Sale Sale all the time…

The past decade or more has been witnessing round the year discount sales all over the world. About three decades ago there used to be definite period for sales which used to precede major festivals like Diwali, Dussera, Christmas, etc in India. Gradually the number of festivals have increased to the point where we have sales with high discounts right round the year like Bill Haley’s Rock round the Clock.

The bedrock of capitalism is free markets and competition. Generally it starts with few early companies reaping supernormal profits. Seeing this there is a herd instinct, and like lemmings, there is a stampede of entrepreneurs and companies to get in quickly in order to appropriate part of the supernormal profits as long as the going is good. The banks and authorities who permit these companies to enter these apparent El Dorado  commercial areas are oblivious to the reality that there is an optimum supply demand band which can be supported at any period of time.

So when through indiscriminate growth of production units catering to the same market place, there is in due course a surfeit of supply resulting in lowering of prices, fall in quality, This excess supply position is also the result of hyper competition, so called innovation of products which in reality are mostly incremental improvements, spread of mall culture, mass consumerism driven by TV ads and keeping up with joneses, hyper capacity, low effective demand, economies in recession, ageing population, highly leveraged consumerism based on liberal proliferation of credit cards and retail loans.

Some of the other fundamental reasons are the bursting of the property bubble which dissipated the feel good notional wealth factor which had led to wanton consumerism. In certain other economies like China, the State subsidises industry which helps in selling at lower prices and gaining new markets. But this debilitates the economy over time as debt to GDP rises to unsustainable levels.

Basically humans have become shallow and are always looking for something to excite them. So retail therapy has become a way of life among all classes of society. So people are caught in a perpetual cleft and disequilibrium between wanting to satiate their materialistic desires all the time and having the necessary means for fulfilling their carnal desires.  

Most companies who find themselves trapped with excess old stocks and discover that the only way to avoid a massive loss would be to sell as much at discounted prices. This way the companies are able to cover their fixed costs  for some time and hence keep their heads over the waters. Finally they have sell out to their competitors or declare bankruptcy.

These events in the real sectors of the economy have a domino effect on the financial system. The later has to carry some of the bad loans on their balance sheet for years.  As it is the financial system is over leveraged. So when substantial portions of loan portfolio become hard, the failure of the financial system is even greater.

We are really living in incredible times where individuals, companies and countries are all over leveraged with high debt ratios and as a result everywhere discount sales have become the normal way of life. This raises one fundamental question: in the system like this is there any true invariant measure of value. What is the intrinsic value of a set of goods? Is it their cost prices, fair market prices or the discounted price at which it’s being sold mostly? At the same time the stock markets and currency markets are always in a state of perpetual gyrations. Gold was earlier the standard measure of value. Then dollar took over in 1972. With the mounting fiscal deficit in US, the dollar is no longer a strong currency. We are living in indeed troubled economic crises times, an age of uncertainty and flux. China is flexing its muscles to step as the world’s reserve currency with its Yuan and its large holdings of US treasury bonds.

It is the best of times and the worst of limes. We are indeed at an inflection point of international history. 

Faustian Cyber Choices...

Today we have almost infinite and ultimate information and knowledge virtually at the fingertips of all. This knowledge is compounding exponentially. Today about 20 to 25% of the world have access to smartphones. Around 35 to 40% have TV access. Knowledge Nirvana is just a keyboard stroke away. Yes indeed it is the great and true democratisation of knowledge. Google is the God of knowledge, whom most of the digerati pay homage to few times a day through multi devices. The net and Google are the gateway to the rapidly expanding / exploding cosmos of knowledge.

Earlier knowledge was the preserve of a few. Only the privileged had access to knowledge which was found between covers to books. Books too were printed manually hence highly limited. Only those who could afford these rare limited editions could access knowledge. In a way Gutenberg changed all this with the printing press which was the first wave of multiplying depositories of knowledge.

This wealth of knowledge which comes virtually free has on the flipside an infinite cost which humanity has to bear. Indeed it’s the Faustian choice where Dr Faustus trades his soul for knowledge and power. Mankind by inventing this Frankenstein has tread into hitherto unchartered cyberspace and hurtling towards the age of singularity which Dr Kurzweil talks of. Even children for the past five years have taken to these wifi gadgets which with their alluring touch screens ensnare them to the infinite reaches of labyrinth of the World Wide Web. These kids are developing ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). This is not only restricted to kids, even adults are suffering from narrowing attention spans. Information overload is crippling sanity and mindfulness.

Man is getting closer to robots which these mass weapons of instant knowledge. Some people have started spending most of their waking hours on the net. This addiction is taking serious proportions. There are dark unregulated pools in the net where lot of cybercrime is taking place. Sex too is a major attraction for many on the digital highway. Movie Her has been inspired by these concepts. Majority of people in developed economies live single. Hence need for digital companions and lives to escape from loneliness.

This is indeed dehumanizing mankind. The scifi movies we see are a reality which bearing upon us fast. There is no turning back. The digital and surreal cyber future is now. 

