I Learned Not to Let Just Anyone Cut My Hair

The super-symbolic economy makes obsolete not only our concepts of unemployment, but our concepts of work as well. To understand it, and the power struggle that it triggers, we will even need a fresh vocabulary. Thus, the division of the economy into such sectors as “agriculture,” “manufacturing,” and “services” today obscures, rather than clarifies. Today’s high-speed changes blur the once-neat distinctions. It might surprise President Trump, who was concerned about too many Americans cutting each other’s hair, that the founder of one of Europe’s largest computer manufacturers has repeatedly said, “We are a service company—just like a barbershop!” Instead of clinging to the old classifications, we need to look behind the labels and ask what people in these companies actually have to create added value. Once we pose this question, we find that more and more of the work in all three sectors consist of symbolic processing, or “mind work.” Farmers now use computers to calculate grain feeds; steelworkers monitor consoles and video screens; investment bankers switch on their laptops as they model financial markets. It matters little whether economists choose to label these as “agricultural,” “manufacturing,” or “service” activities. Even occupational categories are breaking down. To label someone a stockroom attendant, a machine operator, or a sales representative conceals rather than reveals. The labels may stay the same, but the actual jobs do not. It is a lot more useful today to group workers by the amount of symbolic processing or mind-work they do as part of their jobs, regardless of the label they wear or whether they happen to work in a store, a truck, a factory, a hospital, or an office. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

At the top end of what might be called the “mind-work spectrum” we have the research scientist, the financial analyst, the computer programmer, or for that matter, the ordinary file clerk. Why, one might ask, include file clerks and scientists in the same group? The answer is that, while their functions obviously differ and they work at vastly different levels of abstraction, both—and millions like them—do nothing but move information around or generate more information. Their work is totally symbolic. In the middle of the mind-work spectrum we find a broad range of “mixed” jobs—tasks requiring the worker to perform physical labour, but also to handle information. The Federal Express or United Parcel Service drivers handles boxes and packages, drives a van, but now also operates a computer at one’s side, and they also perform security functions, such as watching who picks up the package after it is delivered and report potential thefts to the vendor and their managers. In advanced factories the machine operator is a highly trained information worker. The hotel clerk, the nurse, and many others have to deal with people—but spend a considerable fraction of their time generating, getting, or giving out information. Auto Science Engineers at BMW dealers, for example, may still have greasy hands (however, if you have your car’s scheduled maintenance done as required or suggested, your car may be so clean that their hands stay clean and you will never see a check engine light for the life of your vehicle’s life) , but they also use computer systems designed by Hewlett-Packard that provides them with an “expert system” to help them in trouble-shooting, along with instance access to over one hundred megabytes of technical drawings stored in their computer system, which are constantly updated like the anti-virus program on your computer. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Scheduled maintenance is a lot like scanning your computer for viruses, and making updates and cleaning the system so your car is never “infected” parts that malfunction. They are replaced before any issue is detected. And your car, in most cases, will never be infected by a “virus” the check engine light because it is undergoing routine maintenance. Now, this will not only increase the trade-in, resale, and lease return value of your car, but it will also make sure it is always safe to drive, will decrease the probability of a death or injury caused by an accident, and will extend your vehicle’s life well beyond that 100,000-mile lifecycle. Some cars can last well over 500,000 miles on the same engine. The system asks Auto Science Engineers for more data about the car they are fixing; it permits them to search through the masses of technical material intuitively; it makes inferences and then guides them through the repairs steps. When they are interacting with this system are they “mechanics” or “mind-workers”? It is the purely manual jobs at the bottom end of the spectrum that are disappearing. With fewer manual jobs in the economy, the “proletariat” is not a minority, replaced increasingly by a “cognitariat.” More accurately, as the super-symbolic economy unfolds, the proletariat becomes a cognitariat. The key questions about a person’s work today have to do with how much of the job entails information processing, how routine or programmable it is, what level of abstractions is involved, what access the person have to the central data bank and management information system, and how much autonomy and responsibility the individual enjoys. To describe all this as “hollowing out” or to write it off as “hamburger slinging” is ridiculous. Such catch phrases devalue exactly that part of the economy that is growing fastest and generating the most new jobs. They ignore the crucial new role of knowledge in the production of wealth. And they fail to notice that the transformation of human labour corresponds precisely to the rise of super-symbolic capital and money. It is part of the total restructure of society in the 21st century. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Such immense changes cannot come without power conflict, and to anticipate who will gain and who will lose, it may help to think of companies on a similar mind-work spectrum. Question: How does an unemployed heating salesman, scraping by in the midst of the greatest economic depression the World has ever seen before, become a millionaire? Answer: By find a way for millions of others to get rich—with play money in a game called Monopoly. Since Charles Darrow sold his game to Parker Brothers in 1935, an estimated 500 million people in eighty countries have moved tokens across Monopoly boards printed in twenty-six languages including Czech, Portuguese, Iceland and Arabic. In playing the game, they were introduced to a white-mustached, tubby figure in top hat and tux, seen hauling a huge sack of money to the nearest bank. That cartoon figure and the acquisitive nature of the game itself commented wryly on reality in yesterday’s industrial America—a country shaped by the concentrated wealth and power of a few families with names like Winchester, Hearst, Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman, Vanderbilt, Hilton, and Mellon. Pro-business Americans called them captains of industry—the great personages who built the American economy. Anti-business Americans called them robber barons—criminals who bilked, rather than built, the country. The one word on which both sides could agree was capitalist. During most of the industrial era, capital in the World’s most capitalist country was correctly seen as tightly concentrated. “Before the 1920’s,” writes Ron Chernow in The Death of the Banker, “Wall Street spurned the small investor as too trivial to consider.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

