# The Archdruid Report

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society

## Wednesday, September 07, 2016

### Retrotopia: The Only Way Forward

This is the twenty-fourth (and next to last) installment of an exploration of some of the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of narrative fiction. At a final meeting between our narrator and Isaiah Meeker, President of the Lakeland Republic, certain unstated agendas are revealed and the future of one of the post-US North American republics takes an unexpected turn...
***********
A taxi brought back to my hotel from Janice Mikkelson’s mansion—one of her flunkeys called it for me—and I spent most of the ride staring out the window and thinking about what she’d said about the prewar rich. I’d heard plenty of stories along the same lines, of course, everybody has, but for some reason my mind kept circling back to the way that they’d dug their own graves and then jumped into them. Why didn’t it occur to them that voting themselves one billion-dollar bonus after another, while driving their own employees and the rest of the country into poverty, was going to blow up in their faces sooner or later?
I was thinking that, staring out at the darkening sky, when a little pale streak brought me back to reality. The dozens of governments and corporations that kept launching satellites even after 2029, when the Kessler syndrome in low earth orbit should have given them a wake-up call, had gone waltzing just as cluelessly into a preventable disaster of their own. I thought of the mess we’d gotten into back home by going long on nuclear power plants in the 2040s, long after it should have been clear to everyone that nuclear power was—what was Fred Vanich’s phrase?—a subsidy dumpster, one more technological white elephant that never paid for itself and only looked profitable because most of the costs were shoved out of sight one way or another. I thought of the war going on a thousand miles south of me just then, and wondered sourly why a species that was so smart at coming up with clever technologies was so dumb about so much else.
The taxi stopped outside the hotel, and I went in, climbed the stairs to my room, and made a phone call. Yes, the call was to Melanie Berger; yes, we spent the evening together; no, I’m not going to go into any of the details. We didn’t talk about progress or technology or the future of the Lakeland Republic, in case you were wondering.
Another taxi brought me back to the Capitol Hotel about seven-thirty the next morning. I tried without noticeable success to coax my electric shaver into giving me a decent shave, then showered and got everything but the day’s clothing packed. I’d considered more than once putting on ordinary bioplastic businesswear for the trip back, knowing that people back home would look at me as though I had two spare heads if I got off the train in Pittsburgh dressed in my Lakeland clothes, but that resolution lasted just about long enough for me to reach into the closet and grab a business suit. The slick clammy texture of the thing made my skin crawl. So I dressed in hempcloth and wool instead, checked my appearance, put on my trench coat and porkpie hat, and headed out the door to my final appointment with the President of the Lakeland Republic.
The weather had turned cold and damp overnight, and stray raindrops spattered down as I walked the familiar six blocks to the Capitol. Another round of scaffolding had gone up on the unfinished dome, and stonemasons were already clambering around up there, laying another course of marble blocks beneath the shelter of brown tarps I guessed probably weren’t made of plastic. Down at street level, people were already picking up the latest papers at Kaufer’s News. I bought the Blade, glanced at the headlines on the front page: the fighting in the Gulf and in northeastern Texas seemed to be grinding toward a stalemate; the other North American republics had appealed to the Brazilians and Chinese to stay out of the fighting and try to talk their respective client states into accepting a ceasefire; one of the big Indian telecom multinationals had gone bankrupt—the first corporate casualty of the satellite crisis, though I knew it wouldn’t be the last by a long shot—and stock markets everywhere but Toledo were doing another sickening downward lurch in response.
I stuffed the paper into one of the big outside pockets of my trench coat, crossed the street, and went up the long walk to the main entrance of the Capitol. It was five to nine, still too early for kids on field trips or photo ops in the Rotunda, so the only people I saw were members of the legislative staff hurrying this way and that, getting ready for what would probably be another hectic day, and a couple of white-haired politicians, one light-skinned, one dark-skinned, talking intently as they ambled toward the Senate end of the building. Me, I headed straight across the rotunda to the door in back and went in.
It still startled me that you could just walk into the offices of the President of the Lakeland Republic. No doubt the uniformed guards in the Rotunda weren’t the only guards in the place, but they were the only ones I saw. I went down the corridor into the front office, said hi to Gabriel Menendez, waited while he called back, shed my coat and hat in the cloakroom, and then through another corridor and the round room with the spiral staircase to Meeker’s office.
“Mr. Carr,” said the President, as we shook hands. “It’s good to see you again.” He gestured toward the side of the room. “Please have a seat.”
The same people who’d been present for my first meeting with Meeker were waiting: no surprises there, though I hadn’t expected them to be sitting in precisely the same chairs. I shook hands all around. “Mr. President, Mr. Macallan, Ms. Patel, Mr. Vanich—” With the faintest of smiles, just for her: “Ms. Berger.”
We got settled. “Before we get to business,” the President said, “I have a bit of good news to pass on: to you, or course, but also through you to Ms. Montrose. Our State Department heard backchannel last night via an embassy I won’t name that the Confederate and Texan governments are both potentially willing to talk about a ceasefire. No word yet about when or where, much less what terms either side’s likely to demand, but at least they haven’t rejected negotiations out of hand.”
“That’s good to hear,” I said.
“We certainly have hopes,” Meeker went on. “That’s all we have so far, though.” A gesture dismissed the issue. “I hope you’ve found your stay here—shall we say, instructive.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” I replied. “I don’t mean any criticism at all when I say that in some ways, it’s been two very long weeks.”
Meeker nodded. “Melanie mentioned that you’ve found yourself reconsidering some of your ideas about technology and the like.”
I considered him. “Again, that’s one way of putting it—and that brings me to one last item I’d like to mention before I leave for home.”
“Of course,” said Meeker, smiling. Fred Vanich and Melanie glanced at each other, and I wondered if they’d made another bet.
“I suspect you’re aware,” I said then, “that I had more reasons for coming here than the ones we discussed earlier.”
Meeker turned to look at Stuart Macallan, who said, “Mr. Carr, I hope you won’t mind if I state the obvious. None of us could think of any reason why Ellen Montrose would have sent one of her key advisers here right after the election, when almost any competent staffer could have handled the preliminary work on the the three agreements we worked out. We’ve had plenty of other unofficial envoys come here since the borders opened, of course, and most of them had some agenda other than the one they told us about. We assumed you had one too.”
“With that in mind,” said Meeker, “I’d be most interested in hearing what your other reasons for comong here might be, to the extent that you can talk about them.”
“Fair enough,” I said, meeting his gaze. “You know that Ellen won the election promising across-the-board changes in our national economic policy. She means it, too—we’ve already got the first round of legislation drafted, and everybody’s going to hit the ground running the day after inauguration. I’m sure you know the basic thrust of it.”
“What’s been made public, yes,” said Meeker. “She hasn’t mentioned defaulting on the foreign debt Barfield and his predecessors ran up, but that’s almost certainly going to have to be part of it. Even before this business down south got going, there was no way she could keep her election promises without renegotiating the debt, and that means at least a technical default.”
I gave him a bland look and said, “I can’t comment on that.” He chuckled, and I went on. “The new administration’s going to have its hands full getting the economy a little less dysfunctional, and now there’s what the satellite crisis is doing to stock markets and the telecom industry, not to mention the Confederate-Texas war, to add to the fun and games. Beyond that, though, there’s another set of plans relating to economic regulations, the tax code, and a range of other policies. Those haven’t been made public yet, but when they are, you’re going to find some of them just a little familiar.”
“Indeed?” Meeker said, his eyebrows rising. “Please go on.”
“The short form is that she wants to redirect government support for business away from the high-tech sectors of the economy and into manufacturing and agriculture, and change the tax code and other public policy incentives so that they reward employment rather than automation.”
Jaya Patel waited a moment to make sure Meeker wasn’t about to speak, then said, “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how sensible that sounds from our standpoint.”
“No. When she suggested it to me, though, I told her to her face that she was stark staring nuts.”
That got slightly glazed looks from the others. “I’d be interested in knowing how she took that,” the President said.
“She expects that sort of thing,” I told him. “You’ve heard about her reputation for blunt talk, right? She hires staff who will talk to her the way she talks to them. Half the problem with Barfield’s administration is that he only hires people who tell him what he wants to hear.”
He nodded, gestured for me to go on.
“I told her that there was no way the Atlantic Republic could go back to a twentieth-century economy, that nobody would put up with it, and even if we could and they did, it just meant that we’d be eaten alive by less backward nations that kept up with the latest technology. She pointed out that the more we invested in the latest technology the further behind we got, and I dismissed that as the product of outside factors. We had a fine donnybrook—the kind where everybody else on the floor gathers outside the door to listen—and I finally insisted that it simply wouldn’t work. She just smiled and said that it was already working.”
“So she knew what we’ve done,” said Melanie.
I nodded. “I don’t happen to know where she got her information. I know Barfield sent someone from his inner circle over here right after the borders opened, but her report went into a locked file as soon as she got back and I don’t know if anyone but Barfield ever saw it. Ellen’s got connections in surprising places, though. But she told me that policies like the ones she had in mind were working on this side of the border. I simply wouldn’t believe it, and so we made a deal. If she won the election, she’d come up with some plausible reason to send me over here for two weeks right afterwards and see for myself. After that, if I could give her a good reason why her proposals wouldn’t work, she’d reconsider them.”
Meeker paused, watching me, and then asked, “And what will you tell her when you get back?”
The words came more easily than I’d expected. “Something that I couldn’t have imagined myself proposing a week ago. I’m going to advise her to go considerably further than she’d planned, and begin moving the Atlantic Republic in the same directions that you’ve gone here.”
When I was a kid, my grandmother used to talk about deep silence by saying it was quiet enough that you could hear a pin drop. That’s what came to mind just then; I’d have had to drop it onto Meeker’s desk—the floor was carpeted—but if I’d done it, nobody in the room could have missed hearing it. Everyone but Melanie was staring at me; she was smiling.
“Well,” Meeker said, recovering before any of the others. “If I may say so, Mr. Carr, that’s quite a compliment.”
“Thank you,” I replied. “I’m not sure whether it’s a compliment to the Lakeland Republic, though, or a criticism of everyone else. It shouldn’t have been so hard to figure out that if you’ve gone down a blind alley, the only way you can go forward starts by backing up.”
Fred Vanich glanced at his boss, and then at me. “It’s a little more complex than that, Mr. Carr,” he said. “Progress, development, going forward. Those are powerful metaphors, and it’s not always easy to think clearly when they’re being waved around by those who have blind faith in them—especially if rich people stand to get much richer by convincing others that here and now, going forward means buying whatever technology they happen to be selling.”
I gestured, conceding the point. “Have you decided how you’ll propose going about the transition?” Jaya Patel asked.
“No,” I admitted. “I’ve only had a couple of days to think about it, and quite a few other things to do in that time. When we get the first couple of rounds of legislation passed, cope with the end of satellite services, and figure out how we’re going to deal with the blowback from the war down south—ask me then and I can probably tell you.”
“If there’s anything our government can do for yours in the process,” Meeker said, “I trust you’ll let us know.” With a sudden amused smile: “For reasons that are not entirely altruistic, of course.”
“I know Janice Mikkelson would love to sell us some streetcars,” I observed.
That got a general laugh. “Yes,” Meeker said then, “but there’s also the point you made when we first talked, about not wanting a war zone or a failed state on your country’s border. If I may be frank, if the Atlantic Republic had kept going the way the Dem-Reps were leading it, it’s an open question whether you could have avoided serious trouble for long. The changes Montrose has announced will help, but it’s going to take quite a bit more to achieve the kind of economic and political stability we’ve managed here. If we can help you make that happen, that’s an investment we’ll consider.” He smiled again. “‘You’ in this case meaning the Atlantic Republic and Ellen Montrose primarily. I don’t claim to know what role you personally will be playing in all this.”
“That’s another issue,” I said. “My position in the new administration was one of the things hinging on my deal with Ellen. Of course there’s the confirmation vote on our side and the usual formalities on yours, but part of our deal was that if I ended up agreeing with Ellen, I was committing to four years as our ambassador to the Lakeland Republic.” I drew in a breath. “So I expect to be back here early in the new year, if everything goes according to plan.”
Meeker considered that and nodded. “That’s welcome news, Mr. Carr.”
“Thank you, Mr. President.” We shook hands. Past the President’s shoulder I could see Melanie’s face. She was smiling as our eyes met.

