Self Regulation and "Management"

The two massive frauds that are promoted every day are the same con. The climate change con and the covaids con are identical. The key idea in both is that nature requires management by some assholes like Bill Gates or Fauci. The world that required no management to get where it is today, will suddenly collapse and fall apart if there's no evil billionaire and no lying garden gnome scumbag controlling it. Sure.

I did a bunch of posts on "Earth is Self Regulating" over the years. This is really just a truism rather than any shocking revelation. If it weren't self regulating, there'd be no carbon and water based life. Plain and simple. If it weren't a fairly stable equilibrium it'd just run to one or the other extreme and that'd be that. And for all we know maybe life in some form exists in such conditions anyway.

Our body is self regulating, too, over a wide range of conditions. If it weren't we'd have a really short life span, and probably would have gone extinct ages ago. Our blood pH, for example, somehow regulates itself with no intervention. We're subject to the endocrine system, and cycles of sleeping and waking, hunger, and satiation, etc...

That said Earth is a dynamic place in geological time terms, where sometimes cataclysms wipe out almost every living creature. The atmosphere composition has changed multiple times, supposedly over the geological time scale. Living creatures participate the those changes, for example, when there was only single cell algae in the oceans, it produced enough oxygen to transform the atmosphere, and slowly helped create conditions for animals to exist.

It's really arbitrary to try to stop CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. It's even dumber and more arbitrary to try to stop methane emissions from cows. If nature were left to her own devices, there'd be more herbivores than there are today. The idea that a handful of managers understands how to control all of life on earth, and all the geological activity is completely absurd. The idea that they can maintain a status quo climate is just a fraud.

The same story applies to disease "management" too. It seems like the epidemiologists barely know what they're doing or even understand how the immune system really works. Human beings would have died off 100x if it required a clique of particular doctors to control the spread of dangerous microscopic forms of life.

People have bought these stories lock stock and barrel, though.

I think our use of fossil fuels is foolish, as is the corporate consumer lifestyle. The "elites" crafted those systems, too. Suddenly they're tree hugging elf people who just want to live in the woods? I don't think so.

John Kerry still wants to fly around on his private jet and consume the resources of 1000 families.

Firewood Greenhouse Heat

I built a 12'x16' greenhouse in 2019. I figured the main expense would be heating over the winter. I decided to insulate the building as much as possible, and calculated it would take around 400 pounds of propane per heating season to keep the building from freezing. That was actually pretty close to my real world experience.

It takes about 400-500 pounds (a little less than 100 gallons) of propane to make it through the whole winter. 400 pounds of propane is somewhere around $300-400. That's not too bad, but that's just enough heat to keep the building 53F, which is too cold to be productive.

It doesn't take much effort at all to get $400 of value out of the greenhouse. This year, for example, I'm doing blueberry clones. I'll have 30 just this year. If I bought those, it'd probably be about $200 paying retail prices. If they grow over a couple years, and I sold them I'd probably get around $1000. On top of that, I've got 36 roma tomato plants, and a shitload of peppers. This year there will probably be around $1000 worth of plants that go in the garden from the greenhouse. It's essentially a passive income producer--well not quite passive. Maybe I spent 10 minutes a week planting things, and a few minutes a day watering them. I don't monetize any of that production, though. It's just a hobby at this stage.

Most of the plants really only start germinating and growing in mid-February though, like when the Robins return, which is really pretty interesting. (Actually right now the redwing blackbirds are back, the robins are back, and the raccoons and chipmunks are out of their torpor.) Only Kale grows in the cold, and even that grows too slowly. Once February rolls around the building gets warmed by the sun, even on an overcast day.

It's really not worth planting stuff in December/January if it's only going to be 53F in the building all the time. If it were warmer, they'd grow using artificial light.

