tangled web of complexity

TANGLED WEB OF COMPLEXITY

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If you don’t read the following article, I’ll personally cough a bloody fur ball into your lap, cross you off the Christmas list and inform Baby Jesus you were blaspheming.

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept11/friction9-11.html

I’m not kidding. A very good piece. Now, I can’t find much to disagree with there, mostly it just said what I’d like to, with actual talent behind its presentation. It all ties in with the complexity issue that Tainter wrote about years back. Complexity results in benefits on the way up, but come resource depletion, it is a drag that brings everything crashing down much quicker. And speaking of “The Collapse Of Complex Societies” by J. Tainter, don’t bother spending real money on it. I have an e-copy and it is a dry, boring, textbook style book. I love this kind of stuff, and I couldn’t force myself past page 50 or so.

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Almost every swinging dingus out there is working at a worthless job ( my view of added-complexity jobs ). Even the military. And most of the cops. Hell, half the EMT’s are there to take care of the fat bastards that are slowly ODing on processed genetically modified corn pellets, their bloated walking zombie corpses afflicted with diabetes and heart disease and other diseases caused by “the good life”. At least fifty years ago people had the good graces to die off early from their vices, refusing to step into a doctors office and just working fourteen hour days, chain smoking and keeping a whiskey bottle in the desk drawer, until they keeled over. Outside of needing a coffin, they didn’t impose on anyone else. As far as the military, if we weren’t occupying the oil fields all we would need to protect ourselves would be well armed militia and a nuclear deterrent. Why does education costs so much? If the grounds and buildings are long ago paid for, and they get tax dollars, why does it cost five to ten grand a year to go to college? And why does having a healthy uncomplicated birth cost ten to twenty grand? The doc stands there with a catchers mitt, the nurses sponge off all that nasty crap from the kid, then they throw the infant on to a nipple for dinner. What are we paying for? They say that the cost of a handgun or a ladder is about half lawyer taxes ( past settlements, insurance for future liability ). But surely, there is far more than that accounting for the costs. Hell, sometimes you can buy a rebuilt motor for your car cheaper than you can a pistol.

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So, yeh, everything is paying for politicians taxes, bankers interest cost and lawyers “make work” consequences ( do you wonder why I’d like to see all three of those practitioners hanging from street lamps? ). But it is far more than that. If almost every job is reacting to the reward of added complexity, how much of every cost is the true “unemployment tax”? I’d wager fifty to seventy-five percent. It has to be at least fifty, because over half the population needs to be threatened to explain how no fundamental reform is ever enacted. All these silly ass books that say “I want to save the environment, so here is a dead tree telling you how to do so, but only after everybody does things totally different” are a total waste of resources, to include your time. This isn’t about a powerful elite protecting their coveted wealth. Oh, no. If that was so, we would already be having revolution in the streets. You don’t see two out of three houses underwater nationally ( the house being about the only wealth the middle class have ) without protest if it was just about the wealthy acting badly. No, the masses of workers have been bought off with worthless, unneeded jobs. Oh, they will complain about the drop in benefits and real purchasing power, even retirement, but the plain fact of the matter is, they know, even if subconsciously, they have no real world, tangible, “able to take it with me to immigrate to another country and prosper”, skill set.

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Now, before you get your panties in a bunch, I’m talking about a complex systems skill set. You may be a doctor, but without grid electricity and just in time inventory and long distant delivery, your skills won’t keep too many folks alive. An herbalist would have better luck in a primitive setting healing people. So you can program computers without equal? So what. What can you do in a devolution? I’m not saying people are worthless, just that their specialized petroleum dependent jobs are. And, no, it does no good to have a skill set that thrives in the collapse. Because that won’t pay the rent now. I’m not faulting anyone, just pointing out that complexity is employing us. Almost all of us. So nothing will change. Yet, adding to complexity causes the system to collapse quicker. But that is the only way to keep the unemployment levels down, to keep civil unrest from spreading. Add to complexity, even if it kills you quick. Because not doing so kills you quicker. And I’d wager this transformation has been decades in the making. We’ve only just begun to see its geometric rate of increase as the oil imports have been declining. China pollutes the environment, paves over cropland, sends in riot police to keep order amongst the unemployed and buys our toxic debt, all to keep from collapsing quicker. We laugh at their long term problems, but we are worse with our house of worthless job cards.

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Another reason not to live in the city. The rural environment is no safer from unrest, but it has far fewer rioting zombies per square mile. When real fuel and food shortages appear, every single man, woman and child out there will start fighting amongst themselves. Because none of us have real survival skills. None of us can actually trade our skills for food because we were all raised and trained to live off of the fruits of petroleum. You might be the mighty mountain man trapper, but twenty three people will be following you to “share” in your hunt. They all think they are entitled to live off magical wealth produced by energy surplus ( and, I’m no different. A skill of typing and communicating doesn’t put muskrat in the stewpot. I just know we are all going to die, and why ).

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