I'm Not a Believer

Many cults and religions put heavy emphasis on "belief" or "faith" which is really the same thing. There are secular formulations of that concept too. "Believe in" this or that political party or candidate.

I strive to get my mental model of reality to line up with the natural order of things as much as possible. Since our verbal and symbolic consciousness exists in another dimension (the information dimension), "we", that is our verbal and symbolic conscious doesn't really have access to the natural order of things, especially in verbal and symbolic terms. Therefore, it's not an easy task to come up with a high fidelity model of reality.

Beliefs are worthless and it's generally a bad sign when someone sells a concept or cajoles people into "believing" in products, people, or plans. The Titanic for example was deemed "unsinkable" by White Star Line company. It was sinkable. It didn't matter if you believed it could sink or not.

EU "Leadership" Either Totally Corrupt or Totally Incompetent

A few years ago now, the US and its proxies destroyed a huge natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, the NordStream 2 pipeline. That could have been viewed as an act of war against Russia, but it also disrupted German industry, and essentially was an act of war on them.

I wouldn't be surprised if the war in Ukraine is totally "fake", that is the sides are in on it together to completely destroy the economy of Europe at the expense of the people of Ukraine and Russia. It's hard to explain the European political "leadership" pushing for the war to continue, or possibly expand as they are now, except that they might be in on the scheme as well and getting compensated for their role, or they're pretty dumb.

1893 Financial Collapse

 

The above graph is from Peter Turchin's blog: https://peterturchin.com/age-of-discord/

In 1893 the US financial system imploded, mainly because the rail industry and really the whole industrial economy turned into a money burning machine. That happens periodically, and is happening now. I don't think it's a coincidence that the "elite overproduction" metric coincides with the popping of the rail bubble, just like the currently unpopped AI bubble today. IMO, the explanations for that are simple: there's too many people overall, and there are too many people trying to make money with money instead of actually working. Today there are a host of FOMO scams and retard traps, like gambling, crypto currency speculation, stonks and there's an endless supply of money. 

As in 1800s America, there is a current wave of immigration to feed the beast and absorb money. That causes friction with the native population, for obvious reasons. I think that's pretty tapped out, though. In tech, the cost of outsourced workers has been steadily rising and, while it's not at parity with the US salaries, it's pretty close, so the risk involved in moving half way around the world might outweigh the potential lifestyle reward.

There's a corresponding growth in bullshit and ideology in these elite overproduction eras too. Today it's not religious ideology, but it's political nonsense, especially on "the left" which is basically gays and women, but "the right" is loaded with a bunch of cults--Zionism is a big aum shin rikyo style murder cult. The "temperance movement" went bananas in the late 1800s, early 1900s. A figure like Carrie Nation became nationally prominent. It makes sense that the most extreme, in her case, literally insane, psychopathic authoritarian twats gain prominence in such a time. They're useful idiots for schemers, plus the competition for attention among such loons is pretty fierce at such a time.

Here's the wikipedia article on the "Panic of 1893". The idea that wild "investing" waves like the AI bubble or the rail bubble can grow ad infinitum is a mathematical impossibility. The "systemic" problem arises from bank participation in these scams. Joe Public assumes the banks are stable and make prudent, limited investments, but they're not. They weren't back then, they aren't today. The depositor money is actually pissed away on car loans on Dodge Challengers, and on corporate schemes, like AI stonks, etc... When the first big scam implodes, it leads to a predictable unwinding of the system as everyone scrambles to preserve wealth.

Since the whole economy runs on bank credit, basically, when all that shit eventually goes bad, no businesses can operate. The very old school approach to business, where a person self funds operations, like some Amish do might still function. It seems likely that supply chains of basic stuff like gasoline and natural gas and electricity might lock up completely in the event of a big disaster finance bro MBA retard implosion.

Anyway, today, the feds and banks won't allow a deflationary collapse, so we'll get crushed with hyperinflation as the cretins who run the system try to herd people into government crypto currencies and the like.

