Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Governments, Anyone?

The public network is full of posts, views and counter views. If we give a closer look at the various posts in general, covering nearly all the topics available to mankind and closely analyze the comments, views and counter views, we see that anybody is commenting on anything. That means that everybody knows about or wants to know or has framed his views without knowing anything. The latter's views are normally based on the generalization of the present subject with his specialization. This gives us the conclusion(?) that everybody knows about everything and everybody are capable of giving their own views about everything. Is it? Shall we generalize a little further and tell there is nothing any "body" can do to change the views, Inertia? Does this mean there is no need for any "body" to tell us what to do and what not to? Does this mean we know what is expected from every "body" without anybody explicitly stating it? Does this mean that we have ceased to be taught or we can "manage" ourselves? In other terms is there no need for us to be governed by an elite few? By extrapolating a little further shall we state it in more dangerous terms "We don't need governments"?

OMG, Blasphemy!!!!!!? or would it be a relief? Do governments govern the borders of their political control or borders were born out of the capabilities of the local governments? These governing bodies can be traced back.... previous post... Social adjustments gave way to profit motives in the guise of optimizations they reached a crescendo. After several iterations of societal setup we ended up with classifying the people based on the tasks they were doing and then gradually several tasks were made more important than others and in turn, we had classes increasing by importance. All of a sudden people doing few tasks were more equal than other equal people down the societal setup. As people were grouped based on tasks, the initial industries were also based on the same setup. The initial optimizations was from the artisans themselves by grouping themselves together. The higher groups/classes saw opportunity here also. They wanted to increase the size of the groups so that they could have the advantages of scale. There is the seed of today's large corporations.

Every "body" is attached and dependent on some corporations directly or indirectly. The corporations tell what is expected of every person attached to them. When these controls were not enough, corporations turned to a third party, the governing bodies to bind all the people to corporations. As though, people were born only for this, to work for corporations. There are very rare occasions wherein people have led their life without their umbilical cord not attached to the corporations. Such people will immediately be knighted and an image created wherein it will be told that all others cannot become him or think like him. Now, they have only one person with the "free" attitude while others stay enslaved thinking that they are too "norm" to reach that stature.

The governing bodies(governments henceforth), tell people they should work for corporations to fulfill their worth of being born. The other people whose mentality and attitudes don't suit this labyrinth of laws are labeled unstable or great whichever suits them better.

So, what is the problem now? Governments frame laws to help corporations and corporations employ people, what is wrong. The thing is this system is prepping artificial number ones. If any individual does have the real vision of the society, he will grow up and build better corporations with better hold on the governments. So, the society is being prepared in such a way that if there is anybody against it, he will be treated to the high in the society so that he will become one among the oppressors or else he will vanish into oblivion.

Thing is, the educational level has gone up. Information is available at the finger tips. Anybody wants to know about the rigveda they are welcome to do so. They want to understand Einstein's work they are free to do that also. People know what is expected of them. They know to maintain equilibrium in the world. They know that the number of java programmers have exceeded the requirement. They do suitable adjustments. They make true the basic law of nature, that of "equilibrium". Now it is the time to dictate the expectations from the corporations as well as the governments. Everybody wants to make a difference to the world. Though many of them don't show they have that latent feeling towards nature. Provided an opportunity, they would do miracles for the betterment of the whole world. They would do better than send some food packets to the under-developed countries which feed all the necessary raw materials required for the materialistic life of developed countries.

Of course there would definitely be ideals which would be beyond comprehension to the society and in the same vein society would be incapable of convincing that they are wrong(wrong, either might be). Anomalies do exist and exist they should. It is like the floating point math. Nothing in the world is discrete.

Now, what if, nobody is governing them, ie, there are no governments. just imagine. People move about freely, like minded people pool their ideas irrespective of the borders/languages/caste/color. The same applies to the anomaly group of the existing societal setup. If the anomaly groups argues and convinces the regular part of the society, they will grow, otherwise, there is no way they can come into their own. Why, because, they don't have an enemy now. There were people unhappy with governments/corporations. What are they unhappy about, high rise buildings, no. They are unhappy about "people" running these establishments. This minority is telling the majority how they should lead their life. The 1% of the people are defining the word "intelligence" for the remaining 99%.

You can now argue with me that the majority of the governments formed are democratic. But, we all know the pitfalls of democracy. The person elected by 51% of the people will decide their fate as well as the fate of the remaining 49% who did not vote for him. This is a most theoretical example in a democratic setup. There have been instances where people have won elections by getting only 10% to 20% of the votes. People voting in a democracy have one more constraint, that they have to chose the best of the worst. So we do elect somebody, because, that is the essence of democracy. Yo don't vote, you are missing the whole point. If at all, you give an option for none of the above, in the ballot paper, what are you going to do if the majority of the votes are for this option. what if it is a minority? Oh, my god, Democracy.

