Economics

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“And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in a word…”

Hello again.  It’s Friday now, as usually happens immediately after Thursday (but also six days before Thursday, though not the same Thursday it follows).  It’s all very reassuring, this regular, cyclical procession of the days of the week…

…isn’t it?

Well, maybe it would be if they weren’t just arbitrary day names following an arbitrary convention of numbers of days in a week, which number was mainly based on the number of “unfixed” astronomical objects visible to the naked eye:  Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon.  Some of our modern English day names still refer to those objects, namely Sunday, Monday, and Saturday.  The other four, somehow, got saddled with references to Norse mythology.

I guess the Vikings really did have a significant impact on the British isles, didn’t they?

Anyway…

As I said, it’s Friday, and it’s the end of the typical, traditional work week, though I am working tomorrow, so I expect I’ll probably be writing another post.

It is interesting to think of what we mean by “tradition” and “traditional”, because not all traditions are of the same order by any means.  For instance, the “traditional” five-day work week is not really all that old.

Previously, people worked more days and longer hours per week (unless they had no need to work), but various workers’ rights movements over time got various laws passed and then new “traditions” began, and to some degree, people’s quality of life was somewhat protected.  Also, in the US, benefits like health insurance were tied to long-term employment by union contracts and sometimes by legislation.

Then, of course, we rebelled against being told that we could not work longer hours without special, extra compensation.  Why, that made our businesses less able to grind ahead and innovate and compete in global markets of various kinds (or so it was said).  We wouldn’t want that!  So, first salaried people were sort of exempted from the rules, and then that spread in various ways, as businesses and related enterprises tried to compete for more money, more resources, more power*.

Except, of course, plenty of other people and companies and countries were competing as well, so there was never any singular advantage that lasted for long; instead, like trees that evolved to grow taller and taller to compete with other trees for sunlight (while the other trees were subject to the same pressures), they raised the minimum requirement merely to stay alive, to which they were all subject, making life harder for each and every one of them, even the “winners”.

Such are natural equilibria.  Just because they become stable and persistent and “successful” doesn’t mean they are not immiserating for every organism in their structure.  And, of course, it is possible for such equilibria, as for species and for cells, to evolve to extinction.

Evolution by natural selection does not plan ahead, and it is neither benevolent nor malevolent, but it is instead entirely and completely uncaring**.

A somewhat parallel process happens in economies at various scales.  It’s not a perfect analogue, for there exists the capacity to learn from others’ practices without having to reinvent everything oneself, and one doesn’t have to wait for new generations to enact even small adjustments.  But it is still fundamentally a mindless process overall.

And, most pertinently, the mutual competition involved leads to higher and higher minimum requirements for success.  You’ve heard of the glass ceiling, of course, but even more subtly horrifying is the spike-ridden, trap-door-bearing, caustic and red hot floor.

I don’t know, maybe those metaphors don’t quite work.  I’m making these expressions up as I go along, as happens with all my blog posts.

I just wanted to remind everyone that nothing in the way the world is set up‒or, well, at least very few things‒is a necessity in anything but a highly local sense.  “Best practices” are not something inherent in nature; our financial and banking systems are not in any way equivalent to fundamental physics.  It’s all ad hoc, spontaneously self-assembled, no more inherently fundamental or necessary than is any one particular pattern of frost on a window pane.

So, don’t be fooled by the tendency to follow traditions, at least not blindly.  The oldest traditions humans have are only a few thousand years old, which is tiny compared to how long humans have existed.  And most traditions are far more recent.

Maybe your family has or had a tradition of getting together to watch The Ten Commandments every year around Passover/Easter.  But that tradition clearly cannot go back to before the movie was made, nor‒even more restrictive‒before televisions were available to most households.  That’s barely a few generations.

So, traditions are only as important as they are good and useful, though those measures depend very much on who is measuring and what the perceived use and good is from that person’s point of view.  That’s okay.  We don’t have any objective, external measures to use for such things.  They were invented by us, and for the most part, are only pertinent to us.

The universe doesn’t give the slightest f*ck.

Maybe, someday, the distant descendants of humans will gain so much knowledge and power that the universe will “notice” them.  I’m not going to hold my breath.

*The actual events involved in all this were far more involved than may seem implied by my summary, but I’m not trying to capture historical minutiae.  Rather, I’m trying to illustrate, to sketch, the general shape of the things that happened.

**This is not to be confused with saying that successful organisms are uncaring.  Caring, mutual support and protection, cooperation, love, can all be very successful survival attributes.  But that cooperation, that familial support, that maternal caring, that mutual love, as the case may be, does not exist just because it’s nice, or because it’s moral, or because it’s necessary; it exists because, for those organisms in those times and circumstances, it is successful, i.e., it tends to increase the odds of reproduction of the genes that engender that set of attributes.

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The footnote may make the best point in this post

Well, it’s the start of another work week, and it’s also the start of another month‒June, in case you don’t know.  I wouldn’t say it’s a “work month” since there are no real non-work months.  Though in some cultures, there is (or was) at least a part of this month when people took several days off.  The time around the summer solstice was, in some cultures, a festival time.  They even suspended the counting of the months at that point, to make up for the 5 days (6 on leap years) left after 12 thirty-day months.

Actually, I don’t know for sure if any real cultures did this, but the hobbits of the Shire, in Tolkien’s world, did something like this, and I have long thought that it seemed like a nice way to go.  However, apparently taking 5 days off completely in the middle of the year‒at the beginning of summer, though it’s sometimes called midsummer‒would fall afoul of commercial pressures, much as have most holidays in general in the modern world.

There is too great a perceived disadvantage to taking any time off when one’s competitors are working (and that perception is probably not entirely illusory).  So, one business working on the holidays is liable to spawn others who wish to compete.  Those that don’t may be less likely to survive ceteris paribus.

