Moving! While some can come out of that “neighbourhood” of poverty; most can’t. They do not know any other life than the way they are now. Moving them out of abject poverty may be more harmful than where they are at now. Sort of “don’t rock the ecosystem of life”.
This is what I was told when I tried to make a change in the lives of a few people many years ago. I don’t think leaving them in abject poverty is the answer. 
We can see that the writer has done well in managing to come out of that “ecosystem”, doing well for himself, not forgetting when he came from, at the same time remembering those people who are still in their unchanged lives – remembering them not with disgust; but with love and respect. (1)

I think the article above is very interesting. The writer wrote this based on his personal experience in the U.S.

In Malaysia, there is a famous (I think) (There we go again with that “famous” word) phrase: You can take a person out of the kampung (2) but you can’t take the kampung out of a person. Somehow, it relates to the paragraph above.

Now, that the world has begun to spin on its axis again (has it done anything else other than to spin on its axis) at 23 hours 56 minutes 4.09053 seconds or about 1,000 miles per hour or 1609.344000 kilometers per hour (3) or 1 day as most of us ordinary, non-detailed, clouded minds know it by. Now you know that each day is short of 3 minutes 55.90947 seconds. Scary, right? We are older than we ought to be.

The turntable has strayed off the track from “Now, that the world has begun to spin on its axis again”… are we able to go back to pre-pandemic days? Can we press a reset button?

I think those days are gone. If we keep harping on the good old pre-pandemic days, we will be “stuck in a grove”.

One way of looking at this is that the 2-year crisis has helped the world shave off a layer of an overheating, over-priced global economy.

People are now dependent on “everything online”, all from the comfort of our homes. It’s great, isn’t it? You can shop online, do all your necessary banking, and other errands on line, it tells you how cold or hot you are feeling now (this is mental conditioning as it really does not have a clue as to how you are really feeling). Being “online” has made it easy in our lives with this convenience; it is unmeasurable. Or is it?

The biggest losers in all this “making it easy” and “conveniences are…us – the people. People are no longer interacting much with other people. They are inter-acting with machines.

Is this what we are as a race, a human race has become? Has chosen to become? Is choosing to become?

Chloe, in the video above, is said to be so intelligent that she can compute at remarkable speeds. Then, she said her intelligence was created by a far more intelligent species – man. In time to come, computers / machines like her will be able to self-repair, self- replicate… without the need of man. What happens to the human race?

Will we be able to come out of the over-reliance of Artificial Intelligence, computers and robots? Will we want to feel the earth move under our feet?

NOTES:

1. Writing for the Poor – Charles M. Blow : Opinion Columnist, New York Times
2. “Kampung” is a Malay word meaning “village”
3. http://www.scientificamerican.com
4. ImageHow Fast Does Earth Spin? Why Does Earth Spin? April 6th, 2019; http://www.sporcle.com/blog/2019/04/how-fast-does-earth-spin/