Litost

Thanks for the suggestion, how does what he says stack up against those who came after, I ask this because this is one of my favourite management talks by Russell Ackoff [1] and he mentions Dr Deming so assume he was influenced by/worked/studied with him and given their relative ages wondered if his work might be valuable to start with?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqEeIG8aPPk

We tend to be quite building inspection heavy over here in the UK but I gather if you work with people who know the system well, you can get off-grid style buildings built. Hopefully this is quite a useful example that featured on two episodes of Grand Designs.

Original: https://vimeo.com/28848933

Revisited (apologies for the C4 link which requires hoops to watch): https://www.channel4.com/programmes/grand-designs-revisited/...

Ben Law's website: https://ben-law.co.uk/

It makes me shudder as well, the first thing that comes to mind is the paperclip maximizer - https://terbium.io/2020/05/paperclip-maximizer/.

David Graeber (from Bullshit Jobs fame) talked about this at some length [1]:

"Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true."

"But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones."

"These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”"

and goes on to come to the following conclusion: "Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days."

Having just done Fritjof Capra's Systems View of Life course, channeling the ideas that:

a) "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" [2]

and

b) "All behaviour in complex systems is emergent"

A (vastly simplified) argument is that bullshit jobs is the emergent behaviour from a system compromising between the needs of:

a) People to work so they can earn money, be fulfilled and see a material increase in their wealth.

b) A political class keen to keep the workers busy less they revolt and upset the system.

c) A system of economics/a reductionist western/scientific worldview that increasingly externalised anything that didn't show everyone was better off (e.g. GDP).

d) Elites who were increasingly happy to take an increasing proportion of the wealth from the efficiency gains.

Everyone wins in relation to the amount of power they have relative to everyone else and the system sustains itself based on the fact no-one with enough power has enough incentive/will to overthrow it. Obviously the planet (which once indigenous peoples had been conquered) mostly lost it's voice in the conversation and so that's why we're where we are now.

[1] https://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodosius_Dobzhansky

It's been a while since I've read the Humanure Handbook and I've not practiced many of the techniques in it but it does cover this topic in great detail: https://humanurehandbook.com/

I believe it is possible you just have to be really careful with how it's treated, especially around vegetables etc.

There's also a natural blackwater treatment system, briefly mentioned in this really great video from one of my favourite Permaculture teachers (EDIT: it's at 46:45), which also happens to be a great introduction to Permaculture if you're interested: https://vimeo.com/95060300

With a title mentioning cannibal ants and a bunker, I'm surprised no-one has referenced Phase IV yet, but given it was a box office flop from 1974. I've not watched it in so long, but I seem to remember it being quite scary as a kid and the fact I still remember it now. On the offchance anyone remembers it or watches it I'd be curious what you think? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070531/

To anyone else who's curious links for the above:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer

There must be other examples, but you're right in the famous case of Prince changing his name to an abstract symbol to get round a contractual issue he was having with his record label. Apparently journalists started saying "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" though apparently it didn't stick? Unfortunately I'm not enough of a Prince fan to know what his fans did?

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/featu...

This quote “You’re efficient when you do something with minimum waste. And you’re effective when you’re doing the right something.” reminds me of a Systems Thinking talk Russell Ackoff gave a long time ago [1] where he talks about the difference between doing "the right thing wrong" and the "wrong thing right" and getting more efficient at doing the wrong thing obviously might not be optimal :). This is actually a concept that Peter Drucker came up with, but I've not managed to find a good link to that, I'd be interested if anyone has?

The whole talk is quite interesting, but I've linked to the relevant segment: [1] https://youtu.be/OqEeIG8aPPk?t=591

Ha, yes I always have fond memories of the days when people wrote a serviceable chess program in 1KB which you typed in from a magazine [1] and I compare that to nowadays when I can have a Firefox Tab using 1GB+.

Also some of the optimisations (The Hobbit on the BBC micro actually using screen memory to load the game) and "friendly rivalry" between developers and copiers (I remember trying to Hack Frak! on the BBC micro and it detecting this and playing the Jolly Roger).

