From Charlton:

Maybe fairness is like energy – it is conserved, it cannot be destroyed, but when fairness is deployed it is dissipated into slightly raising the background heat.

*

Perhaps when fairness is moved around it is dissipated into useless low level rhetoric, which can do no work.

*

A society addicted to moving fairness around is perhaps depleting the system of its ability to achieve anything by means of justice.  The fairness death of the universe…

Whole post here.

It is a commonplace that the advance of technology killed the Feudal age. The cost of training, equipping and supporting the Medieval knight was large, relative to the economic output of the era. And this cost was necessary because in many respects it was the best bang for the buck given the technological and economic realities. So the military necessity, the social structure and the available technology mutually created and supported each other in an environment where there had been significant collapse of large-scale institutions and in which there were powerful threats to local populations.

As technology fitfully advanced, new military paradigms arose. The rise, first of archers and pikemen and then the firearm, created a tactical environment unfriendly to the armored knight, which then made the cost of training, equipping and supporting the expensive and arrogant knight sufficiently unpleasant that he faded from the scene.

Technology didn’t stop with killing the knight. Masses of musket-equipped soldiers were eventually joined with mass-produced muskets, mass-produced canned goods, and eventually mass-produced mass production. Soon, even the emaciated descendants of the knight – the aristocracy – was on its knees.

Democracy triumphant! Workers of the world unite, and eat the rich! Buy large quantities of Chinese trinkets!

However, the rise of capitalism and democracy were not without their downsides. While the initial wave led to decentralization of economic and political decision-making, the system did not provide much in the way of safeguards against the eventual re-centralization of power using the techniques and technologies that the age of mass production and eventually the information age provided.

Crony capitalism, regulatory capture, the unfettered rise of the financial industry – we are seeing that allowing these things to happen, and especially to happen with the seal and approval of a democratic mandate, equivalent to the mandate of heaven – is probably not a good idea. In fact it likely will lead to the collapse of modern society – and if you read zero hedge, you’ll know that this will happen sometime before next Tuesday.

There are new technologies on the horizon. The maker movement, 3D printing, home fabricators, automated CNC routers, the nascent technological cornucopia will soon force upon us vast changes, fully equivalent in scale to the changes brought by the industrial revolution, and before it the late medieval technology boom in metallurgy and clockwork and the harnessing of wind and water power.

These technologies, if you listen to the hype of their creators and promoters, will lead to a golden age of libertarian skittle-shitting unicorn rainbow happiness. And hey, they might be right. It might be stage one of the rapture of the nerds, and all humanity will just leap forward into the promised land where everyone is safe from obnoxious jocks with big muscles and little understanding of the wonders and nuances of star trek minutia and WoW guild politics.

But will it?

Just to be contrarian here for a moment, what if the new technology does not result in further democratization and libertarian society fertilization? Okay, sure, the cost of many things will go down, and that would be an argument in favor of the established perception of the economic and social potential of this complex of technologies. Global design and local production will surely have a vast effect, one corner of which will be lower cost of some goods.

But will the cost of absolutely everything go down? I think, yes and no.

The rifle is a simple piece of technology. Mass produced in quantity and distributed, it is and has been the center of large national armies for half a millennium. To be sure, we have accreted a lot of things around the hoary and grey-bearded rifle-equipped infantryman. Artillery, air forces, etc, ad nauseam. And those can generally only be produced by nation states because you need to own the factories to make these expensive items that allow the democratic citizen soldier to prosper on the battlefield.

The concentration of power enabled by mass production and democratization has been focused on the nation-state, and increasingly on the parasitic large corporation/finance behemoths that interpenetrate and influence the nation-state. As Aretae recently pointed out, the interference of the nation state in even simple things like transportation networks hugely distorted the ‘natural’ growth of economies. And this leads to interesting thoughts.

