I’m tired. It’s been a long day, and I was writing and doing battle with formatting, and I’m exhausted.
If we’re going to cast this blog post in the context of yesterday’s example of a really cool status report, the forces of evil are definitely in the ascendant this week. Oh, I’m battling them and getting work done, but it’s taking its toll on me.
This being spring break, on Monday we went to see the elephant – no, nothing metaphorical about it. I took older son to see the elephant. He likes elephants. I think they’re related or something.
It was cold and a little strange, because all the animals were either asleep or eating. But it was fun because it was the first time in… oh, a good year, that the Hoyts were out all together, all at the same time. There is nothing that isn’t fun when we go out anywhere. Our life tends to take a really odd turn when we start talking. What I mean is, I sometimes think our kids view life upside and sideways and we… we aid and abet them.
When they were very little, they used to play a “spaceship game.” Being the children of science fiction writers, their game was a little more coherent than the average children’s game. That is, as older son conceived of it, and younger son added to it, when he started talking, there was an actual bit of world building, and they kept logs or our expeditions.
The conceit was that the house was a spaceship, piloted by a family (ours) which, with a lot of other families, went out and explored new planets and reported back to an explorer corps.
If you can’t see how this made every day life a continuous adventure, you’re not my kids.
If we were under a severe ail storm, it was fire from the native planet the spaceship was orbiting. The car was the away-pod. Trips to the grocery store were sample collecting. Trips to museums/parks/amusement parks were formal visits to other planets.
Our writers’ group meetings were encounters among the explorer families.
And there was a pseudo military structure and a path of promotion. I suspect Robert still has – somewhere – a list of every rank and the colors associated with it. Sometimes I was informed I’d been promoted or disciplined, but mostly we just went about every day in a cloud of the kids talking about the strange and exciting other world they created where we went.
Sometimes I wonder what other people thought was happening – but I didn’t care, because, unless I was driving and they got in a fight over something stupid – I enjoyed the stories they told.
When we moved out of our last house, they wrote decommissioning papers for the spaceship and stuck it through a crack between a closet and a wall. I wonder if some future remodeler will find it and be utterly puzzled.
The game died shortly thereafter, because they were when we moved 8 and 13 and starting to write, and well… living in a live role playing game gets old, I guess, even if it’s your family.
But we still can’t go out without coming up with ten ideas for stories.
It’s an odd way to live.
Sometimes I feel a little guilty. I wonder if we’ve twisted them out of all normal intercourse. We weren’t trying to. We were just living.
And sometimes… sometimes I think that there is an innate need for a rich fantasy life in humans, and that it’s the other people, who can’t create their own, who are deficient. Those of us who can live half-immersed in dream rarely feel a need to destroy other people or tell them how to live. We can make our own music.
The bad side, of course, if that – as they’ve found – there is an edge between dream and reality. For the kids to become writers – or really active in anything – they had to leave the Live Rople Playing Game behind. I miss it, and I know the do too, but the imaginary world intruded on the real world, and as they wanted to learn about the real world, they had to push the imaginary one back and make it less prominent.
Weirdly, a lot of the people I find who are truly embittered or who feel like the world is totally unfair, have never to that. Not really. They live in the world as they wish it were, superimposing it on reality by an effort of will, and if reality deviates, it is reality that is wrong and must adapt, not them.
I feel a lot of what we see, particularly weird arguments – I read on a blog that China is not socialist. It’s a mixture of communism and capitalism. In other words, hot ice and strangely warm snow. (Rolls eyes.) China is of course socialist with a strong component of state-capitalism. Or in other words, fascist, which is a crappy regimen but marginally more stable than communism. (They go poor slower. Though since China like Germany has a racial component… never mind.) – and defensive maneuvers including calling someone the worst person in the world for not agreeing with them, it’s an attempt to keep that game going, to keep the imagined world safe and cozy and unmixed with any harsh reality.
The thing is that it’s possible now – more than at any other time – for large portions of the population to live in that sort of dream. It’s not just that all their friends believe the same but that we’re a rich enough society that a vast part of it is insulated from the realities of life as expressed by Heinlein “Root, hog or die.”
Or even from the reality that the balmy lack of wars we’ve been experiencing these last 50 years or so (we’ve had little wars, but no world wide conflagration) is a result of the Pax Americana, and of us being the major superpower. The idea that the rest of the world will be peaceful and happy the moment we withdraw is more of a fantasy than my kids’ old space game. (This doesn’t mean I advocate foreign adventurism, though at times it is inevitable, but that I believe we should be bolstering our defenses, not tearing them donw.)
Or from the – harsh – facts that books, games, stories of all sorts, even reports of news are not a way to “change the world” or “make the world a better place” (which at any rate brings up the questions “change into what?” “Why?” “Make it a better place for whom?” “how?”) but ways to entertain people and to provide them with the sort of ludic interludes they enjoyed as children.
Looking at both economic and international news, I very much feel the need to escape. And I know I’m not alone.
Will some of these things have a component of utopia or prescription? Almost always. We write what we are.
BUT would following sf writers’ ideas lead to a “better tomorrow?” Oh, please. Sometimes I think from the UN to nuclear disarmament, to Obamacare and not forgetting both the new ice-age and anthropogenic global warming, the surest way to make a good decision is to go against what my people advise.
This is because what makes a good book, or a good immersive reality, is much simpler than the real world. If you factored in everything that works in a real world, you’d not have a novel, you’d have soup.
Take the kids space game – it was lots of fun, and I liked hearing them – but who was that central authority? And why were they dispatching families with kids to dangerous areas. I don’t think it was an utopia, Toto.
So it’s easier to simply, to fasten onto an idea as a plot device.
The problem is that a lot of my colleagues, and a lot of the fans, and a lot of people who live in the world of ideas become blinkered by the fantasy reality and unable to see the real world.
Even I have to fight against it, to remind myself that no, unlike the Bradbury story Almost the End of The World, a collapse won’t take us back to a simpler time, and simpler abilities won’t be in demand. Collapses don’t usually subtract tech, they just make the real world unreliable.
And are we headed for one? Almost for sure. What I mean is, the way we’re printing currency, we’ll pay for it.
OTOH something could happen. A miracle. We could discover the equivalent of Heinlein’s shipstone, that is, free, unlimited energy. Or… something else. History could take a side turn. And we might escape the worst.
We can’t tell. This is why making predictions about the future is so difficult.
And why the dream is so easy.
The dream is fine, as an amusement, and I depend on making a living from it, and I read for escape, just like the rest of you.
But it’s not real.
Sometimes, like Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching, you need to open your eyes, then open your eyes again, and make an effort to keep seeing reality, even when it hurts.
It’s not a comfortable thing to do. But it’s the only way to stay one step ahead of the future and survive it. More importantly, it’s the only way to make sure we have some control over our own fate and the fates of those we love, instead of letting things come out of nowhere — like my promotions and demotions in the space game.
