Tag Archives: Basic Pay

The Great Reveal

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First Blog 2021 2020 The Great Reveal
I wish all my readers a more successful year than 2020 was allowed to be… We have all learned many things: and must now put them to use.

It was also a year of many firsts, not only for me, but for almost everyone on the planet… for there are few places that have not been impacted by Covid-19. The most important first, for those of us who live in the more competitive parts, of global societies: it was the great reveal… All debt and no savings in pursuit of the financialised grail, left us [at too many National levels] high and dry, as public health systems buckled: under the unplanned for assault by nature, at its most vindictive.

And we are still no more than half way through this catastrophe. Financial systems fall apart due to the vanishing of hundreds of millions of marginal customers; yet stock markets plunge upwards at multiples more reminiscent of Japan 1980’s that anything seriously good… The promise of a sluice way of free money to the fortunate… and the horror of Depression for the GiG workers and the broad service sector… until?

So for all of us it this was the first of Firsts: the fundamental ineptitude and incompetence of the historical governance struktures. They had grown fat on decades of good living; that had corroded old rules and agreements: with the result that an outcome is in play that will change all our existences, in this simulation model we are entering… For never was Dylan more spot on with “The Times They are a Changing”.

I think of it as a SciFi year… I write Sci Fi crime adventure action stories against a backdrop that includes an idea called Basic Pay; or Universal Basic Income: as some others call it… Basic Pay is an idea that percolates, especially, in the footnote episodes in the series called The Jonker Memorandum. I took Asimov and Co’s “Credits”: and gave them some economic substance. I was writing what I believed to be fiction… : And here it is in real life … Wow!

Hence: SciFi year.

The closing argument over the two thousand dollars was deeply satisfying… Now we have to convince those converts how it can be paid for.

So with the change of guard immanent at the [so-called] White House… recently the scene of action more reminiscent of 1789 than 2021… The Global chess board is once again in play after a four-year delay… and many players have shown their hands … What hand will the former Senator from the tax haven First State of Delaware play… And let me say that this bloggist wishes him a long life to repair that which needs repair…

To close

This, shorter than standard for a blog of mine [new year’s resolution. After 21 months of writing 22 syllable poems every day… I am going to keep blogs to 500 words and so this is already too long.

Earlier above I spoke of nature at its most vindictive… For me nature was also a great reveal this past year; when first, huge parts of Siberia caught fire: and then later maybe somewhere else in Siberia, a 40,000-year-old Rhino was apparently un permafrosted.

Now, by way of relevant meaningful digression; some forty years ago this bloggist was escorted by security from the great hall at the university in what was then then not yet called Zimbabwe in 1979…

My crime, from the audience perspective … university students… was to point out, that trustable reports suggested that while the Soviet Union had some impressive space achievements they did not
somehow have the technology to dig through some sixty metres of permafrost to get the oil beneath it… So I gave them ten years before they imploded… The crowd were enraged and with chairs flying I left… The rest is history.

Now some mere four decades later… frozen territory that stood the test of time for forty thousand years has melted sufficient for such a reveal: as a forty-thousand-year old creature.

So if the planet is melting so much that Siberia is not only melting; but catching fire [along with other [places that have never known fire]. Then what if the long frozen highlands of Tibet, being mined for water by the occupiers of Tibet; and sent through tunnels north: inadvertently moved some ancient virus, that had on completion of Gaia’s last hit job been deep frozen… forty millennia back.

That’s the quick version … For your further entertainment here is a cluster of 22 syllable poems to close off on that topic
WhatIf: Fake News alert

SoHere
IsSomeNewsI
MadeUpWhatIfTheCo
RonaVirusIsAPlagueWrought
InAn

CientPre
BiblikalTime
ThatWreakedItsTollAndThen
WasDeepFrozenUntilThePla
NetWarms

UpMore
ThanRequiredIce
HasMeltedRiversRun
AndTunnelsSpunToMoveWater
Around

FromHigh
ErUpSouthTo
DrierDownNorthToFeed
DesertSandsWhereNothingGrowsBut
Peepil

YetBats
LiveInTunnels
FeedOnPassingNibbles
OfFleetFlawedFoodIngestCarrion
FromIce

SetFree
FromMeltingAn
CientFroZenLakesAndBats
InTurnIngestedBySnakesThen
Humans

AndLo
InTheWaysOf
NatureAVirusIs
RebornStartsItsPointNoPointBut
KlenZing
Jakari[‘20]

End of Invented News Story folks
Be well and safe until next we pass thru. Loves ya all
Nicholas

Konfession Time.

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Last week I was ambushed by a glib well practiced Flat-Earther, who left me, frankly, gobsmacked: and almost impossibly, to me: without an answer.

 

                          The experience made me realize something I had forgotten about in a rush of enthusiasm. It was this. Over the past year I have presented an argument with far too much seriousness, regarding Basic pay: and how to finance it….

   

               The sheer effrontery of my efforts have left all my readers so similarly gobsmacked, that to this moment, writing this, no one has yet raised any refutable argument against the idea. In a world almost committed to trolling the aisles of lunatic ideas I have been soundly almost curiously ignored. [Technically it is just part of the futility of being a Saharan/Namibian] grain of sand that thinks it can start a sandstorm. Not some conspiracy.]

 

                   So here is my apology for ranting on about something almost no one on the planet has ever given any thought to; and is, in its own way, as bizarre an idea as being earnestly informed, out off the blue, as it were, that the Earth is Flat, despite all protestations to the contrary.

 

                  That my ambusher last week could suggest, in all seriousness, that everything we have ever learned about the Earth, being a relatively solid ball of  tangible rock n mud flying through an ever expanding Multiverse, was/ is, disinformation… Or, in the language of our times: “Fake News”.

 

                    So here too is a full konfession. I write fiction. The piece of fiction about basic pay is an idea based on a phrase that emerged from an ‘out of body’ experience that I believe I had, nearly 25 years ago. That was when I apparently flatlined, for an inordinate time: during surgery for multiple gunshot wounds. In the language of that arch-fictioneer Lobsang Rampa, I took an astral journey that may, or may not, have been anything other than a morphine, whatever, induced hallucination.  That idea was what is today referred to as Universal Basic Income [UBI].

 

                   So what am I on about? Firstly:  I write poetic based Sci-Fi crime stories. I am also not a literary novelist.  My story, “The Jonker Memorandum” is set sometime between Now and Then.  Now is whatever it is when you read it [unless] Then is about a hundred and nineteen years later. The “unless” note, means you may read this after many things that were predicted to have happened along the way, have in the meantime become Now.

 

                    One of the things that becomes ‘Now’, is basic pay, something that  I wrote about in 1994 that has in the meantime begun the journey to become NOW…. only now, is referred to as Universal Basic Income [UBI]. In the marketing language of Product Life Cycle curves, UBI is in the Pre-Birth stage now after [from my perspective] gestating for a quarter century. The idea itself in its various forms has a much longer gestation time. And as we know, about 90 % of all disruptive Ideas, unlike babies, abort before birth occurs.

 

                   UBI is such an idea, that is currently experiencing some prospective miscarriage at te hands of its fondest semi-supporters.

 

                   So: What is UBI?

 

                   For me it is a fiction that solves an accounting and economics based problem that troubled the professional me, about a world running on credit [as our world does presently].

 

My present set of three stories: i.e. Part Four* of the Azanian Quartet is set over three eras: some parts of the first half of the 20th century, and two set in different parts of the 21st.  

 

 

                    In one of those latter two, Basic Pay [UBI] has become real… and as I have routinely repeated I write poetic fiction. It follows the realization that just as Marxist economics reached its apotheosis in 1989, so too [so-called] Neo-Liberal economics reached its own ideological sell by date in 2008, with the invention of Quantitative Easing [QE].

 


QE has spurred the global economy into a global casino economy; favouring oligopolies of all varieties: infesting things that once worked well. And as we all know it doesn’t matter how screwed up the political economy becomes: if you are one of the working ‘prekariat’: you still have to pay your rent and buy your own lunch.

 

                   The problem to be solved in the story was: how is Basic Pay financed. And that is the conundrum. Some of my ‘up to date’, favorite writers have come out in favour, in principle, of Basic Pay: f.i. Luce, Harari, Acemoglou among others. All have however expressed major reservations, in some cases on moral grounds; and more broadly, pure financial affordability grounds. The widely followed socialist economist Prof: Richard D Wolff on the other hand is adamantly opposed to UBI… and anything associated with it… not to mention how it could never be financed….

