In my last post I mentioned the idea of a energy backed currency. This in an interesting meme that I think deserves more attention, especially given the current global financial climate.
I saw a news article today on Zimbabwe’s introduction of a $50-billion note, which is currently enough to buy about two loaves of bread. This hyper-inflation is the inevitable end result of any fiat currency. With the US pumping trillions of new dollars into existence, we can be sure that the long term result will be high inflation.
For a time, the dollar was backed by the gold standard. The dollar had an intrinsic value because it was guaranteed to be exchangeable at any time for a fixed amount of gold. This was abolished in 1971 as they had far too little gold to back the money in circulation. With nothing to constrain growth to match physical reality, things have since spiraled out of control.
Eventually, we will need to return to a more sane system of currency, I don’t think the gold standard is the best choice. Gold is valuable because it is scarce, shiny, and durable. But it is a fairly arbitrary choice with which to back a currency.
Energy strikes me as something far more fundamental. Energy literally powers our economy and life itself. The immense amounts of energy that have been released from fossil fuels have driven our population, productivity, technology, and luxuries. Energy grows our food, transports goods, powers our cars, our computations, communications. Everything we do, need, and love can be reduced to energy. It has an essential value. Equating money directly to energy seems natural.
Money, after all, is but a symbolic token to exchange work of one type for another. When you buy an apple, you are not paying for the apple itself. You are paying for all the energy that went into growing, picking, and transporting that apple to you, so that you didn’t have to do it yourself.
Money would be directly exchangeable with the reserve for a specific amount of energy in some standard form — for example kilowatt-hours or mega-joules. Thus the amount of money in circulation would directly equate to the energy production available. The growth of the economy would be constrained by the growth of energy production. Since energy is so fundamental to the economy, this ensures the economy stays aligned with reality. If a wind farm or coal plant is constructed, this energy can now be exchanged with the reserve, enabling the circulation of more currency.
The government would set official conversion rates for different forms of energy — the energy from a coal-fired plant would convert at a rate first calibrated to the physical output, then adjusted for the depletion rate of the non-renewable resource, as well as any added pollution taxes on the conversion.
An energy backed currency could have unintended side-effects difficult to anticipate. This might help stabilize prices of things like oil, as the price would better reflect the EROEI. It could positively influence the generation of renewable energy, or it could trigger a gold-rush mentality to produce as much dirty energy as possible. It could force us all to live within our means.
There is a great battle afoot, both fueled by the same exponential expansion and growth of human population and development. The expansion and consumption is unsustainable. We’ve already mined the best ores, drained the easiest oil reserves, burned the best coal, farmed the richest soils, and fished the most fecund stocks to the brink of extinction. To continue extracting resources requires continually greater energy expenditure.
It is estimated that the human population currently grows by more than 70 million people each year. That’s like adding more than the population of the United Kingdom to the planet each year. All those extra mouths to feed, all those extra cars and homes and consumer goods to produce. Burn, baby, burn.
At the same time technology marches forth at a blistering pace, largely because of population growth. With 70 million plus people each year there are correspondingly more universities and research labs and engineers and scientists. There is more demand for high technology, greater societal complexity, and better scales of economy.
Technology is a positive feedback loop and the writing is on the wall — if these trends continue we are heading for a technological singularity. The rapture of the nerds.
The question is, will this great experiment collapse before some form of techno-magic can save the day?
This world is a very complex system. Too complex for our puny little monkey-brains to understand. We just don’t know how it is going to play out, but we can project many plausible scenarios. As a lurking member of the lifeboat foundation, I’ve been exposed to a lot of ideas — both scenarios for doom and potential solutions.
Scenario 1: The fast-crash / die-off
This is the classic doomer scenario. Our civilization is far more specialized and fragile than we think. Most of us in the modern world have no useful skills outside the context of modern civilization. We are far overextended in population and sustaining that population requires massive amounts of energy. We are nearing peak-everything, but notably peak-oil, and when demand outstrips supply, food production and distribution will plummet. Economies driven by constant growth and energy will collapse. When the power goes out and the grocery store shelves are empty, the urban centers will plunge into chaos. Billions will die of starvation and fighting over table scraps. There are many that suspect that oil production has already peaked and that production will decline from here on out. A fast-crash will be most likely if development of alternative energy infrastructure comes late to do any good, or a combination of financial collapse, numerous wars, a pandemic, and peak oil clobber us all at once.
Scenario 2: The long emergency
In a nutshell, we avoid much of the chaos of a fast and sudden collapse, but instead enter a massive global depression that never ends (at least in our lifetimes). Globalization will end as nations will adopt protectionist stances, and wars over dwindling resource stocks will become commonplace. Population growth stalls and starts to contract. Civilization winds down and scales far back from where it is today. We live much simpler, local lives. We still have a lot of slack in the system to avoid collapse. I think that the average first world citizen can slash their resource consumption in half without any threat to their survival. Just eating less meat would have a major effect on energy consumption (meat production uses far more energy than crop production). A great deal of energy is used in luxury, and we can do just fine without.