Many commercial greenhouses use very low cost fuels for heat. Heating is probably the primary cost of operating a greenhouse in a cold climate. Wood heat can be very cheap. Some greenhouses have enormous wood-chip boiler facilities that heat a large complex, for example. Woodchips from tree maintenance are a commodity that's marginally useful and are very cheap--they're even cheaper than firewood. Large scale heating with wood is like having your own mini sun. Since the wood is cheap fuel, it makes sense to build a less insulated cheaper greenhouse, too, and it's plausible to expand to a larger area.

I'm in a transition from doing stuff like operating a greenhouse as a hobby to trying to do it commercially and I'm seeing it's plausible with the resources I have at hand. My 12x16 greenhouse cost maybe $5000 in materials. It's really more of a lab than a thing for doing "production". Ironically, a hoop-house type building will maybe be $1000, for a much larger area, like maybe 10x32 or larger. I'll probably build two smaller ones this season to get my feet wet. Then I'll add a wood fired heater before next winter. It seems fairly plausible that I can generate some passive income from just some pretty simple and cheap infrastructure.

The Case of the Covid Nuns

 Some nuns locked themselves up in their nunnery to avoid covaids until there was a vaccine. They got the vax and things didn't work out so well for them.

Link

"We were very shocked by it because we’ve been extremely closed-down. We have not gone anywhere to speak of, and we haven’t had visitors,” said Sub Prioress Nancy Kordenbrock.

Twenty-eight of the 35 sisters tested positive and, sadly, two of them have passed away.

Maybe our immune system doesn't work when we hide away from viruses and bacteria?

The idea that masses of people are going to outsource their immunity to some grifting scumbag corporations and their shills like Fraudci is retarded. The government hates you and wants you to die and the corporations just want to steal as much as they can before you do. They are always lying. They can't tell any truth.

"Fewer Moving Parts"

 I have two old cars. One's a 1997 Ford F-250 with 226,000+ miles and one is a 2008 Honda Element with 230,000+ miles on it. The Element once had the timing chain replaced--that was due to a faulty oil filter from a local oil change joint (don't go to those places). The Ford engine has been running with no problem for 23 years. The serpentine belt broke once while I've owned it. That was the worst hassle I've experienced. That was a minor repair.

One of the things you hear about the benefits of electric cars is they have "fewer moving parts'. Sure. But they also have complex, expensive battery modules, power converters, and other components that will be failure prone. They also have many of the same moving parts as an internal combustion engine based car, like suspension components, which will wear out over time. But mainly the batteries will wear out over time and cost a substantial fraction of the value of the car to replace. This is an issue with hybrid cars today as they age. You can buy replacement, remanufactured used batteries that are cheap, but they'll have a very limited life. All those batteries from all those dead electric cars will need to be processed, and there will be some cost associated with that.

If a car engine can last multiple hundred thousand miles, who cares that it has moving parts? There's toyota cars with several hundred thousand miles on the original engine and transmission. The Japanese cars, especially Hondas and Subarus seem to even have solved the problem of road-salt corrosion. My element still looks pretty new underneath even though it's been through 12 winters in the snow belt.

In theory, a car or truck could last forever. Different materials could be used for a frame or body, and the engine and transmission could be designed to be more readily replaceable. Some purpose-built vehicles, like a farm tractor, will last forever with proper maintenance. I see people in my area using ancient tractors to clear their driveways in the winter--like 1940's International Harvesters. There's people mowing lawns with 1970s tractors.

The government mandated push toward electronic-everything seems really insane. The more I think about it, the less likely I think it is.

My current theory is the push toward an electronic slave grid is primarily about depletion of the Saudi oil fields and the end of the petrodollar system. The anglo/zio/american empire desperately wants to maintain hegemony and control of the world financial system. I'm fairly sure that's what the covid hysteria is about. There's probably already some deal in place with China and Russia to transition to some new fraudulent financial scam system.