Why shouldn't people go about their business without any governing body? Will the huge corporations themselves run their local governments. The most important and deciding factor here is the military. For a situation, wherein, we don't have governments, the first step is to de-militarize the entire world. Now you will tell me the dark forces will take over. You also will definitely tell me that all this is going to happen only over a bloody revolution. That was easy to tell. That was an obvious answer from anybody since the beginning of this subject.

At this time, I would like to know how many people in the wold would like to take to arms when all that the world wants is an equilibrium state, wherein, everybody does his own thing. What about people who know to only handle arms? How will they make their living in this situation.

All the governing bodies in the world was not formed in a day. They were formed because a need was created for their forming and we were "convinced" of that need. Once we were convinced of that need we had to accept the result. Now with the information age upon us, wherein information is generated and assimilated by everybody, do we need to be governed? We know what we can and what we do best. Why should be try to fit ourselves. How would it be if the world expanded and adjusted to us? Awesome. How many Einsteins would we have? Cant tell, because, we have not tried it. We have always complained that the present society is a one size fits all scene.

We now talk about mass customization. When we can go that extra mile for non-living things to suit us, why are we neglecting the same for people. Come one. Cant we remodel the society to embed customization. Each his own. Was it too much an ask?

Eliminate the borders, eliminate the governing bodies, Bring in self help groups, bring in voluntary lead or led individuals and wait for the planet to reach an equilibrium. What, what did I hear? communism, socialism, No, No, I don't want to hear any of it. They are all based on governance. They are but different styles of governance withe varying amount of freedom for the individuals and society as a whole. Will the corporations die? No. The corporations needed will survive. The apt people capable of doing that particular job will position themselves. Everybody would rush to 5 star hotels/resorts? Yes, maybe. But it will not survive. Somebody has to work/pay for the upkeep. People now are smart enough and know they cannot be made sheep once again by pigs and wolves. They know everybody's contribution is of importance. Everybody's voluntary trivial and non-trivial contributions are the requirements for making a truly equilibrium/chaotic situation instead of a non-voluntary controlled situation.

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Indian fonts on Arch GNU/Linux

Go here. for a small discussion. The summary would be

1. You already have yaourt installed or any other front end for the AUR repository.
2. Run 'yaourt -S lohit-fonts' as a normal user in the terminal.
3. Follow the instructions and at the end give the root password.
4. Restart firefox or any other browser/app where you want Indian fonts to be displayed properly.
5. Thank the devs and testers here.

 

Saturday, February 8, 2014

Curious case of premium phones and tablets.

People pay a premium for a certain section of phones and tablets expecting premium in terms of hardware, software, services and accessories. If we observe the trend along the evolution of phones and tablets, the more premium it is the more is it "closed". The more users have to depend on the manufacturers. Nearly zero indie development, Not "expandable" in nature particularly in terms of hardware, Maximum crapware, Forceful need creation(stylus, This may also be due to the lack of tech knowledge and design fundamentals. It is like the pen apps were designed around the pen. They should have started at the apps and then thought of how to use the fingers themselves or things which the user already carries around with him). The stylus was acceptable on a motoming not on devices(os) which have multipoint touch capability.

Let us discuss the subject w.r.t android devices. I see there is no point in discussing propreitory offerings.
If we take the case of the nexus devices, I was shocked at the ease with which the device can be converted to meet your requirement. Unlocking the device was a "breeze". After that, sky is the limit. Indie developers flourish on the nexus devices. Yes, It is not free as RMS would have liked, but, it is an excellent start. Now, these devices are exactly at the middle category w.r.t costs and the overall premium feel. The lower end of the tablets dont interest indie devs. All devs would love to have a maximum sweep when it comes to the number and variety of users.

I though that, in fact, the situation should be the other way round. The premium ones are the ones should be completely open and allow the user complete freedom of their device. Since, the user has payed a premium, Or, If we put it in business terms, He has payed in entirety for the device and services available. So, the device has to be completely "his" to tinker with. The manufacturers already know how to get out of the loop once a user tinkers with his device by making him accept long terms and conditions especially when a user unlocks his device. So, the manufacturer cannot tell us that he is locking the device for better performance during the servicing of the device.

The nexus device since has not taken the "full" amount required for offering the product and services should have been locked more tightly so that the user clings on to the manufacturer, thereby making him returns on perpetuity. Now, you tell me this is exactly what google is doing. Eh?. Instead of google sharing returns from the device with the manufacturers, why dont the manufacturers reverse the technique by making a nexus of all their premium ones and demand perpetuity from google. How awesome would that be. I dont know why the manufacturers are going behind having cheap skins on the vanilla android. This should be allowed to indie devs. Let  them come out with skins. Let them make money.

Will it happen?
It should happen. This is a pure business proposition. Not a tech discussion. This is more on the rights of a buyer. Let people/businesses concentrate on their core competency.

Let us see............