Scenario 3: The Turn-around
After a lengthy decade-long depression, we manage to turn things around with creative solutions in social, political, and technology systems. We manage to become far more efficient and less resource intensive as a species, but maintain a high living standard and high social complexity. We will shift from a fiat money system to currencies backed by energy production. Money will directly equate to Kilo-joules, instead of promises.
Scenario 4: The Status Quo
Bah, peak-oil is a myth. Resources will last us hundreds or thousands of years. We can easily support a 12 billion population, everything is going to be fine! Don’t be so paranoid.
What to do?
How one acts today depends greatly on what you believe is the most likely scenario. If you’re into the status quo, then meh, whatever man.
If you are certain we are in for the fast-crash, then you need to either (a) live it up wild now, while you still can. Go for broke — jet set around the world, take on a huge debt and party, because soon the party will be over! or (b) Move to the country and start off-grid subsistence farming or join a survivalist commune. Stock up on guns and ammo and toilet paper, and hunker down.
If you think the long emergency is inevitable, then you need to scale down your lifestyle, get out of debt, and make sure you’ll have secure employment and useful skills, and buy a bicycle.
Unlike most doomers, I still have some hope in the markets and technology to deliver some clever solutions to our energy problems. The markets and technology can move very quickly when given the right motivation. The best way to generate that motivation now is to raise awareness of these problems and to adjust our lifestyles, which will shift market pressures.
A lot of the discussion in the lifeboat foundation is about what we can do to turn a fast-crash into a long emergency, or a long emergency into a turn-around. So what proactive steps can realistically be taken to turn things around? Well, if you are an average citizen, there isn’t much you can do besides lifestyle changes, education, and political pressure. But there is power in numbers, so spread the word and act. If you are wealthy, you can invest in solutions to the world’s problems — always a good investment. If you are a clever engineer, you can invest your brainpower directly into working on solutions.
Should I harvest clock-cycles or grain? Should I help to engineer a turn-around, or abandon hope and flee into the country to build my doomstead? For now, I think I shall stay the optimist, because frankly, life is more pleasant when optimistic.
Further Reading
Chris Martenson: The Crash Course
This was an entertaining week.
On Wednesday we went and saw Keith Barry (mentalist/hypnotist/magician) at the Bulmers Comedy Festival. A few months ago, I watched this TED talk and quite enjoyed it. Noticing the Dublin accent, I had a quick look online and found the tickets for the upcoming show.
Last night we went to an opener for the Dublin Fringe Festival. We saw an amazing show by La Clique that was a fantastic burlesque cabaret circus act. Super fun. Catch their act if you can.
At work, It’s been attack of the Canadians, as two more canucks, (Morgan and Bryce) have made the leap across the pond to join my team.
On the home front, my XBox got the infamous red ring of death and is out for repairs. Booo. I’m reading a book of short stories by Cory Doctorow. I particularly enjoyed When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth. I am eagerly awaiting an Amazon delivery of two new novels by two of my favorite authors; Neil Stephenson’s Anathem and Greg Egan’s latest novel Incandescence.
Darse pointed me to Chris Martensen’s Crash Course. It’s an amazingly lucid short web-based course on the flustercluck that is the global economic system. I highly recommend getting educated. It predicts a very bumpy ride in the near future. Interestingly, it draws a lot from exponential-growth curves that are hitting us in may areas. The same reasoning is applied by Ray Kurzweil’s predictions for technological singularity. It will be interesting to see how these exponential positive and negative forces will play out. Will exponential technological gains be able to overcome exponential inflation and resource consumption? We live in interesting times.
Oh, and CRON-o-Meter 0.9.4 is out. It is just another maintenance release with some bug fixes.
I’ve been flailing about the internet with excessive ADD trying to decide what to learn next. These are really exciting times to be a software developer / computer scientist. There are so many development fads, languages, frameworks, and methodologies to keep up with. There are hundreds of high quality dev-bloggers to read, so many fascinating concepts to digest. Burp.
It’s an industry where you really have to keep practicing and learning to stay even remotely relevant. To learn a new language or framework is a large investment in time and mental energy, and the industry is quite hard to predict. What looks like a promising and popular new language one day can evaporate into yesterday’s fad.
What to learn? What to study? What to build? Python? ECMAScript? Scala? Ruby? Objective-C? Erlang?
Two interesting trends is that a lot of modern languages all seem to be evolving towards sharing a lot of common features. For instance, I haven’t done any serious amount of functional programming since I was in university. A lot of languages are now mixing in functional programming features. Even Java will be adding closures.
