Useless

"You are useless!" is the typical curse for ostracising an individual from company, school, or even family in the modern society.  It is wondering when they started using such a word useless.  It seems to have been used since the age of modernity where individuals started ostensibly categorising and classifying individual human-beings and target objectives and establishing a solid social order with rigorous ideologies and principles.  

Of course, these characteristics of the modern society are necessary to bring an order and a clear objective for individuals to live in such a chaotic universe.  Nonetheless, these characteristics have become intensive enough to expand the social class division and various conflicts.  This intensity has imbalanced the Yin-Yang by introducing the intense brightness (Yang) characteristics, which also simultaneously created the strong shadow (Yin) haunting behind this intensive Yang from the 18th century to nowadays. 

The modern society dominated by Yang norms and value puts emphasis on the conformity fulfilling their intensive objective.  This conformity classifies individuals into usefulness owing to their objective standard.  Then, individuals not conforming with the standard are labelled and ostracised as useless.  

The modern society, especially after the industrial revolution, has achieved many materialistic goodnesses which are characterised as Yang while leaving the environmental and spiritual goodness behind.  It is not to defy its characteristics of Yang, which are necessary for humans, their cultural development, and knowing and their world.  The key is the balance which seems to have been imbalanced in particular in 19th and 20th century when various catastrophic wars took place.  

The rapid industrialisation of the modern society, characterised as Yang, have been too strong to follow the natural flow.  It is as though swimming against the steam.  This intensity has caused both the environmental damage and the social divisions.  They are progressing while destroying at the same time.  

 

The story of "The last standing tree" in Taoism by Laozi / Lao Tze is very inspiring.  This last standing tree is worshipped for its longevity as a holy site. This tree could survive long because lumberjacks saw its form is too distorted so it was too useless to cut off for using as a resource. 

This story tells us that there is a virtue found in uselessness.  When someone accuses the other as useless, it is simply the matter of where this individual belongs to.  There ought to be right timing and place any individual can be settled in so that each individual has their own merit of existence. 

The modern world puts so much priority of the Yang side that it forsakes the Yin side. Even the Stoic of the Western philosophy insists on helpful/useful for the community. By contrast, this Eastern philosophy is really original and revolutionary enough to encourage every individual living in this world!

The Taoist teaching of life is encouraging for all individuals living in this world. Individuals allow the natural flow of their daily life without either excess aspiration or anxiety. Then, they may eventually find out their way of life satisfying them in a relaxed atmosphere.  

Of course, individuals have to challenge and strive for what they want to obtain or fulfil with their active spirit, Yang.  At the same time, their passive spirit, Yin, is also important to avoid unnecessary conflict, exhaustion for pursing more than necessary, and labelling someone or someone by losing their flexibility.

  

In the Western world, there is an equally inspiring philosopher, Michel Foucault, pointing out of the intense conformity required by the modern society.  Foucault accused of enforced conformity under rigorous social order in the modern society where individuals are classified as though they were the industrial products.  

Foucault mentioned the medieval feudalist society as the counterpart of the modern society in his book "History of Madness".  In the medieval feudalist society, madness is treated as an acceptable characteristics of individuals unlike the modern society ostracising it as an deviant not-conforming with their standard. Not only the madness but also various strange characteristics were tolerated in the medieval age; in particular the renaissance period where the culture of uniqueness was the colourful uniqueness. 

It is not to romanticise the medieval feudalism where the social hierarchy is rigid and strict and the material living standard was far worse than the ancient time period: The medieval sanitary standard was very poor where illness and short life expectancy were the inevitable trends.  

Nevertheless, the medieval age could abolish the slavery introduced in the ancient age so that the peasants, the majority subordinate class then, could enjoyed their social freedom higher than the slavery and a poor stratum of the ancient civilians.  For example, the medieval peasants could enjoy their surplus of agricultural products especially during a good harvest.

Furthermore, regardless of their poor material living standard, the medieval peasants could be seen as socially freer than the modern industrial workers (Including the office workers and some intellectuals such as teachers and doctors).  The medieval peasants had shorter working hours than the modern industrial workers so then spared time and energy for cultural activities in their local community.  

The life of the medieval peasants was very short compared to the nowadays standard.  However, they and their communities had enough capability to welcome various unique characteristics of human individuals' traits not restraint from the artificial social standard. No one was seen as useless because they enjoyed something unique coming out of their short live life.  In another word, the balance of Yin-Yang seemed to be naturally maintained (although someone may argue that the Yin aspect could have been too strong for some medieval societies). 

