. Even though the rising tide raises most of the boats, some of the “super-rich” nations of the world will have to move downward toward the average.

It amuses me when Americans whine about the “1%” rich, and don’t realize that in the eyes of about 6 billion people, they are the 1%. OK, more like 5%, but still. The difference between having a private jet and a car may seem huge, but not when you’re saving up for a cheap bicycle.

***

This was just an introduction, really, but probably necessary because most people in the western world have still not understood with their emotion that their Golden Age has ended, and that lean years are ahead.

***

One trend in the near future of Europe and America should be small, cheap homes. Some of these will be in traditional apartments, but also suburban homes will probably be small, on small plots of land, in order to be affordable. I don’t mean we should tear down the large houses that are still around, I just mean that new homes should be smaller. Young people looking for a place to live will generally not be able to pay a lot, because even if they have a long-term job, it is not likely to be very well paid. There will be exceptions, of course, but their houses are already built, the big ones.

With gas prices set to skyrocket once another billion cars roll onto the roads, the suburbs of the near future should not be just rows of houses with roads to take people to the city. Rather, cities and towns and villages all should have a mixture of residential, shopping and work buildings. Since most work won’t involve smokestacks and the like, there is no reason to have the buildings far apart from the homes. You will not want to drive for an hour for a slightly better paid job, because it will cost you more in gas than you earn. But of course many jobs only exists where there are many people (a neurosurgeon needs a much larger population than a hairdresser). So large cities will continue to be large, but may become more dense and more varied as people seek to live within reasonable distance if they can afford it. Again, small affordable housing near the city or large towns will be highly sought after.

Electric cars will be widespread, but they will remain more expensive than gas or diesel cars, and electricity itself will grow more expensive. At the same time, wages and salaries will continue to shrink. Driving will no longer be something you do thoughtlessly or just because you are bored. And you will think twice about visiting a mall far away, or drive your kids to another town for some trivial activity.

Taking a plane to an overseas vacation will once again be for the rich. In so far as ordinary workers will have vacations, they will mostly spend them at home or at least in their own state, most years. Tourism will continue to grow for a while, because there will be many more tourists from the countries that used to be poor. But it will not grow at a breakneck speed, and not forever. Specifically, travel by plane will necessarily suffer from peak oil and the transportation boom. Planes are fast but not particularly energy-efficient. People will gradually need more and more of a real reason to take them.

With all things electronic continuing to give more value for money, I expect people to gradually switch from skin meetings to video meetings, and relaxing in virtual worlds instead of actual travel. Physical books will also probably become more of a luxury, although this is still a ways off.

The world population is now forecast to peak at somewhere around 9.5 billion, which is within the planet’s capacity to feed, at least for a while. What has changed the most is that most of these people won’t live in dirt poor third world countries, although I fear some will. But most will live in the new “second world”, not the communist world that use to bear that name but rather a compromise between todays first and third world. There are already a good number of such countries, and I expect the rich world to gradually sink to meet them, although not at the same speed as the emerging countries rise.

With a large “world middle class”, food will be expensive but most will be able to afford it. (Again, I expect hard times for the few countries who don’t get up in time.) Luxury food will become luxury again for the ordinary worker in America and Europe. In particular meat will be expensive, since it requires a lot of plant food that could otherwise have been sold to humans. Of course there are many areas that are better suited for grass than for grain, fruit and vegetables. In Scandinavia, for instance, the mountains are suited only for goats and sheep, not for grain or soybeans. I assume the same will hold true for the Rockies and other mountain chains. But overall, meat will become a bit of a luxury. Not something you only taste for Christmas, but perhaps once or twice a week unless you are well off and want to show it.

Again, we are not talking about abject poverty here. I put the word in quotes in the headline because in the eyes of most of the world, it is far from poverty. It is simply sensible living. But for many of us, that will be a rather new thing. We should think ahead and prepare, both individually, as families, and as society.

