The Virtual Economy

Warning: This blog is long and boring but has brief references to World of Warcraft and Muse.

When looking at economics and industry there are three basic divisions.

Primary Industry: Resource Extraction, Mining, Forestry, Agriculture, Fishing
Secondary Industry: Manufacturing, Construction, etc.
and Tertiary Industry: Retail, Services, Banking

Quaternary Industry: I will be focusing on Tertiary Industry which makes up over 60% of the economic output of developed nations. Specifically I will focus on the sector of the tertiary industry that some have dubbed the Quaternary Industry. The tentatively named Quaternary sector is the sector of the economy devoted to development and sharing of information. This includes a wide range of services from the internet, to research and development, to entertainment, to education. This sector is all about buying and selling information, knowledge and ideas (which in itself seems an odd phrase). Its weird to consider the fact that in a society where we consider thought to be free, something as intangible as an idea can be bought or sold. Aside from that, where is the resource to back it up? Should we be concerned that a majority of our economy is based on immaterial information locked up in peoples brains as well as fragile servers that crap out if a stray dust particle lands on them?

Virtual Economies: Its an idea I've toyed with for years, since I saw the first online communities pop up. It is the idea that virtual goods and information could be bought and sold from an online world that could in theory develop its own economy. Of course we aren't talking a world-class currency (yet) but these do exist. Second Life is a virtual world which boasts its own virtual currency and economy. Citizens, who comprise a wide variety of nationalities pay in for the services which the Second Life world supplies and some companies even make money from Second Life services. Essentially Second Life has imports and exports as well as an internal economy despite being a completely virtual non-existent world. Other examples of virtual economies are not so complex, like online MMoRPGs such as World of Warcraft where virtual economies develop out of the illegal trade of in game items for real money. These pay to play games reflect a different side of the virtual economy though.

Entertainment: The entertainment sector of the quaternary industry revolves around a lot of services, including music, video games, and movies. In most cases these economic interactions represent the end of the line with final sale and with an increasing dedication to digital media there is no resale value in these purchases. Essentially in the past 10 years entertainment has become a service, and in some cases just a transfer of information, rather than a tangible product. This is entirely due to the internet which has even gone so far as to remove certain facets of entertainment from the economy almost entirely as pirating the latest Muse CD becomes more and more popular to the frugal consumer.

The Internet: This is the least tangible of all. Imagine this, you pay a subscription to a website that gets paid by advertisers who are selling domain names and server space to a company that sold the web design to the website you're currently viewing. Cyclical and confusing is the nature of the internet economy. It is based solely on the growth of the internet which at the present moment, almost every industry in the world depends on. Almost all business interactions (legitimate or not) rely on the internet in some way. Companies put money into the growth of the internet and in turn the receive services which potentially make them money. Other companies, some of the wealthiest, Google, have made the majority of their money solely on the internet, their goods and services locked up in servers and data. If I had to hazard a guess how much money is locked up in the internet I would have no idea where to start, considering the vicious cycles I outlined above and the fact that all industries seem to now rely on the internet.

The Implications:
-most of our economy is based on fragile things knowledge, data, info., etc.
-we don't have any concrete resource to back up these services
-these are entirely new untested, unquestioned industries except for education

Concerns: Should we be concerned for the economic stability of such a system? If billions of dollars are on the line is the threat of cyber-terrorism significant? What back-ups are in place in the event of cyber-disaster? Can we maintain the internet economy? There is little economic theory on the subject, maybe because its not a problem. I have only a vague understanding of economics but it seems to me that too much money is tied up in services that cannot be backed up with resources. If you want to be guaranteed a job in the event of a cyber-disaster, go into the primary or secondary industry, preferably on a local scale.

These are the unintelligible, unorganized thoughts on current economics by an average blogger, hope you enjoyed.

Old News in Haiti

As some of you may have heard, there was a devastating magnitude 7 earthquake in Haiti. Its old news for more than one reason, A) I'm a couple days late so my news source is basically irrelevant and B) Every other week disaster strikes there and the masses averts their eyes from the squalid world of Haiti. As earlier predicted, relief agencies have stated that the death-toll in Haiti could be up to 100,000 and growing. So far the world has pledged 330 million in aid and the UN is making an emergency appeal for 550 million. The United States has moved 10 000 troops into and around Haiti to help deliver emergency aid. With some 300,000 left homeless and hungry things aren't looking good.