"Don't Do" Simple Rules of Thumb

Back in 2015, I thought about doing a christmas tree farm. We don't have a huge property, but it's big enough to support thousands of fir and pine trees were I to clear some acreage. I planted 300 trees all over the property to get a feel for the potential productivity of the soil. The trees grow really well on some parts of the property, and struggle on others. 10 years later some of the saplings I planted are well over 10 feet tall and have a 6" trunk. In others, they're basically the same size they were when first planted.

As a few years went by, I decided the christmas tree farm wasn't viable, plus I wasn't really interested in it, and liked the trees and how they grew. The christmas tree business is actually pretty weird. The trees are pruned specifically to form them into an unnatural shape. It's not hugely labor intensive, but by the time a tree is sold maybe a couple of hours of labor are spent per tree.

At the end of the whole project I was done with christmas trees in general. I could do a nursery for fir trees or something like that, but probably not the whole chop a tree and sell it thing. In fact, that's a pretty typical pattern for me, and I'm sure many other people as well. I can tell when I am on the wrong path when I do a thing, but it is difficult to see the correct path by itself.

I guess the correct path eventually emerges, like a negative space drawing. My formula is really simple: does a thing actually add more life, or does it grow or feed the dead world? It's also really simple to see the answer to that question on almost any topic, there's no painful wrestling with lies and justifications. Who wants more dead world? There's a lot of twisted freak people who keep building Mordor, but hardly anybody really wants Mordor or wants to serve Sauron/Hades.

I started applying that "don't do" concept on my property and with my personal projects a couple of years ago. Initially I didn't see how to apply it, so it was a bit of a struggle for some time, but eventually it became more obvious. The overall scheme is to imitate, insofar as it's feasible, the natural order. Nature creates a profusion of forms and beings. Apply that to the christmas trees: am I going to cut down the existing forest to plant a monoculture crop, then mow around the trees and sling fertilizer and chemicals at them? No. That's really a crazy thing people do.

Here's a better example. Our property has some drainage issues (we receive lots of precipitation per year). There's a failed network of drainage pipes here. Should I "replace" those with many hundreds of feet of plastic pipes to route the water from the surface to a creek? No way. Plant some water tolerant trees, route the water on the surface through some swales so nutrients stay in the soil. Maybe dig a pond or make a wetland in really problem areas... It costs less and follows the life path.

Inevitably this thinking spills out of personal projects and into my professional life. I've been working in tech for years. In its latest incarnation, it's firmly in Mordor "death land" in spite of flying pride flags and wanting to be "inclusive". It's going to be impossible for me to stay in Mordor. Any tech thing that might help some Orcs escape mordor, is doable, but corporate tech world is pretty bleak these days.

Anyway, the life path is leading me to interesting places.

The Problems with a "Managerial" Economy

In the railroad era, the "maximum profitable miles" of track was unknowable until after it was surpassed and there was a financial implosion of the railroad economy in the 1890s in the US. The "maximum" extent of the rail network was only through an elaborate process of trial and error. The Roman Empire hit some maximum extent, then proceeded to gradually decline, year after year. Today, nobody knows how many Starbucks there should be in the world. Starbucks probably went through the maximum number quite a while ago, maybe in the early 2000s, and in fact has been in decline for years.

The "managerial" economy pops up from time to time throughout history and marks the peak of a given systemic application of resources. We're way into a hyper-managerial economy. The managerial class imagines they can "perfectly manage" the world with some combination of cryptocurrency and AI, that is, by running a bunch of models on a shitload of NVIDA processors. Governments need to extract a bunch of wealth from taxpayers to build a bunch of nuclear power plants to try to make this thing work. Oh, also, they need absolute authoritarian control.

We're firmly in the "pluto" or "hades" world.  Hades was the ultimate seed counter/bean counter. I wonder how far we'll all be dragged into the world of the dead before life and nature come along and wipe their abomination from the face of the Earth.

