Elite Underproduction

I assert that around the 1990s money started to disconnect with utility generation. Instead of the work week reducing in hours, with the advent of telecommunication, we start getting always-on-call jobs, yet people are paid basically the same. Productivity goes parabolic; median wages stay the same. You have to admit that there is something fishy about this, right? I think we basically have found a method to optimize towards a local maximum in productivity, but we are missing the strategies which lead us to a global maximum. And I think this method of optimization towards the maximum is basically serfdom.

Sometimes somebody, irrespective of class or formal education (but not practical education) does something that's actually a pretty big deal. The whole fundament on which humanity rests is actually pretty mundane people doing random stuff. If you're going to point fingers at something, it's probably the pathway to be determined by "society" as an "elite" which is frankly hilariously arbitrary. These paths are becoming increasingly narrow, and their ends are increasingly saturated. This means that people, who ultimately I like to imagine are simply working towards liberating themselves from the system. The system which they never ascented to participation in, but which runs such a perfect monopoly there is hardly a probable escape from. Kinda like some asshole putting together a hot toddy for the first time, why would you put eggs and hot ale together? Or how about the wheeled suitcase?

Were I to want to start a farm, I'd need to buy the property, and to do so I must work within the system for some years either to pay off debts outstanding or else to work until I could satisfy the upfront payment demanded, at that point I'm still subject to laws and codes, not withstanding taxes. I suspect certain portions of these codes necessitate some form of connection which forbids one from wholly living "off-grid". This discounts entirely any extraneous hopes, things like courting and family. In any case this is being drawn further and further from the realm of reasonable aspiration for the vast majority, and so they become increasingly hopeless. Some people are conditioned for groveling, others are not - and this is the emergence of one of the claws of instability.

There is also the consideration that the systems of yore are so thoroughly bred out of the American, and I suspect the Western span, that reliance on your neighbor would be akin to indenture, and soon enough one would find themselves a serf paying tribute to your lord rather than aceding to the satisfaction of a petty debt. It seems to me the only directive of the Western mode is transcending your fellows in the order of social echelon. This whole ideology is obviously flawed. The physicist doesn't exist without the farmer, just as the computer scientist wouldn't exist without the metals miners of the world. If anything we've managed to flip the proper order of the strata on its head, wherein the physicist is prized above those who make it possible for him, and the computer scientist, and the miners all to sustain themselves economically. The reality I think is that we're really all more equal than anyone would like to think, but the Western ideologies so long integrated into our culture have become invisible to its function - and they're wrong, and have been, and most were founded on silly pretense that has been further perverted to the point of total nonsense. From these divisions, a wing of the monstrous chaos is reared.

I imagine most don't want to be working around people who are incentivized to connive and lie for the sake of self. This is precisely what it is that the system as a whole tends to incentivize, and it seems that in the earliest days that criticisms by Amerindians towards their European counterparts espoused precisely that view. I imagine most people actually want legitimate messy, human interaction - this is something we're so averse to in the Western mode of life, that it tends to require a pretty sound cajoling with drugs to encourage and only briefly. And more and more it seems that we're being programmatically goaded into hardline categories through the media apparatus, one would hope automatically, driven by market forces, but the status quo has a vested interest in the division of people into ever-shrinking groups since it delaminates previously cohesive groups into molecules, and finally isolated atomics. This I suspect is the head crowning.

We're inhumane, we're inhuman, our culture is splintering because it has been perverted to the extent that the social contract under which we operate has so long been losing appeal so quickly nobody could possibly anticipate through their lifetime whether their subjugation will be worthwhile. The plainly erring "elite" aren't fit to subjugate a ballpit, let alone the countless masses of the globe. Let it burn.

Now, I'm not personally likely to discover any new physics, but I'm a physicist, and my bag is precision measurement. And it's a blast. It involves not only physics but also often optics, electronics, mechanics, math, and programming. It's recognized as a branch of physics, and is intensely experiment driven. Among the small handful of people who are crazy enough to be interested in all of those things at once, most are physicists.

Precision measurements are also an area where physics discoveries tend to escape the lab and end up in practical use. When a new effect is announced, I always wonder to myself: "When will they turn that effect into a sensor?" I can think of all kinds of measurements that benefit people, including GPS, atomic clocks, and blood oxygen sensors, that are practically all over the place.

The fulcrum of disagreement is the power of paradigm shifts. Paradigm shifts change how existing knowledge is interpreted, even by a feeble mind. These are, from what we can tell, randomly distributed. There is no indication that we are running out of them. If anything, their rate of discovery is increasing.

Since paradigm shifts are about prospective, not knowledge, there is no reason to believe they are limited. If anything, our growing knowledge base implies the next shifts will be more powerful than the prior ones.