Filed under: Constitution, Daily Kos, Emergency, Failure, Government, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Society
The radio said 13 degrees. It’s cold enough that the cats have left taking turns curling up on my lap, and have parked themselves on radiators. We’re fortunate that we can afford to heat this 125 year old house, at least enough to keep us warm if we wear layers.
And the news is as cold as the weather: 533,000 jobs cut last month, over one and a quarter million in just the last three months. Take a look on how Yahoo! news titled that link – it’s very telling. As I have written previously, I think we’re in for a long haul, something akin to a true depression rather than just a bad recession. All the elements are in place, many are already playing out just as they did during the Great Depression. And, as bad as it is, I think this is also a time of potential – potential to make some changes which would normally be resisted by entrenched interests: reregulation (intelligent reregulation) of the financial sector; revamping transportation to create an infrastructure supporting mass transit; introduction of single-payer health insurance; elimination of our insane War on (Some) Drugs.
75 years ago today, during the great Depression, Prohibition ended. It is time to do the same thing again, but with marijuana. Legalize it. Regulate it. Tax it. Treat it like alcohol. Pardon or commute the sentences of everyone in prison for using it or selling small amounts. Quit funding para-military squads in local police departments in the name of “stopping drugs”. It’s a waste of people and resources to fight this pointless war.
It’s been well over 20 years since I last used pot. If it was legalized tomorrow, I’m not sure I’d ever use it again. I don’t have a dog in this fight, from that perspective. But as someone who loves liberty, who hates to see government empowered through fear-mongering, who thinks that we will need all of our resources to deal with *real* problems rather than artificial ones, the time has come to end Prohibition again. And I hope that the new president will have the balls to do so.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI and Daily Kos.)
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, BoingBoing, Emergency, Failure, Feedback, Government, Guns, Kindle, Marketing, NYT, Politics, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, RKBA, Society
An update to this post… In the four days since the site went public, we’ve had almost 75,000 hits. That’s more hits than I’ve had to the Communion of Dreams site this entire year. I’d say it’s off to a good start. Interesting that it has already started to propagate beyond the usual gun forums and whatnot – we got a lot of hits from a link on SomethingAwful, and we’re seeing some links from people’s Facebook and Myspace pages.
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Did you see this post in the NYT about the future of publishing? I was going to write about it, but have been occupied with other matters. Then I saw this piece by Clay Shirky in response, and figured I’d just tell people to read what he said. An excerpt:
There are book lovers, yes, but there are also readers, a much larger group. By Gleick’s logic, all of us who are just readers, everyone who buys paperbacks or trades books after we’ve read them, everyone who prints PDFs or owns a Kindle, falls out of his imagined future market. Publishers should forsake mere readers, and become purveyors of Commemorative Text Objects. It’s the Franklin Mint business model, now with 1000% more words!
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Got a note from a friend in response to yesterday’s doom & gloom report. He asked what my advice would be for anyone wondering about how to handle some modest investments (and acknowledged that I am not a financial advisor in any professional way). My reply:
Warm clothes and sturdy shoes.
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Well, I have other matters to attend to. Have a longer post working in the back of my mind, perhaps for later.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Ballistics, Emergency, Failure, Flu, Government, movies, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Society, Writing stuff
Sometimes I wish that I listened to my own advice. For literally decades, my mantra of advice for friends has always been “trust your instincts”. This isn’t just some mystical mumbo-jumbo: a healthy, functioning human brain with a decent amount of education and experience is an amazing data processor, with multiple layers of analysis always going on – and one of them is what your subconsious is considering that kicks up to your conscious awareness as a “gut feeling”. This is the premise behind the book Blink (which I haven’t read, but have read enough about from the author and others to have a decent understanding of).
OK, so what am I going on about now?
[Mild spoilers ahead.]
Just this, when I originally conceived Communion of Dreams, I was writing a book about . . . wait for it . . . the aftermath of an economic collapse. Yeah, the bulk of the book you see now was pretty much the same. But the backstory was more about how a series of severe but not pandemic flu epidemics lead to the collapse of the world economy around 2011 – 2012. And how that collapse would lead to a significant downturn of the human population worldwide, as the carrying capacity of the planet changed. Yes, I still had the extant plot device of the Fire Flu there, but it was to be what Diabolus became in the current version – a terror threat that played off of the memories of what happened a generation previously.
But I was writing this initially around 2000 – the economy was just too good, things seemed like they would be smooth sailing forever. Trying to get people to think about, let alone believe, that an economic collapse could occur was just too difficult. Most people only understand the functioning of the economy when it smacks them in the face – and in spite of the brief downturn following the 9/11 attacks, few people understood what was building on the horizon.