Mounting global crisis - toys of doom...

Written on 24th February, 2013

New Grammar of Living Model is principally focused around the triad: 1. Social 2. Economics 3. Climate All the symptoms of the mounting global crisis may be categorised under the above three heads. All of excesses which are responsible for present convoluted multi crises which are plaguing the entire globe which are deteriorating both in terms of increasing complexity, frequencies and amplitude. Some details of the root causes have been outlined under Grammar of Life 1 & 2 earlier in in a previous blog in blogspot during June 2010. Since then the magnitude of the problems have perhaps compounded at an alarming rate. Everyone is bent on trying to at best solve the problems by tackling the immediate causes which are not the root causes which are often holistic and integrated in nature. We must not loose any more time in selflessly working towards integrated holistic solutions many of which will at 180 degrees to all that human civilisation has been aspiring for during the past several centuries. All of our standards and aspiration levels have been based upon non satvic values. Tamasik value systems are the order of the day in each and every sphere. Really do not know how the human race can really wean itself away from all it's tamasik desires which have been amply fueled, magnified and satisfied by the Frankensteinian developments of technology. Now it will be well nigh impossible the human race to give up these toys of doom. Each of them has negative connotations for the traid social, economics and climate. We are verily trapped in a complex labyrinthine mesh of our making. Is there no way out of this quagmire. Maybe only in annihilation of all that we know, admire and aspire for now and morphing towards a phoenix which can only rise from the ashes of the past.

Climate threat....

Written on 17th January 2013

A draft version of the 2013 National Climate Assessment is in the headlines this week. According to the report, the effects of climate change are becoming alarmingly visible throughout America and the rest of the world.

The report reads less like a government assessment and more like the Old Testament. Accounts of hurricanes, droughts, floods, impending famines, and natural disasters of every kind are listed in the report, and all of these occurrences have been linked directly to climate change. It is the mature stage of the anthropocene age.

Extracts from summary of the report:

Many aspects of the global climate are changing rapidly, and the primary drivers of that change are human in origin. Evidence for climate change abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans (Kennedy et al. 2010). This evidence has been painstakingly compiled by scientists and engineers from around the world using satellites, weather balloons, thermometers at surface stations, and many other types of observing systems that monitor the Earth's climate system.

The sum total of this evidence tells an unambiguous story: the planet is warming. Temperatures at the surface, in the troposphere (the active weather layer extending up to about 8 to 12 miles above the ground), and in the oceans have all increased over recent decades.

The report is unequivocal about both the causes of climate change and the impacts. As evidenced in the excerpt above, this information was compiled by experts from all over the scientific community, using every possible instrument to be as accurate as possible.

Reuters highlights a few of the more dire consequences of climate change listed in the report:

Threats to human health from increased extreme weather events, wildfires and air pollution, as well as diseases spread by insects and through food and water;

Less reliable water supply, and the potential for water rights to become a hot-button legal issue;

More vulnerable infrastructure due to sea-level rise, bigger storm surges, heavy downpours and extreme heat;

Warmer and more acidic oceans.

An interesting point about the report, a point that was put forward recently by Chris Mooney for Mother Jones, is that it finally puts climate change in terms that the average, unconcerned American citizen can understand: It points out how individuals will be affected in their "own backyards."

This is something that was missing from previous climate assessments, as Mooney points out:

The good news is that the process involves scientists traveling around the country and getting people's reactions to this series of alarming predictions - which makes the final assessment more likely to gain traction. Indeed, the development of the draft report coincides with the launch of "NCANet," a "network of networks" to get everyone from civil engineers to zoo to aquarium managers involved. So far, 60 organizations have signed on...

This may be the real genius of such an approach - and the thing that really terrifies the deniers. If you go into communities and get people thinking about what they will have to do to prepare for climate change, there's a good chance they will conclude that they can't simply "get ready." Preparedness and adaptation may sound good in theory, but are they really plausible when we're talking about turning planetary knobs far past the settings that have endured for most of recent human civilization?

Despite the dire situation that the report describes, there could still be reason for optimism. If the research process has the public talking about the climate change links to the extreme weather they're experiencing, it could open the doors for an honest, open discussion in Washington about addressing climate change impacts.

But that will require the American public to demand action from elected officials, and to remain vigilant about the matter regardless of the view out their window at any given moment.

Conditioning: its insane norms

Centuries of deep conditioning have left indelible scars upon human kind. Generally there is a herd instinct where most of us make choices based upon the predominant conditioning patterns either imposed on us from childhood by parents, surrounding society or hard coded genetic or biological conditioning.

There is a need to analyse the anatomy of the adverse conditioning cycles across the spectrum which have detrimental impact upon both societies and economies which in turn accelerates climate and environmental degradation.

The dualistic nature of conditioning which  forces individuals and societies to choose the more deeply ingrained positions which blindly bereft of any logic, people have been doing so because that is the expected choice they are supposed to take.

