Squirrel Life

That's a picture of "White  Spot" a  squirrel with a recognizable white  mark on his (?) back who visits our yard in the spring and fall. The squirrels all vanish into the woods in late  summer and show up again now around November. He's been around here as long as we've lived in the house (about 1 year). I have no idea if the white spot is indicative of his age or is just a marking. Squirrels can live up to 30 years, though in the wild life's pretty tough for them. The big predator in our area is a Cooper's Hawk. There  are also lots of  owls around, but I don't think  their hunting schedule matches  up with the fox squirrel's daily activities.

Problem Proliferation

Much of human misery and angst flows from the self regulating aspect of nature. The physical world mechanisms that make "self regulation" work are many of civilization's ancient foes. The same forces, e.g. fungus ("the teeth of the soil"), that help a forest grow also rot wooden buildings. Much of our civilization is an attempt to break free of these forces. (The concept of "the singularity" sums this up nicely.) Maybe one of the necessary components of nature is the idea that one can break free?

Many engineered systems aim to counteract the restoring forces of nature. For example, for life on Earth to be possible, large uniformly impermeable surfaces must break up into soil. Consequently, roads and parking lots require numerous workarounds to contain, direct, and lessen the impact of those forces.

"Natural" farming methods attempt to function in phase with those forces. The solutions to the day to day problems that arise in that context generally carry along their own set of problems. For example, if your garden has slugs, then you can add ducks to your farm to eat the slugs and keep their population in check. But once you have ducks, then you will need to worry about hawks and other predators killing them, so then you might add geese to help repel predators, or build an enclosure for them, and so on.

Combining many "solutions" is one way life attains stability within a dynamic environment. Devising that type of solution, however, can be time consuming and almost necessarily dilutes the desired output. For example, by adding a menagerie of animals and other plants to make a strawberry field productive, a farmer also adds more mouths to feed and reduces the space for strawberry plants to grow.

House of Cards and a Pile of Cards

William Atherton was a Kentucky Rifleman who fought at the Battle of Frenchtown in the War of 1812. He wrote a memoir of defeat (Audio Version Here) and his subsequent capture and imprisonment first at the hands of native tribes people and then with the British.

The memoir has a detailed account of the time he spent as a captive of the Indians. The tribe he was with lived a hunter gatherer lifestyle. (According to Caesar, my ancestors did the same 2000-ish years ago.) Their lifestyle as described by Atherton lacked comfort and the quality of day to day life was largely a function of the availability of game to eat. The life was one of day to day drudgery--a nonstop quest for the next meal. According to Atherton, his captors had no calendar and no concept of weeks or months.

The most important characteristic of grains that makes agriculture and civilization possible is they can be stored--almost indefinitely--in the right conditions. A grain silo is essentially a version of solar storage. One ton of wheat (which you could get from one acre of land) yields roughly 2000 loaves of bread. Storing grain insulates people from the type of privation and drudgery that plagued Atherton's captors.

Agriculture and cities remove people's dependence on nature for sustenance and creates dependence on systems of their own design--engineered systems, e.g. grain silos. Natural systems of life evolve over ages to be stable, or to return to stability, over a huge range of conditions. Engineered systems, by contrast, only tend to be stable over the range of conditions people imagined, and when they fail, they typically have no ability to restore themselves.

The Dirtiest Animal

Way more people know who the fictional Jon Snow of Game of Thrones is than the John Snow who proved people shouldn't contaminate water and then drink that contaminated water--in 1854! That's really not long ago at all for what seems like the most basic bit of information that every human should know, but incredibly even this piece of foundational information is totally lacking.

The contemporary solutions to the problems of keeping people and cities clean and keeping drinking water clean are really pretty bad: they're extremely resource and energy intensive. As an example, some articles calculated that the cost of replacing Flint, Michigan's water supply lines was more than the appraised value of all the homes in the city. There are hundreds of communities in the United States in the same boat. Replacing just the water line to a single small house in the United States costs thousands of dollars. Replacing shared utility lines is proportionately more expensive.

Unfortunately in most places in the world, cities aren't capable of maintaining a high level of hygiene, hell, they can't maintain a low level of hygiene. Even the United States has outbreaks of disease caused by homeless populations in cities. I think it's a pretty safe bet that disease, not war, will wipe out a huge chunk of the human population in the next decades.

Think about how the problems attracting the most investment today are superfluous bullshit, e.g. self driving electric cars, while the bottom of the United States rots out. Incredible.

How to Be a Human

The Prisoner is a sci-fi TV series that's 50 years old. It's about the struggle of a man who is wrongly trapped in a weird electronic gulag that eerily resembles modern life. It's streaming on Amazon now, but you have to pay to watch. You can get the gist of it by watching a few episodes. Many of the themes of the show are present in a million other TV shows, movies, and books.

