Committing book a little late

Yes, it's the last day of 2019.  No, I didn't quite make it, schedule-wise.

Release date for Commonweal #5, A Mist of Grit and Splinters, is Friday, 17 January, 2020

Book cover for Comonweal #5, A Mist of Grit and Splinters

Egalitarian heroic fantasy. The first Creek standard-captain known to history, certain curious facts concerning the graul people, and an operational test of the Line's altered doctrine.

Google Play

Books2Read (Kobo, Apple, and the other Draft2Digital targets)

Pre-order is live now on Google Play; it should start going live for Kobo, Apple, and the other Draft2Digital targets under that Books2Read link over the next several days/first week of 2020.

This is what I get for wanting to wait to post a book announcement

There's various comments flying around about "Russia has a hypersonic missile" and so on, and it makes me kinda tear my hair.

Putin is a product of late Soviet strategic thinking, which is fundamentally defensive.  (A country that gets invaded a lot tends to think that way.)

The issue of being surrounded with missile defenses and not able to maintain MAD is absolutely critical, because Putin knows what happens then, and it's the 90s, from which Russia hasn't (and likely never shall) recover.  US missiles in Ukraine are too close to defend against.  Same with Finland, the Baltics, the whole old Soviet periphery is too close to Moscow.  Anything based there is too close to recognize and stop in time.  So priority zero is restoring MAD.

Putin's core -- and, really, only -- strategic problem is "who has enough nukes to destroy Russia?" 

Israel doesn't, quite.  (Hurt, badly, yes; meet the old Cold War criteria for "could destroy", no, especially as all of Israel is one bomb wide and two bombs long.)

France does.

The UK does.

China does.

The US does.

Putin does not give the proverbial rodent hindquarters about opposing democracy, manipulating the economy, or any other such thing.  Putin cares about removing the ability to nuke Russia.  Once that problem is solved -- and ONLY once that problem is solved -- does he have the strategic freedom to address his periphery, his cash flow issues, and the migration problem out of Central Asia.

So; Brexit has nothing to do with destabilizing the EU.  It has to do with getting the UK's nuclear arsenal under proxy control.  Same with Trump.  (Damaging the US' world standing is nice, but it's not necessary.  Getting the nukes under proxy control is necessary.)

China?  China's completely doomed by climate change, isn't inclined to pick fights, is going to have the same Central Asia migration problem, and may not have as many nukes as they say they do.  China is not in an aggressive posture; China is in a resource panic. Putin's perfectly capable of looking at where those graphs cross and not worrying about China.

France?  Well, France is next.  We can see France being next; asymmetric information warfare is something to which the French have a lot of vulnerability.  It's still not about the EU; it's about getting a hard-right satrap in place who will guarantee the Force de Frappe won't be used on Russia.

Over on twitter

Nick Harkaway writes:
Why is it not enough to believe in the project? Why this desire that we all accept the virtue of the man?  It is freaking the shit out of me tonight. For the first time, really.

If you -- generic you -- stop using the rhetoric of individual salvation and the expectation of saviours and, really, when you get right down to it, the notion that morality is a useful response to a political problem, you're faced with two horrible prospects; it would work ever so much better to go all quantified and materialistic and co-operative, and it means everything you believe about yourself is wrong. All that constructed context of goodness and worth is just complete and utter froth without any material basis whatsoever.

Sometimes this happens in adolescence; sometimes it never happens. Authoritarians don't like the idea of it, never mind the actuality, because authoritarianisms do not withstand quantified analysis. Tories of various labels hate it because they don't want you to resist effectively.

What's actually happening in UK politics is that the machinery of capitalism requires a source of loot. Having exhausted many traditional sources, with a surprising variety of traditional sources now able to defend themselves, and with functional control of the Oil Empire passing into the hands of those with no traditional reverence for the Anglosphere, the UK gets viewed as a source of loot. The post-imperial hangover makes this too difficult to believe, providing both useful idiots and a sort of disbelieving paralysis preventing appropriate political responses, so the UK is effectively an undefended mass of loot.

It's far more about "is looting and piracy the right way to get rich?" than it is about Europe, and if you want to look at the whole thing as the judgements of the lord being righteous altogether it wouldn't be difficult. (It wouldn't be useful, but it wouldn't be difficult.)

Stray thoughts

One of the things that distresses me about Anglosphere politics generally and Canadian politics specifically and Ontario politics even more specifically; there's nothing even starting to resemble reasonable climate policy.

I had a thought about that; any proposal collapses under the weight of complexity, how do you fairly compensate, wait, how do you define fair, wait, don't people have a right to? and nothing sensible gets articulated.

Some of that's the natural human tendency to want to believe in someone else's fault; some of that's certainly propaganda.  But most of it is looking at the whole thing from the wrong perspective; the realm of optional things, of compromise, of competing desires, of choices.  That it's fundamentally a political question.

It isn't; we're in the realm of necessity.  Looked at that way, it's not even "if you're a grown up, and you realize there's a leak in the roof, do you cancel your planned vacation and put the money into roof repairs?"  It's the much simpler "do you want to die of something other than starvation?"

That's it.  That's the whole thing.  At the individual, personal, human scale, that's climate change policy.

Do you want to die of something other than starvation?

Infinite village

Humans have a limited ability to maintain social connections; it seems to be about a hundred and fifty people in the abstract (Dunbar's Number) but being authoritarian -- defining and enforcing strict social roles, so you don't need to think much about your relationship with other people -- can make it easier to get the group size up, toward the cognitive limit.

Other people have since produced different estimates; various other people are pretty sure paleolithic human groups were nutritionally limited before they were cognitively limited.  You need agriculture to get the social grouping size large enough to run into the cognitive limits on band sizes.

So it's a cool factoid.  What makes it interesting in context is that you can look just a little more into Dunbar's work and find out that the cost got quantified in terms of social grooming time.  Maybe not literally removing bugs, but spending time maintaining the social connection. For the maxed-out group size, you get to about two-fifths of all your time being spent on (the technical sense of) grooming behaviours.

Social media is a social grooming amplifier; it creates a belief in connection.

It doesn't create the actual connection, or empathy, or any kind of detailed knowledge, but it does create a belief in group membership, emotional group connection, and a common narrative label for events.  Which means being in control of a social media platform gives you a ridiculous amount of power; you get to pick the questions.  (Maybe not the answers, strictly, but picking the questions is more than enough.)

The label goes on the responsibility

So for just years now I've been very uneasy about the taxonomy approach to "we're implicitly enforcing a prescriptive norm and should stop" social problems, but all the explanations for why this isn't going to work (from the perspective of anybody who can't fake the norm) need a patient listener, twenty minutes, and a white board.

That doesn't much resemble helpful.

So -- when you say someone is disabled, or has special needs, or come up with a vast nuanced taxonomy of gender or orientation, the labels are being applied to specify distance from the prescriptive norm.

(It is prescriptive; the more actual science gets done about what people are like, the more obvious this becomes.  The prescriptive norm is a political tool to articulate power across a social group.)

That's never going to delegitimize the prescriptive norm.  More to the immediate point, it doesn't attach to the individual with the responsibility; the point to "special needs" is not that the individual differs from the norm, but that someone is responsible to help them do the thing.  The point with accessibility is not that you want more people to be able to do the thing, it's that someone who owns property is responsible to do whatever is necessary to make some list of material things require no more than a specified level of effort.  (And where are the city inspectors using a force gauges to tow little carts with accelerometers, I ask?  Let's quantify the ramps and the curb cuts; while we're at it, add some reach sensors and quantify the swept volume of the doors and ramps and curb cuts.  And the point A to point B energy requirements.  Measure things, don't wave the sacred name of inclined plane at the problem.)

So, anyway; the appropriate labels aren't "disabled" or "special needs"; the appropriate labels (for structures) are "fit for purpose" and "unfit for purpose" and every commercial building should get a pass-warn-fail card just like restaurants do.  In detail.  And if you fail, you can't operate. Her Majesty's servants come and change your locks and turn off the power.  (You're not a legal commercial utilities customer if your building is unfit for purpose.)

