The Push to Cashless is Not a New Thing.

 I was involved in the first push to go cashless back around 1994. The original idea was called Mondex.

Basically you would carry around an electronic wallet that carried your cash equivalent. There were various ways of topping up this wallet, from plugging it into an ATM to having a home swipe machine.

The Idea didn't really take off because why would you carry an electronic wallet full of money when a wallet full of cash does the same thing? 

I was also involved in the next step after Mondex: telephone banking. I write the application for one of the big 4 banks. It's still essentially the same application today, albeit with bolt-ons. 

But the push to cashless has been a thing since having weekly cash pay packets stopped being a thing. Why have cash if you get electronic tokens into your account for your wages and you spend electronic tokens in the shop? Because Banks. Banks don't like cash. It is labour intensive, as anyone trying to extract cash from a bank recently has found out.

But even the original cashless projects have now been superseded by the smartphone application.

It wasn't until improvements in internet availability and online services really took off that the idea of a cashless society really took off. The convenience of cashless has moved on leaps and bounds. Your smartphone now works like a card, making payments.

You can also manage your account, make payments all on your phone.

But the technology requires several external factors to be available and work for the cashless system to work.

You need electricity, fundamentally, in order for the point of sale systems to work. Cash can work without tills.

If you have electricity you also need the POS system to have network connectivity and on from that access to the internet. 

And that's just the user end. Then you have all the back end infrastructure and processing necessary to process payments and keep track of your account.

Cash works without any of that. It can be exchanged during power cuts, on bomb sites, outside internet access, away from wireless phone signals. And there still are places without any of that.

Cash needs to stay. Otherwise, yet again portions of the population will be disenfranchised. 

Instead of an inclusive monetary system, where all can participate without prejudice, going cashless moves us to a permissive monetary system, where the system has provide special access for people that  don't have all the facilities required to participate.

Someone needs to provide something to people that allows access to money without internet, without power and without access to the internet. 

Of course cash does that already. 

And this is where we get into tinfoil hat territory. Because if cash works fine already and allows a small portion of society access to money regardless of technology, why of why are the Banks trying to get rid of it?

Hopefully, there will be some way to get cash and spend it even when the majority of people are cashless, because it's still very much required by some parts of society.

The Next Great Worker's War.

The pandemic has been exploited by many global corporations. From big Pharma getting in on the act scamming governments into believing that mRNA technology could provide a viable vaccine, to manufacturers centralising production even more. In my last post I talked about how the shipping companies scrapped their less efficient container ships and are now working towards fleets of the largest ships in order to maximise profits.

Back in the 1918/19 Spanish Flu pandemic, production was local, so it was easy to walk back into work and start making stuff again. There wasn't the huge aftershock we are experiencing now. Maybe there were shortages of labour, but nothing new generations coming up couldn't replace within a relatively short time.

During this pandemic the whole world shut down. Products made in Malaysia or Taiwan had to wait for their governments to open up and then take weeks or months to restart full production from scratch.

The globalists see this as an inconvenience. Their logic is to push for more world government and governance. The WHO "treaty" is just one aspect of this. The globalists want to make sure that what they see as local authorities and we see as sovereign countries and governments are swept away and cannot provide the inconvenience they did previously. 

The globalists are trying to reduce the global human workforce to robots, or slaves, or serfs. Whatever your terminology, there is a push to suppress the worker, to reduce them to a mere item. An appliance.

And this is where the next workers war will be fought: the fight will be against the globalists who want to reduce workers to drones, making most profit for minimal outlay, or the pragmatists who realise that the future envisioned by the globalists for their children is a hellish nightmare.

Even the originally safe artistic types are not safe as the spectre of AI is encroaching into their territory. It's no wonder the elites are slavering over AI, as it answers many of the "problems" of one of the last bastions of high-paying jobs. 

It won't be long before a complete photo-realistic movie is made by AI. Already AI is making great strides into the still photographic arena. Just recently a photographer won a competition with a wholly AI-generated picture. And a movie is nothing but a series of pictures presented at several frames a second. This is no animated art. This is photo-realistic. 