 

             Ironically Wolff completely validated, for me, an observation made by Professor Guy Standing, who is a fervent advocate for solving the pending widening and growing reality; of what he calls “the dangerous class” … “the New Prekariat”… a term he has coined: through the use of UBI.

 

Standing argues, that spokespersons for the left had an ideological blindspot, about the entire concept of UBI

 

           And indisputably in the old world we all lived in, UBI could not be comfortably financed with the instruments thatr we have used to fund “welfare” through the 20th century.

 

However we no longer live in that 20th century world: and haven’t now for nearly a dozen years. We now live in a world financed by QE…. aka Quantitative Easing. So how did we manage to finance a world using QE. QE btw is, for the uninitiated, is a polite term for mass printing of fake money on a scale that defies reason… without fueling hyperinflation. In fact what should have fueled a Zimbabwe or Venezuelan surge of prices has, to everyone’s confused horror, seemed to produce Deflation or at best Disinflation. Depending of course on what one chooses to measure.

 

            So the US dollar that should have made Venezuela look tame has simply pottered about…. Nonetheless the inflation is there albeit the effect has been a massive asset price bubble, world wide that is, in part, fueling the huge popular discontent noted globally.

 

            Had I encountered all my above informants varied financially founded oppositions before last year, then their thinking and mine: would have been broadly congruent.

 

           However it is now my opinion [for reasons I have shared with you] that their and my objections were /are pre-revolutionary. I mean, the FIR* transformation changes all things … Again.  And since I hardly think I am smarter that any of those aforementioned excellent writers… I choose to keep my proposed solution method, as a private fiction that I have tested on all of you on behalf of the character that introduces the financing idea, in the second part of the story mentioned above.

 

         Ok. So you can all relax. I haven’t gone mad and flat earthly-ish type weird: I am simply progressing with the background to my story with your tacit participation.

 

What predictions next then, when asking: What If?

  

            So when it comes to predictions here’s one for the road: so I can say Yay later.

 

Based on the current line up; I believe Senator Elizabeth Warren is the only person the Democrats can field, who can beat the Trumper in 2020: assuming she could beat the ‘Tweeds’ and secure the nomination.

 

*[The podcast ‘Jonker’ you will remember, is Part Three]

 

Cheers

 

!NiK[’19]

A Prekarian’s Prediction

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Those who are familiar with my fictional work know that I built a case for Universal Basic Income  [UBI] [I called it Basic Pay] in my podcast fictional serial “The Jonker Memorandum” which I began writing in 1994.

 

As part of that, I have previously mentioned that I also built a case for financing Basic Pay. At that time [the ‘90s] the source for basic pay, was based on the regressive idea of using the Known Tax base, because that was how it panned out in the old system.

 

We [ordinary people] didn’t know then about DATA: and how much it could be worth. Plus I was also writing fiction; and as someone who taught applied economics at high school level, was constantly provoked by wonderfully questioning, clever children, about how this thing I called “Basic Pay” [implied from such glorious SciFi writers as Heinlein and Asimov who called it “credits”] could be paid for.

 

In 1973, the subsequently proved prophet of “Future Shock” change: Alvin Toffler, wrote, in an article penned for Encounter Magazine: “What I have to say about the relationship of laws to life in a period of social revolution is more in the nature of notes and ruminations than a set of fixed or finished ideas”

 

So, in the spirit of Toffler’s musings, below in 220 syllables using my Xrappzi© poetry model, I have set out my “musings” for a case for Universal Basic Income: and shown how payment is already implicit in our newly evolved reality. These consolidated musings develop on previous musings in three blogs last year.

 

My purpose now with my 220 syllables below is to present some opportunistic political grouping out there, on the left, right or centre [preferably centre] amongst all the popular frenzy of political activity, with this understanding.

 

My suspicion is that some hungry Political Party, that actually grasps this reality, that all the comfortably employed Kleva’s seem  to be missing, that the Data Revolution has the potential to capture the swelling centre ground of the political spectrum. That is the part of society Professor Standing calls the “New Precariat”.
 

This space up to now seems crowded out by radicals at either end of an increasingly, obsolete political spectrum.

 

The Yellow Vest movement in Paris for instance could suddenly find a cause to riot about instead of simply venting rage.  They could now march to demand that “#Data must share Rent”.

 

Economic Rent btw, being an idea formulated by the “Greats” of Economic history, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo: and is completely absent in contemporary Economic textbooks… that in its quaint way completely ignore the reality that the financialised economy in which the west now lives is, as Professor Steve Keen calls it a “Rentier” economy.

 

Happiness is not good for radicals of any end. Happiness however should be the goal of all humans surely. In other words unlike all current futurists; and including the usually perceptive Professor Harari, who in his “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”, also sees UBI as some form of welfare payment.

 

Here it is then in 10 x 22 Xrappzi© syllables.

 

WelfareVersusUBI UBINotMoneyForNothing. DataMustShareRent

 

Welfare

IsToChari                       

TyWhatNeitherAreTo                                                            

DataWhichNowPresentsOurKnown                                               

Future.

 

LeftOf                                                                                             

CentreRightOf                           

CentreFocusOnThe                                                               

MiddleWherePrekarianPow                                                  

ErStands.

 

WeWho                                                                                          

SavedTheWorldAnd              

FailedToValueWhatWe                                                                 

GaveAreNowCondemmedToPov                                              

Erty?

 

InPlace                                                                                             

OfGlobalSta                                    

BilityAsWeReach                                                               

ForTheStarsWeGoNowToRage                                                      

InBars.

 

Struggle                                                                                           

HardAgainstIr                                  

RelevanceFollowing                    

DispossesionOfOurMind’s                                                           

QuaintPart.

 

It’sNot                                                                                            

AGrantNotA                           

Favour.ThereToReward                      

AllWhoSlaveUnpaidToSubmit                                                  

DATA.

 

Multi                                                                                    

PlyRawData’s                                     

ValueDemandOurDes                         

TinyReachGrabTheMeanest                                                     

Centre.

 

DATA                                                                   

MustShareRent                           

TodayPayForBytesAs                                

ForOurOilItshallNotSpoilTheChild                                                 

ForOnce.

 

DATA                                                             

ComesFromHuman                                                                

MindsMinedTodayForRent                                                    

HoorayColonisersOfMind                                                              

MustPay.

 

ForBytes                                                                                         

ByZettaTril                                                                

LionsAcquiredForFree                                                              

ThatIsMoneyForNothingNot                                                         

ForMe. 

 

SinceWe                                                                                          

KnowItWorksSo                       

WellWeNowDemandOur                                          

ShareOfRentYouGetFromWeWho                                            

GiveIt

 

Cheers.


!NiK[‘17519]

  

                                                                                                                                                        

Mental Kolonization: The New, ‘New World invasion’

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The Colonization of the Mind:


Never mind 1492: konsider 2018….
Mr. Z meets Kongress


In the fictional world that I have invented: and about which I am currently writing, circa 2037, an anomaly that did not exist before 2011 is remedied. As a result the concept of universal income in our reversion to a pre-industrial era neo-cottage services based economy, has become a reality.


However it is not something ‘given’ for ‘free’’ by the/ or even a/ State organisation… The era of centralized control we have known for the past few centuries rapidly disintegrates under the trend to quantum computing; linked to blockchains [aka distributed ledgers] & crypto currencies. Not to mention a host of corresponding trends and developments as yet as undiscovered: as was DATA at the teenage dawning of the era.


Universal Income becomes a concept based on trillions of micro payments, moving from businesses like Facebook [et al] to data owners, and back…. Creating a virtuous circle of satisfactions where the idea that Governments control all things: is as historical an idea as the one that says happiness is the destiny of humanity.


The future is a decentralized one.


Konfederacy rulz.


Pragmatically this has to happen: in order to sustain what is rapidly evolving into a globally, services based, AI dominated, robotically moved economy.


In that place to which we
Are
Evolving [in my fictional world,
Anyway] at
Breakneck speed, a majority of
Ordinary people does not
[Apparently] have the com
Petence to do any
Thing more complex than
Shop: and mutter
OMG.



The following piece of abstraction, disguised as poetic form, had a curiously viral progression in that past before 2037… through the annals of day to day existance: and slowly allowed the idea of liberation to filter into conciousness.


The Mind as the New world


We are witness now to what will
In decades to come, be seen as
A most momentous moment: in
The brief history of homo
Sapiens sapiens.
We are witness to
And participants in: the kolo
Nization of the mind.