#### 287 comments:

«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 287 of 287

Dustin Hamman said...

  Fantastic post John, and a great plot twist! Thank you for entertainingly sharing a much needed vision of a possible path towards a more positive future. I look forward to a copy of the book. I'd like to think that prior to her reading the locked away report, the first seeds may have been planted in Ellen Montrose by her stumbling across the archived writings of a certain Archdruid. (...an author well known in the Lakeland Republic, however.)
  Re: Additional Themes. You may have already included something similar… Carr could exhibit surprise at the ability to purchase something in the Lakeland Republic that happens to not be hermetically sealed in plastic and styrofoam packaging.
  Cheers!

  9/10/16, 11:03 AM
Varun Bhaskar said...

  Archdruid,
  Really look forward to the book, and loving the end where the fragments of the United states drift toward retro or collapse. I think I will add my own ending past yours, where some 40 to 50 years later people start thinking about reconstitution of the Old Republic. For me at least that would be the perfect ending to a utopian story.
  Regards,
  Varun

  9/10/16, 1:13 PM
Bill Pulliam said...

  I am wondering why another instalment is needed. This feels like as good a place to end as any.

  9/10/16, 1:27 PM
Nancy Sutton said...

  Re: the movie, I'm afraid WE would have to make it happen ;)

  9/10/16, 1:39 PM
latheChuck said...

  I'm trying to imagine what it could mean to go "on the eco-offensive". None of these ideas are new (of course), but maybe it helps to frame them in a heroic, stick-it-to-the-man framework:
  1. Find a way to shrink the distances between where you eat, sleep, work, shop, socialize, and worship. (When we use less transportation, we demand less oil.) Now that all of your "eggs are in one basket", geographically speaking, invest in improving the basket! Make it beautiful; or at least, pick up the litter.
  2. Improve the infrastructure. Friends in my neighborhood has been agitating for improved bicycle routes for about ten years, but we still press on. It takes time to acquire the land from hostage-holding landowners, and local-government funding.
  3. Walk, bike, or carpool whenever you can, and savor the experience. (Unfortunately, with the hot weather we've had lately in Maryland (mid-90's F, mid 30s C), one can hardly travel by bike without being soaked in sweat. To be presentable at church tomorrow morning, I'll have to allow an extra 15 minutes just to travel by bike, then an extra 30 minutes to cool off!) Sometimes I chafe at the rigid schedule of my carpool, but I relish the conversations.
  ... and so on. The point is, every decision has its pros and cons. When the "con" of Business As Usual includes environmental and economic disaster, look especially hard for the "pro" of alternative arrangements. Celebrate the pro's!

  9/10/16, 2:57 PM
temporaryreality said...

  @ anyone interested in my general plan question last week
  @ zach bender
  I wanted to thank you for taking the time to respond to my question about how to proceed. Unfortunately, I'm very late in the process (no excuse, family life takes a lot of my attention, but this DOES point out that the time to get involved in anything is *early* on!). And by late, I mean that I'm still formulating my own opinion, and in no position to state it 'for the record' anywhere. I MAY get a comment to the planning commission/city council before the deadline next week, but that's not a guarantee.
  I'm wading my way through the city's archived documents related to the General Plan (GP) process, plus trying to parse what's being said in the draft GP. It might not be as horrible as I'd originally perceived - though at this point, the suggestion that anywhere *ought to be growing* is, by itself, horrible if the underlying assumptions aren't addressed (ie. why grow? legitimate influx of new residents because ___good reason here__? Are we making good and appropriate use of what we already have? Where are we failing in our town's current reality and is "growth" just a way to mask/avoid dealing with that? Are we assuming today's access to resources is unending? etc).
  I'm unfamiliar with the way this all works - I note that there is talk in the minutes of various city meetings about "articulating a future vision" and that "a great deal of time has been spent in assessment and organization of appropriate goals and policies," but I'll be darned if I can find when and where that assessment and organization has taken place. Maybe I missed all that given my tendency to focus on mostly-home. Maybe it all happened in city offices.
  But like I mentioned upon opening this comment, the ideal moment is the nascent one. Now, I know, every moment holds some sort of nascency and maybe Chris can give us a good Sun Tzu passage that talks about opportune moments and opening acts and the power of early action. But I realized that even though I'm late to the table as it stands in regard to this Updated General Plan and its proceedings, I'm not late for everything. There'll be a next step and a next one. I'll try to be more informed about local happenings so I take the steps I'm capable of taking.
  Thanks, everyone for the conversation that touched on defending turf vs. setting out a vision and working for something. That has been helpful.

  9/10/16, 2:58 PM
latheChuck said...

  Why don't we have the leisure time promised by automation? In fact, I claim that we do; it's just not optimally distributed. Look at the workforce participation rate. The fraction of working-age adults who are actually working (now just 62%) has been falling for the last 38 years, and those who work part-time ARE counted among the working. However, many workers would rather work more hours for more money than fewer hours for less, and many employers would rather have fewer employees working longer hours than more employees working less (for administrative overhead and scheduling simplicity). There's also an efficiency argument for having organizational memory concentrated within a smaller number of expert employees.
  So, how do we overcome this bias toward smaller work-forces? An expensive mandatory insurance plan for "full-time workers only" seems like one way to increase the number of part-time positions!

  9/10/16, 3:11 PM
Patricia Mathews said...

  Martin B - don't insult Old Man Coyote that way!

  9/10/16, 3:30 PM
Cherokee Organics said...

  Hi Jo,
  I second your opinions. The future also means re-engaging with one's children. It used to be that when I was a kid, parents apparently used to sacrifice so that their children could enjoy a future. I see a bit of that still even today, but progress is used as a mental "tool" so as to avoid that particular story.
  Because if progress is that which provides, we apparently don't have to, and that is its reward for the true believers. It looks like a dodgy gamble to me though.
  Cheers
  Chris
  Hi JMG,
  Sorry, I meant the word affect, not effect...
  Cheers
  Chris

  9/10/16, 4:15 PM
Jeff Balvanz said...

  Re: the movie.
  I'm afraid only an indie filmmaker would touch Retrotopia for a movie, and just thinking about the cost of the sets and props I'd be surprised at that. I mean, how many drones did you shoot down in that scene, and how many horses and streetcars is it going to take? It might be cheaper to just build the Lakeland Republic and get people to move in.
  But...it might make a great radio drama. Then all those sets and props get replaced by a good sound effect team. According to the Wikipedia, KDVS in Davis, California still runs radio theater programs, and one of them does social and political themes. Maybe it would play there. And of course you could just podcast it.
  I mean, what would be more Retrotopian than a radio drama?

  9/10/16, 6:38 PM
Shane W said...

  Wow! What an amazing ending! Didn't see it coming! Montrose was in on it the whole time! I can't think of the technique you used, but I'm sure you will tell us. It's more than just a plot twist. Also, I love Meeker's casual reference to default, in comparison to the way the current establishment goes apoplectic/apocalyptic about the issue. So retro nations will now stretch from the Atlantic to the foothills of the Rockies? Awesome. We can only assume that post-ceasefire, the South and Texas are rediscovering I'll Take My Stand and carefully considering their own past.
  Regarding phones, I'm not sure about energy usage, but I do know that rotary dial, loop disconnect, pulse dialing is a very basic, resilient technology that dates to at least Tier 2 or 3 (early 1900s). The only reason it was not deployed by the Bell System was political, not economic. Automatic Electric, the manufacturer of equally indestructible phones for the General System and other Independent telcos, invented the dial and held its patent (hence the "automatic" in its name). The Bell System and Western Electric did not want to pay Automatic for the use of its patent, so they kept using operators. There was one instance in California where Bell bought an exchange and attempted to revert back to operators, but the customers, in true California fashion, protested, and kept their dial service (anyone who has worked California customer service knows how demanding they can be--California is truly "exceptional" in that it really is the "land of exceptions") One nice convenience that Lakeland might reinstate is 5-digit dialing for same-exchange calls. There is a small town in my county, Midway, that still had their old step switch when I was in high school (90's), and they could still call each other by dialing the last five digits. Advertising in Lexington before the 70s would only list the last five ("phone 5-5555 for Bill's Shoe Repair")--I guess all of Lexington at that time was on the same exchange? Supposedly, Lexington's exchange was "AShland" (27X-), but it was never used in advertisements of business phone numbers, only the last five. I most definitely think the old pre-divestiture model of telephone service is Lakeland's model: highly regulated utility, long distance subsidizes local--hence, local service is affordable and unlimited, and long distance costs a fortune, and is only used by businesses and sparingly by individuals. Most homes will be on party lines, and part of the strong regulation is that the phone company is responsible for providing adequate pay phone coverage in poorer urban and high cost rural areas for those who can't afford even a party line.
  As to touch tone, we didn't get our first pushbutton phone until the late 80s, and my parents would never pay extra for touch tone service, so our pushbutton phones were set to dial pulse until they converted/stop charging up in the 90s. I remember, one by one, going around and replacing the "connecting blocks" (grandparents) and four-prong jacks (parents) with modular jacks as we gradually replaced our phones. Am I the only one who grew up with the "General System" and Automatic Electric phones? My grandparents had a teal green Automatic Electric wall phone with the side chrome switchook in one of those built-in-the-wall phone nooks w/the phone book shelf underneath. Is everyone else a Bell System/Western Electric veteran?