The financial system and the western oligarchy are hostile to the population of the western world. That's probably the key thing to keep in mind. Get out of the system as much as possible and do something else. Get savings into other useful forms of stuff while there's still some time. I think it's probably not a dire situation yet... People in the former USSR lost all their savings as that empire collapsed and Russia got worked over by western neoliberals. I am not sure if the USA financial system would get the same treatment or not. Probably. The scum that run the country hate the US population.

I think long term, we'll still be using fossil fuels as the primary source of energy. I don't think we'll have a mostly electric car fleet for many years, unless key engineering problems are solved.

Black Boxification and Money

 The economic system is based on some concepts that were developed during the 18th century--mainly the idea that people should only do the simplest possible "job" because it was more efficient than a cottage industry where people did a variety of tasks. That is, if someone grew and processed wheat into a loaf of bread it was less efficient than 10 individuals doing just one of all the separate (mindless) steps.

As a consequence, most people don't know how to do anything except their job. People are significantly dumber, I think than we were even just 200 years ago. Every capability was outsourced to the "system" and money from banks became the universal token for every exchange.

The world became a series of black boxes for most people. A small fraction of the population knows how their car works, for example, or knows how their house is wired, or how it's connected to the water system. The bulk of people just use a system to fulfill a need, whether it's slaking their thirst, or eating, and have zero understanding of how they got their needs filled. The system has even destroyed the family, and has stripped people of really basic soft skills too, like tending to elderly people, or dealing with death and harsh diseases.

There are, of course, exceptions to this way of life. There's a youtube channel about a Russian guy who is like the youtube era version of Dick Proenneke. There's actually many youtube channels of homesteaders and other people who bailed on the system to live a more complete human life, which actually means reverting to a tech-updated cottage industry economy that's closer to self-reliant. Those people need to be experts on many topics. Their inner world is much larger than the average corporate office drone.

Here's the Russian guy:

The dominant economic system in the western world turns people into a shadow mainly because there's a lack of engagement with the real world on its terms.

 

Their Plan is Too Obvious

The oligarchs in the US want to abandon fossil fuels. The ostensible reason is that CO2 is causing climate warming/change/weirdness... yeah weirdness per that fraud John Kerry. I think two more plausible explanations are: we can't produce enough oil to meet future demand... or people like Kerry or who he works for want an electronic slave grid.

This article shows what the e-gulag would look like: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/amp/California-s-high-electricity-rates-threaten-15970899.php

If everything is electric, then you can basically be taxed for using electricity as a function of income, or anything else they might want to use. They could charge you more for being white, for example, or if your opinion doesn't match that of some clique of brooklyn jews on any given topic, or if you ever wondered how it's possible the Germans cremated 6,000,000 people during war time.

It's almost too obvious.

There's no way the US is going to switch from petroleum to an all electric transportation grid. It's just not going to happen. An electric transportation system is going to be more resource intensive than a fossil fuel system. It will still require a huge amount of fossil fuel to maintain existing infrastructure, plus there needs to be a huge increase in the capacity of the electric generation and distribution system. It really is nonsensical. It's a plan devised by people who live in cities in southern california, I think.

It's hard to imagine that the state and federal governments can discredit themselves more than they already have via the covid scam, but I think climate bullshit and the resulting taxation and policy changes will do it. The system will be completely broken in no time. Non participation will become the norm as people attempt to protect their assets and their freedom.

If we're really resource constrained, then it's time to move on to a new approach to living. The e-gulag doesn't add any value... why will people pay for their own prison? I guess we already do that to a certain extent via income taxes, but at least there's some ostensible benefit to it, but the e-gulag is obviously hostile and bad for everyone.

Natural Value versus Price

The previous owner of our property piled up several stacks of firewood that have been rotting away for years. There's some good, split dry wood there and some other valuable seasoned wood that needs to be split, but the rest is chewed up by fungus, rot and insects. I started cleaning up the piles this past week. It got me thinking about value versus price and how you can train yourself to think in natural value terms instead of price.

