Singularity-minded

What is obvious to anyone with a functioning brain is that there are far more people in this world than any plausibly functional model of our “economy” has a use for.  There are only so many “McJobs” and robots, as the linked article re-hashes, will take most of those. 

The question from there is what to do about that.  I do try in these posts to propose solutions, not merely rail against the myriad of “wrong” in the world, but this one poses a problem to even come up with something which would work, regardless of how unlikely it is to be implemented due to standard human failing and venality.  Here we go anyway.

The population problem is the biggest one.  Back when everything we ate came from family farms and c.80% of the population was occupied doing this, there were c. 1 billion people on Earth.  Now (in developed countries) significantly less than 10%  of the population is engaged in producing our food.

This doesn’t cover all “productive” forms of work, but it does bring the productivity gains of modern technology and organization into focus.  During the early stages of the Industrial Revolution everything was done by hand in a very inefficient but manpower-intensive fashion, resulting in rural depopulation as people rushed to the factories for work.  As time went on and clever people designed labour-saving machines to do unskilled work, those least talented were thrown out of work.  This process began in the 18^th Century and continues today.  Remember that women weren’t part of the workforce at that time (although children were); now we have twice as many people we need to find jobs for.

This frames the problem, but the only two solutions I see popping out of this are:

·         Remove the surplus population, or;

·         Smash our technological base and get us all back making buggy whips or subsistence farming.

It is to be noted that the second option will bring about the first, but without the productivity to make things work; in other words, complete civilizational breakdown.

Nature may soon do something about there being so many of us; Ebola is making its’ way out of Africa for the first time.  The ability of mass international rapid transit to vector diseases worldwide first really got attention during the SARS breakout in 2003, and that had nothing like Ebola’s death rate, albeit it spread even more easily.  Ebola comes in different variants with differing lethality, symptoms and incubation periods so we’ll be dealing with this for a while.  Just imagine if SARS came back too…

Getting back on track, we are in what I’ll call a “luxury-scarcity period”.  It is conceivable to feed everyone, and with very local and temporary exceptions this happens.  If you live in a warm climate (Africa, for example) that is most of what you need to survive; good thing too, given the limited to non-existent social and community housing expenditure there. While there are many people in Western societies who struggle to make ends meet, the number of actually homeless are statistically barely significant and are mostly people with serious mental problems who are essentially un-employable. 

The real question if things don’t completely collapse is: what do we do with the jobless?  I do not believe that there is any “self-evident right’ to anything produced by someone else, although many disagree.  My test of these ideals is how much effort it takes to achieve these “natural” rights.  In this case, it takes the coercive power of a government to make people pay taxes, and it has been always thus.  Breathing is about the only thing that I’d call free, everything else requires somebody to do some work.

“Tax the rich” comes out a lot, usually from people who can’t count past 100 but occasionally from hypocrites like Warren Buffet.  That will not work for the fairly obvious reasons that taxing something makes less of it, and that there isn’t that much money held by “the 1%” compared to what a country spends in a year.   Next year that money won’t be there as the (formerly) rich are confiscated from and those smart enough to see it coming (most of them or they wouldn’t be rich in the first place) will relocate.

There goes the Marxist-Anarchist solution, what next?  Expansion of the current welfare state would seem to be out as that “Scandinavian” model has proven itself unsustainable in the last 20 years.  Shorter work week?  The thing that this glosses over is that there is only so much money in a business to pay people.  If there are 40 person-hours per position and you cut that into 2 chunks, each of them will only be getting paid for 20 hours. 

What all of these ideas have in common is a lowering of living standards. Less money means less stuff, full-stop.  I’ve worked part-time, and it’s great for students or stay-at-home parents who want to generate some more household income while the kids are in school. It was a a time in my life when I had no responsibilities beyond myself and I most certainly could not have supported a familiy on that income. Time is traded for money in pretty-much any type of transaction you can name; the value of that time is highly variable, but however you slice it, ΔTime = Δ$.

