It's good in theory

Some times you walk down Bi-Lo and you see that there's a Coles product in there. That's weird, why is a competitor's product in there? Or sometimes you want to change your insurance company, or check out a different bar in the city or use a different phone provider.

Capitalism is great in theory, but it really just doesn't work in practice. There's all this fake competition going on, just enough to make it all seem legitimate. Really it all just seems like a waste of resources. Why is there a Bi-Lo next to the Coles? Why is there a Target one level up from K-Mart? Just make a bigger Coles.

The Coles brand stuff comes from the same place that the fancy packaging stuff comes from, just packaged a little bit better.

Planned economies must be really, really bad if a system of fake competition, disguised monopolies and oligopolies 'works'.

The longer you stare...

Recently started noticing that the longer I look at something, the more it looks wrong. When you spend a lot of time obsessively checking little details, eventually you seem to not help but pick up errors elsewhere (although maybe not in your own blog). For instance, sometimes people spend hours debating whether it is spelled focuses or focusses. Interesting that for some physicists, in their theories about the Big Bang and the creation of the world, it's the inconsistencies in the starting configuration that help to drive things forward. If everything was the same, then how would gravity work? How would galaxies form? Even at the most basic level, the theory goes that the very slight skew for more matter than antimatter means there even is a universe in the first place. It's always comforting to get some perspective from the realm of science. Errors, inconsistencies... they actually lead a lot of the time to creativity. Sometimes, words don't even seem like words any more when you stare at them enough. You aren't even sure if it's a right spelling or not... even at the higher level you aren't even sure if it's a real word. Sometimes, it even happens with people. The longer you stare, the more you notice what is wrong. Maybe it's something with their face, maybe it's as tiny as the way they pronounce a single word. I hope that the perspective eventually changes, with words, people and ideas that we don't dwell on the errors but look to the possibilities for creation.