The growth of new methods of production might lower the cost of some things enough that the cost of other things, especially networks of things will go up, relatively speaking. (If useful things become cheap enough, you can get lots of them. If they are intelligent things, having lots of them will grant capabilities beyond a linear extrapolation of having just one would lead you to expect.) Will the cost of these networks of things rise to the level at which you need the concentrated essence of economic power – the nation-state – to effectively field fighting forces with them? The likeliest case, given the wider range, is that the cost would fall between the normal individual’s means and national-debt-inducing.

If there is a collapse, or pseudo-collapse, in national and international economies and society as a result of the recent and ongoing unpleasantness – what will happen? Local-producing makers and fabricators will create regional trade networks. Trading designs globally, but producing locally, we can imagine whole new industrial ecosystems growing up around descendents of today’s maker spaces. The modern smithy will be a fab lab where the local artisan can produce circuits, finished parts in plastic and metal or wood – customized and perfectly suited to the task at hand. No more mass-produced assembly line toys from China – if you want something, you go to the smithy and he makes it, just like of old.

But the thing is, a fully realized maker fab will be able to create enormously sophisticated devices and indeed entire infrastructures on a custom and ongoing basis. This goes far beyond printing interesting dildos in pink ABS plastic. Drones, drone controllers – and therefore systems of surveillance, mini-missiles, over the horizon attack capabilities, metalstorm pods, munitions, AAD systems, all networked and controlled by systems of software modeled on modern game software.

Producing rifles – even super-cool, electrically activated, rapid-fire, armor-piercing, self-homing bullet firing metalstorm rifles – with this nearly automated manufacturing technology would be the smallest thing. Equivalent to the medieval smith making a knife – a trivial exercise.

In a world that is suddenly regionalized (at best) or hyper-localized (at worst), where large-scale institutions are enfeebled both by the growing power of new technologies and the economic systems that evolve around them as documented by people like John Robb; and of course by their own inherent flaws as ably documented by Moldbug and Foseti – you have something that starts to look a lot like the pre-feudal age where the common folk are at risk from the still powerful remnants of the old order, and from out of context threats like vikings and other mobile bandits.

And what defends local communities from threats? A defense infrastructure that is complicated to produce, and difficult to utilize. While the local maker can produce any simple tool almost at cost from scrap metal and plans pulled out of the cloud (just as the medieval smith could produce simple tools from pig iron and the sweat of his brow) creating a complex of drones, missiles and automated defense systems that might be very like that imagined by Daniel Suarez in his books Daemon and Freedom(tm) is more on the order of a highly skilled armor smith producing a complicated and effective suit of armor, and the sword smith creating a usable and durable sword out of high-grade steel. And the horse breeder providing destriers, and the community providing for the feeding and training of the knight who used them…

What if the new proto-medieval knight (the old one was the thug who was skilled at arms, and seized the opportunity to create an economic situation that would support him and provide defense for the people sufficient enough that they accepted the rest) is the techno-geek gamer who understands the means of designing and utilizing the new high-tech to provide for the defense of the commons. And whose training to be effective takes years, and requires the output of a significant community, and works best when the skills are transmitted in a master/apprentice mode.

Because one guy with a rifle won’t be an effective combatant in a world with networked drones, micro-missiles, sensor networks, and who knows what else that could be created with a mature fabbing technology. And as easy as a rifle is to learn to use, learning to use complex networks of weapons won’t be.

Technology forces cultural changes. But not usually in ways that we expect. Our current system is between two and four centuries old, depending on how you count it. Technology is undermining it, along with its own inherent and multiplying flaws. That’s about as long as things generally last. In times of great change, things don’t normally continue on a linear extrapolation of current events, or even the events of the last century. We are perhaps foolish to imagine that the result of the changes taking place will be merely the elimination of only the bad parts of the current system.

I have been, as is my wont, supremely lax in posting.  This despite my setting up an automated process to post.  So there you go.

I would say that the spirit moved me to the post this, but that would not be true.  Even without the spirit motivation, Bruce Charleton has had some very interesting posts over the last little while.  The one that caused me to actually pull the trigger on this post is this one:

Pagan missionaries?