When we [humans] colonized
[Allegedly empty] land
Back in the 15th cent
Ury; assuming everyone already
Living there
To be irrelevant to
Purpose
Mainly because they were
Undocumented, unlettered and
Innumerate
Primitives. We
[The invaders] simply
Appropriated the land and
Its bounty:
As we had done for
Thousands of years. This bounty
Became a cost
Free
Windfall
[Almost: unearned].


For instance, plundering
Entire mountains of silver in
South
America: bounty; from which
Inordinate profits could
Be generated: with little
Or no regard for
The source.


The most fascinating aspect of the recent interrogation of Mr. Z
Uckerburg by the Congress of the
Firmian elites… Senators and Representatives
Alike
Was the latter persons’ complete incomp
Rehension at the scale of what had
Happened: while they had been busy
Ruminating
On perennial peccadillo’s.


There was a disconcerting sense of
The time machine. Here was
Cortez meeting the
Aztec royalty, who were
Baffled
At this predicted even
Anticipated yet
Unexpected
Arrival.


Mysterious people, with
Serious intentions: and powerful,
Incomprehensible machinery. Then… whoops
Before they could say SH*T!! … They were in
History’s garbage bag.


In effect, the worthy Congresspersons became as one with the beguiled “Natives”, of many colonized lands: faced with the incomprehensible.


Therefore, they trotted
Out their
Memes and
Things; and each, thinking ‘stomach’
First, asked all the
Questions regarding the inhe
Rent trivia of Mr.
Z’s offence.


Not one
However of that
Kolektion of [apparently] f
Undamentally out of touch
Human’s e
Ven got to grips with the
Kore of the
Dilemma: facing their konstituents.


A Tji-Nyanees participant in a Davos debate
Earlier this year, spoke
Of a Grey Rhino effect, which
He explained represented
“Something so huge it completely
Obscured
The screen”.


The Grey Rhino here is
The word
DATA
And the
Kolonisation of the mind
That it represents.


Naturally the more cynical
Amongst us
May argue that ignoring
The grey rhino is essential to
The continuation
Of their pleasure: which
At heart concerns the Kolonisation of the mind.


Of course that would assume they understood what was happening.


What does this mean?


Simply this. Using the language of
Mr. Adam Smith…. He,
Famously, of The Wealth
Of Nations… Mr. Z
Uckerburg [and
His illustrious peers] are the most
Successful kolonizers of all
Time.


According to
The hype surrounding the man’s
Recent forage around the
Firmian Capitol’ he gains some 25
Billion dollars of
[Profit] annually from
Some 40 Billion $US
Revenue. In a competitive
World of
Razor thin margins that is beyond
HUGE.


The revenue comes from companies
That use the data given
So f
Reely by the b
Illions of
Users of his
‘Machine’.


They use the
Insights it presents to target
Prospects for product
Purchases, more efficiently
Than ever known.
Inherently, this means that, like
The Konquista
Dors, who found mountains
Of silver back in the 16th
Century; appropriated it from naïve
Possessors: like those
Who purchased Manhattan: for bags of
Beads; and
Achieved great
WEALTH.


Mr. Z [et al] have achieved a similar,
Inherently
‘Unearned income’. They are
The
El Supremo
Rentiers.


When Mssrs. Smith and
Ricardo talked of ‘Economic
Rent’, they were referring
To this windfall effect


Resulting from control over the product
Of a natural resource.


In this case, data
Emanating from a human
Source: the ultimate in a natural
Resource.


It also took about a hundred and
Fifty years then: for the penny
To drop too.


We hope the penny will drop
sooner, for humans
today or the rest
of the century could get seriously
rough: especially for those
absently
left behind.


Jerome Powell [new chairman of the Firmian Federal Reserve,] admitted
something in his opening salvo with
the same group of kongresspersons, earlier
this year;
that “The Slack”, to which he made constant
reference when justifying the
continuing,
no inflation trend
of the past decade:


In spite of allegedly: full employment
Conditions in Firmia.


“The Elliot curve is cracked,” they call…
“The mob in here, are all


In thrall to


The slack,” he said: “beyond the Wall”:


The
Fifty million people across the
World
Living daily off the Web… who
Are an almost infinite
Resource
at wage levels way below
Those of the Firmian
Norms.


No one
Has ever admitted that before:
Publically.


So in building Facebook Mr. Z’s true
genius lay in solving
one of humanities greatest
needs… to be in sharing kontakt
with one’s fellows
And
through the power of
digitalization he [and all
the rest of the merry
band of tech’ dudes] invented
The thing called
DATA… symbolically
Packaging James Surowieki’s: “Wisdom
of Crowds”. Hence


The DATA then… becomes the new
‘Goldfields’ now and the
Klondike rush is being relived: as they
ALL
Kapitalize on the window of
Oppor
Tunity by ‘mone
Tizing’ his “free” source
Of ‘data’.


And as with the Silver
Exchanges of past time glory
No mention in the exchange pays rent
to the source.


No wonder the planet is all messed up
And getting hotter by the day


As the greatest beneficiary of “unearned
Income” in history, the
Question the Kongresspersons should
Have been asking, related to that share of
Unearned income [i.e. Economic
Rent] that should be returning
To source, rewarding
Loyalty work
Presently
Given freely: in order
To sustain
And maintain their
Ability to keep feeding
The machine.


!NiK[‘18]


To all my fellow Jedi’s “May de Forth be wid ya”

Our Invisible friend

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Over the weekend I caught the tail end of a BBC interview with an Iraqi Jewish American artist, Michael Rakowitz, who has had an impressive piece of artwork assembled; and mounted on an historically vacant, fourth plinth, on London’s Trafalgar Square.


The artwork is a retrospective reproduction of a vandalized ‘Lamassu’: [“a Winged bull and protective deity”] that stood for 2800 years at the gates of Nineveh, awaiting the eventual arrivals, of the new barbarians, in the form of Daesh: now rebuilt from the detritus and discarded leftovers of modernity.


He calls it “The invisible enemy should not exist.”


The interviewer, Stephen Sackur, asked if his work had a political meaning, and was he therefore a ‘political’ artist since he couldn’t truly be a ‘commercial’ artist. According to Mr Sackur’s Q sheet, much of what he did was not saleable, reproducible, or scalable: or whatever the current re-interpretation of ‘commercial’ is.


In his answer, he indicated that he was an artist, who worked with his interpretation of his milieu, and therefore there would be an inevitable ‘political’ stream in the back-story. [Personally, I do suspect his Lamassu is infinitely scalable and reproducible, but that is not relevant to my point here]


His answer though caused me to pause and ask myself the same question. Am I a commercial writer of commercially satisfying stories that I aim to put in a place where their scalability will enable some form of remuneration… yes? OR. Am I an artist, in the vein of the late New York Jazz pianist Cecil Taylor………..described as a “visionary pianist” in the NY Daily News, and referred to in a different, earlier BBC newscast, as a person who followed his own path? As obviously does the Iraqi Jewish American artist Mr.Rikowitz …………


I was unable to arrive at a conclusion to that: considering myself a simple working class wordsmith. I am also not certain that most people would consider a poet to be an artist.


Nonetheless, I did have to concede that, on two levels, at least I am a completely ‘political’ writer. My evolving Azanian Quartet has two specific political purposes. I am going to share one of them with you now. I’m doing this because today is possibly the most auspicious opportunity that exists, for the human race to ascertain, that it discount’s the late Stephen Hawking’s gloomy prediction: that we would be lucky [the human race] to emerge intact from the 21st century.


I am referring to that glorious entrepreneur, Mr. Zuckerberg’s immanent Congressional Hearings … and the immensely elusive opportunity those hearings present for constructing a solution, to what is already, and going to be even more of, a problem of immense magnitude, by the time we reach the part of my quartet that is set in 2037.


I refer to the inevitable specter of mass scale, long-term structural unemployment, for which we have to create a remedy, that contributes to growth and developments, rather than subtracting from it. Currently everything being suggested is regressive.


My remedy, and #1 political issue of choice, was to identify and provide a viable [fictional] solution for this problem in the future. That remedy I called BASIC PAY: is now more popularly called: Universal Income.


I was always intrigued, as a life long ‘nonprofessional’ reader of science fiction: Asimov, Heinlein, Bester et al, by a particular feature of science based fiction writing. This was the use of the term “credits”, when the text called, somewhere, for how people lived in the future [now arriving at speed] They always spent ‘credits’… And since Credits suggested debt how did they pay for the debt?