Firewood is really similar to other energy commodities like diesel fuel, gasoline, natural gas, etc... It has some energy value per unit, has different grades, and has some specific requirements for storage. If it's stored correctly it won't degrade, but if it's kept outside, eventually it'll rot or get infested with insects or rodents. Gasoline has similar issues--incorrect storage is dangerous, and also lets the gas go bad.

So both gas and firewood have intrinsic value, e.g. energy per unit, and have contingent value--basically they depend on some infrastructure to maintain their value and to be really useful. Gasoline use and storage are very standardized. Since things like diesel and natural gas, or gasoline are liquids and gasses and oxidize into mainly gas components they actually have many of the qualities of "money", especially electronic credit money.

Since firewood is a bulk good, it's really more like gold or silver money. Firewood requires a lot more handling and produces ash as a left-over. Ash is actually a very useful byproduct that can be further refined to obtain materials like potassium fertilizer (aka pot-ash). Also fires require some level of expertise and knowledge to build so they burn clean, etc... So the value of the firewood is really contingent on the infrastructure a home has to burn and process it.

Like I said above, petroleum fuels are similar, however, most people have corporation provided devices and infrastructure to handle and burn petroleum fuels, whether it's a gas can, a small engine, or a car gas tank and computer controlled combustion, or a natural gas furnace, it's all well designed and automated so a user is hardly involved in the processing or burning of the fuel. People come to think of those fuels in pure money terms, mainly because they don't have to handle them at all or manage the combustion process at all. It's a total black box.

The intrinsic value of all those fuels is in the energy that's released through combustion. Heating with firewood is extremely cheap. It's an abundant renewable resource. Governments and corporations dislike firewood for that reason. The government/corporate system wants dependents. It's certainly true that wood fires can produce obnoxious byproducts of combustion unless they're managed with some rudimentary skill and knowledge. However, an idea like "burning wood contributes to climate change" is retarded.

This example shows how the "value" of various products is really couched in terms of a larger system and the training that shapes people's behavior to participate in that system. They get monetized within the context of those systems. You can sell firewood, but I think that business is probably not really very good because of the many contingencies associated with using wood as a fuel. It's really from an era with a different type of person who had more basic knowledge. Today, people are corporate products and live entirely within that corporation system. 

What's a Racist?

 During February, "Black History Month", a lot of major corporations go out of their way to promote black people. This campaign ends up being really ham fisted and stereotypical though. The corporate concept "black" person wears funky clothes and dances, and possibly has a sassy attitude and maybe dreadlocks. You can see what "racism" really is by looking at some of their ads.

A "racist" is someone who doesn't share the opinion a handful of establishment people--probably mostly jews and a few white people--of black people. It really doesn't have anything to do with black people, except they're the mascots or object for the virtue signaling of this little clique. It's sort of a relic of the 1960s and 70s, though. The US has moved on from there demographically, but the establishment hasn't because they're old people, apparently.

The more up-to-date version of establishment race-war games really just focuses on hating white people. Sure, the establishment ghouls have allocated more ethnic stereotype mascots, but those characters aren't nearly as fleshed out and complicated as the stereotype "funky black person". What's the establishment concept of a Korean, for example? There isn't one.

The "establishment" is really a group of the most parochial, literally inbred freaks in the western world. It'd be great if everyone woke up to their scams at the same time.

Smack for Soccer Moms

 Every once in a while, the evil ones promote some academic who's pushing part of their agenda. There's a professor at Columbia who is promoting recreational heroin use. His name is Carl Hart. It's pretty common for one of these academic media personalities to be in the national spotlight. It's also pretty common for them to flame out and disappear after a few months. I wouldn't be surprised if this dude was on NPR promoting his perspective to soccer moms to try to get them to use heroin to smooth out their day, like a cold beer. I can't wait for the NPR story where the reporter shoots up to have the hands-on first person experience they can describe to their audience.