  9/10/16, 6:46 PM
Shane W said...

  Really, I think we're coming closer to a Retrotopia breaking point than people realize. I just spoke with a 20-something at the vineyard/winery I've been working, and he was in total agreement that digital crap is designed to break down, can't be fixed, and is not as good as something made 50 years ago! 20 something! How cool is that? A coworker just quit Facebook, and he's not the only one recently I've heard has quit it. It was eating up too much of his time(!) People are tiring of this progress myth, I tell you...

  9/10/16, 6:56 PM
Steve Morgan said...

  One suggestion for the list, perhaps: trade schools and/or vocational and technical training at high schools. I know that most job training takes place in apprenticeships, as you've mentioned, but there has been a tradition of unions and trade organizations running schools for their soon-to-be apprentices as well.
  On the yard sign/bumper sticker thread, no signs seen for either presidential candidate in Boulder county, CO. Maybe half a dozen Hillary bumper stickers, compared to 10 times as many Bernie leftovers, and perhaps 40 times as many Obama/Biden leftovers from '08 and '12.
  At the Scottish Highland festival in Estes Park today a food stand had three tip jars:
  Trump (with his picture on it) - half full
  Hillary (with her picture on it) - slightly less full
  FREEEEEEEEDOOOOOOOM! (with picture of Mel Gibson as William Wallace) - overflowing at twice the diameter
  Also seen, a t-shirt with a picture of two Corvette sports cars with the phrase "At least America is still building rocket ships!"

  9/10/16, 6:57 PM
Shane W said...

  Emmanuel,
  I wanted to second your experience with Canada. Although I'm from KY, and spent time in Ontario, the difference between community cohesion is palpable. There is way more social trust in Canada, and communities are tighter knit, and spontaneously get together and do things for each other in a way they don't here, even in the South.

  9/10/16, 7:00 PM
Shane W said...

  Odd things you believe when you're little: I thought GTE only served Fayette, Jessamine, and Woodford Co., KY, because everywhere else seemed to have Bell. It wasn't until years later when I went to work for the phone company that I realized they were a national company with service all over. I also thought that cigarette smoking was feminine, because only women still smoked cigarettes in my family (the men all quit before I was born or could remember.)

  9/10/16, 8:50 PM
patriciaormsby said...

  @Shane, my first experience with a telephone about 50 years ago was attempting to dial Empire4-4465, as my mother lovingly taught me, and getting the wrong number. Good grief! Our class on telephone use at school had stressed what BAD children we were if we dialed wrong numbers. I thought I was going to be punished. (The teacher seemed to know what the "Empire" business was, but her explanation went over my head. She was dealing with a lot of other, much livelier children.)
  Years later, the next time I worked up the courage to use a telephone, I got the non-English speaking Greek mother of a classmate on the line, who sounded furious with me.
  The next time I tried phoning someone was high school, stuttering in sheer terror at a friend.
  @JMG, I think you have already reflected my input (or maybe not) several months back with the mentioning of noblesse oblige. That is such a nice and important element in this story! It may be too much to ask (and I'll understand) to mention tech addiction. A couple of kids pointing at an oldster with his handheld something-or-other, and one of them says, "Our grandpa's tech addiction bankrupted the family!" "What, a hacking?" "No! He just had to keep up with everything, and you know it was all just an illusion anyway."
  The only reason I bring up this personal refrain of mine is what I know about collapses or other major social transformations is that one family member with an addiction can really wreak havoc. The system changes and while people are getting used to how the new one works, the quick and creative scammers get to work mopping up loose assets. One handy means is servicing addictions for a reward.
  Katie Singer's most recent "Electronic Silent Spring" newsletter reported: "Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, former clinical professor at Stony Brook Medicine and author of Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction is Hijacking Our Kids--and How to Break the Trance (St. Martin's), has found treating heroin and crystal meth addicts easier than 'lost-in-the-matrix video gamers or Facebook-dependent social media addicts.'" Wondering how they'll cope...
  Thank you for that link back to the original Green Wizardry post, too! That gets me thinking (like you usually do) that the handiest choice of translation of "wizard" is "mahotsukai," but the image of that here is mostly via Disney and Time Warner. They have a much better, familiar choice from China: "sen'in," and I knew a person with that honorary title, who lived year-round at the top of a mountain. The strongest image there, though, is being able to subsist on mists supplemented with lichens, and it really seems closer to "hermit." But Japan had the kind of people you described, and still has them, in fact, carrying forward old knowledge on local herbs and agricultural techniques, for example, and providing Taoist mystical guidance and purifying/divining ceremonies involving fire or steam. In folk Shinto, it is mostly women doing this, and it is quite empowering to them. The men do something similar in Shugendo (syncretic Buddhism/Shinto), but it seems more regimented. The words for such practitioners would be "miko" and "yamabushi," respectively. I've never encountered an "onmyoji" but that would be a male Shinto wizard.
  Quin Arbeitman suggested keeping "Green" as it is, because the Japanese are all familiar with it. The problem I see, though, is they are all familiar with it through "Greenpeace," who made a bad first impression. Their own word, "midori" lacks that baggage, but otherwise has a similar meaning, so I will go with that.
  It will be much much easier translating relevant parts of that post of yours than that two-word title!

  9/10/16, 9:43 PM
patriciaormsby said...

  @Jessi Thompson, I would be careful about Alaska. I suspect like you do that the drift of plumes from Fukushima was substantially more serious in North America than anyone officially let on. From the sound of things (dying wildlife, reports from stewardesses), Alaska got hit hardest. It is merely anecdotal, but shortly thereafter my aunt in Anchorage developed a sudden Stage 4 breast tumor, and many friends and family living within 100 km south and west of Fukushima developed serious health problems or accelerated signs of aging. I've observed the remains of typhoons travelling across the Pacific, and they tend to head north toward and sometimes into Alaska because of a strong low pressure area over the Okhotsk Sea and Aleutians. While Japan insists on restarting its reactors it might be good to steer clear of Alaska or at least its southern coast. There is nothing between here and there to encourage fallout to precipitate until it reaches the coast.

  9/10/16, 10:13 PM
John Michael Greer said...

  Jo, thanks for the recommendation. I don't think it takes oceans of humility to say "Wow, that wasn't so good of an idea, was it? Okay, let's do something else" -- but a lot of people seem to have a problem saying that.
  Pygmycory, that would be too funny. Please do write it!
  Jessi, I wonder if you could include some reference to what you're commenting on -- I have no idea what you're talking about here.
  Hammer, it's not necessarily a fast process, and when you haven't yet had to face the loss of something that's important to you, it can feel very abstract. That will likely change in a hurry as the future tightens around our necks!
  KL, the thing I find most interesting about the article in retrospect is that the conservatives the author lambastes are doing exactly what so many liberals are doing -- talking about how unbearable the situation is and then doing exactly nothing to change things. I may just reference it in an upcoming post with that point in mind.
  Cherokee, many thanks -- a zinc shortage it is!
  Martin, I don't happen to know, and since it's not something with a significant bearing on the book, I don't expect to work it out.
  Trippticket, by all means stock up on reading material! Into the Ruins is shaping up to be a very good magazine -- I keep on feeling, when reading it, as though I've gotten a subscription to Weird Tales or the like from the very first issue -- and the forthcoming magazine from Founders House, Mythic, looks very promising as well. (Full disclosure: I have a regular column in the first and have placed a story in the second.) There are doubless plenty of other interesting things out there too.
  Unknown Jonathan, okay, that definitely works -- and it stresses the local, small-scale, nonprofessional nature of Lakeland sports, which is important.
  Latefall, thank you. The First Nations out where I grew up, on the Pacific coast, were a constant annoyance to anthropologists because the only crop they grew was tobacco -- other than that it was hunting, fishing, and gathering -- and yet they had aristocracies, intricate social hierarchies, monumental architecture, a system of visual communication that would probably have evolved into writing if they'd been left alone for another thousand years, and a lot of other things that you're not supposed to have unless you've got agriculture.
  Olivier, that's good to hear. It suggests a degree of attention to reality far from common these days!
  Samurai, AIM is *exactly* the sort of thing I have in mind. Notice the way the Native peoples did the good cop-bad cop routine on the government, with the very serious peaceful respectable activists on the one side and AIM making as much trouble as possible on the other. That kind of one-two punch is another basic activist skill that's been forgotten in recent decades -- and it accomplished a lot for Native peoples and, in other contexts, a lot of others as well.

  9/10/16, 11:14 PM
John Michael Greer said...

  Dustin, thank you. The packaging is a good idea!
  Varun, I'm less than sure that that's a best-case scenario. The United States was a good size when it had thirteen states; by the time it crossed the Mississippi, I think it had already exceeded the optimum size for a nation.
  Bill, because it's my story, of course, and I have something else to put into it before it ends. ;-)
  Nancy, I'll quietly back away, and leave that project to someone who wants to invest the time and effort.
  LatheChuck, those are good examples on a personal scale. There are other things that can be done on larger scales -- based on some of the things you've said, for example, your church is doing some very constructive things. As for leisure from automation, most definitions of "leisure" don't include starving in the streets -- the question is why we got people starving in the streets rather than having leisure time.
  Jeff, fun! That really does sound like a good Retrotopian touch -- and in fact I've already put a radio drama into the revised story (Carr listens to the radio while he's sick in bed, and that's one of the programs).
  Shane, I've never really known what to say when people talk about this or that writing technique. I don't use writing techniques. I just try to tell an interesting story, and one of the main things that keeps a story interesting is that very often, the plot takes the reader by surprise. I'd had this turn of events in mind from the beginning, as a deliberate contrast to the way that Ernest Callenbach ended Ecotopia.
  Steve, fascinating. I'd have tipped Wallace myself.
  Patricia, what about gyoja? That's the one other word I know for a more-or-less wizard, though I'm not too sure of its exact connotations. On the other hand, if you want to make it "Green Miko," I'd have no trouble with the gender switch.

  9/10/16, 11:25 PM
Martin B said...