Yuval Noah Harari indicated his future forecasts in his books that explain humans in the future will be divided between the upper class and the newly created lower social class called the useless class especially in the post AI revolution society.  Even though the new world will bring furthermore convenience with the advanced technology with a fast growing pace, the social division of individuals will be widened. 

Only the chosen individuals with the most updated skill-set with an even higher conformity level than now can be employable and able to thrive as the active social class.  By contrast, the other individuals who lack the skill set demanded by the production requirement and the societal standard will struggle to be employed/useful.  There will be a big division of individuals between those who are able to aspire to be well-recognised by the society and those who are unable to work hard enough to be recognised by the society.

The "useless" will be no longer a minority while the social dysfunction caused the anomie (losing something to follow in their life) will be even more severe.  Those individuals labelled individuals will be more prone to severe mental illnesses such as suicidal ideation, and committing crime or any other socially undesirable acts.  It is now urging to provide them with the meaning of their life.  

Because the aggregate productivity of the world will grow furthermore, the new diversification of its distribution should be introduced to save these individuals from their loss in their life.  The current societies of this world tend to excessively focus on the instant usefulness, the active side of individuals' characteristic represented as Yang.  By contrast, it is a time to remember that there are virtues in the passive side of individuals which will be beneficial in the longer term or in more comprehensive perspectives.

Even there are some individuals who are seen as completely useless by the society's mainstream definitely have a virtue, a mean of their existence, and a right to be happy.  This is really an arrogant attempt to label someone with a derogatory term in terms of the artificial standard which is against the natural flow of this universe.  Any existence naturally exits in a nature of this universe.  

 

All in all, it is the time to recall the aforementioned philosophical elements while expecting the technological growth.  It is the key to pay enough attention to both the active elements Yang and the passive elements Yin. For example, a balance between order (Yang) and tolerance (Yin) is a significant factor for accomplishing a healthy robust growth of economy and social order. This wisdom is a measure responding to social and spiritual illnesses anticipated to haunt nowadays onward. Then, the robust progress with minimum destructions can be expected. 

Marx and Keynes

 

There tends to be a confusing fusion between political philosophy and economics. Both can be combined to create one solidified social scientific theory although they are meant to be distinguished from each other as an independent academic subject. The former is a general art subject which is frequently based on normative statements including individuals' belief and subjective expectations on what they desire and hope. By contrast, the latter is a more scientific subject based on positive statements which are objective and fact-based as well as precise, descriptive, and clearly measurable.

the subject of economics itself has its own unique political/ethical principle, which is to increase the wealth of individuals which can be accomplished by maximising the physical productivity level of individuals and their communities. This objective of increasing the wealth through the productivity maximisation aims at making individuals living in the world happy while keeping their living environment sustainable.

This implies maximising the sum of individuals' pleasures while minimising the sum of individuals' pains while securing the cultural and humane living standard of all individuals including the least fortunate member of their communities. By means of this regard, the true successors of (the classical/mainstream) economics ought to be only the two streams, Marxian economics and Keynesian economics (The modern mainstream economics).

The basis of logic of Marxian economics purely refers to the classical economics while attempting to diversify the income distribution by altering the whole economic and political infrastructure to retrieve the power monopolised by the minority ruling class to deserve the majority class of individuals. In addition, Marxian theory condemns the market economy where individuals trade their goods and services with their free will with little or no cohesive political control because the powerful ruling class elites easily leverages to exploit the rest majority. Then, it also puts emphasis on the intense political philosophical theory of the majority individuals' revolution against the powerful ruling class as the complementary to this economic theory.

On the other hand, Keynesian economics added macro economic perspectives of economics on the top of the micro perspectives of economics covered by the classical economics. Rather than altering the infrastructure claimed by Marxian theory, Keynesian theory suggests reforming the existing system while remaining the market economy which enables individuals to voluntarily optimise their distribution and desire. It attempts to gradually adjust the flow by providing the market participants with incentives of diversifying their income distribution without suppressing free will of all individuals.



When it deviates from this fundamental ethical principle of economics, it does not fulfil the condition to be an appropriate subject of economics. Of course, economics involves processes on the way to achieve its principle. It needs to research to maximise the financial profit of a particular individual or corporation. It should be considered as a means of the process inside the whole system of economics rather than the end itself.