The appropriate labels for the education system (in the very broad "become able to participate as a citizen" sense) are "effective" and "ineffective"; can the student do the thing?  Well, ok, what's the next thing?  The measures here are inevitably statistical; there's a lot of things.  List of things, rate of acquisition of ability to do the thing, persistence of the ability, all that stuff must be extremely public at the scale of regional statistical abstraction.  People's jobs depend on there being a positive trend in the statistics.

Sure, some people won't ever be able to do the thing.  (Don't put too much weight on that; anything anybody gets a regular paycheck for is something you very likely can't do at all or that well.  The thing you can do isn't anything like general.)  That's not the point.  The point is that we don't get an effective result by declaring "this is normal; be normal".  We might be able to get a more effective result by presenting a stack of capability and saying "we want you to be able to do all these things"; we can measure that, we can attach the label to the responsibility (ministers of education, school boards...) and we can be descriptive ("when we say thing, we mean..") rather than prescriptive. 

For the most part, the violence inherent in the system derives from the prescriptive; making the prescriptive is work, and damaging.  It takes realized threats to make it stick.  If we want peace, we can't have prescriptive.

Proportional representation

This is a hard problem.

There are two constitutional guarantees specific to Commons representation; PEI gets 4 seats, as a condition of joining Confederation, and Quebec gets a quarter of the Commons seats, as a condition of the resolution of the great separatism-and-patriation-of-the-constitution debate  that consumed 1970 through 1995 in Canadian politics.

Then there's Section 3 of the Charter; it is held to guarantee not only a right to meaningfully participate in the electoral process, but that constituencies should have roughly the same number of voters.  This pretty much requires a strict counting rule for seats under proportional representation.

Then there's proportional representation itself; the usual result from proportional representation is a coalition government dependent on a small number of representatives holding extreme views.  The extreme views function to drive the agenda.  There is no actual fix for this in a pure proportional representation system; it's systemically inevitable.

The other three things about strict proportional representation is that you stop having a riding and a specific MP who represents you, on the one hand, and you are electing from a trivially corruptible ordered party list, on the other.  (Exchange of favours for list position in a party list is nigh-impossible to prove.  It makes it relatively easy to buy a political party and it makes it incredibly easy to shut out dissident voices.)  Those are both bad.  The "can't have a by-election" (so resignations for gross moral turpitude, taking bribes, etc. don't cost the party seats immediately) is more annoying than bad.

Oh, and the "while we've got the constitution open..." aspect is a problem; someone is going to try to get a guarantee of private property or similar greed-head thing in there, just to make any meaningful electoral reform impractical.  The incumbents never want reform.  Nobody now in power wants a system that guarantees they will never again have a majority government.

So, what to do?  Getting a majority government with 34% of the exercised vote is obviously not just or democratic.  So as citizens we have a compelling reason to change this, but to get it changed we'd need to agree on something to change it into.

Ok.

Everybody has that Section 3 Charter guarantee of meaningful participation; we can't do anything specific about a proportional representation party list system's trivial corruptibility that involves removing people from it. We can't do anything that works by subscription or produces any additional barrier to exercising the franchise; no setting up representative groups.

So:
Commons is proportional representation.  There's a set "divide the votes by 100,000" mechanism with rounding rules and your party gets the resulting number of seats.  (The first seat requires the whole 100,000; the second seat comes in at 151,000 or 160,000 or whatever the rounding rules say.) The number of seats in the House is NOT fixed.  It depends on the number of votes cast.  (That 100,000 is subject to negotiation; think of it as $SEAT-SCALING-CONSTANT.)

ANY member of the party can put their name in the hat for a seat.  The leader of the party is guaranteed position one on the party's seating list.  "The remaining names are draw randomly by dispassionate officials from Elections Canada" is very tempting but this would be almost impossible to defend; do not give the political parties intense motivation to corrupt Elections Canada.  It nearly has to be a party-members-vote; you can vote for everybody on the list of volunteers if you want, or not vote for anybody on the list if you want.  The total number of votes received determines seating order.  Only when there are ties does something random get used.

There are NO Commons by-elections; is someone dies or resigns, the next person on the party list as of the election that seated this House of Commons gets the seat.

SEAT-SCALING-CONSTANT is different between PEI (to guarantee four seats), Quebec (to guarantee a quarter of the seats), and the rest of Canada.  The Quebec-and-PEI values of SEAT-SCALING-CONSTANT for a particular election are only known once all the votes have been cast; none of this Western Canada "we already know who forms the government, why bother voting?" nonsense we have now.

That takes care of the Commons.  There isn't an obvious Charter violation in there; it's better than Section 3 with respect to first-past-the-post, since your vote will more certainly elect someone to represent you.

The current Senate's this awful imperial relict thing; it's even worse than the provinces as remnants of 18th century communications technology.  So it goes as it is.  We need a way to represent dirt; people need a specific representative whose job it is to advocate for them irrespective of party affiliation.

Trouble is, we need a constitutional way to represent dirt.  The way I'd prefer is to say that area counts less the more people live there.  So about a million people is one senate riding (we don't have the other kind anymore); Toronto and Montreal are a bunch of senate ridings.  Senate ridings are either cities (net outflow of taxes, 3 seats) or regions (net inflow of taxes, 2 seats).  The Elections Canada folks take this tax flow distinction into account when drawing the riding boundaries and maintaining the riding status; if the net flow of taxes changes per census, so does the senate riding's status.

This won't pass a section 3 challenge; a region has 2 votes with potentially the 40,000 people of Nunavut rather than the 3 votes of the million people in city-riding of Mississauga.  Could this be directly added the Constitution?  Sure.  Would it provoke Section 3 charter challenges?  Yes.  Can it withstand the Section 3 challenge on Section 1 ("necessary to a free and democratic society") grounds?  I think it could; we're giving people who certainly don't have one via the Commons a more meaningful political participation and we're not directly disadvantaging the more populous regions because they've got the Commons.  We're doing a checks-and-balances thing but being Canadian we probably ought to call it "many voices".

So we've got 100 senate ridings; Elections Canada draws the boundaries based on combinations of population and area.  No more than a million people population per riding; however much area after the cities (that net-outflow of taxes thing being used to set boundaries) are accounted for to make up 100 senate ridings.  Provincial and territorial boundaries are explicitly ignored when creating senate ridings.

These 100 ridings elect about 250 Senators via single transferable vote.  Senate terms are long (9 years? 15 years?) and staggered; if the terms are 9 years, 1 of a city-riding's senators is up for election every three years.  (The first elected senators have to draw lots for who has the initial short term.)  Senators very explicitly collectively and jointly represent absolutely everybody in their riding and are institutionally expected to keep no secrets from their fellow-senators in the same riding.  They have no party affiliation and may not be members of a political party while holding senatorial office.  Senatorial elections are on the fixed rolling schedule; they have nothing to do with Commons elections.  (The PM necessarily arises from the Commons.)

A bill can originate in the Commons or the Senate; to become law, it must pass both by simple majority.  Neither can override the other.

That's too simple to be an actual detailed proposal and way, way too complicated to sell. This is the big problem with getting rid of first-past-the-post.  Any reasonable alternative is complex and it's hard to build a constituency for it.  Since it requires opening the constitution, it's got to have a constituency.

Some observations on the carbon tax

A carbon tax now, in 2019, it too little, too late; it's the kind of hinting-and-nudging tweak-the-feedback social engineering that would have been useful in 1980. (A carbon tax today is entirely like telling a heart attack victim they should have taken up daily walks twenty years ago.)  Today, the appropriate policy on the user side is draconian fossil carbon rationing with a five year goal of a zero ration for all users.  (If you [cut by 80% every year for five years] made this year's ration 80% of last year's ration, you'd still be over 30% of the original ration in year six.  This is no, no, we're going to zero.)  The appropriate policy on the source side is "stop that", Ultima Ratio Regum.

In the general case, emissions taxes -- if it isn't actually, observably, measurably reused, recycled, or rotted back into a thriving[1] biosphere, it's an emission -- are a good thing.  They provide pressure to close the loop.  We could do with some.  The problem is the idea of sufficiency.

Sufficiency would mean full industrial mobilization, economic rationalization, and just generally acting like there was a twentieth-century style full mobilization war on to replace the economy really fast.  It would have side effects that involved causing the current crop of rich and powerful to stop being, and the suburban land use pattern to go away.  These things are not inside the domains of good or bad; these things are in the domain of necessity.  If we want to have a machine civilization, we need to do at least that much.  (Giving up machine civilization during catastrophic climate change is not much like a sensible plan.)