It's been pretty common for the government to absorb organized crime businesses after a while. It wouldn't be such a shocker if they absorbed the whole drug trade and started taxing and selling hard drugs like they do booze and cigarettes and lottery and marijuana. We need a bunch of shitbird lawyers to keep us "safe" and to regulate organized crime. Sure we do.

Perma Crisis!

 The mismanagement and corruption, or outright hostility of the government to the people that lead to an unreliable utility grid in Texas is then presented as evidence of a "crisis" that the same scumbags and incompetent clique of dipshit lawyers can "fix" with enormous expense. The fuckers in state capitals or in national capitals couldn't setup a coffee table to save their life, but they're universal experts on everything from the climate, to power production, to ingredients in food, or how to grow vegetables. HA!

My whole life, there's been a crisis or a human bogeyman who's trying to kill everyone. The solution to those problems has been to plunder as much money as possible from the nation until people just forget the crisis ever existed.

The new twist from the retarded democrats is that one of the new "dangers" is white people and conspiracy theorists--that is, anyone who questions their insane, inane beliefs about any particular topic. If you wonder why the climate that's changing all the time is suddenly a "crisis" you're a threat. You're probably racist, too. If you think it's hypocrisy that some climate change cheerleader like bill gates or john kerry consumes 10000x more resources than an average american, you're probably an anti-semite. If you think it's insane for the government to throw $50B at some random alphabet agency to fight "white supremacy" when all the white supremacist, wanna-be domestic terrorists are really the FBI, you're probably a Russian agent. 

Received Reality

 There's a genre of youtube videos and even documentary mainstream-media videos that can all be summarized as "oh wow animals have feelings and similar characteristics to humans!"

That genre of video will go to great lengths to show some poor animal grieving the loss of a human companion or another animal. There's donkeys grieving the loss of horses, or ducks grieving the loss of another duck, etc... There's many famous stories, like dogs that followed an ambulance to the hospital or that slept on a grave.

The thing that's weird about those stories is that they're presented as "surprising" or revelatory, when it's actually the commonplace/experience based understanding of animals. The "scientific" understanding is the weird, demented, faulty understanding but that's the received reality. It's kind of shocking to realize we're groomed by a bunch of really aggressive, heavily promoted psychopaths to "believe" in their particular, parochial, fairly arbitrary view of the nature of the world.

The Collapsing Empire and the Sales Job for a new Shittier System

I think slow Joe Biden is America's Boris Yeltsin. That addled old corrupt retard from a family of bag men and corrupt fixers for oligarchs in the corporate crime capital Delaware is an appropriate mascott for the USA of 2021. Joe's dead son was the Attorney General of that state who let a DuPont family child rapist off the hook. There's probably no more apt summary of politics in the US than that incident.

There's an overall loss of confidence in the shitty economic and political system. Look at Texas as a great example of the failings of this pile of garbage. I don't think it's possible to analyze what happened there by the way--there's too many liars involved.

A likely cause, IMO, is the national level mafia government used the weather as a pretext to shut power off and wreak havoc. It's also possible that general incompetence and corruption--e.g. pinching pennies on vital infrastructure to make "profit"--is a contributing factor. It seems unlikely that the utility companies don't have huge safety factors on their infrastructure, but maybe they did cut corners to save dollars and waste billions.

I've got a shit load of blog posts on the general topic of building a more and more fragile system in the name of "efficiency", i.e. transferring wealth to scumbag executives and financial parasites. There's on "House of Cards and Pile of Cards" that's a summary of this issue. "There's no Economy of Scale" is another one.

The US economy and corporate system is a pile of shitty scams and schemes. It's basically a system of overt warfare by the few against the many. A handful of oligarchs push stupid agendas using the resources of the nation. The infrastructure falls apart while they push a jetsons future of stupid gadgets and new e-scams. They're human cancers--termites, rot in a log, whatever.