Hayekian theory attractive as well as useful as a political philosophy using economic policies for those small government adovocates against any tendency inducing a totalitarian state. However, the statement used in Hayek' publications is often normative unlike mainstream economics. It also ignores macroeconomics rather than offering a substituting theory. The example is that the business cycle is believed to be stabilised without any intervention in a modern economy by ignoring the phenomenon that the business cycle instability is perpetuated by neglecting an implementation of a macroeconomic policy.

The monetarists such as Friedman and Fisher is not so different from Keynesian economics that both Monetarists and Keynesians agree with each other for needing macroeconomic policy interventions according to the business cycle condition. They frequently disagree with each other for the degree of this intervention and which macroeconomic policy tools are more effective than the others. Perhaps, the notable difference between them is their view on individuals' rationality: Keynesians are more sceptical about the rationality of individuals who are often prone to various irrational exuberance whereas Monetarists claim for rational expectation in individuals' economic activities. All in all, Monetarist theory can be seen as a derivation of Keynesian rather than a detached one.

At the time of Adam Smith establishing the new academic subject called economics, the market liberalisation inducing the intervention into the market was meaningful to fulfil the aforementioned ethical objective. The contemporary United Kingdom was dominated by mercantilism holding an excess market control by a limited number of oligarchy, which disrupted the economic growth as a whole and suppressed majority individuals' income gain and happiness. Therefore, the free market movement was considered as the reasonable weapon to fight against this negative intervention policy to the aforementioned ethical principle.

Moreover, that contemporary world economy was less complex than nowadays so that the contingent effect of the business cycle instability among regions was insignificant compared to the world economy from the 20th century onward. At contemporary market, the competition level was so high that there were enough rooms for potential developments in all over the fields. Then, freer market induced the freer individuals and more opportunities for economic agents to compete so that both the economic stagnation and the price inflation could be mitigated just by freeing the market.

By contrast, since the 20th century, both the power influence of big corporations and the contingency effects of regional economies to the world economy have expanded. The monopolistic power of these corporate tycoons take advantage of their economy of scale which only a handful of economic agents may duplicate to compete against.. Almost all the economic activities of individuals and their communities are furthermore interrelated to each other nowadays than the past, and the scale of economic activities have come too big to be self-corrected to stabilise their business cycles. 

 

There is a severe obstacle for unifying these two big schools of economics Marxian and Keynesian into one. Some Keynesians from the political left wing have approached Marxists to integrate together to establish a new economic theory deserving the majority of individuals in this world. However, Marxists have staunchly rejected Keynesians' offer because of their resistance against the modern mainstream economics which is still based on the market oriented theoretical principle.

These is a strong fundamental dogma which Marxists have never compromised in. This is their belief in the invincible value of labour. Marxism condemns the market economy because they insist that it will never be able to scale the appropriate reward for the value of labour of the majority working class individuals because the market economy is manipulated by those owning the means of production, the elite capitalist class individuals. Because of the asymmetric power balance of these two classes, there is no fair equilibrium state derived from the market economy according to Marxism.

Therefore, Marxism insists on the alternative economic model which positively plans to provide all the individuals with their fair rewards according to their value of existence. In history, one big experiment of Marxism established the central governmental planning by the working class representatives. These old Marxists believed that the command economy centrally planned by the autocratic government functions to deserve for all individuals when the guardians representing the hope of the majority individuals take over instead of the old ruling class oppressors.

Nevertheless, these guardians became the new ruling class exploiting the rest others with a higher oppressive intensity than the capitalist class regime. The critical failure of this old Marxism is the lack of free spontaneous interactions of individuals' trades, other activities, and freedom of speech and will. Even though there is an asymmetric power balance of individuals' bargaining power, the majority of individuals still hold some freedom to protest in the market economy. By contrast, the old Marxism underestimates the changing mid of individuals once starting to hold the control power of the autocratic government commanding a centrally planned economy.

New factions of Marxism propose some other alternative without a forcible command-ship of both economy and politics for redistributing resources. At the same time, the problem of Marxian claim for radical redistribution is not only about their command planning but also the nature of resource scarcity with the infinite human desires in the real world. Marxian aspiration of redistribution might be feasible to accomplish in the post scarcity world enabling all individuals to be satisfied with what they have already obtained and are able to access. By contrast, the problem of scarcity is still extremely hard to solve nowadays.

 

 

There is a phenomenon called the prisoner's dilemma, theorised by a mathematical economist John Nash, which indicates that the best equilibrium point can be the least achievable state while the point deriving an undesirable outcome is far more likely to occur when more than one of individuals interact. For example, if there are two individuals and two resources existing where these two individuals cannot communicate to cooperate together and both individuals are rational in the sense of maximising their own gain.