  @Patricia: I grew up in the days when a telephone was a heavy black Bakelite thing. My dad had to buy a large cylindrical telephone battery every couple of years, maybe because we were at the extreme end of the line.
  One day I caused consternation by attempting to walk several miles home from primary school when my lift was late. For a couple of hours I was off the map until friendly strangers took me in and informed my parents of my whereabouts. "Why didn't you phone us from school?" my mother asked. Simple. I'd been told over and over that the telephone is "not for little children to play with". It never crossed my mind to use it to phone home.
  As late as the 1970s I was using public phones with a crank handle you had to turn to get the attention of the lady at the exchange. If you had no change on you for the money box but talked nicely to them they would let you phone for free provided you promised to pay later. This was in a small community where everyone knew everyone, so they'd know if you didn't pay.
  The crank-driven telephone generators were also used by the security police to extract confessions. A guy brought one to school one day and we tried it out. Ouch! They give you a nasty kick.
  One modern innovation that must stay is the coiled-coil plastic coated cord connecting the handset to the phone. Those old phones had fabric-covered plain cords that always got twisted, no matter how hard you tried to untwist them. You couldn't just pick the handset up and talk. You had to dangle and untwist the cord first.
  Another retro thing we can do without is the fuse box with the porcelain fuses. Trip switches are so much better than those scary old fuses you had to pull out and rewire, often with a hairpin or fencing wire or whatever came to hand because you couldn't find the card with the correct grades of fuse wire.

  9/11/16, 12:13 AM
Unknown said...

  re Zinc, Century may have closed, but Rosebery, on the West Coast of Tasmania is still going strong. I do not know how long it has been going, but it has mill motors that were built in the late forties. Lead/Zinc with enough gold in the mix to pay the mills running costs every years, so I am told. Still, it is a finite planet, and every mined out hole is one less ore source.
  The scrap metal operation I worked for a few years ago was hooked up with an operation in Detroit (iirc) that was working on technology that stripped and recovered the zinc from galvanised steel. It was described as an urban Zinc mine by management and was seen to be a company maker, at least until the greed and corruption killed the company. Don't know what happened to the research.
  Loss of zinc will have far reaching ramifications for livestock agriculture. Even the best galvanised fence eventually needs work, and staples in treated posts do not last. Electric fences have drastically reduced the amount of wire used, but require plastic to provide the insulators, which often break down from the UV light over a decade or two. Perhaps shepherding will make a comeback...... And galvanized steel is mandatory in any yarding and structural frameworks if you want them to last.

  9/11/16, 2:15 AM
onething said...

  Shane,
  Where I live is rural and it's only about 20 years since they got rid of the party line system, but several years ago we went from dialing a 7-digit number locally to having to dial the area code any time we dial. If it's in the same county, we do not dial a 1. Do you know why they would do that?

  9/11/16, 6:09 AM
Urban Harvester said...

  JMG, regarding Callenbach's reinventing of the utopian genre, I have to say that Ecotopia and Retrotopia are my only forays. I wonder if, in the spirit of the canonical, the kitsch and the warhol, you'd be so kind as to recommend a few to me? There seem to be a lot to choose from!

  9/11/16, 6:34 AM
trippticket said...

  @LatheChuck:
  who said "The point is, every decision has its pros and cons"
  This has been a big topic in our homeschooling lately: systems thinking. My wife is a horse lover and was reading an article yesterday morning about the BLM rounding up something like 44,000 wild horses, not for slaughter and market, which would be bad enough, but just to exterminate to make more room for cattle grazing. Our 8 y.o. daughter was mortified, and wondered out loud how to help them.
  Well, like I mentioned in my earlier comment, it's up to us as consumers to make the decisions that put ugly practices out of business. We can't just say 'this is wrong, stop doing it,' and then continue engaging in acts that require the ugly behavior. You want to help the wild horses you have to stop eating conventional beef produced in this way. You want to fight breast cancer you have to stop polluting the environment and your body. You want to stop topsoil degradation you have to stop buying produce (and all its derivatives) that was grown in exploitative ways.
  Of course YOU know all this, but I doubt seriously that systems perspectives are being taught in public school these days. Bill Mollison said that if you have a headache you don't take an aspirin, you stop hitting yourself in the head with a hammer! Man, if I could just get this way of thinking embedded in my children's heads...

  9/11/16, 6:35 AM
Shane W said...

  I am curious if I'm right about the five digit dialing meaning all of Lexington was on the same exchange. To this day, we have a yardstick imprinted "Fabric Fair Textile Outlet Zandale Center Phone 77914 Lexington KY"...

  9/11/16, 6:38 AM
Varun Bhaskar said...

  Archdruid,
  That's probably true, but a guy can dream. Even with everything that's happening I still have love for the USA. In a perfect world things would workout.

  9/11/16, 11:19 AM
Ed-M said...

  @ Jo 9/9/2016 5:10 PM
  Hi, Jo!
  "Everything I have ever heard of the Great American Suburb is indeed abysmal - I looked up some images on-line, and you are right, they are truly dire from the standpoint of being liveable in a car-free society."
  Indeed. It's very impossible to live out there without a car. Because a lot of jobs in the US are out in the suburbs, city-dwellers sometimes have to have cars, too. And some cities are notyhing BUT suburbs! (Liooking at you, Atlanta)
  "Did you notice the plot point in last weeks ADR post where Mikkelson is salvaging a gated community? I see you have read The Mandibles? A bit familiar, isn't it?"
  Yes, I did.
  "However, major catastrophes and civil wars aside, the future I see for suburbs is this - inner cities will become more an more gentrified and expensive, as the wealthy always get first dibs on the best bits, and the best bits will be a walkable neighbourhood. Suburbs will be left to the poor, and will become less and less regulated."
  Which means these places will bevome extremely dysfunctional.
  "I think what we may see is the re-emergence of 'villages' - small, walkable communities, little centres of commerce and community retained among the rubble and returning fields of the old suburbs. Of course, there will no doubt be much violence, poverty and degradation to get through first, as is also very much in evidence in Detroit."
  Oh, don't you know it. I view some YouTube videos from people driving round-a-bout Detroit and some sections now have the ambiance of a run-down US Southern redneck town that became all poor and all black.
  "But think how much better it would be if there were political will to help that process along in a safer and more orderly fashion, in the manner of the Atlantic Republic's new government.."
  And it usually takes saecular crises to scratch the political will together. And one is coming! Après Obama ou au plus tard, le prochaine Président des États-Unis, le déluge.

  9/11/16, 12:33 PM
Ozark Chinquapin said...

  Onething,
  I think the rich taking more and more of a share is a significant part of the picture, but not the whole reason for the failure of automation to live up to expectations. It doesn't explain why during the height of the era of cheap energy in the USA, the average Amish farm was more likely to make it than the average conventional farm. That wasn't a part of most future scenarios predicted in the early/mid 20th century, although I'm not sure what the Amish themselves were thinking at that time.

  9/11/16, 1:21 PM
David, by the lake said...

  @temporaryreality
  I have served on my (smallish) city's Planning Commission for the past 6 years. I don't know how the corresponding body operates where you live, but here, it is a 7-member body with 4 public citizen members, plus 3 ex-officio members (city manager as chair, city engineer, and a city council member). Service is voluntary, but rewarding. We advise the city council on issues re land-use, conditional use permits, zoning, and the like. If you have an opportunity to get involved in your community's planning body, I would encourage you to do so. It provides ample opportunity to influence policy and nudge the community in a better direction. One thing that I tend to champion is home-occupation businesses, which I see s a vehicle for establishing a more localized economy.
  @JMG
  More on-topic re Retrotpoia generally, but a few notes on recent experiences. I've been working on developing my gardening skills, with my 6 beds in our community garden, and I have come to acknowledge (as I've noted on the other blog) a certain pull towards earth-centric activities in general. So, I have started to pay attention to opportunities to learn about hobby-farming and larger-scale gardening in particular, as I see this as something of a calling. Recently, I was very much looking forward to viewing a show on our local public television channel re farming (Wisconsin Homegorwn Farmer), which followed three farming families/individuals and their endeavors. I was rather disappointed to see that the show was half an advertisement for the University of Wisconsin, which was touted in each of the stories as a vehicle toward better and more efficient farming. I was wanting to learn something else,I suppose. More homestead oriented.
  On the other hand, I have a pumpkin brown ale fermenting in my basement, a pumpkin-honey mead keeping said ale company, and a corn-potato-cabbage chowder (all sourced from my garden) simmering on the stove. One step at a time, n'est-ce pas?

  9/11/16, 2:07 PM
pygmycory said...

  In terms of First Nations taking it to the corporatocracy, the Tahltan and the Neskonlith have used court decisions recognising land rights to issue eviction notices to Imperial Metals projects. This was after IM's tailings pond at Mt. Polley collapsed, and referred to other projects by the same company.
  Other First Nations have been issuing notices to salmon farms.
  They have a limited amount of power to actually force the issue, but it is seizing the initiative and putting companies operating on first nations land on the defensive. I'd say that there has been a significant shift in the power structure in their favor in BC in the last 20 years.

  9/11/16, 3:49 PM
pygmycory said...

  JMG, Challenge accepted. I'll let you know when and if I make it work.

  9/11/16, 4:04 PM
Shane W said...

  I hate to beat a dead horse, but remembering 5 digits is much easier for little kids than remembering 10 digits, and even in major cities, an exchange would cover all the areas a small kid could possibly walk to. The telephone system is very amenable to be retro-engineered, as every telephone number ever issued is still in service (numbers are always reissued after a period of being out of service), and area codes could just as easily be "unsplit" and "unoverlayed" To Myriad, my guess is Lakeland goes back to the hybrid system, whereby lower tier counties w/fewer subscribers are operator-assisted, while Toledo, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, etc. must use automated switches to handle the call volume.
  @onething,
  your area underwent an overlay: basically, when an area code exhausts its number pool, the state Public Service/Utility Commission can do one of two things: split the area code into two, usually giving the more urban of the areas the old area code while giving the more rural area the new code; or overlay the same geographic area with a new area code, which means that theoretically, people next door to each other could have different area codes. Overlays necessitate 10 (or in the case of California, 11) digit dialing b/c the system has no way of "knowing" which area code you mean to dial w/out dialing it, since two or more area codes are in operation in the same geographic area. California, as usual, is "weird" b/c "1" signals you are dialing a 10 digit number, not making a long distance call--people in large geographic area codes in California can make long distance calls using just the 7 digit phone number.

  9/11/16, 4:34 PM
Shane W said...

  Let's just call me Ernestine and make me CEO of the Lakeland System Telephone Company, already! One ringy dingy, two ringy dingy...

  9/11/16, 4:37 PM
David, by the lake said...