Some of the popular blind conditioning stances societies choose to adopt en masse  leading to hugely negative outcomes are:

Colour prejudice or racial discrimination; rich poor divide; blind pursuit of money at any cost and trampling upon fellow human beings in the process;

Rampant corruption mainly financial, legal, political; all businesses and corporations wanting to get bigger and declare more profits hook or by crook ushering in hypercompetion aided and abetted by unfettered principles of free markets, mass consumerism, burgeoning defence budgets;

Love for power and pandering to the whims of king size egos;

Class exploitation where the ruling classes have all the privileges and laws in their favour and 80% of the population forever condemned to their deprived existences;

Rich colluding in reducing taxes for rich so over time so their wealth multiplies at higher rates than the salaried and working classes where often in real terms the net assets of the non rich classes shrink over time;

Possessing bigger homes, cars, etc packed with energy intensive gadgets which are hurtling our planet closer to its doom;

Pleasure seeking hedonistic lifestyles where the senses and palate dictate all living, expenditure, eating, sex patterns and levels, with the modern media like TV and Internet spreading the message among both the haves and have nots (a la medium is the message) forcing all to live a perpetual state of orgasm;

Good life is the sole objective of everyone with all manner of comfort leading to heavy urbanisation, concrete jungles, alienation, urban chaos, energy dependent, meaningless existences;

Best syndrome where all right from school to working life, corporations want to top the list with winner takes all attitudes;

The norms of society have long become insane as postulated by RD Laing, those not able to cope with this conditioning are labeled as insane.

There is an urgent need to decondition and wean ourselves from this insane race which is propelling the human race and earth to oblivion.

New Grammar of Living Model

The New Grammar of Living Model (NGL) is an attempt to forecast the future of the world economy, countries and economic blocs based upon an integrated, interdependent and holistic structured model premised upon the triad of the important planks, namely, social, economic and climate / environment. The NGL incorporates a wide spectrum of causal critical factors which are intertwined with cross impacts.

The NLG will be capturing cross sectional time series data in its most complex version. The model will be capable of combining the noise and signals of the factors across several disciples into weighted rank scores for any point of time, and also projections over a period of time. Based upon these, the model will be to forecast the position obtaining at future points of time, say, 2025, 2050. The prediction will be both in term of the country as a whole encapsulating all the critical factors, and as well as for each of he factors.

Each of the factors will be assigned appropriate weights based upon its criticality, whether its a necessary and sufficient condition. Weights will be flexible so as to vary across countries based upon their relative criticality with respect to local relevant situations obtaining. Once there is sufficient data, factor analysis will help in arriving at appropriate weights.

The scores of various countries can be normalized by dividing by cumulative weights in order reduce all countries, large or small, rich or poor, to a standardized  score which irons out all biases due to size. 

Conditioning......

Conditioning of human beings is one of the main contributing factors for most of the problems facing humanity today. Everything we think, do, say is based upon centuries of conditioning right from Neanderthal man. Broadly conditioning may be divided into two categories: basic or existential and social. The first one is linked to survival instincts like fear of fire, large water bodies, death, falling, physical harm, etc. The second type of conditioning, social conditioning which has evolved later has originated from from social mores evolved from centuries of living in groups of humans.

One part of this social conditioning has been thrust upon us from early religion and scriptures, like right and wrong, holy / unholy, approved activities / sin. The priestly classes who took it upon them to lay down the religious laws in order to control the lives of the masses with the threat that those who do not live according to their precepts will be damned to hell after death. Hence most of us in the hope of eternal life or going to heaven after our mortal lives here on earth subscribed to religion like an insurance or opiate which will ensure eternal life after death. Hence institutionalised religion became a powerful industry or mafia which controlled human thought and action. Anything which went against their mores was considered sinful or heretic and punished. Some of these punishments in the Middle Ages were barbaric. Even today some of the religions have strict mores with fundamentalism and fanaticism.

The other part of social conditioning emanates from centuries of social living and formation of societies. It is basically this variant of social conditioning which is really most inimical to the healthy and sound evolution of society and economies. The most dangerous conditioning is almost hard coded into the mind sets of people and everyone aspires to lead their lives according to these pernicious influences. These social and class oriented conditioning forms the bulwark of free markets. It's a mad race by all trying the reach the pinnacle as per the unfair and ultimately self defeating norms of these class based social conditioning.

According to this school of conditioning which is insidiously passed on to us in our childhood the desired states which are so called positive, good and desirable are: rich, big, faster, powerful, white, handsome, energy intensive, wealth, status, expensive, hi tech, high society, normal, acceptable mores, conventional, right, etc. so basically a bipolar spectrum is created for all attributes where only being on one side is supposed to be good for self and society.

This very attitude fuels a strong movement where all are veering to the so called right end of the spectrum. This concentration of human behaviour at the extreme end leads to sub optimal imbalances for society and eco systems which ultimately impact upon climate change.


                                                                     


TO BE COMPLETED SOON