Massive technological change is coming that will trigger one convulsion after another
 As much as one finds the inclusive dreams and schemes of utopians other worldly, it would be wise guard against them lest they be imposed on our life and times whether we like it or not.
For example, driverless electric cars are in the offing, perhaps replacing 80 per cent of today's fossil-fuelled cars in 20 or 30 years. The tipping point will likely come when driverless vehicles show themselves to be far more accident-free than cars with drivers. At which point health and safety bureaucrats will demand their adoption despite their expense and impracticality.
A downside may be, like an electric golf cart, is that will be authorized to go here, but not there. Such advantages in this and other developments to come are likely to accrue to the state rather than the individual.
Such a developments may be sparked or accelerated by something unrelated, such as today's glut in commercial real estate. This worldwide phenomenon became acute in the Covid crisis in which millions were driven to work from home. Telecommuting created vast swathes of empty office space ready to be turned into badly needed housing.
While that looked like a problem with a ready-made solution, it was not to be. To be sure, there was an abundant supply of what was wanted and a strong demand for what was needed, but vested interests got in the way.
The situation threatened seismic changes in property values and the regulatory jungle that resisted all change to which it was unaccustomed. Elon Musk said he could build a rocket ship or a high-speed railway in a much shorter time than it would take the bureaucracy to issue a permit to allow him to start.
The new Trump-Vance administration plans to reduce the size of the administrative state. There has been talk of eliminating whole departments and merging others with a view to downsizing all.
Working from home, or telecommuting as it is sometimes called, was massively adopted in the Covid scare. The results were and still all criticised because many were treating working from home as gift of more leisure time. The ability to move one's laptop work station anywhere with an internet connection made the problem even more acute as pods gathered and partied on through the working day.
To this, Elon Musk applied the Pareto Principle, the finding that 20 per cent of the workers did all of the work, and created 100 per cent of the value. Thus, he sacked 80 per cent of his Twitter staff and found Twitter, now renamed X, did just as well without them.
Should Pareto Principle be applied at work generally, it would result in massive unemployment, undoubtedly accompanied by, cries for a guaranteed annual income. Such cries would be even more vociferous when one considers that driverless cars and buses would soon be augmented by pilotless, ships, trains and drones.
It has been widely assumed by greater minds than ours that a more peopled world would inevitably result in more geniuses being born to get us out of the problems we face.
What's more, the 15-minute cities from he minds of the dream engineers of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the like, do not as yet provide solutions to problems that confront us.
What is defined confines, they say. Because a 15-minute city is an ideal for one class of person, does not mean that will be suitable for another, much less all. Because the glut of unused commercial real estate becomes available does not mean it is suitable for occupancy by those needing housing.
What bureaucrats of the Deep, or administrative state, seek is uniformity and control. We do not have to go back to Soviet era, where much of those practices started. Still, a system of internal passports might well be revived. Less emotive a starting point with the creation of Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil to replace the old coastal capital Rio de Janeiro 722 miles to the south.
The intention was to have small self-contained and self-sufficient neighborhoods and uniform buildings with apartments of two or three different categories, where integration of upper and middle classes could take place. There have been other creations of new inland capital cities by abandoning old coastal ones, notably Australia's Canberra and Nigeria's Abuja.
And with their creation a resistance to allowing nature to take its course in favour of giving social engineers full rein to shape the future, or at least, appear to do so.
One reason Elon Musk gets away with the things he does is that regulators had not expected private individuals could or would do the things he does. They were simply unprepared to handle an individual who did things only government did.
The reason Donald Trump manages to do the many things in foreign affairs that he has done is because there are few regulatory agencies in his way. No one in the US outranks him, which gives him a free hand in dealing with fellow sovereign powers.
What must be accepted if there is to be any real progress, is that there must be a greater accommodation to danger, and that means a complete rejection of DEI, "diversity, equity, inclusion". At the core of these bogus social improvements is feminism and notions of gender equality.
The deleterious social impact of the progress of progressives is that it makes society as a whole prisoners of women's fears. Women are more fearful, more risk averse than men. One can find exceptions, of course, but exceptions are exceptional. The rule is the rule.
In the job market, a woman's childcare needs should rank no higher than another employee's overwhelming desire to take part in a golf tournament. A woman's childcare needs and a man's need to play golf have the same impact on the employer's profitability.
If a man or a woman join the US Marine Corps, they both should be shaved bald if that is the practice. The purpose is to cut recruits down to size, to humiliate them. Why should female recruits be treated any differently?
Why? Because we do not believe in gender equality as a working reality. Savage treatment meted out to men to toughen them up, is not meted out to women. That's because they are different and men do not want them toughened up any more than is absolutely necessary.
With diversity, equity and inclusion withering on the vine under an outpouring of scorn and derision, and Pareto Principles being more widely applied, one can expect massive female unemployment as fewer ladies with clipboards ticking boxes will be wanted on the voyage as health and safety becomes de-prioritized.
Henceforth, if an "ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure", then the cost of he application of constant preventive measures must be weighed against the cost of the occasional cure, to determine the least costly course.
It might also be an idea to have a portion of those universal annual income earners from developed countries living abroad, able to withdraw funds from ATMs worldwide, and if in a developing country have those withdrawals added to whatever foreign aid the country was receiving. |