Christmas Evolution

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"There should not be a barrier between Buddhists and Christians"

“There should not be a barrier between Buddhists and Christians” says the Buddhist monk in a Santa Claus costume. Christmas has become a widely celebrated holiday in Japan, among other places,  far from its snowy home in Bethlehem… wait…

Here in Norway, Christmas Eve is the high point of the Yule holiday. Around 5 o’clock, more precisely, though it may perhaps be later now that both adults and children stay up longer in the evenings. But it used to be 5 PM, if my memory serves. Church bells would ring, Christmas songs would be played on the radio, and families would gather around the Christmas Tree. A long evening of heavy food, gifts (usually already placed under the tree) and sugary treats would follow.

(A large number of Norwegians also celebrate Christmas as if it was not about the miracle in Bethlehem but rather the miracle in Cana, where Jesus turned water to wine. My family never took part in any alcoholic celebration, and I personally am not influenced by alcohol on a personality level, only in a purely physical sense.)

Living alone, I don’t celebrate Christmas in any outward way, although I enjoy classic Christmas songs all through the month and more frequently turn my thought to the mystery of the Incarnation.

I have a running joke about Christmas Eve, going like this: “Why is everyone talking about Christmas Eve? What about Christmas Adam?” Of course, arguably Jesus Christ is the “Christmas Adam”, as the Bible says elsewhere, “The first Adam became a living soul; the second Adam became a lifegiving spirit.”

This year, however, the voices in my head had a little fun. I hope it is not too blasphemous.

“Why is everyone talking about Christmas Eve?”
“It is short for Evolution. Like in Adam and Evolution. That sounds too long, you have already forgotten Adam when you come to the end. So people use the nickname, Eve.”

(At the time of writing, I was unaware that generations ago, the story of Adam and Eve was in fact performed as a prelude to Christmas, and presumably is one of the roots, as it were, of the Christmas tree. Whoa.)

Christmas certainly has evolved! The first centuries of Christian history has no sign of celebration of Jesus’ birthday. Although the relevant parts of the gospel were in place already in the earliest known manuscripts, nobody made an attempt to celebrate it or even set a date until the Age of Martyrs came to an end. When Christianity was accepted by the Roman emperors, Jesus’ birthday was quietly aligned with the celebration of Sol Invictus. Christianity has after that gradually absorbed various pagan Solstice rituals, and this evolution has continued into my own lifetime.

The Christmas tree appears as late as the 15th century, and did not become widespread until a century later. Christmas trees in homes appear a couple hundred years ago.

Santa Claus is named for the bishop Nicholas of Myra, who was famous for his timely gifts. However, the modern character is merged with Nordic mythical creatures who protected the farms, often thought to be the spirits of the farm’s founder, or underground gnomes. Santa Claus has only gained his current form very recently, in my lifetime, and is taking over Christmas from Jesus to some extent, being less controversial. (Not that this says much.)

But while Christmas itself has evolved, it has also played an important role in the evolution of our society. For the celebration of a helpless child as God has year by year, generation by generation, increased our respect for children. It still has a long way to go for many people, but you will hardly believe the callous disregard for children that was common by the onset of the Christian Era. Both the Greeks and the Vikings allowed a man to kill his infants at his own whim, with no repercussions of any kind. (One theory of the Viking expansion is that it stemmed from a search for wives, as too many girl babies were killed by their fathers as useless in war.)

The bonding of babies and parents that is universally accepted as a good thing was often deliberately avoided in the past, something that may have made sense on a practical level with the high infant mortality. But the importance of this early bonding for healthy emotional and intellectual development is a major part of modern psychology. In a manner of speaking, the relative humanism of modern western civilization can trace its evolution back to the little child in the crib.

 

Why education?

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A forced training facility for boys and girls!

A forced training facility for young boys and girls! The Shugogetten, an ancient protector spirit, discovers a modern high school and decides it must be razed to the ground for the good of the poor prisoners. I am sure some of them would agree.

These days, most people go to school for a dozen years or more. And yet many have never given much thought to why we are receiving all this education. What is the purpose of education? What is education good for?