Continuing down the road that's being laid out by them will be a fatal mistake for millions of people, unfortunately. The system, which provides apparent comfort and easy life has made so many into completely dysfunctional dependents. This dependence breeding is by design.

It seems like there's going to be a hard sorting of wheat and tares in the next years. Look at the "future" that Billy Gates is trying to sell. It's a sort of tech douche utopia of electric cars, "too cheap to meter" no this time, I mean it, really safe this time, and really effective this time nuclear power, and vat meat. In that weird dude's mind, replacing the entire economy with his scams and schemes will be green and beneficial. That world probably appeals to the most dependent people on this shit system.

Overtly Hostile Government

It seems like "western" governments and other institutions turned fairly hostile to their people in recent months. Consequently, I think it's a lot easier to see how our system really works. The west is an oligarchy and has an overarching power structure that controls the puppet figures in governments. The presidents and prominent government people and probably even prominent figures in the corporate and media world are really just employees and front men for the overall organization. They've got as much autonomy as Tony the Tiger in their roles.

Oligarchy is nothing new, obviously, and the US itself has cycled through a bunch of different forms and economic arrangements through its history. Back in the early era of industrialization, oligarchs wielded tremendous power and influence. Politicians are always corrupt scumbags, and it's extremely rare there's a good and decent government that's aligned with the interests of the people.

It's a good question if "the people" will do anything about the worsening conditions, though. It seems like governments and other institutions might force people to act, and the best outcome might be that they force masses of people to opt out of the parasitic system and do their own thing. But we also might get sporadic, random, vigilante violence too, which will probably strengthen the system more.

Quite a large percentage of people are ready to see the government and corporations as the lying and fraudulent, though. The hamfisted propaganda and psyops of recent years have tutored millions of people about the scams and schemes of the scumbags in DC and other world capital cities.

I Was Wrong About Cows

There's a handful of people who keep cows in their backyard here in northeast ohio. It doesn't work that well. The cows turn their pasture into a mudhole. It's a pretty depressing scene to witness. It's too wet here to keep certain breeds of cows confined in a small area--they're too heavy.

It turns out though that cows are actually pretty hardy, resilient creatures that are capable of living in the wild and foraging for themselves. In fact, in certain areas they become a "problem" because they breed out of "control". There are woodland cows, too. So obviously the forest and cows can coexist.

The idea that cows are a significant polluter and cause global warming is fucking retarded. There used to be millions of bison on the prairies in the US and millions of other mega-fauna herbivores in Europe.

The conundrum I've wrestled with for the past 10 years or so is: would nature, just left to her own devices, produce more food for people? I have the nagging suspicion that it would. That immediately leads to the question "what the fuck are we doing?" Our civilization seems insane and retarded, especially now with the corona bullshit. Even without the 'rona there's always some stupid con or lie to keep people running on the hamster wheel and pissing their life away on nonsense projects or to keep them trapped in a box of lies.

Anyway, if you start to think through how that "nature let go" would work, you can really see very basic elements of how our current system really works, and why it is the way it is.

People are afraid to starve to death so they want to hoard food and over time, people learned to preserve food in various ways. Other animals hoard food too. Some birds, like chickadees cache food all over in the woods so they can more readily survive winter. If you have a very productive system of agriculture where food is always available "from the tap" so to speak, then food storage becomes less and less important. If you had 10 cows milling around on your property all the time, you wouldn't really need a freezer full of steaks.

The thing that the food storage system, and the controlled agricultural system gives people is information and apparent predictability. It allows people to fit their needs to a toy model representation of reality, like a number. "I have 4 barrels of wheat." The unit of "1 acre" of land approximates the amount of wheat that's required to make bread for a year or so for a family.

People can't see the overall productivity of nature--because they're kind of stupid, now, compared to the way humans were thousands of years ago. If they could see the overall productivity of nature and knew how it would produce over the winter, they wouldn't need the agricultural system so much.