What are these ‘credits’, I would ask me… where do they come from: and how are they financed? [Declaratory Note: I am not a scientist, I am part of an educator class of financial economist with a bent towards the history thereof and who writes poetry, because it ‘happens’.]


So: in many ways, my entertainment podcast, prose poetic cyber serial, The Jonker Memorandum, exists to provide that answer [as a by-product to telling you what I hope is a cool story]. I call it “Basic Pay”. After many years basic pay is now gaining traction as “Universal Income’: and as such has featured in the current political agenda’s of at least half a dozen countries, and is being punted by such glorious entrepreneurs as Mssrs: Gates and Musk. The problem however remains: how is it financed?


In the cyber serial, my solution of choice was the Transaction Levy [aka Tax]. However: that was then. And it is also on the subtraction side of our growth equation. That was though, before the tech revolution gave us DATA… and me: a writer of fiction, the new Tilling fields that yield the “New Gold”. Something Mr. Zuckerberg has so deftly demonstrated: and regrettably, so brutally abused. DaTA is/are the “New Goldfields”.


So the message that Mr. Z’ and the rest of the new tech ‘Wunderkinde’ should be getting from the Congress is simply this… Their discovery of the power inherent in DATA, contains and illustrates the legitimacy of ‘Universal Income’. Billions of people are contributing quadrillions of Data measures daily for remunerative algorithmic exploration which thus provides the basis for a complete reinvention of fundamental economics. Yes: i shall invoke such an extreme statement


Currently Mr. Z and his Silicon cohorts are implicitly [with no offence] the greatest slave-owners in human history. In the same way however that Spotify [for instance] pays a kontribution to each kontributor from each access, so too must those who ‘slave’ to provide content to the marvelous inventions of Mr. Z’s [and the rest] receive a similar contribution…. I.e. It is time that data starts to pay rent. #DATA must pay rent…


I call myself a poet so I conclude with the poem that will open the second stanza of Part 4 of my Azanian Quartet… My assumption is that by 2037 [the setting] … this moment [NOW] will have been the turning point in this, amazing new journey, on which we are kolektively embarked.


We gave our DATA freely to Mr. Z et al… they in return gave us free use of the toys they made. Then he/they found a way to collect rent… from our contribution… now we must be reimbursed our share for our belief in them. For the data freely given is still ours.


To rephrase Mr. Rakowitz: [with respect]


“The invisible friend that must
Be shown to exist”


Hear ye
Hear Ye


Some will strive
to
Achieve
Nietzschean validation – the
Povo*
Will become automatonotik
Fiddling witheir [sic]
Mobiles
Seeking to affirm their intrin
sic irrele
vance.


Nonetheless
Machines don’t buy things!!
They dispense.


On what basis should we
Perceive
Value.


Given the thrust of
a digital economy that
Konsrukt kalled
DATA
Is the land that must be
Mined for
GOLD.


Peepil become
Products
To be exploited for their
DATA value
Should they not
Receive their
Rightful
Fee?


In Gold?
Yeah gold
You say data is
The new gold.
No… I said it was the new land
Waiting to be mined: for what is in it.


Does it pay rent?
Not yet.


!NiK[‘18]


So there you have it. All Kongresspersons: the most truly
bipartisan goal it is possible to achieve,
on behalf of all humanity.


Thank you on their behalf.


Povo: Shona [Zimbabwe] meaning the ‘masses’ or ‘Mass’
pronounced PorVor.

Begin the Begin

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Howzit Tjina: welcome to Jakari’s blog.

Howzit?


This is a common greeting where I live, and about which I mostly write; so should you be someone who lives what I call, offshore, then know that you may not know that… So in addition Howzit! is often accompanied by the word “China”, which has nothing in common with the place of that name and although it sounds like china it is spelt Tjina.


So you may be meeting someone you don’t know and it is appropriate to be less than formal as with a blog… So Howzit China [aka: Tjina].


In introducing myself to Amazon readers[and those new to Jakari ], I am aware that quite reasonably, most will never have heard of me, and wonder immediately why they should join my band of curious readers/listeners. You would also not therefore know that I have been busy quietly introducing the future to readers all over the cyberverse [sic] for about 20 years now since that world arrived where I live.


Begin the Begin


So. I shall observe, simply, that I am by the standards of fashionable modernity someone who has been around a while [as have a few billion other unknown wannabe noticed persons …one of whom may be you.]


Therefore although I have been a ‘bloggist’ for 20 years now and have even been read occasionally; and nonetheless given this is my first Amazon based blog, since setting myself up as an author of creative work on Amazon, I wondered whether I should perhaps offer thoughts to a new source of reader and wander rather, randomly, over what I am, why I am what I am, and generally why I am increasingly concerned that something I created as fiction is becoming most disturbing.


On the other hand perhaps that will be simply boring. Decisions… decisions!


So recently on Christmas day, I sat on the Internet and played with Google… something I have had little time to do this past 7 years… in that my usage was overwhelmingly professionally oriented. I am now released from that demanding purpose and can more closely koncentrate on ME and my vision plus mission …. And YOU… my reader, listener and, inevitably, once I learn the delicate art of Vlogging: a … viewer; and not to be outdone or outmaneuvered, a participant in some interactions. As Fred’ Nietzsche put it “Now all things are possible.”


What I did on Google was find Wikipedia’s lists of earthquakes that have occurred since forever ago or more specifically about 2,400 years ago, in ancient China and the Middle East and elsewhere.


[And btw as a recently retired septuagenarian old style ‘schoolteacher’ I am aware that Wikipedia has its detraktors. I am also aware that I may infuriate the sensible reader by using the letter K where usual practice calls for the letter C. Those of you who are based in the USA and fear the disruptive effects of that rather curious President ‘Tsunami’ as I call him, who having been voted in is more than usually despised by his populace, as a rude disruptor and it must have been the year, for we were born then too.]


Therefore I invite my readers to check out the information I shall herewith share; and tell me that I am wrong and that my role as a writer of fiction has not suddenly morphed into some curious form of prophetic reality check, and that when I did my research I was too filled with good cheer and miscounted. It was the festive season after all.


My purpose was to establish the total number of particular ‘BIG’ seismic events: [earthquakes broadly] that have occurred more or less ever; and about which we can infer a scale equitable with Richter [Richter Scale: RS]. I was also only looking at earthquakes @ 6 or greater than 6 [RS], a scale roughly equitable with Hiroshima in 1945.


So I was categorizing the earthquakes in two sets: those before 1998 and those afterwards. Now please remember that I am a writer of fiction so, 1998 was the year when I chose a particular sequence of events that took place then, in South Asia. Given that I was searching for a disruption effect great enough to fuel the move to Universal Income and a means to pay for it, I played “what if”: and made that a central background part of my story, the Jonker Memorandum, and in the chaos that follows the event my heroine can act….


Again, because you didn’t know: The Jonker Memorandum [pronounced Yonka] is Part 3 of the Azanian Quartet; and has existed since 2010 on my website nicholasjakari.com that has been visited many times and puzzled many. It took four years of weekend recording sessions in my garden to konstrukt, what I refer to, as the greatest one-man show ever [in my particular genre]. The final episode went up in 2014.


In my self imposed role as a down-market, essentially working class, contrarian mediator in the learning of things Economical amongst frequently less than avid learners, I had in mind the idea, that in the part of the story that is in “The Future”, the masses [Orwell’s Proles] live on what I call “Basic Pay” [An idea that is now increasingly touted as “Universal Income” an idea with which I strongly approve especially since I became older: and generally remained poor].


In point of fact as the themes evolved I realised that everyone lives on it [in the future] … never mind the Proles… Developments in AI, Quantum computing… which promises to be to digital, what digital was to steam… plus, plus, plus… et al … indicate a future in which work, as it was known is HISTORY. Basic Pay is inevitable… self-employment is inevitable on a dramatic scale… how can it work?


In addition to the idea of Basic pay and because the children in my care demanded it, I [plus the ‘demanders’ ] also had to consider how it could be financed or even afforded; something that seems to have been overlooked by most science fiction writers and those others actually actively promoting the idea.


A key evolving methodology seems to be involving… perhaps… a transaction levy… requiring dealing with hugely, insurmountable blocks of vested interests, at the heart of the “system” [however you choose to define it]. Discussions on that topic could keep people employed for ever… and what if we don’t have forever [fiction remember] … Or perhaps there is some other idea, such as one that is now at the heart of Part 4’s evolution, as the closing part of the Azanian Quartet and will be on Amazon later this year.