It is to my mind extremely telling that the arguments against the carbon tax are that it represents an unbearable financial burden on working Canadians.

One the one hand, this is really terrible accounting; when the roof leaks, the sooner you fix it, the less it costs.  This is exactly that sort of situation, and we've waited until there's leaks down into the basement and rot in most of the metaphorical joists.  This won't be cheap; waiting won't improve matters; one way or the other, we're going to pay.  It would be sensible to try to get something we want.

On the other hand, absolutely no one has pointed out that the problem is not that taxes are too high -- given everything that we really must be doing immediately if not sooner, taxes are much too low and much too insufficiently progressive -- but that wages are to low. It's as though there is a terrible curse upon human knowledge and discourse, that there can be no knowledge of value -- that ratio of benefit to cost -- only of prices, and false -- meaning someone set them, there isn't a consensus on worth -- prices at that.  This is what's going on with labour; the idea that you could, perhaps, pay people more is maybe not unthinkable -- how could you tell? -- but it's completely unsayable.

(And the NDP are still to the right of Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives, because the NDP still aren't saying "raise wages" or "spend on industry".)

[1] None of biological diversity nor biological disparity nor five year population averages of key species are decreasing.

Successor States

History is continuous;  you can point to things, but it's long tangled skeins, rather than discrete blocks.

For practical purposes, here early in the 21st, we can look back at three great braided cables; the decision in the English marcher-state to base their economy on the products of loot (that is, you do some processing for value-add before shipping the loot); the decision by Winston Churchill to move the Royal Navy's dreadnought battleships to oil-fired boilers; and the decision to address the looming food shortage of the 1950s through opening the agricultural nutrients loop and adopting the mass use of pesticides.

This can descend into a lot of historical neepery; yes, a triangle trade where one leg is the rum slave labour produces from sugar slave labour produces from Caribbean sugar plantations is loot, anything you get from slavery is loot.  Power rests on maritime control because a machine economy hasn't got the possibility of autarchy and once you depend on trade strait control is power.  Navies give you strait control; oil-fired boilers really are superior to coal (three shifts of stokers are good for about 18 hours, tops, and then it's days before you can go full speed again; oil, even horrid sticky bunker oil, is pumped, and you can run at full speed until you run out of fuel) but the British Empire didn't have much oil, so it had to go get it.  The result is the 20th century's wars for control of colonial possessions becoming wars to control oil and the rise and hegemony of the United States, the one and only Oil Empire we're ever going to see.  Open-loop agriculture runs out of nutrients to add (see, for example, phosphate); it makes a horrid mess anywhere downstream; it destroys soil.  The pesticides drive mass extinction on the scale of a geologic epoch.  (no bugs is no birds, no bats, no pollinators; no pollinators is back to the Aptian in the Early Cretaceous, more than a hundred million years ago.  Nothing now living is adapted to such a world.)  It certainly wasn't the only way or the best way but it fit in well with an economy based on loot.  (That is, an economy built around guaranteeing you can keep the loot.)

Fossil carbon extraction is going to stop.

It may stop because we have a collective rush of sense to the head, or it may stop because agriculture breaks, taking industrial civilization with it.  But is is going to stop; sure as death, sure as fate.  No human thing can keep it from stopping.

No human thing can keep the temperature from going up two and a half degrees against baseline by 2100; that's the "everyone does everything immediately" climate change mitigation scenario from the IPCC, the very most we can now hope to do.  Somewhere in there, agriculture breaks.  ("rain in due season" is what agriculture depends on, that and six inches of dirt; climate change can be understood as water chaos; wrong time, wrong amount, too much, too little...)  When agriculture breaks, the last ten thousand years of civilization breaks with it.

The mass extinction -- the loss of pollinators, the loss of sufficient soil diversity, the whole "enough blocks out of the trophic web and it does the jenga thing and collapses" -- and the open-loop nitrogen, phosphorous, and carbon cycles in the soil both each suffice to break agriculture all on their own.

So; we aren't keeping the civilizations of the Holocene.

Present politics, politics in our time, politics in as much time as there shall be to come; that's going to be about defining the successor states of human social organization.  That's going to start with "how are we going to eat?" and that does not presently have an answer.

It would be useful to insert "we need an answer about food" into politics, but that doesn't suffice the problem, because the social organization you get is what can keep the other social organizations from taking it over.  You have to win all those fights to copy yourself into the future.  So it becomes "how are we going to eat while creating ourselves into the future in the face of all opposition?"

We shall get an answer; all the current answers approximate to "you won't."

That could really do with going into politics.

Morals are post-facto rationalizations

Thing is, the ones you got taught as a wee small child were probably rationalizations for something four generations back.

It makes it hard to think effectively.  There's a nigh-overwhelming desire to get everything into a moral frame, and aside from the difficulty of thinking effectively, this makes a couple-three things difficult.

It cripples people up with an expectation of being good; to be moral is to be good, after all.  Only good is always contextual and if you're honest you'll notice you don't know if you're good or not and then you run into the axiomatic expectation of childhood that you will be good and then you're way off somewhere in "the best lack all conviction".

People are social; people are almost eusocial, and we'll pack-bond with anything.  Only there's a numeric upper limit under a thousand somewhere.  (Probably way under; couple hundred.)  The desire to have congruent feels is antithetical to the rule of law and good public policy, because those specifically abjure congruent feels in favour of quantified measures.  There's a thought experiment; talk about your political goes in dispassionate language.  No "want", no feels language -- absolutely no references to love! -- just material results.  Explain why the material result is desirable in purely material terms.  This feels really wrong; it's amoral, it's inhuman, there's a lot of disparaging words for this one.  It's also what's required for effective public policy, because we shouldn't care about how we feel about it, we should care about what it materially accomplishes.

There's no moral way to resolve a moral impasse.  Historical efforts resulted in rivers of blood; the minimum for an effective, permanent resolution of moral disputes is something like the Albigensian Crusade.  If you want to have a functioning society, you have to notice that you need dispute resolution mechanisms that don't involve the river of blood; people have to be willing to lose sometimes.  This is where the social machinery for identifying facts comes from; you can agree on the material world, if you not your moral responses thereto.  ("Tolerance" isn't a stable approach; though it's looking like facts aren't doing all that well, either, great material benefits notwithstanding.)

A human future will lack

capitalism, great wealth, and most of the traditional grifts.

Capitalism -- the idea that you get to keep the loot, whatever you did to get it -- and great wealth -- the idea that it's OK for some individuals to have many orders of magnitude greater choice and consequence than others -- are pretty obvious; those things are why we're in this mess.  Those things preclude getting out of this mess because fixing the mess involves a whole lot of being responsible and enacting a great deal of husbandry.  (If you're going to insist on a masculine virtue, that's not a bad addition to the fours. (Foresight, fortitude, forbearance, forthrightness.))

The grifts, though; those are about getting people to substitute their feels to reality.

Marginal cultures -- people who live in places where you can't get material security consistently, no matter how skilled and prudent you are -- don't tolerate grifts.  They can't; if they tolerated grifts, they'd all be dead.  Grifting is a symptom of keeping the loot.

Everybody in power, everybody who got that power by doing questionable things, everybody who has created a straightforward belief those Those People need to suffer so they can go on believing they're good; none of them are really much able to do anything useful.  They can't.  It's a consequence of having got into that position in the first place.

If you're thinking the extant power structures can deal with this somehow, you're thinking that the used car salesman of archetypal reference will decide, for the good of others and the material detriment of themselves, to take a vow of honesty, and keep it.

They can't.  Any effective response to the climate has to recognise that.

We're not all going to make it.

I mean, ok, sure, one birth is one death; life has ending.

There's still this concept of excess deaths, people dying where they wouldn't have if something had been different.  It gets applied to things like air pollution (not less than ten thousand a year in Ontario) or asbestos, and sometimes influences policy.

One reason, if you're an existing plutocrat, to want very much that there should be no electric surface transport revolution whatsoever is that you can keep the studies from being done in the present, but it's nigh-impossible to keep people from finding the correlations after the thing stops.  This is what happened with leaded gasoline (and hasn't happened with non-stick cookware coatings based on fluorine compounds); if you stop, the harm stops, too, and becomes obvious.

