Society – Perspectives

Would you be okay with a law requiring fingerprint scanners on all future phones & a phase-out of cash and physical credit cards over time? [Article]

Scott Adams’ take on the future of government & society.

Imagine if the government required fingerprint scanners on any new phone sold after a certain date. And then imagine the government requiring phone companies to phase out service to any cell phone that doesn’t have a fingerprint sensor.

Now imagine that your phone becomes your only wallet and only means of paying for stuff. That seems likely at some point. The government won’t print cash forever, and credit cards are redundant with your phone.

What would that world look like?

When work disappears – What do we do with people whose livelihoods are destroyed? [Article]

Megan McArdle worries about the not-so-distant days when work starts to disappear:

In much of the industrial world, it seems to be increasingly difficult for people to earn a decent living without a fairly elite set of skills–or an elite set of credentials that mimic skills, like a BA in English Literature from an Ivy League institution. The ability to earn a decent living, either yourself or as part of a family, is one of the basic criteria for a decent life.

Where do we bury homeless people [Article]

This may be a first world problem (although I think it unlikely) – Christopher Robbins investigates Where Do We Bury Homeless People? This is an older article, written just before the last year ended

Social Devaluation [Essay]

Dylan Grice, an analyst from Societe Generale, in his letter titled “You are debasing more than our currency”, asks, “do our money-printing central banks and their cheerleaders understand the full consequences of the monetary debasement they continue to engineer?”