The Bigger the Subject . . .
Apparently the powers that be are examining the evidence now
to decide how big a fine to levy on BP for that Gulf oil spill—you remember
that huge eruption of oil that engulfed the gulf, while BP executives sat
around with their thumbs up their collective asses, trying to decide how to
dodge responsibility? It occurs to me, maybe the bigger the better. Perhaps BP
will have to go out of business. Of course, what would happen then? Their
resources would be sold to a bank, who in turn will sell the oil company to
some other bunch of incompetents, who will resume drilling without any clear
idea of what they are doing. That’s the way in this world of ours.
And then we have the bankers and other assorted financial
wizards, including especially the world of economists. I have finally been forced to conclude, with
perhaps an exception or two, that economists are largely trained in sociology
101 and the fine art of statistical extrapolation. Bankers are trained in Monopoly.
And then there is our collective politician world. What can
one say? They were trained in, hmmmm, what training could possibly explain
their seeming total lack of knowledge about almost any subject deemed a
subject? Well, to be fair, they seem adept at discovering what is pissing off
the public at fixed intervals (every two years, say).
So the trend here seems to be something like this: As a
people, we tend to employ a negative correlation model for placing people in
various fields of endeavor. That is, as the field becomes increasingly more
important to the survival of our species, we place increasingly lower IQ folks
in those fields. So, the rule might follow the chart below:
For example, we apparently permit the world of finance to
gamble with the world’s supply of money, with the explicit understanding that,
when (not if) various of the global
financial groups appear to be at risk of running out of the money we have given
them to play with, we will give them
some more money. And this is also with the explicit understanding that their
games (it’s really only one game, called Monopoly) will result periodically in
crashes of the world’s financial systems, resulting in further global
depressions which cause thousands, sometimes millions, of people to lose much of
their savings. That is the known outcome
of the games. In between these crashes, of course, the world’s bankers, and
other assorted financial managers, will make billions of currency units, which
they are free to tuck away into offshore accounts in places that do not tax
them.
The main question in my mind is, why . . . why do we the
affected public allow such a system to exist? It would seem to me that, if we
have the brain power to successfully land folks on the moon and then return
them to Earth, we might be capable as a species of designing a global financial
system that does not lead every few years to complete crashes. And that we would design that more stable
system to include more of the world’s population in the benefits of the
risk-reward calculus. Because that is
the other peculiar characteristic of this system that the financial doofuses of
the world have designed—the reward part of this system is targeted at fewer and
fewer people, with the result that, now, a few hundred doofuses own more wealth
than the rest of the multibillion global population.
At some point, surely, the collective will of the rest of
humanity will begin to weigh in on the design of our financial system, and on
the general lack of technical expertise within the various fields of energy.
Maybe it is really time to halt for a time our exploration of that big space
beyond our world, and to put some of that masterful brainpower to work trying
to rescue the world from the collective idiots who now control many of the most
important fields affecting the survival of our species on earth.
Just a thought.
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