The best case scenario is that both individuals cooperate together to share the resources. At the same time, if one betrays the others, this individual betraying the other maximises the gains while the other loses out. This converse situation happens when the other betrays this individual instead. Due to the fear of the possibility of losing out, they are likely to betray the others for not only their own gain but also their fear of losing out. In consequence, both betray each other despite not only their consequential aggregate loss but also their haunting resentment against each other.

In the natural human world, when someone takes a control over their political and social structure for the sake of diversifying the economy, it ends up with betraying the other due to both their own short term selfish desire and fear and distrust of the others. This is something many Marxists repent for the failure of the old Marxism in practice based on the command economy conducted by the autocracy ruled by the guardians. Perhaps, Marxian economics should be applied without relying on the command economics, and should not be implemented as only one dogma like a religion. Marxian theory may prevail after transforming it to be more flexibly adapted to the real life analysis without worshipping it as the religious dogma like many Marxist believers tend to do.


At the same time, the prisoner's dilemma is a non-negligible phenomenon in not only the command economy fully controlling the distribution but also the market economy without any positive correction for sake of ethics and sustainability. Both John Maynard Keynes and John Nash realised this problem of the market economy without a positive planning. In particular, when the economy of scale for each industry grows and the system interference becomes more complex, the market becomes less trustable to self-correct its own business cycle.

When an economy is in a bubble (economic growth overheat inducing a sudden economic burst at some point), all economic agents should start restricting both consumption and investment to calm the excess growth to maintain the sustainability. At the same time, there is a chance of gaining a substantially high profit by not restricting their activities while the others lose out for not doing it. This factor discourages the others to calm their market activities down due to both their fear of losing out and desire of securing their profit. This eventually perpetuates this economic bubble of the market which eventually induces both the environmental catastrophe and the sudden market collapse.

When an economy is in a recession, at least more than a half of economic agents in this market should become more confident to reactivate their spending and investment activities in order to stimulate the economy. At the same time, most of them are unsure that how many of the others are confident enough to reactivate their activities and nobody knows exactly when and how their economy can recover. At the time of recession, many of individuals from privileged, average, relatively mediocre, and unfortunate backgrounds are unconfident and in despair because the whole macro level atmosphere is in a downturn mode. If only less than a half of individuals in the market become active in consumption and investment more than the others, they unfortunately lose out more than the others because of the stagnated market multiplier. Then, most of economic agents postpone reactivating them despite their reluctance perpetuates the recession which will eventually leads to the depression.


Marx and Keynes came to the different theoretical conclusion while both seemed to aspire for an identical goal. Marx accused the market base economy which he called capitalism and claimed for the revolution completely altering the economic system as the infrastructure of politics and social orders. Keynes also accused the market base economy but not willing to replace it with another while claiming for the reformation of it.

Even Marx admitted that the transformation to capitalism from an older social structure such as feudalism was a necessary process of the evolution of humans and the world in the past. The mistake of Marx was describing the historical evolutional step is discrete (not gradual) with a conduct of radical and often violent revolutionary transformation. By contrast, the transformation of human' life and their surrounding environment seems to be more gradually evolving than what Marx described. Keynes admitted that what Marx called capitalism has advantages for not only the ruling elites but also the rest majority despite the aforementioned disadvantage.

Up to several centuries ago, Marx's view of the world and societal evolution which were discrete, sudden, and often violent was true. By contrast, the pace of the world and societal evolution nowadays are so fast and diverse that there is no longer a discrete historical point of change across times, places, and human-individuals. This is not saying what Marx aspired was wrong. Even Jean Paul Sartre, being converted to a self-proclaimed Marxist in his later carrier, pointed out that Marx's theoretical work of economics was incomplete meanwhile he was attracted to what Marx attempted to establish.

The most remarkable success of Keynes is providing economics with the flexibility. Instead of sticking to a dogma, economic theories can be flexibly modified to gradually reform it fitting in with the most feasible and optimum state at each time period with various experiments without a risky drastic alteration. Those who accuse Keynes often ignore how much Keynes thought highly of the flexibility because these accusers tend to falsely equate Keynesian theory to a dogmatic one as the old Marxism. Keynes himself actually said "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”".

 

 

 

 

Why Public Cloud?

