Madeira Consorcio

145 Madeira Consorcio Meeting 20.7.2024

Jul 21, 2024 at 3:28 pm | Posted in Posts | Leave a comment
Tags: fractal, imbalance, Portugal, provedor de justica, scott galloway, simplex

We met in the Gallery and saw a frank, abrasive TED talk by Scott Galloway, criticizing the balance between old and young in the US:

The speaker says that the older generation are hurting their children in many ways because older people have chances to become well-off that the younger generation will not have.

U. was worried: He is a professor in a renowned US University, but they will not kick him out for the talk because he is not being racist or speaks up against Israel so this falls under Free Speech.

Galloway lists many areas in which the balance should be improved.

Education is one: Universities should try to give changes to the low-class youngsters and not favour the kids of well-to-do elders. Social Security is one of the systems in which older people receive benefits even if they do not need any money from it.

The group thinks that these inequalities will also come over to Europe, and there have been events that show how inequality starts revolts (the Yellow Vests uprisals in France).

In Portugal, the mentality of the populations is such that they tend not to complain too loudly. The Dictatorship they went through, is still in their minds. They complain about problems with the state to each other but not to the public entities.

The “Provedor de Justiça” should be helping the people with legitimate complaints, but they only defend the state administrations. Complaining to them yields a nicely written defence of the system in high-class Portuguese. The population is kept small and powerless this way.

Voting with 16 years would give young people more weight in the system, but J. said that with the Social Media craze, they are not well enough informed and not interested in important issues. Voting rights could also be weighted in favour of younger people based on their longer life expectancy. But again, this measure would not be accepted by the elites.

Banks are bothering the clients with more and more bureaucracy. The complexity will cause more chaos.

U. said that this is another point to see that our life is fractal, things tend to split up into more and more complicated patterns which nobody can control and reign in.

Portugal did go through with the SIMPLEX program from 2006 – 2011 (https://www.simplex.gov.pt/historia), they lowered bureaucracy by cutting around 300 regulations out of the Law. This benefitted everybody, admin and population.

J. asked: Who is responsible when a self-drive car causes an accident and kills somebody?

Politicians should definitely be pushed out of office by the age of 65, as happens to Notaries in Portugal.

A good question for the people to ask always from the politicians and from companies. “Does this help the community?” All decisions should be taken to favour the community and the environment. This is a nice idea but the well-to-do would block it.

The group was not able to fund a more positive ending to the discussion, the problems are too great.