It's Monday, the start of yet another week. And oh boy, what a hot day it is!
The poor standing fan that I am using has been set to the fullest speed that is available, and even then, I am still feeling hot.
I've been chugging lots of cold beer, but it is still, you guessed it, hot.
Anyway, I just completed The Land of Ingary Trilogy, and have started on Handbook of Data Structures and Applications, reading to page 109/1321. The Land of Ingary series of books has a rather fascinating fantasy world similar to that of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, but it is unfortunate that Diana Wynne Jones has passed away in 2011, which means pretty much no more development of this particular world. I don't care if her works are labelled as ``children's stories''---world's all messed up as it is, and I don't always want to be hearing about just how messed up it is all the time.
Sometimes, a little escapism to a good or just fun story is the right antidote. ``Easier'' books for recreation reading are in some ways a guilty pleasure, but in others a great way to unwind and not worry too much. Life is hard enough as it is, there's no need to try and be productive in every aspect of life. Not everyone can or has the crazed discipline to hyper-optimise every aspect of their life for productivity---the vast majority of us simply have no real reason to do so. So in that case, slow down to look around so as to get into the ``beat'' when there is a need to.
Every time I think about things like this, I am reminded about world's first laser at 1 PW. Now, for most of us, when we hear something like ``1 PW laser'', we are thinking of something that is world obliterating due to its power. But if one just looks at that equation in the Wikipedia page, one would realise that the actual energy delivered to do work is just 42.2 J, hardly world-obliterating. More interesting though is the time duration in which this 42.2 J was delivered---it was over 40×10−15 s. That is how the ``1 PW'' power is delivered.
It's a literal application of energy over a target point over a small period of time.
Now this acts as a metaphor on handling what comes in life. We can be high-powered individuals, but there is a metabolic cost to pay, since there is only that total amount of energy that we can deliver. If we attempt to deliver too much energy over too short a time, we might get away with it a couple of times, but doing the same over an extended period of time is just going to increase the amount of wear and tear on our meat bodies and meat brain.
We run on electro-chemico-mechanical systems. The second law of thermodynamics obviously holds for us, though we are in many ways an ``open'' system (because we periodically ingest new energy through food). Excessive wear and tear from over-saturating the healing rate of our body and brain is how we get burnt out. If we are doing that for work, at least we can use the money obtained to recover some of that burn out during our leisure time. But if we go full throttle all the time, even for our leisure, then we are never really going to recover.
So sometimes, it is okay to just take it a little easy.
Having read Capital by Karl Marx, and just observing the world, I just find it ironic that after one hundred years, people seem to have forgotten how capitalism works, and how the worker class is always going to be exploited. Of course, between Marx's time and now, we have created additional middle classes in between, the so-called professional/managerial/engineer/technician (PMET) class that is ``obviously'' higher in status than the worker class, and lower in status to those who hold capital.
Truthfully though, that is a lie. The PMET and the worker class are really the same, they are still exploited by capitalists. The only difference is that the PMET trade in intellectual labour instead of menial labour as compared to the traditional worker class, a type of labour that capitalists have not quite figured out how to quantify the way widgets can be counted in the worker class. One problem on why this is so comes from the multiplicative effect of intellectual labour as compared to the additive effect of menial labour---if an intellectual labourer produces a working idea, said idea can end up multiplying itself into a multi-billion-dollar industry, while if the menial labourer produces a working widget, said widget is just... one widget. But there is no way to determine a priori if an idea is a ``multiply-to-infinity'' one, or a ``multiply-to-obsolescence'' one, and so it makes pricing and managing that harder.
Before I continue though, no, I'm no Marxist nor am I a Communist, in case someone wants to play the smear game. What I am trying to get at is that human dignity is worth even less now than before. But all that is being done is not really sustainable---capitalism never has human dignity as part of its ideological DNA; it has always been about building more capital out of existing capital. Human dignity, unfortunately, is not something that can contribute to capital... unless governmental regulations make it so, with penalties for non-compliance set high enough to be a strong disincentive instead of being taken as a mere ``cost of doing business''.
But how can governments do that when the corporations that they are trying to regulate are sometimes even larger than whole countries?
That's where the concept of organised labour comes into play. But the problem with organised labour in general is that despite the good that it brings (e.g. stronger negotiating position from the workers' organisation against capitalists), it also has a tendency to foster bad behaviour like every other human institution (e.g. eventual corruption to maintaining sinecures for older members instead of actually helping the worker members). And the smear game from the capitalists against organised labour is strong---after all, the capitalists do have the actual capital to pull the smear game off since it is just budgetted as ``the cost of doing business''.
``Eh, you talk so much, got solution or not? No solution, no talk!''
That is the sign of the ever-pragmatic Singaporean's perspective. Look, just because someone can provide an observation on what is wrong about something does not mean that it is the obligation of the said person to also propose a solution---that is one of the fallacies that Singaporeans are wont to do, which naturally kills off all manner of public discourse. Because it has been made a social norm to be beaten into submission when one tries to point out an issue but has no solution for it. It is an easy low-risk statement to brow beat people with, and that's part of the reason why many problems [in Singapore] take so long to surface as problems, let alone be solved. And so we have the situation where apparently everyone can see that there is a problem, but no one wants to articulate what the problem is so that a solution can be found. And for those of us who are problem-solvers by training, articulating what the bloody problem is is the first step towards finding a solution.
But I am digressing heavily with my rant here.
Anyway, it's a hot day. No Cyberpunk 2077 in the day time for sure, and I think that I will actually play a little of it after I have taken my shower. I don't really feel like reading about skew heaps just yet.
Till the next update then.
2 comments:
One difference between then and now is that, these days, the same person can be a proletariat, middle-class and capitalist all at the same time, in a meaningful way. Say if someone has a decent job in the IT line. Sometimes, he will be treated effectively as a slave. At some other times, his contributions may be accepted as meaningful and they may even multiply. All these while, he may invest in his savings and be a (small-time) capitalist.
There is a bigger difference between a small-time and a big-time capitalist, than between a capitalist and a worker.
I respectfully disagree.
As long as one's primary means of income relies on labour, one is still not a capitalist. So for those who claim to be capitalists because they are investing their income from their jobs elsewhere to generate income, they are still no different as a ``slave'' worker. Because they are still relying on the exchange of surplus labour for pay. That will remain true until the day comes where they no longer exchange their surplus labour value for pay.
Calling someone a ``small-time capitalist'' is just one of the many ways to placate people into believing that things are not as bad as they are. Part of why capitalism without good regulation is terrible because there is literally no way to break out of cycle---capitalists will always seek to maximise their capital as a maxim, and workers, no matter menial or intellectual, are always trading their surplus labour value for puny pay to keep themselves from literally dying.
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