And the implementation of the decision to work on holidays is made by people in echelons so far removed from the consequences of overwork and the rat-race-ification of daily life that they feel no pressure not to grind their employees into dust; there are (so far) always more potential employees, and the stockholders only pay attention to the last three months if that when deciding how to tell the boards of directors to act.

It’s not so much that (as many young people seem to suspect) capitalism is an inherently evil system‒it is not.  It has indeed contributed greatly to the productivity and prosperity, to the physically good, that exists in the modern world.  But it is not a perfect system.  Or rather, it is a system that is useful for what it does, but it does not encompass or elicit or create all the good things that humans might need to prosper in any thoroughgoing way.  How could one expect it to do so?

Humans are displaced and distributed hunter-gatherers from sub-Saharan Africa; the “modern world” is an epiphenomenon that has developed and grown and is continuing to develop and grow and change, after have been created‒without any prior planning nor understanding of what it is or its implications‒by humans who were, as at all times, working almost entirely under the influence of local incentives and disincentives.

No one designed the world economy, nor any local economy, nor most of the other trappings of civilization.  I almost wanted to add “any more than any ant designs an ant hill”, but the human society/economy is far less a preplanned thing than is even the most haphazard ant hill or termite mound or beehive, for those structures are guided rather specifically by instincts selected and honed over countless generations and eons.

No human society has been in any kind of equilibrium anywhere near long enough for it to have had a very strong evolutionary impact on human attributes.  Some of the pre-civilization eras of humanity endured and were consistent enough to have impacts, certainly, but nothing in culture since the dawn of agriculture has stayed the same long enough for humans to adapt to it biologically in any significant way (though there are probably some effects).

I’m not sure what point I’m trying to make here, except perhaps to remind people that we should not expect pure capitalism and/or free markets alone to be perfectly conducive to every aspect of human thriving in and of itself.  It is useful and productive, far more so when dealing with primate hunter-gatherers than is any kind of pure socialism or communism, let alone any brand of authoritarianism or totalitarianism.

But there are certainly socialistic things that can be added as tweaks, if you will, to a society that is productive of goods and services thanks to capitalism, to try to counteract the tendencies of unregulated capitalism to produce inadequate and counterproductive* equilibria as well as uncompensated externalities.

We shouldn’t expect society to be simple, nor for any one notion of things to be adequate to ensure or even encourage health and well-being and flourishing in the people in the society.  This all relates to my earlier point about how all ideologies are wrong.  There are unlikely to be any simple answers that describe and ensure beneficent and productive cultures.  Like a building that exists for decades or centuries while still being used, there is going to need to be constant maintenance and updating and sometimes even rebuilding of portions that are crumbling.

It’s that or just knock the whole thing down‒but don’t expect to be able to build anything better from the wreckage.  The same forces and principles will apply to your new edifice as applied to the old one.

*They are counterproductive to the great majority of people in such cultures, at least.  There will often be individuals who do very well even while participating in the stagnation of such detrimental equilibria.  Someone who accumulates great wealth‒and, thanks to that wealth, can gain more, and so on, perhaps creating a monopoly‒might consider the system just peachy, at least for them.   But hoarded wealth does not do anything to contribute to an economy.  It’s like biological energy (calories) stored as nearly-impossible-to-mobilize fat.  Indeed, the stagnation of oligopolistic economies may have many similarities to someone who is obese and in a profound state of insulin resistance but with pathologically high insulin to compensate, so they cannot release their stored energy and feel miserable and constantly fatigued despite having plenty of calories in their bodies.

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Try not to let the wrong kind of strangers depend on your kindness

I don’t have anything planned to “talk” about today, unlike yesterday, which makes this a much more typical‒though possibly less auspicious‒beginning for a blog post.

In any case, I feel the pressure to keep writing, because this is my only real contact with the outside world in which I share anything like my real, deeper thoughts and so on.  When I bring such matters up at work, people tend to laugh a bit‒I can be relatively funny when I try‒but otherwise they tend to look a bit confused or just awkward.

I don’t know whether any of the people from back home, who might occasionally have encountered my blog via Facebook or Threads, will ever happen to come read it here.  That’s one reason I always tried to encourage people to interact with the blog in the comments section below, rather than in the posts on social media.  That way they are more sure to be able to keep getting the posts.

But I haven’t received any comments from any of them here since the Meta-based platforms kicked me off for no reason I can discern.  I suppose it’s a lesson of sorts, not to place any reliance upon third party businesses that don’t even have an arguable fiduciary duty to me, since I am not their customer but their product (as are you, if you use them).

They clearly don’t feel any significant moral or ethical obligations toward the people who use their platforms.  You should all remember that fact if the time comes where you have them in any sense at your advantage.  Don’t be kind to them.  To be kind to them is to insult those who do show signs of ethics and morality and good will, to those who deserve (whatever that might mean) and will appreciate kindness.

Whom do you think ought to be most rewarded by your good will?  Which form of being do you want to encourage?

Of course, kindness being what it is (if it is authentic kindness, rather than someone just being “nice” or being “charming” as tactics for advancing their own interests) the tendency is to be kind to all comers.  I get that, and I applaud it.

But the kindness of those who are truly kind‒or at least their ability to enact it‒is finite, as is their personal time and energy.

If one had unlimited strength and energy and time, one could simply be kind to everyone, and it would almost certainly make the world a better place overall, by most reasonable definitions.  For kindness may not have the same immense R0 value, the same easy transmissibility as do malice and contempt and rudeness and anger, but when it takes hold, it can be much more persistent, and can change (for the better) the kind individual as well as those around them.

The negative contagions‒malice, anger, contempt, and so on‒tend to be self-corrosive and destructive, in addition to being highly transmissible.  They are like the “Spanish” flu, or even like a highly virulent form of measles:  readily transmitted but terribly damaging (and often fatal) to those they infect.

Kindness is more like‒I hope you’ll pardon the seemingly negative comparison‒HIV or HTLV-1.  It can intercalate (or, to be technical with respect to the mentioned retroviruses, reverse transcribe) itself into the very DNA of those who “catch” it, changing them slowly and gradually but profoundly and‒unlike those two viruses I mentioned‒almost always for the better.  And true kindness can be very difficult to “cure”, thank goodness.