The other problem is people would cheat and hoard food anyway, even if it made no sense, and they'd undermine the nature-agriculture system. We're all sort of prisoners in a kind of hellish system because of the worst people.

Deer versus Cow versus Billy Gates Brand Vat Meat

 In recent weeks, I've gotten in the habit of walking around in my woods in the morning. Right now, in the cold weather of February, it's very relaxing to be out in the cold, clear, still mornings. It's pretty common for deer to be hanging out back there. In the hours immediately after sunrise, they tend to nap and lounge around in the woods. They're not totally used to me walking around back there, but they aren't too concerned. They tend to camp out in places that they can easily run away from predators who aren't as fast as they are in difficult terrain.

I've done a few posts on how much easier it would be to let nature raise deer than it is for farmers to raise cows in our northeast Ohio environment. Go drive around in a rural area and check out the pastures where cows graze. It's quite common for the plant life to be completely destroyed by the cows, which are animals of the plains and prairies, like bison, rather than animals of a wet climate... maybe they'd do alright in woods? Nobody does that, though. I think Aurochs were in European forests, and are the ancestors of all the modern cows.

The cows require tending and maintenance. The deer require less than none. Where I live, there's a sizable deer herd in the city of Chardon, and there's a larger herd in the rural areas. I think there's more than one per person in Geauga County. Cows go in a barn over winter in many farms, and live off hay that was harvested in the spring and summer. Deer survive fairly well on foraging through the winter.

It's not too hard to imagine changing how we manage property so the landscape could revert to more of a natural condition, even while maintaining a fairly large human population. Really, if people just did less maintenance it'd just happen. If we're really resource constrained as a civilization, that's the most intelligent approach to "engineering" the future--doing less.

However, it seems like the exact opposite approach is being promoted now. The idea is that "meat" would be grown in vats. It's sold as being more "efficient" than animal husbandry. That's retarded.

As a deer is more efficient than a cow, a cow is more efficient than vat meat. The technological "solution" is to replace all the services that nature provides with human made approximations of the same. A cow has an immune system, for example. In a clean farm, with a low density of animals, and with clean water and good food, animals barely need any health interventions. By contrast vat meat will have no immune system. No digestive system. No circulatory system, so it will require human made versions of all that. It will produce a nightmare scenario breeding ground for weird diseases, bacteria, and fungi.

Why The Emphasis on Automating Blue Collar Jobs?

There are a handful of YouTube videos of machines that perform the tasks of skilled tradesmen. For example, there's a bricklaying robot that would ostensibly replace a bricklayer. However, if you watch the video and analyze the scenarios where that machine will work, you'll see it's got fairly limited application. It needs a construction site that's carefully prepared, and wide open to allow the robot to function correctly, for example. On top of that, it needs a crew of workers to maintain it, to accept brick deliveries, to load it up, etc... It's really only eliminating a fraction of the overall work that's required to build a brick wall but it's probably expensive to develop and maintain.

I think that's probably true of almost all trades. In certain tasks, where the environment is totally controlled, and the task is really repetitive and mechanical, automation is pretty "easy". In most trades, like carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, welding, concrete, the environment is not controlled at all and the tradesman has to solve problem after problem to complete their job. That work will be nearly impossible to automate. In spite of that, there seems to be an emphasis on automating tasks, like driving a truck, that are extremely difficult to automate--and probably won't really ever work.

By contrast the typical administrative or managerial job is easy to automate in most industries. A worker at a bank, for example, is really a database field editor. Their job is already automated. They remain as a human face on a computer program. Similarly, a large portion of the time people spend at work in corporate jobs is involved in makework tasks. If "automation" is really about reducing labor costs or increasing efficiency, it would make way more sense to automate away all the clerical and administrative overhead of corporate and government life.

