bliss-o-matic

it's nice to follow your bliss

I read a joke in an old  Reader's Digest that I picked up from a shop in Gemini Plaza - it involves a lady who tries to purchase a pastry from a shop but the girl working the counter tells her she can't ,because they aren't fresh ,coz they are frozen - but they will be fresh in the morning the next day, when they'll be re-heated.

While we can point to the incorrect use of language or the deceit of the establishment in selling re-heated food as fresh, or the apathy of the employee towards the condition of the customer being exploited , we see the humour to laugh it off.

Let's take each of the things that irk me.
Why is it an incorrect use of the language to call the pastries as fresh ?
 Because, for the customer, the pastries are not really fresh - they are frozen and re-heated.
Even if they were frozen immediately after preparation, transported, and heated once before serving, they shouldn't  be considered fresh, because we typically think fresh means consumed within an hour of preparation.
For the employee working in the shop, 'fresh' has a working definition, and if the process followed defines 'fresh' as  :
-  new pastries are  frozen immediately after preparation, and are heated once in their lifetime, before serving
We can see that this is a plausible definition of fresh, as per the establishment, and exists simultaneously with the customer's version of fresh, albeit in different minds.

When you assume that the economy exists to serve you,  which might seem arrogant but if you rephrase it as "I'd only go to the economy if it gives me what I want,  , and what you want is a  freshly prepared pastry, then someone selling you frozen-overnight pastries as fresh is almost much lying to you. I say 'almost' because you and the seller haven't agreed on a definition of fresh, and you probably haven't gotten a contract signed to the effect that 'fresh' means not-frozen.
But the seller , if you are in a first-world country with a working  legal apparatus and laws , there is probably some document somewhere involving some quasi-legal body posing as voice of the sellers who would jump to protect the seller when you attempt to rectify the situation by suing the seller.

Welcome to the Economy, homo economicus . You are not going to the economy to get what you want, you are going to the economy to get what you can, without which you are worse off.
Everybody's learning Java ? there are better languages, Java is beneath me etc ... a few years later, there is AI and ML in Java and your better languages are almost invisible. Everybody's constructing - me ? I won't sell out my land for an ugly 4-story-plus-one-illegal-penthouse-with-water-problems-needing-a-borewell-and-cramped-parking mostrosity. Guess what, all the neighbours are doing it, and if you don't, someone will eventually buy you out with all the money they get from doing what you wouldn't, and you'd have to take the offer and move 'coz the local economy has left you behind.
States which don't want to become sweatshops will eventually have to follow the lead (and dictates) of states which inflict that upon themselves ( and have made provisions to ensure that they retain the money).

So why are millenials so lack-a-daisical about things ? well, you should ask yourself if there is a reason why they shouldn't be ?

Ranprieur talks about Peter Thiel talking about Unabomber's  notes on why there are no hard problems available and hence no motivation to be focussed.

Notes:
sahlins - original affluent society
diamond - mankind's worst mistake
interestingly, the Unabomber talks about how the two above were wrong
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-truth-about-primitive-life-a-critique-of-anarchoprimitivism.html
I have trouble believing Jared Diamond's works, they seem too 'pat'. The above link seems to be proof of that.


* what has this to do with Howard Bloom's swarms ?
* what has this to do with Tainter's collapse ?
* what has this to do with John Gall's systems ?
* what has this  to do with DeLanda's  stratification , and indirectly ?
* what has this to do with Godel ?
* what has this to do with Kahneman and Cialdini