 

As mentioned in the previously posted article, the public cloud service has become popular among considerably many banks and companies and unavoidably influential enough to worry the Bank of England and the other regulatory bodies of the UK and the EU. Whereas they admit the accessibility and convenience of these public cloud services, these European authorities are worried about sharing their core information of their national economies with these foreign 3rd parties.

Even with their non-disclosure agreement (NDA), the property right of these information data has been no longer exclusive since it is agreed to execute and store them in devices owned by a 3rd party, and these 3rd party service providers are only a handful of the foreign private enterprises nowadays. The European central banks, governments, and other regulatory bodies are thus anxious about the phenomenon that private banks and companies in their nations rely on these foreign public cloud services all the more nowadays.

Well, whenever a brand new technology emerges, these tends to always be a certain degree of an anxiety reaction to it. The public cloud service can be compared to the utility companies supplying electric power from their power plant having emerged since the early 1900s. (Ref. Investopedia, 1st May, 2020) Before these utility companies were established, each individual firm needed to prepare for, maintain, and update their own on-premise power generator while the majority switched to relying the electric power supply from a specialised utility company due to its accessibility and convenience owing to its big scale merit.

※ The following shows the architectural icons and the configuration examples by referring to the imaginary world public cloud architectural design instead of the real world one in order to avoid both the copyright violation and the favouritism to a particular private corporation.

 

As a matter of fact, it is really advantageous for economic agents to increase their share of using the public cloud for their computer based operations and data storage. The public cloud providers bear responsibility for the durability of their infrastructure (servers, storages, and networks) often together with their platform (O/S, middleware, and Runtime) as well as updating their cyber security of them (The platform security depends on the service types, and the users are responsible for the security of applications and data unless using the software as a service (SaaS)). By outsourcing the cyber security update and the maintenance of the infrastructure, possibly with the platform, economic agents can spare more of their time and effort for their daily operations and various projects.

 

In addition to the aforementioned advantage in time saving by outsourcing maintenance and security updates, the scale merit of the public cloud is a remarkable advantage. This scale merit is the most critical key to optimise the net benefit of using the public cloud. Because of using the physical infrastructure, possibly together with the platform, already prepared in the outsourced data centre, the configuration and its redundancy process are agile and flexible.

The most symbolic function of the public cloud is the scalability of instances launched on servers. ]The on-premise server which is statistically set up to serve for a specific purpose e.g. data base server, mail server, web server, etc. Then, the users have to pay the fixed cost for equipping and maintaining these physically present devices. 

 

 

 On the other hand, the public cloud launches an instance of various types on a server and dynamically increase and decreases the number of servers while also switching the instance types depending on the user's demand at each period. The scalability of the server-instances enables the users to convert their fixed cost of preparing their server usage to the variable cost. In another word, by switching from their on-premise server to this scalable instance (the virtual server in the cloud is often called "instance" in short) they can switch their payment to a pay-per-usage model which avoids paying for unused computer capacities thanks to these scalable server instances in agile and flexible configuration.

In terms of the capacity control, it does not require users to estimate the capacity to use in advance because the public cloud service automatically scales it to match the supplies capacity with the demanded capacity every scheduled period. In terms of the on-premise environment, it is extremely costly and environmentally unfeasible to increase and decrease server machines and replaces their inside instances every short period (hourly and daily). By contrast, the cloud computing offers such an elasticity enabling flexibility to dynamically increase and decrease the number of instances. 

 

On the other hand, the public cloud launches an instance of various types on a server and dynamically increase and decreases the number of servers while also switching the instance types depending on the user's demand at each period. The scalability of the server-instances enables the users to convert their fixed cost of preparing their server usage to the variable cost. In another word, by switching from their on-premise server to this scalable instance (the virtual server in the cloud is often called "instance" in short) they can switch their payment to a pay-per-usage model which avoids paying for unused computer capacities thanks to these scalable server instances in agile and flexible configuration.

In terms of the capacity control, it does not require users to estimate the capacity to use in advance because the public cloud service automatically scales it to match the supplies capacity with the demanded capacity every scheduled period. In terms of the on-premise environment, it is extremely costly and environmentally unfeasible to increase and decrease server machines and replaces their inside instances every short period (hourly and daily). By contrast, the cloud computing offers such an elasticity enabling flexibility to dynamically increase and decrease the number of instances.

 

This is the example of the configuration based on the simple idea. This example tends to be seen in such as a simple relatively small internet shopping site purely operated via the web.  Majority of functions are located in the virtual private cloud (VPC). The VPC is designed for protecting these programmes from the outside access as though forming the private cloud limiting the outside access.  The load balancing function represented by Symmetric Loader distributes the access loads to Scalable Instances (Redundancy is implemented).  