Cheapest Possible Road

A few years ago the "Cleveland Area Mountain Biking Association" and Geauga County Parks built a mountain bike trail at the park that adjoins my property. I've been a road cyclist/amateur racer since 1990, but never really got into MTB, because of the lack of trails. Now that there's a trail a mile from my house, I can ride over there in a few minutes and do a lap any time the trail is open, so I've been going a few times a week, weather permitting.

One of the things that's interesting to me about MTB is that people got very skilled at making trails over the years that there have been mountain bikes--really only about 40 years now. A small crew of volunteers, mainly, built and maintain about 6 miles of what's essentially a "road" through the woods. The trail contends with stream crossings, drainage, very steep climbs and descents without intensive use of materials.

The cost per mile is not zero, but it's probably as close as you could get to zero. It's not built for a practical purpose, so it twists and turns all over the place, climbs and descends needlessly, goes over bumps and jumps and difficult terrain on purpose to make the route interesting for riders and to pack 6 miles of trail into a 600 acre park. If it were built for practical transportation and utility, the path and approach would be somewhat different but it would be really usable. A person could get from A to B pretty easily over a $0 road.

The way "the system" works is apparent when you contemplate things like the transportation network. The transportation network tends to be completely replaced at each major iteration. For example, once there were trains, the canal and stagecoach era in northeast Ohio went away over the course of a couple of decades. In the car/truck era the trains routes collapsed to a minimal network.

A fairly large amount of the total production of "the system" is spent on the transportation network. The sub-components of the network all fit together. To use a certain tire composition, a certain wheel size, certain vehicle ground clearance implies a certain road surface, gradients, etc... All that leads to a certain cost per mile, which leads to a certain road density for a given population, and so on. This aggregate "solution" is arrived at incrementally over time and basically by accident, or via a process of mass trial and error. The solution is not optimal, plus the "optimal" scenario will change all the time.

Don't Do

Anything a man builds begins decaying and falling apart the instant its finished, even if it's not used. For example if you make something out of wood, UV radiation, fungi, mold, water start wearing away at it immediately. Even durable building materials start to crumble and fall apart once exposed to the elements and arranged in a man-made pattern, like perfectly square and plumb concrete walls or stone walls.

It doesn't take many years for untreated wood to start to fall apart once it's exposed to the elements. Stuff that performs some function, like a road, gets destroyed by traffic and the elements. As the footprint of all the stuff expands, more and more resources and human time and energy are consumed to try to keep it "alive".

The amount of time and energy that goes into maintaining various things people take completely for granted, like on demand electricity, is staggering. A few years ago I observed maintenance of high voltage power lines from Perry Nuclear Power Plant. The lines and insulators and other hardware are replaced on a regular schedule. Every single tower carrying the power lines is periodically repainted and concrete piers are repaired and replaced. Work crews travel around the country performing that demanding and expensive task.

When we moved to our current property, I started building out farm infrastructure every spring and summer. The first year I built a small woodshed. Then I built a garden fence, an enclosure for ducks and chickens, a greenhouse... but soon I realized each new building was not only consuming money and resources for materials to be built, but would be a future drain of time and money for maintenance while producing only a modest amount of food. I pulled the plug on my plans for building a big barn and other infrastructure with the same approach.

The traditional method for analyzing these projects is to look at productivity improvement of some tool or infrastructure versus the costs involved. The "measure" of productivity is typically money, however, that's a bad measure. When "real" terms are used, like energy or materials, there's probably no positive return ever. It's all consumption. Higher "productivity" just consumes more faster with maybe fewer hands involved. That's a bitter pill to swallow.

In the natural system terms, it's really only possible to rearrange the annual flow of sunlight and use materials that nature provides. Living in the context of the natural system generally leads to a "don't do" mentality, a concept that is core to Masanobu Fukuoka's farming methods.

Almost any piece of technology or infrastructure you might look at will fail the "should I do it" test when real terms are used. A couple of basic questions a person might ask about a given piece of tech or infrastructure: "does it really save energy or time of an actual person?" and "does it save energy or time in aggregate?" Almost any project will fail those questions.