  John--
  Potentially OT, but perhaps pertaining to the blog generally, I had a sudden thought. Why is it do you think that we Americans have such an fetish with respect to Britain? From James Bond to public television, we have a definite Anglophilia. Is it because we, like the Romans, emulate our cultural our predecessors?

  9/11/16, 4:53 PM
John Roth said...

  @onething
  The way telephone numbers work is a bit complicated. Back in the day, if the second digit was 0 or 1, it had a special meaning. That’s why, if you look at the key pad on a telephone, neither 0 nor 1 have letters assigned to them. So if you dialed RY6-6666 (pronounced R’rleh six) the exchange knew that it was a local number, while if you dial 411 or 911 it switches you to a shared, public service number. It’s that 1 in the second digit that made the crossbars do something different.
  When we got national dialing with area codes, the second digit of all area codes was either 0 or 1, which told the switching equipment that you’d just dialed an area code instead of an exchange. That was enough to give 128 area codes, which was plenty. Right? Um, no. That’s why you have to dial all ten digits - with the number of numbers we need, those very convenient 0 and 1 clues went away.
  All-number calling happened when they figured out how to use those 0 and 1 codes for local exchanges. Since they didn’t have letters, they moved away from those easy-to-remember mnemonics. My “local exchange,” for example, is 803. Look at the phone pad, and there is no way you can make a mnemonic out of that.
  There are mnemonic techniques that you can use to memorize these things. Using the Major System, 803 is 8 -> f or v, 0 -> s, z or a soft c, and 3 -> m. Season with vowels to taste. So 803 could be fizzam. Good way of confusing someone who isn’t in on the system.
  When an area code runs out of numbers, there are two possible ways of dealing with it. One is to split the area code, which is what happened here in New Mexico a few years ago, and what’s happened in the Chicago area where I’m from, a bit farther back. The other is to simply overlay another area code on the whole area, which is what happened in the Atlanta area.
  Both of them cause quite a bit of pain while they’re happening, and both of them mean you’re going to have to dial 10 or 11 digits at least part of the time. That extra 1 on the front is more of a billing convenience than anything else today: it tells the equipment that you’re dialing long distance.
  @Shane
  Back when I was a wee lad, we dialed 4 digits for local calls, and put a fifth digit on the front for a couple of different exchanges. This was in the 50s, out in the country where we still had a party line. Phones weren’t all that common until well into the second half of the 20th century. My grandmother had a pay phone in her home, for example - she got tired of moochers using her phone on her phone bill, and badgered the phone company into installing it.

  9/11/16, 4:56 PM
Shane W said...

  @Martin B,
  wow, I'd heard that telephone systems outside the US in the past were way behind the US, but I had no idea how much so. Regarding trip switches, which we call circuit breakers, I agree, but I think that copper will be in too short a supply in Lakeland to continue three-wired grounded (earthed) service, and will revert to two-wire ungrounded (unearthed) service. To this day, many advanced countries do not ground their outlets, and personally, if I had an older home with two-wire service, I wouldn't spend the money to retrofit it w/three-wire grounded unless it was knob & tube. If it was two-wire "snakeskin" Romex, it would be safe enough for me, and I'd keep it and the historic two-pronged outlets. While I'm sure it has happened, I've never been shocked by an appliance w/the ground pin removed, and I don't know of anyone who has. If I had a house w/two-wire Romex, I'd only put in a few grounded outlets for electronics which require grounding for the surge protector to work properly.

  9/11/16, 5:13 PM
Shane W said...

  For those ready to give up their iTrash and make a statement...
  https://www.oldphoneworks.com/automatic-electric/
  http://www.oldphoneshop.com/pages/about-us.html

  9/11/16, 5:17 PM
John Roth said...

  @JMG, latefall
  Anything that researches the past tends to fall into a few traps. One is the assumption of progress, where the the farther back you go, the more primitive it has to be. Another is that, if the researcher can't see it, it doesn't exist. A lot of what's going on in current anthropology is trying to get rid of this; some of the side effects aren't very pretty.
  There's a temple complex in what is now Turkey that's at least 10,000 years old, long before agriculture. It makes one wonder how a foraging culture could have focused the resources to build and maintain the thing.

  9/11/16, 5:39 PM
Nastarana said...

  Unknown, keeping livestock inside their pastures is one of the functions of hedgerows. I understand American farmers used Osage Orange trees, giving that prehistoric relic a new lease on life and wider dispersion; the English like hawthorn.

  9/11/16, 5:48 PM
onething said...

  Ozark,
  "I think the rich taking more and more of a share is a significant part of the picture, but not the whole reason for the failure of automation to live up to expectations. It doesn't explain why during the height of the era of cheap energy in the USA, the average Amish farm was more likely to make it than the average conventional farm."
  This seems to me to be a very different question. I would venture to guess that the Amish made it because they don't go into debt, and probably other factors like having integrated farms that are all together with the household economy.

  9/11/16, 6:02 PM
Mon Seul Desir said...

  onething.
  Ten number dialing resulted from the introduction of cellphone service which caused very rapid increase of assigned numbers which lead to area code overlays, ie multiple area codes for the same region. Even a local call could need an area code.
  A good resouses for the history of dialing plans: http://www.lincmad.com/index.html

  9/11/16, 6:07 PM
Hammer said...

  JMG:
  Thanks. I'll keep taking the fear in little bits every week, in case it will lessen the impact later on. At least the experience of collapse will make any future death of a family member less traumatic!
  Shane W.:
  Lakeland could just use higher voltages and thinner wires. Or use slightly thicker aluminum wires. Maybe North America and Japan originally used 120v because copper was cheaper to them.

  9/11/16, 9:17 PM
Unknown said...

  (Deborah Bender)
  JMG, latefall, John Roth--I think there is a straightforward explanation for that amazing pre-agricultural temple complex in Turkey, and Pacific Northwest hunter-gatherers like the Kwakiutl having permanent buildings, monuments and a complex society, and also for why those appear to be rare and exceptional.
  In order for a society to develop a complex material culture which includes building long-lasting large structures, it needs to have a reliable economic surplus and it needs to be able to acquire that surplus without nomadism or transhumance. All I mean by this is that the local population is able to acquire a varied diet and plenty of it without spending most of their waking hours gathering, trapping or growing food, and without moving around all the time.
  In order to have a reliable food surplus for a city sized population, you need agriculture. However, you can have a complex of sedentary villages within easy traveling distance of each other without agriculture, relying entirely on hunting, fishing, gathering, and low-tech methods of managing the hunting and gathering grounds for maximum productivity (e.g. lighting small fires in the forest to clear out old brush and make space for plants that provide nutritious browse for the deer.) It isn't possible to do this everywhere on the planet, only in areas that are especially rich with plants and animals humans can eat.
  The Garden of Eden story has been explained as a memory of a prehistoric time when the Tigris-Euphrates delta was a place like that. What happened during the Neolithic Revolution was that the farmers and herders outbred the hunter-gatherers, went looking for additional lands to farm and graze, and they drove the pre-agricultural people off the richest lands into the wastelands that the farmers didn't want. If you don't have access to the salmon run, the fertile river bottom land, the most species-rich forest, etc. , it takes a lot more time to gather and catch enough food, and big settled hunter-gatherer villages are no longer possible.
  Most of the places on earth where those villages once were have been built over by later cultures or erased by changes in topography or vegetation. The ones that survived long enough to be recorded, or that left substantial artifacts, are flukes.
  Between the ice ages there may have been a lot of them, and during the last ice age there may have been others on coasts that are now under the wave.

  9/11/16, 9:37 PM
Unknown said...

  JMG, you might just enjoy this. listening to the Country Hour rural report on our local ABC radio i heard a young man who had recently traveled the world on a scholarship to look at the most efficient method of large scale calf raising admit that of all the systems he looked at the most cost effective and efficient was run by the Amish and involved horses and carts.
  I grinned from ear to ear when I heard that, and thought immediately of you. I will meet him sooner or later (Tasmania is a small place and I regularly attend field days where he works) and I will enjoy referring him to this blog.
  Cheers
  eagle eye

  9/12/16, 12:05 AM
Unknown said...

  John Roth,
  Gobekli Tepe for those who are interested.
  There is a guy in the US who has a theory that the statuary in the Egyptian monuments is constructed using a ststem very similar to what we know as CNC machining. I found his arguments quite reasonable.
  Chris Dunn, google Gizapower and his name for his website.
  Cheers
  eagle eye

  9/12/16, 12:21 AM
latefall said...

  @John Roth
  Yeah I think you mean Göbekli Tepe - they mention it as well. I hadn't heard of it before but it really is quite interesting.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ok29INpVxL8

  9/12/16, 12:28 AM
Shane W said...

  Speaking of childhood, I'd like to see Carr's reaction to free-range parenting and the end of helicopter/bubble wrap parenting. His reaction to seeing kids out in the world, on their own, taking risks and responsibility, would be awesome. Perhaps he could witness some kids by themselves playing in a junkyard, unattended.

  9/12/16, 3:33 AM
trippticket said...

  @David by the Lake:
  Re: Anglophilia
  I like to think that part of the reason I fit this description is because the Brits are farther along the arc of imperial decline than America is, and their social/economic/political commentary fits my mindset better than garden-variety American thinking does. Americans are still trying to figure out how every Earthling can have a car and air conditioning like they do. The Brits were popularizing P.G. Wodehouse's "Jeeves and Wooster" a quarter century ago...
  And then Brexit today. I'm still pretty pleased with that. It all shows a more realistic grasp of the future than you get anywhere in America.

  9/12/16, 4:56 AM
trippticket said...

  @ Unknown:
  who said "Electric fences have drastically reduced the amount of wire used, but require plastic to provide the insulators, which often break down from the UV light over a decade or two."
  May be running down a rabbit hole here, but I often wonder why people worry so much about plastics taking forever to degrade. Ever found a 5-gallon bucket in the woods that's been sitting there for a decade or more? Move it even a little and you'll have shards. Then your example. Styrofoam disintegrates even faster.
  And we don't even have a plastic-eating microbe on the scene yet.
  Going back to ceramic insulators doesn't strike me as much of a logistics issue. Might cost the end user more, but...

  9/12/16, 5:09 AM
Ashtead said...

  Unknown mentioned using plastic insulators for electric fence wires -- but before those were available, porcelain ones were used, not just for electric fence wires, but for mains wiring in general. Now a better replacement for electric fences might be hedgerows, as noted later.
  On the increase of the so-called «leisure» from automation, what might be said to have happen, is that the automation has indeed caused less time needed to be spent on working, just like regular leisure. However, the other part of this that would have made it real leisure is missing, since no-one gets paid for their time off. Whether that ever was a reasonable demand is questionable, but that part of the story seems to have fallen out of sight somewhere along the line.

