A Society Without an Underclass
Imagine a world where no underclass exists, where all people have the same opportunity to grow and live fulfilling lives, where the secrets of nature are no longer secret but taught in schools so that every twelve-year-old understands what is possible throughout the universe.
Is this a fantasy or a goal?
If it is a goal, what is needed to make it come true?
This is a rhetorical question that requires us to look at issues our society avoids. Dealing with it leads directly to the controllers of society and the choices they make for their benefit; in fact, the choices amount to crimes against humanity. Thus the silence is orchestrated within public discourse. The most important observation here is that the controllers oppose the nuclear family. In their view, the family is the source of strength to the population and threatens their plans to control the future. They have advantages and see that the advance in technology and awareness happening today will lead inexorably to a decline in their privileges. Above all, the controllers need an underclass of poor, even desperate, people who will eagerly accept what they are offered to survive.
Unfortunately for the controllers, families will not easily shatter at their whim. The policies they have put forth are regarded with distaste, rapidly increasing the people’s realization that they are under deliberate assault. They know far more than the controllers give them credit for; the family is indeed the bulwark against the goals of total domination, the wholesale enslavement of humanity. Their greatest mistake is in underestimating the inherent social growth fostered by families.
Descended through time, families are generations, and the young have a role different from their parents and grandparents, but no one in the family is in that role for life; each role is meant to be outgrown.
And so it should be in society. Designing a social structure to enable all its participants the greatest opportunity to do their best without taking from others is a worthy goal and one that can be reached. Long-term planning and organization, along with wise investments, are core concepts, but the existing structure will not provide this for all. It will not.
Worker or owner is seldom a choice we can make when we are developing our trade or profession; the demands of education, long hours without pay, and moving with little more than suitcases for our belongings means that we replace almost everything we need and buy in the smallest quantities at the highest prices. The cost of initial residences now includes so many mandatory extras that they are impossible to afford without long-term mortgages with interest piled upon interest. Buying and owning so that this vitality-sapping process is ended has become an impossible dream for many young adults today. It does not have to be that way.
The education industry has become the consumer of lives, selling an experience instead of an education. How many people are working in the field for which they prepared and love it? Too few.
The reasons for this are the people and industries that live off students’ lives. Administrative overhead has grown to an outsized proportion of every dollar they spend while the value of the education they provide has withered. Now dependent on grants from monied interests, the faculty panders the truth, selling research to support policies, and propagandizing instead of teaching. The students enter the workforce blinded stead of enlightened.
Disconnected from the market for their work by overly long preparation, students arrive at their industry’s entry point while they are firing established workers to hire inexperienced ones for less pay and no security. Now the debt they acquired to finance their long slow march through the university halls deprives them of any other choice but to work for whatever is offered. The most cited benefit of attending college is the contacts they can use to rise through the industry ranks. But very few have this experience and must pay for the privilege of saying they have a degree.
In the US, these things are true for many types of degrees. Still, in other places, the benefits of learning how to work with information technology have returned real advantages to the students and revolutionized the society they live in.
Only a century and a half ago, it was education that was the information revolution. A century after the commitment to public schools and universities, the cost of information dropped beneath the cost of energy, and it has continued to drop. Now fifty years later, another leap toward information ubiquity is here. Quantum technologies have raced beyond electric transmission into the realm of instantaneous delivery of data, bypassing distributed processing, a new Internet capable of balancing the world’s books within seconds, accounting for the ownership of value wherever it rests. Actual services and goods, rather than money, anchor trade, regardless of time and place.
Accounting for value, tracking its location, and adjusting for changes in global markets make transporting cargo transparent in ways never envisioned. Despite this incredible advance in capability, the processes of tracking and transport have been adapted to earlier structures without ever considering the implications of redesigning the entire system to optimize the objectives rather than the processes.
Changing Trade: Changing Civilization
The global society has grown from trade by sea, land, and air. It is reasonable to believe that without trade, civilization itself would not exist. Without the desire for trade, motivated by its ability to optimize the economic role of specialization and division of labor and to enhance the status and well-being of those who pursue it, there would be little reason for people to risk their lives and fortunes exploring the world and making contact with others. It is because of the inherent risks and the requirement of capital that trade has focused wealth in the hands of so few families around the world. This is a natural progression and is not wrong; what is wrong is that this has been perverted to become a global oligarchical control system intent on total domination of the rest of society worldwide. How this became true is not the purpose of this article, but about the means to change this and recreate the global trade system on equitable terms for all.
At all times, trade is pursued using standard units. Often these units were containers of a certain size and later became associated with standard volumes or weights. The most common form of historical writing from archeology is to find inventories or bills of sale relating to what was in a structure that is now nearly all dust with only ceramic remnants left for history. These describe volumes of trade goods by standard units used at that time. The significance of this for our discussion is that we can establish new volumes and sizes based on current technology and needs. New containers will enable more fluid trade and commerce because they work more easily with how we live and work, move and ship our material goods.
