(from Wikipedia Brittanica, 89th Ed., published 3615)

(For historical reasons, this article refers to the first global collapse of civilization on Earth in 2018.  For subsequent collapses, or for the 2416 implosion of Mars from overmining, refer to “Great Global Collapse (disambiguation).”)

By the turn of the twenty-first century, most of the Earth had developed primitive, post-tribal civilizations¹.  These civilizations were oligarchical, with hereditary ruling castes that distinguished themselves with claims of wealth, or divine or popular mandate². These civilizations were primarily guided by mysticism; at the time of the first collapse, the two predominant forms were bibliomancy³ and economics⁴.

The Economists in particular supported and fought for increasingly opulent acts of worship, which resulted in a sharp rise in the consumption of natural resources and the emission of pollutants.  It also caused a worldwide reduction in well-being, which the clergy excused with claims that those who traded piously, in the name of  Growth and Profit, would be provided for after death⁵.

Some evidence survives that suggests a small but significant number of dissenters argued that this worship would cause the destruction of the earth, the destruction of the biosphere, the end of human civilization, among other things⁶.  Evidence also survives suggesting that many of these dissenters were followers of a cult of “Scientists” who worshipped observation, statistics⁷ and repeatability.  We also know that their religion was heavily ridiculed by both the bibliomancers and the economists⁸, who waged a decades-long propaganda war against it⁹ (it is noteworthy that, at the time, the average human lifespan was less than one century) on a scale not seen for several hundred years after the collapse¹⁰. It eventually erupted into violence, leading to the burning at the stake of several thousands of Scientists in “witch trials,” most famously at Salem, where Albert Einstein¹¹ was executed.

Records show that the collapse began in earnest in 2012. By this point, its inevitability was widely known and even admitted by the leading mystics, who suggested only renewed faith in their ideals would solve their problems. For reasons that are not now understood, they refused to expand their ability to generate electricity, and the power distribution system in north America failed completely after a July hurricane forced several power stations offline¹². As an emergency measure, the grid was broken into smaller regional sections and hundreds of dirty coal generating stations were brought to account for the shortfall of local supply.

The resulting rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is attributed to the unexpected collapse of the Greenland ice shelf later that fall, which spilled into the northern Atlantic ocean and stopped the mid-Atlantic conveyor current. Without the temperature balancing influence of the current, Europe suffered the coldest winter since the previous ice age¹³, leading to energy rationing and thousands of deaths, and the equatorial regions and southern hemisphere faced record heat. Previously fertile regions were flooded by savage tropical storms or seared with drought, resulting in massive crop failures in South America, and Asia.

In the resulting famine, the North American meat farming industry struggled to feed their stock, and decided to feed it to itself, mixed with effluent from the deforestation industry¹⁴. This, combined with widespread misuse of medicines and bizarre farming methods are widely attributed to the appearance of the Delinquent Bovine Pellucidum Influenza. Marked by visible symptoms similar to leprosy and causing extreme aggression in the week prior to death, this highly contagious disease would claim an estimated five billion victims by 2050.

The reactions to these combined crises are difficult to ascertain, as the information surviving this period was largely stored on delicate wafers of magnetic material or on reflective discs that were vulnerable to oxidation¹⁵.  The bibliomancers suggested inaction and prayer, in the belief that the arrival of a saviour was imminent.  Excavations in the 25th century¹⁶ discovered recordings of hymns that identify this saviour as the “Funk Soul Brother.”  Accounts of what the Funk Soul Brother was supposed to do are not clear, but the belief in his timely arrival was widespread.  The Economists suggested that the ruling parties “continue to aggressively infuse capital to promote growth in key industries.”  No records clarifying the meaning of this phrase survive.  In the meantime, surviving evidence suggests that the ruling elite in north America staged fights between donkeys and elephants for the distraction of the public¹⁷.  Exactly why this happened before any preventative action is unknown.  Other responses are even more inexplicable: one group called “The Church of the Black Star” suggested that plenty would be restored directly from the lower digestive tract of the north American emperor, Hope Obama.