So I went with the current revision of the book.
I should have trusted my instincts. They have only very seldom let me down. Because now there is a growing awareness of the precariousness of our economic situation. Most people are still only thinking that we’re in for some “rough times”, which I gather they think will be a limitation of how many new plasma televisions they can buy. But even that level of understanding would be enough for them to understand what I was (or, rather, would have been) writing about in that earlier version of Communion.
And yes, if you look at what I said above, you can conclude that I think that things are actually going to get a lot worse for a lot longer than what the current awareness believes. It really depends on how foolishly our government and business leaders act – right now I am not optimistic. Will it mean a global economic collapse? As one of my favorite actors in one of my favorite roles said:
Personally, I’d give us one chance in three. More tea anyone?
Jim Downey
(With apologies for having my Monday doom and gloom a day late – it was a busy weekend launching Ballistics by the inch.)
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Flu, Guns, Health, Pandemic, Science, Society
Once again, I have a mild cold. Been fighting it all week. It is depressing how many times I have had such minor bugs over the last couple of years. And an indication that my baseline health stats are compromised still from being a care provider. It’s for the birds.
Actually, new evidence suggests that the cold virus is from the birds:
Common Cold Virus Came From Birds About 200 Years Ago, Study Suggests
ScienceDaily (Nov. 20, 2008) — A virus that causes cold-like symptoms in humans originated in birds and may have crossed the species barrier around 200 years ago, according to a new article published in the Journal of General Virology. Scientists hope their findings will help us understand how potentially deadly viruses emerge in humans.
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Human metapneumovirus is related to the respiratory syncytial virus, measles, mumps and parainfluenza viruses. It infects people of all ages but is most common in children under five. Symptoms include runny nose, cough, sore throat and fever. Infection can also lead to more severe illnesses such as bronchitis and pneumonia, which can result in hospitalisation, especially in infants and immunocompromised patients. HMPV infection is most common during the winter and it is believed to cause up to 10% of respiratory illnesses in children.
“HMPV was first discovered in 2001, but studies have shown that the virus has been circulating in humans for at least 50 years,” said Professor Dr Ron Fouchier from ErasmusMC in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. “HMPV is closely related to Avian metapneumovirus C (AMPV-C), which infects birds. Because of the similarity, scientists have suggested that HMPV emerged from a bird virus that crossed the species barrier to infect humans.”
A cautionary tale, and a reason why a lot of scientists and public health officials keep a close eye on Avian Flu (H5N1) around the world for evidence of a new pandemic.
Me, I plan on taking direct action along with my OTC meds. I’m going to get even today, and enjoy eating a turkey. It’s a simple matter of self defense.
Oh, the other thing that has kept me entirely too busy the last few days has been working on the new ballistics site mentioned earlier this month. There are a couple of remaining tweaks to be done, but it is basically ready to go, complete with an associated blog, all the data, all the downloads, and over seventy pop-up graphs. Sometime this weekend we’ll migrate it over to its own domain, but if you want an advanced look, feel free to poke around.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Emergency, Failure, Government, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Society
Forget what I said two weeks ago – we’re now up to $7.7 Trillion:
Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. government is prepared to provide more than $7.76 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers after guaranteeing $306 billion of Citigroup Inc. debt yesterday. The pledges, amounting to half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, are intended to rescue the financial system after the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.
The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $3.18 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.
That comes out to something like $24,000 from every man, woman, and child in the country.
Wave bye-bye to your money.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Civil Rights, Constitution, Daily Kos, Failure, Government, Politics, Privacy, Society, Terrorism, Travel
Vice President Dick Cheney is reported to have set forth the “One Percent Doctrine” following the 9-11 attacks. The basic premise is that if there is just 1% chance that an enemy is planning a serious terrorist attack, we have to treat it as though it were a certainty, and respond accordingly.
So, I suppose it really is no surprise that all the absurdity of “behaviour detection” that the TSA employs at airports leads to just a 1% arrest rate, and that they proclaim this as “”incredibly effective.” No, seriously:
TSA’s ‘behavior detection’ leads to few arrests
WASHINGTON — Fewer than 1% of airline passengers singled out at airports for suspicious behavior are arrested, Transportation Security Administration figures show, raising complaints that too many innocent people are stopped.
A TSA program launched in early 2006 that looks for terrorists using a controversial surveillance method has led to more than 160,000 people in airports receiving scrutiny, such as a pat-down search or a brief interview. That has resulted in 1,266 arrests, often on charges of carrying drugs or fake IDs, the TSA said.