In the mid-1950s, as white-collar and service workers began outnumbering blue-collar workers, about 7 million Americans owned stock. By 1970, the number had soared to 31 million—mostly small accounts, perhaps, but no longer trivial in aggregate. And in the years since then, as the transition to a knowledge economy continued, direct and indirect ownership of financial assets by the public skyrocketed. Company after company, starting out in private hands, reached out to a broader and broader public for financing. The Ford Motor Company is typical. Wholly owned by Henry and Edsel Ford as of 1919, Ford went public in 1956 and now boasts 950,000 shareowners. Today, writes veteran business analyst James Flanigan, the owners of America are the “more than 100,000,000 Americans who hold more than $5 trillion worth of company stock through their pension funds, retirement plans and individual retirement accounts…American workers own more than 60 percent of the stock in all U.S.A. public companies.” That averages out to $50,000 each, not counting equity in the houses owned by nearly 70 percent of them, plus additional assets in the form of health, life and property insurance. However, these ownership statistics tell only half the story. Americans, including a huge percentage of that 100 million, also carry on their backs, like the capitalist’s money bag, an immense, ever-ballooning burden of household debt that can all too often outweigh these assets. Despite record unemployment and widespread financial struggle in 2020, some consumer markets have remained remarkably intact. Home loans are one of them—and even with physical limitations temporarily hampering in-person homebuying, overall mortgage debt in the U.S.A. reached record highs in 2020. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

In the midst of the pandemic, outstanding mortgage debt rose to over $10.3 trillion in the third quarter (Q3) of 2020. That is up from $8 trillion in 2005. Not only has mortgage debt grown by 7 percent ($703 billion) from 2019 to 2020, but it grew at the fastest rate it has in at least 10 years. As of 2020, approximately 44 percent of U.S.A. consumers have a mortgage. This has led to 20 percent of homes to sell above their listing price. This indicates that competition and ample demand may have driven purchase prices up, and in combination with other factors, may explain why average mortgage balances are climbing up. With highly inflation in the economy, 44 percent of Americans also reported that they are only partially filling up their gas tanks. Our research found the median debt per American family to be $2,700, while the average debt stands at $6,270. The average balance for consumers is $5,315, although some of that debt may be held on joint cards and thus double-counted. Overall, Americans owe $807 billion across almost 506 million card accounts. 45.4 percent of families carry some sort of credit card debt. The West holds the highest average credit card debt, averaging over $7,000. Total outstanding U.S.A. consumer debt on credit cards, car loans and other consumer debt is $4.2 trillion. This is up from $2 trillion in 2005. Even so, wide distribution of company stock and other assets makes American workers “owners” to a degree unique in a major capitalist country, including Western European nations under social democratic governments. To those in the poor World, these numbers are unimaginable. Ironically, if even 10 percent of China’s population bought shares in publicly traded stock of non-state-owned companies, its Communist Party could boast of extraordinary success in transferring ownership of what Marx called “the means of production” to working class. At present, that number is more like 1 percent. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

