As Usual

Sun Apr 11 08:45:54 PDT 2021

I suffer from cynicism. It's the Sunday a week after Easter and I just skimmed the HN front page for the morning.

So that's good. Especially for people who need new tracheas.

On the other hand...

...it's business as usual in the IT field.

And we are still under the illusion that you can eat money.

So that sucks.

What to do about it?

• Make it easier to "vote with your wallet"? I.e. ecologically harmonious catalogs?
• ...? Everything else I can think of is already covered:
• More information and education
• Laws and reforms

A coherent model

• eating local and organic from local ecologically harmonious farms helps improve your health, and it keeps resources circulating locally,
• reducing your energy waste (increasing efficiency or decreasing use) saves you money, reduces pollution, combats climate change,
• etc...

It seems to me that a major piece of the puzzle is to drastically reduce the amount of money it costs to live, to the point where you can work about twenty-four to thirty hours a week, and retire (if you like) after only a few years of career. If your rent is $250/mo. rather than $2500/mo. that gives you signficant options. I expect folks to use their free time for the important (non-automatable, non-drudgery) things like parenting, gardening, and mathematics.

Maybe I'm wrong about that (and we'll all become couch potatoes) but that's a much nicer problem to have than what we have got now, eh? I mean, we should be so lucky?

Viable Civilization

What would a *viable* civilization look like? One that respected Nature both as fellow living beings, neighbors and friends, and as four-billion-year-old self-improving nanotech? It would *feel* a lot *better*, of that much I'm sure.