Degeneration

Form Paul Sheehan at The Sydney Morning Herald:

We cannot slow down and it is at our peril

"The future is accelerating. It is racing towards us faster than ever in our collective lives. How can that be known, you must ask, given that the future hasn't happened yet. It hasn't happened but a long-term pattern of accelerating life-cycles of societies is established.
''This is a deep trend of history,'' writes a futurologist, Michael Lee, in a new book, Knowing Our Future. ''It would be foolish to believe this [deep trend] can be easily reversed … Civilisations have life cycles, too, and their durations are shrinking over time.
''The lifespan of socio-political empires averaged 2000 years for a period of four millennia, but then more than halved with the next 1000 years of history. This sharp decrease in the lifespan of civilisations accelerated yet again in the following 500 years of history, dropping to a little over one-tenth of their average duration in ancient times.''
Lee's study of this deep trend was in part based on the work of Robert Samet, a civil engineer and futurologist who traced the duration of societies over history. In Long-Range Futures Research (2008), he described a striking shrinkage in the longevity of empires and cultures: ''The earliest civilisations between 3500 BC and AD 500 last for an average of 2000 years … In the period from AD 500-1500, the average duration was 500 to 1000 years … since AD 1500 … the average duration has been 200 to 500 years.''

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Signs of an accelerating pattern of vulnerability and decline in our own western model of society are offered by the world's most famous economic historian, Professor Niall Ferguson. This year he used the Reith Lectures to chart the elements of decay in the Western civilisation. He gave his lecture series the gloomy and arresting title, The Great Degeneration, just released as a book.
He argues that advanced Western societies are developing sclerosis, manifest in the envelopment of life in bureaucratic and legal red tape. The most advanced economies are also becoming increasingly mendicant societies, evidenced by the unsustainable growth of social welfare spending in the European Union, the United States and, in a longer-term trend, Australia.
Among the telling low-lights offered by The Great Degeneration:

•   The advanced nations which have created public and private debt larger than their gross domestic products confront a narrow range of options. They must raise the rate of growth above the rate of interest. If they cannot, they must default on a large proportion of public debt. Or wipe out debts via currency depreciation and inflation.

•   The real rate of structural unemployment is concealed by the mendicant state. In the three years from June 2009 to June 2012, the world's largest economy, the US, created 2.4 million jobs but 3.3 million Americans were awarded disabled worker benefits. ''Unemployment is being concealed - and rendered permanent - in ways all too familiar to Europeans.''

•   The financial crisis in 2007 had its origins in over-complex regulations not just misguided deregulation.

• ''All political systems are likely to succumb to sclerosis, mainly because of rent-seeking activities by organised interest groups.''

• The rule of law is increasingly being superseded and displaced by the rule of lawyers.

If this lecture series could be summed up in a single sentence it is this: when a majority of people vote for a living rather than work for a living, democracy, freedom and living standards are all in a lock-step of decline.
Ferguson is also a noted critic of casino capitalism but even his concerns about the emerging dominance of the vast financial derivatives market pale when compared with the details provided in another book published this year, Dark Pools, by a Wall Street Journal reporter, Scott Patterson.
The accelerating cycles of capitalism's creative disruption have reached a new velocity with the basic form known as stock trading. Sixty years ago, the average stock trade involved buying and holding a stock for four years. By 2000, that average holding period had shrunk to eight months. By 2008, it was two months. By 2011, it was 22 seconds. It would be even less now.
Patterson describes the global financial market as ''a worldwide matrix of dazzlingly complex algorithms, interlinked computer hubs the size of football fields, and high-octane trading robots guided by the latest advances in artificial intelligence''.
''With electronic trading, a placeless, faceless, post-modern cyber-market in which computers communicated at warp speed, that physical sense of the market's flow had vanished … Regular investors, of course, had little idea about the massive transfer of wealth that was taking place.''
The transfer of wealth upwards over the past quarter-century is well documented as a byproduct of global capitalism.
Then there is climate change, an encompassing process of accelerating change and disruption. The ideology of manic economic growth, driven by the false wisdom that technology can conquer problems caused by technology, is clearly having a global impact on the environment caused by the reality that 7 billion people now live on the planet and the average person is consuming far more than ever before in history. That this must significantly affect not just the environment but the global climate invokes the most basic and self-evident commonsense.
The world's scientific community has presented a compelling case that the acceleration of global consumption is in turn accelerating the much deeper natural pattern of climate change.
If you feel like life around you is speeding up, especially the cycle of invention to obsolescence, it's not you, it's everyone and everything."
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There are some very interesting things in this opinion article, which is why I post it here complete.
I don't agree with everything here but there are some observations that really are spot-on, for example this one:
" when a majority of people vote for a living rather than work for a living, democracy, freedom and living standards are all in a lock-step of decline."
This is something that  amazes me: people who think they deserve a free ride, who want to do nothing and sit at a desk and collect bags of money for it. This is a moral failure. Society is built on trade and exchange: the trading of services (your labour) for credit exchangeable for goods and other services.