After the collapse, there are no surviving records except for those kept by a group who referred to themselves as “The Foundation.”¹⁸ After nearly a century of violence, most of the population had reverted to subsistence farming.  At this point, the Foundation spread out from its headquarters in the Nelson valley in the former state of Canada in an attempt to restore technological civilization.

(more…)

Something has fundamentally changed in my computing experience in the last few years, and I don’t really like it.

Now, back in, say, 2002, people were amazed that a version of windows was available that could usually run for a few hours without crashing (XP).  OS X was at Jaguar, and it was pretty slick, but also limiting, in a strange way.  In the Linux world, GNOME’s window manager wasn’t doing a good job with Xinerama hints (so windows would pop up right in the middle of those two 17″ CRTs heating your computer area) and running KDE smoothly required a whopping 256MB of RAM.  Only OS X could do antialiased text without serious tweaking, and getting 3D acceleration on Linux required some pretty serious wizardry: recompiling kernels with DRI, adding poorly documented sections to /etc/X11/XF86Config, waving chickens over the monitor, and so on.

Roughly, it was the bloody dark ages.  Since then, those of us who escaped to a Mac have seen successive waves of improvement, to the point where almost no grievance has been left untouched; meanwhile, GNOME and KDE have become beautiful, tightly integrated and intensely productive environments.  It’s hard not to look back with astonishment that we ever actually got anything done¹.

But amidst that barbarism, there were some things that had an aura of magic to them.  If you could spend a couple of days tweaking your environment, reading documentation and adding the appropriate cantrips and sigils to configuration files, you could get to the point where your entire workflow—including goofing off—was effortless.  There was a lot of strangely fun stuff like writing a quick perl script to rip through a text file full of lab results, crunch them and spit out a LaTeX table to include in the report.

That doesn’t really seem to happen anymore.  The process of serious work seems to be: start web browser, start Outlook, start crappy custom software.  I’m getting pretty fluent at window juggling in XP, which is painful once there are twenty or so windows up, but there’s no magic here.  Even at home, with my lovely Mac, everything’s pretty inane.

The change is twofold, really.  One is in user interfaces and interoperability.  As usability issues are addressed, one way of doing things is becoming dominant.  This is actually a pretty good thing for the most part, but I have to admit that I occasionally miss rolling my own custom-fitted workflow.  The other part, and definitely the bigger of the two, is the nature of what I do on computers.  Back then, it was “here’s a problem, here are some tools, solve the problem.”  Now, it’s “here’s a problem, here’s the solution, now do it nine hundred times.”

Sigh.

1) I suppose people running windows don’t feel much different now than they did then.

I keep thinking that I have something to write about.  It keeps being wrong.  I get most of the way through something, or maybe even just started on it, and ask myself, “what do I have to say that hasn’t already been said to death?  Why would anyone want to read it anyway?”

These questions kill a lot of my output.  Really, the number of things I can call myself an authority on is shockingly small.  There’s a slightly less shockingly small number of things that I could say I’m decently well versed with, but I have a really hard time getting pedagogical on topics where I assume my readership—and I know all four of you—are as well versed as I am.

There was a time when I thought it’d be neat to be one of the thought leaders of the blogosphere, or at least an occasionally recognized contributor.  A B-list blogger.  Even C-list, maybe.  I was never thinking that I would make a living of it, but the thought of having some form of meaningful discussion was pretty exciting.  But I’ve slowly started noticing that there is no meaningful discussion, at all.

First of all, everyone really loves their ideas.  Libertarians, commies, free-marketeers, yogis, christians and other frightened masses: they all have their own ideas about how the world works, or how it ought to work, and they all have a sort of logic to them.  But they also have a big steaming lump of problems; issues that they ignore or assume would go away if their idea had its day in the sun.  As a result, most of the discussion I see involves chewing the news from different ideological standpoints or straight up preaching, and it’s very rare that something shockingly insightful comes out of the whole mess.

