Health insurance is the biggest point of conflict between me and my mother. This most recent time, I left her house so frustrated and hopeless that I actually considered going on food stamps so I could divert $300 or $400 per month to buy health insurance. We eat well, we're active. I found a physician who takes actual cash, and I saw her last summer when my body went into crisis mode. I understand that if I break a bone, I'll be screwed, but the only other solution that would satisfy my mother would be to go back to school, go $100,000 deeper into debt to get qualified for a job I won't be passionate about so maybe they'll give me health insurance. I think that's crazy, she thinks that's the American Dream.
In this context, I can see that the health care issue is tied up with more difficult issues of class and the meaning of life. I bet most people reading this do not have a single ancestor who had a job they were passionate about. Our remote ancestors had nothing we would call a "job", and our recent ancestors saw wage labor as a chore they had to do in exchange for the benefits of modernity. Only a few lucky people get to have jobs they love -- and that's okay. We haven't worked out yet how to build a complex society out of intrinsically meaningful activity, and it's better for some people to love their jobs than nobody.
But the present situation is much, much worse. The American managerial class is so powerful, so immature, and so secretly unhappy, that it's not enough for them to love their jobs personally -- they expect everyone under them to also love their jobs. You can't even get a job at McDonalds if you admit that you're just doing it because you need the money. I'm tempted to say this is worse than slavery, except it must happen with slavery too. If the managers can not only fire you, but can also have you beaten and killed, then they can really force you to pretend to enjoy your work so they can feel good about themselves.
It also happens with parents. The baby boomers, and to some extent the two generations before them, got to live the American dream -- but some of them are not satisfied, and want their kids to live it too. George Carlin said "it's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." Even at its best, it only gave people enough ribbons and toys to not notice they had no participation in power. Now even the ribbons and toys are becoming vaporous. A college degree is like a $100,000 lottery ticket, guaranteed to put you in debt and unlikely to get you a job. Young people can't afford cars or houses but they can still afford to play Grand Theft Auto and Minecraft. Even jobs that "give you" health insurance typically sell you very expensive health insurance by deducting the premiums from your salary.
So what's the answer? Economic collapse is already underway, and we have to surf it down. The first step is to let go of some of the things you're supposed to care about. Here's a related reddit thread, For anyone who stopped giving a fuck, what were the results?
As for health care, I have yet to see any solution that's politically realistic. My personal strategy is to live like I'm already in the Zombie Apocalypse: if I get seriously sick or injured, I die. Really I would just lose all my savings and be in the same boat as everyone else -- that is, out of my lifeboat and back on the Titanic. To expand the metaphor, we're all on a big ship that's sinking, we're getting on lifeboats, but only the ship has a hospital! So if you get sick you have to go back on the ship and maybe sink with it. The solution, then, is to build lifeboat clinics: sources of good health care, including emergency care, on the fringes of the money economy.
people who sat more than 11 hours a day had a 40% higher risk of dying in the next three years than people who sat less than four hours a day. This was after adjusting for factors such as age, weight, physical activity and general health status, all of which affect the death risk. It also found a clear dose-response effect: the more people sat, the higher their risk of death.
So I've converted my sitting computer desk to a stand-up desk, by stacking a table on top of it. Wait, here's a photo. This effectively limits my computer time because my feet get tired!
Also I've been stretching and exercising more, especially the doorway stretch (illustrated on this page). More than one massage therapist has told me that if everyone did this stretch, they'd be out of a job.
And I'm experimenting with biphasic sleep. Supposedly, before the industrial age, it was normal for humans to get up in the middle of the night and do stuff, instead of lying awake. It probably takes practice, because the last time I tried it, my second phase of sleep was so low quality that it took me two days to catch up. Maybe I could just get up at 4am and then take a giant nap in the middle of the day.
Staple production is easier for gang-bosses to monitor than more diversified farming. Staple production also has lower skill requirements for workers. When demand for staple products is very high -- to feed the proletariat of imperial Rome, to feed the growing cities of late-Medieval Flanders, or to supply the cheap luxuries demanded by early modern England -- slavery or serfdom can emerge even without an extraordinarily high land/labor ratio.
Joel adds that this could answer Krugman's puzzle of why serfdom did not reemerge after the catastrophes of the 1300's crashed the population of Europe. As Carol Deppe mentions in The Resilient Gardener, farmers adapted to the instability of the time by adding many different crops and animals, and this could have made the agriculture system too complex to be managed by slave bosses.
Of course, today plantation slaves have been replaced by industrial machinery. Going back to this link from a few days ago, I used to think this whole system was doomed, but now I think it has an enduring niche. For turning sunlight to physical work, solar panels plus electric motors are more efficient than photosynthesis plus mammalian digestion. Unless there's a universal tech crash, which I doubt, large-scale mechanized agriculture will remain economically sustainable, and reforms to preserve topsoil could make it ecologically sustainable. So the reason to grow food in your backyard is not to save the world, but because it improves your own life.
The idea of something called "An Economy" as distinct from the larger society was invented by political philosophers in the eighteenth century as a way of rationalizing certain self-interested, avaricious and greedy behaviors that take place in a market economy which were formerly sanctioned by ethical and moral systems. A totally arbitrary distinction is made between behaviors that are "economic" and hence outside all other spheres of human relationships - political, social, ethical, religious etc. where naked self-interest is expected and justifiable.
