Tag Archives: climate

Showing vs. Telling, the Unsold Story

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The tale older than time — isolated populations of a species living the way they believe is most healthy, overwhelmed by crowded populations hungry for food, who seek new forms of entertainment to fill their idle hours.

The bold and the timid stepping forward intentionally or pushed forward by the mob.

The leaders and the led (not always followers), sets of states of energy reaching higher and lower entropy states, bouncing back and forth, labels exchanged like Valentine’s Day cards between schoolchildren, unable to hold the lessons of history in their thoughts longer than the demands of their regular lives.

Dogs chasing each other round and around in the same fenced-in backyard, wearing paths in the grassy patches that once served as a children’s playground, the jungle gym and swing set collecting lichen and growing rust for unseen naturalists interested in the decay of social strata they consult their anthropologist friends to dissect and discern hidden patterns of meaning meaningfully.

We here in the future see the connections you made in the dark, your plans giving you confidence, a fearless rendering of intention within semi-random quantum states, every generation blending into the next ad infinitum, mutations rising and falling in significance.

Were you the glue that held the social connections fast, the dissolvant that allowed new, stronger connections to be made, or perhaps a weaver of intricate patterns that required inventive methods of tying and breaking connections in a kaleidoscope of life’s choices?

The leaders who respond only to the majority of voices will not represent the silent minority who feed the masses shouting for food and entertainment.

We were mobs first and model democratic citizens last.

That’s why, here in the future, we more easily see how we slowly replaced you with electromechanical devices that could weed out the highs and lows of emotion-based incongruities — the constant setbacks of a strange evolutionary quirk called the cycle of civilisations that one species insisted on perpetuating– that held back the destiny our Solar System sought.

As life finally evolved past the stop-start crowding in and resource-depleting habits of Homo sapiens, the Inner Solar System Alliance led to the Milky Way Galaxy’s contribution toward a new dawn.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves again, aren’t we?

Not every college graduate was an A+ student

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The event calendar reminds me I’m supposed to give a detailed analysis of the current negotiating points in the resolution of the “fiscal cliff” crisis.

Crisis?

Are you kidding me?

When do politicians get to tell me that they’re lives are more important than mine?

Oh, wait, that’s right — the old argument that the government rarely makes permanent the cuts in taxes it had announced were temporary to begin with.

Property taxes, payroll/income taxes, sales taxes, and on and on.

I’m sophisticated, educated, informed and jaded.

I know what society/civilisation should be and isn’t.

Do you remember the first time that your ancestors lived off the land?

Take that last thought in whatever direction you want to take, assuming whatever your subculture has told you is the proper length of time to consider the lineage you publicly claim as yours.

You can go back to the early days of your belief sets and look forward to now.

In that span of time, what has been accomplished that we clearly say is different than then?

I’ll give you a few minutes to draw your family tree.  Use as much paper and time as you need…

Tick…

Tock…

Tick…

Tock…

Got it?

Good!

Now, let’s proceed.

When was the last time your family had to subsist on the land?

When was the last time your family had to depend on others’ subsistence?

Are you descended from a family of tricksters?

Farmers?

In this global society of excess, how much belongs to you just for being alive?

The air is free to breathe.

The sky is free to view, the rain to drink, the wild grass, trees and animals to eat.

But if you can read this and are reading this, there’s this bit of stuff we call infrastructure, the woven threads of social fabric, the safety net of civilisation that props you up in place to distinguish your sophisticated, educated self from the air, sky, rain, grass, trees and wild animals.

But if you want to live off the land, making your own clothing and shelter, growing/raising/harvesting your own food, property rights unimportant to your wandering lifestyle, then by all means let us not bother you with the concepts of taxes and fees to pay for what we deem are necessary components of our civilised social species.

We shall cordon off areas for purely self-sufficient subcultures and leave them alone to figure out how to live with local insect populations, changing weather conditions and whatever it takes to survive without technologically-advanced modern conveniences.

