A Vast Wasteland of Prosperity

Posted on by hollyfrostgoldportpress

(A Blast from the Past: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2016/09/26/a-vast-wasteland-of-prosperity/ Additional Note from Holly the Assistant: Sarah wants me to let you know that Monday afternoon Dan had a medical false alarm, with the result that their local hospital is going to make a good deal of money off their insurance, and Sarah and Dan are recovering from the effects of spending most of two days and a night in a hospital, a battery of tests, and him being discharged with “Everything looks great, we have no clue, follow up with your PCP,” which all of us who have done that routine knows means they’re dead tired because no one lets you sleep in a hospital.)

Yesterday my husband threatened to drown himself in the shower, if I didn’t stop ranting about the stupid things people believe about history. It’s not that he disagreed, mind you, but that he thought it was too much to endure a graduate-level lecture with side-excursions into various examples he’d never heard about before even getting his pants on in the morning.

I sympathize.  It’s been a long time since I became aware that when that darn, mobile soap box finds me and gets under my feet, I get really really fast-talking and sometimes drop details.

Weirdly, this fit wasn’t prompted by the commenter who came back to an old post yesterday to lecture us about how stupid it is to expect dem poo’ peoplez to be able to retool and find new jobs, once technology dispossesses them of the old ones.  Weirdly, it started because he was telling me about a TV show and something said in the TV show.  (Beginning of digression. I watch second hand TV.  Whenever you guys see a reference or a quote to popular culture, I acquired it by listening to Dan talk about it.  At least most of the time.  No, I don’t know why I don’t watch TV.  What’s worse, I find most of the people who say “Oh, I don’t watch TV” are the sort of prigs who are bragging of their moral superiority.  I’m not morally superior, and my inability to sit still in front of a television, unless I am ill or engaged in some complex project that involves most of my head and hands, is almost as my dad thought a “handicap”.  It isolates me from the culture.  But it is also true.  I think it’s because I never “got used” to watching TV, like some people don’t get used to reading for pleasure.  Most of the time I was growing up, Portugal had two channels, and one only operated on the weekends and evenings. End of digression.) Dan, as he puts it, watches TV so I don’t have to.

Anyway, he was telling me about how terrible conditions were after WWI, and I started pointing out they weren’t.  Not really.  Sure, some people (a lot of domestic servants) were displaced.  Sure, immediately after, a lot of men came back and found their jobs were gone.  Veterans went around the country side, selling booklets and stuff.  You see this in Agatha Christie.

Unspoken is the fact that a lot of these Veterans were actually not quite right in the head, not that you can blame them after the trench war.  BUT even in Britain, which did itself no favors by prolonging the same kind of rationing, etc, it had had during the war, the economy recovered.

Again, if you read Christie, who was unaware of writing history, since she wrote these books contemporary to the events, you see a lot of new houses being built, of factories being started.  Sure, the old families and the old houses never quite recovered.  But that wasn’t because of the economy.  It was because of punitive taxation.  If you had a death in the family, the estate would be lost.

“But Sarah,” you’ll say.  “That’s why the economy recovered and they were able to live better.”

Really?  You’re going to go with that?

I know that was the theory back then, and we really can’t hold it against them, I think, but no, the state doesn’t “invest” in the economy.  Or “ease transition.”

Mostly what the state does is create more and more bureaucracy.  Of course to the extent that that pays a salary to some people it does SOMETHING (I found out, and was shocked at the racism of it, that this is part of the reason democrats support the endless growth of the state.  They think there are a number of people — specifically black people — who cannot adapt to new tech, and therefore must be employed by the state, ad infinitum, in a sort of work fare program.)  I suspect though, having seen the make-work and endless nonsense of bureaucracy in three countries, what it does do is retard the growth of the economy by removing capital from useful purposes.  Oh, and retarding the prosperity of the employees, not to mention their mental health, by keeping them chained to ultimately meaningless work they know it’s meaningless.  A lot of those people are in the position of soviet citizens.  They pretend to work and we pretend to pay them.