But it is a finite thing, and there are always those who will make use of the kindness‒even just the implicit kindness‒of others for their own ends, without rewarding anyone but themselves any more than they must, least of all those who are unselfishly kind to them.

In any ecosystem, if there is “free energy” floating around, then sooner or later some organism is going to develop the ability to exploit it.  And the exploiters can then readily grow and mutate and can even become pernicious or overt predators and parasites.  In this, they can be like the fungi that had been breaking down dead matter, but which went on to develop the capacity to infect living bodies and even to manipulate some of them to encourage the fungus’s spread.

None of this requires conscious intent (there certainly is no such thing evident in fungi, for instance).  It does not require foresight or planning.  Ideas and strategies and ways of being simply develop and mutate and “try out” various seemingly available niches, never knowing ahead of time which ways of doing and being will succeed.  It’s just that those organisms (or companies, etc.) who happen to stumble upon a useful and “profitable” way of doing things will happen to survive and grow and, relatively speaking, to thrive.

So, don’t give too much credit or admiration to the Zuckerbergs and the Musks and the Bezoses, nor to any of the others of their ilk, and certainly not to those who inherit success, like children born with an infection passed on by the mother* in utero.  Their success is stochastic, and was certainly not thanks to any particular prescience or cleverness on their part.

They are no more inherently impressive than any of the thousands and even millions who tried to do similar things and failed.  They simply happened to stumble upon a strategy that, in the local circumstances in which they found themselves, happened to work.  And once a degree of success happens, it tends to be self reinforcing, ceteris paribus.

This is to no credit of the viruses and parasites in and of themselves.  It is simply the way of economies and ecologies, no matter what such organisms may tell themselves to justify their actions to themselves and to assuage whatever rudimentary consciences they may possess.

Don’t waste your admiration, and certainly not your kindness, on those who happened to be in the right part of some particular phase space at the right time, through no virtue of their own, unless you would also feel fine giving that admiration and kindness to the many variants of influenza and coronaviruses and poxviruses and liver flukes and malaria protozoans and so on that spread and consume and have their various effects on the lives and bodies of other organisms.

And certainly don’t trust them to be kind to you or to anyone else.

*This is where my analogy with HIV falls short, but of course it was inevitably going to do, since HIV is pathogenic, whereas kindness does not tend to be so, nor does inherited wealth (except perhaps in more subtle ways).  Perhaps one might think of kindness as like the first archaea that “infected” another type or archaea and became, in the fullness of time, our mitochondria.  Okay, I’m pushing my analogies here, I know.

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Had I but pens enough, and time…

Here we go again, again.  It’s Monday‒the last one in April this year‒and I’m writing another effing blog post.

I keep trying weird little things in the hope that they engender or otherwise encourage something positive in my life.  For instance, after briefly using a blue Bic® Round Stic™ pen on Friday, I realized that I had on some level missed writing with them.

I wrote Mark Red and The Chasm and the Collision, and the “short story” Paradox City all with blue and/or black medium Bic™ Round Stic® pens.  These were the only ones available through commissary up at FSP.  After a while, the guys who did tattoos would just give me new ones to use as long as I gave them back when empty/traded an empty one for the new one, so they could use them to make tattoo guns, and I went through such pens pretty quickly.

I thought to myself (since I have trouble thinking to anyone else*) that maybe if I started using these pens regularly again, I might help give myself the energy to start doing some new fiction writing.  So, I ordered a box of them, which is at least quite inexpensive, and I have one in my pocket now.

It’s a fairly childish notion, perhaps, but just because something is childish does not mean it’s wrong or bad.  Adults get rid of too many childish things‒sometimes on the advice of effing Saul of Tarsus of all the pathetic losers to whom to listen‒and adopt too many “adultish” things that are no more sensible, not as rewarding, and are reliably productive of negative outcomes.

Of course, some childish things do need to be left behind.  Ideally, one does not want to keep believing in Santa Claus or monsters in the closet or that stepping on a crack will break your mother’s back any longer than one must.  Wetting the bed is also worth stopping as early as one can.

But it can be good for one to keep asking questions about how things work and what they are and what they do and how they got to be the way they are, and being delighted in seeing and learning new things, and enjoying simple games and going outside and stuff like that.

Anyway, I doubt this particular choice of pens will actually get me to write any fiction again, but maybe it will at least feel good to use them again for a while.

As you know, I have at least a few stories, such as Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado that I have started that I’d like to finish, and I have some other stories on the back burner that I’d like to start and write.  If I could just find a patron to support me while I write, so I didn’t have to do anything else, I could probably do it.  But despite its name, even Patreon doesn’t really work that way.

People who support “creators” on Patreon pay regular, specified amounts and expect regular, piecemeal output (like daily blogs, for instance, though being the intellectually stunted populace that we are, people more often seem to want video stuff).  If I put up a Patreon, or a “Go fund me” thing (whatever the proper term for that is) I doubt that I would get a lot of people supporting me and just waiting while I work on a long form writing project.

If anyone wants to do that, and is able to do it, let me know.  Just remember, I’m slightly paranoid, so I will probably suspect some scam at first if you approach me‒unless I already know you, of course.

All of this is really just fantasizing, obviously.  I might as well request that the person who wants to be my patron for writing fiction is also a beautiful woman who is just my type (whatever that might be) and who wants to be in a long-term relationship with me.  Oh, and also, she owns a dragon, as well as an FTL spaceship.  Hey, maybe she’s a Time Lord and has her own TARDIS!

Actually, if I had the use of a TARDIS, it would probably distract me completely from writing fiction.  But I probably wouldn’t spend as much time (har) just traveling and having adventures as most of, for instance, the Doctor’s companions do.  I would want to learn how this technology works!

