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We followed the actions of Elon Musk for a couple of years now. Fascinated by his bold steps and insight into the state of our planet and species, and his determination to bring change to it. There are books that try to explain his magic, but we don’t agree with the list presented. For examples the rules in this book are

1. Bring hope
2. Be a good observer
3. Think big
4. Play to win
5. Move people

The above list is more or less what you can observe if you look at Elon, but it is not a list of what makes him succesfull. We believe that reason comes before what he did in Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX and what he inspired in Solar City.

The core of Elons mind has been educated differently form that of most people. We think that where most people did not have a chance to experience reality autonomously at an early age, and where not encouraged to (because they spend time in front of the TV in a city appartment) the relationship of most people with reality is intermediated by people, parents, teachers, governments. This intermediation causes people to be highly social (they adapt to ideas handed to them in the social context) but also potentially ignorant (because what people believe isn’t necessarily true). Elon believed a lot, he had a family member that flew around the world in a plane exploring, and he probably did some exploring outside and from books himself.

So the first rule is :

1.  Autonomously explore. Experience reality as it is. Read to extend your experience.

We know Elon read a lot, which means that his ratio, his inner dialog is very rich and full of references. Kids raised by parents with little time that don’t read won’t have that, except for a lot of social chatter, which is important of course. But the knowledge Elon gained by reading meant he could imagine and reason through more problems. And his interest in meta thinking, so thinking about thinking, or methods of thinking through a problem amplified that. Many people will never learn how to drill down on a problem, because they have never understood or thought about details below the level that they usually deal with.

For some a broken car is a broken car, for others it is a car broken because of a faulty bobine, dirty spak plugs, lack of oil etc. If you don’t like detail you can’t drill down. Tesla himself wrote about his ability to imagine physical devices so vividly he had trouble distinguishing them from reality. They would stick in his mind and be there until he learned something new. That was why he was very active and exploring, and why he could think through problems, which allows much more cost effective design of new inventions (a direction his mother! inspired Tesla towards).

Rule number two seems to work only for some people, because some simply are not born to be inventers or analysts. It is the ability to let go of what you deal with, and look at its constituents, causal orgin, and look at those aspects and dig still further.

2. Learn to analyse problems below the level of day to day interaction.

If you sit in a car and you need to switch on the headlights and the switch is behind you you will think “Who the hell designed this car!”, that is so inconvenient. Once you look at things beyond their day to day appearance you may experience the same. So you read that shrimp are caught in the  East Sea (North of Denmark) then flown to Morocco to be hand pealed, then flown back to Holland to be traded, then shipped across the world. That’s insane. If you just look at the shrimp in the supermarket it looks ok. That why so many people don’t mind buying shrimp that have seen more of the world than the buyer. Than you have grey and light coloured shirmp. The light colored one have been soaked in water to make them more volumous. If you buy those you pay a shrimp price for water.

The same happens to chicken breast. If you look with the analist mind you wonder what is going on. This only happens if you actually care. If you don’t care about how chickens are treated or how people pay more for their nutrition than they should, or how the health of people is affected by meat processed with dodgy additives, nothing can be done. You can not be ‘Musk’ succesfull. You have to care about humans, you have to want to be usefull to others. Then when you analyse the world you will find things you want to change. Then you can do that with your heart in it.

3. Care about what happens to humanity

Elon tells us that he thought about what he could do when he was in his twenties (or even earlier). He did this having read the work of many authors that wrote about life and what can be achieved. Elon thought he’d try to do something to prevent human extinction due to climate change, and something to drive the move from fossil to renewables in energy. Anyone with some talent in understanding physics can reason towards the conclusion that there is no reason to stay under this insane fossil regime. It is a massochistic exercise people rallied against in 1900 already. But Elon did not know how when he thought about it.

Fortune struck planet Earth when Elon and his brother Kimbal tried to build an digital version of the Yellow Pages, then Elon started X.com which turned into Paypal. Some of this was Uber style stealing, some of it was clever thinking. Paypal payed you money to start an account, so that people would use it, so it became usefull (because what use is a bank account if nobody else has one).

When Elon sold Paypal he had upwards of $150 mln in cash. He never cared much for banks, stock exchanges. And he had his dreams. He decided to take the initiative on an electric roadster that the original builders did not want to take further, which became the Tesla Roadster. He also looked for ways to drive progress in space flight, and found he could best do this himself. He didn’t actively manage Tesla until it got in trouble.

In both cases Elon did not expect to succeed. The odds are strongly against building a car brand, and space he found out, is hard. Building a spacecraft is a bit like building a machine that has to travel on its own to about 35,786 km while basically being a bomb continuously exploding for several minutes and still cary usefull cargo : a spacecraft. So rule 4 above is patently wrong : Elon did not play to win, he played to lose, but then worked his ass off to win. Probability of success has to be non-zero, then, provided other benificial factors are potentially there to be gained, Elon will go for it.