Without the galumphing bureaucracy, these people would have shifted and adapted.

How do I know that?  Because they’re human and I’m human.  Yeah, okay, there are differences in IQ range, but you know what they are not that pronounced amid the whole species.  Oh, sure, our dumber friends annoy us, but they’re still smarter than any other thing this planet has ever seen.

And our species thrives on change and strife.  Our species are cunning apes, who keep finding new ways of doing things.  Which drive progress, which shatters the status quo, which in turn causes people who were forced to change to look for more cunning ways of doing things, which…

Yeah, I saw the arguments of our visiting Luddite.  I have also read people who say we were much better before the invention of agriculture.  But what I know is that before the invention of agriculture we lived as individuals maybe 30 years, and as a species occupied certain zones of the globe, and lived in family groups of maybe 15.  There was a total number of us of maybe a million.  Maybe.  Now we cover the face of the earth and as individuals we’re healthier and more longer lived than we’ve ever been.

And while I sympathize with my fellow libertarians who think agriculture brought in a tiered society, I’d like to say poppycock.  With raspberries on top.  It’s not that you don’t get history (archeology is uncertain, and confused at that level.  Agriculture brought greater prosperity, and that made some tombs much less equal than others.  Also, the tombs we tend to find form the nomadic period are all chieftains or their equivalent) what you don’t get is human nature.  You’re engaging in the same form of fallacy the leftists engage in “Humans were perfect, and then an event–”  Bullshit.  I’m human, they were human. I know exactly their degree of perfection.  And as for thinking some kind of egalitarianism prevailed pre agriculture, those of you who think family-bands are egalitarian have never lived in a family with a tyrannical matriarch (or patriarch.)  It can be (not my family, we were never that organized) like a miniature totalitarian regime but even closer and more in your face.

Yeah, yeah, paleolithic diet and people were so much healthier and stuffs.  (Rolls eyes.)  While some of our metabolisms don’t seem to have caught up with agriculture (almost everyone I know who has issues with carbs has a relatively near ancestor from a nomad/hunting culture. Say no more than six generations off.) and while I myself eat very low carb for health reasons, the whole idea that people became LESS healthy with agriculture is a little mad.

Sure, and if you looked at graves from the village, from the time mom was a kid and my time, you’d find modern medicine, vaccinations and antibiotics had wreaked devastation on a healthy population.  This is because people died younger/less battered in her time.  Also infants tend to sort of vanish into the soil, so you wouldn’t get the great culling that happened before 3 years of age.  Only the strong survived.  In my generation, OTOH almost everyone survived, including the halting, the lame and those with chronic conditions.

Yeah, okay, so no progress comes without a cost.  Sure, some things will get worse, if only for a little while.  Yes, I read Christie (as I said.  One of the amazing things about mysteries, because grounded in the quotidian, is that they are a good record of how life really was, not how historians interpret it) and I read a lot about “pre war” (first) quality.  And it’s true there was a quality never again encountered except now, at high end craftsman created threads and clothes and furniture.

But the industry of the time would never have supplied the masses of humanity that progress allowed to live and thrive.

So, technological progress causes some losses, sometimes for a while.

What it causes, mostly, is disruption.  And the older you get the more you feel all disruption is for the worst, and the world is coming apart.  And if the progress happens too fast (say the first 50 years) people have trouble adjusting their MENTAL PICTURE of the world and some depart reality altogether and when this happens, (the last time I can think of is the industrial revolution, which more or less opened with the blood of the French revolution and closed with WWI.  If it has closed) it ends in blood.

Yeah, it’s scary out there, and things are shaking loose.  But a lot of the things that are shaking loose are undoing the mass-industrial-entertainment-news complex, and the idea that one size fits all.  Some of what is shaking lose is the inability for any of us to reach a mass audience without intermediary “gate keepers” who have long been taken over by the long march of Marxists (speaking of people who have left reality far behind.)