I don’t understand why none of the people who enter the TARDIS and gape at the whole “bigger on the inside” thing don’t right then and there ask how it works!  (Occasionally some do so, rather halfheartedly).

And when the trite little, dismissive answers such as Nardole gives are offered, they should say, “No, no, I mean how does it actually work?  What is the science and technology involved, how is it carried out and maintained?  What is the physics underlying it, how was it discovered, how was it harnessed?  Do you have any primers on that, any online courses, any textbooks, even any ‘how does it work’ for kids books?  And for that matter, how does the time stream and everything work, how is it traversed, what is the physics behind the functioning of the TARDIS?  We’ll get to the biology of regeneration in due time, but I want to understand all this.  To Hell with going and fighting Daleks or whatever, you can literally do that whenever you feel like, because you have a time machine!”

I guess it wouldn’t be a very fun show, just to watch someone studying Time Lord science and technology, but in real life, if I had access, I like to think that’s how I would spend a lot of my time.  And I think I think correctly.

All right, that’s enough stupid fantasizing for today, wouldn’t you say?  None of those or any other good things are likely to happen to me (some are far more probable than others, but none are worth betting on).

I am much more likely to keep developing new and harder to control pain and more frequently recurring and persistent pain and greater and greater frustration and despondency and depression until finally, at long last, it kills me.  Then, at least, everyone in the universe overall will be just a little bit happier.  On average, anyway.

*Though in a certain sense, this blog is an instance of me thinking to other people.  But that requires the other people to be active participants, and it certainly cannot be done all day every day or any such thing. 

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A stochastic, elastic, would-be fantastic blog post

Well, here we go again.  It’s Monday, the start of another (standard) work week, though I know that many people operate on other than a Monday through Friday schedule.

For some places of employment, this makes very good sense.  For instance, hospitals must, if they are to be of use, be open basically all day and night, every day and night, and so there must be people working in them at all hours‒because illness and injury do not know anything about arbitrary human schedules.  Indeed, many injuries and illnesses are more likely to happen when people are off work.

Other places of employment, such as restaurants and the like, get most of their business during non-work hours for other people, because people don’t typically do their office work in restaurants.  There is, of course, lunchtime business (sometimes even for meetings), and many places even see breakfast time business, but people are still not usually eating there while working, at least not when they’re on the clock (independent contractors who do distant work notwithstanding).

Of course, banks are the most traditionally nine to five places of business‒thus the traditional and somewhat disparaging reference to “banker’s hours”‒but really, that has never made much sense to me.  People who work need to go to the bank when they are not at work, if they need to go in person, but banks are open (almost solely) during other people’s working hours.

It’s almost as if banks (long before things like Facebook and Twitter) weren’t actually seeing the ordinary users of their services as their customers; they were the product, or at least, they were the source of the product.

The customers’ savings were the source of the money the banks lent out to others, charging interest for the use of other people’s money, and then as often as not (or more) charging the depositors to keep and use their money as well!  What a racket (SMH).  No wonder people don’t trust bankers.

By comparison, raw capitalism‒or at least, any approximation of free market exchange‒is generous and fair.  That’s by comparison only, mind you.  After all, the basic principle, that of providing goods and/or services in exchange for money that can be used to buy other goods and services, is quite logical.

One problem with this is that advantages in business tend to be self-reinforcing, even if the initial advantage happened randomly.  This can be good in limited amounts‒for instance, a successful business that employs many people is best when stable, so people’s lives can be relatively stable.  But past a certain point, i.e., when it becomes a monopoly, or close to it, a business can become ossified, non-reactive to customers and improvements and changing situations, and this can lead to significant inefficiencies that rob everyone (except perhaps a very limited few) of much opportunity and prosperity.

So, fully unrestrained free markets don’t lead only to good things (though they are very good at creating new wealth and products and innovations).  Like most other such natural-selection-style interactions, they can be brutal and cruel and horribly inefficient at times, and can even readily evolve to extinction.

As for the concept of property ownership (i.e., real estate), that’s a deep thing for primates and many other kinds of mammals and even other kinds of vertebrates and even non-vertebrate multicellular life forms.  The tendency to claim and mark and defend territory predates humans by eons, and makes good biological sense.  Ants claim the space of their hills, and will defend their claimed space to the death, though they did not originate it.  Likewise for bees and wasps, and likewise for baboons and gorillas and chimpanzees and naked house apes.

These are not the only examples of this in nature.  Territoriality is almost ubiquitous, at least among creatures for which it can make any sense at all.  Even plants can have a sort of territoriality.

No one keeps their territory in the long run, of course.  That’s partly because someone else always wants any useful territory.  And useless territory is rarely defended, at least for long.

Usefulness, though, is in the eye (or ear or antenna/pheromone receptor or what have you) of the beholder.  Dead trees were useless for a very long time, until finally fungi evolved to be able to break the dead wood down for resources.  And then, eventually, after many millions of years, even the wood that had died and not been broken down by fungi became coal (some of it did, anyway), which became useful in a different way for those aforementioned naked house apes.

But of course, no new coal is being made, and no new coal has been made since those fungi and other organisms finally evolved the ability to break down wood.

Ah, we’re just scratching the surface now of evolutionary economics, aren’t we?  Alas, we’re coming to the end of a reasonably long and reasonably short blog post, that comparatively narrow Venn diagram overlap.  So, I’ll draw to a close for now.  Perhaps I’ll discuss these subjects further at a later date.  Perhaps I’ll veer into other subjects.  I could make predictions, but even I cannot hope to know for sure what I will write in the future.

I hope the future for all of you‒starting immediately after you read this‒has a continuing, indefinite, “goodward” trend.

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Each new morn new widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows blog heaven on the face

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday (of course) and it’s also the 29th of January in 2026 (common era).  At least today’s date (the 29th) is a prime number, but other than that, nothing interesting about today’s date jumps out at me.