4. Accept long odds if you believe you can beat them, and maybe even if you don’t

If you have these four principles only one is left to be added to become an Elon Musk type entrepeneur and achiever, and this is persistence, focus, tanacity, unwavering determination. The thing is that if you start from your analysis of reality which is sound because you had real experiences, because you exposed yourself to learn how things actually work, because you adopted methods to make things work (study engineering or engineering texbooks), if you want to do good, and if you accept and understand long odds, then your choices might as well have been those of Elon Musk. We also experience that every time someone asks us why we care about climate change the answer is  “How can you not care? Can’t you see how it is killing us?”, most people can’t and that is due in part to nurture, in part to nature. Rule nr. 5 is simple :

5. If you, based on your sound analysis, believe what you want to do is right. Do it. Persistence is a result of lack of fundamental change in the situation that set you on a course of action

There is a rational and irrational part to Elon Musks mind, but he tries to keep it as rational as possible. This is constant work. This means he has to constantly detach and reapply his understanding of what the real basic premises are, not what people believe they are. This is the empirical cycle in the production lines. This is the creation of indicators so that he knows what is going on, what he can optimize. He has made a choice to live by his mind, and this also makes perfect sense. Why live by any other persons rules if you can understand them and see your own rules are wiser, better, more exciting, fullfill you more. If you ask what’s Elon Musks secret sauce, we would say it is not the sauce he pours over things that creates his perspective, but the fact he tasted and worked with reality until he understood how to turn it into a great sauce.

If you think climate change surprised the world from around the 1990s, you are wrong. The idea that burning coal, oil and gas causes global warming and climate change is more than a century old. In the 50s when oil use expanded significantly and the rise of CO2 started to exceed the historic variations it was perfectly clear what was going on. Below video shows you what we mean..

It is still the case that baby boomers, people that will likely die in the next 30 years, show very little concern with the situation they created. This may be because they are simply to old to care, most of them. Another reason is that when you are in the grips of healthcare and pension arrangement you don’t want to rock the boat. But still the apathy is surprising.

We worked hard all our lives..(of course not as a construction worker)

We think part of it is that the fossil fuel economy created a situation in which the wealth of children is only marginally dependent on that of the parents, and where there is no real objects of generational care and ownership for most people. Houses are bought based on expected income in a job that is often not related to that of the parents. There is little land ownership and keeping land depends more on how it is used than who uses it.

Cities are like markets..

For a city dweller there is little to connect generations really. There is little control over poltics (economics so banks shape policy), little control over neigbourhoods, so what is there to be attached to? You can feel you are attached to anything of course, but for most people things can be taken away, they don’t control them or own them. Even consumer products like cars and  motorcycles are bought with debt and need to be sold and returned. The rented economy gives people everthing for a low price, but takes away control.

Why are you where you are? Why don’t you own land and a house, without any mortgage? Becase of the needs of the banks that want to profit of the general economy

In this situation it is no surprise generations don’t connect too well. It is no surprise the future has little meaning for many, because nothing they own or care for has a future, except their kids. The kids meanwhile see life as a struggle to achieve the same independence as their parents, an independence that banks decided is simply not for everyone. An independence of illusions of ownership, now real but increasingly virtual to boot.

This is where life can find a future and people can believe in one..

How are people going to care about the future if they have no ownership of it. If they can’t rely on their pensions, if they can’t rely on being in control or able to afford things in the future. the economy is totaly ok with people not belieiving there is a future. Economics never stops seeking profit it just does its thing until it can’t and then moves on. For those that look at the indicators and see them all run into the red due to this short sighted amnesia inducing system it seems the solution is to drive ownership more than anything. Ownership and local power, dependence on local activities for food and energy, not on remote suppliers of the same. So that the causal relation between people, what they do and where they live, and more importantly how they care for the things they own, regains its importance. Then people’s horizon will grow further ahead and the peace of mind returns to plan and act to maintain and care for what we own.

Once we find that we have cared for something that can in turn care for those we care about, like fertile land, a living thriving planet, clean air and waters, oceans full of fish, then maybe we have really cared to the best of our abilities, and we can count ourselves true humans.

The US has a commercial prison system. It is run as a business, in private hands, and it offers cheap labour. It is actually the biggest manufacturer in the country. We always think it is highly dishonest to lament the poor chances of ex convicts on the job market, seeing that the prison system is taking so many easy and even high tech jobs.

This commercial prison system leads to distortions in convictions. Several cases of jail sentences for super minor offences (school pranks) even leading to suicides have been in the news. The issue is that prisons can use prisoners, and like to incarcerate the easy ones, non-threatening workers. The US is experiencing a renaissance of the slave era, or has done so for decades now. Meanwhile real criminals are left to their own devices, creating a super psychotic atmosphere in some prisoners. After all, who is to look after gangbangers that think nothing of stabbing someone or worse.