Technological progress — or even change — hurts.  But so does iodine.  It still allows us to live better and longer than our ancestors.

And the one thing you can count on is that we, cunning apes that we are, will continue engaging in it, and adapting to it, and fighting over it.

Those people who are all concerned about you losing your way in this heartless society?  Those who try to cushion you and put you in a safe space?

They’re not your friends.  They’re afraid of what you do if you and your creativity were fully unleashed.  They have achieved a certain domination over their society but are afraid if anything more happens they’ll lose it.

It’s not you, but them, they seek to help.

Ignore them and build.  Build under, build over, build around.  Anticipate technology.  Build technology.  And ignore them.  It’s the only way to deal with them.

79 thoughts on “A Vast Wasteland of Prosperity”

  1. God bless and keep you and yours date, healthy and happy! You are a treasure to us all!

    John

    John R. Primm CFO, Bridge of Gold Entertainment, LLC 202.257.6569

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  2. People who that the Past was Completely Better than today should be made to live in their So-called Golden Age.

    And yes, it’s easy to imagine the Past was better, but I don’t want to live in the Past (no computers/Internet.)

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    1. Even the mightiest kings, emperors, and pharaohs weren’t immune from rotten teeth, kidney stones, cataracts, etc.

      All things that are easily treated with modern, thoroughly eeeevil tecnology.

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  3. Dang. ER’s are scary.

    BIL had a trip to the ER in an ambulance with honest to god medical emergency. He was still in the ER for over 24 hours after being stabilized before the hospital could get him into a room.

    A friend, that we had not seen for years, knocked on our door yesterday. He was transferred from where he collapsed at work. Heart stopped. EMT CPR, the whole works. He did not say how long he was in the ER (he may not even know). Long enough for his son to leave his work, his wife to find alternative emergency care for her charges (she does in home daycare), pick up their youngest from HS, etc. He is fine -ish. Waiting for a defoliator implant which cannot be done until the blood clot in his knee is gone (from the fall).

    Glad Dan is okay.

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      1. If the question is meant for me: slowly.
        We’re both taking way too many naps, etc. This was just a lot of tests, but I stayed with him, because the initial symptoms were scary, and the sofa provided me for the night was horrible. I slept maybe two hours. So last night I slept 12 and am almost human.
        Dan had visual disruptions that might indicate a stroke, but no other symptoms. They’re now inclined towards maybe migraine (which he isn’t aware of having had before, but then again… he doesn’t pay attention unless the symptom is florid enough to make him strop working.) Anyway, worth checking out, but so exhausting for both of us that I called on Holly to fill in yesterday AND today. (Yeah, she owed me for last week, but still.)
        Anyway, we’re okay, but I have so much to do and I’m being so slow.

        Liked by 5 people

        1. The Reader is glad to hear that the arrow of progress is up, Sarah. And Dan should know that migraine triggers increase and change with age (the Reader curses the day about a decade ago when he deduced that chocolate had become a trigger).

          Although the Reader was interested in how dep729 is doing after her heart surgery.

          Liked by 1 person

        2. Migraines are no fun. Worse mine start with visual auras. Scary when you do not know what is going on. These days the start, and my reaction is “well s*”. No I do not know what triggers them. Do not have them constant enough, especially these days into retirement (so before some stress relationship involved), to make a determination.

          Yea, having migraines trigger by holy chocolate would suck.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. I used to have severe headaches, no idea if they were “migraines.” They pretty much vanished after menopause, which was interesting.

            And there have been a couple of heat exhaustion headaches, which I would not wish on my worst enemy.

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        3. Visual disruptions are also worth a trip to the optometrist, since there are certain optical conditions worth ruling out. I should go back to mine. (Mind you, I just had to replace my phone and it informed me of a missed optometrist appointment, but given certain weirdnesses I both don’t know when that appointment was and I don’t know if that was even from this year, given that it reloaded photos from three years ago.)

