All the tomfoolery that has unfolded to and through the State of the Nation non-event has been wearisome if not outright depressing. It has certainly provided fertile ground for widespread speculation about what the future holds. Well, it holds a National Budget for a start. Some talking heads feel that government have now arrived at the place between a rock and a hard place and will have to scale back on the free stuff, which of course includes paying thousands what is called a salary but in the absence of productivity is really a grant.
It won’t help those who have long dismissed gold as a not particular rare mineral that’s costly to own and clearly(?) being superseded as a store of value by Bitcoin, to be reminded that the rand price of the yellow metal has doubled in the last 5 years. In the meantime, not only have many “blue-chip” listed shares been tainted by the smell of cooking books, but also now the exchanges they were listed on, are closing. Our civilisations and system were built on the now rare concepts of honesty and trust. Which are now crumbling in the absence of any rule of law. The Marxists won in the end.
It is so confusing trying to follow an American story about energy. It really is time they learned that the liquid fuel we put in our cars is called “petrol” and that the stuff that (mostly) comes out of the ground alongside crude oil is “gas” This is the substance that Europe (and even the USA uses to cook and heat their homes with and which President Biden sabotaged by destroying Russian gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. The word “gasoline” has reached its sell by date! It’s so 20th century.
There are at least two phenomena unrolling in our world that have the potential to make profound impacts on our lives far sooner than we would think possible. Both are happening at an incredible rate. The one is so called artificial intelligence where computers are apparently able to perform in ways that are indistinguishable from what human beings can do, think and say. We are already familiar with Google suggesting the best place for purchases of things we have been researching. But now it is moving to a higher level and the so called “chatbots” are reportedly well on the way to writing Tidemarks every week. With better punch lines.
The second is the appearance of central bank digital currencies. This is quite a hard topic to understand but is the ultimate goal of authoritarian governments who are sure they can make far better decisions about how to live your life than you do. This week a perhaps deluded individual allowed himself to be implanted with a microchip thereby identifying himself indelibly. He should never lose his credit card again because it is now buried under the skin in is left wrist! He’ll also never be able to pop down to the pub for a quiet beer without everyone knowing. Already we can track our cars and our kids (think cell phone). The notion of the digital currency is quite difficulty to think about but we already mostly have given up using cash and strongly suspect that our banks readily share whatever they know about us with some bureaucrat. The threat however lies in the idea that if you do something the governments don’t approve of – like vote for the wrong party – access to your account can be frozen and you quickly become a hungry unemployable pawn. Tax evasion will be a thing of the past!
As you read this the second day of the Dusi marathon canoe race is navigating the sewers of outer Durban . Brave folk those. If they fail to stop at the mouth of the Umgeni they could well find themselves in the midst of Chinese and Russian sailors showing off their toys in Exercise Musi II. Our own chaps are blowing up balloons for the visitors to shoot down.
James Greener
Friday 17th February 2023
