Part II: Romancing Snails

“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.”

- Albert Einstein

Notwithstanding the instinctual inclinations of people, as well as birds and reptiles, who enjoy escargot and will move rapidly to catch a less-agile snail, unless caught, the gelatinous shelled slug knows the sun will rise again and fatefully moves ever forward in its mobile home to locate, digest, process and expel food crawled upon. Expending energy in this way each day the snail will likely avoid the digestive enzymes of a cat or dog in its lifetime, but certainly represents a hearty meal to some other living being on the food chain.

It's quite debatable whether the average snail will continue to grow ad infinitum if it is not caught and eaten, succumbs to a fatal infection, freezes or starves to death. There is a life cycle at play. A baby snail is introduced to the world, grows, reaches maturity and eventually dies. To its larger and faster predator, a plump and oblivious mature snail is obviously worthy of catching. Such is life.

It might make sense for the mature snail, if caught and if it could communicate with its captor, to argue to let it live and in fact reproduce, if kept safe and healthy and offered a mate, to create a veritable bounty of even more juicy snails, as it would much rather give up its children rather than being devoured that day. Augmenting any natural talents to survive, the ability to communicate its own value would seemingly be paramount.

Alas, until removed from their mundane existence, snails crawl alone unaided by technology, financial assistance or legal advice; productive on their own scale, a mouthful of food for their swift hunters. The snail is staunchly independent, a master of its own existence yet still a valuable morsel of energy. Burdened by neither family nor community, preferring a grounded solo lifestyle, rarely would their predators come across a festive herd of snails.

Among the developing nations in the world, there are snails.

Fortunately, when combined with butter and garlic, there are people who will defend the rights of the captive snail to procreate unfettered and deliver many unsuspecting offspring unto a consuming populace. Knowing the value of a properly cooked half dozen and wisely removing the element of a chance encounter, this is the essence of farming and for lack of better description farms are factories. Their product is food, which people need to produce things, presumably more useful things than our ancient predecessors.

In particular, not only do factories manufacturing food these days need to slice and separate but they need to refrigerate and deliver their finished product. Whether on a massive scale or not, due to the energy required, food produced in factories is not free: refrigeration requires electricity and delivery to the market requires oil. Be assured, food is delivered at a profit, which a factory today needs to survive and continue to acquire the vital energy it needs.

Just like a snail of any size, humans need energy to both move and grow. So do nations. Productive people equals productive nations. As energy sustains all living beings, and factories large and small, it also sustains nations, fueling their transformation on a macro level and impacting productivity as a measure of success and their value in the unnatural investment world.

Food factories do not produce people, nor do they produce energy.

In order to grow, and not at a snail's pace, to balance employment with birth rates, all nations need productive people (educated, safe and healthy) and profitable factories and, the tipping point in this equation, the energy required to operate them. Fed people are happy people. Because profit is maximized as a result of sales exceeding expenses, for a factory to compete and survive, the costs of all energy must be obtained as cheaply as possible.

On one level, a snail is known as a productive recycler of organic waste and on another as a tasty escargot, a food factory might be known for the number of people it employs and the boxed meals it produces efficiently, and a developing nation for its natural resources and an ability to competitively deliver them. To enable their growth, people always compete locally for paid time and nations compete globally to offer cheap electricity to new factories.

Despite the effects of disease and disaster, each year nations need more factories to feed more people, and thus the need for more electricity. However, factories have a life cycle too. They mature, become unprofitable and die. During the Victorian Era, power plants were built (by the powerful) to fuel colonial factories to process resources and profitably create product... after all, employees could live on fruits and roots found freely on the land.

In these old days, power plants burned coal or oil to create electricity and once the benefit of electricity for future generations was explained and understood by owners' friends and family members, monopolies to both generate and transmit new electricity were conferred in collusion with nations' colonized and now-civilized leaders. Understandably, around the world, civil wars and revolutions are a result of these recurring profits and the use of their finite energy supply.

Everything is relative, and nothing really changes.

In the Dot Com Era, within the investment world there were developing businesses termed Gazelles, based on the speed professionals predicted their stock prices to move; indeed fast, yet catchable by those presumably smarter and faster. It may take only one person to catch a sluggish snail, but many would be required to catch a Gazelle, not to mention the technology needed to expedite their task.

At great expense - implying great value - many Gazelles were introduced and in fact "incubated" to grow, farmed with an expectation of profit upon maturation. Snails were ignored. After all, on the Savannah, a lithe gazelle once leisurely strolling from patch to patch of grass, now captured and hapless between a firm set of unrelenting jaws, would not win a similar 'life over death' argument with so many other of his equally tasty herdmates grazing nearby.

As this modern world evolves, the growth of people, factories and nations are inextricably intertwined. In nations today, humans need factories, as factories produce (process and prepare) many things humans need, such as food - but not exclusively - and factories need their energy. The professionals who operate in the investment world operate farms too and, like factories, need product flow, their teams transforming energy into profit, acquiring and portioning ventures.

In Western Europe, just over a hundred years ago factories needed more humans than technology to transform raw material into finished (and valuable) goods among not only the privileged but a burgeoning middle class with an ever increasing amount of disposable income. Among this breadth of consumers some were able to discern quality and thus value, while others could not; a decade ago, some believed all Gazelles were profitable.

The public trolling media and an integrated and developing world online were invited to participate in the hunt for Gazelles and share in the highly-anticipated feeding frenzy shortly thereafter, and not wanting to miss this golden opportunity many humans believed they could easily feed their families and become powerful as well, especially with so many Gazelles before them to choose from.

To the victor, go the spoils. Even the lowly snail has value.

As opposed to the attractiveness of a simple (kill or be killed) debt-free nomadic life, the benefits of civilization, of being civilized, infer a quality of existence among its citizenry that is deemed necessary, as in any developed nation, as it has throughout history, including the opportunity to invest. Therefore, rather readily, Gazelles were located, penned, fed and grown, but eventually these fantastic herds were culled, discarded as worthless and abandoned at great expense.

Humans are certainly diverse in their nature: some preferring to live to eat, while others prefer to eat to live; some choose an unpredictable life in the wild rather than an urban life. Humans being human, the majority are concerned for the welfare and comfort of their offspring. Factories have no soul, and operate for the basis of profit. Their managers understand the life cycle of a business once margins begin to turn downward - as revenues decrease and costs increase.

Nations are managed too, though do not need a profit to survive, merely provide access to those crucial aforementioned resources to the investment world, and a debt (to be paid by their children) solves all problems. Developing nations need electricity to power food factories, and fuel factories to supply this electricity. Their leaders can choose to own and operate their nations' power supply, or not, as there are many foreign farmers willing to exploit any resource base.

At the end of the day, factories produce product; those aided by technology can do so quite fast and effectively, while some of are slow and inefficient. They all need energy, and they all need profit. With plenty of manpower at hand, there are new technologies available that convert (free) energy used to fuel these new factories, such as the sun's rays, to feed nations and enable growth, with requiring either coal or oil; hence, without sacrificing future generations to service debt, forever.

Perhaps powered by the sun, a nation's energy needs to be renewable.

Whatever else they do with their time, other than converting food, both the snail and gazelle need energy, until facing their inevitable end and then are merely digested by microscopic organisms, vaporized in a lavaflow or transformed into energy for a ravenous predator. There is the snail treading the food chain that offers up itself as a meal for a bird, or unlucky gazelle delighting a pride of lions for the feast it has provided.

We all share one thing in common, snails and gazelles, people and factories: without a supply of renewable energy, we will all simply disappear (transformed or absorbed), including nations.