It’s very important to remember what’s reality and what’s fantasy, even when we feel the need to escape to stay sane.
According To Hoyt 
“The conceit was that the house was a spaceship, piloted by a family (ours) which, with a lot of other families, went out and explored new planets and reported back to an explorer corps.
If you can’t see how this made every day life a continuous adventure, you’re not my kids.”
Huh. I played a game much like this for quite a while as a kid. But by myself, and never told anyone, because while I was quite clear it was a game and not reality, I wasn’t confident anyone else would be clear that I understood the distinction.
When it got old, the game changed to submarine colony. Probably went through some other permutations I’ve forgotten.
Eventually I decided it was cool enough just being in a town full of real scientists and real laboratories: I grew up in Los Alamos. Funny how you can miss the cool that is right in front of your face.
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*sigh* I wonder how different things would have been for me, had I grown up in a place like that.
Don’t get me wrong. Having the run of the YMCA Camp, during the summers, where my father worked was awesome, but I grew up around a bunch of adults (most classmates were too far away to hang out with on a regular basis) who really didn’t give a damn about the kinds of things I was interested in, and considered college a place where kids went to learn how to be arrogant know-it-alls.
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” and considered college a place where kids went to learn how to be arrogant know-it-alls.”
I’m an adult, and consider them correct. How often do kids go get a degree and immediately think it means they can go tell all the people who have been doing the job in the real world for the last twenty years that they are doing it all wrong?
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I’m an adult and I still play that game.
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I play it while driving.
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“Begin strafing run: Pew pew pew!!”
We gots some great hills for playing that.
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I really have to elaborate.
Star Wars came out the summer I turned 15. Shortly after I got my driving license.
Los Alamos is famous for its finger mesas. These are long skinny mesas with perfectly flat tops and very steep sides. Between the mesas are equally long, skinny valleys with perfectly flat floors.
One of the roads in the area makes a fairly steep descent from the top of a finger mesa down into the adjacent valley and then has a long, straight run along the valley floor between this mesa and its neighbor.
C’mon, you can see where this is going. “It’ll be just like Beggars Canyon back home!”
Ah, youth.
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Oh yeah! I know that road. :)
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Might Kent the Bold let little ol’ me in on the secret designations (highway numbers) of these fabulous roads? Sounds like they’re crying out for motorcycle reenactments…
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The one I had in mind is now closed to the public, post-9/11. However, two others are almost as good: New Mexico Route 502 coming into Los Alamos from the east, and East Jemez Road just to its south.
For that matter, State Road 4 to Bandelier has some wonderful canyon descents/climbs.
Really, the whole area is beautiful.
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Many thanks, I’ve been ‘near’ the region, but that was many a year ago. I’ll write these down in my travel goals: roads to explore.
I’m fond of much of the subtle beauty of the Southwest, and have wandered one or another NM road from time to time.
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Did you go to see Up? You might find the opening interesting.
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But by myself, and never told anyone, because while I was quite clear it was a game and not reality, I wasn’t confident anyone else would be clear that I understood the distinction.
Wise. I just recently figured out that people were such idiots about not believing me because they couldn’t understand that when they asked me to tell them imaginary stories, I didn’t believe the ones I told them!
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You grew up in Los Alamos, I know at least one guy grew up in/near Oak Ridge — I grew up in Kingfisher, “Buckle of the Wheat Belt”, _but_ my first Scoutmaster was a Kerr McGee nuclear engineer, about five years before Karen Silkwood’s death… Atomic Energy merit badge = PieceOfCake, with sprinkles!
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“Sometimes I feel a little guilty. I wonder if we’ve twisted them out of all normal intercourse. We weren’t trying to. We were just living.”
Why on earth would you for even a second wish to condemn your offspring to normal? Look around and see the thundering hordes firmly ensconced in normal. Ewwwww. I can’t for long before having to look away.
But then I’m an Odd and always have been.
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I have to agree with you too– why would anyone want to be this normal?
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The Smart and Crunchy(tm) Son isn’t normal. He sees ‘normal’ every day in high school, and wants no part of it. Having exposed him as much as possible to the real world (where results are important, and stupidity can hurt you badly) he views where he’s at kind of like visiting an asylum.
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You have introduced him to Douglas Adams, and in particular to “So long and thanks for all the fish”, one hopes
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Oh, yeah. I’ve been trying to get him interested in Pratchett as well, but no luck so far. (Too many YA zombie/apocalypse series out there…)
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I lived that way from six to twelve when my parents pulled me out of the fantasy and into reality. My reality included washing clothes in ditches, cooking, cleaning, changing diapers, etc. What saved me was the ability to immerse myself in the books. It made the reality less hard. My mind still turns to stories for stress relief.
The problem with this kind of mind shows in other ways– when I was sick and on some severe drugs, I began a path of hallucination that included becoming the characters that I read (or the hubby read to me– at one point I couldn’t read). Plus it could go bad really quickly when I was not in control of it.
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My medium of choice was modeling clay. My mom introduced me to it, and I learned how to mold all kinds of objects, including people. Using cardboard boxes I built the Seaview from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Time Tunnel, and the Jupiter 2. I built portions of the Enterprise, but it was just too damned big to reproduce in my bedroom. And then I played out the stories from my imagination that I thought they should have used in those shows. I guess I was a writer then and didn’t know it.
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Heinlein knew very well how significant a development shipstones would be. We are awash in cheap bordering on free energy. It’s just seldom in the place or in a form easily turned to our immediate use. And once generated it’s transient, definitely a case of “use it or lose it.”
Our current best devices for high density, easily transportable, useful energy storage are all chemical in nature requiring a fairly violent reaction to convert the stored energy into actual work. An internal combustion engine or a firearm are two classic examples.
Batteries are horribly bulky and terribly inefficient. Handy little buggers in the applications where their poor weight to energy density can be dealt with, but so much less effective that a simple metal tank of petroleum product. It has always been the primary stumbling block holding back development of practical electric automobiles.
The problem with electrical generation is the old question of average vs peak loading. Power once generated is either used or lost. Saving it for later simply isn’t an option, at least at this time. TVA went so far as to cut the top off a mountain outside Chattanooga so they could pump water uphill into the lake they built in off peak hours just so they could let it run back down through pumps turned into generators during peak demand. I understand it provides the equivalent of a nuclear reactor as a power source.
Shipstones would solve all that. Extra energy at hand? Stick it into a ‘stone for later use. I always pictured vast shipstone farms in the sunny southwest just soaking up all that free abundant energy, and when they were ripe/full being plucked for shipment where needed. Sadly, Robert was a bit vague about the specifics of their construction. One of his little jokes I’m sure.
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I’m cautiously optimistic that the developments in so-called “super-capacitors” may help in the area of energy storage.
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Yeah. They should build them in space, or grow them on vast solar powered vines. Hmm, read something about that somewhere . . .
