Ecologically and Socially Friendly and Sustainable, Anarchic Civilisation
Articles relating to various areas of ecological, sociological or other consequence
I’ve read several people recently claiming that “poverty is the natural state of human beings”, and I’m not sure if this is new bullshit or just old bullshit being rehashed, but I am sure it is bullshit … allow me to explain.
Humans are just another mammal, that’s all we are, and prior to the invention of the gun and the industrial revolution, lets have a look at what was going on with our various species of sentient mammalian cousins.
If we were to make a generic unit of resource, such that all units of energy, matter, space, and time could be converted to this standard unit, we could more easily analyse how efficient our processes are. I’ve written a couple of articles over the last few weeks about this ( just have a look back through the blog roll ), but I want to in this article discuss the general concept of efficiency itself from an input resource perspective.
Continue reading “Input efficieny: consumption per unit of consumption”
Imagine you have a successful business within the capitalist economic system, but at the same time this new paradigm has been up and running for a while, and so you decide you’d like to experiment with a single project run via this new framework to see how it will go by comparison to the usual way of doing things. Or perhaps you want to know where your skills will be of use in a post transition Resources Based Economy.
This article is a hypothetical scenario of how that might play out for a few different circumstances ( both during and after transition ), just to give you an idea.
This article originally came to me as an idea about how to simply distinguish the differences between property/trade/currency vs. non-property/trade/currency based economic systems – being that the former manufactures scarcity, while the latter removes it ( where possible ). Which in turn was inspired by a debate on social media about whether or not the world is over populated, what we mean by that, and how/why we justify such a statement.
It then occurred to me that for people to understand these issues, they must first understand what scarcity is, and how it occurs – ironically, the people who understand this the least are often the ones who should understand it the best ( economists ), and yet it’s quite apparent that many of them haven’t a clue. The reason for that being, scarcity is an ecological issue, but not an economic one within the confines of the capitalist economic paradigm ( though it should be ).
So let’s start at the beginning and look at what scarcity actually is.
First of all, let me begin this article by stating that I hate the word “pest” to describe POLLINATORS ( which is what many insects are, not just bees ), or to describe whatever else might be in your garden, orchard, or crop fields. I only use this word ( “pest” ) because it best grabs the attention of those whom I want to reach, and hopefully influence to change their practices with respect to “pest control” – particularly in agriculture – but more broadly this article is about the planning of a sustainable civilisation by a marriage of technology and permaculture on many levels.
Continue reading “techno-permaculture: civilisation planning”
There’s a lot of valid questions I’ve been asked about my work and the vision it expresses, although these questions are usually asked in a very poor – even invalid – format, so I have to reinterpret the question, in order to help the querent understand their own question, and therefore understand the answer.
Continue reading “What happens to greed?”
I know that more than half the people of the world believe in something they would call “spiritual”, and for any of you whom have read much of what I’ve written, it won’t come as a surprise to you that I feel sorry for these people – I pity the adult who cannot see past religion. I hope the religious amongst you will read this nonetheless, as I think it offers you something far greater and more wonderful than the brainwashing death-cult you currently follow.
So in this article I want to deal with the question:
“how would religion fare if it had to take responsibility for the consequences of its actions.”
Continue reading “The fate of religion and spirituality in an open empire society”
If you design a system based on the correct interpretation of valid data, there’s a thing you should experience at some stage, and which validates the development track you’re on, and I have experienced this thing at least a few dozen times … it goes something like this ( to provide the most recent example ): Continue reading “Unexpected evidence”
People often argue that capitalism is efficient, and that it strives for efficiency, but even a cursory glance at the reality around you should tell you otherwise. There are countless other examples of the inefficiency of capitalism, but I want to provide you with one detailed example first.
I was walking up the road from my house when I saw a man using one of my most hated devices, the leaf blower, a device which is a very common and typical example of the failures of capitalism … let’s take a look at exactly how redundant and wasteful this device is. Continue reading “The “Leaf Blower vs. Broom” analogy”
I’m one of the generation who grew up with the first home computers; some of my friends at school had things like the Atari, Commodore64, ZX81, Apple III, and Amiga ( amongst others ), while our family had an Apple IIe, one of the schools I attended had some Amstrads, and the local TAFE ( aka Australian technical colleges – actually called a CAE ( “college of advanced education” ) back in those days, long before it became a fully fledged university ) had a punch-card & tape-drive mainframe system ( probably IBM, but I’m not sure ). Continue reading “A lesson for Microsoft ( and other tech developers )”