Reality Is A Farce

Today I got to read 2 extremely brilliant articles which propound a line of thought to which I subscribe whole-heartedly. Interestingly these articles might have seemed a bit politically incorrect had there not been an economic slowdown.

A little secret that will make the world fall apart

Most of the time, the valuelessness of money doesn't really matter. As in a Ponzi scheme or a run on the bank, unless everybody tries to cash out at the same time, nobody ever notices that the bank didn't actually still have all the money you gave it in deposits. Conversely, unless everybody tries to actually exchange their money for goods and services all at once, nobody realizes that the economy didn't actually have all the goods and services you thought you could pay for. When people realize it all of a sudden, that's when you get inflation.

-- Does not this post reflect the title of this blog itself!

The future is… boring

Computers again. We made text editors; text editors expand until they can read email. We made web browsers; now web authors spend half their time choosing an optimal shade of blue and tweaking animation timings. We made software installers with automatic downloading and dependency checking; now systems like Debian split each package into infinitesimal pieces just because they can. We made spreadsheets; they were done by 1995, so we added Clippy instead. We made fancy GUIs with detachable, customizable toolbars and subwindows; now we have non-detachable, non-customizable ribbons and tabs. We made email, then newsgroups, web forums, blogs, and now twitter; the same thing over and over.

And yet we keep trying. Technology fixes a problem, and then it overfixes it ...

-- Is not this the reason why our generations can fancy a 4-Hour Workweek? My father and his father’s father never had any time to kill…