Switching to electric surface transport improves air quality, and people are going to notice.  They might even notice the consistent paucity of studies for such a long time, too, and reach conclusions.  One of the obvious conclusions is that pretty much all of the "lifestyle" issues around health are noise; we're living in a high volume varied flow of industrial effluent.  This is relentlessly ignored in favour of magical thinking around individual control.  (The vaccine not only doesn't cause autism, there isn't anything you as an individual can do about the rate of autism.  That second part gets missed; people are medium-desperate for a world view in which their personal decisions control their specific lives, and this is utter nonsense.)

But!

We're headed into a major recession, mostly because various political actors have decided to break the mechanisms of international trade but also because the economy goes right on doing the wrong things in the wrong way.  (You don't care about price, you care about value, and you don't want to try to do anything for value if the economy is structured to concentrate money.  That's roughly equivalent to building an irrigation system using criteria to maximize the size of holding ponds.)

It takes a long time to come out of recessions these days; it's not like everybody's actually recovered from 2008 here in 2019.  In 2029, it'll be obvious agriculture is in terrible trouble.  (That was obvious in 2009, and is certainly obvious today in 2019; most farmers have side jobs to subsidize their farming hobby.  Pretty much none of them have adequate capital to consider doing anything different.  Then we get into the "slather the landscape with bioaccumulating and persistent toxins for yield" aspects of the system.)

You got any confidence that the present crop of politicians has a plan for addressing a persistent recession during a period of crop failures, actual dearth -- I think the "we might have to eat ugly fruit" folks are charmingly naive -- and in the awareness that the available infrastructure is all wrong and failing under the hammer of the rain?  That the "you know, it'll get lethally hot here sooner than anybody emotionally expects" projections will result in orderly migration, useful infrastructure, or effective planning?

I certainly don't.

Given those things, yeah, we're not all going to make it.

It matters a lot how we don't all make it.  "Kill everyone who might compete for resources" is better understood as "if we get the skills pool small enough, fast enough, we guarantee human extinction".  (Which is about what you'd expect from a death cult, really.  Even if it's a death cult with peculiar habits of rationalization.)

Now's not the best time -- it turns out sometime in the 1970s would have been the best time -- to be thinking about this, but it's the time we have.  What do you want to happen when it gets obvious we're not all going to make it?

No you can't

Various learned commentators are remarking that domestic violence, patriarchy, white supremacy, and fascism are inextricably linked, as a common source of coercive social violence.  As is the entire notion of a legitimately coerced prescriptive norm; there isn't a short term for that (so far as I know), but it's all of a piece.

You know what sits under all of those?

The idea that you can legitimately get rich.

White supremacy starts off as a moral system to explain why it's ok to steal things; it's the engine of colonization, which is after all a system of organized looting rather than production.  The reason for the looting is that it's fast; you get rich much quicker if you can loot it.  (It also uses a much different skill set than production does.)  This is not a net win, but you're rich now, and not obliged to care.

Everything after that is a set of interlocked, ramifying rationalizations for the desire to get really rich.  (It is potentially instructive to look at the backgrounds of the main conquistador figures in the creation of the Spanish empire; they were nigh-uniformly people from poor backgrounds with no prospect of social advancement due to ethnicity.  Enough gold could almost fix that.)

Thing is, as soon as you introduce the necessary degree of control to the system, the one that allows you to create and maintain disproportionate great wealth, you're introducing failure.  You can have success or you can have control; wanting to be really rich compels you to introduce control and chose failure.  (Notice how there's these repeated financial crises that are hard to explain in their ubiquity?  Some of that is feedback timing, but a whole lot of that is the insistence on a means of control.)

This is not, by the way, an argument for poverty or for moral virtue arising from poverty or similar nonsense.  Having more choice is a good thing.  It needs to be relatively evenly distributed in the absence of systems of control, is all.

Corpse-piling as a political tactic

Firearms ownership is deeply entangled with white supremacy; "I can shoot anyone who threatens my social position".  This isn't even obvious; this is unmissable.

(Even before you notice that the NRA is an unlawful lobbying organization for the post-state transnational actors pushing white supremacy as a way to get rid of democracy, since democracy actually threatens them.)

Any fix for firearms violence is kinda pointless without a fix for the white supremacy.  In an industrial culture, there's an arbitrarily large number of ways to kill a lot of people.  Many of them are much easier than the firearms approaches; it's an entirely grim thought, but the focus on shooting people is keeping the casualty count down compared to a political movement trying to maximize the body count by the most expeditious available means.  (No matter how doubtful you are of this claim, I am not about to post examples of alternatives.  Just trust me on this one.)

Directly opposing firearms gets into a purely tactical, politics-and-morals conflict the white supremacists are well-positioned to win. It doesn't matter that their creed is factually not even wrong; it matters that it's simple and easily copied into other people.  Like anything else operating under selection, what matters is how it gets copies into the future. Nuance, accuracy, and facts are generally political disadvantages.  They're especially political disadvantages when the other side is specifically opposed.  (Because if the white supremacists ever start admitting facts and accuracy they have to look abashed and acknowledge their entire world view is sin in its own terms; cowardice and folly.)

Going for logistics -- quintuple the cost of ammunition; very tightly control gunpowder; move the controlled part (in the US) from the receiver to some pressure-containing part -- doesn't work because the great majority of Anglosphere law enforcement is white supremacist and won't enforce such laws and the white supremacist party has more than enough influence to prevent a distinct enforcement arm from being created at an effective level of funding.  (And the legitimate hunting lobby would be opposed, too.)

So what can you do?

Attack weakness.

Attack weakness in the system, because the fix is a different system.

Especially don't confuse "this is killing a lot of people" with weakness, because to the white supremacist plurality killing a lot of people is strength.   The system proves it works by stacking corpses.  Trying to attack this morally serves to prove to the white supremacist that it's working, they should do more of that.

"Shooting sports are awful" isn't weakness; despite recognizing that most shooting sports model accurately as turning money into noise, a great many people sincerely believe shooting sports are fun.  (If you can't observe people figuring out they should drive as little as possible and lobby continuously for decarbonization, expecting them to connect up the white supremacy and the shooting sports isn't a practical expectation.)

White supremacy is an ideology of fear; mostly fear of their own incompetence.  Fear makes you stupid; one of the consequences of people recognizing that they're (at least relatively) stupid is that they want to forcibly simplify the system around them into a comprehensible ߞ thus much simpler — form.

The way you get rid of white supremacy is not economic prosperity.  (That was the Long 50s, up through Civil Rights.  It did not reduce white supremacy.)  The way you get rid of white supremacy is by doing one of three things.

1. extermination.  This is the most expensive option; given that it's patriarchal white supremacy, don't bet against the consensus of the matrons going for this in a few years as the demographics shift.  But as a political plan it's not helpful.

2. systemic opposition.  Armed police with a union are a rival power structure to the civil government; they're meant to be a rival power structure to the civil government.  (That Civil Rights backlash thing.)  Institutional armed force is the monopoly of the state, and so long as there are armed police with unions, this rather essential pillar of civil government is not in place.  Whether you disarm the police, make them much more tightly agents of the state (no union; no shred of a union; direct oath, inspections from bits of the bureaucracy outside their influence, etc.), or simply forbid police unions, that's a legislative start.  So is assigning terrorist status and applying all the financial penalties to organizations which continue to fund white supremacists.  (That is, if someone gets designated a white supremacist terrorist and you can prove they got a paypal donation, paypal gets chapter 7 liquidation after the third one.)

