the nation with gross domestic happiness

Miss travelling days

pandemic has closed borders on international tourism.How I miss the travelling days.Spectacular Paro Taksang in Bhutan was a childhood dream fulfilled

Even idols have feet of clay

When you've reached a certain milestone on the journey of life,you find it hard to keep the idealistic vision alive as time and time again,your hopes are disappointed and your expectations are frustrated.so reality bites and life sucks,always has been and always will. So ,the disillusionment leads one to take a cynical perspective on the world. One man's meat is another man's poison as the adage holds true.When people hero-worship a person and puts them on a pedestal,sooner or later some years down the road,the hero becomes zero when his human foibles,misdemeanour or wrongdoings are exposed and judged by the values of a different context and culture,we find that even idols have feet of clay. Now the younger generation in the US want to pull down statues of confederates hero as they are tainted by allusion to racism and white supremacy.When i finished reading George Saunders "Lincoln in the Bardo",there were excerpts that struck one as he was not portrayed as the brilliant orator,the polished diplomat and skilled leader but a real sordid character who sent thousands of young men to their deaths in the civil war and the self centred person who neglected his parental duty to hold an evening dinner party while his young son lie dying of an illness. Saunders put it beautifully in his novel "Evidently,a person of very inferior cast of character,wholly unequal to the crisis.Will go down in posterity as the man who could not read the signs of the times,nor understand the circumstances and interests of his country..who had no political aptitude,who plunged his country into a great war without a plan,who failed without excuse and fell without a friend.You have seized the reins,made yourself dictator,established a monolitic new form of government which must dominate over the rights of the individual.Your reign presages a terrible time when all of our liberties shall be lost in favour of the rights of the monolith.The founders,look on,in dismay." So all Saunders wrote about that demystify Abe Lincoln has been a lesson in which history has repeated. Capitalism and industrialisation were the pillars that drove imperialists to capture Africans to be bought and sold as slave labour to work in the cotton plantations of the South.This was free labour for the plantation owners to increase the profitability of their labour intensive industry just as in England child labour was used in cotton mills as they could pay underpay them and exploit them to work long hours.Its only thro use of mechanization that free humans from non living wages and poor working conditions.The only downside is mass unemployment in the agro sector when lowly uneducated manual labour is replaced by automation and drones and robots.The business is caught between the devil and the deep ,blue sea.How to provide employment and improve living standards of rural inhabitants and stop the exodus of rural urban migration,overcrowding in cities and creation of slum settlements. I would dearly love to buy the blu ray DVD of Pixar's newest animation Soul as it puts an African American as its protagonist just as Mulan has elevated the status of Chinese females in Disney movies and Pohacontas,the native American females.Soul has an interesting plot that is optimistic and positive like all fairy tales of Hollywood.It casts a talented musician who at the cusp of achieving his life long dream is killed in the city and meets a wise young soul called 22.It's like the antithesis to "Lincoln in the Bardo' as both are caught in the intermediate state between life and death and whereas wwillie is a young soul mentored by the wise old Reverend Everly Thomas,this midle aged musician is mentored by a young soul that sees all the suffering and ugliness on Earth and rejects Life on Earth. Now Im half way into reading Richard Dawkins "Brief candle in the Dark".The man is abominable,irreverent but never a dull moment as he can go from being in the ivory towers of Oxford academia to exotic,remote jungles that time has forgotten.It's only when he talks shop on evolutionary biology and fascination with wasps and leaf cutter ants that my brain suffers from brain fog.The theory and observation are way above my head.

how grassroot voter expectations shape legislators role

Because of inefficiency of local councils and difficulty in negotiating complex bureaucratic processes,the electorates expect the MPs to do their jobs servicing the needs of voters from issues with garbage disposal to clogged drains. So much so they are nicknamed longkang councillors and reduce them to rotten politics.So even an election will not result in real reformation in governance because their performance is judged on their personal linkages to the elctorates whether its in allocating funds to mend potholes or attending funerals n religious ceremonies. Many times during crucial debates at parliamenrary debates,there is lack of quorums as the MPs seat are empty or some use the moment to gain their five minute of fame by making incendiary or rude ,sexist comments. " It is this deep,everyday penetration that came to maintain the electoral-authoritarian regime by acculturating citizens towards a particular model of engagement with their government.Over time,citizens came to expect and rely on patron-clent relationships,nested within party machines,albeit reinforced by carefully structured distributive and development policies." ( Weiss,Meredith 2020)A June 2016 national survey found that the activity respondents most commonly ranked their first priority for MPs was serving the people (19%)followed by going down to the ground (15.5%).No one ranked law making first.Secular restructuring,not political strategy,is elevating support for programmatic policies and diminishing the salience of patronage.Middle class voters can opt out of patronage networks and protest their shortcomings;a rising ,educated middle class has greater access to information on the extent and negative effects of corruption and the benefits of reforms,and these demands are simply increasingly difficult to afford,especially amid budget deficits ( Wilkinson. 2014)Lessening access to patronage resources ,we do see parties increasing recourse to an ideological politics of ethnic polarization in the classic divide and rule strategy.