When we are small, we go to school because we are told to do so, and because everyone else does. Also, if the school is even reasonably good, it satisfies a natural instinct in children: Curiosity. (It also satisfies their social instinct – children, and many adults, get very uncomfortable if there are not other people around, preferably several other people.) It is also pretty obvious that reading and writing are useful skills, reading especially. Even comic books become better when you can read the speech bubbles!

At the other end of the long corridor of education, when you approach college, you probably have a specific career in mind. And even if it is not very specific, you probably believe that higher education improves your chance to get a job at all, but especially a well paid one. So a good many people see higher education as an investment: You spend time and money in the hope of earning more later, and (perhaps not least) get a job that is interesting and has social status, rather than hauling parcels at some warehouse for the next forty years or more.

And that’s where it usually stops, it seems to me. But that is to underestimate the value of education, and to miss one of its main purposes. Education, properly understood, aims to make us human.

That is not to say that we are not born human. But our human potential is to a large degree just that, potential. A child raised by wolves is actually highly unlikely to build a city (contrary to legend) or indeed experience any of the joys of civilization. Culture is mankind’s attempt to answer that terrible question that arose some time in the dimly lit prehistory, when a human first lifted its face, looked around, and thought: “I exist! And I know it! OMG what am I going to do with this discovery?”

Since then, the fact that we can think has been a constant source of trouble, and to this day some highly respectable friends of mine sit down regularly trying NOT to think, a process known as meditation. But if that was the sole purpose of meditation, then trees and stones would have us beat already at the starting line. Rather, in meditation we seek to reclaim our selves from the myriad distractions that draw and quarter us, consume us and scatter our ashes while we are still alive. Its purpose is to make us whole, a word related to both “healthy” and “holy”.

Now seems a good time to ask what side our education stands in this. Does it make us whole, healthy and holy (inviolate)? Or does it scatter us, pull us from side to side or to different sides at the same time, distract us,  confuse us, remove us from our very selves?

This is not a rhetorical question, although sometimes it may seem so. Education can work in either of those two directions. And as we grow older, each of us has more and more responsibility for making sure we truly benefit from our education.

The philosopher James V. Schall has written a book to this effect, saying in its subtitle “How to acquire an education while still in college”, without too much irony.  In the rush to become high-earning adults, it is easy to forget the curiosity that made our heart beat strongly on our way to our first school day all those years ago. And not all have been privileged with teachers who protected that flame of curiosity, fed it without overwhelming it, and encouraged us to eat knowledge and grow rather than just carrying it on our back as an ever heavier burden.

I might finish this with a brilliant conclusion, but that would defeat the purpose of writing it. Rather, this is the time for my thoughts to step aside so yours can emerge. If you are undertaking an education, or even educating others, it is time to ask yourself: Are you gathering or scattering?Are you building, and if so, what? Are you growing, and if so, who will you be when you are grown?

The changes are a-changin’

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Screenshot anime Nichijou

In the near future, we will have to run like a flash just to stand still. Or so it seems.

We should have acted. It was already here. But nobody wanted to believe, believe it even existed.

The technological singularity has begun to pull us in. Like a whirlpool, spinning faster and faster, gradually it becomes unavoidable. The speed at which changes change is changing faster. As Einstein said, compound interest is the strongest force in the universe. Meaning, when you keep adding to something and then keep adding to the addition to the addition, there is no limit to how far you can go, and it can only go faster and faster. And it goes faster and faster at an ever faster rate.

In the year 2000, I wrote the entry “Datapad 2010“, predicting that in 2010, it would be common to have handheld devices doing many of the things we in 2000 did with computers, but anywhere, at any time. In reality, 2010 was indeed the year of the iPad, but the iPhone (2007) was at least as close to what I had predicted. TV and movie on the datapad I predicted would happen  “perhaps 2020”. It is already here. Not quite impressive yet, a bit of a “because we can” really. But we can. I can rent movies on my Samsung Galaxy (also from 2010). And I can easily afford the wireless bandwidth to do so, at least in moderation.