3. Push cultural change.  You cannot get "no guns"; you can get "skilled guns" after the European gun club model. (and then it's mostly an old people thing, and boring.)  Use it to push firearms out of the home into secure storage facilities where access requires multiple individuals.  (Which is what militaries do!  The same person doesn't  generally have keys to the rifle storage and the ammunition storage.)  Make a day at the range require five-actor access; make all ammunition purchases through the gun club. (You can't buy ammo; your gun club can buy ammo for you, it's on the shelf with your name on it, but it never passes into your sole control until you're on the gun club's range.)  Require the gun club to pass random inspections, require both approval-of-the-membership, competence demonstrations, and state-administered testing to join; have a small percentage of law enforcement or former law enforcement (like, 10 percent maximum) membership limit; limit total ammunition purchases to whatever is least of four times the amount fired by women members and the amount fired by non-white members last year.  (In Canada, Native members would be an interesting third category for this.) (If you can demonstrate falsified records, the officers lose their membership, get fined, and can never own firearms again.)  Mail order is fine, but it goes to the gun club under the same five-actor controls.  If any member of a gun club participates in a mass shooting, the entirety of that club's firearm holdings are confiscated and destroyed.  If you're not a gun club member, you're not qualified to own a firearm.  (If you're rural or you hunt, you can have at most five long arms in your free possession, none self-loading.)  Point out pistols are useless and dangerous until you can get a home-storage ban.  Send high school kids off to "learn safety and scrub filthy bolt components with a toothbrush" summer camps; the mystique of firearms doesn't survive much of this.

I'd be going for a combination of 2 and 3.  Note that if you do 3 for serious, there's no reason the club or members of the club can't own a belt fed machine gun if they want to.  That will turn a lot of money into noise, but it will get buy-in into the new system from the mostly-sensible gun owner majority.  You want a system where the young and foolish have to struggle for the approval of the old and experienced; you want there to be a graceful way for the not-so-young-now to acknowledge that, yeah, that was a pointless expense, I'm going to get something that lets me work on my group size now.  You also sincerely require a social context for all this; that's a good reason to make sure there are urban options, with subsidized (or public) range access as necessary.

But as long as the idea is to solve the gun problem, nothing will work, because it's a white supremacy problem, not a gun problem.  Effective measures must solve the problem actually present.

(Look at all the work done on how prohibition movement was much more about domestic violence against women than alcohol, and how that turned out, and take a lesson.)

Capitalism's Ghost Dance

The Ghost Dance was "a North American Indian religious cult of the second half of the 19th century, based on the performance of a ritual dance that, it was believed, would drive away white people and restore the traditional lands and way of life."

So; a religious insistence that the bad thing is magically not going to happen.

The bad thing is going to happen. The seas will rise and agriculture will fail.

Even from a purely empirical "was this a desirable result?" perspective, capitalism has failed.  No accumulation of money excuses making your species extinct.  Rather than face this, admit error, and seek to make restitution, what we're seeing is a whole bunch of effort to create religious movements able to forcibly prevent anyone from mentioning the fact of the failure.

(Fascism is the trivial cowardice of supposing will can prevent change if only you will be violent enough.  But much as you can't practically tell a fandom from a religion, you can't empirically distinguish fascism from a religion, either.  It's the same broad category of not dealing with things as they are.)

Is this going to work?

Well, probably, in as much as there isn't much sign anyone is going to be able to shut down the system of social organisation around the accumulation of money in time.  ("In time" would have been by about 1980.)  There remains some hope people will figure out that the diverse justifications offered for going on with organising society around the increase of wealth are all nonsense.

People seem generally to have the climate backwards

I think a lot of this is the fault of the official projections.

It's not "we've got twelve years to save the planet" or "twelve years to save civilisation" or something like that.

If you go look at the available science, we're right solidly into "everybody dies".  Every available indicator says "the Arctic Amplification Hypothesis is correct, it's happening, it's been happening for awhile"; that means we get between 8 and 12 degrees (Celsius degrees; 14.5 to ~22  Fahrenheit degrees) of warming and it doesn't take all that long.  Remember that we're into "agriculture is busted" by 2050 per the conservative IPCC projections, and the immediate meaning for the arctic amplification hypothesis is that those projections are massively optimistic.

The best present understanding is that the Arctic tipped in 2005 or so.  It's absolutely not reversible unless the Culture shows up in a benevolent mood.  Sequestration and geoengineering aren't materially feasible options.  Regenerative agriculture and planting deep-rooted prairie biomes and reforestation aren't all that feasible; we know how to plant trees but we don't actually know how to restart a biome.  People have been trying with a short grass prairie since not too long after it got ploughed and haven't succeeded.  They've conserved some species but they haven't make the prairie live again.  In the time of angry weather, this is a much harder problem.  It won't hurt to try but it's not anything you could call a solution even should it succeed perfectly.

I do not (oddly enough) counsel giving up.  There are things we can do.

Stop fossil carbon extraction, completely, without exception, by 2025.  If people die, this is better than everybody dying.

Get an every-nerve-and-sinew effort going to produce an industrial toolkit that can make a boat, a greenhouse, and a heat pump (refrigerator, freezer, A/C; all the same thing with different design objectives) with zero fossil carbon inputs, which can power those things somehow, and which doesn't need more than a million people to run.  (Wireless communications and anaesthetised dentistry would be nice, too; that's the absolute floor of stuff we have to keep.)

Replace the housing stock; it needs to be more than 50 metres above sea level, it needs to shrug off tornadoes, and it needs to have drainage for a metre of rain in an hour.  A surprising amount of this is doable with hand-work, but the parts that aren't (sanitary sewers! potable water pipes! windows!) are part of the every-nerve-and-sinew effort.

Every bio-accumulating (= gets into the food chain in increasing concentrations) or persistent (it doesn't go away) thing being dumped today stops being dumped.  That includes most pesticides and it includes anything in the way of packaging or plastic or shoes or whatever that doesn't rot or recycle.  ("reduce" is not a bad idea, but in practice this is an argument that it's OK to have your testicles in a vise so long as whoever turns the crank turns it more slowly.)  We're part of the food ecology; we need to remember that.

But, anyway; it's not "save the planet"; it's "save us".  We're well into "everybody dies" and if we work real hard we can maybe get into "not everybody will be accounted an excess death."

Not all the ideas in your head are on your side

So there's this thread where Blair Braverman talks about how having multiple dogs to care for made "everybody's different" emotionally real.

Somewhere down in that thread, someone talks about how they are getting that their body is part of a diversity but it's still hard to think of it[0] as good.

Thing is, good is always and in all things and in all times and all places contextual.  (Got the job? you might think that's good, if you wanted that job; all the other applicants who need and don't have jobs likely don't think it's good.  Maybe you really wanted the job, but it's in the antipodes; your parents don't think this is good, they won't see you from one year to the next.  And so on.)

Someone trying to impose a context on you so they can say good or bad is not your friend.  An internalized axiom about what constitutes good or bad is not your friend.  The social system that insists there must be a good and there must be a bad absolutely is not your friend; it's a tool of control exercised by whomever gets to make up the definitions for good and bad.  (Because of the way people learn axioms, it's quite possible whoever that was is dead this long while and the world has changed.)

(You can try Zhuangzi if you want a philosophical pedigree for this.)

"Does this serve my present purposes?", "Is this annoying enough to alter?", "What purpose does this serve?", "Is this consistent with the Settled Peace?", "Is this consistent with (my understanding of) my duty?" (that is, will future-me find it easier or harder to like themselves if I do/don't do this?); those can be useful questions.

"Good" and "bad" are not useful questions.  They're a control mechanism, and when trained into it at a young age, you wind up controlling yourself on the basis of objectives maybe no one living still has.  And which are never yours of your own will.  It's a really effective and horridly persistent way to produce social power (directly) and material power (indirectly), but it isn't a system in which you are obliged to participate.  (It will try to hurt you until you agree that you do.  Highly likely it already has.)

There has to be a system; living together in groups creates necessity about having a social system.  It need not be one built on "good" and "bad" and the imposition of context.

[0] you are the meat; the notion of mind-body duality is not obviously helpful, either.

Science and Authority

There's a certain "why the hell would anyone do that?" around cuts to education or children's programs.

We know with great confidence that relatively teeny social investments in child care and education have big valuable consequences; more education, greater economic success, mass escapes from poverty.  Even awful rich people ought to want a larger economy; that's more for them.

Universal education is inherently inimical to the rich.  The "harder to control the vote" part is something of a red herring.  It's really really easy for the rich to control who there is to vote for, even when you can't control the vote at all.

What isn't easy is the fundamental issue with education, which is that you're going to wind up teaching science.  The idea of falsification is everywhere; history, modern languages, the study of any of the classical antiquities, all of these have acquired notions about falsification and statistical methods.  Once you've got falsification you get the Hard Part, which is the idea that anything you think you know can be wrong.  It's not very likely something like quantum (where we've got a lot of decimal places and many many working machines) is wrong, but you can't actually assert that something is Correct.  It's 'our best understanding'.