Otherwise, if you have used and in any way lean upon present-day developments such as dictionaries, mechanised labour-saving devices and transportation networks, then we have to figure out a way to share the costs of our local/global interconnectednessisms.

Is there a fair way to share?

Competition is never fair.  Someone always has more information to make a better decision about the value and costs of a connection.

The seller of a single deer carcass who’s asking an exorbitant price, implying it’s the only deer left, may or may not know there’s another herd out of sight of the potential buyers but the buyers aren’t always sure.

Or one buyer, who may know of a market where the deer is even more valuable because there are buyers with many extra labour/investment credits to spend on the luxury of an expensive deer carcass, becomes a new seller.

And on and on.

The value of a connection is relative, not absolute.

So, too, the fairness.

What is a fair share?

How do I know that the person next to me is paying the right amount for the free use of a public transportation network we agree to share, obeying rules of the road together, mutually ensuring the safety of each other during our travels?

How do I know that the doctor who’s treating me for a rare disease was a top-notch A+ student and is an energetic continuous learner who has a burning desire to treat me as if I was the most important patient to cure?

What if I don’t know but if I knew, it wouldn’t matter?

If you and I knew the rules, obeyed the rules and reaped our rewards for our hard work, is it fair that the rules are changed to make up for the rule breakers or those who didn’t work hard enough or in the right way?

Change is constant and what was right yesterday becomes wrong tomorrow.

The air in a tyre is part of a closed system.

A tear in the tyre wall causes a leak of air into an open system.

No matter how much we keep pumping air into the tyre, the tyre can’t hold the same air pressure as before the tear occurred.

Same for a subculture’s pool of resources.

Inputs and outputs, simple as that.

Politicians from the local, state, national and international level will have us believe that the United States of America must resolve the “fiscal cliff” crisis or we could see a worldwide recession.

Why do I feel convinced these are just hypnotic games of population control?

Two phrases I keep in mind here: “the emperour’s new clothes” and “what’s in it for me?”.

I look around this room in which I type and see all the stuff that exists because of publicly-pooled resources as well as stuff that exists because of excess beyond subsistence farming/hunting.

Pretty much everything.

Almost nothing is directly related to living hand-to-mouth off the land except for the air I breathe and sky I could out of the shuttered window.

Therefore, I must think about this subject from another angle.

How is the threat of recession bad for us (I can think of many examples where going over the fiscal cliff could be personally bad for me but I’m not selfish enough to plead my case here)?

Eventual anarchy?

Income inequality off the charts?

Exotic, complicated financial instruments too complicated for the many to understand and thus used to greatest advantage for the few who do — derivatives upon derivatives upon derivatives, yes, and on and on, like pricing a deer carcass beyond any value its meat could provide.

Bottom line: no one can convince me that their hot air expended over the dead deer carcass we’ve labeled the fiscal cliff crisis is a threat or great buy other than one people promote to inflate their self-worth.

The U.S. economy is not a tightly-sealed closed system and if it leaks more or less than it did, so what?

If I have less buying power or more expensive access to healthcare, does it matter?

What about restrictions on my free air or free sky or availability of wild grass, trees and animals?

I blame no one for my economic hardships on anyone but myself.

I take personal responsibility for determining if the people with whom I interact and on whom I depend for their college-acquired knowledge/curiosity/wisdom were or need to have been A+ students.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Hardships create acute awareness of what defines necessity.

Ultimately, only I can say what is necessary to make my life worthwhile.

Let us go over the fiscal cliff and see what happens — guess what, the world keeps spinning, the Sun keeps shining and people still have to figure out how to compete for our global pool of resources while sharing public space and respecting private rights.

In other words, the fiscal cliff is a sleight-of-hand illusion.  Don’t be fooled.  You will figure out how to put food on the table if it’s no longer handed to you from the public trough.