The show seems to really be about the struggle of a man to be fully human within the context of civilization, and the psychopaths and patsies that are its servants, who want to reduce him to a number.

The Borg from Star Trek: Next Generation is a fictional representation of a similar set of themes. The Borg and Data represent two sides of that problem. The Borg is all consuming, reducing humans to numbers who live in a hive. Data is a computer that wants to have a heart (the Vulcans represented the same concept in other iterations of the show). The Cylons of Battlestar Galactica are yet another version of this concept.

Why Facebook, Twitter, Instagram et al Took Over

There are still a lot of active blogs, but social media dominate people's daily Internet use these days to the point that people like Faceberg think their web site for posting cat pictures will be around forever and is divinely ordained. Meanwhile new social media like Gab or Minds or a dozen others struggle to get traction.

Facebook isn't what I'd call a "tech" company. They integrate technology, they don't make any new stuff. I'm guessing most of the engineers at Facefuck are bored out of their minds on a daily basis and spend all week in meetings about the social justice of what color borders to use for their text boxes.

Facefuck, Twitter, et al replaced blogs by making posts shorter and consequently less filtered and less work to read. Twitter forced that to an extreme and it actually worked. Since the posts are unfiltered, it allows people to form an emotional connection with a community and is a platform for acting out and ranting. By getting rid of written language formalisms like paragraphs and punctuation and spelling, it makes the creation and experience of content more visceral.

Now those sites are adding commissars to patrol posts, which hopefully kills them all. 

I Quit Twitter

I liked using twitter. It reminded me of the very early days of the Internet when there were still weird forums and message boards. It was a pretty entertaining and informative way to spend free time. It could be constructive, too. I interacted with smart, curious, intellectually interesting people every day for a long time and it really broadened my horizons. Unfortunately, it's starting to look like social media is a big honeypot that was engineered over the course of a number of years using the "problem-reaction-solution" formula.

In recent years, alternative media provided a platform for genuine people with a wide range of interests to share their views. But it also provided a platform for actors who were reading a script and participating in staged events to create the appearance of a problem, e.g. nativism or white nationalism, and the corresponding clash with staged freak-outs by dumb college students. The phony extremists work as a pied piper for gullible people, and also radicalized centrist opposition and create the atmosphere of a crisis, even though the whole thing is a sham and less than a tempest in a teapot.

In response to staged events social media companies are now contracting with groups like the ADL to act as the social media equivalent of the TSA. It seems probable that those groups will end up working like an extortion racket and victim exploitation business rather than neutral observers or defenders of the downtrodden, so Twitter can go jump n a lake.

The idea that public companies are fiduciaries or care about their bottom line above all seems to be refuted by Twitter, Google, and Facebook. By adopting any political posture, they drive a portion of their user base away. It's beyond weird that Twitter decided not to capitalize on its success in the 2016 Presidential election. Twitter provided a platform that kicked the ass of long established media companies with a new mode of communication. Instead of celebrating that, they called in the STASI to prevent it from happening again. Twitter doesn't even have sufficient political independence to be successful.

One of the most pressing problems we face is keeping the Internet free and open and out of the hands of the would be STASI. There's a group of people that seem intent on building an electronic gulag. If I had things my way, I'd keep noodling around with the big philosophical issues I kick around on this blog, but most of my technical expertise directly pertains to this issue, so I'll probably shift gears and work on that for a while.

Order and Economic Competition

I just finished a huge list of house repairs and improvements on my old home in preparation to sell it. When you're doing all that stuff yourself, and you've got an older home, you realize you're basically a caretaker in a community of caretakers. The work you do is establishing a little island of order in a sea of chaos. Along the way you can end up feeling some sympathy for future caretakers and feeling angry about sloppy work people in the past did.

"Order" is wealth. In the instance of real property, like a house or the soil of a farm, or clean streams and rivers that wealth transcends any individual's "ownership". However, in the system of the western world today, all those things are subordinated to money and accounting of profits and losses that only make sense within the context of a phony version of economic competition. (it's political domination masquerading as a neutral system)

Cultural Knowledge versus Science

Quite a whlie ago people figured out how to build stick frame homes and use wattle and daub and limewash for walls. They did all that way before the scientific method was invented or before chemistry was understood. They arrived at recipes for doing things via trial and error and intuitive guesses rather than via first princples and math based engineering.

Cultural knowledge such as methods of home constructions has some advantages versus the scientific method approach. For one--it's really slow. It's on pace with natural changes in the environment, so it's also regulated by the environment (more or less) and in theory could allow for the co-evolution of the plants and animals in a given region. (In practice that didn't happen.)

Maybe science could be remodulated to work at that pace. Science is at least as likely to kill off the human race as nature--maybe much more so. Also, since science made men much more dependent on the 10 kilowatt lifestyle, it also made us much more vulnerable to large stochastic events--like plagues or large natural disasters.