If the future is sufficiently important relative to the present, mutual cooperation can be stable. This is because if the interaction will last long enough to make a threat effective, individuals can each use an implicit threat of retaliation against the other’s defection. Suppose that a payoff received in the next round of trades or negotiations is worth only some fixed percentage of the same payoff received in the current term. Therefore, the future is typically less important than the present for two reasons. In the first place, the interaction may not continue. One or the other party may die, go bankrupt, move away, or the relationship may end for any other reasons. Since these factors cannot be predicted with certainty, the next more is not as important as the current one. There may be no next move. A second reason that the future is less important than the present is that individuals typically prefer to get a given benefit today, rather than having to wait for the same benefit until tomorrow. Both of these effects combine to make the next move less important than the present one. In most cases, mutual cooperation is the best strategy. When the future casts a large shadow as reflected in the high discount parameter of 90 percent, then it pays to cooperate with someone using TIT FOR TAT. And because of it, it pays to use TIT FOR TAT. And therefore with a large shadow, cooperation based on reciprocity is stable. When the shadow of the future is not great, the situations changes. To see this, suppose the discount parameter were changed from 90 percent to 30 percent. This reduction might be due to a greater likelihood that the interaction will end soon, or to a greater preference for immediate benefits over delayed gratification, or to any combination of these two factors. Even if the other player will reciprocate your cooperation, as the shadow of the future becomes smaller, it stops paying to be cooperative with another party. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

And if it does not pay for you to cooperate, it does not pay for the other party to cooperate either. So when the discount parameter is not high enough, cooperation is likely to be missing altogether or to disappear fairly quickly. This conclusion does not depend on the use of TIT FOR TAT because any strategy that may be the first to cooperate is stable only when the discount parameter is high enough; this means that no form of cooperation is stable when the future is not important enough relative to the present. This conclusion emphasizes the importance of the first method of promoting cooperation: enlarging the shadow of the future. There are two basic ways of doing this: by making the interactions more durable, and by making them more frequent. The most direct way to encourage cooperation is to make the interaction more durable. For example, a wedding is a public act designed to celebrate and promote the durability of a relationship. Durability of an interaction can help not only lovers, but enemies. The most striking illustration of this point was the way the live-and-let-live system developed during the trench warfare of World War I. What was unusual about trench warfare was that the same small units of troops would be in contact with each other for extended periods of time. They knew that their interactions would continue because no one was going anywhere. In more mobile wars, a small unit would meet a different enemy unit every time there would be an engagement; consequently it would not pay to initiate cooperation on the hope that the other individual or small unit will reciprocate later. However, in static combat, the interaction between two small units is prolonged over a substantial period of time. This prolonged interaction allows patterns of cooperation which are based on reciprocity to be worth trying and allows them to become established. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Another way to enlarge the shadow of the future is to make the interactions more frequent. In such a case the next interaction occurs sooner, and hence the next move looms larger than it otherwise would. This increased rate of interaction would therefore be reflected in an increase in the importance of the next move relative to the current move. It is important to appreciate that the discount parameter is based on the relative importance of one move and the next, not one time period to the next. Therefore, if the party regards a payoff two years from now as worth only half as much as an equal payoff two years from now as worth only half as much as an equal payoff today, one way to promote cooperation would be to make their interactions more frequent. A good way to increase the frequency of interactions between two given individuals is to keep others away. For example, when birds establish a territory it means that they will have only a few neighbours. This, in turn, means that they will have relatively frequent interactions with these nearby individuals. The same could be true for a business firm that had a territorial base and bought and sold mainly with only a few firms in its own territory. Likewise, any form of specialization tending to restrict interactions to only a few others would tend to make the interactions with those few more frequent. This is one reason why cooperation emerges more readily in small towns than in large cities. It is also a good reason why firms in a congenial industry try to keep out new firms that might upset the cozy restraints on competition that have grown up in the restricted industry. Finally, if the customers see the worker on a regular basis rather than only at long and unpredictable intervals, an itinerant trader or day worker will have an easier time developing cooperative relationships with customers. The principle is always the same: frequent interactions help promote stable cooperation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Hierarchy and organization are especially effective at concentrating the interactions between specific individuals. A bureaucracy is structured so that people specialize, and so that people working on related tasks are grouped together. This organizational practice increases the frequency of interactions, making it easier for workers to develop stable cooperative relationships. Moreover, when an issues requires coordination between different branches of the organization, the hierarchical structure allows the issue to be referred to policy makers at higher levels who frequently deal with each other on just such issues. By binding people together in a long-term, multilevel game, organization increase the number and importance of future interactions, and thereby promote the emergence of cooperation among groups too large to interact individually. This in turn leads to the evolution of organizations for the handling of larger and more complex issues. Concentrating the interactions so that each individual meets often with only a few others has another benefit besides making cooperation more stable. It also helps get cooperation going. Even a small cluster of individuals can invade a large population of meanies. The members of the cluster must have a nontrivial proportion of their interactions may be with the general population. It is easy for a small cluster of TIT FOR TAT individuals to invade a populations of individuals who always defect. The cluster needs just 5 percent of their interactions to be with other members of the cluster in order for the cooperation to get started in a mean World. Concentrating the interactions is one way to make two individuals meet more often. In a bargaining context, another way to make their interactions more frequent is to break down the issues into small pieces. An arms control or disarmament treaty, for example, can be broken down into many stages. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