I was 3 years wrong with the datapad, 10 years with the movie streaming. Admittedly these were more like first mainstream appearance, and it takes a bit for them to spread to most of the populace. Still, iPads and Tablets are pretty mainstream now in the old developed world. Not just for geeks or the rich. Still, look at these numbers again. What I predicted for 2010 came in 2007, but what I predicted for 2020 came in 2010. I am not the only one who make these mistakes. The acceleration of the accelerating change is accelerating. Time is compressed, more the further ahead we look.

In the year 2000, most of you did not even know what I was talking about with the “datapad”, or why anyone other than sci-fi geeks would have any interest in them. Today, there are also many things you don’t even think about, that I think about but don’t grasp fully.

This also affects the world economy, which I used to write about in great detail. Now, I cannot write fast enough – by the time someone stumbles on my website, it will likely have happened already.

The crisis in the Euro zone. The collapse of the dollar. Will they happen in a year, or in a week? I cannot say. The future is becoming hazy. Probably not because of tachyons from Antarctica. Probably because a middle-aged man like me has a hard time believing the speed at which things happen, now in the waning years of mankind as we have known it.

The boss of a large multinational oil company recently mentions that the world is expected to need two-thirds more energy by 2050, or the equivalent of another OPEC in addition to the one we have. Again, my first reaction is “That’s after the singularity, so not something humans should worry about”. More importantly, it is far after Peak Oil, which is now, more or less. New oil is being found here and there, but it is generally more expensive to extract than before. Despite the economic stagnation in the rich world, oil prices have risen again. You cannot simply put the ruler on the current development and say “in 2050 we will be… there!”

I’ve mentioned before that around 2040 we are expected to know millions, probably billions of times more than we know today, and the knowledge will double every day or so. Perhaps most of that knowledge will be the equivalent of  teenager Twitter messages, but it would surprise me if somewhere in those millions of times our current knowledge there isn’t something that will make our current oil companies seem obsolete, our current railroads, our current schools even.

The obvious problem is, we don’t know WHAT. It may already be there, buried in some data file in one of Google’s big computer halls. Something that changes our energy economy as much as the bow changed hunting in the Stone Age, perhaps. But how would we know? When will we find it, if ever, and how? All we know is that we know less and less of what there is to know, because knowledge is covering our world now like water is covering the bottom of the sea. And it is only the beginning. Soon everything will change. Even we.

But for now, we shall have to live with being shortsighted. Because beyond that short sight, everything becomes a blur of movement.

Rain and hydropower

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Small waterfall in the computer game Skyrim

This picture is actually from the computer game Skyrim, which is based on Norwegian nature. There’s a lot of water here in real life too, I assure you, but if I were to try to photograph it, my camera would become wet.

It’s been raining… well, I am not sure it is two days out of three, this fall, but I would be very surprised if it was less than one out of two. That is quite rare, even in fall, here on the south coast of Norway. It also rained copiously during summer, more so than in a long time. Nor is this the only part of the country that has received plenty of rainfall this year.

The last couple winters, the hydropower magazines have been near empty, and the price of electricity has been abnormally high here in Norway. Well, abnormal for Norway. Other European countries are used to paying more for their electricity than we are. Hydropower is a quite affordable energy source, once the dams and turbines are in place. And usually rain is plentiful here in Norway. So we have gotten used to even heating with electricity – some modern houses were literally built without chimneys. And then we had several years with very little rainfall, and at the same time Swedish nuclear reactors were down for repairs much longer than expected, so we could not import electricity from there during the winter either.

Now it has rained and rained for months. It hadn’t rained many weeks when people started getting suspicious: Norwegian power companies were exporting large amounts of hydropower to Europe. The prevailing theory on this was that they were worried the dams might not be empty this winter, and then they would not be able to charge extremely high prices as they had done the last couple years. So they had to hurry to get rid of that water during the summer.