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            1. FWIW, I had a round of visual disruption (an area in my vision just started making patterns, like a vibrating paisley (sic) mark. I was at work, got scared, ran to the optometrist. He told me the following:

              It’s called an “ocular migraine,” but it has nothing to do with migraine headaches.

              Nobody knows what they are.

              Nobody knows what causes them.

              They go away on their own.

              Don’t worry.

              I still get them once in a while and they do go away fairly quickkly. I don’t know if that’s anything like Dan’s problem, but it’s a bit more data.

              (And you are both in my prayers).

              Liked by 1 person

              1. ocular migraine

                –

                I was told “visual migraine”. Mine, usually does end in a headache as the visual fades away. I cannot shorten the visual fog/waves but I can head off or lesson the severity of an headache with OTC medications, sometimes.

                Can be scary even after knowing what is happening. Especially when driving. Or out running errands that require driving to get home. (At work or school when they triggered couldn’t work easily because could not concentrate on computer or phone support, but couldn’t just leave and drive home either.)

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              2. I’ve had those too. A tiny patch of weirdness, usually off to one side, that gradually grows to a splotch covering maybe a quarter of the visual field. Whole episode usually runs a few hours.

                At least now I know what to call it.

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        1. I’m glad you’re doing better. Been wrapped up in my own body issues. Protip: if that medium sized metal box seems too heavy the first time you lifted it, your body is going to pay (a lot) by the fourth. I think I tore a muscle in my right groin area. Trying to minimize stress on that leg so it will be able to do more when the left knee is worked on. 6 weeks to go.

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  5. The issue with agriculture is there are several levels of efficiency involved. Soil condition is critical. Water is critical. Climate is critical. Weather is critical. Pest control is critical, including the 2-legs who want to take what you grew for nothing. Until the great age of exploration, crop and animal selection was limited. Cultivation on open ground by hand is laborious and usually only provides enough to feed the cultivator. Domestication of animals and the invention of the animal drawn plow was a revolutionary improvement in how much food could be grown. Development of the tractor (in all its myriad evolutions) increased productivity by another order of magnitude. Ditto with fertilizers. Pesticides and herbicides, used properly, are of great benefit. (Used improperly, they’re killers.)

    I was reading about high density raised bed farming that was done within the city limits of Paris that supplied foods nearly year-round, with around 3 harvests per year. However, that only worked due to cold framing, and significant composting that raised the soil temperatures by decomposition, enabling early sowing and late harvesting. Mostly hand cultivated, weeded and debugged. And no large animals to wander into town and eat your crops. (Didn’t say whether they required guards to prevent food theft though.)

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    1. (Didn’t say whether they required guards to prevent food theft though.)

      Probably it was assumed that the reader wasn’t an aristo playing at gardening….

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    2. Read through some of Victor Hugo’s work, such as Les Miserables, and you’ll see that the default for Paris yards was fully-fenced, including in poor areas of town. Also remember how our hostess has described how weird the US is for having unfenced yards that we put stuff in and expect it to NOT be stolen, like Christmas decorations.

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    3. Some cultures plant taro root or rice, both of which are labor-intensive compared to nutritional value, because local soil conditions don’t allow more-efficient crops.

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  6. Government ‘work’ is almost entirely non-productive, thus it must be supported by taking money from productive people who support the economy with real jobs. The more money that disappears into government, the less that remains to support (and grow) the real economy. Paying more bureaucratic drones to fill out more government forms is NOT prosperity. Every time the government raises taxes, they wind up getting less money because they’re further strangling the economy, which they try to solve by raising even more taxes.

    They keep not figuring that out.

    Liked by 2 people

  7. The amusing irony of mentioning World War I and expectations that blacks can only work for the government is that during World War I our president was Wilson, and…

    I don’t think I need to say anything further. 😅.

    Of course, any push to get minorities into government jobs in the US likely started after the Dems switched which races they were supporting.