So back in 1998 I was wrestling with this [relatively unoriginal] idea that I had, which is really only a back-story part of the background to the main sci fi adventure crime story, in the knowledge, that neither idea was feasible in almost any term, short of a disruption effect on a monumental scale … so huge that the entire planet’s destiny was almost terminally; or certainly irrevocably changed.


So since I write fiction and since, like many of my fellow-now-aging-those-of-us still-surviving, wild kolonial boys, I had learned long ago about a military, firearms usage procedure, called the “Double Tap”: and serendipitously in that same year [1998] while in search of raw material for plots and themes, I had occasion to encounter the “double tap” method at the hands of a practicing expert.


It was done under the specialized supervision of a man, who was, some years later, arrested on an Interpol International arrest warrant, for [allegedly] 49 professional murders: and may therefore be seriously considered as an expert on the use of that double tap method. Albeit I did not then, know, that previously unshared information… albeit his general after action beer conversation was loaded with the usual conspiracy stuff.


But nonetheless I was then, contemplating the truthfulness of his affirmation; that the second shot amplifies the power of the first shot, by 500%, and by extension, I wondered: the second by the third et al to 6..


The news of the tit for tat bang, bang: by the two contenders for influence in that south Asian region, was routine fare in a place always desperately shifting attention elsewhere, in a variation of the standard national scapegoating exercises practiced in most localities.


Nonetheless. They [the two South Asian nations] were, to me, nestling on a great big piece of tectonic geology called the Himalayas: and ‘what if “ was a given.


In other words you will recollect that two competing regions in South Asia began a six-bomb test consecutive blast interregnum of underground nuclear explosions later in that same year, 1998.


Each was allegedly about 2.5RS.


I speculated … What if this is a Nuclear Triple double tap … 2500 x500% x500%x500% x500%x … = huge times… Maybe massive on Richter.


I write fiction remember. I checked out my idea over the years with ‘klevas’… people ranging from ordinary scientific types focused on classroom physics and chemistry, to Nuclear scientists and climate change people who all confirmed that I was writing fiction… and I went on… feeling ok.


The effect of what I have thus called: “The Ringing’, was global disruption. This was characterized by a sequence of flooding and tsunamis that I ‘created’ together with the mass scale disruption that followed the changes to the climate that I hypothesized over the next period of time. All this was part of the back-story to my tale of robbery and murder. In fact the explanatory chapters are simply headed as Footnotes. [For instance the footnote chapter in which the region I call Keiretsu [aka Japan/Nippon] was engulfed by a tsunami went up one week before the recent tsunami that devastated parts of the country and ruined a nuclear power station…. Elsewhere [Chapter 10.] the trouble starts after an airliner disappears in flight … published two years before an airliner disappeared]


And that ‘disruption’ of course; that idea changed the real story. And while I dealt with that need, which took a few years, I put together “7Ways to get your money” from notes I had made during the time after I became a ‘returnee refugee’ in this country where I now live. I had inadvertently, seriously annoyed the man who became the post liberation Dictator, of Zimbabwe; ultimately being forced out in a recent coup after 37 bloodstained years. So I had to exit post-liberation Zimbabwe, in something of a hurry: with my wife, two babies, four dogs and four cats in an old Volkswagen panel van; that blew up at the entrance to what I now call the Dome surrounding the Mega Unicity most of us call Jozi.


It was a time when a ‘sixties drop out’ had to come in from the cold; and make big money fast, in a place, that was itself, on a steeply slippery slope… to its own ultimate oblivion.


The Dome btw is an idea represented by the multilane high speed ring road that surrounds the inner city of Jozi, in Mzansi, where I have lived on and off ever since the 60’s, having relocated to Zimbabwe, in the ‘70’s as part of my ‘drop out’ period some years earlier, when it was still a naughty, disruptive, now failed, Kolonial experiment, with other people’s places.


The ‘other people’ wanted to go back to how things were before any koloniste arrived; and have successfully returned to the 17th century they sought. They are now displeased with the result… but that is another tale altogether and is otherwise irrelevant.


So 7Ways is a Prelude to the Azanian Quartet: a tale of many revolutions. 7Ways represents the world of relative order that makes everything possible. The Azanian Quartet is implicitly a metaphorical story about how the world ended, and what happened afterwards. It is also a story about the ambiguity of memory regarding how it all happened. It is also a story that gains more relevance in what has now after ten years of Quantitative Easing [QE] become a planet running on about one point three quadzillion US$ worth of global debt: meaning that getting the money is now more urgent than ever before.


Which brings us back to my Wikipedia search.


Allowing for some marginal calculation error… Wikipedia lists many earthquakes below 6 on the Richter scale… so I may have miscalculated here and there or over calculated elsewhere. And for all I know I may have been on the wrong page. I am still at heart a techno moronic, aging, baby boomer.


Pre 1998; going back 2400 ish odd years.
Slightly more than 400.
Specifically 413 … [four hundred and thirteen]. Subject as mentioned to korektion.


Post 1998. The next 19 [nineteen] years
Slightly more than 400.
Specifically 414. [Four hundred and fourteen.]


Perhaps you can understand why I am worried about my fiction writing skills. Tell me its imagination… or that I’m reviewing usage through a naughty Wikipedia page, which is…. Not appropriately Peer reviewed, is it?


For clarity purposes.


*You have access to the Prelude: 7Ways. Available now on Amazon. @ https://www.amazon.com/author/nicholasjakari
**Part 1 of the Azanian Quartet : The Buffalo Hunters is currently with an editor undergoing some surgery and should be available, end February 2018.
*** Part 2 The Ashanti Raider will be online by end April 2018.
**** Part 3 The Jonker Memorandum an 84 episode podcast cyber serial is available for your listening pleasure online at nicholasjakari.com


They are not sequential other than in order of writing so you can listen in pleasure. Many of my listeners are bed bound invalids and other resting persons. And like Mr. Nietzsche [whom I played for the world international Konference celebrating the centenary of that Philosopher at Pretoria University in 2000 AD] many of the ideas presented in that story have become common usage now since some 10million hits have occurred on my website many of them from people, say about 10%]


***** Part 4 is still under konstruktion and has passed the three quarters mark targeted to be ready by August 2018.


Hope to have you back again soon
Regards
Nicholas Jakari.
And don’t forget to buy the ebook.

Ruminations on Basic Pay

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Also known as the inevitability of Universal Income.

“ In the 21st Century we might witness the creation of a new massive class: people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value, who contribute nothing to the prosperity, power and glory of society.”
Homo Deus p325.
Yuval Noah Harari


This statement by the author: Harari comes at the climax of what could be the most brilliant sustained piece of writing that this bloggist has encountered in years. The writing is more brilliant for being extended over two masterpieces of modern writing: Sapiens and Homo Deus: for which I would recommend the author for a Nobel Prize in literature. For the “times, that were changing” reported by a recent, past winner, Bob Dylan have sneaked up and abruptly arrived: on steroids.


The veracity of Harari’s premise is thus well timed. It arrived at precisely that moment in history that the exponential pace of technological development, has so outpaced the capacity of humans to keep up with the changes, taking place in the macro world, that the possibility of an accident kicking off something that is fast running, means we could once again be on the edge of a cataclysm, the likes of which we have not experienced since the last one a century ago… when progress went into steep decline: and put us all through a century of violent disruption: Stalling time.


A while back I came across some thing published, that I had written, as the closing paragraph, to an editorial piece at a different time in the past: The op/ed piece was broadly a comment on Mr. Alvin Toffler’s book: ‘Future Shock’…. I finished with the following comment on Toffler’s vision: “The alternatives are clear: either we train people to adapt to the future, or, in Toffler’s words, ‘we are doomed to a massive adaptational breakdown.’”


And what could be a greater “adaptational breakdown” than that represented by the “New Lefties” i.e. those now referred to as the “Left Behind” … what Hannah Arendt referred to as “The Mob”…. And for whom George Orwell, less politely, coined “Proles”. Such a phenomenon apparently elected to BREXIT, in the trending from formerly Great Britain to global britain; and put America’s first ever [perhaps] ‘Working Class’ President into power in that ‘Firmian’ Republic. Tsunami, is a “brash Blu Hawk real estate developer”; as said by a Republican Grandee on Bloomberg a moment ago as I wrote this … he spoke as if describing a Martian alien, who had just walked uninvited into the men’s room.


And then of course Le Bleu’s did the same thing; voting for the least disliked option rather than someone who could do them any good… They all promise to do that, don’t they?