The power companies tried to explain that this was not how it worked: The empty lakes were the huge reservoirs up in the mountains, which took many years to refill and many years to empty. The power they now generated were from smaller dams in the lower valleys, which would otherwise overflow and the energy be wasted. This is generally consistent with the structure of Norwegian water reservoirs. But a lot of people still hold on to the conspiracy theory.

This just goes to show that Norwegian too are stupid and ridden by mind parasites, much like our cousins around the world. Well, not quite as badly as some places, where your life is in danger if you are not insane. But still pretty bad.

Of course, power companies are not saints; they seek to maximize their profit. But the best way to do that in northern Europe is to produce as much as possible of your power in winter. Remember, Norway is about as far north as Alaska. That means the neighboring countries we may export to are roughly comparable to Canada. Air conditioning in summer is a luxury, but heating in winter is a matter of life or death in all these countries. There are several countries between here and Spain or Italy, the “south states” of Europe.

Over the last couple decades, new large-capacity power cables have been laid from Norway to neighboring countries, not just Sweden which we border on directly, but also under the sea to the south: the Netherlands, and at least indirectly, Denmark and Germany. But all of these countries also have icy cold winters, so there is a lot more money to gain from producing all of your power in winter, if possible.

But yeah, the ability to export large quantities of hydropower means we will never again have the comfortably low prices on electricity that we had when I was young. We don’t live in that kind of world anymore. Luckily we also have a lot more money than we did back then. And generally better insulated houses.

It will still take many years of rain before the large hydropower reservoirs are filled, if it ever happens. But nature is certainly doing its best on our behalf. And I, for one, am not complaining.

 

Insane terrorists and others

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Photo: Jon-Are Berg-Jacobsen/Aftenposten/REUTERS/SCANPIX

This picture is all most Norwegians have seen of our worst terrorist since WW2. Not a lot to base a judgment on. But since when has that stopped any of us?

Norwegian public debate ran into an ice berg a couple days ago, when a psychiatric report concluded that Anders Behring Breivik, the supposedly right-wing terrorist who blew up government buildings and massacred teenagers at a political camp this summer, was actually insane. “Paranoid schizophrenia.”

Very few had expected this. Certainly not Behring Breivik.

The public reacts generally with disbelief and anger. The general opinion is that these experts don’t know what they are talking about. Their scientific report should be overruled by people who have never met Behring Breivik, much less actually talked with him for hours and hours on end, and who have not even begun to read his own “manifesto” even though it is freely available on the Net. After all, they have seen the news on TV. That is all you need to know everything in the world, and have absolutely infallible judgment.

Yes, I’m putting the irony on here. My respect for actual humans is, generally, extremely low. This may not be obvious because my respect for the human potential is enormous. We have the capacity to become, fairly precisely put, godlike. In practice however we pay little attention to the soul and so we live and die as a writhing mass of mind parasites, largely unaware of reality beyond what is necessary to survive and procreate. Sometimes we may also fall short of this.

Thus, public opinion about terrorists in Norway and bankers in the USA only matters because we have some degree of democracy. Luckily it is mostly “opiate of the masses”, giving people an illusion of having real power. Long may this last. When the masses awaken, mass murder is sure to follow, since approximately 5% of the population are utterly devoid of conscience, and the remaining 95% generally have no idea how to constrain this minority without the rule of law. That’s, you know, why we have the rule of law in the first place.

So chances are that despite the loud wailing, the court of law will listen to the extremely tiny minority who actually know what they are talking about, and ignore the overwhelming majority who don’t. This is as good as it gets. One day perhaps we will in great numbers realize our human potential. But until then, most live and die only a few steps from insanity, and some will fall off the edge.

 

Black Friday

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"I'd rather pay double than have to put up with this kind of crowd!"

I hope you all had a wonderful Black Friday.

"Bargains and time sales can go rot in Hell!"