This is indeed the Hard Part; it's not easy to do, it's interesting historically in the notable failures more than the notable successes, it's just generally a struggle.

It's a hugely productive struggle; it's a philosophical position worth striving for.  It's also utterly corrosive to the authoritarian "because I said so!", and the rich are all authoritarian.  (Certainly in the statistical mass.  If you're seriously rich, you make decisions outside your competence as a consequence of your wealth, so to a statistical first approximation to be very wealthy is to be incompetent and to need protecting from the consequences of that incompetence.)  They just can't allow a productive, powerful idea that, no, no, not because you said so, and not even; all knowledge is provisional, subject to falsification and revision and the increase of knowledge.

"Coming for the right to vote" is just the start; they're coming for anesthetized dentistry.  Because you can either have the idea of falsification -- facts are what you arrive at by a multi-person public process -- or you can have personal authority.  And the very rich must have the personal authority.

This Ravelry thing

Ravelry has banned pro-Trump anything on the grounds that the Trump administration are white supremacists.  Various people are declaiming that this is an obvious failure of tolerance.

Just in case someone is suffering from a sincere confusion on this point; an expectation of tolerance on your part -- you expect to be tolerated -- required the exercise of tolerance on your part.  You have to extend to others the tolerance you expect to receive.

White supremacists definitionally don't do that.  As an ideology, it's about imposing a strict hierarchy, enforced with violence.  ("I might not murder you this time" is not tolerance.)

There's a much longer description about acting to constrain other's choices and how the material goal of justice is to expand the scope of just treatment to all people, but it really isn't necessary.  An expectation of tolerance is isomorphic to an agreement that you're not special.  Anything with "supremacist" in it fails that agreement.

Death cults, self-image, and goodness

https://twitter.com/KashannKilson/status/1141876248563474433

has in other places people making remarks to the effect of "the Right has become a death cult".

Of course the right has become a death cult.

It's the only way they can think of themselves as good people.

This is why you don't think of yourself as good.  This is why you try to avoid good and bad as labels; think about the material consequences directly, because good and bad elide all sorts of stuff into what you got taught before you were five.  In a stable benevolent period, that could perhaps be responsible, but in the times we live in, it's not responsible whatsoever.  Everything will change and there will be both great trouble and no status quo for centuries.

As far as the right is concerned, if they look at material consequences -- we're headed at something between the Eocene Thermal Maximum and the End Permian nine-tenths-of-all-life extinction -- they've been advancing unwise policies by not-especially-licit means for forty critical years, from 1980 to the present.  It turns out greed is still a sin, value cannot be measured with money, and that wealth is not virtue.  If those facts are accorded the status of facts -- things incontrovertibly of the material world, independent of belief or unbelief both together -- then it's impossible for the people whose policies created the disaster to be good.  (It calls into question the utility of any moral frame as a basis for decision.)

If they're not good, they get to have a severe existential crisis; it doesn't even need to be a religious existential crisis.

As it gets more and more difficult to keep from noticing that, nope, not good; it has to be from the viewpoint of hypothetical insect survivors in a million years to even suppose this could be good, the bad insecurity management -- which is always about trying to disdain facts in some way or another -- gets more and more violent because primates.  The larger the pile of skulls, the greater the vehemence and conviction.  Maybe they just have to bring about the End Times, there's a theology for that.

This can work on fellow primates; the wetware doesn't distinguish correctness and conviction. 

It doesn't work on the rain.

Uncertainty

People in general cannot stand an uncertain future.

If you have no power, you invent rituals and do what you can to create a belief that it will all work out somehow.

If you have power, you use that power to create the closest approximation of a certain future you can get.  This is where the organization of society around making wealth generationally persistent comes from; wealth is the tool to produce a status quo and through that status quo a predictable future.

Today, no certain future is possible.  We don't know what the climate is going to do; any honest person is going to tell you that it depends a lot on what we do for the next year, the next five years, the next ten, but also that we're in a future of large error bars somewhere between the Eocene Thermal Maximum and the End Permian.  (That's between "a third of ocean life" and "ninety-odd percent of ocean life" going extinct.)

This is intolerable; people deal with it generally by insisting it isn't happening.  But it obviously is happening, and the conflict between what is endurable and what is factual is destroying the mechanisms of government.

The fix is to create belief in a plausible reliable future.  There is a plausible reliable future, if we can manage to both remove the tiny number of extremely rich people blocking access to it in favour of the doomed status quo and to all work hard to enact it.

The first critical step is to require elected representatives to publicly agree that they will indeed destroy the status quo in favour of the reliable future.

Capitalism destroys value

I've said this before, but it's been awhile and @GreatDismal had a short thread reminding me of it.

Value is the ratio between benefit and cost.  It's contextual; five hundred dollar shoes that let you walk without pain (unlike all those other shoes) are great value.  Maybe not for someone else, but for you.

In general, if a business is trying to deliver value, they're competing to sell you something that gives you greater benefit per unit cost.  A value-delivering business needs to be making a profit -- they want to stay in business, and using profit as a measure of value-add if you're not making a profit there's no general agreement that you're adding value -- but must not be, cannot be, motivated by profit.

A profit-maximizing business -- the point is to make as much money as possible -- has to do at least one of reduce the benefit or increase the cost.  That is, they deliver less at a particular price (increasing their profit margin) or charge more for the same delivery (increasing their profit margin). 

Once you accept profit maximization as a legitimate objective, this is systemic; intent doesn't much enter into it.  As a result, you get people lamenting that it's no longer possible to buy a new-made pair of pants of the quality that was generally available in 1980.  The drive for maximized profit -- capitalism -- has destroyed the ability within human civilization.  (This is far from the only example!)

Think of profit-maximization as a virtue is analogous to a fungal parasite, slowly pulling all the nutrients out of its living host organism.   It's not markets, it's not exchange; it's about the destruction of value to capture a greater share of the money.  (Money which is useless after the inevitable collapse.)

Greed remains a sin.

Carbon taxes

So both Ontario specifically and Canada generally are having a political controversy over carbon taxes.

I think this is unfortunate, as I do not personally support carbon taxes.

Carbon taxes -- emissions taxes generally! -- would have been an excellent policy in 1980 and a useful policy in 1990.  Today, it's utterly pointless; it assumes there's lots of time for a nice slow status-quo affirming industrial pivot of some kind to using fewer fossil carbon inputs.

That's not the situation we're in.  The situation we're in is that we need to zero out fossil carbon inputs and thus fossil carbon extraction by 2025.  (Well; 2000.  Earlier would have been better.) But 2025 is worth it for limiting-the-damage purposes.  The appropriate policy now is carbon rationing along that decreasing schedule to zero, backed up with whatever level of force is required to enforce compliance.

Yes, that has to go along with "decarbonize agriculture" and "decarbonize core transport" and a few other things.  The point is that we the emergency is now, we cannot avoid it, we don't have the option of not experiencing it, and the certainty of having a sufficient response is not a thing we can get.  Faffing around as though the status quo is durable or desirable isn't helpful in any way, in that sense any talk of carbon taxes is pure political kabuki.  What we need is a full industrial mobilization, tax rates set at "whatever it takes", and a very public approach to meeting the "decarbonize agriculture" and "cease fossil carbon use" by 2025 goals.

#NoPlant19

Anybody remember 2012?  Beef got cheap.

One edge of what we're looking at with the American maize crop not getting planted is chicken getting cheap.

If you're a scientist speaking in a scientific capacity, you're constrained in your language.  Most people don't know how to read it; it's a skill they've never had cause to develop.

I'm not a scientist.  I don't have the obligation of constraint and I'm not trying to get anything through a committee nervous about political responses.

Irrespective of what happens in this year of the Common Era two thousand and nineteen, industrial agriculture is going to break hard and forever by 2030.  This is a combination of dependency on fossil carbon, mass use of bioaccumulating toxins (agriculture that kills all the pollinators is not functioning agriculture!), and needing to know when it's going to rain.

Is this year the year?

Maybe not.