And the ‘Left Behind’ are obviously in the majority… and in case you are confusing them with “New Left”: many are, in effect, new ‘Right’ [whatever that is]. They are an inter and intra class phenomenon, notwithstanding that the Brash Blu Hawker… a man who hustled buildings for a living, will not be permitted [they think] to implement his agenda, even though his agenda does not really lack any more purpose, than the agenda’s of all those others, who promised things: and then [often sensibly] compromised on the delivery: and then struggled to deliver, in the face of ferociously frantic; furiously factional vested interest groupings.


Further on into the article, that I happened upon serendipitously last year, in the midst of Mzansi’s # FeesMustFall: University ‘disrupting season’, I wrote:
“The future shock problem is viewed in many Western circles with such seriousness that a number of influential bodies, among them the ‘Club of Rome’ have gone so far as to recommend a moratorium on technological developments while the human race catches up, and gets it breath back”.


Well it never happened did it…: In fact during this past month listening to the radio local news and opinion discussions on day to day events I have lost count of the frequency with which the ‘approved’ spokespersons, on a range of topics, cite, improving education: as a solution to the problem of ‘ADAPTATIONAL BREAKDOWN”S.



Yet Mzansi, for instance, spends a huge percentage of GDP, relative to most of its chosen peers, for, apparently, as little gain as those Brexiting, President Tsunami/Le Bleu’s stricken peers have apparently gained, in the time since I wrote the piece from which I have quoted. It was published in August of 1978… [i.e:39 years ago this past month] In a magazine that no longer exists: in a country that, likewise, no longer exists.*


So we didn’t put the tech’ development process aside; and by the well known Moore’s Law dictum whereby processing power doubles every 18 months that means that the tech world has taken 26 steps, during the time that we more Linear thinking human beings have moved 39 steps… and that is only referring to those that have been moving forward.


Unfortunately the message attributable to the New Lefties, is, that they seemingly moved, more or less one step: 39 times. Meanwhile 26 steps in exponential language, [What was called Geometric Progression in high school mathematics] in the expanding macro environment is [assume each step to be a meter] more than Thirty Three Million meters. No wonder the poor NL’s feel left behind. Almost everyone is left behind.


And so it is likely that many are working on the edge of the new economy. The characteristic of the old economy, that replaced the frugal subsistence of the previous 70,000 plus years, was “Nasty brutish and short”. It was and often still is, a condition in which workers were treated like machines; and conditions were inhumane. The early behaviourist: B. F. Skinner observed then, apparently in all seriousness, that: “The real problem is not whether machines think; but whether humans do.”


Eventually the cost and legalities of fixing the horror of mass employment raised the cost of production, above what the corresponding, mass consumer market sought out: absolute rock bottom price points. So there was a clash thus, between the people who wanted to be wonderfully well rewarded, for doing something mundane: [me for instance] while simultaneously wanting as much blood as could conceivably be extracted from every stone.


And so tech has solved the inhumane aspect of mass production, to desired scales, through replacing humans with real machines that are rapidly, apparently, taking on tasks that require far more than simple manual dexterity.


True ‘thinking machines’ are evolving; and part of the world … even many of the [so-called] Globalists themselves, stare at prospektive superfluity. This as the emerging trend to kwantum komputing takes tech’s exponential journey Kwantum simultaneously, to more than a billion meters in only 5 more steps. Truly; to be left behind in such a maelstrom of evolutionary expansion is almost… normal.


In the meantime in our own part of the world I was shocked recently, to read, as part of an opinion piece published in the Jozi Star on the eve of the “Youth Day” weekend this year, a piece of information that took the idea of “Left Behind” to an unprecedented level… for me.


The piece carried the byline of a Mr. Jeff Radebe, the 5000:1 outsider for the job of President of the ruling party; and later the country, should the present ruling party win the next election again: Something within reasonable probability. As a rule politicians tend to be pretty close to the 39 step by step linear process, which is still a way ahead of NL’s trend, you’ll gather..


Radebe’s piece was broadly one of the most powerful evaluations of the idea of ‘Future to shock’ that one has come across from a sitting politician in many years. He laid out a blueprint for what had to happen, for Mzansi’s and more broadly Afrika’s emerging transformation; in order to marginally keep pace with the techno/economically evolving 21st century. The piece certainly revealed the thoughtful appreciation of someone who perhaps had covered a few hundred meters over the 39 steps…


In fact when one evaluates the alleged negative behaviour of the all the allegedly naughty President’s persons, routinely reported in a broadly unsympathetik media environment, in the kontext of what Minister Radebe presents as the stark reality of Afrika’s dilemma, then one kan understand the instinctive desire to grab the money and run, when the opportunity presents, for opportunity comes only meagerly.


So what was the shock that triggered this response?


In that part of the op/ed piece where he deals with the relevance of FIR * to Mzansi in particular, Mr. Radebe makes an astounding assertion. [* FIR = the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution a name given to this historical period which is to be characterized by the evolution of [AI] Artificial Intelligence].


Mr. Radebe asserts, that in a continent of some 880 million people more than 600 million, live presently, in a pre-electric world… a world essentially before “steps” were even considered.


To put that into perspective… Electricity represents the second industrial revolution…. [The one everyone learns about at school was based on steam, you’ll remember.] I don’t know how valid Minister Radebe’s statement is, in a world typified by ‘fake’ news lately. No references are identified in support of the assertion: I am simply assuming, rightly or wrongly, that the Minister is using staff resources to establish accurate information.


In other words nearly 70% of the people on the entire Kontinent have not yet encountered the 2nd Industrial Revolution in any meaningful way… Now that is what you kan validly call “Left Behind”. How does one contemplate developing a place that has to cover more than a billion steps just to catch up: with no idea how to do so? [unless somebody else has a betta plan]


A recent piece in the Economist raised questions regarding how an Afrika emerging from a pre-industrial era … [Mr. Radebe’s point regarding those most truly ‘Left Behind’] can progress in a world where machines that work for capital redemption, are superseding well paid cost centres, called manual workers [and those in routine clerical, for that matter]. They suggest that Afrika will have to find a new way… They were unable to suggest one however.


There is one solution, as a palliative to what is impending. I would not suggest thjat it is the only one it is however the one most likely to prevail eventually. It is the combination of VBasic Pay aka A Universal Income… linked to a levy on transactions in specific new areas of activity. I have as many of you know, promoted the idea of Basic Pay for years now. What else will there be other than Basic Pay for an increasing mass of overwhelming humanity… aka Universal Income [U.I.]. There are experiments in U I taking place in parts of Groland, currently, and of course in Mzansi, where i eke out my own pittance, there are presently 17,000,000 people living on a meager dose of basic pay… with close to zero chance of ever finding anything else.


So what does this mean
For the future
Of everything…?
Logically:
The Monetisation of
Humanity
Through data derived
Micropayments.


!NiK[17]

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Some weeks ago The Citizen published an AFP piece on the growing acceptance of what I call “Basic Pay” and their headline called “Universal income finding favour” [2 Feb, 2017].
 
I anticipated a flood of random outraged/acrimonious/ responses and have: either missed them, or they didn’t happen. This is odd since this subject should be the biggest subject in the country … never mind the world. We may well discover its completely hidden role in maintaining order, should the threatened ending on March 31st of the contract to supply 17,000,000 [seventeen million] persons with “Basic Pay”, RSA style, come to pass.
 
Then we may well discover it to be a mechanism to stave off mass conflict with those alleged to be, according to your correspondent; with reference to the recent Swiss, first round referendum on the subject, rewarding “… the lazy and the feckless” beneficiaries. While in reality they have [regrettably] committed an ancient sin of being superfluous to need.
 
Late last year you published a Gwynne Dyer piece, called “Half the jobs are going”, which I used as a discussion piece for a year end 9th grade exam. It was one of a rising tide of such articles appearing over the past few years. Simultaneously while U.S. Pres Trump is making much of his ‘bring back the workers’ theme there is growing evidence, some reported for instance this past week on the Bloomberg channel, that only about 20% of the jobs were lost to ‘cheaper’ venues from the Manufacturing industries of the USA over the past three decades; were actually lost to cheaper offshore labour.
 

80% apparently was lost to automation.
 
And this was obvious to me some 23 years ago when I began writing a futuristic [fictional story] called the Jonker Memorandum*. Aside from being intended as entertainment, the story also contains, the fact of Basic Pay and its associated Digital accomplice, The Transaction Levy [also loosely known as a Transaction tax or a Tobin tax,] as well as some ‘historical’ comment on some of the economic arguments used to justify it. This idea is currently under review in a number of quarters and China recently indicated they would be introducing it on a zero based level to begin with.
 