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TSA spokeswoman Ellen Howe said the program has been “incredibly effective” at catching criminals at airports. “It definitely gets at things that other layers of security might miss,” Howe said.
Sure it does. Because people who are carrying drugs or using a fake ID are really the terrorist threat that you say you are protecting us from. And to achieve that, they had to have over 99% false positives.
It’s just more Security Theater, of course: the illusion of ‘doing something’, not any kind of practical prevention. I’ve written about this often, and in looking back through those posts it is clear that the real effect of this whole bureaucracy is to make us more and more inured to the systematic destruction of any sense of privacy at the hands of our government. As I wrote just over a year ago:
Over the weekend, news came out of yet another “Trust us, we’re the government” debacle, this time in the form of the principal deputy director of national intelligence saying that Americans have to give up on the idea that they have any expectation of privacy. Rather, he said, we should simply trust the government to properly safeguard the communications and financial information that they gather about us. No, I am not making this up. From the NYT:
“Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,” Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, told attendees of the Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s symposium in Dallas.
Little wonder that they’re happy to define 1% as “success” – it gets them exactly what they want.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI and Daily Kos.)
Filed under: Astronomy, Fermi's Paradox, Marketing, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Survival, Writing stuff
Yeah, I know I said I’d try and get a nice cheery travelogue up next. Oh well. This has more relevance to Communion of Dreams, which is ostensibly the focus for this blog, anyway, right?
Right. So, here: seems that researchers have for the first time clearly determined the extinction of a mammal to have been caused by disease.
In 1899, an English ship stopped at Christmas Island, near Australia. Within nine years, the island’s entire native rat population had gone extinct, and scientists have wondered ever since what exactly happened.Now, researchers led by an Old Dominion University scientist think they have unraveled the mystery – and, they say, the lessons of Christmas Island apply today to issues such as disease, invasive species and the law of unintended consequenceTurns out, says ODU biology professor Alex Greenwood, that a British black rat had stowed away on the ship in a bale of hay. Upon reaching the island, the rat – or several rats – escaped on land and spread a “hyperdisease” among the native population.“Anyone who has ever tried to kill a rat – let alone a whole population – knows how hard that can be,” Greenwood said in an interview Monday. “That’s what made Christmas Island so fascinating for so long. Imagine, a whole species – especially one as tough as a rat – gone within 10 years of exposure!”
OK, for those of us who are non-biologists, this may be something of a surprise: why wouldn’t extinction occur due to disease? But the prevailing theory has long been that it was virtually impossible that a disease would wipe out all members of a species – and that any survivors would pass on their immunity to their descendants, thus continuing the Darwinian arms race. To determine that this has happened – and to a robust and fast-reproducing species such as a rat – is real news.
Which touches on an older item I came across recently:
Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction
Jason G. MathenyAbstract: In this century a number of events could extinguish humanity. The probability of these events may be very low, but the expected value of preventing them could be high, as it represents the value of all future human lives. We review the challenges to studying human extinction risks and, by way of example, estimate the cost effectiveness of preventing extinction-level asteroid impacts.
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3. Estimating the Near-Term Probability of Extinction
It is possible for humanity (or its descendents) to survive a million years or more, but we could succumb to extinction as soon as this century. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. President Kennedy estimated the probability of a nuclear holocaust as “somewhere between one out of three and even” (Kennedy, 1969, p. 110). John von Neumann, as Chairman of the U.S. Air Force Strategic Missiles Evaluation Committee, predicted that it was “absolutely certain (1) that there would be a nuclear war; and (2) that everyone would die in it” (Leslie, 1996, p. 26).
More recent predictions of human extinction are little more optimistic. In their catalogs of extinction risks, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees (2003), gives humanity 50-50 odds on surviving the 21st century; philosopher Nick Bostrom argues that it would be “misguided” to assume that the probability of extinction is less than 25%; and philosopher John Leslie (1996) assigns a 30% probability to extinction during the next five centuries. The “Stern Review” for the U.K. Treasury (2006) assumes that the probability of human extinction during the next century is 10%. And some explanations of the “Fermi Paradox” imply a high probability (close to100%)of extinction among technological civilizations (Pisani, 2006).4
I haven’t spent the time to look up the entire paper and read it, though I have followed this topic in the (popular) scientific news for most of my adult life. It is, in fact, one of the reasons why I decided to write Communion of Dreams – to explore the idea of humanity on the brink of extinction (as well as to examine Fermi’s Paradox, as I have written about previously). Just as most people seem to prefer ignoring their own mortality, we as a species seem to prefer ignoring the possibility of our own extinction. Even the vast majority of Science Fiction (including my own) written with humankind facing the possibility of extinction is resolved with some kind of salvation – it’d just be too bleak for most readers, otherwise.