[1] http://users.ox.ac.uk/~uzdm0006/scans/1kchess/

I'm not the best person to answer this either, but whenever anyone says old code is fragile and we should just throw it all out and start over, I always point at this, possibly famous post, by Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Couple of key comments for me "The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed."

"It’s important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time. First of all, you probably don’t even have the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don’t actually have “more experience”. You’re just going to make most of the old mistakes again, and introduce some new problems that weren’t in the original version."

A similar analogy might be Chesterton's Fence, it's important to know why it's in the state it's in before you decide to alter it?: https://fs.blog/2020/03/chestertons-fence/

Fascinating, I've not read any of these books, but I'll stick them on top of my list. Do his books come to a conclusion on how to solve the "conflict" between the Wizard and the Prophet, it was hard to tell just reading the Amazon Reviews? Am I right in thinking it's worth reading 1491 first?

This might be a bit tangential, but I can't help but be reminded of this article on Two-Eyed Seeing, which says there's value in both the Western (scientific) view and the Indigenous (natural) view and they both have things to teach each other. http://www.integrativescience.ca/Principles/TwoEyedSeeing/

There's a brief video explaining in the above. http://www.integrativescience.ca/Media/Video/

It's a topic I've not been able to find much reference to, though there's also a TEDx talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bA9EwcFbVfg

P.S. Even more tangential, but coincidently I was only today reading an article about the agricultural system in use in the article, growing maize, beans and squash often with the use of fish heads which was quite advanced and also nutritional - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)

"To be fair much of Scotland used to be covered in forestry and has been denuded. There are some interesting projects showing what happens if the land is simply protected from over grazing (particularly by deer)."

Interesting this popped up, as I'm studying an Ecosystem Restoration Design Course and the first week was studying exactly this, related Ted Talk here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAGHUkby2Is

But yes, overgrazing is the main culprit there (and also in a lot of other places that have suffered ecosystem collapse).

Did Jung mention anything about alternating between both? Am I right in thinking this is a spectrum so it's perfectly fine/possible to be somewhere in the middle or is the argument this really is an either/or?

I was going to say discovering music is easy, maybe it's just me, but like anything, just get stuck in?

a) Find some bands you like, go see them live.

b) Get talking to people at the gigs (this helps if they're smaller venues), they'll recommend all sorts.

c) See the support bands, odds on you'll like some of them, then go and see them, see the other bands they're in, it doesn't take long before this gets out of control :).

d) Make friends, go and see bands they like, it might not always be your thing, but if it's a social thing anyway, it doesn't really matter.

e) Go to festivals, listen to all the bands beforehand - i used to generated spotify playlists of glastonbury etc. Ok, listening to stuff on spotify doesn't make the artist much, but if you like them, go see them when they headline, buy merch, recommend them to friends etc.

f) I used to take photos, it's pretty much a dead industry nowadays but it puts you in touch with bands and helps get you kind of noticed which might lead to opportunites you might not get otherwise.

g) Be eclectic, you're spoilt for choice, if you're lucky enough to be in London or SE England or a decent sized city.

h) Follow bands on facebook, soundcloud... often this leads to other similar bands.

i) Personally i don't bother with large venues or bigger bands that much, i might make the odd exception, but there's serious amounts of really great music and musicians well away from the expensive/aircraft hanger venue/popular stuff and there's the bonus it might actually have some meaning because it's not trying to make money :).

I thought this was quite an interesting comparison between "Old Google" and "New Google":

http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/never-trust-a-corpora...

Something i'm increasing attributing to the difference between making money and adding value, between a nash equilibrium and the socially optimal solution now seemingly picked up by volunteers like the Internet Archive :(.

I still use google search, youtube and maps but increasingly i can only see this use dwindling partly due to malvertising but as mentioned due to the problem of not getting to depend on any google service. But also in the case of search because of privacy concerns and maps because (free) apps tied to Openstreetmap are so much better for anything other than driving, and i can contribute back to them etc.