Charleton’s knife of insight is sharp, here.  If a modern St. Patrick were sent to us by real Christians from some parallel world, maybe from a Patriarch of Constantinople who didn’t live in Istanbul, what would he think of us?  I imagine that this hypothetical Apostle to the Americans would see us in our secular glory rather like the Conquistadors saw the Aztecs.  With horror.

What common ground could our St. Patrick find with us when the core assumptions of our daily life are so far removed from what, historically, people have always believed?  Oh sure, we don’t put people on altars and rip their hearts out.  Yet.  But at least the Aztecs believed in the divine.

I have what others have described as an interesting relationship with Christianity.  (And there’s a draft post that needs finished…)  I find that I need a Pagan Missionary, really.

Then we have this:

Therefore deification does not mean the “actualization” or “realization” of one’s latent divinity, a belief that is less Christian than monistic or pantheistic.

Actualization is a fingernails on blackboards kind of word for me.  It makes me want to punch somebody.  Kind of like the feeling I get when I see someone wearing a Che tshirt.  It is indicative of the depths to which we have sunk that even the people pretending to traditional faith still feel that it’s all about them, and not, you know, God or something.

And finally this:

But in Orthodoxy (so far as I see it, not far) there is not the same sense of trying to reach an intellectually coherent and satisfying answer as there is with Western Catholicism.

For the Orthodox there are these parable-like narrative theological explanations, mostly comprehensible to the common man – and beyond these simple explanations there is mystery.

If you want to go further, the path is spiritual not philosophical. The understanding aimed-at, therefore, is not more complex or logical, but (presumably) an understanding which comes directly by revelation, and is not (perhaps) communicable to those of lower levels of holiness.

This is the one thing in Orthodoxy that most appealed to me, when long ago I formally converted. I was raised in a particularly dry and dusty sort of Lutheranism. A comfortable enough community, in its way, especially if you can’t sing and like potluck dinners. Which, as it happens, is me all the way. However, the efforts of our Pastor to explain to me the passion and mystery of Christ, redemption, and the like fell a little flat. Largely because it sounded like he was relating to me the minutes of the local Rotary club. Of which he was a member. Look at the benefits that accrue, to you – the local business man, if you become a Rotarian!

Exciting.

And the Roman Catholic hyper legalism is just as annoying. But here’s these guys, the Orthodox, with a rich, nay, baroque iconography, beautiful liturgical music, they don’t do any of that. They go up to a certain point, stop, and say, “It’s a mystery.” I like that. I may not have the spiritual development to understand. Might not ever. But at least I’m not treated like a prospective Chamber of Commerce supporter, or bedeviled with hair-splitting exegesis.

Once I thought that this was the most awesomist picture ever:

Or maybe this one:

But now I know that it’s this:

Bearmageddon.  Jesus wept.

Today is day zero for this webcomic, done by the guy who did the starkly amazing Axe Cop with his kid brother.  New pages every Wednesday and Friday.

Interesting interview with sf author and singularitarian Vernor Vinge here.

Vernor Vinge: I see four or five concurrently active paths to the Singularity:

1. Artificial Intelligence: We create superhuman artificial intelligence in computers.
2. Digital Gaia: The worldwide network of embedded microprocessors, sensors, effectors, and localizers becomes a superhumanly intelligent entity.
3. Internet Scenario: Humanity with its networks, computers, and databases becomes a superhuman being. (Bruce’s story “Maneki Neko” is a beautiful and subtle illustration of this possibility.)
4. Intelligence Amplification: We enhance individual human intelligence through human-to-computer interfaces.
5. Biomedical: We directly increase our intelligence by improving the neurological function of our brains. (I regard this last item to be the weakest of the possibilities.)

AR is central to progress with possibilities (3) and (4).

If we humans want to keep our hand in the game, AR is an important thing to pursue.

Cool stuff, as you’d expect.  But the most exciting thing for me is the news that there will be a new Vinge book out this year, a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep called The Children of the Sky.  Sweet.

Evangel Cathedral.

This, more than anything I have ever experienced, makes me want to want to dig a hole and pull it in after me.

