From: cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: Re: Bailing Out (rant) (was: Re: Freedom of Re
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 1 Sep 92 02:38:41 GMT

In article <17uhorINNhrp@stanley.cis.Brown.EDU> SL500000@brownvm.brown.edu (Robert Mathiesen) writes:
>I like what you say, Janis, about the economy.  Another piece of the whole
>picture may be connected with how wealth (not money) is created: one of the
>easiest ways is to find something valuable that nobody has owned, claim it
>and sell it or whatever you can make from it.  A lot of the prosperity that
>my grandparents' generation saw had to do with claiming unclaimed natural
>resources.  Those days are probably gone forever in North America now (and
>folks on this net are more aware than most of the consequences of all that
>turning of nature into property).  There aren't any other ways left of cre-
>ating so much wealth so easily, at least not that I can see.  

There are entrepreneurial ways of creating things and then convincing
other people that they can't live without them.  Witness fax machines.
Fifteen years ago, businesses got along just FINE without them.
Nowdays, if the office fax breaks down, people are crippled.

(Richard Feynman said something about this that hit the mark.  He was
talking about word processors as opposed to typewriters; the subject
came up when he was sitting on the panel investigating the shuttle
explosion.  He looked over the panel report and noticed that it had
"Version 23" written on it.  In his heyday of manual typewriters, you
only made three versions of something before it was ready because they
were so damned difficult to make.  Nowadays since we have word
processors, we have twenty-three versions of everything, and it ends up
taking the same amount of time as it always did.  Some time-saving
devices, huh!) 

>So the pie
>is about as large as it's going to get, and more and more people need pieces
>of pie.  Either we all get less; or some of us get the same or more, while
>the rest get a lot less.  

That last in infinitely more likely, and not from some liberal
Cassandra-like doomsaying (and let's not forget that she was right).  

In any system so driven to instability as this one, any small
differences between parts are going to be modified; there is no
stability or uniformity in time or throughout the system at any one
time.  Whether it's plasma, water, sand, or money, things in a runaway
system tend to glomp up in blobs in some places, and desert others.
It's how the blobs of matter that make up the planet were formed (we
think)!  At any rate, material will pile up in one place and find an
equilibrium of sorts, until it get shaken up, upon which point it will
settle down again somewhere else.   

>Eventually no one can afford to keep the basic
>stuff (food distribution, sewage, water, roads, etc) functioning -- and
>that's *before* we factor in the cost of repairing what has broken down
>from age (like replumbing a whole city, when the 19th-century water
>mains all wear out about the same time).  

Oh, you mean like now?  Ask someone from Chicago what this can do. 

>I'm simplifying, of course,
>massively simplifying, and no one can foresee everything (so something
>I've overlooked may alleviate parts of the whole problem), but the main
>trend seems clear, and it goes downhill ...

Sometimes massive complexity can actually make the problem easier to
solve, since you can make blanket assumption and rely on statistics,
which are basically trustworthy, provided you collect you data in an
unbiased way.  Ask someone who does thermo (NOT me; I hate the stuff). 

You also need to have a handle on all variables in the system; here we
don't even know what all the variables *are*. 

>So the religious right, or something equally totalitarian, may cause
>a lot of suffering for a long time, but probably for less long than
>one's worst nightmares suggest.  I doubt they have the intelligence
>to solve the sort of problems we've been talking about here.  

It's not that that worries me; they sure are smart enough to make NEW
problems, though, ain't they!

>-- Robert

Blessings,
Janis