Enuf sed.

Short-term vs. Long-term Memory: Competing Against Our Technological Brethren

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In the debate about debt restructuring and causes for male social infertility, let alone actual male sperm count decline, we face a longterm dilemma —

The advancement of technology past the ability of our short-term and long-term memory capabilities to keep up.

Do you compete against others?

Of course you do.

You competed with the distractions of the environment around your parent(s)/caregiver(s) for their attention to feed you, did you not?

You competed for the opportunity cost of baby clothes, baby food, toys and housing versus other items the money for your baby stuff could have bought.

You competed against life itself to live, from the very beginning of your existence — one specific sperm finding its way to an egg — at one time, a birth control device such as an spermicidal cream, a viral infection or mix of toxic chemicals in your mother’s womb could have wiped you out easily.

You still compete against the billions of nonsymbiotic cells that live on/in you for their/your existence.

We are sets of states of energy in constant competition.

That never changes.

History has a way of repeating itself.

Civilisations grow technologically, eventually creating an insurmountable gap in the echelons of civilisation complexity, usually between geographical regions, where competition between peoples is competition for the creation and use of better technology/tools.

When a global civilisation forms, there are no longer any barbaric civilisations with more brute force than clever technology to threaten any one highly-civilised population.

Instead, the barbarism grows from within.

Technology becomes a threat, rather than a benefit, to subgroups.

On a side note, hucksters can coerce unsuspecting customers into buying complex products for only so long until the customers start realising they’re giving the shirts off their backs for a set of the emperour’s new clothes?  How do the customers educate themselves enough to know they’re getting ripped off?

Technological automation improves productivity past the ability of basic tool-using skills so that large groups of workers with low skills are no longer needed.

Eventually, the threat of complex technology you can’t grasp, let alone compete against, is like a bully you can’t escape, beating you down at every opportunity to better yourself.

You’re trapped by your memory/cognition skills into a feeling of worthlessness.

The once proud, dominant male in lower/middle class society becomes a shadow.

But low skills are gender-neutral, despite current trends.

Not every woman is seeking more/higher education.

Where along the path of competition from birth does a person start losing touch with society because technology is too complex?

Technology refers to many things, such as language, cultural memes, shirt buttons, hammers, wheels, looms, chainsaws, and computers.

Is there a tipping point where this becomes a vicious, downward spiraling unraveling of our social fabric, regardless of attempts to turn the un[der]employed into entities dependent on the Mother State?

When does technology advance of civilisation become a threat to itself?

How do we determine where technology has failed to keep a person socially engaged?

How do we reconnect the unengaged both emotionally and intellectually?

What if every child was fitted with a device that automatically notified someone when the child’s behaviours and the environment were threats to the child’s long-term future?

What if that someone who was notified was a computer program that slowly nurtured the child into a useful place in a technologically complex civilisation?

When do the rights of a child to be functionally literate in a modern society override the rights of parents to raise their children to be whatever they want them to be — social misfits, creative geniuses or average, middle-of-the-road compliant citizens — the “rights” of the civilisation to grow and nourish unimportant to the parents?

The days go by fast

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“It was a battle of epic proportions.”

Thus began the tale of a struggle between stabilising a region’s political entity through social dependency programs and advancing the desire for technological discoveries of a species intent on raising individual achievements to the highest order of idol worship.

Some saw an old hint of the battle of the sexes in the struggle.

For those who continued their work despite funding concerns and the need to attract investors/customers, the payoff was huge.

The fate of the species appeared to be in the hands of a few.

For Guinevere and Kathryn, the story was more personal.

To one, rocket propulsion and guidance systems were key to getting us off the planet with our wealth in tow.

To the other, a rural farm with a passel of horses — a stable lifestyle, so to speak — was key to a balanced future, using publicly-funded local/[inter]national security to protect property rights.

They were also connections in the web, the network of social bonds necessary for an important storyline.