 

Then, the data of transaction, etc. are gathered in Vertically Scalable Database, most notably installing SQL. Then, the gathered data in Vertically Scalable Database are sent to one Scalable Instance specially assigned for an analysis.  

 

Storage Bucket outside the VPC stores the analysis data from this Scalable Instances and the logs of all the programmes' activities. 

 

The access going out of the VPC requires to set up the point where the connection ends there.  The edge of the VPC is equipped with the gateway connecting between the VPC and outside which is represented by Edge Portal here.

This example is more complex.  This model combines the public cloud with the on-premise configuration.  Like a gaming company, there is always a certain amount of a fixed volume of the loads whilst the total volume is very fluctuating over time periods.  

This type of company tends to manage their staff ID access managements and remain their core functions within their on-premise environment. It needs to directly connect the on-premise environment and the public cloud environment to frequently forward and connect their information, data, etc. between them.  Then, there is Straight Access between the on-premise environment and the public cloud environment.

 

There is the domain name service (DNS) is allocated in order to transform to manage the domains and the IP addresses among these access connections.  The DNS also has a function of balancing the loads between the available paths.  

There is a newly introduced database server represented as Horizontally Scalable Database, most notably NoSQL database.  This database is used for more qualitative data which are not relational like what Vertically Scalable Database which handling more quantitative relational data. 

 

Overall, the public cloud services are really passionate to study and image to use in a real business field, and it will certainly keep growing enough to become non-negligible to mention while discussing about economics and other forms of social science. Even in politics, the controversy on this emerging technology will be a hot topic.  This blog project is going to furthermore focus on the present states and the possible and feasible development of the public cloud from now on.

 

 

FinTech and Public Cloud

I have been really surprised at one of the latest speeches of Bank of England (BoE). Both the BoE staff and the interviewers frequently focused on the rising influence of the public cloud far more than the currently ongoing negative impacts of COVID-19 pandemic and the anticipated future economic outlook.  Their main current concern is that many of private financial institutes rely on using the public cloud services, and their reliance is furthermore growing nowadays.  

They admitted that these private agents frequently use the public cloud service because of its convenience.  The main concern of both British and Europeans is that only a limited number of the cloud service providers outside Europe offering such a service.  Despite its convenience and accessibility, they are worried about the potential security threats of sharing the financial and personal information with the limited number of the private sector outside their country. Therefore, they implied something like reinforcing the security audit conducted by the public entities.  

The underling aspect is that FinTech (abbreviated form of Financial Technology) is rapidly growing in the world.  FinTech requires the providers to be capable with supplying the elastic loads of the service usage volume which dynamically changes across time, place, and occasion.  

The conventional use of the on-premise computer servers incurs the fixed cost for setting the servers and the maintenance cost for the servers and the operating system (OS).  By contrast, by outsourcing such as the servers (The infrastructure) and possibly the OS and the middleware (The platform) as well, and their maintenance, the usage of the public cloud service can transfer their cost from fixed to variable.  Furthermore, by outsourcing the servers, etc., the these economic agents can be concentrated on their projects without taking much time and efforts on preparing for their on-premise infrastructure (and possibly the platform too depending on the service). 

In order to understand how significant the public cloud service is for the FinTech industry, it is accessed by means of the following five forces analysis:

    Competitive rivalry: Reasonably High

What FinTech offers already varies from online money transaction to the crypto-currency based on the blockchain management. They are already in various kinds of competitions.  As long as their technology enables the duplication of their rival technology, it allows them freely join the competition.  At the same time, there is still a barrier of the entry: Information technology (IT) literacy and the efficient use of the latest available technology are the key condition to enter this market.  For example, the usage of the public cloud service is essential for the cost and operational efficiency to compete with the others. 

    Threat of substitute products: Relatively Low

Only and the biggest substitute product is the traditional conventional financial institutes such as major banks and asset management companies.  FinTech is already the most technologically advanced financial service.  Then, the older financial services are their only substitutes.  Majority of economic agents in the world feel like being familiar with the traditional financial industries and the fiat-currency based trades, and various services offered by FinTech are still relatively new to them.  Therefore, there are still people stick to the older services instead of adapting FinTech in their daily life.  However, more and more people have already started realising how convenient FinTech services are. Unless there is a revolutionary invention of any unimaginable alternative product taking place, there is a little threat from substitute products.