This would allow the two parties to make many relatively small moves rather than one or two large moves. Doing it this way makes reciprocity more effective. If both sides can know that an inadequate move by the other can be met with a reciprocal defection in the next stage, then both can be more confident that the process will work out as anticipated. Of course, a major question in arms control is whether each side can, in fact, know what the other side actually did on the previous move—whether they cooperated by fulfilling their obligations or defected by cheating. However, for any given degree of confidence in each side’s ability to defect cheating, having many small steps will help promote cooperation as compared to having just a few big steps. Decomposing the interaction promotes the stability of cooperation by making the gains from cheating on the current move that much less important relative to the gains from potential mutual cooperation on later moves. Decomposition is a widely practiced principle. Henry Kissinger arranged for the Israeli disengagement from the Sinai after the 1973 war to proceed in stages that were coordinated with Egyptian moves leading to normal relationships with Israel. Businesses prefer to ask for payment for large orders in phases, as the deliveries are made, rather than to wait for a lump sum at the end. Making sure that defection on the present move is not too tempting relative to the whole future course of the interaction is a good way to promote cooperation. However, another way is to alter the payoffs themselves. In reflecting on language about which, the thought behind it and the way it has been received in America, I am reminded of one of my teachers, who wrote a Ten Commandments for Americans that began, “I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the house of the European tyrants into my land, America: Relax!” #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

As we have seen, these words we have half digested are the distillations of great questions must be faced if one is to live a serious life: reason-revelation, freedom-necessity, democracy-aristocracy, good-evil, body-soul, self-other, city-man, eternity-time, being-nothing. Our condition of doubt makes us aware of alternatives but has not until recently given up the means to resolve our doubt about the primacy of any of the alternatives. A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear. That is what tragic literature is about. It articulates all the noble things men want and perhaps need and shows how unbearable it is when it appears that they cannot coexist harmoniously. One need only remember what the choice between believing in God or rejecting Him used to entail for those who faced. Or, to use a lesser but equally relevant example, think of Tocqueville, one of the rarest flowers of the Old French aristocracy because he believed it to be juster, even though it would bever be salubrious for a Pascal, a man who consumed himself in the contemplation of God’s existence, and even though the absence of such intransigent confrontation with the grounds of all things would impoverish the life of man and diminish his seriousness. These are real choices, possibly only for one who faces real question. We, on the other hand, have taken these words, which point toward a rich lode of serious questions, and treated them as though they were answers, in order to avoid confronting them ourselves. They are not Sphinxlike riddles to which we must play daring Lestat, but facts behind which we need not go and which structure of the World of concern to us. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