We see that minor online offences are now getting serious jail time attached to them. So sharing a password becomes a federal crime. In the UK, where they need cheap workers because of the detachment from the EU and lack of exportable gas (and possibly the slumping financial services), 10 year prison sentences are introduced for onlin piracy. This is insane unless you see why you want a young person stealing a movie to go to prison.

“Leave an old washing machine in your front yard, miss too many days of school or catch a fish during the wrong season, and you could end up in jail.” (source)

In a bad crime forstering economy, invest in prisons!

The copyright industry will shake hands with the commercial prison system, and these big money industries will lobby everywhere to achieve the same punisment for these victimless crimes. TTIP will introduce it in the EU if accepted, and apparently the UK is more willing to allow wanton exploitation of its young and disadvantaged.

This all ends in the most idiotic minor offences clearing individuals out of society to work as super low wage worker in a prison somewhere, until they get stabbed to death by a real criminal inmate. It makes no sense to do this unless you see that we are still all competing over the same resources on a global market, mainly to generate cashflow for banks and oil companies. Billions are flowing through these prison systems, including a lot of tax breaks and subsidies, and this keeps them operating like they do, it keeps them corrupting the justice system and cooperating to increase sentences for simple acts like sharing music.

In Holland we have witnessed the quick removal of trees from cities. They are used as biomass in power plants, turning cities into dusty places. increasing stress and damage to lungs from stupid internal combustion cars…

Yes, this tree was sick (right)

How to reverse this quickly, how to bring leafy green growth back to the streets. That’s actually quite easy. We can use lamp posts and so called creepers.

Plant creepers in special pots that fit around lamp posts, street lanterns, and let them grow. They grow so fast it takes only a year to cover the lamp post. By covering the post with root fabric the creeper will not damage the paint and can be easily removed.

Pots will fill with roots over time, and limit the ability of the plant to grow, so for the best results ground rooted plants are preferred.

Pots of plastic or metal can be used and planting can begin quickly. For each type of lantern there can be special pots. Installing and maintaining them can create jobs. And ‘harvesting’ overgrowth can yield biomass. The leafy plants can clean the air and provide oxygen and stress relief to city dwellers, and remind us nature exists..

Some creepers or vines will lose their leafs, others won’t. Some will grow wide as their branches look for horizontal support, others will be less volumous because those cross branches are thinner.

QandA  (Nederlands)

Welke klimplanten zijn er ?

• Klimop, hecht niet
• Wingerd, hecht niet
• Hortensia, hecht aan muur

Waar zouden ze in de stad kunnen groeien ?

• Vanuit de plek waar normaal gesproken een stoeptegel ligt
  • Tegen gevels
  • Tegen lantarenpalen
• Vanuit een bak, voor korte duur

Hoe wordt de klimplant tegen de lantarenpaal of muur bevestigd

• Door beklimbaar doek te spannen, bv met metalen ring om lantarenpaal
• Door metalen of plastic raamwerk te spannen, op afstand van muur of paal, met klemmen of kijlbouten.
• Door kabels te spannen vanuit klemmen.

Hoe kan een lantarenpaal beschermd worden tegen de klimop ?

• Door worteldoek, een om tegen te groeien en een om de wortels echt te stoppen.
• Door een niet hechtende plant te gebruiken die tegen een losstaand raamwerk of kabels groeit.

Zou worteldoek om de lantarenpaal de verf beschadigen ?

• Het zou het eerder beschermen tegen de zon. Dauw vormt tegen de metalen mast, en dit verdampt door het doek, maar water is niet schadelijk voor de verf.

Wat is zijn de onderhoudseisen ?

• Regelmatig korten zodat het in de komende periode niet voorbij de gestelde grenzen kan groeien (eind worteldoek of raamwerk)

Hoe wordt een deel van de plant verwijderd ?

• Door de stammen door te knippen rond de mast en de nieuwe scheuten weg te trekken.

Welke partijen zijn betrokken

• Groendiensten
• Beheer lichtmasten

Misschien is deze ‘banner hardware’ voor lichtmasten geschikt om klimop kabels langs te spannen.

Stevig materiaal

Over Groene gevels

Green Walls

Streetlife

Some industries are damaging to public health. It’s clear the coal power plants in China cause many people to die early, as they do in Europe. The numbers run in the hundred thousands. How to deal with this problem? The ETS system failed in Europe, the Carbon tax has not been put in place and banks keep fuel prices where they need to be for a growing economy.

Maybe this suggetion may work. Let’s say we know that coal fired powerplants are responsible for 16.000 deaths in Holland annually. Rather than deads lets count lost lifespan, in years.  Let’s say it cost 16.000 x 5 years on average = 80.000 hours. That’s 80.000 manhours lost every year. Let the coal companies add those as a cost, like invisible employees. That means the industry has to hire 38 others, that make 4.000 a month or so, so pay 152.000 Euro in salaries. It’s clear this is not much of a burden to a billion Euro industry.

