The looming death of capitalism and the population explosion?

During my extreme left wing era (which probably lasted about two years until I realised they were exactly the same as the extreme right wing, but with a different colour) I used to hold the opinion that people should be marching for the right NOT to work. Work, in my emerging mind, was a form of slavery in which we were beholden to the slave masters; the capitalists.
Strangely enough, that idea of mine, (or did I read it somewhere in one of the plethora of left wing books and journals that I read, or even in the realm of science fiction, of which I was and still am, a huge fan? I'm not too sure.) has evolved into an idea that, at sometime in the future, we won't need to work as the mechanisation of the workplace will be doing the work for us.
There are now tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people who will never be in continuous employment during their lifetime, because of mechanisation. Millions of people have been thrown out of work because of computers. Many of the younger people reading this will not have experience of the armies of clerks that were needed to get the paperwork done. They have mostly all gone. They will not remember the huge swathes of the population who used to work in factories; robots have taken over their monotonous jobs. Times have changed. We, as a global society, do not need all these workers.
So what do we do with all of those people who are excess to requirements? In the past that question didn't arise because we lost so many people through disease, famine and wars that we needed the 'working and middle classes' to keep producing children to fill the gaps left by their premature deaths. The advance in medicine, new surgical techniques, better food production and treaties put paid to this sort of levelling. The advances in technology have put paid to the jobs which have only exasperated the situation. Do we then hold back medical care for sections of the population with the hope that more people will die off? Do we increase global tensions to the extent that massive wars take place again? Maybe we have a combination of both? We cannot un-invent technology so something will have to be done, mostly in first and second world countries, to address this situation. Or do we really need to?
The global society we live in now makes this a problem solely because we live in a global society of capitalisation and finance. Capitalism is not the cure; it is the problem. As a species we can feed, house, educate and give medical care to all the peoples of this small planet while still supporting the advancement of technology. So what is stopping us from doing that? The answer, sadly, is money. Take money out of the equation and there is no 'problem'. Let us remember that 'money' is just the authority to get something done. Money is the lubricant to enable the society to function. Take away the 'society' and we don't need the money. Ironically, the late Margaret Thatcher was right (I paraphrase) when she said that: 'There is no such things as society' but not in the terms that she envisioned. 'There are only people'.
Yet, if we do not feed, house, educate and give medical care to those people who will, increasingly, be unemployable then we will have a breakdown of order. We will have riots and disorder breaking out all over the world. That is not capitalism, which the leaders of this planet espouse, it is, instead, a form of communism. Remember that this is not just affecting the great unwashed of the 'working classes' but, increasingly, the aspirational 'middle classes'. How many university graduates are unemployed, in their chosen profession, looking for work with little prospect of gaining employment in their chosen field? That figure will only increase as technology takes large bites out of their prospective employment as it has already done with the 'working classes'?
There are troubled times ahead and, until we accept the unthinkable, the potential for disorder will only increase. Capitalism will have to go. It has no future within a peaceful society. Capitalism, in the near future, will not save us, it will destroy us.

The pharmacy chip?

Caduceus

Isn't science & technology wonderful? This article on the BBC science website got me thinking. After reading the article I thought, "what a wonderful idea!". Then I thought of a more darker side. But let's not get depressed, just yet. Let's look at the potential benefits. Planting an electronic chip under the skin to remotely pump out drugs into a sick person's system when the programme, or a remote medic, recognises the patient's need for the drugs is, in my humble opinion, a fantastic idea. Eventually sick people, like diabetics, won't have to give themselves their insulin injections as the chip would be able to recognise the need for insulin and either automatically pump it straight into the body's system or inform a remote medic who can decide to send a message to the chip to start pumping. Diabetics, and other people suffering from a various list of diseases or abnormalities, will no longer need to remember to take their medicine; the chip will do that for them. They can then get on with living a fairly normal life. The chip will pump in the required drugs and monitor the patient giving the medic an almost instantaneous and continuous medical update. People at risk from heart attacks would have a chip subcutaneously inserted which, on detecting an approaching heart attack, will pump into their system the required drug and, more importantly, inform the remote medic that this patient is about to suffer from a heart attack. This system will save millions of lives. Now to the dark side.

We have all heard the scare stories about big brother being able to know exactly where we are by locating out mobile phones. Thereby allowing big brother to track our movements in time and space. However, for it to work we would need to carry the mobile phone [cell phone to you American cousins] with us. Having a memory like a sieve I am constantly forgetting my mobile thereby making it difficult for big brother to trace potential anti-government activists/terrorists [like myself or even you?]. Having a chip implanted under your skin obviates the need of Big Brother to trace their targets by their mobile phone. So, Big Brother gaining access to the medical computer, which observes the 'chipped' patients, under the guise of state security is such an easy step to take. But there is more. Imagine a state 'target' that the security services would wish were no longer a 'threat' to their society being remotely executed by the state by allowing certain chips to include cyanide, or some other drug, to be included along with the patient/target's medicine. Far fetched? Not so far fetched as one might think.

Amundsen, Scott and Nobu Shirase

Nobu Shirase

We all know about the great race to the Antarctic between Amundsen and Scott but how many of us have heard of  Nobu Shirase? I know I hadn't until I read an article in New Scientist. 

Shirase died in 1946, poverty-stricken and forgotten.

"Shirase was the victim of bad timing, says Ben McInnes, a Japanologist at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, Australia. "If Shirase had won government support, he would have reached Antarctica at the same time or perhaps earlier than Scott and Amundsen," he says. In the event, his efforts were eclipsed by those of his rivals."

These are the types of people I hold in deep respect. Those who are driven by an idea, no matter how stupid or daring, and strive to overcome the obstacles put in front of them. Long may these types of people exist.

What is time

It's that time of year again when the current year disappears [sooner if you live in Ufa, Russia. Hello Gyuzel & Alina. By the way, if you are reading this I have lost your phone numbers. :-( ] and a new one miraculously appears. If anyone has been watching the particle physicist Professor Brian Cox's television programme on the BBC-not the Dundee actor Brian Cox who slaughtered the obnoxious little Englander historian David Starkey on Question Time-called 'Wonders of the Universe' his first programme talks about time.

So what is time? If this was QI then I would be holding up my 'Nobody Knows' placard. The time we look at on our clocks and watches is an expression of time and not time itself. So if time is not what we think of it what is it? I've spent a long time trying to suss this out and have been doing somersaults in my head trying to understand this. I know, I should get a life. The only conclusion that I have managed to come to is that time IS the universe and all the quantum particles are just an expression of this. I remember reading a book, years ago, called:  The Planiverse by Alexander Dewdney in which he postulated the idea of a two-dimensional universe. It blew my mind and got me thinking-I still hadn't delved into the String Theory then. If you do prepare for a mind explosion-if it is possible to have a two-dimensional universe it must also have time because time, as we know it, is there to stop everything happening at once, therefore the Space Time Continuum, in our universe cannot exist without time. Multidimensional space therefore, according to String Theory, can only exist if there is time. The only constant in the Universe is time therefore the Universe must be time. So, what is it?

When you get down into the quantum world you see that particles are not really particles at all but expressions of wave forms. Imagine an ocean with various waves travelling over the ocean. Particles are just the peaks and troughs of those waves but the waves are just an expression of energy moving over the ocean, which is why a quantum particle can be in one place but all over the ocean at the same time. 

So, what has this got to do with the price of eggs?  Well, the true answer is that I don't know. Answers on a postcard please. Hope that I haven't muddled up your brain too much. Have a happy new year.