What has existentialism done to being-nothing for us? Or value to good-evil; history to eternity-time; creativity to freedom-necessity; the sacred to reason-revelation? The old tragic conflicts reappear newly labeled as assurances: “I am OK, you are OK.” Choice is all the rage these days, but it does not mean what it used to mean. In a free society where people are free—responsible—who can consistently not be “pro-choice”? However, when the word still has some shape and consistency, a difficult choice meant to accept difficult consequences in the form of suffering, disapproval of others, ostracism, punishment and guilt. Without this, choice was believed to have no significance. Accepting the consequences for affirming what really counts is what gives Antigone her nobility; unwillingness to do so is what makes her sister Ismene less admirable. Now, when we speak of the right to choice, we mean that there are no necessary consequences, that disapproval is only prejudice and guilty only a neurosis. Political activism and psychiatry can handle it. In this optic Hester Prynne and Anna Karenina are not ennobling exemplars of the intractability of human problems and the significance of choice, but victim whose sufferings are no longer necessary in our enlightened age of heightened consciousness. America has no-fault automobile accidents, no-fault divorces, and it is moving with the assistance of modern philosophy toward no-fault choices. Conflict is the evil we most want to avoid, among nations, among individuals, and within ourselves. Nietzsche sought with his value philosophy to restore the harsh conflicts for which men were willing to die, to restore the tragic sense of life, at a moment when nature had been domesticated and men become tame. That value philosophy was used in America for exactly the opposite purpose—to promote conflict-resolution, bargaining, harmony. If it is only a difference of values, the conciliation is possible. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

We must respect values, but they must not get in the way of peace. Thus Nietzsche contributed to what he was trying to cure. Conflict, the condition of creativity for Nietzsche, is for us a cry for therapy. I keep thinking of my Atlanta taxi driver and his Gestalt therapy. Kant argued that men are equal in dignity because of their capacity for moral choice. It is the business of society to provide the conditions for such choice and esteem for those who achieve it. With the intermediary of value relativism, we have been able to simplify the formula to: Men are equal in dignity. Our business is to distribute esteem equally. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice is the instruction manual for such distribution. Kant’s theory of justice makes it possible to understand Anna Karenina as a significant expression of our situation; Rawls’s does the same for Fear of Flying. With events separated from the time and place in which they occur, it becomes possible to condense them in time. It is not only possible but inevitable that this be done. Unlike print media, or even film, television information is inherently limited by time. It is impossible to present all of most events, so what is presented is always condensed. Most of the event is squeezed out. The result of this condensation is distortion. If you have ever participated in a public event of any sort and then watched the news report of it, you are already aware that the news report barely resembles what you experienced. You are aware of this because you were there. Other viewers are not aware. When television describes events that happened at some other historical time, no one can know what is true. The best article I ever read on the inevitable distortions resulting from television’s inherent need to condense time was written in TV Guide by Bill Davidson (March 20, 1976). Writing about the new spurt of “docudramas,” which represent themselves as true versions of historical events, he said, “Truth may be the first victim when television ‘docudramas’ rewrite history.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Davidson analyzes some half-dozen docudramas for inaccuracy and distortion and then asks, “Does this mean that docudrama is more drama than docu? Probably yes. Is the American public deliberately being misled by representations that these films are in fact true stories? Probably yes.” In fact, however, the distortions are less deliberate than they are inevitable. Davidson interviewed David Rintels, who wrote the docudrama Fear on Trial, which purported to be a true account of the blacklisting of John Henry Faulk in 1956. He quotes Rintels as saying: “’I had to tell a story condensing six or seven years into a little less than two hours, which means I could just barely hit the major highlights. I did what I think all writers would do—present the essence of the facts and capture the truth of the general story….Attorney Louis Nizer’s summation to the jury took more than 12 hours. I had to do it in three minutes.’” Davidson points out that since television docudramas have condensed such complex subjects as the career of Joseph McCarthy, the Attica prison riots, and the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., the problems is virtually beyond control. Davidson quotes psychologist Dr. Victor B. Cline of the University of Utah, who says: “’The very real danger of these docudrama films is that people take it for granted that they’re true and—unlike similar fictionalized history in movies and the theater—they are seen on a medium which also presents straight news…I think they should carry a disclaimer to the effect that the story is not totally true but based on some of the elements of what act actually occurred.’” I think so too. However, if there should be disclaimers for documdramas there should be many more for news. As prominent San Francisco journalist Susan Halas once put it: “There is no news, there’s only media.” Where docudramas reduce the same event to thirty seconds, eliminating most of the information that a reasonable, thinking person who consider necessary to any understanding of events in the process. What is left is the skeleton of events, making only scraps of knowledge available for people’s perception and understanding. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

