Anything as a Service

Anything as a Service – A Cure for Consumerism

Economy, Futurology,

We live in the age of hyper-consumerism. Companies are desperate to convert as much raw material as possible into anything that can be purchased. The machine has been perfected to the point where even leftover byproducts from any production cycle can be fed back into another production line to manufacture something somebody would buy. Sometimes this includes using unhealthy materials, both for us and for the environment. But it doesn’t matter as long as it turns a profit. The machine has to keep producing something, anything, just please, buy it. This is wrecking our ecosystem and is woefully unsustainable.

Awareness regarding the bleak future we might be creating for ourselves after drowning our planet in toxic trash is increasing. However, most people still buy products built to last a very short time because there are no alternatives. And even when certain products could last longer, companies have gotten very good at fooling their followers that fashion doesn’t apply only to clothes, but to everything else as well. Now-a-days, many people willingly throw away perfectly operational devices just to jump on the latest model.

But a new economic model is becoming increasingly popular – the monthly payment for a certain service, sometimes metered based on how much a person has used the service. At the moment, this is particularly successful in the digital space (media streaming, software, data and bandwidth, games). Let’s see what a generalized version of this system could mean to our economy and ecosystem in the coming decades. I call it “anything as a service”. The term is already used for software, but in this case, it is truly anything.

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Printing Money Is Sexy

Printing Money Is Sexy

Economy,

I love the Internet at times like this. Here’s a beautiful answer to a series of pictures that the elite has shamelessly published online. I never really expect empathy from the likes of those that control financial systems, but this way of launching a “money product” is particularly disgusting. Financial honchos have staged a nonchalant photoshoot as if they were fundraising for orphanages. The online response has been hilarious (while in the same time highlighting the sadness of the situation we’re in).

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Petrol Money Poison

Petrol Money Poison

Economy,

One of the most unfortunate things that can happen to human beings is social disconnection. Depression often causes this. But in today’s article I’ll focus on wealth. A root cause of social disconnection due to wealth is when an unprepared individual attains great wealth. In this situation “unprepared” means not ready to emotionally and rationally adapt to a sudden change of situation. The moral compass of such individuals is vulnerable. In time, many of them end up behaving in ways that would seem unacceptable if they could ask their own younger selves.

Social disconnection also occurs in children born in a situation where vast wealth has already disconnected the entire immediate social group (friends & family) from the way “normal” people live. By “normal people” I mean the statistical average for the standard of living when looking at the entire planet. Children born in socially disconnected families (and this includes royalty) grow and develop using completely different life standards. They don’t even get to opt out of this until much later and sometimes never, something that will in the future probably be considered akin to abuse through deprivation of opportunity (similar to what children in poor, unstable families experience with parents that have a history of substance abuse).

In this post, I’m focusing on a certain social group: petrol-rich citizens from the Middle East. Here’s what that triggered me to write this piece, an article that tells about how Qatar’s billionaires have migrated to the richest areas of the most expensive city (property-wise) in Europe.

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Bitcoin Logo

Does Cryptocurrency Have a Future?

Economy, ,

The cryptocurrency craze is on! Social media websites have been swarmed by advertisers hoping to entice people to jump on the Bitcoin wagon or tempting them to invest in any of the ICOs (initial coin offerings) popping up almost on a weekly basis for various competing cryptocurrencies. It’s almost hysterical.

The Bitcoin has grown by more than 1200% in about a year. That’s a staggering development no matter who you ask. Many analysts warn that the bubble will soon burst, but they’ve been saying this for months and the Bitcoin is still growing.

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American Worker At A Fracking Rig

The High Cost of Cheap Fuel

Economy,

The plummeting price of fossil fuel has made certain industries quite profitable due to decreasing production and delivery costs. It also marginally helped car owners in certain parts of the world, even though the actual fuel price has not decreased as much as crude price.

Unfortunately our reliance on fossil fuels may end up being much more costly in the long run than any short term gains. Here’s an article that explains why the situation is the way it is while also highlighting one of the worst effects of the worldwide drop in oil prices: collapsing oil-depending economies whose fall hurts millions of people.

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Happy Consumerist New Year, Featuring Bottled Water

Happy Consumerist New Year! Featuring, Bottled Water

Economy, Recommendations,

I’ve always been amazed by the bottled water industry – and not in a good way. The wonderful article I’ve shared in this post sums up pretty much everything I ever wanted to know or say about bottled water. Very well written, documented and presented.

For me, it would be hard to maintain objectivity when it comes to this topic, but the author managed to pull it off quite well, kudos for that. There are very few things that can highlight the abuse of consumers as well as bottled water.

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Super-Sized Agriculture

Super-Sized Agriculture

Economy, Recommendations, , , ,

On the topic of “we are what we eat”, here’s a fascinating photographic essay.

Regardless of what you think about “in balance with nature”, the images are quite staggering. This is one of those situations when a picture is indeed worth a thousand words. Industrialized agriculture has definitely reached some impressive heights (or lows, depending on who you ask).

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Panama Papers

Why the Panama Papers Are a Big Deal

Economy, Recommendations, , ,

Last week, the first results of a masterpiece in investigative journalism, civic attitude and international collaboration started to show up. Lots of people owning great fortunes ran into the misfortune of having not only their hidden wealth, but also their tax-avoiding ways exposed to the world at large, thanks to a massive document leak.

The Panama Papers consist of 11.5 million confidential documents that provide detailed information about more than 214,000 offshore companies listed by the Panamanian corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca, including the identities of shareholders and directors of the companies.

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