Thing is, the climate is going to get worse for the next couple centuries; the whole truly foreseeable future is the climate getting worse.  It will do that if all use of fossil carbon stopped tomorrow by miraculous means.  It's plausible that the Arctic Amplification feedback tipped in 2005 or so and we're going to get 8 C of warming by 2100.  It's not impossible that we're going to get thereabout of 12 C when all is said and done and the feedbacks have unwound.  It's quite likely that the notion of a temperate zone in the climate is going to go away; whether you want to think of this as Arctic and Not Arctic or Tropical and Not Tropical is much of a muchness.  That means a couple of things; the most important is that absolutely no one knows where it's going to rain how much at a level of detail useful for farming.

(Some of the others are that the direction the weather comes from is likely to change, and over the next little while -- one human lifetime -- lots of places become uninhabitable.  Which is irrelevant; the relevant thing is the first time it goes over 35 C wet-bulb and even the hale and robust and well-hydrated people die.)

What can you do about it?

Bloody revolution is an annoying distraction.  General strikes lack sufficient population buy-in and the brain mangling via media is too effective to expect to change that in a useful time frame.  (The useful time frame was back in about 1980.)

No place in the Northern Hemisphere below 45 North is all that likely to stay habitable; it might, especially at higher altitudes, but it might not, too.  And if it does it might be dryer than a dry dry thing most of the time and food is mostly water.  Plus we're not likely to see the survival of the industrial nation-state able to support major overland transport; bootstrapping one where you've had a credit system and thus a fuel supply collapse, for example, isn't going to be a "everything fine in five years problem", because that'll be the second hard blow to the head of food security.  Any shipping is likely to be by water, and it's likely to be small-scale, slow, and never cross the equator.

So what you could do is to get far enough north somewhere currently wet (and thus likely-ish to stay wet) and vaguely coastal and see about growing food by one of the labour-intensive, high-yield-per-area robust approaches.  Any non-fossil-carbon tech base you can install is likely good; don't forget that you need some kind of sewage handling just after you need food, because sewage handling is what lets you have neighbours in a social way and you need neighbours.

(To tangent on to a go-bag thread; toenail clippers.   You're considering to walk indefinitely off yonder and you haven't got toenail clippers?  Unless you're skilled and flexible enough to trim yours with a knife, this is a bad plan.)

Have we got the whole ten years?

I kinda doubt it.

Necessary and desirable are different

This has many applications, but the one that's niggling at me is wanting to point out that fascism is violent authoritarian corporatism, to the extent that isn't a redundant description.

It's trying to take over because it must; any functioning democratic process tends to get rid of it.  It can only exist at a fairly low level of social organization.  Widespread information flow, strong democratic institutions, and any kind of effective progressive taxation results in a society that doesn't have violent authoritarian corporatism.

If that system of organization wants to copy itself into the future, it has to take over.  Strong central authority under democratic direction will obliterate it.  (An awful lot of work and money has gone into keeping that from happening since about 1980.  There are limits to these things.)

This isn't to say fascism is trivial (no) or that things aren't serious (they are) or the climate isn't making everything else extra-double-plus-hard-mode (it is); it's to say that the whole thing is coming out of a mix of fear (the system they depend on is very, very vulnerable) and incompetence (if the problem is getting copies into the future, oppression is not the answer.  It shouldn't ever be the question.)  Any sense of inevitability or doom is the wrong way around.

Swift away the old world passes

So we've just had white supremacists elected to a majority government in Alberta.

We've got white supremacists in majority government in Ontario.

What is going on?

https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3322 has the important graphic

(short version; billions die by 2100.)

All power is unitary.

All power is also social; it arises from people co-operating.  If people ignore you, you have no power.

Carbon-binge status quo arises from the military utility (and then general ubiquity) of fossil carbon power sources.  It's traded a brisk and global round of looting for (probable [0]) human extinction.

This is the kind of thing that leads to a loss of legitimacy; people stop thinking it's a good idea to do what you say.   If the extinction isn't especially abrupt, circumstances become risky for incumbents in positions of power and authority.

There's three possible responses to our present circumstance; you can go authoritarian (the overt white supremacy), you can waffle energetically (everybody saying earnest things about climate change while approving new fossil carbon infrastructure, or, alternatively, lying vigorously in ways meant to prevent coherent action; they're both acting to preserve the status quo), or you can try to figure out how to preserve enough decarbonized industrial civilization to keep as many people and as much ecosystem alive in the future.

There's a lot of political risk in trying to deal with the problem; for example, if you start taking the third step seriously, there's no reason not to, and a bunch of positive reasons to, try every oil company exec since 1980 for deliberate, for-profit genocide.  "But everyone is complicit!" doesn't address how everyone wasn't making policy, and the how the people making policy went for maintaining the status quo.  (It's a bit like a leaking roof; you fix it as soon as you  notice it.  If you wait, everything gets worse.  We've seen the politics of hogging the dry spots play out these last two generations, and are seeing them now.)

Things are now obviously bad enough that the third option -- try to fix the problem -- has open political advocacy that wants to actually do it, instead of waffling about it as a means of maintaining the status quo.  The incumbents think this is an intolerable threat to their current wealth and power, and, well, they do have most of the money, and people are more-or-less defenseless against modern media.  (We're a band-forming social primate; an environment where you get lied to continuously in ways you can't check is not in our evolutionary history, and we're pretty much defenseless against automated approaches to bulk lying.  Were we to survive as a species for another ten or twenty generations, that would change.)

Thing is, we're losing the current status quo.  Sure as death, sure as fate.  Keeping the status quo isn't an option.

That's going to inform all politics henceforward; that is all politics henceforward.  What future do you want?  Are we trying for some material chance of general prosperity into the indefinite future, or are we absolutely determined that those now rich get to die that way?

(The white supremacists are in the "all die, but at least the social hierarchy didn't change!" camp.  Since the social hierarchy involved is the one that caused this mess, it's a clear example of consistency failing to be a virtue.)


[0] the default human thing is being a hunter-gatherer, but being a hunter-gatherer is hard; you need to know a lot of stuff about your specific environment and have a broad range of skills.  Being a hunter-gatherer from a starting place of negative skills and knowledge in a depauperate ecology undergoing a mass extinction?  Not going to work.  Humans evolved in the Holocene, and we've left the Holocene.  "Deadly threshold" means no agriculture there; no ability to do the work, and plants don't like that much heat either.  Add in the other reasons for agriculture to fail.

White supremacy

White supremacy is the idea that, because you are easily sunburnt, you are innately blessed to such a degree that it is right and proper for your to loot, rape, murder, and enslave.

Put it accurately like that and it's obvious nonsense.

Why is it such wretchedly persistent nonsense?

Bunch of reasons; if you want to enforce inequity of social organization, you need really committed people, because the social costs to the enforcers are high.  (This is a good test for inequity; do the people responsible for keeping the system functioning have worse outcomes than you'd expect from purely economic and background factors?)  It's pretty easy to get commitment by telling the incompetent that they deserve more status than their capability can earn them, and then letting them exact that status through threats of violence.

If you're an oligarch, an explanation for why you should under no circumstances blame the oligarch for anything, and should blame the powerless instead; that's useful, too, and explains where a lot of the money comes from to keep these ideas going.  The long habit of looting has a lot to do with the oligarchical position on this, too.

How do you get rid of it?

If you're trying to get rid of bad insecurity management, you have to do better insecurity management.  That means a respect for facts, quantitative analysis, and calling things by if not their right names then consistent accurate ones.  (This is difficult habit to get into when the culture around you is a big machine for asserting a moral norm.  It's a highly dynamic moral norm, and it claims to be completely immutable.)  It also means being very careful what society rewards.

In the white supremacy case, well.  It's at least eleven kinds of false, but pointing that out doesn't help; the problem is not whether or not it's factual, the problem is that it's an excuse to hurt people until they grant status.  That's a basic basic primate thing; the form of the excuse is irrelevant.  The fix is to not grant status, and to make any attempt to do so materially expensive.

Facebook delenda est.  Youtube, too.  Feedback with no constraints is going to catch fire and explode soon enough; we're not obliged to wait for the boom.  Anti-vaxxers (functionally another weird-ass flavour of white supremacy) are engaged in something that meets the material criteria for a conspiracy to commit bioterrorism -- the B in the NBC abbreviation for "weapons of mass destruction" -- and they've already killed specific, identifiable people. Might-maybe be time to treat it like what it is.  (This would be an excellent test for whether or not a law enforcement organization was itself hopelessly corrupted by white supremacy; can they look at anti-vaxxers and do the material analysis around what happens, rather than how people feel about what they are doing?)

