Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
Slave State.
Math Is Freedom.
Von Mächtigkeit reden Achtjährige und meinen nicht Könige oder Kanzler, sondern Mengen von Haselnüssen und Rosinen. Und wenn sie sagen, irgend etwas sei irgend etwas anderem "eineindeutig" zuzuordnen, dann stottern sie nicht, sondern sind stolz darauf, daß sie dem Vater auch dann überlegen sind, wenn er Abitur und Doktortitel besitzt. Laut Mengenlehre-Gegner Hans Stahl (Stuttgart) "sehen die Kinder früh, zu früh, ihre Eltern hilflos und unwissend. Damit schwindet die Achtung, die Kinder können nicht mehr ihre Eltern fragen, deren Vorbild verblaßt".
Seven Milli(on)seconds.
…There is a role in [capital] markets for traders whose work is more speculative…But when taken to its logical extremes, such as computers exploiting five millisecond advantages in the transfer of market-moving information, it's much less clear that society gains anything…