My site has, since its inception in 2011 attracted some 7,000,000 hits, mostly from machines, but also by some human persons: adding my arguments to the global debate.
 
In constructing my fictional world I embraced many of the ideas proponents are postulating in your AFP piece, albeit one of two departures is in your opening line… Rather than promoting basic i.e. ‘Universal’ pay in my story as a “Utopian idea” it is rather, a solution for an increasingly dystopian environment… a world increasingly perceived as less and less egalitarian.
 
Most obviously a world that continues to pour out an ever increasing mass of persons for whom no form of employment will ever exist, beyond new evolutions of self employment, is one facing mass scale disaffection; as is being revealed via BREXIT, Trumpism and a range of similar psychic reversal leaps in “LEFT BEHIND!!!!”current thinking.
 
Therefore different ways of managing survival calls for a complete re-evaluation of our understanding of the role of money [as opposed to wealth] in the world and so my story is at heart a sales pitch for the introduction of these tools [Basic Pay and the Transaction Levy] into society. If we can survive Quantitative easing to the rich why shouldn’t the same system work for the poor… at least they will spend the money: and the world’s problem [at east one of them] as the Federal Reserve keeps telling us, is an absence of demand.
 
Those unenlightened Neo Luddite persona who envisage “Taxing ROBOTS”, as your correspondent’s “Benoit Hamon surprise Socialist candidate” for Frances’s pending elections suggests, or more latterly, and surprisingly, Mr. Bill Gates suggests, have completely lost the plot regarding the destiny of both the human race and the future of the “Internet of Things”.
 
I chose with difficulty to write fiction, because by inclination I prefer poetry. So I wrote what eventually became an 84 episode allegoric prose poetic podcast cyber serial, over a period of years from 1994 to final episode uploaded in 2014. When I started on the journey I realized that it would take disruption of the most terminal type to bring about the revolution posed by basic pay and the transaction levy, so I used an event in 1998 as the trigger for a wave of disruptive tsunamis and other seismic phenomena that completely changes the dynamics of the planet; during which my Heroine introduces the idea as a solution to chaos.
 
Over the past years since I wrote and then read the world a “bedtime story’” a la Podcasting, I have noted [with concern, after all I thought I was writing fiction] that a disturbing number of things predicted as part of my story have become reality. Included amongst these is that, apparently, the mechanization of work has advanced to such a degree that three years ago in 2014 a Hong Kong based venture capital company, Deep Knowledge Ventures, achieved a world first: appointing an Algorithm to their board with equal voting rights to the other five [human] board members*. Current indications are that the algorithm performs better than the humans.
 
In closing I would mention that my position on the inevitability of Basic Pay financed through the Financial levy was first influenced and then founded by me on the following observation by Wassily Leontif [Nobel Economist 1983] who noted [then] that “The role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses … was first diminished: and then eliminated. Technology” he concluded, “can sever the link between infinite desires and full employment.”
 
Given the almost complete disappearance of horses from daily life can any statement have been more prescient?
 
Thank you.

* Ref: Homo deus Yuval Noah Harari. p322

Enter Basic Pay

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As my readers will know,because you’ve been following me for a while,the inevitable ending of our present track will be the replacement of most ordinary work by machine managed operations. This means that for the vast mass of the exploding human race population explosion most will have nothing of any significance to do in order to keep body and soul together. We are even on the cusp of making agricultural workers obsolete.
 

I write fiction and blogs n things and i wrote this blog that follows, based on two stories that appeared in the Business Report section of the local Star Newspaper on the 24th this month.
 
It was written as if to them, but since there is no certainty that it would pass muster to fill diminishing space, it will be on my blogsite, with tags to their edition.
 
Some weeks ago Business Report [BR] published a letter from a person in a place called Mount Edgecombe who wrote that: [BR headline] “Leader’s beliefs entirely opposed to their portfolios”. [BR: Monday May 23 2016.]
 
That headline came to mind when read I the BR Op-ed piece on the 24th [May] by Dr Thami Mazwai. [A Starting point for the State to help fortify small business.]. The writer gives such grudging concessions to the very idea of: “MARKETS!??” that I was left wondering what his actual understanding of ‘business’ was: enabling someone to buy what you want to sell to them? Hard routinely dispiriting work..or dealing with only one customer… the State…. And is that actually business? we were not informed about that.

 

I bear no philosophical grudge against the idea of governments facilitating developing small businesses either. I simply moved on from his resumé/litany of depressingly same ole same ole “we must do this, we must do that…” Surely it is time for a few: “We have done’s?”.

 

I did note too, the sentence in paragraph 6 that said “… that government spent R7,3 billion annually in support of small, medium and micro enterprises.”

 

So I moved on; and a headline in the International section caught my eye: “Swiss look at $2500 for DOING NOTHING!” The Swiss are voting to eradicate most welfare payments in return for a national basic wage payable equally to all [presumably: citizens] Wow! Basic Pay. At last a rational move, from a rational people.

 

The details of it are vague. Nonetheless Basic Pay is an idea I adopted back in the day, as a fictional idea for a work of fiction, and have promoted for 22 years, in promoting my fiction. It was cool to see it headlined at last and we shall establish the present extent to which the idea remains fictional.

 

And then I remembered the SEVEN point three BILLION and I sat down and I wrote down the following equation: What if: 7,300,000,000 is divided by 17,000,000 welfare recipients [BR recent budget report refers]? What would that equals?

 

Answer R132.73. p.a. Not much: A cup of coffee in Dubai.

 

The same equation with the 204.6 billion spent on actual welfare transfers, in the latest budget, was only R12035.31 PA. Again: not much albeit it is keeping 17,000,000 people alive, which was never the natural environment’s intention*. (*Tag`; ‘Reader. John’]

 

Now I would dispute the point made by Dr Mazwai, that the international start up business failure rate is 50% [Paragraph 5]. And that therefore for some weird reason, there must be something wrong with us because we are “5 out of 7” [or 71%]. Depending on size of sample and locations, most places are higher than 50. We have always been higher. In fact most estimates I have read over the years are in the 80% range so the Minister’s observation reflects an improved perspective. This is good because right now there is growing, reported, concern, that the trend in the total number of new start-ups in ‘home of business’ USA [for instance] is disturbingly less than in the past. There is no indication either that the fewer start-ups have an improved success rate.
 

There are businesses that owe their existence to the task [often Sisyphean] of reducing that failure rate. [When I say always, I am mindful that the country’s infancy was rooted in, initially, monopoly control of business opportunities in an encroaching band of territory by an early multi-national corporation: de Dutch East India Company … a period that extended through other means as well for a considerable time thereafter until after liberation.]

 

In fact self-reliance has actually been a hallmark of South African development. But the number who can manage self-reliance is thin. And thus many commentators, in your various supplements, routinely refer to our low, entrepreneurial, enterprise oriented populace, by comparison with such places as, for instance Chile, and more brusquely with those who are, as Dr Mazwai points out, subject to “intermittent explosions”. However our citizenry is really rather normal in this regard, risk taking is often bad for survival, so sensible people attempt to minimize risk. Crazy people start great companies… with no disrespect to those magnificent spirits.

 

So logically, the Swiss should vote YES. After all they have a similar problem to us, being that most people, even there, are not naturally entrepreneurial. Therefore it could actually be cheaper to give everyone a basic guarantee, [“According to need” as Marx observed in his Critique of the Gotha Programme]. Lose job, register online, receive basic guarantee through guarantee credited to account in finance house of choice [not withdrawable [sic] as cash], find new job, tax registration online suspends guarantee until next time. Simple. And: all done by machines. Presumably the place [Switzerland] has modestly effective compliance rates

 

This means it could also save the administrative cost of maintaining an otherwise under-productive, swelling bureaucratic edifice, to facilitate determining who should have the right to receive a slice from a complex welfare payments web: something that will inevitably raise the number seeking productive work… albeit that should in turn produce a surplus that could be added to the stipend.

 

It could nonetheless reduce the number of business start up failures, [for reasons that would perhaps be beyond the scope of this specific blog]. And that would be beneficial to the economy.

