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Every rooftop and, looking down at the town, every sidewalk too was now a morgue. The town was a morgue, and it was as hot as ever, maybe hotter. The thermometer now said 42 degrees, humidity 60 percent.
“No one is safe until all are secure” seems to be their principle here, and in that project, geotechnical expertise and lots of money are both very useful.
Nothing could be said. It was what it was: history, the nightmare from which they could not wake.
Pillars of the community. Givers to charity. When they go to the concert hall of an evening, their hearts will stir at the somber majesty of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. They will want the best for their children.
“What’s the reaction?” “Bad.” He shrugged. “Maybe Pakistan will bomb us, and we’ll retaliate, and that will start a nuclear winter. That will cool the planet quite nicely!”
So the scales are never balanced. Particularly if one nation murders another nation for three centuries, takes all its goods and then says Oh, sorry—bad idea. We’ll stop and all is well. But all is not well.”
They’re just piling on, like everyone else. Someone takes the bull by the horns, grabs the wolf by the ears, and everyone takes that opportunity to stick knives in his back.
The courts only work when some petty war criminal gets caught and everyone decides to look virtuous.”
Jurgen throws up hands. Cost of this cannot be calculated! Calculate it, Mary orders him. J. frowns, pondering big picture in his head. A quadrillion. Yes, really. A thousand trillion is not too high. Maybe five quadrillion. Dick: So just call it infinity.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. What did that mean? Could you live without hope? There was a Japanese saying he read in a book: live as if you were already dead. But what did that mean, why would that be encouraging? Was it encouraging?
Therapy taught him to give up those hopes. Hope would have to reside in something like this: hope to do some good, no matter how fucked up you are.
Edmund laughed and said, “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
There are about a hundred people walking this Earth, who if you judge from the angle of the future like you’re supposed to do, they are mass murderers. If they started to die, if a number of them were killed, then the others might get nervous and change their ways.”
The hidden quality of the nistarim is important; they are ordinary people, who emerge and act when needed to save their people, then sink back into anonymity as soon as their task is accomplished.
What is this? A sixth of humanity on one big triangular patch of land, caught under the blazing sun, cut off by a mighty range of mountains: who are these people? A democracy, a polyglot coalition—wait, can it be? And what can it be? Do we make the Chinese, who so decisively stepped onto the world stage at the start of this century, look dictatorial, monolithic, brittle, afraid? Is India now the bold new leader of the world? We think maybe so.
Roy Harrod said the discount rate was a polite expression for rapacity.
Of course suicide bombing is often effective, but this is a crude and ugly way to go about it, and uncertain. Most of us didn’t want to do it. We weren’t that crazy, and we wanted to be more effective than that. Much better to kill and disappear. Then you can do it again.
Communist organic farmers, B notes. He thinks it’s funny, M doesn’t think he should joke. Locals happy to agree to his characterization. Also these changes mean end of caste’s worst impacts, they claim. Dalits now involved, women always half of every panchayat, an old Indian law now applied for real.
Women and all castes equal, Hindu and Muslim, Sikh and Jain and Christian, all together in New India. Communist organic farmers just the tip of the iceberg.
When you lose all hope and all fear, then you become something not quite human. Whether better or worse than human I can’t say. But for an hour I was not a human being.
That a tenth of one percent of the human population owned half humanity’s wealth—that was us, yay! That half the human population alive at that moment had no assets except their own potential labor power, which was much weakened by poor health and education, that was definitely too bad. But blaming this on capitalism was wrong, we told these non-listening boring people; there would be eight billion poor people if it weren’t for capitalism!
How could it go on for so long? Where were the fucking Swiss police? Were they in on this? Was this a Swiss plot, like the Red Cross or something?
Jevons Paradox proposes that increases in efficiency in the use of a resource lead to an overall increase in the use of that resource, not a decrease.
Our current economics has not yet answered any of these questions. But why should it? Do you ask your calculator what to do with your life? No. You have to figure that out for yourself.