  9/12/16, 6:08 AM
Phil Harris said...

  David wrote
  "John
  Potentially OT, but perhaps pertaining to the blog generally, I had a sudden thought. Why is it do you think that we Americans have such an fetish with respect to Britain?... "
  Forgive me jumping ahead of JMG answer. Could be interesting - but seems unaccountable to me this side of the pond. People from Japan seem to enjoy actually coming here - my daughter who has Japanese friends suggests it is because they like being tourists. Perhaps this has some resonance your side, though you prefer a more couch-based interest? Or is it a bit like paying to get a DNA test? 'Yes, 3% Neanderthal, wow!'
  best
  Phil H

  9/12/16, 7:10 AM
Glenn said...

  John Michael Greer said...
  "The First Nations out where I grew up, on the Pacific coast, were a constant annoyance to anthropologists {Snip!} and a lot of other things that you're not supposed to have unless you've got agriculture."
  We must know different anthropologists. The ones I know point out that the critical element for a complex culture is a food surplus. Before European contact, the Pacific Coast north of Baja California was one of most food rich natural environments in the world.
  On a tangential topic, that of technology not necessarily dictating culture, something you've emphasized in this series; I attended a very interesting talk at the Wooden Boat festival in Port Townsend this weekend. "Seawomen of Iceland". From settlement around the first millennium C.E. to the mid 19th century, when influence from Europe began to have a greater effect, an average of a third of the Icelandic population going to sea in fishing boats and local coasters were women.
  Glenn
  in the Bramblepatch
  Marrowstone Island
  Salish Sea
  Cascadia

  9/12/16, 8:19 AM
Steve in Colorado said...

  @Shane W
  I don't disagree with the assessment of the quality of modern electronic products. But the problem is NOT that they are electronic or digital; it's in the design and manufacturing.
  I have worked most of my life in the "digital" arena, making and designing products (gadgets mostly), and they are made this way by intention. And it is not really all that different than anything else made today: shoes, shirts, cars, toasters, you name it. The modern mentality is "use it up, throw it away, buy a new one". Few people fix old things and manufactures are happy to oblige this trend (and no doubt played some part in creating it), it reduces their manufacturing costs and ups their sales.
  Why are most shoes made today so that they cannot be re-soled? When was the last time you saw someone wearing jeans with patches on the knees? Or someone who brought a TV into a repair shop instead of just junking it and getting a new, bigger model. Why is it the quality old shirts I get at the second hand store feel and look better than most new shirts after a couple of cycles thru the washer?
  As a society, we have forgotten about quality and thrift, and we are reaping the results. In almost every product we use, from socks to the food we eat.
  Electronic stuff is no different. They could be made so that they were repairable built to last for years and years. That the touch screen on your cell phone was easily replaceable when it broke, or the battery could be simply replace, etc, etc, but they are not. Face it there just isn't the demand for it. Not that many people demand that level of quality otherwise it would be there. It used to be for electronic consumer products.
  So yeah, we may be closer to the edge than most realize, but is not digital that is leading us there. It is our acceptance of crap quality at almost every level. Until that changes, the problem does not go away

  9/12/16, 9:29 AM
whomever said...

  Slightly off-topic for Retrotopia, but for those who don't read xkcd, today's one does a great chart around the history of the Earth's climate. http://xkcd.com/1732/

  9/12/16, 9:30 AM
RandomQuestionGuy said...

  I have been reading this story from the beginning, and in many ways I enjoy it. It points out the idiocy of over-complicating devices that are supposed to fulfill a basic need, and points out how society could be different if the people in power simply shifted their incentives. This works fairly well for trivial innovations--clothing, phones for apps, basically things that could have been done before, but different.
  On the other hand, I think that the story ignores a major point. All innovation isn't trivial. A good example of non-trivial, large-scale effort innovation that literally changed the world would be the development of nuclear weapons (something I note is absent from this story). How do you address this? The Lakeland republic is nice and all, but they're basically prey to whatever nearby power decides to build a nuke, and the Confederacy should be able to do it (they got the labs and production facilities for nuclear materials in Nashville). It doesn't matter how sustainable or well-developed your society is if several such weapons can wipe you out, even if they are a long-shot innovation-wise. How does the Lakeland republic respond to that? With its own arsenal? If the slightest edge in delivery technology could mean the difference of a whole city being destroyed or not, do they let themselves fail in the race for better delivery and counter-battery systems?

  9/12/16, 10:11 AM
Cortes said...

  Did Ellen Montrose deceive her voters? The retro plan seems to have been a surprise to our narrator when he learned of of it. How does the incoming administration plan to steer the supertanker of state away from the shoals she and her inner circle are aware of without triggering mutiny aka calls for regime change?

  9/12/16, 1:19 PM
Cherokee Organics said...

  Hi RandomQuestionGuy,
  I'd have to suggest that your idea of nukes is perhaps suggestive of a phallic talisman of ability to project power. Just sayin... They are best used as a threat.
  Mate, those nukes are way complex machines and I often wonder at how well maintained those machines are. If you've ever looked into a failing airline business, one of the first things they ditch in order to stay financially afloat is maintenance. Again, just sayin...
  Cheers
  Chris

  9/12/16, 2:35 PM
Shane W said...

  @John,
  your timeline is a little off, all number, 7-digit calling dates to the 70s, but all the area codes w/"0" and "1" were not exhausted till the mid 90s, when they finally had to repatriate the two codes that had been used to call Tijuana & Mexico City. Before the mid 90s, you could call long distance within your area code by dialing 1+just the number, after, you had to include the area code even if it was the same, b/c the system could no long differentiate based on the middle digit. This is how California won its exception, California customers complained, and the state PUC mandated that customers be able to call w/in their area code by just dialing the number, regardless of local or long distance--dialing "1" just signaled you were calling outside your area code. 10 digit dialing is not required unless you live in an overlay--my area code, 859, is not overlaid, and we make local calls by dialing just the phone number.
  Regarding voltage, I read online that 220-240 is the preferred voltage, but that by the time it was made the standard in the mid-20th century, Americans already had way more electrical appliances than people in the rest of the world, so it would be very difficult to switch, and people would have to scrap all their appliances, so we kept 110-120V, despite its deficiencies (thicker wires, less voltage pressure, more line loss). However, we have the better frequency, 60 Hz vs. the 50 Hz the rest of the world uses--supposedly, 60 Hz is better for electrical motors, etc., but that other countries use 50 Hz. b/c it is more compatible w/the metric system.
  JMG, if Lakeland is retro, and was under a longstanding trade embargo, I'm assuming that it scrapped the dual metric/customary measurements currently used in the US for strictly customary units for simplicity's sake. Please let us know if any metric survives in Lakeland--I was told that even the medical system had old customary units for pharmaceuticals/etc.
  Extremely off topic, but my first call center job was a 411 operator. I got "ma'am'd" all the time. At first, if they asked, I'd tell them I was a Sir, then there'd be that awkward pause. After a while, I was just, "Frack it", and started doing phone drag. I'd even have my work drag name, "Jayne". Phone drag is much easier--you don't have to put on a face, wear stilettos or sequins. The real interesting part was the guys flirting with you. "I'm sure you're a real pretty lady." Me: (giggle)"oh, honey, you wouldn't think so if you saw me." "No, I know you must be a real pretty lady." (Sigh) Any good Southern girl knows how to tactfully rebuff a man's unwanted advances...

  9/12/16, 2:39 PM
Shane W said...

  Actually, I stand corrected on voltage--I think it was standardized worldwide @ 220-240 in the 20s, not midcentury, but still, even at that time, the Americans had way too many electrical appliances to convert w/out hardship. The ideal voltage/frequency is 220-240V/60 Hz., which is in use in only two or three countries (Peru, Saudi Arabia, ?) Any electricians out there who can back me up on this?

  9/12/16, 4:48 PM
Justin said...

  Cherokee,
  It's perhaps reasonable to assign phallic qualities which most likely exist to things like ICBMS, fighter aircraft, guns, etc to explore the underlying motivations behind the proliferation of such devices. On the other hand, you have to admit, without phalli, we'd really be in a pickle as a species, no?

  9/12/16, 6:46 PM
trippticket said...

  One other quick note about leisure time - I think we have to factor in Jevon's Paradox. Just as having fewer children in a culture that can afford more does nothing but make fewer, more spoiled children, creating leisure time from automation does nothing but free up time to work on more projects. Most people with HVAC, clothes washers, dishwashers, crockpots, and Roombas (for heaven's sake), just spend more time working on other things. And spend a considerable chunk of their income on maintaining the automation.
  In other words, automation doesn't really change our activity level, it just fetishizes automation.

  9/13/16, 5:34 AM
trippticket said...

  JMG, you might be interested to know that my wife and I picked up a modern version of a "hay pot" this summer, made by a Japanese company - http://www.tayama-usa.com/Thermal-Cooker.html - (you should see the exotic recipes included with it), and think it's super-cool.
  Boil rice for 5 minutes, turn it off, stick it in the insulator for half an hour, and BAM! Perfect rice every time. No stirring, no unnecessary heating of the house, just great rice. Among other things...

  9/13/16, 5:48 AM
Scotlyn said...

  @Ozark - your question about technology, mechanisation and leisure got quite a decent treatment here by David Graeber (author of Debt, the 1st 5000 years) http://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit

  9/13/16, 6:03 AM
RandomQuestionGuy said...

  @Cherokee Organics
  The first nukes were decidedly non-phallic, and to be even more honest, weren't all that sophisticated. Most of the sophistication in them comes from ensuring that they are as efficient as possible in achieving fission and fusion, and the rocket delivery system. But the nukes themselves will work just fine with a less sophisticated explosion system and a larger amount of fissible material, and they can be flown and dropped instead of rocketed. They are undeniably powerful weapons that can wipe out cities and almost guarantee complete safety from invasion to the country that has them. I find it odd that the greatest societally disruptive advance of the last two thousand years gets dismissed out of hand as a phallic symbol. Only two of them were ever used in war, and killed over two hundred thousand people. One could argue that if Texas and the Confederacy in the Retrotopia story had nukes, the hot war over oil would not have happened because of the threat it might escalate. It is a non-trivial topic, and I find it odd that it is completely skirted in the story, which I otherwise really like. One could argue that the invention of nuclear weapons is the reason why our society is developing towards this techno neo-feudalism, as it is.

  9/13/16, 6:29 AM
PatriciaT said...