Any kind of post-scarcity geek (or other) utopia is based on cheap and abundant energy.  With enough cheap (clean) energy you can do almost anything you want, and paying the heat and light bills of non-productive members of society becomes plausible then..  I am partial to the Culture books of Ian M. Banks as far as post-scarcity sci-fi is concerned, but that construct only works because nearly omniscient AIs are running everything.  The suspension of my disbelief for that is far less of a strain than to assume that people with no profit motive (Star Trek Next Gen) could create and sustain such a thing.

In case you somehow missed it, I am a small-r realist, and I do NOT believe in the perfectibility of Man.  “Pretend to pay them, they pretend to work” didn’t work for Communism so any version of confiscatory taxes intended to level the playing field will have a similar effect.  It takes money (or equivalent) to get stuff done, so I remain at a loss as to how to deal with computers taking our jobs.  It happened to me once already, but the consolations were another job and the fact that the program did a far worse job than I had.  These consolations will be in increasingly short supply.

The irony is that developed countries are just that, developed, and their decreasing birthrates are in step with increases in productivity with Japan leading the way in both.  These countries will not remain prosperous if they have to take in millions of unemployable (because there are no jobs) immigrants (Japan again, but an exception to this).  That is another issue, and panicky diseased epidemic migrants could scupper us all even before the robots do. 

Symptoms of the Diseased Body Politic

With the Global Whack-a-Mole on Terror sputtering along again in Iraq, the issue of "foreign fighters” is at the fore once more. The UK has announced an intention to do something half-assed about non-citizen passport holders who go off on jihad. While some may take this as "finally someone's doing something", I personally see it as a sign of the rot and weakness which will be the end of Western Civilization.

Western Civilization has had a rough go for sure and is far from perfect, but it has produced most of what makes modern life comfortable and reasonably long. Scientific Method, germ theory of disease, immunization and advances in horticulture and chemistry have all come from "us", immeasurably improving lives the world over and the only things which make our current population remotely sustainable. This doesn't even include the advances in materials sciences and computers which keep everything moving.

It's not about colour or race, it's about culture. Anybody can be "western" if they want to, and there was a time when it was the thing to aspire to. Two World Wars accelerated the collapse of the British Empire as well as that of the French, but not before both had left their modernizing and linguistic impressions across the globe. The ideas were loose but so were some others, specifically Communism and Islamism. It could of course be argued that Communism is a Western development, but despite its' geographical origin it fails the "keep moving forward" test. There was a time when that was about unrestrained development, but it moved past that (for most people) to be about doing things better than before, not just bigger.

That still exists, but it is increasingly opposed by limiting philosophies. Foremost in my estimation is the "Climate Change" lobby. If you actually look at who is doing what you'll notice two distinct groups. First are the profiteers, the ones pushing carbon trading scams schemes, the Solyndras and wind farm subsidy-seekers, and of course the "scientists" who have sold out for the grants. They are bad and dangerous, but their motivations are venal and easily understood. The real menace are the Luddite (watermelon) Greens.

EVERY proposal to limit greenhouse gases (they could start, simply by ceasing to breathe) would destroy advanced technological societies by wrecking their economies. The partial success they've had in North America has driven up electricity rates and decreased reliability of supply, a mere shadow of what they would like to do. See the UK for the next step from where we are.

All of this is to say that the seeds of the downfall of Western Civilization are sown from within, and we are proving ourselves "unfit" in the evolutionary biological sense by the death-wish we have as a society. Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory are the key tools to take us down from within. When Moral Relativism is your guiding philosophy the outcome seems to be that everything else is judged superior to your own culture.

I like Rule of Law and having a decent chance of surviving walking the streets at night; it may surprise you but the two things are not actually related. They are in fact a historically exceptionally (vanishingly) rare combination even in the imperfect form we find them today in our First World countries. The harsh truth is that if you hate your heritage so much that you'd deluge your country with "Diversity" the basic institutions created in that First World will be replaced by the Third World which you have imported. Think of India, but where it's too cold to live in a shack, but that's the best case going down that road.