It may be a small burden, but for once there is a logical link to lives lost due to activity and the bottom line of an industry. Now the number is in the books, and reducing the health risk of buring coal (for example) translates to the bottom line. This could work for any product, but perhaps we should up the cost or make a handicap formula. Perhaps we should also use an exponential measure so that

• 1 live lost          hire 1
• 5 lives lost        hire 5
• 10 lives lost      hire 20
• 20 lives lost      hire 80
• 50 lives lost      hire 400

What do you think, would this work? The money should not be spend, or given as subsidies to the competition provided it does not kill anybody. If you are looking at energy it’s clear wind kills less people than coal, and so it will have lower running cost. One can look at numbers counted in deaths per nr. of persons exposed to the technology times the duration of exposure. Just a thought, what do you think?

Large trade agreements like TTIP, CETA etc. are being negotiated and put into force outside our normal attention span. They do things we really don’t want, mainly give control over our lives to banks, who want to see cashflow happen everywhere. Music, food, any and all activities have to involve trade, and that trade has to be concentrated so that cashflows are predictable. The banks, who handle these cashflows can then sit back and live easy lives, no matter how restricted and boring and inescapable the state of citizens is.

You can look at the up side : There will be large overlaps in experiences between world citizens, so they will identify more and feel more kindred, which will make war less likely. Or you can say that a lot of waste in the economy will not happen because of inefficient small companies who are replaced by efficient mega companies taking over with endless Wallstreet credit (everywhere, from taxi’s to second hand goods). Humanity as a monoculture or a carefully managed heterogenous culture (like you can choose between Pepsi and Cola, Democrats and Republicans). How easy and peacefull a life.

But there is a snag, at least, for now. That is that this system depletes resources at an alarming rate, a rate that can not be sustained. Not only oil,coal, gas, but also water, wood, even sand. You can’t build highrises in every city, or build roads to every town, give cars to everyone. It’s good for business, but not for humanities survival. Trade agreements and banks do not care. They reason : If the planet can no longer sustain it we will find out when it happens. Until then, let’s push for more power.

The real life consequence of the limits to what an economy that does not recognize limits can devour is that there has to be a selection between people. There is always a selection : Beautifull people are given more breaks, get partners easier and promoted faster. Even though this would imply that they also get more kids with better lives, it is often poor people that get kids with miserable lives. However, the economy likes people that sell more stuff, that cause you to buy stuf. It likes celebrities, but also just nice people that can infect us with a sense of needyness so we will purchase something they also have.

One can divide society in economic sense in two groups : Those that sell and those that don’t. The ones that sell get opportunities, the ones that don’t don’t. If you are a bum you won’t get a break, because you will make whatever you do look bad. If you are a beautifull woman you get lots of breaks, and you can be iJustine and sell whatever you touch, hold as you show your natural beauty.

But this harsh truth is even harsher : People are not in short supply. If resources had to be divided evenly then all would be average and nobody would stand out and drive people to new purchases, new behaviour. So the economy wants two groups, one with a lot, more than they need, and another one, the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ as they are commonly called. This is not a fantasy, years ago Citigroup already published a plutonomy report, about the two groups and what the rich could look forward to.

To be clear, this is only a result from a system that does not tend its resources. It wil fish a lake empty, it will clear cut a forrest, it will destroy and not stop because it does not care for things that are not there.  It wants to trade. To handle the world without responsibility. Economic thinking put the traders in charge, and they are trading our futures and lives away for a piece of the action.

Humans in this system are challenged to fight for a role, to become either the executioner or the executed. This is a false dillema, because the third way is to be outside the system, but of course the minions of this system will put a price on everything, until nothing is free, nothing exists prior or outside the pressure applied by economics. A life in this economic system is almost an accident, like a role of the dice. So a person is born, is talented, can use his/her intellect to further the breath and power of the economic system, or not, and die. If the person is without talent then it is to be poor, to have dangerous unhealthy jobs and diet, to die early from bad habits in bad neigbourhoods, from crime, drugs, and nobody will have the time to care.

The idea “But a working economy benefits all” clearly is untrue, and with that the idea we all need to ad our share to it’s succes. It is not a benign machine, it is not a vehicle for world justice and wealth, because resources have to be selectively given to the most attractive groups, and not to any other. These groups are also taught to find that natural, and it is in a way. But the core issue of scarcity of resources is not adressed, never will be.

For the poor, the weak, the sick there is one option : Organize, to become a force that makes it so that what is needed is provided, so that the system becomes not a depleting machine but a generating, one that adds resources instead of destoying them without replacement. And the poor and weak that organize have to understand they can not run to the other side, as usually happens. Usually you get a poor person that rises to some prominence, then gets to choose : go for the money or be destroyed. This is how many movements become impotent, as their leaders become saboteurs.

The global economy is not a place for all humans to unite in harmony, even if it may claim to be, it is just a machine designed by people that want to secure their lives. It is an incredible complicated way to do so and it forces them to neglect the damaging effects or suffer a lifestyle change. The future will never be better with this kind of powerstructure, and the solution is to divide and localize authority as far as possible, and to introduce renewables and use them to build up and restore resources where they have been depleted using automated systems. This I call the Roboeconomy, andit is time to adopt it as the way to extend humanities life expectency.