So what can you do? Spread the word, pledge donations to online or local charities that are supporting the cause in Haiti. You can even text "Haiti" to 90999 to donate 10$ which will be put on your phone bill. The convenience of the electronic age. Don't just look at the horrific pictures coming out of Haiti and say, "Oh that's awful, someone should do something about it!" They are there to guilt you, and maybe we should feel guilty. I'm thinking of going in depth, on my other blog "the Curious Chronicler," about the issues in Haiti that have made this disaster so serious.

Update: I completed my meager analysis on why Haiti is the way it is. Here it is:
Haiti: A History

US sending 10,000 troops to earthquake-hit Haiti
Red Cross Canada

Later, I'll be posting another song by Emmanuel Jal, hopefully that will fit the situation in Haiti. Any ideas? To all those, approximately zero people who read this blog, not to mention who also listen to Emmanuel Jal, I challenge you to donate to the Haiti cause.

Age of Stupid

Fifty years from now they'll look back and call this the Age of Stupid. Looking at all us consumers and followers. We don't know where our food comes from. We don't know the impacts of our actions on the world. And most importantly we don't realize we can make a difference. Even in the Age of Stupid we are the Architects of the Future, how will we build the future? Hopefully in a way that our descendants won't label us stupid.

Movies: Age of Stupid, Food Inc. Check them out.

Movement Musician of the Week: Johnny Clegg & Savuka "One (Hu)' Man One Vote"
PS its Reconciliation Day in South Africa

Questions for the Human Consumer.

They call us consumers.
But why?
We are people.
We are human.
We have thoughts and emotions,
Words to speak and feelings to act on.
We hold beliefs, and ideals,
morals,
loves, hates,
wants and needs.
So, let's call that a person,
Sounds good right?
Vague, but good.
So why do they call us consumers?
We are numbers to them,
Statistics,
Demographics,
We are money,
Buyers,
Living ads and banners,
Branding perfected.
So what's better?
Or are they just different,
Is happiness freedom?
Is truth freedom?
Does freedom matter?
I'm a person,
And at times a consumer.
They control my mind in one way or another,
But aren't I still free?
How does one free their mind?
Is it worth the sacrifice?
Is it truly fulfilling?
Would I still be a puppet?

Movement Musician of the Week: Rage Against the Machine "Bullet in Your Head"

The Deserted Diviner

The Deserted Diviner speaks his daily news, in hopes that excited ears will heed his words. He knows however, that no one hears his discordant drivel. His audience is deaf dumb and blind to his doctrine, drowned out by the myriad voices of capital. Focused solely on the technological teats before them, devouring their propaganda potions. How can he wake them from their apathy? Better yet, should he? He long ago chose the song of truth and beauty, knowing full well the horror and despair that played the atrocious accompaniment, but his foolish followers reached out for the hypnotic, to avoid the pain. He doubts himself, why not take the drug, with its false felicity? He would not know the difference. He can't give in though, for verity can bring about vivacity, and the other course, however simple, is ignoble. The Deserted Diviner waits on a world trapped in a trance.