 

Obfuscatorily [sic], it would also require a subtle re-engineering of the overall tax system, to move from its present broadly, historically onerous, direct taxation levels with their often violent origins in a pre digital physical world: to less noticeably painful, micro deductions congruent with a digitalised world. These will be made to accommodate the introduction of the Transaction levy concept; as the Chinese have begun, to do, with their introduction of the [presently zero-rated] “Tobin Tax”.

 

On the other hand, of course, a myriad lifetime’s of memes, expressively symbolic of your “DOING NOTHING” headline, will more probably kick in this time, and so the Swiss vote may only pass, on about the fourth attempt… when the current wave of impending doldrums causes serious evaluation of the unintended costs of welfare.

 

Perhaps though it could be argued that Consumption is a job. I did mention that I write fiction, didn’t i?

 

But pass it eventually will. It is part of the future of Public finance, along with the transaction levy; recently nudging into re-existence, now in China… presently and cautiously limited to Currency trades, but, inevitably, spreading out into those world’s of derivatives, hedges and swaps, n all things ephemeral: as Rent is extracted from Time, without due consideration for dues: thereby starving more risky actual ‘real’ value creating businesses, of the kind sought after by Dr Mazwai… while adding less value to the common good. All good fiction isn’t it? Except that some seek to make it fact… and if it could increase happiness shouldn’t we consider it?

 

Thus we [the human race] will strive to harness the kinetic energy of the [so-called] ‘Casino Economy’ that we have invented, through the micro-cent mathematics of the new digital economy.…. as represented by for instance [of all things?] Spotify… ultimately without harming its [the ‘Casino Economy’s’] potential for amplifying change.

 

Thereby we would begin to effect the present ongoing transition of our global enterprise from its current earth warming smokestack era to a digitally driven greener future, where robots do the ‘heavies’ and humans learn to evolve to ‘our next level of consciousness’, as the Late Professor Tobias observed some years ago in his final public speech, in answer to a question from me on the subject.
 

So to return to Dr Mazwai’s R7, 3 billion spent on “supporting emerging enterprise” for what, to judge by the doctor’s gloomy prognosis, is something of a loss leader. So perhaps the Doctor could cut directly to the chase, and not wait to pass go… and take the entire budget and …. Ask …

 

Is it a viable idea? Who knows? So many things that didn’t seem viable or even tenable, when they first happened turned out to be game changers, and perhaps, paying people to become consumers isn’t a bad job in an age of saturation supply overwhelming all traditional theories of economics: a discipline founded on the management of scarcity. After all, surely consumption trumps NOTHING [if we may still use that T word]

 

And then there is a growing body of opinion suggesting that the current slow moving environment is partly due to QE enriched bankers using their haul to prop up their balance sheets, rather than exploiting the leverage potential of flooding struggling under- consumers with life enhancing salaries. That doesn’t sound much like fiction.

 

Aah. Such are the random thoughts of a fiction scribbling blogger.

 

Yours

Nicholas

WATERLOO and a GAME OF BONES

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WATERLOO and a GAME OF BONES… the current, endless, ‘Greek [bail out] Drama’ moves to what may be a pre-denoument climax: or simply the end of Act 27th. In my once role as Plato’s Socrates i would have to conclude that it is time for a new ‘gig’: and perhaps Mr Veroufakis is the man to deliver it… or NOT.
 

Yesterday I lucked into and watched a completely spellbinding Bloomberg interview with Mr. Yanis Veroufakis, the finance minister of Greece, who bluntly rejected what he called ‘extend and pretend’ bail- outs in what, after listening to him [and many others over the past few years… ], I call ‘a Game of Bones’.
 

The Greeks are presented with a classic Greek tragedy drama dilemma… Take the Hemlock now or die in the desert later. Reason suggests, according to Mr Veroufakis, taking the hemlock now. And that therefore the Greeks should vote NO.
 

And I agree. For precisely the reasons he gave. I was initially scepticl of Mr Veroufakis when he first burst in on the scene some months ago now. In yesterday’s interview he laid all doubt about him to rest. He made his point with rare clarity and forcefully constructed [if subtly obfucscated] logic.
 
The country is bankrupt. It is being humiliated routinely and the terms are [allegedly] approximate to a violation of human rights. Why it is bankrupt may be debatable and is routinely and vociferously debated: and there are many sides and nuances therein too. Nonetheless i am not a Greek, notwithstanding my prized role as Socrates. So the myriad countervailing rages that murk the entire exercise are, well ‘Greek… to me’ as the cliche avers.
 
The past is the past and cannot be unmasked with clarity.

 
So terminate the implicit, informal ‘Chapter 11’ status and bite the bullet.Vote YES: and you bite the bullet in slomo… Vote NO: and you move rapdly into the afterlife. It wont be the first time.
 
So where to go…YES/NO and why therefore is he right … to vote NO. [?]
 

NO ends the game… With NO the creditors walk out empty handed and have to claw their way back in… at a time when interest rates are still favourable to tjhe debtor.
 

It is only money after all and the logic of restructure is obvious.

 
As Mr Veroufakis pointed out: the kind of proposals he has made would have been ‘meat and drink’ to an average New York trader: What’s with the locals!!!
 

NO means that the creditors are facing reality. They are not going to be paid.
 
Therefore what can they do…. walk away empty handed and fume… maybe
 
Perhaps [though] at heart they are the Dealers this new age has prepared them to be.
 

Simply agree to convert the debt into a 100-year annuity at a rate favourable enough to guarantee a return but amortised over sufficient time to unhinge the shackles breaking the Greek economy. The Greeks would wish to honour their word but at a price that can be managed in a way that stimulates growth, which is/was after all, the entire purpose of the union in the first place: isn’t it?
 

In the mysterious ways of the multiverse, this past forthnight has seen many commemorations of the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, by all accounts one of history’s bloodiiest. Then, the country later called Great Britain, facing reality again after the defeat of Napoleon [not to mention their defeat by the USA in the same year at the Battle of New Orleans] were bancrupted and had to pay the debt to retain the “Greatness” they assumed to be their destiny. Simultaneously however, while handling a post-conflict recession that turned slowly into a severe depression. Perhaps politicians had more power in those days or reality was more obvious then than in our’gotitall’ world of today.
 

They chose to consolidate all the debt into one big package, which is of course something taking place now in an increasingly routine and evolutionarily effective way thereby increasingly to a massive [by 19th century standards] variety of packages.
 

Of course in the case of what the ‘Brits’ still call “Consols” [Consolidated Annuities]: currently yielding 4.4% [apparently], issued two centuries ago at 2.5% [par], debt was simply stretched out forever… and after all: if anyone has been around forever it is the Greeks.
 
Mr. Veroufakis certainly presented the almost pathological Greek sense of “place in history” that I have come to associate with those persons of an Hellenic persuasion, with whom I needed to become acquainted in order to rehearse Plato’s interpretation of Socrates, in in my own performance of that great man’s legacy.
 

One cannot help but suspect a circumstance brewing, that may be likened to the “English” moment recently; when to everyone’s shock… a party with which it was/is fashionable to avoid being associated, won by a significant margin. People, it seems, lied to the omnipresent ‘pollsters’ then: and may be doing so again.
 

So it certainly would not surprise me to read that Greece voted by a landslide against the idea of indentured servitude in the new digital serfdom. and voted NO.
 

Simply put: the evolution of the new “Extreme Money*” logic [as propounded by Mr. Satyajit Das for instance] could fully embrace the concept of [redeemable] one hundred year ‘Consols’; although it would be more sensible of the Greeks to offer [for a more attractive rate] an ‘in perpetuity’ annuity, subject to the EU amending its rules to accept that a venture that will take another century to bring to even marginal fruition, should surely anticipate being around in 2200 AD at least… or don’t they? … And if not… What do they know tht we don’t?
 

Consider how much more effective the flow of energy unleashed by the era of unlimited money would be were we to eradicate some of the confidence denting road bumps that do, in all sensibility, proliferate. Of course how one deals with the ‘TRUST me’ factor is the real road bump: with each party having its own agenda; and deeply embedded, smoking demons.
 

Notwithstanding this though, and in the full knowledge that the EU negotiators may accept NO as a rejection of their dream; not to mention that NO could be the apocalypse that awaited Greece at Marathon had they faulted then. They must follow the Veroufakis logic and reject servitude now.
 
No. The EU negotiators need to apply what i call Rule #8… “Take no thing personally” and lift their eyes from the plate for the moment and; stop interpreting the European vision through the hindsight spectacles of myopia. They have to review and check out what barriers need to be moved aside to reach the vista beyond.
 
For if there is no vista beyond servitude then there is no purpose to the venture.