English : the original open source language and ultimate human language

English is destined to become the official language of humanity. This is due in part to structural advantages and socioeconomic reasons I will illustrate to support my claim.

The first and most dominant reason is what I call the Hollywood effect. People in small countries, young people especially that have a choice in appetites seek the coolness that Hollywood marketing pumps out on the order of billions of dollars a year. It is newer bolder and speaks more to young people despite that they have a national language and culture that their parents use. Hollywood sells sexy smart and new in the pursuit of economic ends. Not cultural ones. But every satellite and every music video station shows young people the life they want. It's attributional envy.

The economic reasons are obvious. Today's largest economies use English based on the US superpower status. Even outsourced jobs in far away lands derive from teaching and training from English speaking staff living in Anglophone territories.  If you want to make money globally, you need to have English. In many countries, rich people hire English speakers to teach their children English. Do they know something the rest of their countrymen don't know? The richest nations are at least functional in English so it can't be a bad choice second language.

English is the language of banking, science, engineering, law, finance, in addition to Hollywood art. Most technical societeies are based in developed nations and write standards in English. Sure, sophisticated people listen to operas in Latin or Italian. But they speak English at the after-parties.

The structural reason why English will become the human language is that the history and structure of English makes it easy to use. It is simpler than German and French. It has less tenses, less conditions and it is easy to master basic English. Fluent English speakers know and use the exceptions but do not judge people learning. In addition, its harder for English people to learn the harder languages so it falls on others to learn English. Try speaking French or German in a store and watch the shopkeeper switch to English. How can they expect people to learn when they are snooty?

It's not like English people have a secret plan or illuminati aiming a strategy for global domination. It's not important to guide the language, it's just easier to use. People choose English because it makes sense.  The French have the Academie Francaise that demands people use the word couriel in French but normal people use the word e-mail. It's easier. People don't select language options they use the easiest option. That's the secret undermining factor. Instead of plotting, English-speaking people create in English and offer it to the world.

English is the original open source language. That's the insidious reason English will win. It doesn't compare to other languages. It subsumes them. It absorbed Latin terms and Greek terms as complimentary. Medicine depends on these terms and they blend effortlessly into English. It's structure is so simple it adds words faster than any other language: someone creates a new need for a word and responds by creating a new word from current word parts. Sometimes it's stolen from another language or mashed from root words. But it's created right there and promulgated. Email, after-parties, bromance, frenemy, tweaking and twerking. It is a living language that consumes all, not unlike The Simpsons consuming all of Hollywood culture and references.

Mark this prediction, it will become the dominant language of Earth.

The real trickle-down economics : science to products

It is no secret that every nation has benefited from incorporation into the economy. The flow of goods and ideas is beyond the imaginings of Adam Smith, as he wrote of in The Wealth Of Nations, about purchasing abroad what is too expensive at home.  It was his proposal that a nation is richer when it chooses not to make uneconomic goods at home and buys them from somewhere else.

His vision and ideas have shaped all the economies, trended them towards integration, and made their citizens more prosperous than they could otherwise be in the old world economic view.  If you need proof, look at the standard of living of the nation that is the least integrated into the rest of society: North Korea. The people there live in the worst conditions and share the bleakest outlook of all.

The problem now is that globalization, the Internet, and international corporations have changed the problem to the other extreme: instead of being hard to set up a business it is getting harder and harder to keep a business going when you can find another cheaper work force and move the factory, the machines and the senior people to a new location, new tax zone, or new hemisphere. How can established nations retain work and therefore workers and taxes when it is so easy to lose them?

Here is a new law that describes this new reality.  The Law of Production Mobility: any skill, technique, or trade that derived from science and engineering that goes into goods production can be passed on when sufficient time, information, and education is available.  The longer the public is aware of it, the less unique it is and therefore the less valuable it is over time.  The more times it is refined or improved, the more likely it is to transfer to less developed nations.

This means any skill has a expiry date on it.  If it can be simplified, trained, divided, and made into YouTube videos then the workforce that depends on that skill set will eventually be too expensive to compete in the labour force of the future.  No work force can expect an infinite duration of the task providing for the family.  By design, all high tech becomes low tech.