 

 

For years this blog is trying to explain the strange similarity between fossil fuels and money. We commonly think we need money, but we always use that money to buy fossil fuels. No production process runs on dollar bills, almost every production process, logistic chain, mining operation runs on fossil fuels. This is the big mindfuck of this era. People don’t seem to get it.

What does this carbon-credit relationship mean? It means money is created to distribute fossil fuels. You need to think through every product just a bit to see where the money is spend on fossil fuels. Of course there are exceptions, but we mean the general process. So steel cost money because coal and diesel cost money. Labour cost money because the fossil fuels to make bread, toys, clothes, food all cost money. This is changing a little bit, slowely, which means things cost less money if they use more renewable energy. Still all the money that flows flows because fossil fuels need to flow.

Exxon is in favour of a carbon tax, a tax on CO2 emissions. People wanting to fight climate change suggest this tax. This means that industries emitting a lot of CO2 will need to pay more taxes. We have tried the Emissions Trading Scheme, but politics is so carboncorrupt that this never worked, it only created a boom for the bankers (who do the corrupting), a lot of nice jobs and NO CO2 reduction because too many ETS rights have been granted. The ETS system is so broken that members of the dutch parlaiment discussed whether they should think of a new reason to have an ETS, such a deep insult it can hardly be imagined. It is like saying : You build this chair for us to sit on, but maybe we should burn it for heat?

The ETS doesn’t work. Carbon tax will also not work. The reason is simple once you understand the carboncredit system, which is the intimate relationship between money and fossil fuels. So a company emits a lot of CO2? This drives up cost? Banks have two options : See how the company switches to renewables (as people expect) or simply give more credit at lower rates. This means the company gets more money to spend, spends part of it on carbon tax, the tax goes to the government, the government spends it on products and services, which emit carbon. On those emissions tax is payed, These return to the government, the government buys more stuff, services, which causes more emissions of CO2. Really besides the added administrative jobs this changes nothing.

Banks will simply increase the amount of money, will charge different interest rates, will add cost for the government (that it has in its grip), will reroute the tax to financial instruments and make a lot of money for itself. That is because banks are free to do whatever the fuck they want, just like oil companies, and this is where the problem needs to be solved. NO MORE FREEDOM FOR BANKS OR FOSSIL FUEL COMPANIES.

The way to fix it is hard to get for people that do not see or ‘believe’ in the carbon credit relationship. Right wing people don’t ‘believe’ banks are dependend on fossil fuel companies and vice versa because right wing people live of this dependency and protect it. Without fossil fuels there will be no right wing politics. To fix it we need to do two things :

1. Raise the cost of fossil fuels, not of emissions but of fuels sold by fossil fuel companies.
2. Not spend the tax income, keep it in an account and never spend it.
3. Not tax fossil fuels if they are used to build or create renewable energy sources. So a product specific fuel tax.

This means that a company that uses a lot of fossil fuels to make plastic cups out of oil will find it can’t make them as cheap as the company that makes them out of recycled plastic. This means that an airline that flies people to Spain with Kerosine can not do it as cheap as the one that uses biofuels. This means that a solar panel factory can produce panels at a cheap price and continue to grow its market while the people driving fossil fuel powered cars have to see electric cars take over because it is cheaper.

The money not spend is money taken out of ciculation. The banks will say this is bad for the economy, because ‘the economy’ equals bank profits from fossil fuel cashflows. Define the economy as the combined wealth in existence, priced by their owners (not the banks who like to determine what things cost) then this strategy will grow wealth, even if the government doesn’t spend. The effect is simply this : If you use fossil fuels you are being burdened, if you sell fossil fuels you will see less demand. If you are a bank and you loan to a fossil fuel using company you see less return.

So no carbon tax, simply directed fuel taxes, and no spending of those tax revenues.

 

 

 

It’s not mentioned often, but the fossil industry has a habit of killing opposition. Entire wars are fought causing millions of deaths just over the resource. Industry in general has no morality, this is clear from examples like sigarets, DDT, the fracking industry. It is certainly clear from logging companies.

“Four Peruvian tribal leaders have been killed on their way to a meeting to discuss ways to stop illegal logging.”

The problem is our world is divided in a part where respect of the law is rewarded by a public prosecutor that will attack a criminal in your name, and a part where government will not do that. Large parts of our planet have no law and order because those that we expect to protect it don’t do it because they are corrupt, or don’t because they are absent or incapaple.

“The loggers have invaded a reserve set aside for uncontacted Indians and built an illegal network of roads to transport the wood, says a statement from CIPIACI, an organisation of South American indigenous people set up to defend uncontacted tribes. ” (S)

Activists in tropical forrests trying to protect their habitat against clearcutting are regularly slaughtered. We hear bout 57 activist killed this year alone. This is because they have no representation, no allies, nobody that is interested in their existence. Especially in poor countries this happens, because in those regions so many people suffer that a few dollars can turn a loser into a killer.