Ah, yes. Black Friday is the most recent of the American customs that have leaked into my native Norway over the Internet, along with classics like Helloween and VD. I am not sure whether this actually is the first year I’ve seen it here, but it just might be. The name certainly seems well chosen from the perspective of the porcupines among us, don’t you think? ^_^

Thankful to not be American

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Well, to be honest I am more precisely thankful to be Norwegian and live in Norway, the world’s best country for years now according to the UN. Those who live in Congo, Somalia or even Colombia probably regard the USA as pretty much Heaven on Earth, and not entirely without reason. But the disturbing fact is that for years now, the US has been in decline, while the world as a whole has been growing healthily. Even after the onset of the Financial Crisis, the emerging economies (much of what used to be the Third World) have been growing at a brisk pace.

What is more important is that the growth in the emerging economies is largely real growth, caused by investment in infrastructure such as roads, railroads, education and telecommunication. In contrast, the growth in America has for a long time now been false growth, caused by growing consumption based on borrowing.  The “dotcom” bubble was quickly replaced with a housing bubble, which exploded spectacularly in the so-called Financial Crisis, impacting many other rich countries to some degree. But what is less obvious yet is that this was followed by yet another bubble, which is still growing: The government bubble.

The government is issuing ever more debt, and we are now talking about truly astronomical amounts, where trillions come and go. There is no plan, not even a vague idea, for how to pay back any of this. In fact, there is no plan for how to stop borrowing, ever. In fact, there seems to be no one who sees this as a need, or even a goal, or even a possibility. It is assumed that for the foreseeable future, America and its government will be financed by borrowing.

Unfortunately, that means the foreseeable future is getting shorter.

Unbelievable as it may seem, there are over 6.5 billion humans who don’t particularly think that the US is God’s chosen  country and is entitled to getting money for nothing. But as long as everyone else is also playing along, as long as you can sell American debt or use it as collateral as if it were gold, it is in everyone’s interest to continue to lend. The day someone big throws the cards and back out of this charade, it will be quite unpleasant to live in America for a while.

Not that it is particularly pleasant now, from what my friends there tell me. High unemployment has become a feature and is taking its toll: There are still many people slowly unwinding their life savings while trying to get a new job, even one that pays less than they used to have. There are still people living in houses they cannot really pay the mortgage for, putting off bills and racking up credit card debt while they hope for better times. But the better times don’t always show up, and so people slowly sink down into poverty. Neighborhoods gradually turn into slums. Schools deteriorate and teachers are fired.

Meanwhile, police is beating up protesters on a regular basis, and public parks are becoming like Palestinian refuge camps, permanent spots of squalor and anger.  In several states, recording police brutality has itself become a crime punishable with years in prison. Some of the latest police crackdowns seem to have been organized on a federal level, something that is against the constitution. (Let us leave aside whether or not it is a good idea to beat up leftists, in  principle, if they give the slightest excuse to do so.)

The culture war goes on, with the enmity between “blue” and “red” growing ever stronger, slowly inching toward an actual civil war with blood on the streets. (Not that the streets in America are free from blood even at the best of times, with the violent crime in the country being several times higher than in other first-world countries, and a general acceptance that you choose to risk your life if you walk into areas populated by people of a different skin color.) While the economy is in chaos, and infrastructure falling apart, the political parties are latching on to obscure pet projects that serve little or no useful function, but simply demonstrate their loyalty to their side of the culture war.

It is not that many years since people around the world looked up to America as a shining example of what a modern society should be. But something has gone horribly wrong. I would be surprised if it is not the same thing that always goes horribly wrong with every empire that has a golden age: Hubris. Overweening pride. A sense of being entitled to privilege. Well, at least you had your days in the sun. I hope you enjoyed them. Your golden age is over – so say your analysts.

 

Subjective wealth

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Let them eat cake!

Still sick, still trying to be short, still trying to not roleplay a holy apostle on the Internet.

Let us talk about money. It is a definitely this-worldly thing, I hope we agree. There may be those who worship it, but hardly in a literal, religious sense. Apart from that, admittedly, all bets are off. People can get really excited about it. Probably more than it warrants.

I have looked at these protest movements in the USA and elsewhere, where people want a change to the current distribution of wealth, where a small minority has most of the money. I do not agree with them. Here is why.

