The luxury of aging and still having a bit of a memory to work with, and the urge for economy in thinking and writing, can result in writings that resemble wisdom in the output, and are also fun with words :-) This isn’t really that. This is musings on the edges...
There were stories decades ago about the first bank employee to figure out that when his institution computed earned interest, that computation went out so many decimals and then had to settle on a dollar and cent amount to record for the customer. This employee in the IT part of the bank made changes so that computations were worked out to one more decimal place, and then in rounding down to the cent, the fraction of money recorded in that extra place was deposited into an account he opened. He told the bank, when you round down, I will keep the 1/1000s for you that no one will miss. He was right, for thousands of dollars over a short while (recollection is, he was caught when his catchall account won a drawing for a customer award of some kind and the bank actually looked at the deposits and withdrawals of that account).
The bigger corporations in the world today are adept at and equipped for running all calculations out past the margins and then using the over-the-edge information for gain of some kind. Compiling information, raw data, trends, insights, and actual money and resources. We and our wallets are often the product being bartered around by these companies. Trade in old people with discretionary incomes.
So the sharpest corporations knew all along what the problems with crypto currencies would turn out to be, and have undoubtedly been shaping the financial environment to the benefit of their own standards of banking. When you are big and sharp enough, you play markets going both up and down — your financial gains can be generated by a reciprocating financial engine, if you will, under the direction of the fastest and most accurate AI systems ever developed. No motivation like making yourself rich off the rounding errors of others. How long can a crypto account be kept in existence, even receiving deposits, before the owner realizes it is never going to grow for him?
And we poor working people have no idea how “tuned” our commercial world has become — why else are there SO many varieties of everything in a big grocery store? The sharper big companies are whetting the edges, the teases and come-ons, the ads and product placements, the influencers and innovators, the YouTubers and Instagramers, to lure us into unplanned purchases, because the impulse buys are still generating more income than is lost by having all those bags of chips to be discarded because they’ve gone past their sell-by dates. Discarding from a store is carefully done, in conjunction with stocking the shelves, and such considerations as what product will go at eye level lead to extra charges up front to the selling corporation — and the expense of that goes into the price point of the product. If all we ever bought was food we cooked ourselves from scratch, the price of the raw product would be much less per pound. Supporting the sales of all the varieties of crap makes the cost of the raw materials have to be greater too. That’s why Aldi’s and their relative Trader Joe’s can price lower than other groceries.
We know groceries thrive on a thin margin of consistent profit and a steady growth in customer base (but we also know in these hotter and stormier times, not all places are growing equally, and some contract, have to hunker down and even get wiped out — the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed, per William Gibson — we can keep reminding ourselves).
Corporations monitor employees more and more minutely. It doesn’t occur to us that having workers that are in debt and anxious may make for a more on-time workforce, one that can be directed to round off in favor of the company when it comes to productivity and time and attention to the job. We know that some fields of endeavor depend on a deep pool of local potential employees and high turnover — few jobs with pensions in America, apparently — and that there is always pressure to keep the workers from comparing notes and demanding better, safer conditions and humane treatment. That loses the edge for these corporations. Maybe the calculation is that the stress can hone the edge, but really it grinds it. Grinding poverty is killing America, one crumbling soul at a time, because we can’t bank fractions of humans — a fraction of a person may just be a dying person when looked at closely. And dying people are a great expense and burden to every community. A small annual percentage increase really mounts up over time. Heat and disease, poverty and stress, manipulation and deprivation — we need to center our resistance, and pull together, to get into more of that future as stable communities.