    Bargaining power of buyers: Relatively High

 

FinTech is one of the attempt to liberate the financial market. This aims at capturing the demand dead-weight caused by the monopolistic power of the conventional financial institutes.  

The favourable characteristic of FinTech is offering the lending money to those who are struggling to borrow money from the conventional financial institutes.  Then, FinTech lenders are assumed to often offer a lower interest rate (r(Inv.) ) than the conventional counterparts by lowering the cost of risk monitoring.  Furthermore, in order to attract more savers/investors producing their lending resources, FinTech companies inevitably offer a higher return than the conventional counterparts (represented as r(Sav.) ).   

The key for FinTech industry to survive to thrive, these companies highly rely on attracting customers who used to be unfamiliar with these newly introduced services with both the higher accessibility for borrowers and the better convenience for savers/investors.   In order to achieve this objective, the procurement side mentioned in "Bargaining power of suppliers" is highly relevant.

    Threat of new entrants: High

Not only the conventional financial institutes and traders but also those from the other industry types such as the IT media also join this market competition.  In order to attract more customers, it offers something which the conventional financial services hardly offer is the key.  For example, on the top of managing the customers' financial assets (The service outcome), it offers "enjoyment" while using this service (The service process). 

The media companies have a strong advantage of offering the "entertainment" in their offering service.  For example, they can adapt some gaming elements in financial services. Then, customers enjoy not only their monetary gain by using the service but also the entertainment while using the service. 

Both the financial transfer and the accessing entertainment incur a very elastic load of service usage.  Moreover, these entrants need to spare enough time and resources for their project of inventing their extra service elements without spending too much time, energy, and cost.  The public cloud service fits in with what is required to accomplish both requirements.

    Bargaining power of suppliers: Relatively Low

In order to offer the lower lending interest rate with the higher saving interest rate for the users, the cost efficiency is indeed the crucial factor to reduce the lending fee and the investment return.  Then, the procurement becomes an unavoidable factor to achieve this goal.  At this time, taking an advantage of the public cloud, potentially lowering various costs, is the essence of reducing the cost. 

All in all, FinTech and the Public Cloud are something tied up with each other in order to thrive in the world economy.  FinTech has a potential to liberate the entire world financial economy by offering a wider range and more convenient services.  Then, the public cloud offers a higher degree of liberating the market by assisting the new entrants of the financial market. 

Stirnerism can be explained as the blockchain P2P network like Bitcoin

> Is Stirner an anarchist?

There are some arguments claiming Max Stirner is not really an anarchist because his theory regards highly of some sorts of system orders without a unified autocracy and spontaneously determined contracts.  

What defining Stirner's socio-political theory (Stirnerism) as an anarchism is that it attempts to dismantle all the architecture of the modern bureaucratic system and monopoly of both government and huge private corporations.  Furthermore, it suggests, instead of managing public goods and services in the centralised authority, free individuals cooperate together when these public things are needed to manage under a naturally made contract.  

It can be somehow similar to the fundamental form of direct democracy where all the decisions are democratically determined by means of individuals' direct representation of voices.   Nevertheless, there is a fundamental difference with the political system of direct democracy and Stirnerism. The former still owns a congress or some form of the centrally controlled organisation monitoring the whole system.  By contrast, the latter is not supposed to have any central control tower of managing politics and social issues.

 In another word, Stirnerist anarchism is different from a radical anarchism disregarding the public managements and contract-forming.  It is quite difficult to explain what Stirnerism really is.  Nonetheless, thanks to the current notable development of the information technology, it has become easier to image what Stirnerism will be like nowadays.  

> Stirnerism is like the blockchain based on the P2P network 

Frankly speaking, Stirnerist socio-political structure can be compared to the network of the blockchain like the one used in the cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.  This network system does not have any central server monitoring the entire system as a control tower.  

Instead, each individual computer calculates and verifies the interactions and actions among the community utilising this network system.  This is called the peer to peer (P2P) network where their application architecture is distributed among these individual computers.  These individual computers participate in their tasks and workloads as the peers.  The privilege and the equipment are equally distributed among these peers, and there is no authorities overriding their rules of activities. 

This network architecture is what Stirnerism attempts to apply to the socio-politics of human individuals.  These individual humans are supposed to cooperate as the peers to share the tasks and the workload according to their needs and skills.  There is no unified central authority overriding their mutually formed peering connection. 

