Abundance Report: Video Conference from the Jungle
Last weekend I experienced an amazing example of abundance. My friend in Thailand called me. She and her friends took a drive two hours out of Bangkok to a nature preserve. When she was there she used her GSM cell phone to connect her laptop to the Internet and show me live video of the waterfall she was visiting.
The examples and levels of abundance are staggering.
First consider who she is. She is a young missionary from the Philippines teaching English in Bangkok. Her monthly salary is 750 USD. She is the youngest of 6 children of a disabled fisherman. She sends money home to support her parents, helps her other siblings with loans plus tithes 10% to her church. That doesn’t leave a lot of disposable income. So keep that in mind.
This call was not for business, it was just for fun. This is one of the characteristics of Abundance. When things are so cheap you don’t pay attention to the price. Except for the GSM connection to the Internet, the call was free.
She has a laptop with a webcam. So do a billion other people. Just 15 years ago the idea of a laptop was an outrageous luxury item. Now a computer with more processing power than everything that ran WWII is casually taken to a park. And this laptop wasn’t provided by her work. It was a present.
Nearly everyone on the planet has access to the Internet. Most of it high speed and capable of video. Cafes, restaurants, and cheap hotels give access away for free. Some of the poorest people in the world have such cheap and easily available Internet service they can spend hours sending Nigerian SPAM email.
She had a GSM phone to access the Internet in the middle of the countryside. She wasn’t in a big city. She was out in the jungle looking at a waterfall. The GSM phone is three examples of abundance. She could afford to have the equipment. The service was there. It was cheap enough that she didn’t care about the cost. Just 20 years ago making any phone call between Thailand and the USA would require scheduling overseas operators to make connections and it would be so expensive only governments or large corporations would do it. Today a young lady on a day trip calls a friend half way around the world and thinks nothing of doing it.
She used Skype to do the video conference. The software and the service were totally free. Once she was online everything was free.
The fact we even met to become friends is another example of abundance. Global communication is free and easy. Two people out of 6.5 billion on the opposite sides of the world with no people in common were able to meet based on shared interests and values. It wasn’t long ago that was nearly impossible. Now today its common place.
Abundance is the design of the universe and we are seeing the accelerating effects every day.
Physics Causing Abundance, Possibly a New Science
I suspect there is a physical constant at the core of abundance. I believe the constant is related to the relationship between the amount of information and the amount of matter involved in providing a good. This could be a huge break through for science and economics.
I don’t have the resources to explore this idea so I’m tossing it out there for someone else to develop. All I ask is you credit me with the concept. If someone wants to provide the resources I would gladly do the research.
Many people have heard of Moore’s Law or at least the effect. The number of components that fit on to a microchip doubles every 18 months. That means every 18 months new electronics such as computers are twice as powerful as the previous generation. Moores Law has been functioning consistently since the 1970’s.
Ray Kurzweil has a presentation where he points out computers aren’t the only thing with the doubling effect.
Almost all technology has some doubling. The rates of doubling are different for each technology but each one has a consistent doubling rate. So why is the rate consistent?
Innovation is an information processing activity. You analyze desires, which are information, then use information to affect something physically resulting in the desire being satisfied. There is a material component and an informational component to innovation. In fact everything in the universe has an informational component. Read more
Lawyers Create Scarcity
Almost all scarcity is either artificial or limited to a time or location. Let me make it clear that there are some valid uses for solutions in law. When law is used in the wrong situation it will always create scarcity. Monday I ran into a perfect example of how lawyers create artificial scarcity.
Sunday I got a flat tire. My tires were old and worn so it was time to replace them. Fortunately I had a complete set of tires in my garage. My friend had taken a car to the scrap yard but saved the nearly new tires. The tires were a different size from what his new car used so he didn’t have a use for the tires. It was junk to him but useful for me. I put them in my garage to safely save them for when I replaced the tires on my car.
Monday I loaded the tires into my car and went to Sam’s Club to have my used tires mounted. Sam’s Club offered this service free to members. I was so happy with this service that I frequently recommended membership just because of this service. To my surprise they don’t provide that service any more. Was it because of cost cutting? No. Lawyers stopped the service because of fear of liability.
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Predictive Innovation: Core Skills Book
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