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The problem is, most of the right-thinking people think we already have the shipstone, and the minority with real power think cheap energy and an expanding humanity is the worst thing that can happen. The first generation of electric cars was a disaster, but there’s a “documentary” movie that says the electric cars really worked, and the oil companies surpressed them. (They went 50 miles on a night plugged in, then a month later 30 miles, then ten miles, then they were absolutely useless and the auto company bought them back at a huge loss.)
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The real problem is that such “right-thinking” people are completely incapable of understanding the basic science that underlies their world, and who think that wish-fulfillment is how things Really Work (TM).
Which, I suppose, does an awful lot to explain how Obama and company wound up running this country…
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Couple years ago Uncle Timmy told me a utility company in New York State wanted to construct a facility similar to the one near Chatenooga. Enviro weenies shut them down cold with lawsuits.
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I’m pretty sure the best way to do this will be to find an efficient way to store hydrogen so that you can later combust it and generate electricity. Probably the solution involves creation of methane and/or methanol (or similar). I think means we need some catalytic improvements to take CO2, turn it into CO and then add 4 hydrogens to the CO.
There doesn’t seem to be any good way to store H2 as a pure substance (gas. liquid) because it’s such a small molecule it leaks out and makes what it leaks through brittle.
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This. With nuclear, the plant costs as much to not run as to run, so it’s not great for peak power generation. With solar, you take the energy when it comes, ditto. So you store as synthetic petroleum generated using coal and electrolytic hydrogen. Or, if you are really worried about global warming, you find a way to pull CO out of the atmosphere to hydrogenate.
A little local company hereabouts was working on catalytic reduction of CO2 using solar power. Didn’t prove viable in the current market, but that could change.
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I like the one I saw that some guy in England is developing to store Hydrogen in glass microspheres ( http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/2012/07/26/british-company-teams-nasa-develop-hydrogen-fuel/ ). Somehow, heating them will allow the Hydrogen to escape, so it can be used. He plans on making it available as an automobile fuel, because apparently it’s not hard to modify an existing engine to run on Hydrogen.
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Interesting. Storing H2 in a manner that is sufficiently energy dense to be useful and yet be both safe and easy to extract the H2 from is definitely a hard problem. Burning H2 whether in a standard internal combusion engine or some thing else (e.g. a fuel cell) is the easy bit.
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I’m a different kind of Odd on this one. I have sometimes done a Walter Mitty thing in my head in the past, but never got into my own world on a large scale basis. Also, whenever I talked about anything out of the ordinary, my parents’ eyes would glaze over. Kind of put a damper on things.
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While on this blog, rather than eyes glazing, at least half if not more went “pocketa, pocketa, pocketa” in our own heads.
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“Or even from the reality that the balmy lack of wars we’ve been experiencing these last 50 years or so (we’ve had little wars, but no world wide conflagration) is a result of the Pax Americana, and of us being the major superpower. The idea that the rest of the world will be peaceful and happy the moment we withdraw is more of a fantasy than my kids’ old space game.”
I believe it’s often not a conscious choice for some of these folks, or not at first. From your previous posts, you seem to be fairly well aware of how atrocious public education is, and what passes for history or civics lessons is astounding. It was bad when I was coming up, and it appears to be even worse now. And isn’t the world a much more comforting place viewed through the eyes of those who believe civilization always progresses, wars are caused only by nationalism or misunderstanding, and things would get better if only everyone could better see things their way?
Of course, I think that the refusal–as it appears to me, at any rate–to consider countervailing facts or worldviews is immoral and irresponsible. So too the resentment of the messenger, if based solely on the message. In case one can’t tell normative from positive description, the discussion of harmful unintended consequences or the parade of horribles that may result does not mean that the naysayer wants any of the negative things to happen, or that all of the bad outcomes will happen. Nor does describing either make someone a bad person. I do think that stubbornness is (or is closer to) a conscious choice, especially in those prizing open-mindedness generally but who then, inexplicably, close their minds and ears to arguments that are unpleasant to hear.
And it is reckless to refuse to consider that message just because your belief is more comforting – the faith, for instance, that a dictator or terrorist somewhere would stop short if you talked more nicely and helped him understand that hurting others was wrong. As if a dictator, like a bully in an afterschool special, would say, “You know, I never really thought of it that way before,” and resign to do social work.
Or take the same magical thinking writ small: say, if children learn not to make gun-shapes out of their fingers or pop tarts, we should be able to stop all homicides within a generation. My friend, I would love a safer world, but I don’t think that’s going to get us there. And I’m not saying this because I want people to be killed. (Though, because I am an NRA member, I’m told by a substantial minority that that is exactly what I must want.)
Sorry for the ramble – thanks for sharing a great story about your family, and some great takeaways with your points about dreams and reality.
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As though social work were a good thing.
Which it’s not; it’s meddling. MYOB.
M
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We can eliminate murder inside a generation exactly as easily as we can eliminate fornication.
Supposing that the one is natural, and should only be celebrated, while the other can and must be eliminated comes from a poor understanding of human nature.
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Dreams are a controlled environment, even if you’re not entirely in control.
You can see what the inputs are, and at least KNOW what’s going on.
I think the fad for predictive this or that– there’s ALWAYS a fad thing that’ll tell you what’s going to happen, ABC– is because “we’re all gonna die because of this and that” is oddly less scary than “I have no real idea.”
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I expect your trip to the zoo didn’t turn out much like ours:
http://jasini.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/last-weeks-zoo-trip/
Though, really, our trip was pretty routine, until we were driving home, and saying, “What on earth are all those police cars doing here?”
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I read the original news story and cried. It felt like my last refuge of childhood had been violated. I know, zoos are not sacred ground, and I’ve seen “kids” behaving badly (wanted to push one idiot into an otter pool. He was leaning waaaayyy over the fence with a stick, trying to “poke them out” to see them. They were not at home at the time, as the sign clearly stated, but anyway.) at zoos, but it still feels like a punch in the gut to read about the mess. I’m glad y’all missed it.
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Did they ever come up with any evidence there actually were shots fired? All the articles I come up with state that there were reports of shots being fired but the police haven’t came up with any evidence, nothing was hit, no shell-casings, or anything. Makes me almost wonder if someone wasn’t doing something like lighting off firecrackers as a prank.
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I haven’t been following the story much since. That is a possibility.
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Looking for further news, I found this:
http://www.kansascity.com/2014/03/25/4915569/juvenile-charges-filed-after-kc.html
Sounds like someone *had* a gun, at least.
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I found myself shocked as a child when I learned other kids didn’t tell themselves stories about the world. It seemed so strange. Then came the devastating revelation that they didn’t really want to read. Here I am, surrounded by aliens.