An Omni-modal Container Standard
Consider the use of robotics in loading and unloading containers. Effective deployment of these requires a repetitive application, such as filling the sub-unit containers with orders arriving via conveyor belts, each labeled so that the robotic system can organize the load for maximum weight distribution and space optimization.
When the idea of a shipping container that was small enough to move in an elevator and load on the bed of a pickup truck was originally developed, it was as immature as a small green apple. Over time the problems and issues that plagued it were resolved until it became an idea filled with promise and simple utility. Today this proposed standard has many aspects that are ready for the market and ready to revolutionize commerce. Its biggest obstacle is the scale of its market and the requirement that its specialized capabilities be useful wherever it is applied. Its exact dimensions gained importance as the goal of being an Omni-modal container was reviewed for years while its major applications were researched.
The impact of the ocean container was its model. Beginning in the mid-1950s, the ocean container went from private business innovation to an industry standard adopted by every country and trade company worldwide. The originator of this approach to shipping did not benefit from all of the time and money-saving adaptations to material handling and transit; they were usually adaptations of existing technologies called up to specific sizes and strengths. Still, the improvements to trade have had a revolutionary effect on the cost of shipping and the availability of goods everywhere in the world.
This revolutionary effect is expected from successfully implementing this new container size and design. In its original shape and size, it competed with the existing ocean containers that had been it inspiration, but that was soon abandoned in favor of being a sub-container. This size would slide into the existing containers like peas into a pod. This approach yields a rectangular size meant to fill existing ocean containers without unused space inside. Interior volumes of ocean containers lost four to five inches due to the corrugated steel walls and doors, which needed to allow the units to be stacked and shipped without supporting frameworks. Because of this quality inherent in the ocean containers, there is no need to overbuild the sub-units since they are meant for the same purpose as the truck bodies that travel the streets of every city and state. Indeed, this is the best way to describe their purpose in the logistical flow. Truck bodies can move from ship to rail to truck to building interior while sealed and bonded. Another important feature related to the above is the cost of entry to the global distribution of goods. At one-sixth the size of a standard forty-foot container, the ability to ship worldwide is possible for much smaller businesses as is receiving shipments for local distribution. greater specialization will lead to many new markets being developed
Because they will move inside steel ocean containers for most of their transit until they are transferred to or from their “first-last mile” handler at the point of origin or destination, they will need less protection from the elements, vectors, vandals, or thieves. Adoption worldwide will unleash opportunities for productive adaptations throughout the entire shipping chain, but mostly at the point of origin and destination.
Beyond the innovation in size and volume is the opportunity to improve material handling features to achieve full automation to and from the ocean container. Being concerned with the machines used to move it, identify it, verify its contents, and easily manage it within warehouses for loading and unloading containers shows us immense opportunities to automate and speed its movement in that environment.
From the original concept of this system until today, every aspect of its implementation has been examined and reexamined.
From the perspective of invention, the difference between an original invention and a process improvement is important. Still, in this case, the true invention is rooted in scale and its ability to overcome the many opposing forces. The primary oppositional force is inertia, or why society should adopt a new system. This must be addressed at the most basic level, at the level of the individual producer with little capital and needs to start their economic life from that position.
A Central Intelligence Agency representative analyzed the concept of the META City. The result was simple, “The idea is too large; its scale is unworkable.”
That was true then, but since then, many things have changed. Ironically, the CIA is largely responsible for the opportunity to implement the META City strategy because they have worked to undermine progress on so many fronts that now the sheer volume of broken systems and dysfunctional approaches at every level and in every nation makes the scale of the META not only acceptable but probably the best hope of restoring civilization on Earth to a positive direction.
I say this with candor, not because I am championing it, but because no other approach is integrated, solves so many problems, and benefits the entire population, integrating rural towns, cities, states, and nations into a plan that leads directly to a stellar civilization. Never before has the opportunity to address the convergence of technology, culture, and the flow of history existed on the scale we see today.
We have all seen sports teams go from horrible losers to stunning winners. The difference is always harnessing the talent on the team, changing roles and style of play, and having a workable vision for the game and every play within the game. It begins with the vision, how the coach conveys it, and the recognition by all involved that they can work together to implement it successfully. A small percentage of the population is on the team, but everyone will feel the success and share in it. Metapallet is part of the MetaCity Concept, a new game and league to grow in our lifetimes, it is a game worth playing, one that has been destined to emerge at this time in the world, and everyone who wants to contribute has the opportunity to play.
Scale is important.
