From time to time people on this site bring up the true fact that our scarcity problems are caused by human population. Right now our society has defaulted to feeling that any woman can have children if she wants them. So we have Octo-moms and Septuagenarian Moms and there's no stopping them.
Or could we at least stop the medical people for "advancing" the science of fertility?
Cross-posting this from the automation thread:
Wendy’s (WEN) said that self-service ordering kiosks will be made available across its 6,000-plus restaurants in the second half of the year as minimum wage hikes and a tight labor market push up wages(...) In addition to self-order kiosks, the company is also getting ready to move beyond the testing phase with labor-saving mobile ordering and mobile payment available system wide by the end of the year. Yum Brands and McDonald’s already have mobile ordering apps.
Declare a 50-67% hike in the minimum wage over the next 5 years and what will companies who employ low-skill labor do? Answer: Invest in replacing human labor.
As Andy Puzder, the CEO of Carl's Jr succinctly puts it:
“Does it really help if Sally makes $3 more an hour if Suzie has no job?”
Something that hit me: Contemporary cultures are by nature competitive. We raise our children to be performers… and tough luck for the losers. At school, at work, everywhere you look, this is the same pattern.
Over time, with the help of overpopulation and resources scarcity, this behavior can only get more acute.
So, Wendy eliminating jobs for better performance? All will do the same if given the opportunity. The fault to the wage increase? No. This is merely a pretext. The real point is lower cost and higher profit.
Stagnation is seen as a shame, as a loser's trait.
We have to be winners… including myself. If I don't perform, then someone else will do. if I don't get this money, someone else will get it. If I don't get this job, someone else will get it. If I don't spread my ideas, someone else will spread a different point of view. Etc…
Could be summarized as this: I will drive the last nail, not you!
Lot of entireties make decisions that have unintended consequences. From the micro - individuals, households, small community groups, to the macro - large corporations, central banks (private entities by the way) to indeed governments. Somehow when we get on this track it seems that the only entities that ever do that are governments, when the problem is people, at what ever scale they function at.
Lets dive beneath the surface a bit. Complexity is not a problem, we live in a universe that is complex beyond our imagination. Is it not the fact that human constructs, when complex, can become out of sync with the universe in which they exist because poor constructed thought processes, like those that conclude that governments are the only entities capable of decisions that have unintended consequences?
TB-
Yes you make a really good point. Its much easier to point at government and make fun of the actions they take that ends up backfiring. In our own lives, some of us feel unhappy so we eat a lot to comfort ourselves - intention is comfort, unintended consequence is, we get fat. In fact, now that you mention it, our entire lives are chock full of unintended consequences.
Perhaps the problem lies with the common approach that we all take to life, rather than what role we are playing in society.
Re-reading Tao, I see that it describes a way of thinking and being that encourages a whole sequence of beneficial consequences that somehow all occur without explicit effort - and in fact, how explicit effort tends to result in a whole lot of bad things happening.
Somehow, if you simply are, consequences occur, and the better you are, the more positive the consequences become. I have always been really fuzzy about how that all happens; engineers are all about an if-then cause-effect world. I can't simply sit at my screen and "be" and have the program write itself.
And yet…"being" an engineer, the code does really flow without a lot of effort. Maybe that's what they mean. Doing without effort. Is it really work if you're having fun? But its more than just having fun, its having an understanding of how everything fits together - and if at first you don't understand, you just try stuff that feels like it might work until you discover the right approach. My sense is, you cannot replace one great engineer with any number of mediocre engineers. It is not the amount of code that gets written, it is the number of bugs (and what is a bug but an "unintended consequence"?) that are written into the stuff that comes out. Not-creating bugs comes from true understanding, and true understanding is relatively rare.
I did some research and found this explanation of my favorite Tao quote:
The master does nothing, Yet he leaves nothing undone. The ordinary man is always doing things, Yet many things are left to be done... --Chapter 38
Nonaction or inaction is almost a heretical thought in Western society. However, true wu wei is the most efficient action possible, the most spontaneous and often the most creative action. It is not a life of a sloth or laziness, but one in which the least possible effort yields the most effective and productive outcome. Actions come from a more intuitive area of the mind. The closest analogy would be when an athlete is "in the zone." The actions are not coming from the thinking or calculating area of the mind, but they are being done. Obviously, this is not the same as doing nothing.
So wu wei is not non-action but effortless action. It is action without meddlesome, contentious, or egotistical exertion. It's the effortless action that results from combining your inner nature (P'u and Te) with the natural laws operating around you. In short, it is being in harmony with the Tao.The "how" of this is always the trick, isn't it? Presumably, one cannot try or expend effort to get into this state, and expending effort to get there is likely counterproductive.
If we want to change the course of the river, we have to reintroduce the wolves. And yet, who among us "ordinary men" could have determined this was the correct action ahead of time? The master re-introduced the wolves, they acted like wolves, and the river changed course. Master did literally nothing to change the river's course, yet he left nothing undone.
That approach beats the hell out of hammering rates down to zero by spending 3 trillion dollars trying to force-feed credit into the economy, only to end up with the unintended consequence being the impending collapse of the pension system. "The ordinary man is always doing things, but there are many things left to be done."
DF-
Great thoughts, I could not agree more. There are lots of terms for being "in the zone" as you mentioned, one of my standards borrowed from Zen is "non-doing". Another term is "complete action", where nothing is left over - because the doer is not separate from object of action or observation. To be in this state, it is imperative that we let go of results of our actions and that things be done for and of themselves, otherwise something is left over and action becomes incomplete. The desire to control outcomes is the driver of unintended consequences. So nothing is ever "finished". When an action is complete, we need to wait and see what comes back at us and then respond accordingly with another "complete action". We can never seem to do this because we cannot let go of FEAR.
The very thought "government is the problem" is the poster child for unintended consequences, it creates all the problems that we say that we are against. I yammer on and on the perceptual mind vs. the analytical mind, but to no avail. When we are in "the zone", we are using the perceptual mind rather than the analytical mind. Unintended consequences is currently the water in which we all swim because we are currently so enthralled with the power of the "rational mind". We are all doing it all the time! Central banks, major corporations, governments, households, individuals, everybody and everything.
I spend a lot of time doing any exercises that help the body's energy flow. Experiencing this current flowing through me powerfully is like being part of a river; I can opt to be fully, or partially in the flow or get out of it completely. To enter the current even more, I can empty my mind and allow it to flow in the stream of consciousness in meditation. Hopefully, eventually I am not just one with the river but with everything that is. It is probably quite difficult to appreciate taoism without being able to work with this flow. The best way to change the course of the river is to be one with the river.
Arthur Whaley's book is well named: "The Way and it's Power." The Tao is about working skillfully with the power that underlies everything until it becomes second nature and effortless. It's more about being a source of energy than destroyer of energy.
May the Force be with us.