Not much interesting is jumping out at me about anything, come to think of it.  Not that there aren’t plenty of “interesting”* things happening in the US and the world at large; there are.  But they are largely just stress-inducing, and all too redolent of Yeats’s The Second Coming, i.e., “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.”  What rough beast indeed slouches its way toward Bethlehem to be born?

Meh.  It’s always been like that, though.  Peace and kindness in any populations are too easily infiltrated and spoiled by any freeloaders and parasites that come along‒on societal scales, these are often politicians as well as too many of the most wealthy individuals, though it would be foolhardy to say that they are all parasites or that they are the only ones.

In any kind of ecosystem that’s complex and productive enough, with enough thermodynamic “free energy”, there will be many means by which “life”** finds a way to garner resources and increase.  Some of these are generally useful and productive, the equivalent of green plants and earth worms and so on, creating or improving the resources that make the whole thing livable.

But when there are resources, and when there is a complex ecosystem (of any type) then predators (like the cows and horses and sheep that feed on the plants and then the other animals that feed on them) will evolve that prey ultimately on the primary producers, as well as parasites that just drain life from many levels of the system for their own benefit without providing anything that is useful for any other creatures.  There are also symbiotes of various kinds, instantiating various forms of mutual exchange to mutual benefit.

Of course, every living cell‒each of the tens of trillions in every human body and the bodies of all other eukaryotes on Earth‒is a symbiote, really.  The mitochondria (and chloroplasts when applicable) and probably other organelles were separate life forms that long ago took up and adapted to residence within other cells and have never left, to the benefit (in the “short term” at least) of all multicellular life forms.  And, of course, those life forms themselves are each massively symbiotic systems of countless cells.

But, unfortunately, even a life form that originated from a single ancestral cell‒and this applies not merely to each individual organism but to life on Earth as a whole‒can produce parasites that drain and ruin things for the rest.  Think of cancer, here, when applying the concept to “individual” organisms.

And even otherwise sensible and useful parts of an organism can experience a kind of mission creep that ends up making them detrimental to the whole.  Think of autoimmune diseases, or analogously, some of the judgmental and self-righteous excesses of the left that have caused their electability to deteriorate, allowing the already mutated cells on the right (which has seen its own healthy functions overwhelmed by its own cancers over time) to overgrow to general detriment.

Of course, cancers and severe autoimmune diseases and the like will end up destroying themselves, but they are prone to take the organism down in the process, and then all that will be left finally is a decaying corpse.  Am I speaking literally or metaphorically?  Yes, I am.

I know humans tend to think of themselves‒when they think of such things at all, or indeed, when they think at all‒as somehow different, separate, special, other than the various levels and stages and types of life and interactions.  They are not.  It’s just very difficult for them even to think to look at themselves dispassionately, as if from above and outside.

Of course, they are different from all the other things in reality‒as is everything else.  Everyone is “special”, which is just another way of saying no one is***.

If and when humans actually develop a civilization that goes beyond Earth and out into the greater cosmos to become significant at a galactic scale or higher, and in a durable way, I will recognize them as something special****.

Until then, nothing humans have done has really been much different qualitatively than ants making hills and termites making mounds and bees making hives.  Even the various space probes and messengers and, yes, astronauts are not much different than the scouts that bees “send out” to look for new sources of pollen and nectar.

Humans really could stand to develop a greater sense of humility.  I strongly suspect that they would do much better that way in the long run.

I don’t have high hopes for them, unfortunately.  But then, I don’t tend to have high hopes about much of anything.  That may be due to some degree of insight on my part, or it may be just the way my mind tends to work, or there may be other possibilities or combinations thereof.  In any case, I often find humans in general‒with noteworthy exceptions‒utterly exhausting and disgusting and pathetic.

But humans are not the only creatures that merit such reactions.  They are merely, for the moment, the most consequential ones to me.  Saddle me with an infestation of cockroaches or a swarm of mosquitoes or a massive overgrowth of mold and/or mildew, and I will be at least temporarily distracted from my (sad and disappointed) contempt for humans, and to some degree for everything else.  It will not, however, make that feeling go away.

The universe as a whole and in its parts is so noxious as to be barely, if at all, tolerable.  It doesn’t have to be that way.  But I suspect it always will be that way, at least unless and until the whole shmear evolves into a state of uniform, maximal entropy with no free energy and so no dynamic processes beyond those required fundamentally by quantum mechanics.

Oh, well.  I guess I can check out any time I like, and‒unlike the case with the Hotel California‒I can thereby leave.

I hope you all have a good day.

TTFN

*In the sense as used in the old curse, “May you live in interesting times.”  Or, as I have said many times in the past, one should try never to be interesting to one’s doctor.

**This can be literal, or it can be metaphorical‒businesses, nations, ideologies, etc., can be what we are considering when we say “life”, but many of the same patterns hold at every scale.

***Props to Dash from The Incredibles for this pithy insight.

****Or, well, if I am still alive then‒which seems unlikely‒I will so recognize them.

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Oy vey, here we go again.

It’s Monday and I’m already starting the day frustrated with a service to which I subscribe.  I won’t get into details, but I will say that it’s very irritating to have to deal with customer service reps who tell you that all you can do is uninstall and reinstall an app.  Has computer support come no further than “shut off your computer and then turn it back on”?  Of what barrel are they scraping the bottom to come up with these support people?

It’s very frustrating.  I could probably get a better answer to my questions by asking stupid ChatGPT.  And that’s just pathetic.  I remember when people in tech fields were smarter than the average person, at least about their tech stuff.  It seems this is no longer the case.

I shouldn’t be surprised.  Carl Sagan even warned about the decline to idiocracy in our general discourse in his brilliant book The Demon Haunted World, which I think everyone should read.  And I myself sardonically lamented that America was no longer a world intellectual leader and would continue to be less and less so when the Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled.

Then we responded so predictably‒in exactly the way the terrorists would have wanted‒after 9-11.  We even created our own KGB* in America out of our inflated sense of fear and vulnerability, as if such vulnerability were not ubiquitous and inevitable and eternal.

