New Medium Essay. Not very Sci-Fi this one. But I needed to get it out of my head:
“The problem with monoculture is that when pathogens — parasites or predators — find a way to exploit one individual, they will have created a successful strategy to exploit all the others too. This is not a hypothetical intellectual curio, banana plantations worldwide are currently under siege from Fusarium oxysporum, ‘Panama Disease’.
This is why we go to the trouble of having sex…”
An Iain M Banks’ Knife Missile, coming soon to a battlefield near you!
Car of former al Qaeda number two…
“The secret R9X missile is designed to destroy individual terrorist targets without harming surrounding civilians and could potentially kill a car’s front seat passenger without harming the driver.”
These belong in fiction, but I do love IMB’s nasty, aggressive little Knife Missiles, they are a big inspiration for my ‘Torches’.
When world building for the Singularity’s Children universe, a not-too-derivative way of getting Knife Missiles into my tech tree was a top priority!
‘Modern Monetary Theory’ is a startling paradigm shift which seems to be gathering some influential followers. It’s a favorite of new radicals like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Jeremy Corbyn (who, I guess is actually an old radical, in that he is old, and also an OG-radical from the ’80s.)
See here, and here (I don’t usually link Business Insider stories, because they have always felt a bit ‘click-baity’, but the bullets here are pretty succinct)
Sounds like with the money taps on full power, wealth will be continuously evaporating and only those with the most IQ at their disposal (mostly synthetic) will be able to continuously resupply. I suppose if with UBI we have a floor that stops the poor falling too low, then this would be a seething, volatile, boiling layer of potential breakouts making end-game runs to off-planet style mega-wealth…
I like terrestrial real estate, as a long-term investment; the concept of land ownership goes further back than money, 6K BC vs 600 BC (coins), so it might survive a deeper peeling back of social niceties post-catastrophic collapse. I also see the economy needing stable reserves of value other than Bitcoin to regulate the volatility of all that cash perpetually transpiring up, and sublimating off, the Magic Money Tree.
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