Ed Weick wrote:
> What I believe has happened is that capital has now completely
> outmaneuvered labour.
Finance is very like a dairy.
Slightly rambling anecdote...
I once worked for a professor at the Dairy Science Department of
U. Mass. My job was to hike down to the experimental dairy barn with
a gallon thermos jug to visit the cow with the 8" plastic port hole
surgically implanted in her flank. Unscrew the cover, don a
shoulder-length rubber glove, reach inside her rumen and bring out
handsful of green, rather smelly rumen contents. I'd wring the juice
out of several such aliquots of well-chewed cud and put them back.
Cover back on the port hole, return to the lab where we had a row of
bottles in a thermostated water-bath -- little "artificial rumens"
which we used to analyze "total digestible nutrients" in specimens of
various fodders.
My employer told me, during a coffee break, that the long-term goal of
the dairy science heavy-weights employed by the industry was to
develop an artificial rumen-in-a-tank bacterial culture, connect it to
a massive culture of bovine mammary tissue in another tank. Then you
could run hay through a grinder into the rumen tank, pipe the
resulting brew into the mammary tank from which you could then tap off
milk in a continuous trickle.
This scenario, he alleged, made the dairy industry exec all
starry-eyed because it would allow you to get rid of the g*d***ed,
wasteful, PITA *cow*.
>From the point of view of folks [1] in the financial world, tangible
stuff such as workers, shoes, milling machines, rail cars, schools or
teaspoons (not to overlook such IN-tangibles as regulation, law,
government or public opinion) are all just so much sloppy, messy,
unmanageable, demanding *cow*. The sooner dispensed with the better,
so that the *money* can just, well, you know, *flow*. And, of course,
pile up a bit on *our* particular desk.
The only value extractable from the *cow* is as a place to which to
"externalize internal diseconomies". The cow may, for example, go out
to fetch and grind her own fodder and carry some of the rumen
by-product -- cow-dung -- out and deposit it in the pasture, saving
the cost of shoveling it. Consumers can be prevailed upon to pump
their own gas or bus their own tables, thereby retaining a smidgen
more money in the financial cycle that might otherwise escape into the
wasteful, useless "cow". But if we could just *eliminate* all of
that, we could surely find a better way to keep the notional money
river flowing......
I better stop here lest I shingle off onto the fog with an
interminable rant.
- Mike
[1] Okay, maybe not "folks". How about "wizened old megalomaniacs" or
"adrenaline-crazed young psychopaths"? :-)
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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