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    1. The other interesting thing about that is that it serves as yet another example of “the words of this wizard stand on their heads.” I remember not that long ago that government jobs for ethnic minorities were pitched as “a highway to the middle class,” a cute sleight-of-hand substitution of middle-income for middle class.

      Historically the middle class were those who got their living wholly independent from the Crown (state), in contrast to the aristocracy (holdings in fee simple to the Crown) and their tenants, who indirectly depended on the Crown by depending on the Earl of Grantham or whomever.

      A government functionary is the exact opposite of that definition of middle class.

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    2. I just recently saw a post lauding Wilson for… well, I’m not quite sure what it was, except that he advanced certain causes (probably referencing women’s right to vote, which amendment passed during his tenure) and yadda yadda yadda. Didn’t do much more than glance past it because anyone posting stuff like that isn’t apt to react well to the truths of his severe racism.

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      2. Kind of surprising since both sides of the aisle seem to agree that Wilson was scum these days. Many on the left don’t worry so much about the dictatorial crap that he pulled. But they’ve become aware of what a horrible racist he was, and how he rolled back racial equality.

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        1. Kinda funny how Truman gets credit for integrating the US military when he was really REintegrating it, reversing Woodrow Wilson’s actions when he threw out all the black troops who had been fighting the Indian Wars and manning the frontier fort outposts for the fifty years since the Late Unpleasantness ended.

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          1. There were even blacks who graduated from West Point. IIRC, Grant was the prime mover in much of that during his time in the White House.

            And while they couldn’t become officers, there were also a number of blacks serving as enlisted in the navy. Wilson got rid of that, too.

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          2. Okay, a bit more nuance than that – when Wilson got rid of the black troops he did so by ending the segregated black combat regiments. And I skipped over the Spanish American War – when the USS Maine was sunk and war was declared roughly ten percent of the US Army was black, and all four black combat regiments were called up and shipped out to Cuba. Black troops fought with TR and the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill, and five black soldiers and one sailor earned the Medal of Honor during the conflict, not surprising with fifty years of fighting on the frontier.

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  8. On the (somewhat tangential) subject of history in Agatha Christie books:

    Rereading some of the early Marple stories, it’s interesting to see how many complaints there are about the sex ratio: the men are always complaining that there are too many women around, and the young women are always distressed that they want to find a young man and get married, but the competition is just so high that they don’t think they stand a chance. Until this week, I always just took that as background noise, but just a couple of days ago, I started wondering: how much of that was due to World War I? Were all of the men who should have been courting Miss Marple’s maids and asking them to put up the banns dead in the trenches in France?

    WWI is an event that doesn’t get talked about so much in our history classes, mostly just, “The Treaty of Versailles was bad and led to Hitler,” so I think we tend to underestimate how big an effect it had (and maybe still has) on the cultures of Europe.

    Liked by 5 people

    1. I tend to spend a lot of time (relatively speaking) there, and on the Thirty-Years War, because they are such breakpoints, one for European culture, and one for global culture. But I also am permitted to set my own syllabus and schedule, without worrying about state standards and checkpoints. This is what happens when you turn an Odd loose with a textbook and limited adult supervision.

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    2. Dorothy L. Sayers speaks explicitly about the lack of men in the UK, after WWI. That was why a lot of women ended up having careers or being poor relations, live-in aunts, etc. Or they emigrated.

      OTOH, it is a known fact that high testosterone, successful, men tend to have a lot of daughters.

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      1. Lack of men after:

        30 year war

        American Revolution

        Civil War

        WW1

        WW2

        ….

        Oh, wait. Any major war. I wonder why? …

        Some, women and children were affected too. Just not to the shear numbers.

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      2. Hmm. I had not heard of that fact. Might be somewhat of an explanation for my birth family (three to one), and my own family (two to one).

        Of course, it doesn’t explain my sister’s family – three to zero. BIL’s family was six to one (although rather a mix in “successful” outcomes).