What does this mean for nations?  It means that any strategy where they expect a skill to remain is a losing one. Any nation that relies on companies to generate all the economy is equally unwise. Companies are animals of profit, they cannot innovate without risk and loss and they have a vested interest in selling what they have. Also, they tend to find cheaper work forces and offload the more cost expensive parts of the products to the less developed nations. It is as natural way to offset rising labour costs. You can't expect them to operate differently if they are national or international.

What is true is that science, namely research or basic science leads to engineering, that leads to new products and new services. Research is the discovery of new ideas, new methods, new things. Those that research new areas are the first to know the discovery. The engineers and technicians that work with them build upon, expand and develop these ideas further into new ways that are better,faster, cheaper than the existing technologies in the world.

The fact is that the work surrounding a new discovery is hard to move from the place where it took place.  Yes, journals and papers are written and people can reproduce the work. But the reality is that development of an idea or process take times and effort, lots of mistakes and prototypes. That succeeds when the effort is centralized in one long chain from the lab to the factory floor. The new technology is valuable on the world stage and the value is.

Any nation that wants to keep the longest chain of workflow from a research to technology develop net thence into products for the world must concentrate on research at the beginning of the chain. Concentrate the resources t providing society the largest suite of technology from research. This trickles down the maximum value back into society for money invested.

This is the true trickle down economics.

Mandatory registration for psychopaths

Sociopaths are a wide behavioural group, but they tend to become some of the most depraved dangerous people in society. That is a generalization, but the stats bear out the reality that psychopaths are most likely to offend and cause damage to society. As Jon Ronson wrote, most Scottish psychopaths end up in London jails.

Since we know that, it stands to reason that registering them is equal to that of paedophiles or convicted criminals.  Therefore society has a vested interest in detecting and tracking them. When they are found to possess psychopathic personalities, the education system and the health system should identify them. Nothing prejudicial, a therapist fills out a form and they are entered into a database and they must maintain their address with local government.   That's it.

 Since cities are hard pressed to resource all police work it makes sense to collect as much data as possible. Like a list of previous offenders, a DNA database, a finger print registry, and of course a sex offender registration they all provide data for police to start with; if a crime involves psychopathic behaviour it would help to know if there are any around at the time.  It is a unique factor that reduces the burden. Being on a list does not mean they are guilty, it simply assists investigations.

Sam Roberts is a Buddhist

I have a lot of respect for Sam Roberts, the Canadian artist and leader of the Sam Roberts Band.Let me explain why I think he believes in Buddhism.

Here is an excerpt from a recent song "We're All In This Together"  :

"Mine, mine, it isn't a lot 
So why try to take more than I got
More, more, we only want more
It's not what we came for,..."

Mankind suffers in the pursuit of base pleasures - greed, lust, jealousy, that are not our true nature nor do they bring real happiness. We all fall victim to our desires and in the process we suffer.

"Every night I free fall into a dream
Mirrored halls in the chrome machine
It's a phenomenon that goes on and on
Saying it right but you're doing it wrong..."

The world is an illusion. Nothing is as we think it is, we are reflections like a image of a moon reflected in a still pond.

"We may never be the same again, we may never be the same again"

Everything in the universe is in a constant state of change. The Earth is rotating at a speed of 465.1 m/s and hurtling through the expanding Milky Way galaxy at a speed of  67.80 km/s. Truly, we as an ecosystem are not where we were a second ago in the universe. He repeats it because we are also personally changing, constantly over time. We age, cells are replaced, our attitudes change, allegiances change and so on.  


Then later on he sings:

"Slow down you're going too fast now

A delicate dance take your foot off the gas now

Don't try making it last now 

Sooner or later you're a thing of the past now"

So make your mark, do what you believe and inspire the change you wish is his message.  Live your life today because there is no more today tomorrow. 

"...
We are all in this together, so keep moving don't stop,

keep moving don't stop. "

We are all parts of the universe we share, a shared history, a shared future, and a fate in each other's hands.
 
All of these ideas on their own all seem like common sense, but collectively they mean Buddhism.  I'm sure he knows it and if he believes all of this then he's a Buddhist.