Off Tangent?

There is often a slight difference of mentality between writing a blog entry in the morning, and one that is nearer the end of the day. The morning entries have a tendency to be based on a whim/fancy that was struck during the hours of sleep, while that of the evening is after a whole day of exertions. To me, morning entries have a tendency to be more abstract and ``large scale'' in nature, with little to no direct relationship with the happenings of the world, while the evening entries tend to be inspired by the goings on that I had experienced throughout the day.

Considering that I am currently still on sabbatical, much of what I am thinking are based on what I have been reading and am already mulling over, as opposed to actually being reflective of what has happened. Because let's face it, when one is spending most of one's time at home looking metaphorically out of the window, there really isn't much of the outside world that affects one directly. The number of interactions with people are few, and even if there were, they had a tendency to be much more muted in affect. Besides, as time goes by, the state of my being on sabbatical and how the rest of the world isn't means that a divergent of general interests and behaviour is already taking place.

If I keep up this sabbatical for another year, it could well be the case that I might be a total and absolute hermit. At this point, I cannot convince myself that it is not that appealling an idea to pursue.

Extended sabbatical... isn't it just another way of saying ``early retirement''? Considering that my current ``goal'' is to merely outlive my parents before I set my on/off switch permanently to ``off'', it might well be the case that it is a worthy goal to pursue.

Realistically though, I will still need to get some kind of job to pay the bills. This isn't the era where hard work will grant one with the means of living a stress-free life ``in the future''---the old pension schemes that promoted that idea had been scrapped within the past thirty years once employers/corporations start realising that people are living, on average, twenty years longer than they were ``supposed'' to, which, as a result, confirmed that the predicted spending required to fulfil pension requirements was never going to be enough, more so if they expected to leverage on the future contributions of future workers to feed into the pension to pay off the current pensioners.

Sadly, the numbers will never match up for the simple reason that every economic system currently in operation is based solely on the assumption of growth. There are the usual platitudes on why it is believable: technology is always ``improving'' the way we can do more with less, there will always be cheap workers available for the parts that we cannot automate away, and more work is being done to ``value add'' to products beyond mere manufacturing.

Unfortunately, they are all wrong.

With much more at stake, technology is mostly in the ``exploit'' phase as opposed to the ``explore'' phase. There's a tendency to see more of the same, but ``at scale'' as opposed to something truly new/extraordinary that changes the way we do things for the better. The internal combustion engine, for example, is still going to be around for quite a while, no matter what they say about electrification, as long as last-mile electricity distribution isn't improved upon. Fiat money will still be primal no matter what the crypto-currency enthusiasts say.

The game of cheap workers have been one of arbitrage; it's actually symptomatic of the entire theory of economic systems. The basic premise here is that of exploiting competitive advantage in order to secure higher profits (not just revenue). The only ``small'' catch is that for certain types of competitive advantages (specifically that of labour), the margins will decrease the more they are exploited as the associated cost of living increases as the quality of life improves. In short, there will come a time when all places offer equally expensive labour. Labour is expensive because their replacement tends to take a while and have interesting scaling issues unrelated to just the quantity---the quality (available skills and competency) of the said labour counts as well. There isn't an economic system that prioritises self-sustenance and balance---and it isn't obvious how one can be created as such since all we have known over the past two hundred years of human history is growth, growth, and growth [in human population].

``Value adding'' to products after manufacturing is a bit difficult to understand, for the simple reason that it is likely to be a multi-dimensional manifold with many possible local optima. The objective of the game then is to identify enough of these local optima to provide the ``value add'', while using the least amount of resources. Put in more lay-terms, it means that one needs to identify and corner the market where the consumers in it want to consume the very services that one can produce, amidst a large and not-globally-well-understood needs space. It ends up with fragmentation, really. Think of it as the ``artisanal'' phase of service. Maybe at some point enough similarity of service requirements may be found to automate away, but there is still that intangible aspect of service that makes such automated means less welcome as compared to a real person.

Where was I again? Eh... it doesn't matter. Got my daily rant out of the way.

Off to something else then. Till the next update.