Surely if all the bad streams are coming from the same small number of accounts, or maybe many accounts that don't pay much/any subscription, this problem is simply neutralised by rejigging the payout formula?

Assuming this is still the case: http://markgoldenstein.com/spotify-others-use-unfair-formula...

then by calculating revenue more fairly as per the formula in the above link the problem goes away.

e.g. Instead of calculating the amount an artist gets as total revenue * (their plays / total plays) it was individual account revenue * (their plays / total plays) summed over all accounts. This would then penalise the gym/bar or bot accounts, that either aren't paying any money or are generating huge numbers of plays.

Though, cynically you could probably say there's a reason the formula has been done that way so it would be unlikely to change???

Much as i don't want to cause any further depression in an already quite depressing thread, but if you follow Joseph Tainters work on The Collapse of Complex Societies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0R09YzyuCI

a) Complexity has killed off pretty much every major society prior to ours.

b) People's innate desire to problem solve increases complexity.

c) Cheap energy has enabled this process.

So there's an argument, an unlimited source of free energy would actually be a major problem because

1) It would enable more complexity, which is already pretty unmanagable.

2) You've still the problem of out of control resource usage.

Ah thanks, it's been over a year since i did the initial evaluation, sounds like i'm overdue another :).

I'm still slightly new to editing OSM as a MTBer, maxerickson and c0nsumer have covered the details of how to do this already very well, but i found after comparing a seemingly never ending number of competing apps in this space, i found Viewranger GPS really useful:

a) For planning routes in advance to then download to your smartphone and follow using the app (as mentioned elsewhere OSM was definitely the best mapping layer to use for this both as a resource and as a mechanism to feed your own updates back in).

b) For creating tracks from the routes you've actually cycled which can then be uploaded to the website for later examination.

c) In addition to b) you can annotate your uploaded track on the website with actual pictures from the journey round. These can be from a number of sources (i use flickr) and it will either time sync or gps sync them to the route so you get a nice one stop for looking at previous trips. This has the added benefit you can just take pictures as your going round to then refer back to when fixing OSM without having to worry about making notes as to where it was etc.

Has anyone else used this app or anything else to do this as i'd be interested if there's any alternative ways.

Example annotated track from Hay Bluff: http://my.viewranger.com/track/details/MTIzMzAxNg==

Anyone else find it slightly revealing, and obviously disappointing, that any conversation about wealth nowadays only seems to encompass financial wealth, as though all other forms of wealth [1] were either redundant or meaningless. I often wonder when i see headlines like "1 percent of the world's people control 50 percent of its wealth" how the other forms of wealth are distributed and if indeed having more of one predisposes you to have less of all the rest?

[1] - Whatever they may be, spiritual, happiness, obviously off the top of my head, i've ran out here because it's not a topic i usually hear discussed, any other suggestions?

First time i saw it was on the london underground: https://www.flickr.com/photos/litost/15113770968

Yes, i do love Banksy's take on advertising, much as i do Bill Hick's (even more angsty) [1]. Though you do have to wonder, i thought i heard Chomsky say that 1/6 of the world is engaged in Marketing/PR and Advertising which for me boils down to 1/6 of the world playing zero-sum games with each other for your ever dwindling attention span (assuming you actually watch tv and don't install an ad-blocker).

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhjCrL40JIM

Pretty tangential, and i've no idea yet as to it's accuracy, but i loved the idea that the human race's "emergence into consciousness was triggered by our ancestors encounters with visionary plants". From an ironically, as otherwise i probably wouldn't have stumbled on it, Ted Talk by Graham Hancock:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0c5nIvJH7w

Out of interest, are there any other theories as to what might have caused this "leap"?

This reminds of what Peter Higgs (of Higgs Boson fame) said "I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system" http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-b...

I'd have to agree with the other commentator on this, the BBC is hardly unbiased, it's under huge pressure to tow the conservative party line via threats to its funding and it's coverage is often populist (a lot of stuff about the royal family) and shallow, I gave up watching it years ago.

Channel 4 news is better, but still i despair at some of the trolling for soundbites that goes on, it's still about the best of the mainstream UK news channels.

