Hi folks,
The shelves at CostCo where we, Johnny's Gone Fishing, obtain some of our merchandise.
Your blood supply is important for every little piece of your body. It just takes one clogged or broken artery and you have a problem, unless the affected region of the body has an accessory (secondary, other) source of blood. The blood carries oxygen from your lungs, hormones from your endocrine glands, food from your gut, vitamin D3 from your skin, waste products from your liver, kidneys and all other organs, and lots of other important stuff to their destination in your body. All the things that you need to survive are carried, one way or another, directly or indirectly, by your blood. It is a well-oiled machine, much like CostCo, except that CostCo is just one small part of our food chain. As a co-owner of a small grocery store, Johnny’s Gone Fishing, I take weekly trips to CostCo with one of my two great co-owners, Erica (writer of an interesting book, The Wet Nurse’s Tale), and we collect basic commodities for resale in smaller amounts. Just like small blood vessels in your body, as we drive back from CostCo we carry foodstuffs to where they are needed in locations very remote from the source.
Johnny's Gone Fishing aka Johnny's has come back as a grocery store and neighborhood hangout, just like the old country stores of yesteryear.
Our food, apart from that grown in the garden, flows from farms all over the world, along channels comprised of boats, trains, trucks, planes, donkey carts, mules, and a plethora of other means of transport. It reaches us after being divided into small units and packaged just for us, like oxygen is packaged in the hemoglobin protein in the red cells in your blood. To have a healthy supply chain for food there are thousands of control, backup, and communication systems, each playing a vital role in the flow of food to your table. Just like blood. But our food supply system is highly dependent upon money, and what is money but trust attached to a symbol made of paper or metal or computer bytes.
What is the equivalent of money to the workings of your cardiovascular system, I wonder. The closest I could come to an answer was eons of chemistry just doing what it does, providing various forms of currency to exchange for goods and services in remote regions of the body, the best example of which is adenosine triphosphate (ATP).
So, humans have a lot in common with CostCo and similar organizations. Furthermore we are each part of CostCo and it is part of us, whether we like it or not. If this system is not carefully maintained and cared for it will break down, and local hunger might ensue. Similar problems can occur with your cardiovascular system, for which good maintenance including an appropriate diet and safe exercise for better health.
So be kind to your cardiovascular system and your grocery supply chain if you want to have a long and happy life.
-k @FitOldDog
Today’s workouts:
A solid Rick Fee 4000 yard swim, and get ready to go to the beach.
Keywords: blogging ideas, safe exercise,
Not sur about this!
Money is:
A means of exchange,
A unit of account,
and A store of value.
It is created simple by fiat (we have no gold standard, but this might change)
The Fed, and central banks do “quantitative easing” that is they increas it by massive amounts thereby reducing its unit value. I cannot see this done by one thing in a biological system…
On balance, having thought further money is not a good analogy. It seems all transactions within a biological system are done exclusively by barter.
Hi Trevor,
I think that the real trick is to decide, within biological systems, which events are transactions as opposed to the supply chain linking them. I liked d’Anconia’s discussion of money in Atlas Shrugged, so I wondered what your thoughts on that might be.
In Biology absolutely nothing is free, as far as I can tell, as we use the energy of the sun to dance the dance that defies entropy, but only in the short term, whilst every spot is under attack from other organisms wanting the spot. The less fun (freezing, horribly hot, horrible chemicals [from the carbon-based life-form perspective], the less desirable the niche, but there is always something out there wanting to take it.
Interesting area to think about, and I find great joy in doing that, even though every apparent answer leads to more and more questions.
-k