 

On the other hand, the P2P network system of both the blockchain and Stirnerism contains some fundamental problem.   This P2P system tends to be still inefficient when it comes to the management of data serving and access authentication.  

Establishing an centralised system is efficient to store and serve the collectively used data, services, and public goods because maintenance can be concentrated on the limited places.  By contrast, the P2P network requires all agents to share the same responsibility of maintaining, managing, and updating their quality of what required to prop up this whole entire system.  

This is why each transaction of Bitcoin still takes about at least 10 minutes.  In addition, organising human individuals in terms of the P2P network is far more extraordinarily challenging than setting up the computers. The setup for individuals cannot be flexibly adjusted as same as the artificial creations, and it is beyond our comprehension by means of the imaginablity of the current human civilisation. 

 

Yet, there is still a hope for accomplishing Stirnerist P2P public management.  At least, Stirnerism has become imaginable to establish to the certain extend by comparing the socio-politics with the hard scientific technology since the introduction of the blockchain and its P2P network. 

In the past when the information technology is not developed as much as nowadays, there has no civilisation having succeeded in establishing such an individualist mutualist anarchist society like Stirnerism even for a short time period.  This is simply because it was unimaginable.  

Some hints from the development of the hard science can be linked to developing soft-science and arts of politics, sociology, and economics in the future.  When a hard scientist discover some feasible solution of transforming the current P2P network system to the more efficient and manageable alternative, it will be beneficial for a soft scientist to innovate their own theory.

守れ、日本国憲法！国民の文化的生活水準の確保(憲法第二十五条)と平和憲法(憲法第九条)のためなら天皇制廃止を妥協してでも護憲派を貫きましょう！

国民の文化的生活水準の確保(憲法第二十五条)と平和憲法(憲法第九条)のためなら天皇制廃止を妥協してでも護憲派を貫きましょう！ 日本国の再軍備を何としてでも阻止するためにも日本国ができるだけ戦禍から遠ざかることを切に願わんばかりです。国民の文化的生活水準の確保(憲法第二十五条)と憲法第九条を守るためなら天皇制廃止を妥協せざるをえなくても平和憲法の護憲派の立場を貫きたい所存でございます。

おそらく確実に世界中での貧富の差は拡大し、そこで世界中の裕福層は自分達の利権保護のために進化し続けるテクノロジーを駆使していくでしょう。その中でその他大勢を支配していくためには、各国に人種や国籍を問わず彼等の傀儡を何人か置いておいてシステムを運営しながら間接的に大衆個人等から収奪していくシステムが既に確立しているからです。

もう一度言います、文化的生活水準の確保(憲法第二十五条)と平和憲法(憲法第九条)のためなら天皇制廃止を妥協してでも護憲派を貫きましょう！

実は改憲の動きが強まっているのも小生が今年、日本を出る予定です。数年前に帰国せざるを得ない理由がございました。しかし諸々の事象があり現在ではもうこの国に未練が無くなりました。親族との縁を切る覚悟でこの際日本国から足を洗う決意ができました。まだ彼の地での生活基盤は確立しておりませんが、餓死や事故死も覚悟してでも外国へ渡る決心がつきました。それでも腐っても我が母国、少しでもこれ以上状況が悪化しないことを切に願います。その一つとして現存のリベラルな憲法は最後の砦です。憲法を甘くみている人々が大きいですが、意見主張する際の原則として存在するため羅針盤としても大切な存在意義があります。そこだけでも日本国の存続意義のためにも切望し続けております。

 

そして女系天皇の支持もよろしく！小生は現在の日本国憲法の維持および女系天皇の容認を認める条件で支持します。

小生は現在の日本国憲法の維持および女系天皇の容認を認める条件で支持します。今まで徹底的に天皇制廃止を望んでいた小生ですが、日本に帰国してから◎ゆちゃんとひ★☆ちゃんと出会ってから彼女みたいなめんこいおなごなら象徴として崇拝するのも悪くないと感じました。そして最初はAKB48とその信者をバカにしていたことがございましたが、地方勤続時代にフォーチュンクッキーというお店がございましてそこの嬢等と戯れているうちにアイドル萌悪くないんじゃないの、AKB48総選挙万歳！っと思うようになりあのアイドルっ子たちが天皇になるんだったら天皇制を支持しても良いかなとも思い始めてきました。それこそ古来日本の神道のあるべき姿に帰化すると思いまして、柳田国男先生のアナーキスト民俗学との整合性も取れてvery good だと思います！