“116 environmental activists killed in 2014”

Knowing this, and knowing that a fait accompli regarding logging (the forrest is gone and sold to us for lawnchairs) will not be reversed, so that only real prevention helps, suggests we need to start protecting activists in lawless countries. We need to ask the UN to organize details of soldiers that will protect environmental activists so they are as strong as their enemies. It is a function of the UN to keep peace and bring justice, and no more justice and peace can be brought than by preventing exploitation, ransacking and theft of natural wealth where it is possible.

Countries like the US will take control of others, like Puerto Rico through their force and money, and no doubt they will open up the country to loggers and protect those loggers like nature has no right to exist. This needs to be balanced by a force for good, one that maximizes life and protects those that want to protect themselves.

 

A short comment on the discussion if we are living in base reality or not. The discussion is an old one, because all through our history humans have augmented their reality with mystical entities who’s existence could not be proven, only derived from hard to understand phenomona. The gods of the Greeks, the animistic spirits trees and objects. The question “What is real” has always been hard to answer.

The quandry

Elon Musks argument for the idea we are existing in an artificial simulated environment goes like this : Considering that simulations, so tools that give us an impression of reality without being real (video games) are becoming more convincing all the time, at some point in the future it seems we won’t be able to decide whether what we experience is real or a ‘video game’ simulation. We can not know if this process of ‘video game’ optimization has already happened and we are in a video game already. The bottom line is we can’t tell whether our reality is real or not because it might be it is the result of a long process of making it appear as real as possible, so that it actually does appear real.

Reality is energy moving between dimensions..

From science

There are several angles you can still tackle this quandry. One is quantum physics. The deeper more fundamental research focusses on the pattern of rules dictating the existence of fundamental particles. They show surprising symmetry. It appears there is a super stiff lattice that contains all the dimensions energy can occupy, in a quantized space sense. and the rules of nature follow from energy moving in and our of these dimensions, defining the nature of the particles. Those that do not occupy dimensions can travel at the speed of light, those that do can’t. We find that only the most violent and energetic explosions found in the universe (where we need to be lightyears away to even survive them) are able to send a ripple to the stiff lattice. Some energy ends up in the lattice, but it doesn’t break. What is its nature? Is it like a giant computer memory manipulated by some giant processor?

Gravity waves propagate along the fundamental stiff latice in which all energy exists

No reason to expect us to ever escape this ‘simulation’ if it is one, and still no explanation why it is structured the way it is, other than to be discrete (which means that we can only see energy that takes some discrete transferrable form, like we can only read letters when a contrasting color concentrates in a certan spatial pattern). Part of our understanding of the universe includes that there’s an ocean of particles and energy we will never see because they only exist for a tiny amount of time, seemingly entering from elsewhere into our reality, but to short to be detected. The Kasimir effect proves their presence. So our understanding of reality is limited by what it allows to be known, tested and measured.

What is weird about reality is that it constantly comes into being in a way that preserves energy, the first law of thermodynamics is never broken. When we detect interactions between particles it always follows the rule of conservation of energy, even though quantum physics tells us there need not be particles, they could be in many places, until (it seems) some energy is transferred between dimensions, and that is what our reality exist out of. It’s like we’re in a big possiblility soup but once some part of this soup (us) starts to move the rest of the soup takes shape and becomes our reality. The constitution of reality is like a puzzle that is thrown in the air and falls perfectly into place every time we force it to. This does hint at some external process, but also tells us it can never be observed.

From the conservation of meaning

To answer the quandry of Elon Musk, or speak to his doubts about the reality of reality, we can also approach it in a different way : If reality is a simulation, but we can never find out, it is reality. This has to be the case or the word reality would lose its meaning. The mind that thinks “This might not be real” has no reason to think that other than knowing it can’t know. This is similar to thinking “There may be a God”. To be very dry about it : It’s not consistent with an empirical mind to assume things that can not be proven empirically. It is not consistent with the same mind to assume something that can not be tested, something that does not really play a causal role in reality. It follows that a mind that doubts reality without there being any causal effect of the outcome of such wonderings is either idle, deranged or has meta motivations (motivations that go beyond that of the individual mind). Religions usually combine all three aspects.

From purpose

A third way to anser Elons conjecture is to ask “What is reality to us”. Obviously there is no objective reality, as there is no objective observer. Reality for us has been, since we where worms on the precambrian ocean bed, what we deal with to keep ourselves alive. Reality was what we could sense, from the time we could only sense light to the moment we could actually read text, the reality for us as organisms was what we could tune our behaviour to so that we survived. Our imagination has been necessary to sensitize us to threats to our existence. They may not have been real, but they made us behave as if we lived in an augmented reality. Our minds don’t work like a typewriter, where reality has to impress itself to get in, they work more like a guy with a checklist seeking confirmation of what is expected. That expectation is a regenerated experience we call memories.

