Oh hello.

Rather than posting up my musings on places like facebook, I’ve decided to chop it back a gear and go for a blog instead. So now, instead of having my ideas rammed down your throat, its up to you to come and have a look at my site and see for yourself what I am doing.

This blog is going to be somewhat political in nature. Sorry. Political and progressive. But hopefully not too anti-anything. Yes, I think the system is all fucked up, but no, crying about it I find doesn’t help. Talking about it and spreading information on the other hand DOES help. Thats what this is all about.

So, to back the bus up, why the fuck should a very well off person like me who has a good job, in a good industry (ie one not hell bent on raping the third world, providing devious monetary instruments that appear more toxic than Chernobyl, selling arms to anyone with the cash to pay for them. No, I’m in Technical consultancy and software design, for the most part I design and keep mobile phone networks running. How boring.) Sorry, back to the point here. Why should I be getting concerned about the state of our world when I have it pretty good?

Think of the world as a giant petri dish. The agar are the resources, we’re the bacteria and the clock is wound all the way back to zero. What is the process that the world will follow here, and as importantly, what studies have been done to support the theory we are going to put forwards.

To start with, if we consider what happens in a bacterial system (ie, a real Petri dish and the bacteria are real bacteria, not humans) the graph below gives you the general picture.

In the growth phase, the bacteria are not faced with constraints, there is no major waste problem, resources are plentiful, and the conditions are such that the system will keep expanding. Once one of either of the two main constraints is reached – waste (which is toxic to growth) or resource depletion (without which growth cannot continue) then this becomes a limit to the system’s ability to continue to grow. Initially, this only has a small effect, but over time and the continual production of waste and the continual depletion or resources, the growth model first balances itself out, and then the cycle goes into reverse.

So, back to the earth shaped Petri dish, and draw the similarities, and the differences. The similarities are pretty obvious. Waste and resources, thats pretty obvious. The big difference however is that bacteria are not capable of the rational thought process that can:

A) Recognise that there is a problem

B) Start to change things in a way that adequately deals with that problem

Humans are pretty good at this sort of thing. As well as opposable thumbs, we have a fairly clever thought process.

But, just to balance things out a bit, we will add in some other nasties like races, religions and ideologies. Bacteria dont have to deal with any of that stuff. Each one of those 3 words has the potential to change our system in a very short space of time. With waste and resource depletion, we’ve got a fairly clear idea of how bad the problem is (although we’re not really doing that much about it…), with races, religions and ideologies however, problems can appear more or less instantly, and they can take the entire system down with them.

Next, disease. Again, something that can appear out of nowhere and seriously wreck things for everyone, depending on how bad it is.

And finally, to round out the picture, the final piece of the puzzle – greed. Or to put it in a politically correct way – inequality. We’ve gone and globalised the world, mulitnational corporations, the internet, business etc, and now the poor countries have got a pretty good window on how the wealthy countries live, sometimes at the expense of the resources of those poor countries, and they are pretty pissed off about it. Pissed, but powerless. For now.

So, with a swag bag of problems all laid out, we’ll turn our attention to possible solutions.

Thats what this blog is all about. I’m interested in solutions to problems. Whatever and where those solutions may be.