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    3. A running theme (over multiple decades leading into the 1960s) in Christie’s work is the complaints of the young about the old, including the verbally-expressed ‘why don’t they just die and get out of our way already.’

      It makes me wonder what she endured on a regular basis, that it comes up over and over.

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      1. We still see that today. Lots of complaints along those lines directed at Boomers (and to a much lesser extent Gen X) these days. Boomers living longer due to improved health is likely making the complaints more pronounced than they would otherwise be. But I suspect Gen X would be getting the brunt of it if the majority of Boomers had died off by now. The older generations are always “in the way” of the younger generations.

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    4. “To Serve Them All My Days” made a similar observation, and Paul Brickill’s biography of Douglas Bader refers to it when describing Bader’s marraige at the time. Even if he had no legs, he was still relatively functional, and apparently that was rare.

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  9. Similar complaints can be found in Georgian era novels where London’s “Season” was the primary marriageable elite marketplace, and it was chocked full of statused and/or moneyed families daughters being introduced, while eligible sons were discussed as quite scarce in the events, according to the disappointed daughters and their even more disappointed mothers. To some extent the various wars in America and the continent had an impact, but the novels include characters commenting that it seemed like so many more daughters were being born than sons.

    I know it’s fiction, but I have to assume these authors (Andrew Wareham comes to mind) did their research on this as they did on the stuff I know about. I don’t get any read from these books that the anuthors are transplanting modernity back into these period pieces – if anything the opposite.

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    2. Actually, that’s a little complicated. After all, you wanted a bridegroom who could support the bride, by working in a genteel profession, if he was not independently wealthy.

      It was a rare man who was wealthy enough not to work — usually only the oldest son if any. And you wanted to marry off all your daughters, not just one. Therefore — a profession.

      But, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, before the discharge of officers from both the Army and the Navy, but after most of the mortality had reduced their numbers — there were more sons of gentlemen than there were jobs to support them well enough to marry.

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      1. I have also read accounts of ships packed full of respectable daughters, albeit the ones passed over for several of The Seasons past in London and thus aged out at home, yet unwilling to go the spinster route, packed onto East India Trading Company ships and shipped off to the subcontinent to try and land a spouse form those fortune-seeking extra sons in that exotic venue.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. That makes sense – until the diplomatic cleanup, which took years after Waterloo, the British had both the as-yet-unconquered areas away from the coast and the French East India Company enclaves to contend with in India, so I doubt mass shipments of unmarried young British ladies of breeding would be thought quite appropriate.

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      2. “more sons of gentlemen than there were jobs to support them well enough to marry.“

        –

        Sons and daughters. My own family tree has both maiden aunts and unmarried uncles, in the family tree, that never spawned branches. Cannot be that uncommon. What was unusual is the maiden aunts and unmarried uncles were not shipped off to convents, for the women, and seminaries or army, for the men. Mostly because lack of convents, seminaries, and already as far west as could go (until WW1/WW2) in the area.

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        1. Kipling put them in verse:

          https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_lostlegion.htm

          There’s a Legion that never was ’listed,

          That carries no colours or crest,

          But, split in a thousand detachments,

          Is breaking the road for the rest.

          Our fathers they left us their blessing—

          They taught us, and groomed us, and crammed;

          But we’ve shaken the Clubs and the Messes

          To go and find out and be damned (Dear boys!),

          To go and get shot and be damned.

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        2. The daughters could not hold down jobs. Indeed, consider how in Pride and Prejudice, the daughters could not help in the kitchen. They might sew, but they had to have servants to have genteel status.

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          1. Nannies. Governesses. Maybe household managers.

            In general, could not hold down jobs. Which is why they ended up either in convent, vocation or not, or the live in auntie.