The Broadcast

I'm not sure what this blog is going to be about. It's a broadband broadcast of a yet undecided message. Its been a while since I wrote anything worth, anything, literally, I haven't written in over a month. There are things that I've had on my mind, but not had the motivation or time to write about. Corporatism, globalization and neo-liberalism. Whatever that means, I'll pretend I know. All concepts that are an inevitable part of our everyday lives and yet concepts I'm growing to become more and more skeptical about. My reasons are complex, or maybe I'm just brainwashed and therefore can't explain them, but I'd like to call on my moral system. My inspiration and educational materials are as follows, The Corporation, Food Inc., Age of Stupid, The Flobots, FightWithTools.org. I wish I had less corporate means of discovering the evils of corporatism but alas any message must be spread through the corporate controlled mass-media if it is to be heard anywhere. What is corporatism? Our world is filled with it, where corporations (legal persons) are given preferential treatment to REAL persons. What is the justification for this? A buck? Because corporations supposedly work for the benefit of the majority, giving us what we want and raising our standards of living. But without environmental, economic and social justice corporations work worldwide to exploit every resource and every last ounce of manual labour in an effort to turn over a profit. It cannot be denied, the corporation is a psychopath and its goals are ultimately destructive to those around it (roughly 6.6 billion human beings). After watching the three movies listed above, and being socially indoctrinated by the Flobots heavy beats and movement lyrics I find myself thinking long and hard about the food I eat, the things I buy and the media I consume. Branding. Corporate Buyouts. Bankrupcy. Monsanto. DDT. Agent Orange. Abuse of Power. Corporate Lawsuits. Child-labour. Starvation Wages. Exploitation. Extortion. Oil Extraction. Disaster Capitalism. Shock Doctrine. Corporatism. Neo-Liberalism. Globalization. Climate Change. CO2. PPM. How can we free ourselves of brands? In everything we do we are attached to a brand, even in writing this blog I'm attached to the brand of the internet giant Google Inc. In watching TV I'm forced to watch and thinking about advertisements for commercial products, and brands are inadvertantly built in my head, the greatest and most expensive product for corporations, and yet the easiest to sell. I'm a Walkman, you're an iPod and he's a Zune. Again, how can we conquer this? Remove brands from our daily conversation. We can try hard as we might to avoid brands but even those "farm fresh" bovine products have their history in corporations not unlike Monsanto. But even if we are forced to by into a brand we are not forced to talk about it and fuel it. Eleanor Roosevelt said, "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." Well the same applies for brands as people (considering the corporation is a legal person anyway). To talk about brands is to narrow your mind and the world you live in. We need to talk about ideas, learn ALL sides of the story, recognize the bias from all sources. As an online friend said, we need to develop strong roots for support and stability, not flashy flowers and foliage. A tree survives through the winter because of its roots, the foliage dies out, its fleeting. While foliage is necessary for a time and to a certain extent a tree without roots would dry up and die, fall down and rot.

Movement Musician of the Week: The Flobots "Rise" (Forgive the corporate propaganda pre-video)
Rebel of the Day (so cliché): Ban Ki-moon UN chief urges leaders to 'seal deal' on climate change
For saying a climate deal is in sight when leaders such as Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper are saying there is no deal on the horizon and therefore are taking a can't do won't do strategy, Ban Ki-moon is the rebel of the day.

Sony sucks and Nintendo f**ks

So, Sony releases their slim version of the PlayStation 3. True innovation if you ask me. Where other companies look to innovate and provide a better gaming experience to users, Sony just says, "Well, we'll make our system smaller and more attractive, and everyone will buy it." So they put it on a diet, but it wasn't working so what did they do? Lowered the price to $299. They basically turned the PlayStation 3 into a cheap crack whore. But look at what the competitions doing. Microsoft is going to revolutionize gaming with Natal, the motion sensing, AI peripheral... that will cost users upwards of 400$. Okay, so Microsoft is innovating, but not doing much for the consumer's wallets. Then there's Nintendo, who's been fucking us all along. They had the technology for 1:1 motion sensing at the very beginning, but instead of releasing it on launch day bundled inside the little Wii remote they decided, "Hey, we'll let them play with half-assed motion sensors for two years and then when the novelty of flailing their arms randomly wears off we can make an extra buck off 1:1 motion sensing and no one will notice our clever trick." Also, how can the slim, HD, blu-ray playing, 120 Gb hard-drive PS3 system with 100 times more processing power than the Wii be only 100$ more than the meagre Wii? Finally, after 3 years Nintendo has agreed to a 50$ price cut that brings the Wii from 250$ to 200$... they could have done much better not to bundle Wiisports with it in the first place and sell it at 200$ then cut it to 150$ now, but maybe the economics isn't on my side here. What's one of the selling points for the Wii? Its supposed to be cheap. Its supposed to be accessible to everyones price-range, but you'll probably find that it quickly becomes more expensive than any system with its many peripherals. Between the console, an extra wii remote an extra nunchuk, classic controllers, virtual console/wiiware games, SD cards, 2 wii motion pluses, balance boards, a few games, maybe a few accessories a la Wii Zapper we're looking at upwards of... 600-700$. That's only if you don't want to go for the full 4 controller set. And whats this new feature in Nintendo games that allows players to skip parts of the game if they're too hard? Or to have the game play it for them? I thought game guides were bad, but now the actual game will play for me. That's just obscene, its an interactive media for a reason, you aren't supposed to watch it like a movie. Casual gamers are hands down ruining gaming. So Sony sucks, Nintendo is screwing us over, and Microsoft is... tolerable but still staying costly. What choice are we to make? Well, to be honest, the choice I should have made was not to get a gaming system at all, because I rarely play videogames these days. They just aren't living up to their hype and publicity anymore. The gaming industry has taken a long slippery slope since the hayday of Nintendo 64 and PS1. There was a point where the Big Three stopped being passionate about what they did and just started grabbing for money at every turn, that is the point where I stopped being passionate about gaming. I feel like, as much as the gaming crowd is "expanding" to new audiences, it is ultimately dieing because of the policies of these corrupt organizations. The new gamer is a gamer that gets bored after a week and moves on to new things, but these are the perfect impulsive people with disposable income for the gaming industry to market to. These people don't care about quality, they care about a cheap thrill for two minutes and once the companies have sold their system what do they care if it gets thrown in the garbage? Nintendo sure doesn't care about attach rates, considering the average attach rate is 0 for Wii (with WiiSports bundled). Hopefully someone will start developing for people who actually enjoy videogames, hopefully, this boom of casual gamers will prove unprofitable for the companies, and I can start to enjoy gaming again.

