y2k is here again

Y2K IS HERE AGAIN


Saturday I went into town for my usual weekend chores. As I was waiting at the Laundromat I was hemmed in by an unexpected parade ( old downtown is set up in a long rectangle and if you are parked in the middle you have to wait until the parade starts to be able to leave ) which was a belated celebration of Cino de Mayo. This town is absolutely gay over its parades, a sad commentary on a dead lifestyle that was brought about by the very Yuppie Scum who flock to the celebration of the nostalgic. Kind of like all the overweight balding cellulite ridden morons who flock to the farmers market, selling produce shipped in from 300 miles away because those customers bought up all the local farmland and put McMansions on once fertile soil. Try eating your sheetrock and SUV upholstery once the oil runs out, jerks. Anyway, for the most part this was like any other parade besides the huge number of Mexican families attending. A few low riders, a couple of jacked up trucks with the back windows spouting some kind of non-English gibberish which probably translates to one form or another of “kill whitey”. But that was rare, as those mean grandma’s probably put a stop to most of the empty headed macho mumblings. But I wonder if even all those attending know the origins and consequences of Cinco de Mayo?

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Around 1861 or 62 if I’m not mistaken, France decided to invade Mexico and install a puppet leader. Kind of like we did in Afghanistan. Cinco de Mayo is the date they got their Frog asses handed to them by a bunch of amateur fighters. Almost like us in Afghanistan ( yes, yes, how silly of me! If we were only allowed to nuke them then we would win, just like in Vietnam. Nothing at all to do with a long logistics train that was one of the main reasons the British were defeated here, along with fourth generation warfare tactics. Nothing at all. Just lack the political will, yeh, that’s it. That’s the ticket. What’s that about hubris? ). If they had won, and had a base in our hemisphere, they would have supported the Confederacy. And with that support it is quite possible the South would have kept its independence. Remember that the War Of Southern Independence, also known as the War Of Northern Aggression or The Industrialists War or most accurately the War Against States Rights, was never a sure things at the start. Southern skill and strategy were quite superior. It was only later that the meat grinder tactics of throwing federal troops composed mostly of poor recent immigrants much better equipped than the enemy began to prevail. If the South had a better supported start they might have won prior to the state mobilization of the North. As it was, that set the tone for all our coming wars. Arm the poor well, and send in a wall of lead. A bankers paradise ( the poor make bad customers, but the arms maker paid with tax dollars are very good at taking out loans ).

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With a shrunken land area and the constricting force of a well armed and belligerent neighbor most likely contesting farm land west of the Mississippi ( and the later sharply reduced oil supplies with the absence of Texas ), it is open to debate if the USA could have turned into the empire it is today. So, in effect, Mexican-Americans are celebrating the fact that they could come to this country to be exploited by our corporations which can only exist with our global resource grab supported by a military founded on our control of Lone Star State petroleum. Sad that this is preferable to staying in the home country. But, hey, they have pretty and shiny McMansions and SUV’s just like us white folk now. Leaving that farm plot is going to work out real well for them here in the near future.

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Y2K never panned out. No, I don’t believe it was due to the mighty and Herculean efforts of a few nerds, valiantly coding late into the night while drinking Jolt and eating Twinkies. If we were pretty much the only nation doing that ( in a massive effort way ), why didn’t all the lights go out in other places that didn’t try to fix the problem? Why did one industry here that only saw a surface minor effort have as few problems as a sector that saw massive investment in fixing the issue? But I digress. We could of course see a Y2K Lite problem if an enemy military successfully computer network attacks us. It would definitely be back to the Stone Age if we saw a huge EMP attack, or if a solar flare of significant size happened. But, consider a more sinister possibility. Our communications network is rendered impotent by mere economics. Think for a moment on how any business or government entity is totally dependant on computers and their links to other computers and servers, etc. And think how antiquated and decrepit our electrical grid is. Computers, cheap and easily replaceable, have taken over from human laborers. No one could conduct business without them. This is just like the nightmares of sixty or seventy years ago when artificial intelligence took over the earth. But instead of sentient machines killing the humans, the human elite have harnessed computers to do all the work, displacing the masses of laborers. And rather than see modern Luddites rising up to smash the machines that put them out of work, those masses have instead embraced the entertainment computers to keep themselves placated.

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We are fed fake Frankenfoods grown with oil and controlled throughout with computers. That is our bread. Our circuses are computer generated news, computer games and computer entertainment of all kinds. I’m not saying we don’t willingly go to the slaughter. Most of us do. But, unhappy news for both our controllers and for their willing slaves. Our entire communications network will fail from economics long before the end of oil. In fact, its demise might leave a lot of oil in the ground where it will stay forever. Its failure might accelerate the end of the Oil Age. Okay, try to follow along here. Like everything else, our communications are dependent on affordable energy. But even with rising costs of running our computers, it is still cheaper than employing humans. BUT! The end consumer won’t be so resilient to rising energy costs, and like all other sectors in the economy, our communications are run on economics of scale. Even with nearly free fat pipe bandwidth ( the bankrupt companies that installed too much fiber optic lines in essence gave us a almost free infrastructure ), it takes almost every consumer in the US hooking up to the Internet and using a cell phone and getting cable TV for all these companies to stay in business. They are just like grocery stores. Their mark-ups might be, whatever, thirty or fifty percent, but their after costs profit is two or three percent. They must have volume to stay in business. Just look at the issues Wal-Mart had the last few years when their pace of growth fell. It almost put them out of business, and only radically screwing the loyal customers from the past kept them in business.

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With the ongoing and ever increasing pace of failures across our economy, customers are suffering. It isn’t a question of can they afford higher energy and food cost. They can. The question is if they can pay for everything else besides. Wages are stagnant and hours are being cut. Discretionary spending is eventually cut. It will be one of the last things taken from the budget, as Internet, cell phones and TV are, literally, the opiate of the masses. Without them the full reality of their soul crushing existence will be made apparent. But once the cuts in entertainment are made on a large enough scale, and remember it could be as little as such stopping the increase, the communications sector starts contracting. Entertainment subsidizes the communications. Without all those willing customers, what economic subsidy will keep the computer net alive for the banks and the energy sector and the phone companies? Because our economy is not only run on the cheap labor of computers, it is done with nearly free communications. Very inexpensive because free spending consumers pay all the heavy fees to keep the system up. Without their disposable income, the communication system of literally the whole economy is in danger. Look, we are all hooked on growth. All our economic activity must grow to survive. It is set up that way and inescapable. As growth slowed, the only choice was to employ cheap energy. As cheap energy ended, we needed cheap labor. Our computers are our cheap labor. Make them more expensive and now you have no growth. Profits are at razor thin margins now. Upset that equation and companies fail. Not rocket science. Expect your communications to fail fairly early in the collapse. Which will feed the collapse. The original Y2K just suffered from bad timing.

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