the ethics of it

 More than incorporating religious studies in public education,its vital to inculcate ethics in instilling an innate sense of right and wrong in young minds.After reading mindf@#$k by Wylie,the elite are the privileged ones with access to inherited wealth and education and status and uses that to become neo colonialists in using information warfare to control elections in African and third world nations.By employing and getting handsome payoff through data mining,the access to big data enables them to manipulate voters and sway the fencesitters.When previously capitalism thrived on colonialists access to cheap natural resources or slave labour,now surveillance capitalism manipulate consumers behaviour and combined with analysing neurological responses of tv viewers or surfers,they can know the personality profile of users better than their parents,or partners.Where in the past they sought to access cheap natural resources or labour,now they invade privacy a nd gather data to be used for marketing purpose or political manipulation.If unethical behaviour reigns,the result would be corruption,obscene profiteering or vote buying becomes entrenched.

' The other interesting insight I read is on Ellsberg paradox,in which the economic theory on decision making proposes that between the devil and the deep blue sea,people tend to choose the devil they know than the ambiguous uncertain option even if they have a lower possibility of winning if they choose the devil.Fear of the unknown is a common psychological response in decision making 

We need to rethink social media before it's too late. We've accepted a Faustian bargain

Jeff Orlowski

A business model that alters the way we think, act, and live our lives has us heading toward dystopia

‘We scroll insatiably, unsuspecting that the technology that connects us, especially now in a distanced world, is also controlling us.’ Photograph: Sam Thomas/Getty Images

Sun 27 Sep 2020 11.28 BST

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When people envision technology overtaking society, many think of The Terminator and bulletproof robots. Or Big Brother in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a symbol of external, omnipotent oppression.

But in all likelihood, dystopian technology will not strong-arm us. Instead, we’ll unwittingly submit ourselves to a devil’s bargain: freely trade our subconscious preferences for memes, our social cohesion for instant connection, and the truth for what we want to hear.

Indeed, as former insiders at Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube attest in our new documentary, The Social Dilemma, this is already happening. We already live in a version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. As Neil Postman puts it in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business:

In Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

The technology that threatens our society, democracy, and mental health is lurking in our bedrooms, sometimes lying on our pillows, as we fall asleep. We awake to its call, bring its chiming notifications to dinner, and blindly trust where it guides us. We scroll insatiably, unsuspecting that the technology that connects us, especially now in a distanced world, is also controlling us.

It is a foundational problem of our time, underlying many of the other societal conflicts that require compromise and a shared understanding to fix

Our social media platforms are powered by a surveillance-based business model designed to mine, manipulate, and extract our human experiences at any cost, causing a breakdown of our information ecosystem and shared sense of truth worldwide. This extractive business model is not built for us but built to exploit us.

A third of American adults, and nearly half of those aged 18-29, say they are online “almost constantly”. But, unlike the citizens of Brave New World, we’re miserable. As our time online has gone up, so have anxiety, depression and suicide rates, particularly among youth.

Social media is also derailing productive public discourse. A largely ignored internal memo to senior executives at Facebook in 2018 explained: “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.” Left unchecked, the algorithms will feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform”.

In 2014, Pew Research Center found that partisan antipathy and division in America is “deeper and more extensive than at any point in the last two decades”. Over the past six years, social media has only exacerbated these sentiments. In 2019, 77% of Republicans and 72% of Democrats said voters in both parties “not only disagree over plans and policies, but also cannot agree on the basic facts”.

‘Facebook’s recent measures do not address the fundamental problem of their exploitative business model.’ Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

In The Social Dilemma, Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist and the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, points out that far before technology overpowers human strengths, it will overwhelm human weaknesses. Sophisticated algorithms learn our emotional vulnerabilities and exploit them for profit in insidious ways.

By surveilling nearly all of our online activity, social media platforms can now predict our emotions and behaviors. They leverage these insights and auction us to the highest advertising bidder, and they have consequently become some of the richest companies in the history of the world.

'A climate change-scale problem': how the internet is destroying us

Read more

But users aren’t just being sold a pair of shoes. The targeting capabilities of these platforms give anyone with a motive the power and precision to influence us cheaply and with phenomenal ease. Disinformation campaigns have been cited in more than 70 countries, and doubled from 2017 to 2019.

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The whistleblower Sophie Zhang has revealed how pervasive the problem is on Facebook’s platform, and how little the company acts on it. Facebook recently rolled out a series of updates to mitigate political misinformation in the upcoming US presidential election, including a bar on political ads one week before election day, but these measures are too little, too late, and they do not address the fundamental problem of their exploitative business model.

