9: Capital in the 21st century; Life on Venus; and more..
Hello peeps!
Hope you’re having a peaceful weekend. Here is my weekly reporting for today:
Capital in the 21st Century:
Thomas Picketty, a french economist, has written a book about what 250 years of economic progress has done to capital and what await us If we choose to let capital’s leash loose. Won’t be fun. Life of the 19th century will rear its head once again.
Edited together with amazing footage spanning all economic bubbles( 1929 crisis, dot com bubble..) and the two world wars, a fascinating documentary was made to summarize the book. The world of the 18th and 19th century, what you read in Jane Austin Novels, and saw depicted in the movie Pride and Prejudice was a world in which capital was concentrated in the hands of the aristocracy(1% of the population). Back then, Capital was mostly land. If your parents were rich( had big swathes of land) you were destined to follow in their footsteps. And all the rest of the population were there to make productive use of your land. There was no such thing as social mobility, where you get to climb the rungs of the success ladder through hard work and effort. It was a world with two kinds of people, the rentiers( the inheritors), who live off profits,dividends,interests, and the laborers who work hand-to-mouth. During the industrial revolution wealthy people were getting richer, faster now, thanks to assembly lines and factories churning out profits which were then invested to expand the business even more. To distract people from the societal stratification that was occurring inside the country, Nationalism was born and world wars ensued. Rentiers were devastated during WWI and WWII. Inequality declined significantly during that period. When the rich lost what they inherited they were left with nothing, but the laborers would resume their work whenever things went back to normal. The world, especially Europe and Japan have prospered. Banks were giving credit to everyone, and for the first time, the middle class was booming. The middle class drove the consumer market, but this bubble of economic prosperity was soon to get bust. The price-wage war, and the amount of capital poured into the housing market culminated in the global crisis of 2008. The banks stopped giving credits and the middle class began collapsing.
Tomas Picketty found that during the past 250 years, The return on capital was constant ( 4-5%), as opposed to economic growth(1.5-2%)_ You might see exponential graphs of economic growth but that would only mean a GDP increase owing to increased population_. 85% of Today’s capital is circulating in a closed loop, Same people selling and buying from each other and the value of money meanwhile is going up, up, up..Alas, That is not a productive use of money. Only 15% capital is being used productively. Money invested into risky high reward ventures. Rentiers are resurfacing again, it seems. There is a lot wrong with this system. Big corporations avoid taxes by offshoring, and moving to countries where the regulations favor them. For the first time in history, Children are poorer than their parents. Globalization has given the opportunity to banks to control more capital. One minor solution to control capital is population increase. The main solution to inequality in the world, the author argues, would be taxing the rich, and applying a global tax regulation so that no one can avoid taxes by moving to other places; capital must be controlled and regulated or else we’ll repeat the 19th century. You inherit wealth and you bequeath it to your descendants ad infinitum, all while getting exponentially richer. Meanwhile, the unfortunate is struggling at the bottom to make ends meet.
Life on Venus:
Phospine is said to be a biological sign for life if found on another planet, On the 14th of September, a paper was published saying that Phosphine was found in the atmosphere of Venus at 60 km altitude, in its acidic clouds . Its absorbing the low altitude waves was detected by telescopes. Venus surface temperature is super hot,467 degree Celsius hot, but 65 km in the atmosphere life( microbial life for now) could be possible. Sulfuric acid can be dealt with?
Two black holes collided 8 billion years ago and only last month have scientists recorded their radiation impact.
Cool findings:
The internet archive: is a public good, non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, and websites non existent elsewhere on the internet.
Brave Software: This is probably the safest browser i’ve ever used
What I’ve been reading:
I finished reading The art of possibility last week. An uplifting book. Check out my review here.
What I’ve been watching:
YouTube:
Stephen Colbert interviews Dune cast: Fun interview for the upcoming film Dune
Dune Trailer: Must have seen it 10 times already. The score, the cinematography, and the cast are all signs that the movie will live up to the expectations.
Talking tech with Mark Zuckerberg: An interesting conversation focused on Facebook’s role in the future of augmented reality(AR) and virtual reality(VR). Mark talks about his vision for Oculus, of connecting people through holograms and augmenting the senses for humans, which, according to him, will happen in 5 years.
Can AI generate art: Two minutesPapers is a YouTube channel I discovered recently. They summarize newly published scientific papers. Very useful to keep up with the new.
Limitless is a bonkers franchise: Limiteless is a movie about our obsessive need to work hard, fueled by neolebralism. Neo-liberalism is the idea that governments should stay out of the market and give free reign to capitalism, under the banner of meritocracy. The movie is based on a book that didn’t become a bestseller, but the movie did. The movie propelled the Nootropics( mental functions enhancing drugs) industry _a 5B dollar industry that is expected to rise to 10.7 b$ by 2025_. A lot of people are literally dying to be more productive and that is unhealthy. NZT, the pill in the movie is the dream of millions. Exercise works better than pills.
Films:
Archive: Archive corporation give people the opportunity to say their last goodbyes by conserving a copy of their digital selves for 200 hours in the cloud before they’re gone forever. A young roboticist has to build a functional human like robot so that he could upload his girlfriend before she’s gone forever. Worth watching.
Coma: Coma is a world constructed of jumbled memories where the law of gravity doesn’t make any sense, and reapers(corpses thrown out in this world) are there to kill. People who went into a coma meet there and things happen. Cool film.
Red eye: Amazing thriller, Rachel Mc Adams performance is top notch
Vanilla sky: I don’t know how i’ve never seen this film before. Mind bending. Can’t wait to see it again.
Best of Twitter:
Music:
Pumped up kicks(medieval style)
Somebody that i used to know medieval style
That’s it for today. Let me know If you have any beef with me, lol
Until next time.