Intelligent Decline

Nature is

2010-11-14T18:51:00.000-08:00

Nature is not your friend. We need nature. We depend upon it for much of our survival. But nature wants to kill us and turn us into something else. Probably random atoms. Nature will win. But until then we have each other. we will hold off the dark of entropy and in so doing we will strive to be less constrained and so less dependent on nature. We must learn from our enemy but we must always strive for one more day of victory.

2010-10-27T17:12:00.000-07:00

We must establish a national Living Wage that's tied to the real cost of living. Too many families are falling behind in the light of rising costs of basic needs like health care, food, housing and transporation.

Insofar as the idea of a living wage depends on knowing what the real costs are for real people, any such system would be subject to error as it is generally more difficult to measure the real costs facing people, than it is to know their income. The idea that immediately lept into my head was that this could be mitigated by the provision of a packaged living wage lifestyle.

But on the other hand credit/debit/etc payments might be collecting very good information on what people are spending their money on, with specific regional granularity. Yikes, it starts to feel a little big brother.

A little related news

2010-07-02T21:48:00.000-07:00

Disease and intelligence: Mens sana in corpore sano: "
Parasites and pathogens may explain why people in some parts of the world are cleverer than those in others
HUMAN intelligence is puzzling. It is higher, on average, in some places than in others. And it seems to have been rising in recent decades. Why these two things should be true is controversial. This week, though, a group of researchers at the University of New Mexico propose the same explanation for both: the effect of infectious disease.

Media Comments

2010-07-01T22:41:00.000-07:00

Perhaps this might be my home for media commentary. Focusing mostly on the Idiot Box of course.

I suppose related fandoms might come into it too.

Watching HIMYM: Girls vs Suits

2010-07-01T22:35:00.001-07:00

I want to see NPH and James Marsters together in something.

Maybe slash? ;)

Misc Intelligent Decline Links

2010-06-21T14:28:00.000-07:00

Intelligent Decline

2010-06-16T21:34:00.000-07:00

I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with this. But the phrase caught my ear and imagination with its concise summary of a possibly post evolutionary effect of civilization. IE civilization leads to a decline in the quality of the genetic pool in so far as selective pressures are removed, mitigated, cured, treated, or otherwise have their impact reduced. Thus the rise of intelligence/civilization eventually leads (inevitably?) to it's own decline.