I wrote some of them down, I kept others solely for myself. As I progressed through school, the keeping to myself became more common than the writing down. Far too many teachers obsessed with making sure you understand the difference between fantasy and reality… “Ma’am, I made these characters up in my head. I crafted them, deliberately. I’m clear on the distinction between real folks and made up folks. The made up folks go away when they annoy me.”
Anyroad, thanks for the slice of life. It brings back interesting memories, and I believe I will dwell in the mind for a bit.
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There are a lot of disturbing things that you find out about other people when you start talking to them about tools and other things that you’ve constructed in your mind, and you discover that they don’t think about things like that, at all.
Ask someone about how they visualize the passage of time, for example: In my experience, most people don’t bother to construct such a visualization. They don’t even see the need for it, when you talk to them. “Time? Why would I need to visualize that…? What are you talking about? What use is that…?”.
Some rare few have created visualizations that take on the aspect of calenders, bound into books, and placed on shelves. Others see time’s passage as being a moving point on a helical track, moving along a repeating annual cycle, one year being a single “spin” along it. The vast majority see no need to place themselves into any such mental contrivance, content to live without developing a real context for “when” they are, let alone “where”. There are probably dozens of ways to visualize such things, but the average person doesn’t seem to see the need. Which is flippin’ odd, to me. How do you get a feel for, and an understanding of history, without such a mental tool?
Most people don’t bother to develop such tools, which is a strange thing, to me. You try talking to them about such things, and they simply stare at you with uncomprehending looks, and think you’re strange for even thinking these things, let alone trying to talk about them.
I suspect that such things as this are accurate markers for the “odd”. If you’ve done something like this, you’re not one of the herd, I fear. Telling yourself stories, creating mind-worlds of your own, is another. I remember conversations I had with other guys pulling long night duty, trying to stay awake, and asking them what they did during such long hours of monotony. You don’t know how few there are that can even conceive of such things on their own, or feel the need to. It’s frightening to realize how bare the mental landscape is, for many people.
I suspect that in many ways, the urge to tell stories is a means of colonizing other minds, if only for a moment or two. You perceive a void, and try to fill it. Perhaps, if you pour enough of yourself into your stories, you’ll manage to ignite a spark inside another mind, and be able to light a fire from that.
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I have a heck of a time figuring out why people would visualize as a way to understand— I imagine the feel, and construct visualizations to convey those sensations. (Usually tactile, but sometimes almost-audio, with some scent. Probably because my eyesight isn’t so good.)
I’d imagine this is related to the “types of learning” thing that was big a decade or so back.
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Maybe the term “visualize” should be expressed as “abstraction”, then.
I don’t think I’ve ever run into someone who described how they thought of these things as being in a tactile manner, to be honest. Although, when you think about it, that’s precisely what the Incas must have been doing with their quipus.
So, Fox… Do you build a mental abstraction to think about time, and it’s passage? How do you organize your thoughts on the issue, when placing yourself into context in terms of history, past-present-future?
I have trouble trying to put myself into your shoes, and imagining a tactile “feel” for time. How does that work? Knots on a string, kind of?
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More like water– if you’ve ever been swimming in a river, kind of like that, with the stuff that happens being like rocks, sand, silt, branches, leaves, trees in that river. (Makes it very easy to imagine God watching from the riverbank and knowing what is in THAT spot right THERE and what is above and below it.)
My four year old informs me it’s time to make lunch, so I’ll have to leave it at that.
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What’s the course of this river look like, I wonder?
Seriously–You’re the first person I’ve met and talked to about this who’s come up with that particular abstraction, although I have to admit it’s pretty obvious once you hear it. We’re always hearing of time as a river, so I wonder why more people don’t build their abstractions like you have.
Most seem to go with something like the paper calender bound into a book, and on a shelf, different shelves being decades, different bookshelves being centuries, etc.
I’ve always seen it as that helical path, winding through space and time, which makes me almost unique.
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I always have trouble when reading the 1632 universe remembering which are the “Uptimers” and which are the “Downtimers” because it’s almost completely opposite of how I think of it. For long term times like that, I tend to picture a timeline with the oldest time at the top, and the newest time at the bottom.
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Chuckle Chuckle
A few years back, my mom (a school teacher) asked some of her students to use the word “back” in a sentence. Some of them responded “Back to the future” and Mom later talked with me about it. The thing is that Mom hadn’t seen the “Back To The Future” movie. [Wink]
Oh as for understanding “Uptimers” and “Downtimers” in the 1632 universe, I think of two ladders. The “Uptimers” were higher on Ladder One until they were moved to a “lower spot” on Ladder Two. Of course, “Downtimers” just refers to people who were always on Ladder Two. [Smile]
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The German terminology for the stone ages always leaves me blinking. Early neolithic becomes “early young stone age”. Late neolithic becomes “old young stone age”. The trouble is that the old-young-stone-age comes after the young-young-stone age. Oh, and the young stone age comes after the young-old-stone age. Which may or may not be separate from the old stone age, depending on who the author is writing for and what nomenclature they are using. “Uptime” and “downtime” sounds blessedly clear! :)
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We’re always hearing of time as a river, so I wonder why more people don’t build their abstractions like you have.
Been thinking about it as I got lunch set up, trying to put words to the feel– I think that few folks visualize it that way because when you read about it in books, folks always talk about the river from the God point of view.
That works ok for a history book, but not for an individual story– we’re not on the bank, we’re in the middle getting pushed around, hit by stuff we can’t see, feeling the effects of things that we only guess at and rarely glimpse from a very limited perspective. It’s only really small things that we notice and catch that we can examine closely, and while we’re doing that the entire river is passing by.
We can sort of figure out what’s up stream because there are other folks around, and we can pass on our impressions, and if they say they got hit by a log we can try to spot a log now…but we’re taking a lot on faith, and our experience, and belief in a shared understanding of similar but not the same experience.
Makes me wonder if the “time is like a river” cliche came about from someone having the same sort of trying-to-put-it-in-words thing I do, and then it was so good for explaining the God point of view that folks who’ve never stood in a river and drawn the connection started using it.
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…! I always thought I was weird(-er than usual) for thinking in those terms. I always conceived of a flow of teeny-tiny beads…very tactile notion for me.
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As a general rule, I quit discussing the specifics of my canted brain in 1st grade or so. I felt odd enough without adding to it.
Nonetheless, I’ve had lapses where I opened my mouth and the ol’ brain had its say. The looks serve as a fine reinforcement for camouflage. Most folks just don’t think like I do, and I occasionally become discouraged with glimpses of their interior lives.
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The really discouraging thing is realizing that many don’t have interior lives…
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Exactly. they are too busy with the minutiae of everyday living to do anything else.
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I suspect that part of it is that those who don’t have interior lives are sufficiently challenged by day to day life that they have no excess mental horsepower or bandwidth to put to use for such introspection.
Either that, or they’re using it for something else, and what that “else” might be, I have no idea.