Functional programming is of particular relevance to the second interesting trend that is going on. The microchip industry has reached a practical limit and we are no longer seeing huge leaps in clock-speeds. Instead we are seeing more and more cores packed into each chip. The trend for the next while will be more and more cores instead of faster speeds. What this means is that as a programmer, you can’t rely on your single-CPU program to get faster on newer machines. But you will be able to speed things up if you can write your program to divide it’s work up over many cores in parallel. Functional programs lend themselves to natural parallel execution.
It’s widely considered very difficult to write multi-threaded programs. I don’t disagree, however, I’ve always enjoyed it. I get a big kick out of tackling multithreaded programming issues and squeezing out that parallel performance. A lot of researchers are struggling to design a new language that will make it easier to write parallel programs in our multi-cored future.
So I’m still not sure what I want to really dive into. The other problem is that I need a good project. Without a significant problem to solve, I can’t really choose a good language to learn, and I can’t truly learn it without using it to solve a non-trivial problem. Now if only I had a small, but cool {radio-astronomy|bioinformatics|cognitive science} project to solve….
We’re heading to Las Vegas later this week. There’s a lot happening there over the 4th of July weekend. The World Series of Poker main event will be on at the time, but for me, more importantly the Man VS Machine Poker Championship will be happening at the same time. A lot of folks I know from the UofA will be there. Several of my coworker/friends from Dublin are also going to be there. It promises to be an exciting trip. After that we are heading up to Edmonton for a summer visit, which will also be action packed with a wedding, visiting family and friends, and the like.
Well, I have to say, investing in an Apple Time Capsule was a smart move. I finally got a new Disk and restoring from the Time Capsule was an effortless and flawless experience. The fact that it constantly keeps you backed up over wireless means that you never have to remember to plug in a drive, and so I lost nothing after the crash. I’ve been pretty lucky with disks so far. I’ve been a heavy computer user for over 15 years and this was the first time I’ve ever had a disk crash.
Now if only I could get a Time Capsule for my brain…
Definitely no coding going on this weekend. My MacBook Pro’s hard disk decided to go belly up on Thursday. I’m very glad now I invested in a Time Capsule, as I should be almost perfectly backed up.
I got a big fat new development machine at work for doing server development. It has 8 cores and 16 gigabytes of RAM. It’s a beast.
It needs a 64-bit OS, so I decided to give Vista a whirl to see what all the fuss is about. What a mistake. I lasted two days. I couldn’t even get our server software to run without crapping all over itself. An endless chain of permissions issues. At least now I understand why there’s been so much ill-will over Vista.
The linux nerds at the office hooked me up with an Ubuntu Linux 8.04 install and I have been playing with that for the past two days. WOW. So. Much. Better. I really missed the command line and my virtual desktops.
Of course, I’m not much better off because our code base has not been compiled in GCC for quite a while, and many things don’t build as of yet. It’s going to take some elbow grease to get it running. My plan is to get it compiling error free again, and see if I can get it going under Eclipse CDT.
If that doesn’t fly, I am digging ubuntu so much I think I will just have to do development using virtualization environments running Windows XP, as a last resort.
Apologies for my blogging absence. Working and socializing have devoured my time of late, leaving little for anything but passive modes of internet usage. I wish I could just poop out mountains of text each day. It was one of the motivations to start blogging in the first place. I need a way to train myself in the discipline of regular serialization of thoughts.
I admire those who seem to be able to effortlessly spew forth massive daily discourse, fully coherent as if it simply poured out of them in one crystalline piece. My three hindrances are
- Discipline. It’s so much easier to just flip on the XBox and play some Call of Duty 4….
- Organization. My mind is a fuzzy nebulous place. Writing requires a linear structure. It’s like learning to paint perspective, mapping three-dimensions onto two.
- Originality. I find it hard to write about something if I know that someone, somewhere, has already said it, and said it better. I may as well just link to them and say ‘what he said’.
Nevertheless, tonight I find myself reclined on the couch, clacking away at this post. I guess I’ll hit ‘publish’ and then follow it up with some random ‘here’s what’s happening lately in my life’ kind of posts.
I’ve spent a little more time this weekend learning Objective-C and Cocoa programming for the iPhone. It looks like sqlite3 is the format of choice for structured data storage on the iPhone, so I’ve been working on stuffing the USDA sr20 food dataset into an sqlite3 format. Using Apple’s examples, I’ve figured out how to do basic lists and navigation bars. So far I have a simple app that loads the food names and displays them in a single scrollable list.
Now that I’ve figured out the basic mechanics, comes the hard work — design! I can’t just do a straight port of CoM to the iPhone — it just won’t fit! And using only fingers to navigate and enter data adds a further challenge. I’ve got to come up with the core functions and design each screen carefully. It also doesn’t make sense to track the complete set of nutrients since there’s not much screen space to display it all anyways.