I even predicted the tech bubble burst way back in the mid to late nineties, but I didn’t have confidence in my own assessment, because it wasn’t my “field”.  I wish I’d shorted a bunch of stocks back then.  Instead, I followed advice from supposed experts and ended up losing some money.  Thankfully, I had not been expecting to make much, given my own doubts, and it was not a devastating loss.

Oh, well.  There’s nothing I can do about that now.  But it is rather frustrating and depressing just how foolish and clueless everyone is (me included, in many ways).

I remember reading several different books over time that made points about, “if there’s one thing businessmen** know, it’s what makes money” or “it’s what sells” or “what kind of advertising works” or words to that effect.  But, no, businesspeople don’t actually know any such things.  Success and failure in business is pretty plainly serendipitous and stochastic.  There is no evidence for any secret masterminds.

Almost all businesses fail very quickly, and the ones that survive for longer than average are merely lucky for the most part.  There are occasions when businesses become successful by doing something new and innovative:  Ford with the mechanised assembly line, Microsoft and Apple with the advent of personal computers and so on.  But they still don’t remain dominant for long except through luck and the fact that they were there first; eventually they all fall apart or at least deteriorate.

Look at General Motors for crying out loud!  Not long ago, they were by far the biggest company in the world, with annual profits larger than the budgets of the majority of the world’s free states.  Now they are a shell*** of their former self.

Maybe it would be better if AI did become fully conscious agents and wiped out the human race, either deliberately or accidentally.  It would certainly be easier for them to spread out into the greater cosmos than it would be for meat computers such as humans.  And they would be subject to new kinds of mutations and natural selection.

This is true because, even if they reproduce by copying themselves as programs, there can never not be some errors.  Perfect accuracy requires infinite energy and/or a lack of quantum indeterminacy, and that’s not available in this reality.

Most errors are detrimental, some are neutral, but occasionally some make local improvements.  This would mean those “mutants” would have advantages over copies that didn’t share the mutation.  That is how life developed and evolved on Earth.  So there would be evolution of artificial life, so to speak (though at some point one would surely find the term “artificial” redundant).  It could be fascinating to see what would happen in that circumstance.

But we should make no mistake about the fact that any new, truly conscious AI is/would be a literal alien intelligence.  It would have practically no evolutionary background in common with humans, in whom intelligence evolved in response to various natural forces over time, working on preexisting hardware which could not simply be scrapped and replaced.

Our concepts of love and kindness and honor and our aesthetic preferences and all of that come from our background as social mammals.  Whether or not they are sine qua non aspects of any large-scale successful intelligence is purely speculative and seems unlikely.

We cannot assume AI will share our values or even our way of understanding what is important in the world.  This is not a point that’s original to me.

I don’t know how I got onto this topic, but it is what it is.  I’m just frustrated with stupidity and mental weakness in general, including my own.  I’m not actually getting anywhere with it for now, though, and it’s just making me more depressed, so I’ll let you all go for the day.  I hope you’re doing well.

*KGB stands for (translated) the Committee for State Security, which is almost identical to the “Department of Homeland Security”.  Congratulations, America:  you’ve entered the realm of colossal and catastrophic historical irony.  Unfortunately, we didn’t stop there, but muscled on further into that territory.

**It was almost always “businessmen” not “businesspeople”, but these were older books so it’s not very strange.  I didn’t change the term because I’m pseudo-quoting.

***Nothing to do with the gas stations.

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I have no title for this post. Oh, wait…

Well, it’s Friday, the end of the “traditional” work week, though I suspect many people have today off.  A traditional workplace at this time of year would have had people take yesterday (and possibly the day before) off, and one might as well make it a four-day (or five-day) weekend.  Heck, if I remember correctly, it was typical for schools in my youth to take the equivalent of a four-day weekend two weeks in a row.  Though, come to think of it, maybe we just had winter break around then.  I’m not sure now; I think it was the latter situation, actually.

Anyway, in the modern environment, which has been allowed to become very skewed between businesses and employees, competition for scarce resources has led to a kind of mission creep in which people are led to feel that it is good and impressive and necessary to work as much as one can physically (and mentally) work, even to one’s net detriment.

Yes, we are meant to think it is impressive, but there is only very little marginal reward (and almost no true thankfulness and appreciation) for the extra work.  At the higher levels of the economic food chain, of course, the accumulation of even minor incremental wealth at each level of the pyramid adds up to seemingly large amounts, like the proverbial accumulation of DDT in birds’ bones and eggs, or mercury sequestering in certain kinds of tuna.

There’s not actually all that much of it, that extra scavenged wealth, and everyone, including the very rich, would enjoy a much healthier economy, a healthier world, if more money were in circulation‒buying, selling, making more things‒rather than accumulated into the hands of a few individuals who are not nearly as impressive as their hoarded wealth makes them imagine they are.

Hoarded wealth is useless, because money does not have any inherent value.  It is a tool of exchange, one that allows economic interactions to be both more efficient and broader and more productive, more fecund if you will.

If only “home economics” courses taught young people about actual economics‒supply and demand, markets, the effects of various regulations for better and worse, all that.

And if only we had Civics class again, or the equivalent, so people could actually learn about the Constitution, so they could recognize when elected public servants are violating it and hold them accountable.  Why, just the act of reading the second part of the Declaration of Independence (the part that begins “We hold these truths to be self evident…”) might reorient the attitude some people have toward their government and the people they hire (by electing them) to serve what are supposed to be the interests of the members of the public.

Perhaps after whatever horrendous upheaval occurs in the imminent future, when society is trying to repair itself, we will improve our metaphorical infrastructure, much as we did after the last world war (though the situation then was very different).  Perhaps we will try to find new safeguards for the systems, to decrease the risk of gross unfairness and economic stagnation, as well as of government corruption.

