Back in the old days, think mid 1980s, we had minicomputers, specifically a DEC VAX 11/780. An entire freshman computer science cohort at a major university would sit down at 9600 baud DEC VT 102 terminals, shoehorn themselves into a machine with one sixteenth the ram that my cell phone has, and internet access for the whole school was a single 56k circuit, about a quarter of what I get out of my cellular 3G network. My phone has a four gigabyte flash card, ten times the capacity of the 14” RA-81 drives that the minicomputer used.
Given that only sixteen meg of ram were available the system would have double or triple that amount of swap space configured on one of RA-81 drives.
And when too many things were happening at once the system spent more time moving things back and forth from memory to hard disk, thusly getting no real work done despite being 100% utilized.
This is the situation our Congressional staffers face today, things are this way intentionally, and it certainly does benefit corporations, who have seized strategic planning duties from our government.
The Democratic party used to have an internal think tank known as the Democratic Study Group. This 150 employee LSO (Legislative Service Organization) was destroyed in 1995 when Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution defunded it, setting off a massive wave of corporate looting.
Today, sixteen years later, two dozen right wing corporate think tanks churn out homogenized junk glorifying extremist, simplistic Randian theories of economics. We’ve basically let long term planning for humans devolve to the point where it’s in the hands of sociopathic virtual persons who react on a quarterly basis. I already know my mind on this matter – how is this working for you?
There are two deeper problems we face.
The first is John Locke’s view of the Earth as being infinite. A creature of the 17th century, the beginning of his life overlapped the end of Galileo’s. He knew the world was round, but his theories of government presume that no resource is more rare than the wits and will needed to go and create something of value to humans out of the raw materials nature provides.
We also know the world is round, because we look down on it each day from satellites that measure drought in the U.S. and east Africa, melting glaciers everywhere, and a thousand other signs that there are simply too many of us on this little rock for everyone to live like a westerner.
The second phenomenon arose about a century after this infinite Earth theory. Usury was banned for Christians in 325 AD and the prohibitions really didn’t ease until 1545. We finally agreed that compound interest was acceptable about two centuries ago, roughly concurrent with the broad exploitation of fossil fuels. Human economies that are limited to the solar maximum for their geographic location are either static, or they grow slowly.
If you spend a little time on The Oil Drum you’ll learn about peak oil. We might have peaked in liquid fuel production in May of 2005, or maybe the summer of 2008. This isn’t clear as they fiddled with reporting methods, but what is clear is this: there is a linear relationship between liquid fuel use and GDP, and we are going to enter a permanent reduction of liquid fuels to the tune of 3% to 5% annually.
Stated another way: Our GDP is going to contract 3% to 5% from now until the time we get down to the solar maximum for our geographic territory.
GULP
So how do we pay compound interest at 8% annually when our economy is in a permanent contraction of a roughly similar size?
We don’t
America won’t default this week due to political shenanigans, but it will default eventually. And no power on Earth can stop that.
Look at the decisions being made.
Ruin water via fracking in Colorado, Pennsylvania and Texas forever so that corporations can post a few more quarters of profit.
Genetically engineer plants despite many concerns regarding the long term consequences. Again a few quarters of profit trump sensible long term plans.
Not only use but subsidize the worst fossil fuel we have due to purchased political access rather than wise long range thinking.
We either thrash corporations, seizing control of our government and our future, or they’ll be the death of us all. We still need vehicles to manage large capital projects, but as things are now we’re not owners, we’re slaves.
And we start that process by stopping the mental thrashing of those who work on Capitol Hill. I see how much is on these kids' plates and I know we're getting rolled by lobbyists. We need infrastructure and I’m not talking trains and wind turbines – first we have to have the infrastructure we need to get the right policies in place so that we can get these other things.
Blogs were the genesis of a media of our own, one based on reputation and facts rather than on dollars and corporate spin. We’ve started taking steps toward replacing the Democratic Study Group, but we’re going to need to be stealthy, swift, and wise in how we use our limited resources.
Feel free to drop me a note if you’d like to get involved in this exercise …
I was being cryptic there at the end. Can you evaluate software? Support and train others using software once it passes muster? Can you maintain a server? Can you grab big datasets and whack them around so others can get them into tools they understand?
We basically need some IT support, then we need smart analysts to use the systems we have available in order to help Congressional staff, Progressive NGOs, and hopefully some of these folks will turn out and raise hell during election season.