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  10. I am glad that Dan and you are all right. Hospitals, and especially ERs, are not a place for anyone to rest. If he has another worrisome episode, do not let the “false alarm, you’re fine” keep you away from the ER. I’ve been sent home with a you’re fine. A few months later I was back with what had been a previously undiagnosed episode of atrial fibrillation.

    Golden ages. I am a 74 year old former farm boy. One of the best things Dad ever bought for us was a set of Collier’s Encyclopedia. We would sit down to look something up and end up paging through, reading the interesting entries. Now we have the internet with all of its knowledge if you want to look for it. And then there is Grok and Claude. A lot of answers there if you know to double-check if it matters. This and modern medicine make this a golden age.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. My folks got Collier’s (1960 or thereabouts) edition. We got a few of the annual yearbooks too. Money wasn’t that ample so it must have been a sacrifice. That was a fantastic encyclopedia back in the day; I loved it (just turned 65 a couple of weeks ago).

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      1. Our money was also tight, mom was not happy with the money spent. She relented; they were great rainy-day entertainment for six kids. I considered them better than any the local libraries had.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. I have said this before. Anyone thinking they are having heart issues get a Kardia. Cheap assurance if nothing else.

      Afib detected on the Karda, saved my life. It wasn’t happening that often, maybe every 6 to 8 weeks. Nor did it last more than 8 hours an incident (i.e. by time anyone would see me in an ER, it would be over). But it was happening. I could prove it. I could send the files to my PCP. My PCP could listen to my heart, even though the afib was not happening. Then the PCP heard the “whoosh” of the valve. Note, not that I know how to read the ekg output correctly, but the afib and regular heart rhythm do show the valve stenosis.

      Yes, the valve issue and afib are two different systems. One is plumbing. The other is electrical. I am convinced the valve stenosis was triggering the electrical disconnect.

      My point? Being persistent with the files, even after diagnosis, is what has saved me. FWIW with the surgery cancellations, and the afib suddenly constant, pretty sure my surgery was not delayed a third time. I had the files to show it was if not constant, it was daily for longer than before. I sent the files through my medical, account, “MyChart” portal online app.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. The latest Apple Watch can do an EKG by holding your finger on the crown for 30 sec, with more detailed results visible in the “Health” app on a paired iPhone. The app can look for indications of AFib. Apple Watch can also once again monitor blood oxygen levels continuously, though thanks to a lawsuit ruling they lost but found a loophole around, you can only look at the results of that on a paired iPhone.

        But any of the Kardia gizmos are just truly amazing tiny bits of kit. Anyone with any concerns would be well served by following dep729’s recommendation. I have the 6L and it is simply incredible what that little flat thingee can do, generating full on six-lead EKG recording that is sent over Bluetooth to your device of choice just by balancing the gizmo on the skin of your knee or ankle and touching the two pads with fingers of each hand on the top, then you can save and print out the full EKG recording for your doc to go through in detail. And they also have a credit card sized version now that does single-lead EKGs. They are at kardia.com.

        I have no interest in them other than a satisfied customer.

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        1. Fitbit, which I also have, also has a app that detects afib. Fitbit will also report suspected afib, long after the fact, but it reports it (or how I learned I had an incident 3 AM – 6 AM, when I was asleep last April). But only a single-lead. Quick easy way to see if need to pull out the Kardia to send results to doctors, and to track how long an incident lasts (never was 24 hours, even at it’s worse the weeks before the OHS). The 6L Kardia is the best commercial based option.

          I got mine through Amazon. But direct from Kardia is good too. I too have no interest in the company other than an extremely satisfied thankful customer.

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  11. “And while I sympathize with my fellow libertarians who think agriculture brought in a tiered society….”

    This is essentially the James C. Scott hypothesis (Thinking Like a State, The Art of Not Being Governed: I didn’t read the former but I read the latter, long ago); settled agriculture (rice cultivation) made populations legible. There’s a point in there about calories sufficient to support a large and stationary population, but it might perhaps be taken too far. Been a long time since I read The Art of Not Being Governed so I hesitate to speak too definitely.