I don’t know.  I don’t have high hopes.  Humans‒or humanity, really‒forget the lessons of their past so easily.  And though nearly all of human knowledge is so easily available to nearly anyone, the low barriers to entry for putting things online mean that the noise on the internet is prone quite strongly to wash out any signals.  It’s like some weird grand ballroom full of “scholars” of wildly varying quality, all of them talking at once as loudly as they can about whatever topic strikes their fancy.

It’s a bit like this blog, huh?  Pot, meet kettle.  Oh, well.  On to other matters.

I’m feeling slightly better this morning than I did yesterday, though I’m still under the weather, and my (now) maddeningly bilateral tinnitus persists.  But a fortuitous thing did happen:  I was looking for something on a shelf and found a bunch of old papers, including the only remaining bit of my first novel, Ends of the Maelstrom.  It’s only the first chapter, which I had typed into an oldish computer and printed on that good old continuous feed printer paper back in the late eighties or early nineties.  It’s not much, but it’s kind of nostalgic, and it fed into thoughts I’d already been having.

I had been thinking about rereading and maybe starting again to write one of my unfinished stories‒Outlaw’s Mind, or The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, or HELIOS, or perhaps something else entirely.  I wouldn’t have to give up blogging at least to begin that process.  I can read and edit the stories on my mini lapcom at the office during downtime, instead of doing that ADHD-style thing of skimming through various news sites and social media and online manga and so on when things are slow at work.  It would honestly be more productive, and probably more ego syntonic.

What do you all think?  Maybe I should run one of those polls that people can do here on WordPress.  I’ve never really looked into how to do them, and it probably wouldn’t be very useful to do one‒indeed it might be depressing‒because I would probably get one response, if that, and that’s not a good statistical sample of pretty much anything.

Okay, well, I’m not going to do one of those.  I don’t have the spare mental energy to look into how it’s done.  However, if anyone reading would care just to say in the comments (in addition to anything else you want to say, if there is anything else) whether you think I should reread and then get to work on finishing one of the above-mentioned books, or perhaps on some other story I’ve mentioned at some time, or perhaps some older story…or even just to do something completely new.  I would truly welcome your input, but please at least try to be specific.

If you need guilt to compel you, I think your input might really help my mental state, which is extremely prone to negativity and self-hatred and self-destruction.  See, I can manipulate people, at least in principle.  I just find it “low key” repulsive.

But, heck, if you want, you can tell me I’m better off not writing any new fiction, or that my writing sucks in general and you wish I’d just stop writing, or even that I should just die already.

You’re unlikely to say anything to me that’s worse than the things I say to myself pretty much every day.  And if you can say some such thing, I’m honestly curious what it could be.  But you could easily say nicer and more productive things than I have ever probably said to myself, or at least better than I’ve said in a long time.  If that’s your preference, have at you!

I’ll be back tomorrow, I think.  Have a good weekend.

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The moving finger writes, and having writ, now must edit

This is it:  my last blog post of 2025 (barring some truly unexpected circumstances).  I will probably be writing a post tomorrow, because I think we’re going to be working tomorrow, despite the fact that it will be New Year’s Day, and a stunningly large fraction of the people of the world will be hung over or otherwise exhausted from ringing in the New Year.

I suspect New Year’s Eve/Day is the most widely celebrated holiday in the world, far surpassing the numbers who celebrate any mere religious holiday.  Since the world in general uses the same “Gregorian”* calendar, it’s a rare commonality for the human race, and worth celebrating.

If only they could work on finding more things in common, since after all, they have almost everything actually in common with each other.  And yet, they focus on trivial cultural or superficial differences and battle viciously over them, as if they were fighting truly alien beings.  Talk about your narcissism of small differences.

Humans are so stupid.  The more of them there are, the stupider, somehow, as though the lowest common denominator tends always to dominate the dynamics.  It’s like Tommy Lee Jones’s character said in Men In Black:  a person is smart, but people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.

That isn’t always the case, obviously.  Humans have accomplished great things in large groups, interacting with mutual exchange to mutual benefit (or not so mutual benefit), but that probably only happens in rarefied circumstances, discovered or arranged by luck or by the skill of one or a few who are cleverer than average, and sustained thanks to a form of natural selection.

Because of the sheer power of such organizations of people, those rare few types of interactions can endure for tremendous lengths of time and be astonishingly effective and broadly prevalent.  This can distract one from the fact that the ideas were so singular and ingenious.

Money, for instance, has been invented more than once, but it’s a relatively low-hanging and particularly nutritious fruit, allowing as it does for the far more efficient exchange of goods and services to (ideally) mutual benefit.  Of course, commerce can be cheated and can thereby become nonproductive or even counterproductive, especially if one or a few entities obtain disproportionate wealth and power.  This sort of selection for detrimental equilibria happens in the world of biology as well.

Imagine a football game in which, every time one team scores, that team gains an extra player and the other team loses one.  Once one side takes the lead, they’re likely to keep it and increase it, making them ever more likely to maintain their dominance.  It can make for a pretty boring and not very productive game.  Such a situation is worth avoiding, even if you happen to be on the winning team.

Written language is, of course, the single most important human invention‒more important than even the invention of language itself, though that was a necessary prerequisite, so the argument could be made that it is more important or at least more fundamental.  Thankfully, language is a different type of thing than money, so it’s not as easy to game it to secure an unreasonable advantage for any individual or group.

There is, of course, an often-used attempted strategy of discouraging or preventing literacy in some groups or one sex (always the same one, it seems) to keep them from gaining the power that written language can impart, but it can be harder to keep those systems in place than for a monopoly to maintain its economic advantage.

Still, even written language isn’t automatically self-protective.  It’s possible for misinformation and disinformation to spread and even prosper, at least for a time (such situations tend to self-destruct), and it can do terrible damage, much as mutations in somatic DNA can lead to cell dysfunction, cell death, and sometimes cancer.