I’m also starting to think that a lot of the discussions are about issues that it doesn’t make sense for me to form an opinion on.  The last time I blogged was about the upcoming depression, and that news hasn’t really affected me yet.  I suppose people who put a lot of faith into “the economy” and “growth” and stuff are feeling it.  I’m sure we all have an opinion about the kerfuffle in Gaza, but how many of you has it directly affected?  I’m going to guess that among the people who read this, the closest it will come will be having a friend who has family in some other part of the region.

This is actually bringing me to a point.  I have an opinion on the events in Gaza: it’s none of my business.  I can’t take sides, because for the life of me, I can’t understand what motivates these people.  The history of the conflict is so full of savagery from both sides and so steeped in the arrogance of colonial Europe that I’d rather just leave it alone.  I do believe that the US should be acting as a peacekeeper instead of backing Israel, and that will probably happen now that Bush is out, but I’m not going to say either side is bad or good or better or worse because the issue is too complex for that kind of reductionism.

The modern world is full of examples where serious harm has been done because people who believed they were right stepped into something that was none of their business.  The imperial quest to “bring civilization to the savages.”  Every ostensibly religious war.  Banning drugs whose consumption doesn’t violate the peace (and oddly having no trouble with some that do).  Abstinence-only sex propaganda.  The list goes on.

I don’t know if there’s an evolutionary basis for not believing other people can form coherent worldviews and make sensible decisions based on them, but it seems to be endemic.  We have an almost striking inability to appreciate the subtleties of each other’s viewpoints, and we make strawmen of them just like we reduce everyone outside of our monkeysphere to a stereotype.  In fact, I would guess that the number of viewpoints we can appreciate in a detailed way¹ is considerably smaller than Dunbar’s number.  I’m going to guess it’s less than five.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it was usually one, sometimes perhaps even zero.  I can imagine tribes of apes having a dispute and forming shrieking, chest-thumping groups to intimidate the others into submission.  For some reason, it feels like our current discursive tools are the abstract descendants of this.

Now, if all of our discussions are boiling down to ideological chest-thumping, I’d rather opt out.  There are much more interesting things to do.

1) Let’s call this Reid’s Number.

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the need for transparency in the financial system.  Well, I think we’ve pretty much got it.

Let’s trace some of the steps here.

1. The fed rate gets really low.
2. A bunch of banks, crazed by the cheap money, make a lot of high risk loans, many of which turn out to be bad.  See: sub-prime mortgages.
3. It becomes clear that these loans are bad, so instead of being counted as assets, they’re counted as liabilities.  It now becomes clear that they’ve lent way beyond what they can back with actual money¹.
4. The banks can no longer lend because they’re close to their reserve rate, which is the minimum ratio of assets to liabilities that was put in place, *cough*, to prevent banks in a partial-reserve system from lending like madmen.
5. Because the banks can no longer lend, every business or person that operates on debt financing is screwed.  Shockingly, over years of cheap credit, almost everyone has been convinced to start doing it.
6. “To let us lend again,” the banks say, “the government has to help us deal with all this bad debt.”  A plan is drafted to drop 700+ billion dollars into buying bad debt, which will restore bank reserves.
7. The US Federal Government issues 700+ billion dollars of bonds, which are bought by the Federal Reserve in exchange for cash, which they’ve just printed (well, electronically transferred).  Now, bonds are debt, and the government owes interest on that debt.

So where are we?  The government is a nearly a trillion dollars further in debt, and has gained nearly a trillion dollars of known junk.  The banks are right back where they started before the lending frenzy, and the Federal Reserve banks are up nearly a trillion dollars in bonds, which they can now sell for profit.

But wait, it gets better.

The Federal Reserve banks are owned by their member banks, which just happen to be the same ones that were doing the stupid lending in the first place.

And now the chairman of the Federal Reserve is saying “the banks need more capital.”

Someone, please fill in the facts that I’m missing so this stops looking like a shockingly transparent swindle.

1. *cough* I know, shut up.