Recently The UK Guardian, which i used to have a very high opinion of, got into quite a bit of trouble (with the readers) about it's biased coverage against Jeremy Corbyn's labour leadership campaign.

I imagine the US media is way worse, but in todays horribly co-opted world, sometimes the best you can hope for it to take a cross-sample of biased sources and somehow average it out in your head :(.

I've just watched this and assuming it's unbiased which it seems to be, it makes a number of very compelling arguments to go vegetarian/vegan. Not least the huge water, grain and land requirements and the resultant methane emissions of eating meat which are globally unsustainable: http://cowspiracy.vhx.tv/

I was curious about this, as a relation has gluten intolerance. This reckons that the gluten content of wheat hasn't really changed: http://nogluten-noproblem.com/2014/03/has-the-gluten-content...

And entertainingly this reckons increasingly industrialy generated wheat is now so devoid of any nutrients, even pigs won't eat it? http://www.grainstorm.com/pages/modern-wheat

Is it just me or is it becoming increasingly more difficult to get the truth on any matter, because you're wading through so many layers of human generated FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt)?

I'm thinking aloud and obviously taking a negative purist view here, but does anyone else wonder, if in 20-30 years, if civilisation has actually advanced any, if we'll look back at ads in the same way we now seem to be treating tobacco, sugar, alchol etc. etc. ie a poison, but in this case of the mind rather than the body [1] [2]?

I mean all that mind bogglingly dark patterny/cynical gameplay we engage in everytime we watch one. And there's also all the negative, misery inducing, pressure when you realise, even if you sold the house and spent it all on plastic surgery you wouldn't be anywhere near as attractive or thin as the size zero model they've just tried to use to sell you the gadget you probably don't need, that you probably can't afford that was likely made by some "exploited" person from resources that probably aren't sustainable and then shipped halfway round the world. And then you go and buy it anyway and hate yourself for being gullible and buying something you probably can't afford... just so you can support some guy who's just doing his job but secretly hates himself for engaging in a zero-sum game with the rest of mankind and persuading you to buy something you... every time he sits down at his desk so he can buy his kids new ipads for christmas when they'd arguably be better off without anyway [3].

Another nash equilibrium in a world crying out for socially optimal solutions [4] or just an another inevitable inefficiency of capitalism [5].

I mean what ever happened to the Just In Time philosophy. We've ran with it on the supply side so stuff is cheaper than it should be, but every day i get bombarded by tens of emails from companies investing a lot of effort in trying to kiddology me into buying stuff which i thankfully just filter away (as i do with the rest of it - ad-blockers, don't watch live tv or listen to radio stations with ads, don't buy into the whole sky pay for stuff and then also have to watch ads). It's almost like a stupid tax.

At the end of the day I'm just not going to buy your <unnecessary> thing so stop wasting my time/sanity/electricity/bandwidth and yours. It's not as though, for example, if i want to buy a new tent (which so far i've done about every 5 years) or do a canvas (probably twice a year) i can't just wait ten minutes for the next millets sale or photobox offer (i mean when does photobox not have a sale on for something they just keep increasing the base price of anyway). And anyway i'd probably be better going somewhere that had spent slightly less on their kiddology so their quality sucked less.

I entirely get why people do it, the "good" of the website/service/... i provide hopefully outweighs the "evil" of the mechanisms i go to try and support it, but if you didn't "need" the money, would anyone go anywhere near an ad-broker?

I can't help but think if we factored money out of this whole equation, this whole pyramid of snafu would collapse and we can move onto a slightly more healthy, enlightened society? Is this the best we can do? Would basic income help [6]? Or do i have to wait for likely societal collapse to a lower energy level to render this whole thing moot (see Tainter)?

</more ranty than i intended>

[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/litost/15113770968/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhjCrL40JIM

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGab38pKscw

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jILgxeNBK_8

[5] https://libcom.org/library/inefficiency-capitalism-brian-oli...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

For completeness, i guess most people have seen the ant colony layouts? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGJ2jMZ-gaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmD5ahkOPAQ