Here’s a note from Protocol, a tech newsletter:

“Three hundred and thirty-one billion dollars. That’s how much revenue the five biggest companies in tech — Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook — brought in over the last three months. Here’s some Very Sophisticated Analysis: That’s a lot of money.”

The total GDP for the United States in 2020 was $19,278,194.2 million or simplified 19 trillion and change. Doing the math, the big tech companies made 6.8 percent of all the money made in the US economy in a year. We’re familiar with the impact of a pandemic. This is a techdemic.

In a capitalist system, profit must make more profit even if it has to consume other profit sources to sustain growth; the street term is ‘grow or die’. The tech companies have had enough influence to avoid their greatest enemy – antitrust. Each tech company, and we can include huge entertainment corporations like Disney, must continue to buy up control of larger and larger and more diverse businesses not only to avoid competition but to sustain larger profits.

Mariner doesn’t know anyone who can fix this. Just thought you should know.

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On the mind front, Netflix has a series called ‘The Mind Explained’. It is an informal approach to how memory, dreams and other mind phenomena work. If one follows the episode about memory, one comes away realizing that the mind is designed to help make our best decisions under the circumstances and does not retain unbiased or even truthful histories of our lives. The mind simply decides ‘this is who I am and given this existential situation, this is what I’ll do.’ Our mind certainly is no computer but certainly more complex.

Ancient Mariner