And that doesn’t sell.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Emergency, Failure, General Musings, Government, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Society
I have a friend who complains that when he goes to check his usual blogs on Monday mornings, he has to brace himself about the bad economic news I’ve written about on Sunday. I hadn’t really realized that I had this weekly schedule, but what the hell. In that spirit, if you want another insight into just how f*cked-up the Wall Street financial crisis really is, spend some time with a long piece by Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker. Here’s an excerpt from The End:
To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.
I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.
He’s talking about his experience on Wall Street over 20 years ago.
It’s long. It’s fairly dense in places. But it does a phenomenal job of explaining how we got to the point we have, and how the situation is actually much more grim than most people realize.
OK, I’ll try and post a nice cheery travelogue later.
Jim Downey
It looks as though there will indeed be some manner of bailout/loan package for the “Big Three” automakers, now that the Bush administration is joining the cries from Democrats. And I’m really not sure how I feel about that, since there are good arguments pro and con, and given the mountains of money we are already throwing at the financial industry why the hell shouldn’t we also help out people who actually make something real?
But it comes as no surprise to me that the automakers are hurting. Sure, there’s the well understood economic forces at work – the ‘legacy health costs’, the lack of financing availability, the volatility of the cost of gas – but there is something else, too: buying a car is a major pain in the ass.
Yeah, I know, everybody knows this. Everybody has written about it. The lack of popularity of car salesmen is a cliche. But that’s exactly my point – it has been like this forever, and there has been no real effort to make any changes in the system. That, right there, tells you that there is something fundamentally wrong with the entire industry.
A case in point. A couple of weeks ago a friend decided that the time had come to get a new car. That with the economy being the way it is, she’d be able to get a decent deal. She did her homework, knew what was the fair market value of the model she wanted, and that there were models with the options she wanted, and in the color that she wanted, in our vicinity.
So she called the local dealership. Said she wanted thus & such car, and that she knew five specific versions of that car was available in the surrounding area. “Yup, we can get that,” said the dealership, “here’s what it will cost. Financing will be zero percent, keeping with our current promotion.”
“Let me think about it,” said my friend. She did, ran the numbers, everything looked good. Not great, but the price was fair. She called the dealership back. “I’ll come in tomorrow (Wednesday) on my way to work, and we’ll take care of the paperwork.”
She was assured that everything would be ready, wouldn’t take more than 15 minutes.
OK, now, complete the story. No, no, go ahead – tell yourself what happened. Got it?
And that’s my point. You *know* what happens next. My friend went in at the appointed time. Of course, there “was a problem.” The “sales manager said we can’t do that price with 0%.”
“What if I just write you a check for the car?”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“What would the price be if I just wrote you a check for the car I want, right now?” (My friend was dead serious about this.)
Salesman goes off to confer with his manager. Comes back. “Well, the car you want . . . ”
Go ahead, finish the sentence. Yeah: “. . . isn’t here on the lot, so we’d have to have it brought in, and there’ll be transport charges, and the other dealership will need something for their trouble, so . . .”
“Wait. We had an agreement on the price of the car. I just wanted to know what the taxes and whatnot on it would add, so I could write the check.”
“But we can’t sell it to you for that.”
My friend got up, walked out. Within an hour she had an agreement from a dealer in a neighboring state for the car she wanted, at a specific price. The manufacturer’s website showed the car in their inventory, so there’d be no problem. They’d hold it for her to come pick up on Saturday.
She and her husband drove up Friday night, stayed with friends in the area. Saturday, they went over to the dealership.
Yeah, you guessed it: Much the same initial song and dance.
Yes, my friend did come home with the car, after telling them that she had left one dealer’s showroom when they tried to pull this crap, and she was perfectly ready to do so again. But it is simply ridiculous that she had to do so.
And yet, this story (all of it true), comes as absolutely no surprise to anyone who has had to go through the hassle of buying a car anytime in the last four decades. Maybe longer – I’m only aware of it that far back. Even people who live here and who have never bought a car from a dealership know to expect this kind of bullshit. It is absurd.
Now, you can say that such a system continues to exist because the profit derived from it for dealers is great enough to overcome the alienation that buyers feel. And besides, everyone else does the same thing. I’ll say instead that this system is proof that car makers in the US do not care about consumers, and are just looking for a way to screw them over at each and every opportunity.
And there’s a big part of me that says payback is a real bitch.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to Daily Kos.)
Communion Of Dreams 