As I see it, there is not a big difference between the rich and the middle class. Not even between the super-rich and the lower middle class. Sure, in absolute numbers the difference is staggering. A single oligarch can have more money than a whole town. But it is still just different levels of luxury. The real difference is down to the actual poor: Those who don’t know where their next meal will come from, or where they will sleep tonight, or when they will find a pair of shoes without holes.

You may have read about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.We often refer to this as a “pyramid of needs”, but I have a revelation for y’all: In terms of money, it is actually an upside-down pyramid. It takes little money to eat, it takes a lot of money to gain social status, and in between there are things like living in a good neighborhood, getting high-quality medical treatment and so on.

But it gets even more convoluted than that. For the highest levels of the traditional pyramid barely need any money at all. To actualize yourself certainly may require some free time (“slack”), but you can also gain that through having a menial job you can do with half your brain. You don’t need to travel the world to grow as a human. But it probably helps to not be so hungry that you don’t know or care where you are and what you are doing.

I think of money as following a Briggsian logarithm, or base 10. That is to say, someone who has 100 dollars is twice as rich as one who has 10. One who has a million dollar is twice as rich as one who has 100 000. Actually I am not sure, it may be fading at higher levels, but it seems to hold pretty well at low levels. If you don’t have money at all, having money to buy a bread makes a huge difference. A bread can provide food for a person for a week. But for a middle-class person, finding extra money of that order is basically worthless. It is barely worth stopping to pick up. For Bill Gates in his prime, it was said that picking up a $1000 bill would cause him a net loss, because his time was so much more worth.

Does this make sense to you?

Paid friends

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Hey, how about paying people to become your friends?

I have only so much free time, so after I picked up City of Heroes again, I have barely watched anime. Also, there have been slim pickings of late, at least that could even vaguely interest me. This past weekend, however, I took the time to watch a couple first episodes. One of them stood out.

The one that intrigued me was Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai, (“I don’t have many friends”) where episode 1 was about a high school boy and girl who realized that they were both completely lacking friends. In fact, none of them even had any idea how people made friends in the first place. The girl had an “air friend” (like in air guitar), the boy had thought he had some friends in the school he went to before, but he hadn’t heard anything from them since, so perhaps it had all been one-sided. Says the girl: “You could pay people to be your friends. Like 1000 Yen [$10] to be your friend in school for a week.” The boy rejected this out of hand, comparing it to paid love.

I think she had a great idea there, although the story did not follow that thread. In these times where more and more jobs disappear because we find better technologies, many people go without work. At the same time, there are needs not so easily met by machines. I have noticed that much of emotional advertising plays on people’s want to be accepted and surrounded by friends. So why not pay people to be friends? It should not be so well paid as to keep the skilled workers out of the workforce, but it must be better than just paying people to sit at home and drink beer. Instead, they could drink beer at some gathering place, being social with lonely people.

The most realistic alternative, however (at least in the beginning) is online friends. I mean, you have all kinds of online services, so it is not a big jump. You could have professional chat room hosts, for instance. Professional guild officers in online games. In fact, you could perhaps make a new type of online games that were more social and less violent, and that came with such hosts from the start. How about “home party online”?

Would people pay for this? I think so, if they were not shamed about it. I mean, people pay for porn and phone sex, which is much more shameful. It is not very demeaning to log on to a web site that hosts imaginary home parties, where you mingle with other online guests and professional hosts. Obviously there would need to be ways to deal with troublemakers, but it being a paid service would already go some way toward that.

Actually, it probably already exists, even if I can’t remember having heart about it. If you can think of something, it exists on the Internet – if nowhere else, it exists in Korea. But I don’t know Korea, and probably never will. But given that they have the world’s largest Internet gaming company (NCSoft), and the world’s greatest broadband density, they probably have thought of it. Now it is our turn. Not that I particularly volunteer or anything. As Adam Warlock once said when he was roleplaying Christ: “My friendship is free and must be freely accepted.” But your friendship may vary.