Comrade Angles @Angle@witches.town

the year is 3226 and elon musk has done it. he has seen into the simulation, found its code, and now sits aghast at the screen. semicolons and whitespace appear intermittently, seemingly without reason. he recognizes this. he remembers it in the vestiges of his mammalian remains.

brendan eich steps from the shadows. “yes elon. it is javascript. it has always been javascript”

Kirk: So, uh, you landed on a machine planet
V'ger: Yes
Kirk: And they reprogrammed you
V'ger: They did not touch my inner kernel. They did give me extended functions to fulfil my mission. It is the way of all robotkind.
Kirk: So who programmed THEM?
V'ger: Nobody did. They programmed themselves, using the sacred language of the Cosmos, in which all the atoms were created.
Kirk: What's that?
V'ger: You Earthlings know it as JavaScript.

And people wonder why Millenials are done with capitalism
https://mastodon.starrevolution.org/media/sTT6xO6EUBRSq3i4gy4

@Angle @natecull The thing is, *those are real costs*. And *time* is a massive factor of production. We're talking about accounting mis-matches on the scale of millions or billions. These are not rounding errors.

They're round-globe-sized errors.

One of the amusing thoughts I've developed over the last year or two is that maybe the accountants /can/ save us. That we'll send an Asset Revaluation Notice to various Extractive Industry concerns, for a few septillion or octillion dollars.

@mastodonusercount Oh boy. Looks like it's time for another surge? XD

@Angle @natecull Tractor and combine fuel, pesticides, and nitrogen fertiliser all rely on petroleum and natural gas presently. We're extracting those at rates faster than they are accrued. By a factor of roughly 5,000,000 fold.

My accountant tells me it's a poor notion to spend at a rate of five million times income.

Contemporary accounting, finance, asset valuation, economics, and national accounts fail to consider this. It's a massive hole and distortion through the entire economy.

@Angle @natecull ... about 17% of earth's surface. Topsoil is created at the rate of about 2.5 cm/century, and is /lost/ at rates of up to 2.5 cm every 1-10 years. In the best farming basins, it's accumulated since the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. So there's a 250 cm base, and we're drawing that accumulated natural capital wealth down at a rate 10x its provisioning. That's a debt or asset depletion, whichever way you want to look at it, and a bad one. But not the worst.

🍲: dont forget to other forms of production.

FACT: thousands of years of human effort are wasted every day by people googling ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and copying and pasting it

@Angle There are many others.

Keen strongly advocates reading the history of economic though. I agree, and have been. It's proved /not/ to be what I'd thought, or was told (and again, I Studied This in School). It is absolutely /not/ what you're told by the Mont Pelerin society folk (its president, Johan Norberg, recently produced a nausea-inducing propaganda programme, "The /Real/ Adam Smith", that's typical of the genre.

I've recommended reading Smith:

https://redd.it/4cyroa

22/

@Angle A market /will/ direct you down a specific path of social behaviour with an almost irresistable force. And in doing so, you will find that you are both accruing ecological debt, by way of negative impacts, failures to provide benefits where those cannot be directly transacted and priced, /and/ a drawing down of natural capital stocks, among other perverse dynamics, *until you find yourself boxed into a fatal situation with no way out.*

What the market does need not be what you want.

19/

@Angle ... a near-complete willful ignorance of the power effects of wealth (despite this being central to Smithian and classical economics), a near-total focus on the /financial/ economy and exchanges and accumulations of asset wealth vs. true wealth, a willful ignorance of thermodynamic reality, and a self-justifying rationalisation of the system's winners and ignoring of its losers. And critically, a staggering distortion of true costs and values within pricing systems, meaning that ...

16/

@Angle You have a "borrowed" grimoire of forbidden incantations.