Walking Commentary
Manchester to Rome 2021
I know there are people out there who think that calling something a ‘first world’ problem is elitist. The real ethical dilemmas are often the reverse of the correction. Does a quota system that manages for inequality discriminate against those that formerly had the upper hand? Does labelling for first or third reinforce the stereotypes? Probably but what other language do we have?
In a normal world, there are people who study deviations beyond the standard. There’s a conventional heuristic (rule of thumb) that our most significant interests fall within three standard deviations from the meanest of any measure.
I journaled here of a corporate presentation I titled ‘To 3σ and Beyond’. That, together with the opening paragraph today, are (bad) statistics-based jokes intended to refer to new learnings that may lurk within less than 6.7% of a range of products or data.
Some might argue that the giant tech companies are the Viking hordes of today. Today’s shopfronts might be likened to the walls of monasteries, masking a profound sense of loss after everything of value has been carried off, repurposed to the benefit of others.
Some have warned for decades that the tech giants need to be regulated otherwise they’ll recreate the monopolies like those of the American railways in the nineteenth century. The analogies for today’s supply chains include fibre as rail track and the servers as locomotives. Platform versus content. Utility versus consumable.
Jame Joyce thought that ‘Thought is the thought of thought’ or so he wrote in Ulysses which he started in 1914, at the beginning of The Great War, when people forgot to think and petty jealousies among Imperial cousins killed millions.
Rabindranath Tagore, while on a US tour in 1916, wrote that ‘You who live under the delusion that you are free, are every day sacrificing your freedom and humanity to this fetish of nationalism, living in the dense poisonous atmosphere of world-wide suspicion and greed and panic.’
8 Mar 2020 – noon GMT – 7°C Mostly Cloudy – Co. Longford, Ireland
Ireland had a general election recently. Moribund policies in discussion that brought about the election include housing, healthcare and pensions. The twelve-year economic recovery is not perceived as benefiting the majority of society that are working so hard to sustain it. And now an electorate desperate for change has voted into a position of strength a group that we suspected are run by an army council of shadow players.
However to focus on these issues is to miss a point. These issues may not be as important as one fundamental problem.
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