To boil the above angle down to the essence : What we experience to be reality can only be reality because otherwise the word reality would lose its meaning. To go beyond the boundaries of our human existence invalidates the use of reality as whatever we conclude the nature of things to be will never be real to us, never decide our fate. It makes no sense to wonder about things that we can’t see, feel, hear, taste or smell..

Conclusion

Even though the nature of reality can not be decided from our point of view, and is unlikely to change due to the immens energy required to gain knowledge at its fringes, we can wonder whether we live in a simulation. If we do it matters very little to our struggle to survive, and may even jeopardize it if we think of some intiricate but deadly way to prove we  are right (like all the ISIS suicide bombers can’t attest to becasuse they are dead and not in heaven). There is no limit to the conjectures that can be made when one assumes our lives exist in a simulation, like there is none if we assume angels exist, gods, etc.. It seems the chance we live in one is both large and small, large because we can’t know and don’t understand how we could exist at all (yet), small because reality is what we are born to deal with, it is what we are born to know to the best of our senses, and that means by definition it is real, not a simulation.

P.S. The Mathematical fallacy

Some people will say that it’s odd that all the laws of nature can be captured in mathematics. They will say that if our existence was a running computer program the rules would also be mathematical, and this somehow proves that nature has a mathematical basis, and thus may be a simulation. This is an extremely circular argument. Our brain is mostly concerned with ‘what happens next’ in order to protect us or point us to opportunities. As a result evolution resulted in a brain that can follow causal relationships in our surroundings. Mathematical formulas are just one way to represent them (1 + 1 = 2 means if you put two single things together at t=0, then at t=1 you count 2 things). So our mathematical language has two basic elements : things we can discern and how they develop over time. The way our brain works is that we can imagine based on a small clue, and a symbol number is a small clue it can work with. Mathematics thus makes a lot of use of our imagination, either prior, during or after it has reach results.

Reality in fact does not follow basic mathematical rules, and the temporal relationship that is implicit in formulas breaks down below the quantum level. Time turns out to communicate with space such that less time can happen if you wish to cross more space. We argue that this is because if you travel you extricate yourself from space (any dimension), but that is another topic. For some reason the new state of the universe every time we look at it is a result of a carefull summation of probabilities, a summation that took place in zero time. The result is unpredictable, because it is a probability field so that for instance an electron can show up in a number of places at any time. So (x,y,z) = ??? we don’t know.

So the fallacy of mathematics is that it views it’s ability to capture a lot of what we know in causal relationships as proof there is a fundamental mathematical nature in reality. But if the transformations allowed are any and all we might encounter, like the position of a particle is a result of summation of probabilities, then the ability of mathematics to capture it is trivial. Is the ability of an apple to be picked up by a hand proof there is handyness in the apple? And if the hand picks up a basket and carries 10 apples, is that still proof of a handy essence in the apples? Clearly the part of reality that eludes us is where there are no causal effects, so where particles exist and dissapear without interacting. The only thing that is wondrous about reality is that it is consistent with itself. Mathematics can not be consistent with itself, even though it’s rules are always trying to force consistency (so this similarity is also trivial). Why reality is consistent, energy is conserved, nobody knows, only that there would be nobody to wonder if it wasn’t the case..

Europe is in the grips of a rising tide of populism. We can easily see why that is the case : There is to much central authority, which freezes up the market structure, and this is against the wishes of the banks, and industry, who both have an interest in chaos and dependent people. The more chaos the more opportunities for loan and credit and control by banks, and the more  chaos the easier it is to hire and fire people from companies who are in the hard regiment of bank required profit.

The two ends of the political spectrum are either to be intelligent and have a vision for a better more equal and fair future, or to be unintelligent and be angry about things. The intelligent part is lied to and catered to by conservatives and labour both in the sense that both present a vision. Conservatives sell freedom, labour sell the fair share and government care. Both are driven by positive desires because although conservative freedom seeking is profit motivated, and the profit motivation is to serve the banks, the base of that desire lies in that for stability and a good life.

On the unintelligent side though the motive is fear and anger. These people do not have control over their lives, they are in debt, they get lousy jobs, they create a negative environment for each other, they are unrepresented because they don’t trust easily. The conservative and even labour mentality is to ambitious for them. They are used by conservative led companies, and they need labour to protect them, but labour doesn’t do that, it is driven by economic principles which never protect the individual (that is what a competitive job market means). What these people can do is vote. They can be motivated to do things, not by a vision of improvement but by anger and fear. And populist know that and speak to that anger and fear.

It is necessary to have populist at the moment, and it is very noticable where their funds come from : It is the fossil fuel industry. Why is that noticable or necessary? Because first of all these people all serve the economy, the PVV, Farrage, all care nothing about the individual, only about money. Money is fossil fuel credit. Having our lives dominated by cost of everything is what keeps us in the fossil fuel regime. All conflict, strive, aggrevation, anger, frustration is evoked to disable the large group of people who will suffer as money (thus energy) is shifted from them to industry. They NEED to be angry and frustrated at all these things to NOT unite them against the reason for their suffering : The fossil fuel and banking sector.