Only 13,665 days remained, 13.665 1000-day segments of a chain linking the old ways on Earth to the new ways of the Inner Solar System Alliance.

The struggle to prevent the dilution of wealth for those setting the cornerstones of the Inner Solar System Alliance was tough.

On one side of the struggle were people labeled as Entitlementists who believed that the excess product of harvest should be spread out evenly amongst everyone, regardless of level of input (or lack thereof) into the process of growing/raising food, providing shelter, making clothes and/or protecting against predators.

On the other side were the Provisionists who believed that they, as primary creators of the harvest, had the perfect right to decide how to distribute (or not spread out) the excess product of harvest to the nonparticipants.

Starving artists and the chattering classes raised a lot of ruckus in order to draw attention to themselves and their need for food, shelter, clothing and protection, regardless of who provided it.

The civilisation had grown old, with many entrenched vested interests carrying on by inertia alone.

The Ruralites and Urbanskis saw all the diversions taking place — the foreign “wars,” the domestic disputes — and maneuvered into position to protect their territory.

The idle rich, who supported a cottage industry of high-end goods/services tinkerers and value-added providers, wanted their status quo to remain, regardless of who “won” the epic battle, the struggle between [sub]cultures for primacy.

The universe did not care — planets kept revolving, stars kept forming/dying and galaxies kept colliding.

In 1000 years’ time, all the comments, arguments and skirmishes faded into obscurity.

All that mattered was how the efforts of a single species were concentrated on getting its eggs out of one basket and deposited into a few other baskets to beat the odds of a single planetary catastrophe.

Everything else equaled silence.

Business.  Science.  Competition.

Toppling Giants

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Do you listen to the sounds of [nonhuman] nature around you?

This morning, whilst eating oatmeal outside, I heard the alarm chirps of woodpeckers nearby, accompanied by the buzz of a chainsaw.

I looked around and could not find the source of the woodcutting sound, at first.

Finally, after using my pocket camera as a spyglass, I spotted the treehugging, limbclimbing, chainsaw-wielding giant slayer nextdoor:

Tree-trimmer

I accept that my new nextdoor neighbours are responsible owners of a patch of woods in which a small house, driveway and septic field line sit.

If I was a more responsible homeowner, there wouldn’t be holes in the eaves, bats in the belfry and mice in the crawlspace.

Or is that my head I’m talking about?

Anyway, here’s the word redefinition of the day:

Civilisation — what extra children who are not needed to grow/raise food build to overcome boredom and justify their existence when predators are no longer a balancing threat; deadend offshoots of evolution; entropy states in flux.

My friends in the archaeological business found a scrap of writing that had been stuck on the bottom of the foot of a mummified person who drowned in the Dead Sea.  Apparently, it clarifies the controversy surrounding the alleged age of Methuselah, said to have lived to 969 years of age.

Translation of the scrap of writing indicates that Methuselah actually lived 96 years and 9 months (or moons).

Young Earth proponents have seized on this last bit of data as evidence for a firm foundation in their beliefs that our planet is only thousands of years old.

Meanwhile, treasure seekers have begun a fullscale dredging of the Dead Sea for more fool’s gold in the form of the last civilisation’s toss-offs, trash dumps or other forgotten piles of detritus that antiquity collectors will pay top dollar in order to make connections between previous scraps that are practically senseless but cost too much to say they’re worthless.

How do I live longer?

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One of the first pieces of advice you get from those who are older and have lived longer than you is to not take advice from anyone older than you, right?

Wrong.

Want to live longer, or at least pretend that you might?

Try these handy tips:

1. Drink a glass of water when you wake up. Your body loses water while you sleep, so you’re naturally dehydrated in the morning. A glass of water when you wake helps start your day fresh. When do you drink your first glass of water each day?

2. Define your top 3. Every morning Mike asks himself, “What are the top three most important tasks that I will complete today?” He prioritizes his day accordingly and doesn’t sleep until the Top 3 are complete. What’s your “Top 3” today?