Watch the first minute or so, if you can, and then jump to 3:54.

Sheesh. I need more guns.

[wik] Ashton Kutcher as the face of the new order of the ages. Along with the obvious horror, a secondary horror is the staggering historical ignorance this little piece of unintentionally Orwellian theater demonstrates in its art design.

[alsø wik] Ashton Kutcher, I have always felt, represented something evil. I just wasn’t sure until today what it was.

[alsø alsø wik] I for one would like to be among the first to welcome our Stepford Hollywood Elite Overlords. Non servium.

[Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] My wife just suggested Non Servium would make a nice tshirt. So as not to implicate myself as a Satanist, we’d need to add a picture of Obama. Maybe done up Che-style, but I think the socialist realist depiction from that video would perhaps be most apropos.

[See the løveli lakes...] And really, Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër? Sweden seems almost Republican now.

2008 was a shitburger sandwich with a side of fries in many respects. Financially, it was a wash, and my work in the bowels of Customs and Border Protection was quite simply the worst work environment I have ever experienced. And I worked at a place where someone tried to kill me. Long hours of boredom and sociopathic coworkers were bookended by two hour commutes.

In a word, it completely fucking sucked.

But before our three remaining readers start dialing the suicide hotlines on my behalf, not all was crap on rye. For instance, there was the birth of my daughter Claire, which alone more than outweighed working for one of the tentacles of the Department of Homeland Security.

And all that free time at work gave me a lot of time to read. And my interminable commutes gave me a lot of time to ponder.

I wasn’t really able to convert much of that to prolific blogging thanks to time constraints and the prejudices of the internet filters at DHS facilities. Which I hope to rectify, somewhat, in the near future.

Some of the fruits of my year of suffering are these:

I no longer believe that the entire community of astronomers, astrophysicists and cosmologists have the least fucking clue what is going on in the universe past where the air gets kinda thin.

I no longer have unlimited faith that democracy is the best system of government.

I think Velikovsky may have been right. Or at least on to something.

I drifted into these things sideways, really. While I am naturally a bit of a contrarian, (Okay, a really big contrarian. Shut up.) I have not made a habit of seeking out outre heretical thoughts just to make a spectacle of myself.

Since I was a kid, I have always read with amazement and delight all the breathless stories, describing all the remarkable, implausible theories modern science has come up with. Black holes, quasars, quantum strangeness. I ate it up and went back for seconds. And if it wasn’t for beer, I might have actually been a physicist myself.

But in the nineties, I started getting a little dubious. Once, a friend of mine and I were attempting to explain the concept of Ockham’s razor to a particularly dim and more than slightly drunk sorority chick. Why we thought that it was important that we should do so, and whether we thought it would do any good is beside the point. But in trying to find an example, we settled on gravity. We explained that mass attracts other bits of mass. You’re sitting on a particularly large bit of mass. So it pulls you down. See? Simple. Can be explained by a few lines of equations, utterly predictable and nice.

But why is this explanation better than any others, she asked. Well, shit. Uh, imagine that there isn’t any mystical force of gravity. Imagine that the only thing that is holding you in that chair is gravity trolls. Their job is to hold stuff down. There’s trillions of them, and they, with infinite care, go around holding shit down. That’s there job.

But I don’t see them! Oh, we forgot to mention, they’re invisible gravity trolls. You can’t see or feel them. But trust us, they’re holding you down right now.

Oh. But what about airplanes? she asked. Well, while the invisible gravity trolls are diligent, the curvy shapes of wings confuse them. They forget to hold them down. Helicopters work the same way. And, before you ask, hydrogen, helium and hot air make them drunk.

Why is there no gravity in space? Well, what do you think, invisible gravity trolls can breathe vacuum? How do satellites stay in orbit, then? Well, there’s a long line of IGT’s holding hands, and the last one is grabbing the satellite.

And so on. We spun out a massively baroque and ridiculous IGT theory of gravity. And then, we said that given the two theories that both explain the curious phenomenon of stuff not floating away, it’s probably best to take the simpler one.