I do find such people to be disturbing, and somehow, not quite what I consider human. I swear, I’ve met dogs and cats with more imagination, compassion, and richer inner lives than a lot of the malformed two-legged apes I’ve been unfortunate enough to encounter.
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I don’t like thinking this way. It’s too close too thinking that other people aren’t human, because they don’t live their lives, like you do yours. They may not read as much, or think about the same things you do, but they are every bit as human as you are.
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I may not be expressing what I’m getting at, very well. There’s a young lady with Down’s Syndrome who works as a bagger, at the local market. I’ve talked to her often enough that I have a reasonably good feel for whether or not she has an inner life, and she does. It may not resemble mine or yours, but she does have one, and it’s actually a lovely place. I would never doubt her innate humanity, or right to exist. Hell, I’d gladly defend both to the death, to tell you the truth.
The ones I’m referring to are like that creepy little kid down the street I caught torturing one of the neighborhood cats. You look into their eyes, and there’s something utterly lacking in there. No compassion, no empathy, just sheer unadulterated desire for gratification and power. There ain’t no “there” there, if you catch my drift.
I’ve dealt with enough of that sort of “human” to have an utter lack of compassion for them. I also refuse to consider them as anything other than what they are–Two-legged animals who’ve managed to pass themselves off as human beings. Vermin, in other words.
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Ah now I know what you mean. Psychopaths and sociopaths.
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I don’t know that those terms really capture what I’m getting at, either. I know a couple of high-functioning sociopaths who I’d rather have as neighbors than some others I can think of…
Some of the sociopaths I know of basically know they’re missing something, so they rely on complex rules they’ve made up from observation or that they’ve been given. They have the self-knowledge to know that they’re missing something important, but they try to compensate for it and still fit into polite society.
If I ever hear that they’ve done something horrible, I’m going to know that someone somehow violated one of their “rules”, like killing their dog.
The guy I’m thinking of? If some idiot cop were to ever casually kill one of his pets, I shudder to think what the likely denouement would be. His hometown will likely be missing a police department. All of it.
That said, I’d still rather have that guy as a neighbor, than some of the other idiots I’ve been saddled with over the years.
Maybe the term I’m looking for isn’t really in the language. There’s a component of what we could term religious spiritualism, so perhaps we could come up with a word that combines soulless with sociopath? It’s a gap in the language.
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What I really meant was psychopath.
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It sounds like you’re talking about the Possessed.
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I’ve been seeing that, particularly in some of my colleagues. There’s a look to the eyes. It’s not so much like no one is home, but like SOMETHING has moved in.
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Empty. That’s a good term for what I’m getting at.
Void of soul, empty of character, and possessed of an utter moral vacuum.
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“The guy I’m thinking of? If some idiot cop were to ever casually kill one of his pets, I shudder to think what the likely denouement would be. His hometown will likely be missing a police department. All of it.”
I would consider this response perfectly reasonable (which of course may mean I’m not a reasonable person) but I wouldn’t really consider someone who cared that much for their pets to be a true sociopath. Sociopathic tendencies? Sure, but I see a true sociopath running strictly on reason and logic, without really any input from emotions. The fact that he would take out the police department, because he valued it less than his dog would show his sociopathic tendencies, but the fact that he did it in retribution for losing a dog that was already gone and he couldn’t get back shows too much input from emotions to be a true sociopath.
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There seem to be a number of people who are sociopathic in regards to humans, but not animals.
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You might find this essay interesting:
The Terminal Orc
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@ Bearcat.
It’s not that the gentleman I’m thinking of is entirely sane, or that he’s that possessive, it’s more a case of loyalty. I think the only unconditional love he’s ever gotten is from his dogs, and he feels a deeper connection to them than he will ever have with another human being. Hurt one of them, intentionally, with cruelty intended, and he’s simply going to end you. I don’t think he sees a difference between a human being and say, a coyote or cougar going after one of his dogs or the sheep.
A mutual friend told me what happened when he found one of the local little creeps torturing one of his border collies, after having trapped the dog. It was a near-run thing, but the mutual friend just barely managed to dissuade him from gutting the kid like a fish, and leaving him where he found him with the dog. No emotion at all was shown, while he had the kid (early teenager) pinned up on the fence with one hand, and the other filled with an open folding knife. “No, Fred… I’m going to kill this one. Slow.” Said in an utter monotone, and with no more regard for the kid than you or I might have for a rat in a trap.
What stopped him from doing it? Our mutual friend pointing out that the cops would come and take him away, and then his dogs would go to the pound, and might not get adopted out before they were killed by the Humane Society. Without that, and a need to get the dog to the vet, I think that kid would have died that afternoon. And, died horribly. I’ve always wondered what the hell happened with that little creep, afterwards. One would hope that the experience scared him straight, but you really never know…
What’s messed up about me? I would probably vote for a finding of “justifiable homicide” if I were on the jury. That particular dog was a sweetheart, and it was heartbreaking to see what that little creep did to her. Hell, to be quite honest, I don’t know what I’d have done if I’d been in the shoes of that mutual friend. I might have just told him to get on with it, and I’d be in the car taking the dog to the vet…
I thank God on a daily basis that I’m not faced with moral choices like that as a routine.
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How true. Extroverts are often lacking interior resources, which is why they need so much more stimulation and can’t understand how you can live without it.
It goes back to the cradle. You can figure out which kids will be extroverted by noticing which ones respond more weakly, or not at all, to a stimulus.
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You’re probably better off not worrying about My Neuropsych Is Not Your Neuropsych. Seriously, there are just so many variations in the brain and nerve software that are concealed by common culture and language, that it pretty much has to be a Valuable Feature instead of a bug. Once you’ve spent your time wondering about whether your red is the same as everybody else’s red, that’s about the end of that. (Unless you want to do philosophy or neuropsych or something similar.)
For what it’s worth, it’s pretty obvious that a lot of you all on this blog are engineering types….
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As long as we’re not social engineers, it’s all good.
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That is one of the things you learn how to do when you do family history research. Often times, you see people, names, dates and places in isolation. Oh. He was born in 1842, in England. He married in 1862 in Philadelphia. He died in 1917 in Nebraska. You can kind of trace a general path but until you can place it on a continuum with world and local events, even laws passed at a certain time can make a BIG difference in understanding hows and whys, which leads to more finds and even some cool stories about his life. I do like visualizing time lines to get a more full picture of what was happening. And that spills over into my life too.
Next time you run it to somebody like that, who doesn’t think they think that way, ask them where they were on 9/11 or when Challenger blew up or . . . . Maybe they’ll get the idea. They do mark time and have some visualization of it but never think about it.