Which brings us back to the intro paragraph. Thousands of Saudis flocking to al Qaeda and now ISIS is no surprise. What is more of surprise on the face of it is recent Muslim converts of European extraction doing the same. Scratch the surface a bit and it starts to make sense. If you think of these Salafist groups as both "a Cause" and as gangs, you will see the appeal to overlapping personality types.

The simplest type is the adventurer. Young men have been from time immemorial headed out on raids and general mayhem, and these find expression in gangs, pirates, drug cartels, etc. I'm sure you would find that many in ISIS' current ranks aren't "true believers" but more opportunistic criminals and psychopaths with a gloss of religion to make it look good to the group. The next group need to belong to something, and jihad is the most dynamic something going today. A sub-set of them are the types who hate Western society as decadent and overly permissive and find the intolerance and rigidity of Wahhabi-style Islam the perfect antidote.

If the Arabs hate us, big deal, we've been fighting them since Roman times at least. When our own people turn against us to join them we really need to think about root causes. The simplest way to look at this is as osmosis or as Nature abhorring a vacuum.

Our confidence in the way we do things has declined, and with it our confidence and assertiveness as a culture. People in most parts of the world like to be on the winning side, and right now that doesn't look like us. We need something to believe in, but the common culture we once had (even between British and French in Canada it wasn't fundamentally different) has been systematically dismantled and blackballed as the worst thing ever.

There's your vacuum. Something needs to take the place of the Iliad and Odyssey, Horatius at the Bridge, Charles Martel, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Vimy Ridge, the flag raising on Iwo Jima, etc. If you don't have passing familiarity with at least 5 of the above, well, you're not alone these days.

The past is treacherous territory, but at some point you have to choose something to believe in. It could be where you come from (dangerous to outsiders) religion (ditto) or whatever else, but if you don't stake out something as the Line Which Shall Not Be Crossed you'll have no anchor and no standards for how things should be. We can do better than the old days, but we need something for people of diverse backgrounds to rally to. The current Canadian government is bucking the trend and trying to bring our history back, but they won't last forever. As long as we can't give our people something worth dying for, radical Islam will be ready to fill that void.

Power madness

Germany's coalition government has announced a reversal of policy that will see all the country's nuclear power plants phased out by 2022.

The decision makes Germany the biggest industrial power to announce plans to give up nuclear energy.

Environment Minister Norbert Rottgen made the announcement following late-night talks.
Chancellor Angela Merkel set up a panel to review nuclear power following the crisis at Fukushima in Japan.

There have been mass anti-nuclear protests across Germany in the wake of March's Fukushima crisis, triggered by an earthquake and tsunami.

This is first and foremost a huge mistake. Germany gets 23% of it's power from nuclear and this will need to be replaced. The biggest problem is that I hear about "sustainable" and "green" replacements, but I've not heard a plan yet, let alone one that uses existing tech.

Next, it's panicky nonsense; this economic policy fiasco was precipitated by the recent disaster in Japan, but apparently geology/geography is not taught in German schools. Central Europe is in a low-tectonic activity zone (certainly compared to Japan) and all but the Baltic coast is totally immune to tsunami. This is the radical Greens at work, as there is no rational reason to completely junk such a large part of their energy production.

The costs of this (increased energy costs leading to decreased economic competitiveness, etc.) have implications throughout the Euro zone, and if Greece etc. need bailouts down the road, who will be able to do it? The death knell has yet to sound for the Euro, but the ringers are limbering up. Death pool for the Euro anyone?

Earth Hour is Bullshit

This will be quick but topical, with Dirt Hour tomorrow. Turning off your lights for an hour is completely pointless from an environmental standpoint, and anything you could do that would make a significant contribution to lessening electricity demand would drastically reduce your standard of living.

The rising cost of everything is doing a good job of that already, and energy costs are the biggest part of it. Turn off all of your lights for the hour if you want, but I challenge anyone to convince me that it will make any difference to anything. The link shows base load and peak power output, and Earth Day is more likely to put a strain on the system when everyone turns their lights back on at the same time than anything else.