Industry will happily go green, renewables. That would create millions of jobs and make life cheaper. But the fossil fuel lobby and banks can not allow that to happen. Not as long as there is still oil and gas to sell. And to make sure that people do not turn around to attack the parasite on their backs there need to be politicians that keep the poor and uncapable focussed on other causes of misery, right or wrong. To keep them from cooperating constructively to alleviate their lack of ownership. To avoid not a Brexit but a recapture of land and real estate and industry to local citizens. Focus on the EU, not on your own street, because you have no means (money) or ownership in your own street. 

If people decide to calm down for a second and follow a different path, one in which the anger and frustration and fear is targeted towards banks, real estate and peak oil, a path that recognizes the increased scarcity of all resources (including f.i. sand, water, oil, gas, wine, chocolate, medicine) , then this would not be good news for banks and fossil fuels. Renewables, generated locally can help local manufacturing of all the things people need, and once such energy sources are in place the need for credit will drop. The power of the banks will disappear. People will be able to live their lifes comfortably in their homes they have payed off. Water will be clean, air will be clean, all things will improve. If they direct their anger at their captured state. If they direct their fear towards their uncertain fossil energy future.

Anyone who stands up and points this out will be branded a communist. Most people are well conditioned to respond to this epitaph with anger and loathing. This is the curse of those same less intelligent people : They fall victim to conditioning, they fall victim to the effect of repetition, because they do not use language as effectively and consistently as the higher educated. The difference is that to one you explain, to the other you repeat. Underlying this is that the people in the poor neighborhoods are demoralized. Because of their lack of control they do not want control. They are negatively motivated, which makes them such easy targets for populism.

For ten years we followed the rethoric about banks, and as usual this rethoric is owned by the banks. Because people are forced to fight for every Pound or Euro or Dollar they always anger when they see people who seem not to deserve the money. Money is so important to them and this is the trap, because those that have less complicated lives (using the term low education already casts them in a role of inferiority) do not create money. They are struggling at the trough of the banks and companies that distribute their means of existence. This is what they allow to happen because the need they are kept in is high.

If these people cooperate then two things happen : 1. it is branded communism, even though you’d be talking about a few people cooperating, not gulags and not a 5 year planned agro economy (at all!!). 2. Some well spoken neat person will take over at some point, some well meaning individual with better social skills and better manners, that impresses all those cooperating. He/she will shut them up. He/she will tell them about the economic aspects of their ambtions and guide them back to serfdom. 3. If such a person is not accepted then the group or organization will be smeared as anarchistic, Violent elements will be send to create an image of anti social behaviour. This will poison the initiative. These things will happen sooner or later. There’s always time to increase the downward pressure of debts and low income.

The way to change this dynamic is to adopt a standard approach that keeps cooperation local, but also creates a recognizable movement so people elsewhere can be inspired and feel solidarity. The aim should be to own. Owning real estate is just a way to reduce debt pressure, not a method to create wealth. Wealth comes from energy sources, agriculture and local industry. Those need to be owned by local owners too. The way to achieve ownership can be any that doesn’t put people in jail. The priority should be towards reducing the cost of living, not attaining some ‘high value’ asset or beautifull landmark. Going bankrupt is a fair way to achieve this.

Locally the communities that want to escape the money carving cycle can do what they can to reown their environment. On a higher level they can cooperate and vote against any rule that criminalizes debt, that helps banks, that creates monopolies that drive cost up for those of little means. Driving renewables is a core aspect to make this movement work, because renewables put power in local hands.

Call it the EasierLife movement..

• Reduction of role of money in daily lives
• Local trust systems, local cooperation based on clear living standard outcomes
• Regional cooperation on law creation, to protect against bank, fossil, industrial lobby
• Local ownership of cost of living reducing assets
• Local ownership of agricultural land
• Creation of living earning roles in local economy
• Debt burden reduction by assisted bankruptcy
• Reduce fuel cost by eiminating fuel requiring technology, introducing renewables

Populist motivation

This movement has to be motivated by populist arguments, driving anger and fear, but unlike the common ones used by extreme right wing and xenophobic movements, the enemy is the real one, the fear is the appropriate one. Not forreign immigrants with no power are the enemy, but foreign companies with enormous, illogical financial support.

1. Banks should not own everything, they should not force us to earn money because debt is not a real need that needs to met
2. How with peak oil, scarcer resources are we going to make a living, or even run companies we work in?
3. Why is there constand crisis, how can we become locally resilient against them
4. Foreign companies that sell us products, why do they need to be foreign.
5. Who pays for lobbyists? Who pays for right wingers? Who pays for wars? Why do we accept that?
6. How can we use renewable investment to reduce cost of living.