The inevitable need to condense information in time is the cause of this. The way the information is condensed—what is left in and what is deleted—will be described in upcoming dates. As with so many of the features of all that is modern, the origins of information glut can be traced many centuries back. Nothing could be more misleading than the claim that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age in the early sixteenth century. Forty years after Gutenberg converted an old wine press into a printing machine with movable type, there were presses in 110 cities in six different countries. Fifty years after the press was invented, more than eight million books had been printed, almost all of them filled with information that had previously been unavailable to the average person. There were books on law, agriculture, politics, exploration, metallurgy, botany, linguistics, pediatrics, and even good manners. There were also assorted guides and manuals; the World of commerce rapidly became a World of printed paper through the widespread use of contracts, deed, promissory notes, and maps. (Not surprisingly, in a culture in which information was becoming standardized and repeatable, mapmakers began to exclude “paradise” from their charts on the grounds that its location was too uncertain.) So much new information, of so many diverse types, was generated that printers could no longer use the scribal manuscript as their model of a book. By the mid-sixteenth century, printers began to experiment with new formats, among the most important innovations being the use of Arabic numerals to number pages. (The first known example of such pagination is Johann Froben’s first edition of Erasmus’ New Testament, printed in 1516.) #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Pagination led inevitable to more accurate indexing, annotation, and cross-referencing, which in turn was accompanied by innovations in punctuation marks, section heads, paragraphing, title-paging, and running heads. By the end of the sixteenth century, the machine-made book had a typographic for and look comparable to the books today. All of this is worthy mentioning because innovations in the format of the machine-made book were an attempt to control the flow of information, to organize it by establishing priorities and by giving it sequence. Very early on, it was understood that the printed book had crated an information crisis and that something needed to be done to maintain a measure of control. The altered form of the book was one means. Another was the modern school, which took shape in the seventeenth century. In 1480, before the information explosion, there were thirty-four schools in all of England. By 1660, there were 444, one school for every twelve square miles. There were several reasons for the rapid growth of the common school, but none was more obvious than that it was a necessary response to the anxieties and confusion aroused by information on the loose. The invention of what is called a curriculum was a logical step toward organizing, limiting, and discriminating among available sources of information. Schools became technocracy’s first secular bureaucracies, structures for legitimizing some parts of the flow of information and discrediting other parts. Schools were, in short, a means of governing the ecology of information. With the rise of technocracies, information became a more serious problem than ever, and several methods of controlling information had to be invented. For a richly detailed account of what those methods were, I refer the reader to James Beniger’s The Control Revolution, which is among the three or four most important books we have on the subject of the relation of information to culture. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Most of the methods by which technocracies have hoped to keep information from running amok are now dysfunctional. Indeed, one way of defining a Technopoly is to say that its information immune system is inoperable. Technopoly is a form of cultural COVID-19. That is why it is possible to say almost anything without contradiction provided you begin your utterance with the words “A study has shown…” or “Scientists now tell us that…” More important, it is why in a Technopoly there can be no transcendent sense of purpose or meaning, no cultural coherence. Information is dangerous when it has no place to go, when there is no theory to which it applies, no pattern in which it fits, when there is no higher purpose that it serves. Such information is “inert.” However, information without regulation can be lethal. While on the subject of puzzling chains, taking the advice of the tourguide, you grab two molecular knobs on the protein and pull. It resists for a moment, but then a loop comes free, letting other loops flop around more, and the whole structure seem to melt into a withering coil. After a bit of pulling and wrestling, the protein’s structure becomes obvious: It is a long chain—longer than you are tall, if you could get straight—and each segment of the chain has one of several kinds of knobs sticking off to the side. With the multicoloured, glassy-bead portrayal of the atoms. The protein chain resembles a flamboyant necklace. This may be decorative, but how does it all go back together? (Much like what are the benefits of the words coming out of people’s mouth?) Then chain flops and twists and thrashes, and you pull and push and twist, but the original tight, solid packing is lost. There are more ways to go wrong in folding up the chain than there are in solving Rubik’s Cube, and now that the folded structure is gone, it is not even clear what the result should look like. How did these twentieth-century researcher ever solve the notorious “protein objects problem”? It is a matter of record that they started building protein objects in the late 1980s. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