Medium term, do what is necessary to secure the general prosperity in the time of angry weather, which means food security for all, above all.

Systemic stability

There's this result from operations research and system theory that says that if you want to control something, you need to provide matching variety (as many states as the system you're trying to control has in the controls), limit the system variety (letting the dog run, but inside a fence...), or build some kind of variety amplifier so you can match the number of states in the system with fewer inputs.  (Traffic lights, and the enforcement mechanism that makes them consequential.)  ("Law of Requisite Variety", for the curious.)
 
What does that have to do with anything?

An overclass is a control system.  A relatively small proportion of the population organizes society so they get what they want.

The portion of society making up the overclass is too small to do this directly; there has to be a variety amplifier.  That's a lot of things, mostly belief but also various limitation mechanisms.  The ideal of democracy is that there's general agreement on the necessary system, and that everybody gets a say in how it's constructed.  (This hasn't ever happened, though it's been closer than it now is.)  The practice is that things are arranged to guarantee outcomes for the overclass.

There's a bunch of problems with this.  The most important difficulty is that people in the overclass believe that they can and should have control, and are taking a counter-factual position when they do it.  A sufficiently stable -- that is, nigh-static -- can give the illusion of the possibility of control, and the conservative takes on the importance of obedience, the inherent nature of ability, and so are all derived from the position that control is possible, necessary, and right.  And to be as fair as possible, the results indicating that, no, really, you can't have that; it isn't an achievable thing only date to the 1940s or so.  That's not a very long time compared to the last five thousand years of "obey the king".  It is still a disaster when the people running things demand counter-factual outcomes.

The nearly-as-important difficulty is that system is real; personal moral choice has almost nothing to do with it, and pretty much any progressive political movement gets tripped down the metaphorical stairs of trying to be good.  (Where it will neither be good nor achieve any specific material objectives.)

If you want a different world, you need to be building a different system.  That's really tough; it's, in effect, the need to build something large enough to be capable of being responsible for fixing everything.  (You can only be responsible for what you have the power to alter.  So individual responsibility isn't sufficient, and the idea that it is or could be isn't helpful.)  It may well mean taking over the incumbent system and using it to build something else.

And of course we're headed into a period of history where the incumbents have utterly failed, are losing legitimacy, will lose all legitimacy, and where the status quo cannot possibly hold.  This is not a problem human societies have a good record of dealing with.

The status quo is gone; the question is how to respond, and the question of how to respond effectively is how to respond without trying for control.  This is a legitimately difficult problem.

It's also something of a timed exam.

Prescriptive Norms

Today is apparently a ranty day.

So the unifying thread of various everything to day; whether James Barry's identity as a man should be respected (yes), whether intersectionality is a thing (yes), why conservatives keep doing that, and so on, all come down to the idea of an enforced prescriptive norm.  Pretty much everything that sucks about being alive in the Anglosphere comes down to an enforced prescriptive norm.

That is, who has the power to decide on what constitutes normal and then hurt you for not conforming to it, either until you die or start to conform.

It is not useful to point out that this is terrible.  It copies itself into the future effectively, and has persisted for multiple generations and shows no sign of going away on its own.

It is not useful to try to devise some kind of universal norm to which everyone could conform.  Not only would this require knowledge of the future and an impossible degree of empathy for the present, it misses the point; the utility of the idea of enforcing a prescriptive norm is that it grants power.  (Really a whole lot of economic power.  Look at the amount of money involved in the Pink Tax, as one relatively minor thing in prescriptive norms.)  Definitionally, the test of power is whether or not it is retained.

This returns it to the Basic Problem; how decent can life be for who, and this form of social organization still win fights with the alternatives?

(The notion of what's possible in this respect has been badly skewed in the Anglosphere the last couple centuries by being at the front of a period of technical innovation.)

Anyway; the obvious alternative is to structure society not around norms, but around boundaries.  Inside the limits, it's fine; outside the limits, there are material consequences, probably necessarily quite severe ones.  And it gets tricky to avoid picking unnecessary boundaries and to do so only on the basis of some form of material harm, to keep it from turning back into prescriptive norms with different language.

Can this win a fight with prescriptive norm forms of social organization?  I should like to believe we are going to find out.

Some assumptions about cars

https://twitter.com/EmporersNewC/status/1097550055400181760

Is a twitter thread about why Honda is leaving the UK for manufacturing purposes; the official Honda statement is "pulling manufacturing back to Japan", and the comments almost get it.  Almost.

The thread notes there's a global trend to geographically shortening supply chains; it notes that cars on the water are a lot of tied-up capital, and the longer the time on the water the more capital.  It even manages to note that car manufacturers are all heavily invested in electric.

That's all factual.

What gets missed is that an electric car is fundamentally less expensive than an ICE powertrain car.  Cost scales with parts count, and the drive train parts count in electric drops a couple orders of magnitude.  The margin to support long-distance trade in automobiles isn't there in an electric world.

Honda (and everybody else making cars) is sharply aware of this.   They don't want to say so, in part because the longer it takes the buying public to notice that car prices should be dropping in real terms, the better.  Also in part because so much of the current trade order is about car parts, and getting blamed for the boat capsizing is best avoided.

Given current Chinese policy (fairly close to "electric or death"), the distance from Japan to China, and the fundamental impracticality of shipping anything but Veblen-good luxury vehicles globally in an electric car world, of course Honda is pulling out of Europe.

Overall, this is a good thing; that's a good hint we're getting closer to the electric transition for personal vehicles.

The insect decline has hit the mainstream

Which is good, in as much as that increases the chance of something being done about it.

The science types have been aware of this for years; work on trying to figure out why the whole guild -- that is, a group of organisms with a similar ecological role, not necessarily related -- of aerial insectivores has been declining has been going since at least 2010.

(Some bats, some birds, and some other bugs all eat bugs by catching them [in flight].  All are declining.)

The answer is not "climate change", or at least not directly.  (Climate change isn't helping.) The answer is "pesticides".

Persistent biologically accumulating toxins eventually kill everything.  It's important to remove any such thing from agriculture, other environment dumping, and to not stop at "this was made for that purpose"; the incidental (all the hormone-analogs and mimics released by the plastics industry, for example) counts, too.

It's important to not allow a lot of hand-wringing and pointing to a need for study to slow or stop the immediate need to completely phase out any such thing; lawns, golf courses, highway verges, farm fields, wetlands, everywhere and anywhere the answer is not so much "you may not" (though it is, indeed, "you must not") but to destroy the ability to produce the stuff, globally.  With about the fervor and focus that would be applied to someone selling bulk refined plutonium; that could kill us all.  The pesticides are killing us all, and (like the climate) we don't have very much longer and the only way to find out for sure how long we've got would be to keep going until all are dead.

I'm going to miss Google

I mean, it'll be awhile, but they've gone and decided to die.

Inbox by Gmail was going to be the new email application; new design, treat email as a task list (which is pretty accurate for how most people use it), auto-bundle stuff and allow management by bundles.  Leverages the kind of information management stuff Google's both skilled at and advantaged in.

Nigh-all of this except the bundles has been ported over to gmail; there's a (highly dubious) claim the bundles are going to be ported to gmail.  (That's the sort of feature, like "what encoding do we use for *char?" that has to go in at the beginning, at design time, because its presence informs everything else.)  There's probably a way somewhere to make the gmail app's colour scheme stop being shrieky, but there really isn't a way to make it (with the bundles) actually work half as well as inbox does.

Which is kinda beside the point, unfortunately.

Rumour -- highly plausible rumour -- has it that the business decision to kill the Inbox app, rather than the Gmail app, comes down to "Inbox makes it too easy to dodge promo emails".

Google's original business model was "let's get more people using the Internet".  That worked, in large part because there was a vast amount of unrealized utility available.  Now, though, it's turning into "let's glue eyeballs to ads".  Which, well.

You can have success, or you can have control.   Both is not an option.

This is Google deciding that it MUST have control.

That'll kill ya.