  I hope that in the book that you can include a chart or table with a timeline of events, starting with the 2nd Civil War up to the time of Carr's visit (or, perhaps, beyond).
  Looking forward to reading the last chapter tomorrow. Thank you.

  9/13/16, 11:02 AM
Martin B said...

  @Shane - Japan is peculiar in that half its grid runs at 50 Hz and half at 60 Hz. Interconnections need frequency converters.
  "This originates from the first purchases of generators from AEG for Tokyo in 1895 and from General Electric for Osaka in 1896." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan

  9/13/16, 11:41 AM
John Roth said...

  @Shane
  On phone numbers. I don't believe I specified a time line. There are a lot of places where you don't have to dial ten digits, not just California. All it requires is not being able to assign a 0 or 1 as the first digit of an exchange.
  To explicate a bit more: with those nice alphabetic prefixes, they couldn't assign a 0 or 1 for either the first or second digit. That's 640 possible exchanges in an area code. Allowing 0 or 1 in the second digit expanded it to 800 and in both digits to 1,000, which is over a 50% increase in the available number of digits.
  What you lose in the first bump is the ability to automatically distinguish an area code from an exchange. What you lose in the second is the ability to just dial 1 + 7 digits for out-of-area-code numbers.
  It wasn't cell phones that caused the expansion in numbers. Part of it was Direct Inward Dialing. A company used to have one phone number for a lot of lines; their operator or PBX took the next few numbers to get to the right phone. Now they'll assign you a block of numbers so every employee has cis own number.
  Then one of the phone companies started giving out unique phone numbers for "friends and family" dialing. And there are blocks taken up by alarm companies, where they give each of their clients a unique phone number to call rather than making their devices more complicated by having them dial a code number.
  We are using a lot more phone numbers than strictly necessary.

  9/13/16, 12:13 PM
Cherokee Organics said...

  Hi Justin,
  That is very amusing! Yes it is a pickle! Hehe!
  Hi RandomQuestionGuy,
  Well the fire bombing of Dresden during WWII was pretty brutal too and caused a similar affect and that didn't require nukes at all.
  Nukes are used all of the time to project power, but if the other guy has them, they are a zero sum game - they are at best a threat.
  I also understand that nukes were mentioned in the story earlier, or maybe that was in the comments.
  You dismissed my observation about the maintenance of those particular machines by saying that we could replace those delivery machines with another bit of delivery technology without taking into account that the story represents a society in decline. That seems like a spurious argument to me.
  Cheers
  Chris

  9/13/16, 2:51 PM
John D. Wheeler said...

  This isn't a suggestion for the story, more a musing about the future; I wonder if people will still hang on to the idea of "progress", but they will decide that technology and materialism are not proper goals, so they will be progressing in a very different direction.
  What really gets me thinking along these lines is the story of the "stone age" Tasaday. Of course the general public considers anyone not living an industrial lifestyle to be primitive. But when anthropologists started studying them in depth, they found they were truly different from other uncontacted peoples; their culture did not show the same depth and maturity the others did. Linguistic and genetic analyses showed that they had diverged from the main population only a few centuries ago, around the time Europeans started showing up and taking slaves. Thus the anthropologists think the Tasaday are actually refugees. But in this context, it is the idea that there is a cultural clock showing how mature a society is that I find fascinating, and I suspect modern industrial society is quite young on that scale.

  9/13/16, 3:10 PM
Shane W said...

  @John,
  as a phone company veteran (GTE, SBC, and AT&T, both landline and mobile) your explanation is totally off. No prefix or area code begins w/a "0" or "1" and never has--all area codes and prefixes begin with digits 2-9. No prefix ever had a "1" or a "0" in the middle prior to the mid 90s, and no area code ever had anything but a "0" or a "1" in the middle before the mid 90s. 10-digit dialing is conditioned on whether the area code is overlaid or not, not the presence of a "0" or a "1". My area code, 859, has lots of prefixes with "0s" and "1s", but we are able to make all local calls by dialing the 7 digit number. I'm not sure where you're getting your information, but it is off...

  9/13/16, 4:17 PM
Unknown said...

  (Deborah Bender)
  @trippticket--I've been looking for a fireless cooker, either new or antique in working condition, for years. The Tayama thermal cookers look good. Where did you buy yours? The website only sells wholesale and has no information about retail outlets.
  I emailed an inquiry to them just in case. Haven't done a web search yet.
  I'm partial to soups and stews when I cook in quantity and I think I would get a lot of use out of one of those.

  9/13/16, 9:15 PM
RandomQuestionGuy said...

  Hey Cherokee Organics,
  We thankfully have the budgets for both the nuclear stockpile maintenance and the air force maintenance publicly available right now to check that statement. The yearly maintenance budget for the thousands of nuclear weapons the U.S. has is around 25 billion. The Air Force is about 170 billion. Just from that, the nukes are more efficient as a deterrent weapon, and even more efficient if you simply don't build thousands of them, since no one really needs that many. In the Retrotopia world, probably having a couple of dozen reliable nukes+delivery systems would be enough for a deterrent for a regional power, since most states do not have that many cities to target. You don't need enough nukes to wipe the whole continent, merely to threaten a single belligerent.
  That being said, I'd rally like to hear from the author on this.
  The bombing of Dresden (and of Tokyo) were done with conventional bombers, sure. Dresden required over 1200 heavy bombers. Nagasaki and Hiroshima required just 1. Dresden killed 25000 people. Each bomb dropped on Japan killed at least 40,000. By any metric, the nuke is, unfortunately, a much more cost-effective and efficient weapon. It needs less maintenance than 3,900 tons of bombs and 1200 aircraft, and even in the modern age it requires less maintenance than the equivalent destructive power in the form of airplanes or tanks. We could go through the manufacturing costs and such, but, again, the cost of production of a single nuke and a single plane/rocket to carry it is cheaper and faster than the cost of 3900 tons of conventional bombs and 1200 heavy bombers. The argument of simplifying costs and keeping things as efficient as possible, often used in the story, pushes any rational actor to adopt nukes. You can have a citizen's millitia for minor border disuptes, and nukes to ensure no real invasion ever starts, and it would work.

  9/13/16, 10:36 PM
Scotlyn said...

  And of course I did not say "ALL you do is" wait until you need to defend yourself. I said "it can't be wrong to defend yourself if the battle is already at your door"..
  The point you are making is very clear to me. For this to really work the battle has to be taken elsewhere, TOO. But not, I hope, INSTEAD.
  I believe there is a binary developing here that I'm trying to find a third way out of. Because if "environment" means anything it means "home" on every single scale you can think of. And if someone fighting to defend this home or that home is wrong to do so and should be doing something else instead, then I don't know what the heart of this environmental movement can be.

  9/13/16, 11:38 PM
Scotlyn said...

  As an addendum, I would say another thing. Until we see ourselves as active members of our environment - at home and among family with the soil, trees, animals, micro-critters and etc that we share food, water, and breath with - environmentalism will *be* nothing but another Rescue Game.
  The "environment" needing saved is not "out there" - it is our living world, and we in it and of it.

  9/13/16, 11:44 PM
pygmycory said...

  Using a nuke on Toledo would be stupid. Lakeland isn't attacking anyone, and if the aggressor country is nearby, they'd be affected by the fallout too. All the nearby countries would be angry with them because they'd be worrying about fallout landing on them, and the land near Toledo would be useless to an occupier for many years due to radioactivity.
  Even if you ignore the ethical issues, it would completely not be worth it.
  Nukes are much more useful as a threat than as a weapon that is actually used, especially when you live within a thousand km of the target!

  9/14/16, 9:04 AM
Randy Darrah said...

  JMG. Nice!
  Haven't gone through all of the comments yet, so... if I repeat some, I do apologize.
  I can definitely see repair/fixit shops in LLR. Look at how well Cuba has kept all of those classic cars running in the face of isolation. And what cannot be fixed can usually be recycled. Salvage opportunities aplenty?
  I think the ceramics and pottery industry would be more prominent than today. From plates and cookware to heat-shielding materials. Glass refractories and firebrick refractories as well.
  Seasonal outside entertainment. Yes, festivals and even the concert from the gazebo in the town square of smaller towns.
  I would think windmills and waterwheels for a power source would be prevalent. Grist and sawmills for example.
  The agricultural side of things should see renewed interest in things such as proper crop rotation, including letting some fields lie fallow for a season. There are other legumes than clover, by the way. Lespedeza is one for pastures, and works very well with native grasses. minimal bloating.
  A resurgence of steam powered tractors, harvesters, et cetera. This would probably also involve the travelling harvesting crews. Here in the Midwest, there are many "Old Thresher" events.
  Sail power has been making a comeback, especially for cargo vessels. Think windjammers.
  I can see diets being much more seasonal. Canning, Salting, Pickling, and Smoking for food preservation. A much more common occurrence not that long ago.
  Many of the areas in Retrotopia remind me of The Nine Nations of North America by Joel Garreau.
  On a side note to last weeks' post about campaign signs, I have seen a few Trump bumper stickers, as well as some Bernie stickers. The only yard sign I saw was one that modified a Trump one by coloring in the T and the P. "RUM---Make America Great Again." That one at least makes more sense to me.
  Looking forward to the book.

  9/14/16, 9:59 AM
RPC said...

  Pretty late in the cycle, but on rereading the first sentence jumps out at me: "A taxi brought me back to my hotel from Janice Mikkelson’s mansion..." Ottawa Hills is the better part of an hour by horse from downtown Toledo; it might make more sense to take Mr. Carr to the nearest streetcar stop or use one of the rare biodiesel powered limousines. OTOH, Mr. Carr IS a bigwig and Ms. Mikkelson is known as a heavy tipper, so perhaps a cabbie could be persuaded to take half the evening for the one fare.

  9/14/16, 10:31 AM
I Janas said...

  Maybe for publishing, because it´s more or less off topic:
  I´m a reader of both of your blogs - could I get both in a print-version?
  Thank you very much for your work!

  9/14/16, 1:16 PM
heather said...

  Re. electric fences being replaced by hedgerows:
  One of the handy things about the electronet fencing these days is how portable it is- easy to use to carefully manage the health of a small pasture with a few animals. Also flexible in terms of changing flock size and even species from season to season; a batch of broiler chickens in the spring, a couple of piglets in the late summer/fall, in different areas and configurations, is no problem with lightweight posts and portable solar chargers. I need to learn more about how very small scale farmers managed similar tasks in the past. Lots more human herders, no doubt, and well-trained dogs… another instance where plug-and-play is on its way out.
  --Heather in CA

  9/14/16, 1:34 PM
heather said...