What has happenned? I suspect the main reason for the failure here is that we see others who appear to have done nothing for their wealth and thus people say to themselves "why should I be working if they have more than me yet they don't work at all as hard as me?" . . . . . except it is all a lie.
Money for nothing is worth nothing.

Bye Gerry

Gerry Anderson, creator of Supermarionation TV shows Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and others, has died at 83.
Thunderbirds had a big impact on me as a youngster: not only were there groovy zooming ships and gadgets, they did it all to SAVE people,  and yet there was still room for explosions, monsters and secret agents.

The only thing that came close since was Team America: World Police which you could say went further  - and it was inspired by Thunderbirds.

Iron Sky

If you haven't heard of it, Iron Sky is the spoof movie made by a group of indie folks from Finland, Germany and Australia. It is a whole lot of fun too. In short, the Nazis have hidden away on the dark side if the moon since 1945, and in 2018, they return to get their vengeance.   . . but don't take my word for it, see it yourself if you like B- movie sci-fi fun.
I bought it for 14 bucks online from itunes  (look carefully, there is a button there) which is still about the same price as a ticket at my local cinema and cheaper than a new movie DVD. 

It is awesome: Nazi flying saucers attacking the earth,  mad american advertising executives, and of course, the spunky Julia Dietze as you can see on the left, who really knows what high heels are for.

(You will have to see the movie now if you want to know what I am referring to!)

Don't forget, this is not made by any of the big movie houses. that fact alone should move you to have a look at it. Oh, and did I mention it's also hilarious? I have no fear or respect for the Nazis, and this movie doesn't either. Then again, it doesn't paint the American government of 2018 or the UN nicely either.
Best fun I have had all year, worth every cent.
Oh yes, I got the soundtrack by Laibach as well. Wunderbar!

Sign of the times

No Mistaking

Never mind why I think I need to say this. I'm saying it here and now.
I do NOT support any illegal activity including drug use.
That goes for me as a normal person and as High priest of The Church Of Nothing too. 
The C.O.N. does NOT advocate any drug use at all.
Even legal drugs are not good for you, the only exception being when a good doctor prescribes them and follows up with proper medical help.

I drink one cup of coffee a day in the morning and I might drink a glass of alcoholic drink on Christmas or a birthday or other special occasion but I am not a drinker. I do NOT smoke. I don't even like aspirin or other pills.
Do not associate me with any of that, I have better things to do with my time. 

If you really want pleasure that is not bad for you or illegal, why not try sex? at least your body is designed for it even if the ultimate purpose is only to make more people, but then we modern folks have ways around that. 
And while I'm at it, don't get caught up in the wacky stuff. Pain is pain, pleasure is pleasure.
 Apart from sex, your body releases endorphins to ease pain because you overdid it when exercising.
In my view the human body is not that different from a machine: if you drive it hard all the time it will wear out faster. That doesn't matter with a car or appliance since you can just get another but with us humans, you only get one body. 

This is all my views, please note. If there is scientific evidence to support or discredit this let me know. I am always open to learn new things. 

A new form of magnetism, plus WHAT?

I was reading this article over at the Reg which talks about a newly confirmed magnetic state, one that is chaotic . . . . . . . . but read on . . . . .

The researchers "believe they’ve observed fractionalised quantum states.

Quantum states are generally assumed to exist only as whole numbers – after all, the basis of quantum physics is that the quantum is the smallest possible change in state that can exist."

I cracked up at this point. I love it when scientists kick a hole in their own sacred canon. It fills me with hope that we might actually solve some of the serious problems we have without dying of collective stupidity.

 Enjoy the silly season folks.

The crappy code problem

In "What Compsci textbooks don't tell you: Real world code sucks", author David Mandl at The Register talks about how badly coded software is everywhere and yet there is little being done about it: relating to his experiences in writing software for financial houses, he cites some scary problems that have caused stock market trouble and made billions "disappear".
The article targets some basic faults with software projects: first, that programmers are just not very good , or worse still make their code unnecessarily complex so that no-one else can understand it, effectively keeping themselves employed since they are the only one who knows how it all works.
Then there is the "eternal patching" problem: badly written wares are patched to fix the fault but then there is little incentive to fix the original code so it keeps getting patched and becomes unweildly.
Well, I can see that this is a modern problem that won't be going away soon.

Sometimes I think that I should just stop upgrading to escape from the new bug problem and the de-featuring problem. I'm talking about iTunes 11 here. For some reason known only to Apple, they have removed features from the previous version and changed things that I certainly didn't need or want changed.
The worst part of all?
iTunes 10 would start when I pressed the play button, but the new version can be delayed by as much as seconds after I press it. WHY? the files are the same, the computer is the same, so why a new delay? I can only call it an anti-feature. I have been warned not to try and go back to the old version too: apparently there is a real danger of losing your library and having to rebuild it.   WTF?
This is definitely the silly season folks.