AI is also generating speech. Realistic sounding speech, making people's voices say anything, with the correct intonation, pacing, etc. Almost, but not quite there. But it's getting so good that if you hadn't been told it was generated by AI then you might not know. 

The cues are currently subtle. Photographic AI seems to have an issue with fingers, vocal AI seems to be a bit off in some portions of speech, especially where it doesn't have enough samples of a person speaking a certain word. A word that someone hasn't spoken before and wholly generated by AI may sound a bit off. 

But both of these will get better as they learn more and more. Photographic AI will learn better rules about fingers and vocal AI will study intonation and pacing on similar words to better generate a convincing-sounding word never before spoken by the person it is impersonating.

The workers of the world need to get savvy and understand what's coming down the pipeline. 

Why is Everything so Expensive?

Recently I've been looking for something relatively simple: a folding canvas outdoor chair. 

Pre-pandemic, you could have picked one of these cheap chairs for less than a tenner. The going rate was about £8.

Now, you can double or treble that amount. 

But why? What is making such originally cheap goods so expensive? Is there some post-pandemic profiteering going on?

Well, sort of. The big Shipping companies saw an opportunity during the pandemic to dispose of their smaller container ships. Now, this was a logical step: the ships were laid up at anchor with crews on board, so they were being paid, but the ship wasn't earning money.

The companies then decide after a few months that this may be a good time to pay off the crews and scrap the smaller, less efficient ships. I say efficient, what I really mean is cheaper to run. Instead of a crew of 15 being in charge of 10,000 containers and earning the revenue from them, the companies could instead have a crew of 15 on a AAA container ship in charge of 50,000 containers. So the smaller container ships went off to the scrapyards of Pakistan. Where incidentally, Covid wasn't really a thing, certainly lockdowns weren't. So the ships were processed in short order.

Which is great, had the pandemic continued and the shipyards been able to produce enough AAA container ships to match the global demand.

Well, it didn't quite go to plan. The world opened up within a matter of weeks and the demand for imported goods spiked almost immediately. 

And now there weren't enough ships to move the containers. Yes there were the handful of AAA container ships available from before the pandemic, but the smaller ships were gone, scrapped, never to return. 

There simply wasn't enough capacity. So the law of supply and demand kicked in and shipping prices started to skyrocket as importers struggled to guarantee supply chains. The pre-pandemic shipping cost of moving a container from the Far East ballooned from £1500 pre-pandemic, to ten times that within weeks of the pandemic ending and the world opening up. And this was before the price of oil went up. This was just a week or two after the pandemic when oil was relatively cheap.

The going rate now is around £20,000 to £30,000 because the increased price of oil has been added into the mix. To ship a single container. Failure to pay usually ends up in severe delays as your container gets gazumped and bumped off the ship in favour of someone paying more. That's how the market works now. To guarantee supply, you have to pay dearly.

Which gets me back to the folding chair at the start of the article. How many can you get into a container? As a simple maths exercise say 10,000 chairs. 

Instantly the shipping cost per chair has gone from a negligible 15p to a pretty substantial £3. 

So along with the other increased costs like wages, local transport and energy, that £8 chair is now looking more like twice that. 

And that's the thing, these are not insubstantial increases. It's no wonder inflation is so high. The cost is in-built because that particular item is being shipped half way round the world. 

But that's the weakness in globalist theory. Yes, you maximise profits, but there is a risk. Sadly the global corporations mitigated the risk by controlling governments who handed out large sums in compensation for their losses.

During this pandemic the whole world shut down. Products made in Malaysia or Taiwan had to wait for their governments to open up and then take weeks or months to restart full production from scratch.

This should be a lesson to the globalists that their ideology is not robust. Relying on a handful of shipping companies to transport goods from places thousands of miles away is a risky practise. 

So is relying on your ideological enemy to provide the bulk of your energy needs. 

We have to get back to a more local production and supply chain. Maybe not duplicating production in every town and city, but at the very least each continent should have the facilities to produce everything that continent needs. Most continents have the majority of raw materials and workforce able to do this.