  @unknkown Deborah re. fireless cookers:
  Very late, not sure you will see this, but I thought I'd mention that I use my SunOven solar oven as a fireless cooker too. Start the rice or stew on the stovetop, and then transfer it to the solar oven box. Even if there's not much sun, the box itself is well insulated except for the glass top, which I just cover with old towels or a blanket. Another way to get some use out of the gadget.
  --Heather in CA

  9/14/16, 2:52 PM
Auriel Ragmon said...

  As to the thread regarding 50 vs 60hz, my mother once had an older electric clock that would not keep time! she couldn't figure it out, took into the repair shop (we had clock repair shops back in the olden days) and the guy told her it was 50hz and so the motor worked slower than the newer clocks.
  Jim of Olym
  PS Sometimes I wish I still had it. It would make time march slower which would be good!

  9/14/16, 5:02 PM
PunditusMaximus said...

  Not that it matters much, but I really wanted to hear more about the chemical industry that supported things like birth control and medicines that were above GP level.

  9/14/16, 5:15 PM
Glenn said...

  heather said...
  Re. electric fences being replaced by hedgerows:
  "One of the handy things about the electronet fencing these days is how portable it is- easy to use to carefully manage the health of a small pasture with a few animals. Also flexible in terms of changing flock size and even species from season to season; a batch of broiler chickens in the spring, a couple of piglets in the late summer/fall, in different areas and configurations, is no problem with lightweight posts and portable solar chargers. I need to learn more about how very small scale farmers managed similar tasks in the past. Lots more human herders, no doubt, and well-trained dogs… another instance where plug-and-play is on its way out."
  They are called hurdles. Essentially, short sections of fence, 6 - 8 feet long and as tall as needed for the stock in question. The bottoms of the posts were sharpened to act as stakes, and the sections were lashed together as required. Most commonly used for sheep, as they are frequently shifted.
  Glenn
  in the Bramblepatch
  Marrowstone Island
  Salish Sea
  Cascadia

  9/14/16, 7:53 PM
Neo Tuxedo said...

  Why didn’t it occur to them that voting themselves one billion-dollar bonus after another, while driving their own employees and the rest of the country into poverty, was going to blow up in their faces sooner or later?
  While looking for something completely different on my Tumblr blog, I found an answer to that question, in the form of a chain of reblogs whose previous links have all been severed. It comes off a discussion of the 2013 giant-robots-vs.-giant-monsters movie Pacific Rim, and of world leaders' decision to abandon the "Jaeger program" (the giant robots) and build a "Wall of Life" around the coastlines. This is what the previous poster in the blog chain, self-published fantasy author Alexandra Erin (who, I think, is over in Hagerstown, not far from Chambersburg or Cumberland) had to say about that:
  I keep wondering what the actual endgame of the world leaders was… if they didn’t think the Kaiju would ever strike farther inland if left to run rampant, or if they thought the walls and the target-rich environment on the other side of them would always slow them down enough to be brought down with conventional weaponry, but at the end of the day I think it’s perfectly realistic to believe they had no endgame.
  What’s the endgame on denying climate change? What’s the endgame on vulture capitalism destroying the consumer class that makes capitalism possible? What’s the endgame on propping up this quarter’s profits by stripmining the future? Strategies that literally have no future in them still win out.
  There have been studies that show that neurologically speaking, we regard our own future selves as different people, that when we contemplate consequences of our actions down the road, the parts of the brain that activate are the same ones that happen when we regard things happening to other people. I think there’s a profound implication in this for how people who lack empathy also seem to lack any sense of long-term self-preservation even they clearly embrace it in the short-term.
  The architects of the wall don’t have a plan for the future, because the future is something that happens to other people. In the here and now, they’re a thousand miles form the ocean and that’s good enough.
  The "something completely different" was an alternate answer to the "what's their endgame" question, but I won't post that until and unless I actually find it.

  9/17/16, 8:39 AM
Raymond Duckling said...

  Sorry for the lateness of this feedback, but I was unable to articulate this idea until yesterday evening.
  On what we'd like seeing explored further on the paper edition of Retrotopia.
  Ii have been meditating on progress and its fruits, and I have come to the conclusion that there are 2 (actually, 3) types of benefits one gets from progress: technology and knowledge.
  The work as is does a very good job at exploring the diminishing return of investment on technology development, so I will say nothing further there. It is the knowledge side of things that interest me now.
  I.e. think about fire-fighters. Sure, they have much more technology now, but its benefits are eatten away by the challenges posed by having to act in a more techno-rich environment: Mechanical ladders that fall short of reaching to the highest buildings, fire retardant in garments that have to stand much hotter chemical fires, respirators that have to protect against not just regular smoke but much more toxic fumes, etc.
  Yet, modern fire fighters are nonetheless more effective than their peers from 150 years ago. I suspect this has to do with having a relatively small number of people devoting
  their lives to figure out the details of how fires work, and what can or cannot humans do to mess with the natural working of fires in an effective way. Then there is a larger number fo people that devotes a fair share of their time to learn that knowledge, distill specific tactics and operation procedures, and drill down those into becoming teams of people that can fight fires effectively.
  From those come types 2 and 3. Some of those knowledges can be just passed down indefinitely was long as there are youngsters willing to pass the torch to the next generation. But others require a minimum of infrastructure to keep going. I don't see modern fire-fighter stations in counties of tier 1, 2, and maybe 3; though I do see every tier can have organized, trained volunteers that do hold day jobs but still serve as first (and in some cases, only) responders when needed.
  I do think this part was kind of covered in the military side of things, when Clnl Papas explained the defense strategy of Lakeland Republic, but at first I dismissed this as a special case and did not think about its implications for other professions as well. Progress applies a limit on only to the "technological level" of a society, but also to its "organizational level" as well.
  I do see doctors and teachers bypassing this with an appropriate use of apprenticeship, but others are not so easy. Fire-fighters come to mind, as do law enforcement. It is not hard to pick a bunch of (mostly) law abiding citizens that are not shy about using (a proper level of) violence to put trouble makers in their place, but then you end up with frontier/pose level of justice, and all the fine grained stuff about patrol work, or detective work, etc, just gets lost.
  John, you probably will not open new arcs for the sake of this, but maybe you could hint at this issue while discussing the cases that are already there?

  9/19/16, 9:52 AM
Neo Tuxedo said...

  The "something completely different" was an alternate answer to the "what's their endgame" question, but I won't post that until and unless I actually find it.
  About five minutes later, I found it or it found me, and it is, as William S. Burroughs said of shooting up, a wildly unpretty spectacle. It explains why the Montrose administration's biggest struggle may be disentangling the Atlantic Republic from the World Bank*, why the rentier class seems to be swooping into its grave like cummings' shrill collective myth**, and why you may be wrong about AI being impossible:
  http://aberrant-eyes.tumblr.com/post/142123318928/capitalism-as-geobiological-extinction-event
  "What happens when human survival stops being an absolute limit on capital’s ability to infinitely expand itself? What will it mean when humanity becomes yet another barrier for capital to overcome? [...]
  "By some estimates, upwards of 70% of the volume of trades in the US stock market are made by automated algorithms. These high frequency trades occur thousands of times per second at the speed of light across a globally-integrated communications infrastructure constructed to coordinate the planetary distribution of resources. This tendency in political economy is a marked shift from a few short decades ago, when trading times were measured in hours if not days. Vitally, human agency is irrelevant to these decisions. The agents which now operates a majority of finance capital are nonhuman ones. Humanity is rapidly becoming obsolete to the functioning of market economies. [I]t is naive to presume that human survival imposes an absolute limit on capital’s operation - that capitalism will reach the point at which it threatens humanity’s planetary dominance and then stop. Indeed, as the trend towards market automation shows, the more machinic, the more alien, the more inhuman which capital becomes, the more efficient its operation. [...]
  "Just as the aerobic mode of production revolutionised and terminated the anaerobic population which sustained it, planetary technocapital is rapidly approaching the point at which humanity will no longer be a necessary component in its functioning. Beyond that? It’s possible all of human society to this point has served only as a precondition for the capitalised and posthuman beings still yet to come. Human history until now may be a mere trace to be detected in the geological record in a thousand thousand years by our unrecognisable descendants, as moved by our deaths as we are by the suffering of our anaerobic ancestors."
  Or, alternatively, they could drive us into extinction and then, with nobody around to do maintenance on the computers that run them, follow us.
  TL;DR The world economy is dominated by the closest thing to artificial intelligence we have, and we exist in the same relationship to it that the anaerobic bacteria had to the cyanobacteria at the time of the Great Oxygen Catastrophe, or possibly that the ant has to the brainworm as it climbs to the top of the leaf and waits to be devoured.
  * Unless they already have and I missed or forgot where you mentioned it.
  ** Line 9 of "all ignorance toboggans into know"

  9/20/16, 6:25 AM
Raymond Duckling said...

  @Neo Tuxedo
  The article was interesting and engaging, but IMHO your fears are misplaced.
  Your premise seems to be that computer assisted trading, aka High Frecuency Trading (HFT) is somehow pushing the economy into some sort of exponential self renforcing loop. This is not correct. HFT does not increase economic activity, just realocate financial resources backing preexistent economic activity over and over again.
  If this realocation was done with the purpose of making the economy more "efficient" (for some objective definition of that word) you might be onto something; you'd see how HFT would asymptotically approach some "ideal allocation" of money to make maximum use of industrial capacity or whatever. That is not the case. I've never worked in the financial industry, but know people who have done so (at least one as HFT programmer). The utility function they are pursueing is short term financial gains. Sure, the algorithms are complex and try to detect patterns that humans cannot, but more often than not those patterns are related with the volatility of markets rather than the industrial capacity itself.
  At the end of day, HFT does not uncover the mythic long-term pulse of the economy, but just tries to arbitrage the process of financial allocation itself by analyzing the noise in the signal and placing buy/sell calls ahead of unsophisticated investors (or other HFT machines executing an almost equivalent algorithm just a handful of microseconds slower than yourself). HFT transactions do not set new trends, they just rip off a few cents, here and there, from the naturally ocurring trends; and they do so at the cost of making the whole system much more chaotic.
  That HFT is seen as the shiny new thing is, again IMHO, not a sign of strengt but of weakness. If professional investors had bigger fish to fry they would not dream on pursuing this strategy that forces them to deal with finicky computers and the weirdos that control them. To me, it looks like they are scrapping the bottom of the barrel and are using computers to scoop into the crevices that their own hands are too big and clumsky to reach.
  Now... if you add the Internet of Things into the mix... that's a whole new dimension of hurt that computers could cause once they are left to pursue their mechanistic, ill-defined goals in the physical world.

  9/21/16, 10:23 AM

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