Québec Nationalism At Its Worst

Oh Québecia! Our home and native land! Oh seperatists, how you never cease to amaze and disgust me. I designed this graphic to put on a t-shirt. It's meant to be ironic because I don't take Québec nationalism seriously in any way shape or form and I just find it funny and ironic to praise Québec nationalism in big block English words.

Well anyway, a little while back, there was this plan to hold a reenactment of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in Québec City. For those of you (likely most) who don't know the historical significance of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. Well it's basically the defining Battle in which Britain took control of Québec. Its a big moment in Canadian and Québec history and was scheduled to be reenacted in Québec city, like the Civil War reenactments in the United States. Of course unlike the mock Civil War shows, that go off without a hitch, one crazy high-profile separatist decided to threaten violence against the event. You know, they call that terrorism and instead of being put in jail or questioned he's been made a keynote guest at the show.

Needless to say, the whole reenactment has been cancelled and apparently is now being held in New York at some point. Yes, this is very historically accurate. Now, instead of having the Plains of Abraham Reenactment they're putting together this Québec culture event including reading of Québecois literature. Now one of the proposed literary readings is going to be the FLQ Manifesto. That is the Front du Liberation de Québec, (for those who need another history lesson) a Québec terrorist group from the 60s that senselessly bombed English businesses and kidnapped high profile politicians (including Pierre LaPorte who they murdered). Its also noteworthy to mention that the event is being held on the anniversary of the confrontation with the FLQ, which is, disturbing in itself.

Now, I'm all for Québec history, but reading the Manifesto of the FLQ as "great" Québec literature is absolutely inappropriate. So inappropriate that even hard-line separatists from the Parti Québecois are boycotting the event. Anyone who lived through the FLQ crisis will remember how comfortable it was to have bomb threats at their children's schools and to have people in military fatigues patrolling the streets. To look at that particular chapter in Canada's history as "great" is a disrespect to anyone who has ever lived in Québec. My own mother recounts stories of being nine years old and not being allowed to go to school because there was a threat against her English school.

Not only is it inappropriate to praise the only terrorist group ever in the history of Canada, it's just ridiculous to consider the Manifesto "great" Québecois literature. Technically its a meager few pages, hastily written and mostly plagiarized from the works of Karl Marx by a bunch of anarchist hillbilly french baffoons. So I'd just like to say, that these Seperatists, take themselves too seriously, and undermine what little respect they have in the international community through actions like this. At this rate, Québec will never be its own independent country. There is more to Québec history than a struggle against the evil English. Its about time the separatists give in, if they can't have basic respect for "their" own culture, history and people.

Here's a few links: Manifesto of the Front de libération du Québec
More information on the actual event
Decide for yourself.

Something Foamy Brewing in North Korea

Hailed as the Pride of Pyongyang the Taedonggang beer produced in a North Korean brewery is getting publicity in North Korea today. In a strikingly capitalist move thoroughly communist North Korea has launched a television ad campaign. To be fair it is not your typical Western media advertisement. It looks to have a significantly lower budget than it's western cousins with a style reminiscent of a 1960s Slinky® commercial.

Now I don't speak or read Korean, but it looks to me like the commercial advertises that the beer is locally made and appeals to the worker in North Korea. The advertisement says, "It represents the new look of Pyongyang," and, "It will become a familiar part of our lives." Foreign critics say the beer is of high quality. It is hailed for being produced with fresh and pure ingredients. The beer has also been sold in South Korea.

In recent weeks we have seen nuclear tests, missile test launches and threats from North Korea and retaliation from American and Western nations. As tension builds on both sides, is the DPRK government advertising this beer to keep dissent from brewing in the population? Or is it just a cash-grab for the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il?