involuntary simplicity

[biz modl]

hi folks,

 

for all you simplicity fans, a note from greer on the price of disintermediation:

 

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2014/10/dark-age-america-involuntary-simplicity.html

 

lovers of the simple life (in a steady state economy) don’t typically think about being hip deep in pig manure J

 

have fun,    biz

[John deC.]

...but then again, many of us do! I and many others look forward to this massive disintermediation,leading to increasing numbers of people doing work that actually needs to be done and the elimination of the so-called "market economy" with its utter dependence on cheap oil, externalization of planet-destroying wastes, imperatives for constant growth, and endless creation of new "needs" and insatiable desires. Incidentally, if you're such a poor farmer that you often find yourself hip-deep in pig manure, you probably need to head down to the library and check out a book on raising pigs. You'll find you're doing it wrong.

[Ishi Crew]

Coming from my position of total humility combined with omniscence,  one good thing we can learn from posts like greer's dealing with social evolution and earlier ones by people like darwin, gould, s kauffman, etc. is that disintermediation  (one more redundant part of the vocabulary everyone should aquire) is a good thing.   get rid of the middle woman!!!   for example, who need all these biological species when one is really all you need (homo sapiens, or adam).  the EPA could just go, along with endangered species act (which gave Czech his PhD).   who needs a 3rd degree anyway? why do we need 2 sexes in general, when many reasonable species just clone themselves?  we could then do away withe porn industry, prositution, and other sins.  

As a very learned individual, i learned that the world is composed commonly of molecules, made up from elements.  but who needs the periodic table, when the hydrogen atom is already a hard enough problem to solve in quantum mechanics.  (I briefly dealt with people in quantum biology who were trying to write schrodinger's equation for DNA, or even an biological organism.   or even the 'wave function of the universe'---john wheeler (feynman's prof and atom bomb supporter). 

so how much is enough, where the power of diminishing returns hits zero marginal utility level?  One thing is clear, which is that things like blogs ---- more and more of  them----could reduce the needs for other things.   blogs require almost no physical labor or capital or other inputs ---since people in india  doing the programming or in the congo digging up the material or in china assembling computer or electricity employees fixing power lines don't enter in the equation.      These were freely provided by your humble Creator.  ask Ishi, or 'go ask alice, when she's 10 feet tall'. (jefferson airplane)  or as the doremouse said, 'feed your head'.    The USA just got voluntary simplicity last nite.   My mom this year bought me a cell phone since i have a tendency to dissapear, and a watch, and someone else bought be some e cigarettes. (the way to kick cigarettes is similar to new year's revolutions----the 1st step is to go buy your last pack, and resolve to 'stop procrastinating '  and make your resolutuions Now---eg i resolve to stop procrastinasting starting next year).   all my stuff got destroyed when i didn't make it across the river.   police too were wondering why my stuff was wet so i told em.   they also told me to hold my hands over my head since they wanted to make sure my guitar in a case was really a guitar. (i actually told em i guess i got ripped---i thought i was buying something but i guess this'll do.---my music actually is probably more dangerous than isis---greek godess.) 

all you really need is 0's and 1's---the continuum, all the numbers between 0 and 1. one could get rid of all the libraries, and books, etc. and just code it into one real number; all language could be replaced by machine language, and all music could be replaced by john cage's 4'33" and lou reeds metal machine music.  then we could all return to nature, and live in grass huts, though improved using baroque architecture, so they'd be sort of a combination of grass huts, the taj mahal, vichi palace, capital hill, etc. there would be no more 'intermediation' by the media (apart from conflict resolution specialists trained at GMU (mercatus center, genetic literacy project, clarence thomas, koch bro's) or Gtn U---who succesfully resolved the conflict between luther, the pope, lucifer, and ones in the  middle east and middle west and the middle class).  Everything would be face 2 face disintermediation.    One could also get rid of the faces  (eg Faze2 gogo band or facezyouknow on my blog axiomsandchoices )  and just have 'brains in a vat' who preach at each other.

[thompsco]

I've been meaning to read Tainter's book, this adds another reason to do that.  The insight that increasing complexity is what does in societies seems right.  One can see that cycle played out in the private sector with companies, over and over (at least in the U.S.).  The hyper-intermediation I see in large corporations, such as now, never fails to astonish.  Sooner or later it all comes crashing down in a pile of MBA's, meaningless titles and powerpoint presentations.  So Tainter's dynamic can be seen all around us, I guess it just takes longer (and with harsher consequences) for entire societies.

Being ready for a local economy seems wise.  Part time, acquiring skill in producing food or other truly needed things is enjoyable, at least I find it so.  Raising large livestock, well, that would probably not be so fun, as you point out.  But growing plant food is relaxing and not that dirty if you know what you're doing.

On Saturday, November 1, 2014 4:29:27 PM UTC-7, Biz Modl wrote:

[biz modl]

yes,  and don’t forget the vast government bureaucracies that are the ultimate intermediators - care to imagine how many 'facilitators' exist in the pentagon or the healthcare bureaus J

 

have fun,    biz

 

From: steady...@googlegroups.com [mailto:steady...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of thompsco
Sent: Thursday, November 6, 2014 12:17 PM
To: steady...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: involuntary simplicity

 

I've been meaning to read Tainter's book, this adds another reason to do that.  The insight that increasing complexity is what does in societies seems right.  One can see that cycle played out in the private sector with companies, over and over (at least in the U.S.).  The hyper-intermediation I see in large corporations, such as now, never fails to astonish.  Sooner or later it all comes crashing down in a pile of MBA's, meaningless titles and powerpoint presentations.  So Tainter's dynamic can be seen all around us, I guess it just takes longer (and with harsher consequences) for entire societies.

Being ready for a local economy seems wise.  Part time, acquiring skill in producing food or other truly needed things is enjoyable, at least I find it so.  Raising large livestock, well, that would probably not be so fun, as you point out.  But growing plant food is relaxing and not that dirty if you know what you're doing.


On Saturday, November 1, 2014 4:29:27 PM UTC-7, Biz Modl wrote:

hi folks,

 

for all you simplicity fans, a note from greer on the price of disintermediation:

 

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2014/10/dark-age-america-involuntary-simplicity.html

 

lovers of the simple life (in a steady state economy) don’t typically think about being hip deep in pig manure J

 

have fun,    biz

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