After nearly three years of working on this film, I now see “the social dilemma” as a foundational problem of our time, underlying many of the other societal conflicts that require compromise and a shared understanding to fix. If two sides are constantly fed reflections of their pre-existing ideologies and outrageous straw men of opposing views, we will never be able to build bridges and heal the challenges that plague humanity.

But there is hope. In The Terminator sequels, Arnold Schwarzenegger comes back as a good guy. “Who sent you?” John Connor asks. The Terminator answers, “You did. Thirty-five years from now, you reprogrammed me to be your protector.”

In the absence of time travel, the solution needs to incorporate the work and voices of devoted activists, organizations, scholars, and those who have experienced the harms of exploitative technology, which amplifies systemic oppression and inequality. We can’t rely on the people who created the problem to be the ones to solve it. And I won’t trust these social media companies until they change their business model to serve us, the public. Humans created this technology, and we can – and have a responsibility to – change it.

• Jeff Orlowski is the director of the documentary The Social Dilemma

To travel is to take a journey into yourself

 

how onsen is a social leveller and therapeutic destress tool

 While enjoying a long shower,my mind drifts to a new story.

How does an onsen become a tool of social leveller as rich and poor goes back to bare basics,stripped off from social status of clothing and accessories,a communal bonding and a therapeutic tool to mentally destress.a comic tragic tale

Owner of onsen in which business is at risk as people have shifed lifestyle and bathtubs with jacuzzi installed in privacy of homes. Their ancestors have given a secret formula to be used when business  is bad.this secret formula added to the waters of onsen will bring about harmonious relationship into lives of onsen users.One by one lives are transformed until competitors are jealous and try to send in spies to find out secret of their roaring business

An arrogant superior and the bullied employee get to soak in the onsen during a paid company trip.This high tech onsen has a glass frosted screen that if you press the button,it will mist up and you cant see the occupants.The two get into the tub and the superior fogs the screen but unknown to him,the device is spoilt and they are in full view of passers by.Superior is conscious of his hairy back and his wife nickname for him is THE BEAR.He makes the employee scrub his back with a towel but the cheeky chap uses a special backscrub filled with ink that reacts to steam He doodles pictures of clowns and faces of dogs and spiders on the back of his superior . Onlookers gather around at the back,giggling and laughing.Superior drunk on sake,wraps towel around waist and totters out to the warm applause and bows of onlookers.

   Should read more japanese novels for ideas that are comical 

Another customer is a left behind girl.She  has issues of conflict with her mother who is a bitter divorcee and warns her that men cant be trusted and marriage is a trap.So she binge eats with comfort food and develops severe skin allergy that disfigures her face.No cosmetic treatment works.

One day,after a big fight with her mother,her best friend takes her to the onsen and says it may help lift her mood.The dip soothes her inflamed skin and reduces the itch.She becomes a regular at the onsen.slowly she clears up her skin problems and resolves her conflict with her mom.Then the waters boost up her metabolic rate,she decides to try a slimming diet and exercise  and slowly shed the pounds.After two years,she feels light and healthy and much more confident.She went for a backpacking trip alone to explore the world.She meets and falls in love with a sushi chef at this small Italian city,and gambles and takes a chance to start anew.She took him back to her hometown to meet her mom who gives her blessing.They visit the onsen together and sweet memories of her life flashback

the spy has disguised herself as a shiatsu massage therapist at the onsen to see what draws so many repeat customers back to the onsen.after  the place is closed ,she bribes the cleaners to let her into the spring.She secretly stores some spring water in bottles and hands them over to the competitors.Chemical analysis shows it had the same mineral contents as their hot pool.Ah ha,try drinking the raw stuff and she got severe diarrhoea and purging,running to the loo non stop.

There have been rumours among customers who told her that their infertility problem was resolved after dips in the pool so she paid for a guy who had trouble having children to go there but he had no luck even after a year. 

Matsu  had frequent quarrels with his wife Kaori as he felt she was too career oriented ,with her online business,frequent business trips overseas,going to check on her factory,distributors etc.He felt that her stress level and lack of time for him made it difficult to start a family.Coming from a well off family as the only heir to the family busness,he was pressurized to produce a grandchild to con tinue the family business.Despite numerous IVF treatments,they were unsuccessful.Doctors warned him against going too much to the onsen until he found that his wife was infertile,not him.He bought the spa package at the onsen with the massage therapist so she could relax and destress.He was surprised to see how she was so relaxed and chill and started to be frequent onsen client although everytime he wanted to get in bed with her,she turned away and would sleep in the spare room .unhappy,he went to the maids cafe where he met a sympathetic young waitress from his hometown.He poured out his problems and soon they started an affair.A few months short of his forty three birthday,she gave him a big surprise by announcing her pregnancy.He was worried how to reveal it to his wife.Over the birthday dinner,she sprang a surprise on him.She asked for a divorce and confessed her love for the therapist and how she hid her secret life from him.They divorced on amicable separation,she with her grand business enterprise and new partnet and he with his new role of parenthood.The spa was really the place for wish fulfillment and harmony.