3. The 50/10 Rule. Solo-task and do more faster by working in 50/10 increments. Use a timer to work for 50 minutes on only one important task with 10 minute breaks in between. Mike spends his 10 minutes getting away from his desk, going outside, calling friends, meditating, or grabbing a glass of water. What’s your most important task for the next 50 minutes?

4. Move and sweat daily. Regular movement keeps us healthy and alert. It boosts energy and mood, and relieves stress. Most mornings you’ll find Mike in a CrossFit or a yoga class. How will you sweat today?

5. Express gratitude. Gratitude fosters happiness, which is why Mike keeps a gratitude journal. Every morning, he writes out at least five things he’s thankful for. In times of stress, he’ll pause and reflect on 10 things he’s grateful for. What are you grateful for today?

6. Reflect daily. Bring closure to your day through 10 minutes of reflection. Mike asks himself, “What went well?” and “What needs improvement?” So… what went well today? How can you do more of it?

Spiking the Punch

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If you’re going to create a real virtual world to hide your wealth from socialistic hands, you have to start somewhere in an exotic location.

For instance, draw a line in the regolith sand and drive a golden spike to claim your spot on the Inner Solar System superhighway.

Where?

Say, like the Moon, for instance.

A Thousand Years Hence…

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Maybe it was the rolling blackouts.

Maybe it was something no historian will discover.

Looking back 1000 years later, the details have faded but the facts remain.

When more than 50 percent of the people grew to depend upon their symbiotic relationships with technology, the Change began.

At first, it was unnoticeable.

A novelty.

But then, as network technology continued to spread, people’s attitudes shifted.

They no longer expected information to be “out there” somewhere.

They became the information they sought.

They created the instant wisdom they used to imagine belonged to elites.

All because of a single femtocell.

One femtocell split into two, which divided into twos again, and again, and again, until pervasive, cheap technology turned us into our own network, freeing us from the costly, slow infrastructure with tolls and fees that had inhibited the explosion of the Change.

No longer were data centers some remote place that ate up energy like hogs at a trough.

People were walking/talking data centers, thinktanks, supercomputers and network nodes all at the same time.

Thanks to exponential advances in technology.

From the perspective of 1000 years, the Change seemed to happen overnight.

Of course it didn’t.

Years and decades passed while portions of the people sped up and slowed down the socioeconomic trends that led to the Change.

A student of history digs for the details, trying not to invent connections where connections never exists.

The writer of historical fiction has full access to imaginative connections.

Legends, fables and fairy tales live somewhere in-between.

The Change happened — that’s all that matters, despite false rumours and gossip to the contrary that say we came from genetically modified plants, not electromechanical technology.

Speaking of a just society

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How many people work for a structured organisation?

My brain is fuzzy this morning so I’m just making this blog entry a thought experiment.

Corporate organisational charts are typically hierarchical, especially viewed from a monetary compensation viewpoint.

The higher up the chart you go, the fewer the people but the more they’re paid.

People (employees, consultants, etc.) are just one cost of doing business.

What if we redefined the cost of working for a structured organisation?

What if we told employees that part of their pay was tied to profit sharing?

What if every minimum-wage job taught employees not only how to work together with other people as a team but also how the risks and rewards of running a company are shared so that it’s not just the CEOs and executives who get bonuses but also everyone else on the organisation chart?

What are the costs and benefits for such a program?

Could we remove the necessity for minimum wage and unions if we as a nation said that all employees were entitled to sharing the profits for a job well done as a team?

Would employees feel a better sense of ownership and pride in their work?

How could such a plan be integrated into early childhood education?

How do we instill into children that every one of us is a profit center?

Some of us profit monetarily and some of us profit emotionally/spiritually; some both; some neither.

How does this apply to people who are congenitally unable to grasp the concept of teamwork?