I am the nothing that makes everything happen. You don’t know me, you don’t understand me; and yet still, if you want justice, I will help you to find it. I am blockchain. I am encryption. I am code. Now put me to use.
One principle for bankers in perilous times was to avoid doing anything too radical and untried. And so they were all going to go down.
Power was entrenched—but that phrase caught just a hint of the situation—actually the trenches were foundations that went right to the center of the earth. They could not be changed.
Keynes thus hoped to create an international balance of trade credit which would keep countries from becoming either too poor or too wealthy.
The Bank of England had also been founded in a state of emergency, during a war; but there was always an emergency that would serve when it came to finding reasons to perpetuate and extend state power. So whatever the law said, in practice the bank/state combination did what it pleased.
Even if they saved the world to save their privilege, maybe that didn’t matter. Justice being not at this moment her first priority.
When Mary reminded them that they had quantitatively eased trillions of pounds into existence when needed to save the banks, they nodded; their job was to save the banks. To quantitatively ease trillions of pounds into existence to save the world: not their job. That would take legislation.
A start to something better. I don’t like to think of this as giving up, it’s just being realistic. We have to live, we have to give this place to the kids with the animals still alive and a chance to make a living. That’s not so much to ask.
What’s the monetary value of human civilization? Trying to answer that question proves you are a moral and practical idiot. Well, economists make such calculations all the time, but that’s their job, and they think it makes sense. In this case, better just to throw up your hands and say civilization is effectively a fiscal infinity, a human infinity.
It will be all right, Priska said. The Fründenjoch is not that hard. I don’t like the sound of that, Mary said. She knew that not that hard, when talking about the Alps, was Swiss-speak for fucking hard.
The rentier class will not help in that project. They are not interested in that project. Indeed that project will be forwarded in the face of their vigorous resistance. Over their dead bodies, some of them will say. In which case, euthanasia may be just the thing.
So: either a huge boon, a complete calamity, or a non-event. Thus the economists, faced with explaining the biggest economic event of their time. What a science!
But what else did they have? The world runs by laws and treaties, or so it sometimes seems; so one can hope; the granite of the careening world, held in gossamer nets. And if one were to argue that the world actually runs by way of guns in your face, as Mao so trenchantly pointed out, still, the guns often get aimed by way of laws and treaties. If you give up on sentences you end up in a world of gangsters and thieves and naked force, hauled into the street at night to be clubbed or shot or jailed.
So the people who fought for sentences, for the precise wording to be included in treaties, were doing the best they could think of to avoid that world of bare force and murder in the night. They were doing the best they could with what they had.
This is part of why geoengineering no longer a useful word or concept. Everything people do at scale is geoengineering. Glacier slowdown, direct air capture, soil projects like 4 per 1000, they’re all geoengineering.
Thus you see people shorting carbon coins, meaning the worse the climate does the more money they make. They’ve hedged the apocalypse.
Since money is an idea, a system based on social trust, when things go south, and trust disappears in a poof, then there simply isn’t as much money as there used to be.
The sun still rose, plants kept growing. But people lived in ideas, so despite the sun in the sky and so on, things felt crazy. It was a panic spring.
America! They are the rich person who has to accept owning just fifty million rather than infinity. They’ll be the last ones to come around.
Build your own project. You will love it as we do. There is no other world.
Have you heard of those drones developed to shoot mangrove seeds into the mud flats, thus seeding hundreds of thousands of new trees in terrain difficult of human access? Very nice, but that same drone could shoot a dart through your head as you walk out your door. So it illustrates my point, if you care to think about it. Our tools are expressions of our intentions,
No, life—what was it? So deep and important and full of feeling, so crucial, then suddenly just a blink, a mayfly moment and gone. Nothing really, in the grander scheme; and no grander scheme either.
Swiss German is such a funny language, it is sometimes hard not to smile. It’s maybe like the sound of their medieval life, chopping wood and clanging cowbells and the nasal toot of their alphorns, and maybe rocks falling off the sides of their awesome mountains.
When everyone jokes like the Swiss do about each other, when everyone in the world has their dignity, we will be all right.