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  13. If you compare small population health to small population health, then yes, you could say that hunter-gatherers (in all their variations) in good habitats were healthier than settled farmers. They had fewer cavities (less starch in the diet) and at first, tended to get more protein. Too, they didn’t have the sanitation-related diseases (cholera, typhoid, typhus) as often, that we can observe.

    In the longer run? Being able to grow food on a regular basis, and having a predictable crop year leads to larger populations (aside from sweeps of epidemics, of course). And not all hunter-gatherer groups lived in ideal habitats.

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      1. I went to Gunsite in early 1991, and the Colonel remarked that beer was a hallmark of civilization. Not directly mentioned in contrast were entities where beer is forbidden…

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    2. There is also the life spans of both groups, farmers did tend to live longer especially after animals were domesticated.

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  14. Today’s apocalyptic change is the development of useful AI, which in the last year or so I have stopped calling Artificial Stupidity Systems. Now the fear is that it will put everyone out of work and usher in Skynet to destroy humanity. It seems to me the way to make sure Skynet develops is to centralize the control of AI in a government bureaucracy or corporate monopoly, which of course some people are pushing for. Left to a decentralized chaotic mix of various developers I don’t think there is much chance of the dystopian scenarios coming to fruition. There are certainly big changes coming, but if we can keep the busybodies from screwing things up, the net positive should greatly outweigh the negative.

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    1. Funny how all the hysterical Chicken Littles are the ones that know nothing about computers (with B.S. Bernie leading the mob of idiots) while the people who actually do understand the technology are calling bullshit.

      Also funny how “Computers are going to destroy us all!” but “Computerized voting is 100% Safe And Effective! We need Internet Voting with an app on your phone!!”

      Come to think, if the machines really did want to take over, might they not start by getting a whole passel of stupid, ignorant, loudmouthed incompetent buffoons installed in the government?

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      1. </i>

        <i>

        Come to think, if the machines really did want to take over, might they not start by getting a whole passel of stupid, ignorant, loudmouthed incompetent buffoons installed in the government?</i>

        The joke’s on them; we got there long ago!

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  16. Must be going around. Most Beloved and I just spent the other night at second choice ER ourselves. (Usual choice looked like great place to catch late summer flu; also ten hour wait estimated). (Deleting the tedious and vague fifty words that were here), vitals checked. Blood draw. Wait. Brief exam. Lots more waiting. (Only one provider that night and several very sick people, not us.) Early morning ER room. Testing commenced. Afternoon diagnosis; not serious. Sent home with prescription for pills.

    Long night. Long day.

    Y’all rest up.

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  17. “must be employed by the state, ad infinitum, in a sort of work fare program.”

    Wasn’t the initial proposal for the Transportation Security Administration to be an intelligence fusion center. Then Congress got hold of it and turned it into a jobs program.

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  18. From what I can tell, a lot of why WWI was so incredibly bloody is everyone running it still had a medieval perspective of war. At the time only the US had had and industrial war, the ACW, and Europe didn’t really register it.

    I suspect we recovered from it, because it was over fundamentally ideological questions that could not be resolved, while Europe more or less sleepwalked into it assuming it wasn’t going to be a big deal.

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  19. What worried me, the multiple times I have had to visit the ER, was the number of “code grey” calls. It was explained to me that this meant “security alert – behavioral emergency”. Where I live that normally means unstable person brandishing a weapon. Given that my nearest hospital has a reputation for being the best in the area for treating stab and bullet wounds I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

    Also, I really hate hospitals. The staff are always great, and it is always interesting to chat with them, but fellow patients tend to the deaf and/or unstable – the TVs never turn off. The food is generally better than expected but I had the nastiest case of food poisoning ever whilst in a hospital – 24 hours of projectile vomiting – as a result of spoilt milk.

    One also knows that, the minute one walks through the door, there is at least a $5,000 bill.

    Glad to hear you and yours are well(ish).

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