Today’s mass media is full of articles on important subjects. Trans rights, racial discrimination, anthropogenic climate change, the virus (yes, corona virus, if you still remember it), hunger in Africa. All worthy themes for public discussions, my woke friends! After all, aren’t we all in favour of rights and in preserving the precious human lives? Yes we are, my bleeding heart comrades! But it seems to me, no one really cares about a rather substantial group of people, who keep suffering en mass, without anyone steering the faeces on their behalf, so to speak. I’m referring, of course, to the unhealthy golden billion.

The problem with democracy

Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. Sounds familiar? This quote, attributed to the seasoned politician Sir Churchill, sounds true today more than ever, given that nowadays there are so many countries on this planet that call themselves democratic. And yet one must be blind not to notice huge problems in almost any single one of them. Rampant corruption, demagogues in power, erosion of law and order, growing inequality and good old misgovernment can be seen from the space, some times literally. Is there a common denominator here at play?

Elon Musk is a prolific man. There is no need to retell his glorious career here, the curious reader can always review the relevant Wikipedia page, which we will assume to be somewhat accurate. Important to bear in mind that the guy loves to innovate. Most of the time he doesn’t really create a completely new products that no one has ever thought of before. On the contrary, he usually takes an existing idea, such as an electric car, and makes it work. Both technically and, at least to some extend, financially. Of course, Tesla is ridiculously overvalued at the time of writing, March 2021, but Tesla auto mobiles can be found nowadays on every road. And thanks to the blind herds of Robinhood and friends, he can fund his other ventures from the general donations of the American government.

Humanity has come a long way in recent decades. We learned how to make a nuclear bomb and how to send messages almost instantaneously. We landed on the Moon and we put a mobile phone in almost every hand. We are almost done with communism, now that China is more capitalist than the US of A. We even haven’t had a world war for the last 70 years - and that’s a big one. But one thing still eludes the human genius - the male baldness. Yes, this sad and deceptively simple cosmetic condition seems impervious to the best medical efforts so far. Of course, there are some remedies. Unfortunately, they fail to combine two simple and very desirable requirements, namely:

Who said that the corporate world was soulless? Bullshit! The gods of the big business are also almost human. They laugh, they cry, they pooh (money and gold, of course) and they even text! So one day they scratched their collective heads with receding and pointy hair and decided, that what their minions really need was to do some corporate texting. Texting is in vogue. Texting is woke. Texting is cool and improves communications, when done under strict supervision, of course. And thus was born Symphony.

We, humans, love exchanging presents. Even people with limited resources try to provide some gifts for their special ones on important occasions. Naturally, this can lead to some anxiety. How to arrange a nice present to your daughter on her 10th birthday, when you have barely enough money to feed the family? For the more affluent among us gift exchange is often a source of a different kind of stress - what to give to a person who already has “everything”? Hence endless shopping trips and non-stop web browsing in search of the perfect option, which, one hopes, won’t be binned or re-gifted next day. No matter - the relentless pressure of the society forces us to be part of the process, whether we like it or not. Old religious traditions have been enlisted by the retail establishments in the relentless fight for more shopping spending. Who nowadays remember, that Christmas used to be a celebration of the ostensible birthday of Jesus Christ? The atheists had nothing to do with Christians forgetting about the theological foundations of the date, consumerism did that for them. Lots of other religious and secular calendar entries have been employed for the same purpose, and new ones invented. Probably one of the most recent ones is the so called Singles’ Day - mainly a Chinese phenomenon of massive online and offline shopping on the 11th of November. If we are to believe the Wikipedia, the tradition started just a few decades ago, and already it happens to be the largest retail day of the year globally in terms of turnover. And there isn’t even an ancient deity to encourage it along! St Valentine’s day, Mothers’ day, Fathers’ Day and so on and so forth - any excuse to squeeze a few more presents from the general public!