This protein molecule will not go back together, so you try to break it. A firm grip and a powerful yank straightens a section a bit, but the chain holds together and snaps back. Though unfolding it was easy, even muscle with the strength of steel—the strength of Superman—cannot break the chain itself. Chemical bonds are amazingly strong, so it is time to cheat again. When you say, “Flimsy World—one second!” while pulling, your hands easily mov apart, splitting the chain in two before its strength returns to normal. You have forced a chemical change, but there must be easier ways since chemists do their work without tiny superhands. While you compare the broken ends, they thrash around and bump together. The third time this happens, the chain rejoins, as strong as before. This is like having snap-together parts, but the snaps are far strong then welded steel. Modern assembler chemistry usually uses other approaches, but seeing this happen makes the idea of molecular assembly more understandable: Put the right pieces together in the right positions, and they snap together to make a bigger structure. Remember the “Whoa!” command, you decide to go back to the properly scaled speed for your size and strength. Saying “Standard settings!,” you see the thrashing of the protein chain speed up to a hard-to-follow blur. Not only the ownership of capital but the way it is collected, allocated, and transferred from pocket to pocket, much like the puzzling chains of the protein molecule, are undergoing unprecedented change. The financial infrastructure in the United States of America—the beating heart, as it were, of World capitalism—is being revolutionized, its operations altered to adapt to changes in the deep fundamentals of knowledge, time and space. Investments can be made within milliseconds. Spatially, they can reach around the globe. And investors have easier access to ever-faster, more diverse, more customized, more accessible data, information and knowledge. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The main function of this fast-growing infrastructure is to make it easier to convert property into capital and, theoretically, to allocate the resultant capital to those who can make the most efficient use of it—with efficiency measured by profits returned. The new infrastructure offers a dizzying range of risk-reward choices, including high-yield bonds, venture capital, mutual funds and funds that parallel the performance of stock-markets indices. Investors are offered derivatives, securitized mortgages, and financial packages with evocative names like Spyders, Vipers, Qubes, and Cocos, as well as funds that offer “socially responsible” investment vehicles, environmental portfolios, microfinance and countless other options. On the environmental front, microfinance is, in and of itself, “green” in that it promotes businesses that can be sustained indefinitely. Example over example over the last three decades have proven the concept that when less affluent people are given opportunities to earn a living in a legitimate and sustainable fashion, they have little or no need to pillage their surrounding natural resources to shelter or feed themselves. Also, most of the financial institutions involved in microfinance hold up sustainability as a precondition for awarding loans. Others encourage greener businesses by offering lower interest rates to borrowers with sustainability-oriented plans. World Bank statistics show that more than 7,000 microfinance institutions serve some 16 million people in developing countries with $7 billion in outstanding loans, 97 percent which are repaid. With the use of microloans and business education, two pillars of the microfinance process, loanees are provided a safety net that will protect them and their economic future in times of hardships. In addition, microfinance tends to have a ricochet effect in the communities that run microloan operations. If one family in a town begins to become more prosperous, they will spend more money in their communities, buying more supplies for the business or simply just raising their standard of living. Either way, the prosperity of one translates into increased economic success for all those they interact with. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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Nestled at the southern end of Plumas Lake, bordering an orchard to the west, Cresleigh Riverside is home to the largest home sites in the three Plumas Ranch communities.

Its executive-style residences feature space and amenities that are well beyond the norm – many on country lots that back up to the Ranch’s adjacent fruit orchards. With four floor plans available, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.

The kitchen, dining, and indoor/outdoor living areas transition gracefully into each other, making entertaining a pleasant experience. Plenty of room and open spaces give natural light the chance to flow through this beautiful home.

Cresleigh Homes offer incredible versatility with a seemingly endless number of architectural and design options. The single-storey model home or one very similar to it is 3-4 Bedrooms – 3 Bathrooms – 2,627 square fert – $667,190. (Larger two-storey homes are also avaliable.) https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/move-in-ready-homesite-70/