Anywho. Later on in that decade, we started hearing a lot about dark matter. And then more about dark energy. The universe, it seems, wasn’t behaving right. The invisible gravity trolls were acting up – and a central bit was that galaxies were spinning as if there were much more mass than could be seen. So, invisible mass was proposed. Other problems arose, and dark energy explained these discrepancies.

It got to the point where cosmologists now insist, with their faces hanging out, that 96% of the universe is undetectable by pretty much any imaginable means. I started thinking, that smells like fudge, as in fudge factor. I started suspecting IGT’s. But, not being a physicist, and not having anything better to put in in its place, I let it go.

Then I ran across Plasma Cosmology. The basic thought is that electromagnetism – a force which is 41 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity (that’s 41 zeros) might just have something to do with how the universe fits together. For the same reason that a child’s magnet can counteract the force of the inconceivably larger earth below it when it picks up a paper clip, electric and magnetic fields in space could have an effect on how stars, nebulas, and whatnot all behave.

They say, and I have come to believe, that substituting a gravity plus electromagnetic universe explains things better than a gravity only universe, and without resort to dark matter and dark energy – which had already seemed to me to be fudge factors more concerned with preserving theory than explaining what we actually see.

And that led in to a lot more stuff, which I plan on writing more about later.

But first, to get you started, read this introduction to plasma cosmology. It explains the basic idea in a readable way, and makes a good starting point.

[Wik] Apparently, Zombies suck at keeping their websites up. I’ve adjusted the image so that it again displays, but no guarantees into the future

A taste:

luvs2cuddle

Tagline: “I enjoy long, slow, lumbering walks on the beach”

Interests: Lumbering, staring vacantly, cuddling

Dislikes: Sniper fire, barricaded windows, fast-moving automobiles

Note well the disclaimer, however:

Disclaimer: ZombieHarmony is for zombies only. We advise signing up for ZombieHarmony only if you lack a pulse, have limited motor skills, or feel an intense desire to feast on human beings. We are not responsible for lost or ingested loved ones. If you go on a date with a zombie, we cannot be held liable for contributing to the apocalypse.

Please date responsibly: bring a baseball bat or crowbar.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how I might best avoid the Tyrannosaurus Rex in the event I went back in time 70-odd million years, either by design (time machine) or by accident (CERN’s accelerator warping spacetime and hurling me back to the Cretaceous).

Howevermuch 12 gauge ammo you might have managed to bring with you will not be enough. The male T rex was 40+ feet long and every ounce of five tons; females even bigger. It would be like trying to kill a whale with a shotgun- I suppose you could do it, eventually. But imagine that the whale is not trying desperately to get away from you, but is instead bent on pursuing you until you are food. What are you going to do with your shotgun then? Look, when we’re talking zombies, shooting your way out can be a valid option. When we’re talking about dinosaur survival, I don’t think firearms are the way to go.

So now what?

My thinking so far is that an animal as massive as a T rex must have had a similarly massive range. It is not hard to imagine a box 20km on a side, for example, that would encompass enough prey animals to sustain the beast. So that’s something right there- you try to be the needle in this haystack, and that’s really the natrual instinct of tiny mammals isn’t it? Avoid. Hide. Dig. Burrow. Interesting that that’s my initial thinking as well. This may be optimistic, but I don’t think predators that size would be so hard to stay away from. A critical first step would be in indentifying what T rex liked to eat, and then staying the f*ck away from that.

Another bit that would have to be resolved quickly is understanding their mating habits. When they are in rut or pregnant appetites might be ravenous, even by dinosaur standards, bringing them into areas they may not typically go in their search for food. Similarly, we need to recognize possible nesting habitats, and stay out of those.

The success of the avoidance plan hinges on the things being solitary, and there’s no way to be sure until you get there. It’s possible they could operate as a team, or at least tolerate other individuals in close proximity at certain times of the year or under certain environmental conditions, the way crocodiles can. If that’s the case, and you’re hiding not from one scary monster but several, that’s a more complex problem that I am not prepared to address at this time.