Imagine all the waste involved in the operation of the financial system, or the tax system, or the insurance industry, or hospital billing. Those industries consume a sizable fraction of the economy. Any one of those systems could be streamlined overnight compared to the effort involved in automating truck driving. Millions of man hours go into tax preparation every year, for example, and involve the operation of computers, printers, etc... It's a less than useless task. Car insurance could be completely automatic.

The effort to automate blue collar jobs is driven, apparently, by spite and something resembling actual "racism" or hatred of a type of person. I think it's also driven by something resembling self-loating or fear of being discovered in a con. An industry like the auto insurance industry or banking are really based on scams, while carpentry, for example, is based on necessity. Automation and disenfranchising all the blue collar workers is sort of like building a fortress around the frauds.

 

Debt Money, Central Planning and the Atlantis Future

The idea of Atlantis--the lost civilization--shows up in several classical world works. The most famous ones are found in Plato's writing. The Greek's mythology was backwards from ours. For them, Atlantis was a lost pinnacle of civilization, and it was all downhill after that. They were looking back in history to see the ideal. The people of our world think we're the current pinnacle, but the future be an even higher pinnacle. Sci-Fi took Atlantis and moved it into the future and also made "tech" the basis for greatness.

There are lots of different versions of Atlantis in sci-fi. There's the established, but failed dystopian central planning Atlantis of a movie like Logan's Run or Demolition Man. There's the utopian version of Atlantis that's depicted in Star Trek. They imply some cataclysm happened, and from that collapsed civilization emerged the space-fairing technology of warp drives and anti-matter power plants. There's the secret Atlantis where a select few know Atlantis exists, but it can't be revealed to the public of Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. There's the Battlestar Galactica cyclical collapse version of Atlantis where some ineffable unknowable force drives man's journey. Then there's the Bladerunner version which I think matches our current reality.

The common thread of future Atlantis mythology is that technology will one day completely free man from constraints of nature (or God). This is even reflected in our monetary system of debt, and our civilization's obsession with technology. In recent decades endless credit was offered to corporations that develop "new tech" and built new tech infrastructure, like Amazon, or Tesla.

Most of my blog posts point out inherent problems with tech--mainly that it creates at least as many problems as it solves, in short that it's really severely constrained by nature, rather than a doorway of escape from natural necessity. This is really exemplified by an attempt to switch from fossil fuel to so called "renewable" energy, and the attempt to switch to an electric transportation network. Solar and wind power infrastructure are energy intensive to produce and rely on the existing fossil fuel infrastructure and road network, for example, and produce more waste and toxic byproducts of production and require energy storage, etc...

Another problem with tech is that it makes people stupider and weaker and overall worse. Tech seems to offer ways for the worst aspects of humanity to completely manifest themselves. It empowers egotism and narcissism. The philosophical notion that we "live in a simulation" is the ultimate expression of this tendency. Life is so easy for some people that they deny the existence of an outside world. (That philosophical solipsism works until you get back problems, or a broken bone or a broken tooth, or cancer, or experience loss of a loved one.)

The "biotech" field is the side show byproduct of the ego plus technology. For some reason, some men want to be biological females, and seek to replace their endocrine system, which ties us to nature and reality on some very deep, fundamental level, with regular injections of synthetic hormones. They even want to have uterus transplants for some bizarre reason.

It's a quarrel of an ego with God, or mother Nature. Nature's organized for systemic stability within the context of a very dynamic, interconnected system that's beyond man's grasp. There's no super brain, or computer model that's going to let humans see or manage that natural whole. This project seems weirdly childish and demented.

It seems like we're at the end of the road of the modernity project and the current attempt to "build Atlantis" is in the final stages. The people who are making decisions on how to use resources are going for the "Bladerunner" future. Their idea seems to require central planning and control of individuals toward that end, so now they're obsessed with dissolving the notion of individual sovereignty via the corona-scam. They're also obsessed with making people weaker and completely dependent on the state and corporations for survival.