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“Perhaps, if you pour enough of yourself into your stories, you’ll manage to ignite a spark inside another mind, and be able to light a fire from that”
THIS THIS THIS. Uh, good abstraction / visualization. It is DARK out there in the wilderness of the Average. We need to light up more Odds to illuminate our passage…
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So long as we’re not lighting those Odds the way Nero is reputed to have lit Christians…
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I think of time as a rope frayed all up and down its length made of bubbles with each bubble being a separate moment in time. The individual strands are separate timelines. I’ll admit its an incomplete picture but I need to do more reading to get a better grasp on it. :D
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It shocked me to realize that there are people who take no pleasure in learning things. I am like Guyal of Sfere; I can’t stuff enough nollij into my brain to satisfy my lust for more.
It shocked me even more to realize that there are actually grown adults who never read for pleasure. It boggles me as much as I probably boggle them.
What’s scary is that I am badly outnumbered.
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Yes. Learning for the sheer joy of seeing what’s out there. Unfortunately, formalized education seems to be doing its level best to crush such joy. Then burn it and wash the ashes out to sea.
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…formalized education seems to be doing its level best to crush such joy. Then burn it and wash the ashes out to sea.
And this, along with the comment above about formal schooling being most akin to visiting the asylum, is the most accurate description of my High School experience that I’ve yet come across.
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Mine, as well. *sigh*
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But, but, if only America was humbled, then the forces of imperialism and oppression would be banished forever and we could live in a peaceful eco-friendly utopia of international brotherhood and friendship . . .
Put down that carp!
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Okay! *drops carp from 20,000 feet*
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Clams got airlift!
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Fish paste! Anybody got some toast?
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Clam’s got bomber aircraft!
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Clam musta bought that tupolev off ebay.
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Clams got fishing gear and altimeters!
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Clams got Norden bombsights!
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Clam hearts Curtiss LeMay!
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“The carp will always get through.”
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Really, really need a “like” button.
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When I was in the 6th Grade I decided that I need a crew for my spaceship so I started assigning class mates crew positions. The 6th Grade teacher was not amused. Come to think of it most of my teachers were not amused.
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“Your rank is . . . Redshirt Third Class.”
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I drove my brother nuts by putting Star Trek control panels all over our shared room. The closet was the transporter room. I also turned my father’s den (what we would today call a man-cave) into the engineering deck. Fitting seeing as how he actually was an engineer.
That one actually embarrasses me a little now. Trekkies, they are not normal science fiction fans.
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‹tongue-firmly-in-cheek›That’s because Start Trek isn’t really science fiction; it’s space opera.‹/tongue-firmly-in-cheek›
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Worse than that–it’s a Space Western!
(Not quite as literally as Firefly, though.)
On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 6:15 PM, According To Hoyt wrote:
> Joel Salomon commented: “‹tongue-firmly-in-cheek›That’s because Start > Trek isn’t really science fiction; it’s space > opera.‹/tongue-firmly-in-cheek›” >
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The original concept was a Wagon Train in space
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Not quite: the original pitch was Wagon Train in Space, because the studios might buy it. The original idea was Horatio Hornblower in space, which is a related but very different thing.
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Which is why I think Weber could do very well with Honor Harrington movies / TV series.
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Regardless. The original Star Trek series really was pretty good stuff, for the time, for many of the episodes of the first two seasons.
By the end of the second season, Rodenberry, who was a consummate ass, drove off the best talent and the series dissolved into camp.
Hate most everything that followed in the franchise, with two exceptions.
Wrath of Khan was the closest the series ever came to being magnificent science fiction.
The Borg thread was not far behind.
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Glad to know i wasn’t the only person whose closet was a transporter. At least mine (at the time) had a folding door.
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We did Indian tribes (lots and lots of American Indian stuff while I was in grade school), made little spears and bows and arrows, vanished into the woods behind the school and probably worried the teachers. Then we played Star Wars and other such fun stuff. Then my family moved to Texas and whoah Nellie, different world on the school yard. All PE and no imagination.
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Oh, the irony. It doesn’t burn as bad as teh stoopid, but it comes close. I’ve been dealing with this for what feels like centuries but can’t be because I haven’t lived that long. The left and their craziness makes me insane.
I have had people with honest to god PhD is history tell me that only by disarming can the United States make itself safe. Seriously. When asked what happened to Rome when it could no longer field an army (hint: Google Atilla the Hun) and how we could apply such a lesson to the modern US the response was a shocked and offended silence followed by “Well, the world has changed since then.” When questioned as to how I got a blank stare. Yup, your tax dollars and mine at work. These are the high powered intellects that are influencing the future leaders of our country.
Don’t get me wrong. What Sarah’s kids had sounds awesome but it has to be seen for what it was: A fantasy world where they could go to relax and enjoy themselves. I’m all for that. I have one of my own creation. We’re odds. Probably a lot of us do. What bothers me is that too many leftists think that the world will magically conform to what they think it should.
It doesn’t work that way folks. Providing foreign aid to a country is not going to fix its problems long term. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not for letting people die in droves after a natural disaster. But long term foreign aid depresses local economies, prevents local development and often leads to armed conflicts over who is going to get all of the free stuff. Oddly enough, places that don’t get foreign aid some fare better. People who are forced to work together to survive find a way to do so.
Of course, other liberal fallacies are just as bad. We all know that banning guns won’t decrease violence. Welfare at home creates dependency and not indenpendence. A reset with Russia does not get them to do what we want. I could go on, but why bother. Until the other side is ready to confront the way things really are, nothing is going to change.
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Providing foreign aid to a country lets it make its chief export aid applications — as long as it keeps its people poor — which can easily be done with corruption.
Cutting off the aid does more than giving it.
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To many of these countries, foreign aid should be given in the form of old tractors that still run.
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YES!
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I’ve been playing with some ideas surrounding the concept of common sense.
It is my understanding that the common in common sense refers to class rather than frequency.
If so, common sense would be more strongly developed by living in one way, and less strongly developed by living in another.
A person in our society has more wealth and comfort than very many aristocrats of the past.
Does this mean less people need live in a ‘common’ manner?
This isn’t, as I see it, related to modern class structure.
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Common sense is so freaking rare that it really ought to be classed as a super-power. Seriously.
I can think of an entire comic book/story/movie concept where such a thing would work, too–And, it’s increasingly credible, these days:
“Gee, Cindy… That’s a really dark basement… Why don’t we get a light and a large-caliber handgun, before we go investigating that strange noise?”
Followed by the sound of gunfire, as Common-Sense Man makes use of his super-power to not do stupid shit that normally gets the average character in such movies as this get killed.
Thirty years ago, this would have been parody. Today? With the decrease in such things, it’s probably a valid concept for a storyline in many media…
“Hey, how’d Bob survive when everyone else died?”
“Well, Timmy… Bob has a special power that normal people just don’t… He’s not a complete dumbass…”.
I look around me, these days, and I really do begin to think that common sense really ought to be considered a super-power. Look at what just happened over in Oso, Washington: The County supervisor is on record, now, as having said that the land slip that happened was “Unforeseeable”. Oh, really? Gee, what are all these Army Corps of Engineers studies saying again? When were they published? Oh, over the last thirty years, and they’re all warning that that hillside was unstable, and likely to repeat the landslides that have happened there historically? Gee, we can see the outline of the previous slip on aerial and satellite photography? WTF?