From 2003, Paul Krugman on serfdom and population. The idea is, when population density is high, it's cheaper to hire a worker than to feed a slave. When population density is low, the ruling powers have to hold their workers through violence to stop them from running off and being self-sufficient. This is something we'll have to struggle with as global population declines.
The Beer Game, or Why Apple Can't Build iPads in the US. The idea is, if a manufacturing and distribution system is too far-flung, then each part of the system tries to make up for delays by anticipating future orders. This leads to a feedback loop, instability, and failure. So China is good at manufacturing because the supply chains are so dense. I'm wondering how this will change as home-scale fabricators get cheaper and better. Maybe in 20 years a town will decide to specialize in building ultracapacitors or brain implants or airships, with all components made locally by different people in their garages.
We might as well consider civilization a game with bigger stakes than usual. It's no coincidence it was a success as a PC game too. Too bad both get a bit dull towards the end.
I think there's a deep truth here. Why is it that most games, and most societies, are more enjoyable at the beginning than at the end? I've quit Fallout 2. Now that I've got NPC's with shotguns, and gone back to the Den to kill the slavers and get the car, there's not much to look forward to: guns with different names and higher damage numbers, balanced by enemies with higher numbers, and a long series of quests that are starting to feel like busywork. The fun part was the beginning: designing my character, analyzing and optimizing skills and perks, squeaking by on primitive weapons and tools and finding my first good ones, and as a player, mastering the interface and unfolding a vision of a different world.
It's easier to see how this fits with civilization by looking at Civilization the game. You start out as a settler exploring the uncharted wilderness, you build up a city from nothing, you get new buildings and units with qualitatively different abilities; and then by the halfway point you can see the whole map, you have ships and airplanes, and "progress" becomes quantitative. In role-playing games this is called level grinding: the novelty and excitement are gone, and you're just doing the same stuff over and over to get higher numbers.
Compare this to the "American dream". You come from a poor family, work your way up into a series of higher paying and higher status jobs, get a house in the suburbs and two cars... and then what? There's nothing left but to make more money so you can get material possessions with higher price numbers. This is why rich people keep trying to make even more money, because if they say "I have enough", life becomes meaningless, game over. I think this is also why most lottery winners end up bankrupt. It's not just that they're irresponsible, but that they feel more alive when they're struggling.
Games don't model decline because it wouldn't be any fun, just trying to hold onto what you have as the numbers get smaller. But there would be one way... When your empire peaks, you stop playing the empire, and begin playing the new system that's going to replace it! Of course this is what the citizens do in real life. Many Americans are still obsessed with "security" (playing the decline), but more of us are giving up on the old system and turning our attention to various systems that might replace it.
Are human societies going to keep rising and falling forever? If we had a stable system, what would keep it interesting? Individual humans can keep their wealth stable and find meaning in things other than money, so how could a whole society do this? And why is this not a problem for other species? If life were satisfying in the right way, would we have no need for novelty? I'm thinking of an answer, but for now I'll leave these questions open...
What work are trees doing, and what work are birds doing? And what work are the sun and the moon and the stars doing? Except man, nobody is so insane to think that you have a certain great work to complete. This is how they have created the achieving mind.
This is related, oddly, to cosmology. I don't believe in the Big Bang, and some astronomers agree with me, but they have been pushed to the margins for cultural reasons. Our culture of expansion and achievement has projected its own mythology onto the universe, giving it a spectacular beginning and a linear progression to some kind of end. If, instead, the universe has always existed, then anything that could possibly be done has already been done an infinite number of times. If it's possible for you to win a Nobel Prize, then if you go far enough back, there's a world exactly like this one where you already did it. So there's no point doing anything just to accomplish it, only to enjoy it.
I feel like it's time for me to have some useless fun, so I've been playing Fallout 2, which you can download for $6 from GOG.com. If you decide to play Fallout 2, you will appreciate the Nearly Ultimate Fallout 2 Guide. ]]>Pacification was accomplished through the proffering of Western goods, including machetes, axes, metal pots, fishhooks, matches, mosquito netting, and clothing. The seductive appeal of such things was nearly irresistible, for each of these items can make a quantum improvement in a sylvan lifestyle. Acquisition of several or all of these goods is a transformative experience that makes contact essentially irreversible.
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With the convenience of matches, one quickly loses the knack for starting a fire. Shotguns decisively outperform bows and arrows, but cartridges must be bought at a good price. Such newly acquired dependencies fundamentally altered the life of the Indians, who were compelled to work for wages instead of spending their days hunting, fishing, and tending their gardens.
This is the kind of thing Ivan Illich wrote about all the time, and it's still happening today, to you. With the convenience of frozen dinners and restaurant meals, one quickly loses the knack for preparing food. iTunes decisively outperforms radio, but music files must be bought at a good price. To navigate sprawl you need a car, to pay expenses on a car you need a job, and so on. But at the same time, many of us understand this web of dependency and are fighting to get free of it. We're not trying to live like our ancestors, but to do something totally new: to preserve the most helpful complex technologies, while shifting to a political and economic system where power is fully shared.
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