Anxiety over mankind

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While it is quite true that bad news sells more newspapers than good news, the media are not really covering the great majority of scary stories. Fukushima is a particularly nasty example. Anything that might slow down the economy is forbidden.

I've been feeling kind of crappy about humanity lately too. Last week (Just as the weather was turning bitter cold here) my slumlord of landlord turned our hot water off for two days to "fix" it. But it was never out to begin with. When he turned it back on, the water would run tepid for two minutes, then run cool.

So I go talk to my super and he tells me people were complaining to the landlord about the hot water so they called those repair guys in and had them lower the temperature and lock it in, and there was nothing he the super could do about it. That's right folks, my landlord was claiming that people were calling them when it was bitter cold outside and saying they didn't want hot water any more!

I could have filed a complaint with the city but we had a rat in our cellar once it took the city over a year to do anything about the stench, and the only reason they finally did was because it got so bad that the postal service refused to come deliver our mail any more. In theory, they're supposed to come with in a week or so.

I ended up just bribing my super $200 to turn the heat up on the water. It worked. Not as hot as it was but hot enough and I don't have to go through the entire winter with cold water or risk getting into nasties with my landlord.

This is what I feel like life is like these days though. Everyone is out for themselves. EVERYONE. I don't treat people like that, I mean I'm not a saint, but I would never force people to have cold water in the dead of winter. How scummy is that? And the super is a church going guy too! (But to be fair he seemed kind of scared for his job.)

Edit - sorry forgot to mention the reason this is relevant to this thread - 30 years ago this neighborhood was a dangerous ghetto type place, but when the landlord started messing with us we had government avenues to address it and put an end to it quickly. Right now it seems like the citizen is largely on their own without much help from the government. It's scary! Coming economic crisis or not, how can we keep on like this as it is just trending downward?

If you were a teen in 60s and 70s you would have had to worry about the draft, and Vietnam, which you dont have to worry about now. In the Fifties they were convinced that nuclear armageddon would happen any day. In the fourties they had World War Two. In the thirties they had the Great Depression. And so on..

I do the "back to the roots" emergency plan. In the cellar there is still an old stationary oven, that can be heated by gas, wood or anything that is flamable, and that is heating your room as well as a cooking station. Even when not fully using the old fruit-trees in my garden, I forbid my partner to cut them. Yes actually, tons of the fruit, simply get composted. But if a major crisis comes, I´ll be happy about every plum, apple and nut. ^^ I do a bit of gardening, right now its not much, because of me working I lack the time for more, but its sufficient for experiences about gardening. If you manage to raise two tomatoes plants in a good way, you will be able to raise more. If you manage to raise two pumpkin plants, ... Same goes for herbs, ... I live in a very rural area beside the woods, so I got myself books about eatable and usable plants. Its not only about harvesting mushrooms, but there are so much more herbs, plants, fruits and tree-seeds that can simply be gathered. If you are a noob then photographs are really useful. Same goes for books about traditional techniches for keeping food storable. Around here its called "The old female farmer book." and there are simply oldschool things explained, as conserving with garlic, oil, sugar and other stuff in glasses or creation of sauerkraut. As well as a rural planting guide, that goes for the seasons. For the garden water use, I have luckily a small tiny river (you can cross it with a bigger step ^^) behind the house and a mile from here is an mountain underground dwell.

Actually I do think, that a crisis will come, because actually our lifestyle depends on creation of food by few, while everyone else works in the production of other stuff, but due to industrialization, limited resources, and globalasation there simply is no need for everyones working craft. So we will have to go back into self-creating the stuff we need, instead of simply buying everything. But I dont see it as a "OH my god, its the end of the world!" crisis. Most of the world lives in a more simply way, and manages to stay alive.

There is mankind, - and then there is man. As a member of mankind, I want us to survive.
I don´t know about man.....
Man is that creature, who destroys nature for money, - who skin rabbits alive for their fur, - who has fun letting dogs attack blinded bears and watching birds claw each other to death.

"Man delights me not" (Will Shakespeare).

I think that statistics show that deaths by hunger and violence have been going down. Hans Rosling has some wonderful, optimistic presentations on historic trends. However, the world is also delaminating into super-rich and very poor. Democracies are clearly co-opted by big money, with fake oppositions for appearance's sake. U.S. politics used to have a left and right wing. Now the extreme right is screaming about the "socialist" far right. People regularly confuse socialism with totalitarianism, as if no democracy can regulate itself. It may be that the only planets to survive the arrival of technology have put quality education first. John Sirkis summed up his school days nicely with "We were learning what to think instead of how."

I've known about Ray Kurzweil's singularity for a long long time. It's pretty cool, and there are many who believe him. He is older and worries that he won't make it. Also there are many interesting videos of him on youtube. Here is one from four years ago... going on half a million views:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uIzS1uCOcE

I put Kurzweil's 'singularity' nonsense in the same category as Jacques Cousteau warning (in the 1960s) that the oceans would be dead by the 1980s. It's one of those seductive ideas that means there will always be people expecting it to happen, even if it only ever remains just around the corner...

Of course, I could be wrong, and my house will be stormed by killer robots hunting out thought-criminals one of these days.

or demons.

Granted it's way past the 80s and the oceans aren't dead, but they're kind of messed up.

I really don't obsess with all this stuff, I try not to, but when I actually look around and see what's going on, we seem to be on way downward trend. I know a lot of people who like some of you are pretty casual about our future.

(ah, i just reasked the same question, but what I've read so far, somehow isn't tricky enough).