Common-Sense Man really needs to stop by and slap the shit out of the people running the building department, over there. Along with the County executives who have been running the place…
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Well, Wikipedia gives this quote:
“Common sense is not so common.”
* Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764)
Which would seem to indicate that you’re on the right track to call it a super power.
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It also suggests the problem is very old, at least among the European-style elite.
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Part of the problem is that one person’s common sense appears to be another’s blithering lunacy. Certainly I’ve noticed that when I hear someone say “It’s just common sense to…” what follows is frequently nonsensical idiocy and regurgitation of misunderstood half-truths
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As near as I can tell, “common” in the case of “common sense” is actually more closely related to “peasant” than “universal.” So it’s “peasant sense”, the sort of knowledge that you get when you work with your hands and actually see what happens when you do something.
And that makes a lot of sense, given the general level of wealth that we moderns enjoy. We’re all nobles, so it’s hardly surprising that peasant sense is in short supply.
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That’s pretty much my take on it, too. If you live in a situation where screwing up is hazardous to your health, you learn a lot of life lessons that other people don’t.
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Yeah.
If mechanical aptitude is related to common sense…
Growing up around/using tools and equipment that one can break, that one improves one’s life by keeping operational and in good repair seems to do wonders for mechanical aptitude. I may use the term capital equipment, but people don’t necessarily think of cars, typewriters and sewing machines that way. For a peasant this may have been as simple as a shovel.
Your average person in America’s middle class may be so wealthy that they can throw away some or all of their tools without irreparable harm. Becoming exceptionally wealthy requires making exceptionally good use of one”s resources. Maintaining exceptional wealth also takes some effort and attention.
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Heh. I’m going to be taking a serviceable shovel with the handle broken out to the recyclers tomorrow, because I have another one with a fiberglass handle (I’m hard on wood handles).
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Too many times I’ve seen shovels set with the shaft in the wrong bloody direction, so some of that may not be you.
The ovals of the wood should be in the opposite direction of leverage (to the sides of the blade, perpendicular to lift). To replace the shaft on a good blade, grind off the old rivets and set as above. Use good, dry hardwood for a better, tighter set.
Putting a new haft on an axe or shaft on a shovel is one of those disappearing rural mechanical skills. I’ve had the opposite problem with fiberglass handles, they usually cause me problems- too lightweight, don’t stand up to heavy use as well for me (could be I’m just odd). It’s good someone gets some use out of ’em, though! *chuckle*
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I’m a big guy, and with the clay soil around here, I tend to stand on the wings of the blade and work the handle back and forth hard, just to get it down all the way, then pry up a 30-lb or so chunk (I’m impatient).
At least I used to. I’m too out of shape to do a lot of heavy work, so maybe the fiberglass handle has just enjoyed the benefits of lower intensity work. But at least I don’t have to worry if I leave it out in the rain once in a while.
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Sounds a little like Wiley’s “Obvious Man” from the Non Sequitur cartoons.
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There’s a lot of people I’d like to see Common-Sense Man slap the shit out of… primarily inside the Beltway where I’m convinced they put low-level hallucinogens in the water supply.
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ROFL!
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Awww, now where’s the fun in the horror movie if nobody does anything foolish?
“Why…do white people stay IN… the haunted… house? — Eddie Murphy.
Look it up on You Tube. Priceless.
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With much Eddie Murphy LANGUAGE, I’d probably better add.
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Tucker & Dale vs. Evil. That’s all I’ve got to add…
Well, that’s probably a lie–I’ll no doubt think of something…
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The world’s shortest slasher film:
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LOL
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I would SO go see that movie.
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I recommend C. S. Lewis’s Studies in Words, which has an entire chapter on “sense” including “common sense.”
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I’m probably wrong on this, but I think common sense was in part derived from our previous educational methodology. Specifically, copybooks.
Back in the day, to practice your handwriting, you would have a copybook, and you would have a sentence at the top that you would write over and over again underneath it. And they were usually bible verses or pithy aphorisms like “a stitch in time saves nine”. Thus, people were sort of marinading in what was perceived to be accepted and time-tested wisdom as they were doing other things, and hopefully absorbed something more than just half-way decent handwriting. (almost certainly better handwriting than mine).
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For so many, it seems their imaginary, better world to avoid the downsides of this one is a variation of “If I were king…” i.e. “If I were bureaucrat of X, I’d make everybody do Y, because I’d be right, dammit” – then they try to live in that imaginary world, which would be OK except they try to make us live in it too. (Rather like one of Chuck-K’s 6th grade classmates, except the game is a lot less fun…for us at least.)
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To your larger point, I suspect a big part of the inability to recognize and treat with reality is the inherent complexity of — everything. There is so much to existence that we accept proxies, merely to hold onto our sanity. Proxies are useful, insofar as you remember the limitations. But — we’re human, and we forget.
It’s the forgetting, wherein evil slips. Political theory is rife with the consequences of group proxies running into the reality of groups of individual people. And any system that purports to ‘solve’ societal problems can be safely assumed to be operating from proxies and not reality. (which is not to say things can’t be done, merely that things can’t be solved)
Opening our eyes has a lot to do with setting those proxies aside (or, perhaps more realistically, re-correlating them with reality), in my thinking. I live in a city of 375 thousand people. 6 million in the greater metropolitan area. 26 million in the state and 314 million in the U.S. 7+ billion in the world. The arrogance necessary to think any individual, or group of individuals can ‘design’ on this scale is staggering*. We need to remind ourselves as we observe reality that there’s folks walking around intent on doing just that.
*The idea is too large to work without a few proxies myself. Of course I realize it’s possible to work with the logistics of groups of people on large scales. Traffic, housing, food transportation, and onward. Groups of people can and do design within these parameters. But it’s the difference between making available and making happen. Beyond that, my brain is foggy from insufficient sleep, so any problems of clarity are mine to own.
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Huh. I was daydreaming in the third-person from a very young age.
May explain why I don’t write in the first person, ever. 0:)
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Kent G. Budge has also felt like an observer looking in on his own life.
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And perhaps from now on it should be Kent the Bold as well as always in third person. ;)
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Done.
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Nah, mine was imaginary people in imaginary lands, doing imaginary things.
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I think in first person, but I have an almost constant narration going of the things around me. It’s… distracting some times.
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I pre-plan IRL dialogue if I can. It makes things easier.
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Hah! I do the same, though I’m doing better at avoiding it. It only really works if you know the other person well, and if you get it wrong you end up having to ad lib anyway, so why not approach the whole things as an improv sketch from the start? Saves me trouble that way.
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Then I just break into Monty Python. Four Yorkshiremen most often.
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Yes but people are predictable.
