Woke up this morning and had my usual breakfast – almost finished my second container of yoghurt but now that I know what a good combination of the chia seed pudding with the yoghurt is for breakfast. I did order some groceries online tonight because I really wanted a roast lamb dinner with roast vegetables but I hadn’t organised myself on my day off at the beginning of the week when I was doing my shopping. Tomorrow I’ll head down to the supermarket during the day and buy some extra yoghurt plus a few other bits and pieces that I forgot about ordering which should mean I am all good for the week.
My original post on BlueSky regarding ‘financial innovation’ came as a result of watching the following video:
I’m always reminded of when I see something needlessly more complicated than what required to get the job done that more often than not it points to something dodgy that is going on. There was a recent property developer had their business collapse in New Zealand where the owners owned multiple businesses and money being shuffled between these different business entities. For me. when I see something like that it looks to me as something that is very messy, very untidy and it tells me just from that alone that something not quite kosher is taking place. A person running honest business doesn’t need to set up multiple registered businesses – the corporate structure would simple and straightforward, accountability for who owns what, who is responsible for what would be transparent and wouldn’t require an army of lawyers and accounts to untangle the mess when it all goes belly up.
This where I come to the whole AI bubble which has all the tell tale signs of something not quite kosher with businesses once again creating holding companies, moving money between entities, recording revenue from those transfers when in reality it is little more than circle financing. This whole situation reminds me of the Three Stooges comedy routine of circulating the same note to each other. When all this goes to hell in a handbasket we’ll have another enquiry into the mess, none of the people involved will be held accountable (see the global financial crisis as an example of no one being held accountable) the the usual suspects in politics and the media will claim that ‘no one could have seen this coming’ even though there were many people who were sounding the alarm but were being ignored.
I’m a great believer in the KISS principle, Keep It Simple Stupid, don’t make things more complex than they need to be. Whenever I see something that is needlessly more complex then it tells me one of two things – those involved have more money than what they know what to do with so they create an over engineered solution. The other explanation is that they’re making it overly complex as a form of obfuscation in an attempt to hide the fact that what they’re doing isn’t above board but they want to hide it under a layer of jargon and complexity so most people give up and not ask questions.
As someone who is interested in understanding how the world works I am always keen to acquire more knowledge across many different disciplines because there isn’t one discipline that explains it all. When I look at the world from a materialist perspective I am asking myself how material reality shapes one’s world view – that includes one’s class, culture, economic circumstances, whether one is raised in a monoculture or community with many cultures that are integrated together rather than being siloed off from each other etc.
As frustrating as things can get I always keep reminding myself that people don’t just act in random ways, that there is a material explanation for why people behave in a certain way. The benefit of spending time, across multiple disciplines, is being able to understand how people tick which alleviates some of the frustration when understand why a person behaves in seemingly irrational ways. The other benefit is that immunises oneself from the sort of conspiracy theories and scapegoating that politicians and influencers love to use as a distraction from the fact that they don’t have any real answers to the problems the voters are facing in their lives.
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