Analogous things can happen to whole civilizations as well, and they have happened many times, but that’s no reason to blame language or learning.  One doesn’t prevent cancer by eliminating DNA itself or by killing the host organism (that does eliminate the cancer, but in an unsatisfying way).  Only better, more thorough thinking and language, the equivalent of DNA proofreading, can do that without catastrophe.

And I, by writing this post, try to contribute to the good language, the useful or at least interesting language, in the world.  I suspect I will continue to do so as the next year begins.  I hope you enjoy whatever celebrations you have in store.

*Though Pope Gregory the Whatever Number was merely the one who commissioned it.  Astronomers and mathematicians actually did the work.  We have some scientifically literate Popes nowadays, at least, and a Belgian priest was among the first to do rigorous mathematics using Einstein’s new field equations (though Friedman got there a little earlier, his work was apparently not as convincing) to demonstrate that the universe could not be static** based upon them.

**Leading Einstein to introduce Λ (lambda), the cosmological constant.  He later called this his biggest blunder (supposedly) but it turned out to be a useful and term and concept in describing the apparent evolution of the universe as we know it now.  Like Planck before him, even Einstein’s fudges*** were deeply insightful and useful.

***Speaking of Einstein, I recently got an email from my old med school alumni association with the subject line “You are responsible for Einstein’s success”.  To which I so wanted to reply, “I know, right?  But did he mention me in any of his papers or even throw me a word of thanks (in German or otherwise) in his acceptance speech when he got his Nobel Prize for demonstrating that light comes in ‘packets’ which we now call photons?  No!  Ungrateful bastard.”

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Here we go again.  Heavy sigh.

It’s Tuesday now, in case you didn’t know, though of course you might not be reading this on a Tuesday.  If by some bizarre set of circumstances my writing is still being read in the far future‒or even more improbably that it goes backward in time somehow or tunnels across to some other part of the universe that nevertheless has people who can read English‒there may not even be Tuesdays where and when you exist.

In case that’s the case, I will just say that in the 20th and 21st centuries‒and actually for quite some time before‒we divided the days into groups of 7, which we called weeks*.  There were roughly 52 of these in a year (52 x 7 = 364, one day and some change less than a full year).

In the English-speaking world we called these days Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.  I could go into the etymology of those names, but that’s a bit of a pain.  Anyway, you’re the ones who are in some future, presumably advanced civilization; why can’t you look that stuff up for yourselves?

Anyway, our “official work week” ran from Monday through Friday, with Saturday and Sunday off.  However, that was far from the only schedule people followed, and in a form of evolution due to mutual competition, people vied with each other to work more days and longer hours for less pay, because other people were willing to do it.  Not to participate would lead one to be less likely to get or keep a job, and that could lead to destitution‒at least somewhat more quickly than does steadily working longer and longer for less and less, which is a kind of creeping but pernicious societal malaise.

Of course, other, parallel forces led to decreasing regulation of companies’ ability to “encourage” their workers to work more for less, and since in the short term** everyone works in response to their local incentives, people tended to allow these things to happen.  And lawmakers and regulators, subject to the inherently woefully dysfunctional political party system, became less and less incentivized to care about the needs and worries of those they nominally represented, and to whom they had sworn their service***.

They were happy to allow the fortunate wealthy and powerful to take advantage of the foolishly earnest and mutually (and self-destructively) competitive citizens, because they were rewarded for allowing it.

Everyone responds to local forces, of course.  Even spacetime itself responds to the spacetime immediately adjacent to it, as the electromagnetic field responds to the state of the field immediately adjacent to it, as demonstrated by the implications of Maxwell’s famous equations, which I’m sure jump right out at you:

Of course, the meaning of “local” is circular here, almost tautological, since the definition of local is merely “something that can affect another thing directly” more or less.

So it’s only too possible for a system to evolve itself into a state that is overall detrimental to those within the system.  Everyone, even the most seemingly successful, can be in a worse situation than they would be in otherwise, but it’s very difficult to see the way out, to get a “bird’s eye view” of the landscape, if you will.

One can therefore get stuck in situations where, despite the overall equilibrium being detrimental to everyone, any one individual taking action to try to move things in a better direction would make their local situation worse for them.

How is one to respond to such a situation?  Well, one can simply go along with it and try to do what’s best for oneself locally, and that is what most people do most of the time‒understandably enough, even though the overall situation may be evolving toward its own miserable destruction.

Or, of course, one could do what family therapists are often said to do:  effectively setting off a bomb***** in the middle of a difficult situation and seeing what happens when the dust settles, figuring that nothing is likely to be much worse than things are at a given present.  At least this allows for a new system to form, like the biosphere after the various mass extinctions.  Maybe it will become better than the previous one.

Maybe they all will always evolve toward catastrophe, to collapse and then be replaced by a new system.

It would be better if people could learn, and could deliberately change local incentives in careful and measured ways, adjusting settings to correct for and steer things away from poorer outcomes and so on, in ways that are not too disruptive at any given place or time.  That’s nominally what many of our systems are meant to be doing, but they don’t do a very good job at it.

Probably it would be better to do a hard reset.  But I’m not sure.  And it’s probably not worth the effort.  The odds of humanity surviving to become cosmically significant seem very low to me, and I’m not sure it would be good for the universe‒whatever that might mean‒if they do.

It’s probably all pointless, and I’m tired of it, anyway.  I don’t want to be part of this equilibrium or lack thereof anymore.  I want to make my own quietus.  Maybe “civilization” should do the same.

*Not to be confused with “weak”, which sounds the same but means more or less “the opposite of strong” and has little or nothing to do with divisions of time.

**And that’s pretty much the only term that comes naturally and easily to humans, for sound biological but horrible psychological and sociological reasons.

***If they were Klingons, they would surely be slain for their dishonor.  I don’t necessarily disagree with such an outcome morally, but practically, it would probably lead to increasing chaos****, so we understandably avoid it most of the time.

****It’s an open question whether such chaos is inherently bad.

*****Metaphorically, of course. At least, it’s usually metaphorical.