“How are you?” (and all the various variants)
I only answer with stock phrases (and most of them are pretty old by now).
Rote response has its place in normal conversation, and frankly I’d be lost without it very quickly. Work dialogue, distant relations dialogue, etc. Useful to have prepared something so I’m not standing there woolgathering.
Believe me, the world is a better place for me not improvising on the spot. I’ve been known to say (shoulder deep in an engine, trying to torque 85ft-lbs in a six inch space) “If you’re not on fire, go away. If you are on fire grab the hose and douse yourself before you get it on me!”
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I tend to think in plural first person, and have a constant narration going on. I’m not sure if that means I have royal blood in showing through or if I have a multiple personality problem. ;)
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Multiples personalities. Couple of ’em are royal. Compounds your problem.
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Third-person’s just the way it’s done…
Right?
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Ah, a little nesting fail. So lovely. Please to tie this to marycatelli @ 1:42pm…26, March 2014
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It’s certainly the most common format for autobiography, historically….
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People who had a vivid childhood imagination might like this Kipling tale
http://ghostwolf.dyndns.org/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/TheDaysWork/brushwoodboy.html
It always resonated with me. (And yes it is probably borderline SF).
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I think “The Brushwood Boy” is one of my favorite Kipling stories. I always wished I could find someone who shared my fantasy worlds.
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“Even I have to fight against it, to remind myself that no, unlike the Bradbury story Almost the End of The World, a collapse won’t take us back to a simpler time, and simpler abilities won’t be in demand. Collapses don’t usually subtract tech, they just make the real world unreliable.”
It seems to me that the vast majority of Preppers have bought into this fallacy. They firmly believe that come the collapse the top skills of 100 to 200 years ago will become all important, so they learn to blacksmith, or move to a rural area and homestead.
Heinlein had a great quote that specialization was for insects, and I firmly believe that people need to learn how to do many things, not just their current way to make a living.
That is far from a belief, however, that the world is going to lose the last 100 years (or more) of technological advancements. I just can’t see that happening.
“And are we headed for one? Almost for sure. What I mean is, the way we’re printing currency, we’ll pay for it.”
Harder times are most likely coming, but I believe we are far more likely to see electricity become less reliable than to see it totally go away.
Our plans for the future should reflect what we believe to be the most likely of the possible futures.
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Or, not.
The point I keep making to people who predict doom and gloom is this: We’re literally in completely uncharted territory, here. Nobody has a felching clue what is going on with the economy, and that includes the idiots running it. As an example: Look at the percentage of the population that is engaged in keeping us fed. How many Americans are working in agriculture, or agriculture-related fields, these days? Percentage-wise, and depending on how you parse it, it’s nowhere near what it once was. I believe I’ve heard the numbers described as being between three and ten percent of the workforce.
Agriculture was once around ninety-five percent of the economy, and they had a hard time keeping just the US fed. Efficiencies keep rising, and fewer and fewer people are now required to feed more and more people. How does that reflect in the economy?
Same-same with manufacturing, with resource extraction. We are, I fear, rapidly reaching the point where the biggest problem in the economy is going to be finding productive things for the majority of the population to be doing. The recent dislocations are possibly the very first tremors of that earthquake. What the hell happens when ninety percent of the economy is run and operated by ten percent of the population or less?
The politicians and economists are clueless, and I think that a large part of the reason that the economy hasn’t totally tanked is because of things like this–There’s a lot of ruin in it, now. How much? That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question.
To a degree, I don’t think that the current crop of geniuses in the capital are going to be able to ruin quite everything in the time they have left. And, what they do manage to ruin? The forces of change and the market are going to do a lot to overturn that ruin. The energy policies of this administration should have already done a hell of a lot of damage, but the onslaught of fracking has done a lot to prevent that.
I don’t think we can really predict the outcome of all this. At all. Maybe in a few hundred years, it will be totally obvious, but trying to predict it from where we’re at? A fool’s errand.
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…a large part of the reason that the economy hasn’t totally tanked…
OK, no argument that things could conceivably be worse (i.e., Gee, only one multi-kiloton atmospheric meteor explosion since the financial meltdown in 2008), but what is the argument that what is happening now is different from “totally tanked?”
I was astonished in reading the economic blogs that while there is a very precise definition of a Economic Recession relating to N quarters of growth after N of contraction in agreed upon quantifiable economic measures, there’s no equivalent measurable quantifiable definition of an Economic Depression. As a result, the “Great Recession” label is actually the best the economists can do for what we’re all still experiencing. The main reason what we’re in is not a Depression seems to be “no bread lines”, but given the underlying labor participation rates and long term unemployment numbers that are hidden by the official stats, and given the recovery curve charts I’ve seen that show this “post recession recovery” looks more similar to something from the 1930’s that anything more recent, I’m really not so sure.
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The point that I’m making is that while the labor participation rate is down, the other indicators aren’t doing much. Productivity per worker keeps rising…
I really don’t think anyone has a bloody clue what’s going on, or how all this is going to shake out eventually. I keep remembering the doom and gloom guys who got the last downturn right, and they’ve been predicting that the final collapse was “just around the corner…”. Only, it hasn’t been.
I repeat, I don’t know what’s going on, and I really don’t think anyone else does, either.
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OT: Hubris, a novel set in the Cat universe, is live. The acknowledgments list one S.A.H. and the Huns, Hoydens, and Mad Genii for helping make the book possible. :) Although if it is thanks for keeping me sane or making me crazier I leave for you to decide.
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Red, a link would help… Hubris is a rather common title, I fear.
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Red is “Alma Boykin” and the full title is “Hubris: The Azdhagi Reborn”.
Oh Sarah, WordPress is messing around again. I provided a link to Alma’s story and my comment is “awaiting moderation”. [Frown]
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Sorry. I’ll be sending a note to the Mighty Oyster, so I didn’t want to overdo the advertising. It’s http://www.amazon.com/Hubris-Azdhagi-Reborn-Alma-Boykin-ebook/dp/B00J8UCN9O/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1395874825&sr=8-1&keywords=Alma+Boykin+Hubris
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Good to hear. I was just going to poke you because there wasn’t an email in my inbox yet! :D Keep it up, Red!
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My wife noted that we can say a line out of almost anything we’ve seen/heard/read, and have our kids come back with the next line, or another related allusion.
They both have fun writing/creating their own stories and fan fiction — too bad they suddenly say they can’t write the it becomes school work.
It is great having imaginative and intellectually active kids.
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Completely off-topic and unimportant:
WP (delenda est!) has apparently decided I’m not to subscribe to this post. My first comment was 7 hours and 15 minutes ago, and still no subscribe email. Anybody else have issues?
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Not I, but have you checked your spam? I’ve gotten several “Phishing Attempt” tagged ones in the last day or two. (Perfectly normal emails,)
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Did earlier, need to do so, again. Thanks.
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