Rufus T. Firefly: Thank you, I thought so 🙂

Getting around to this somewhat late, but thanks for the links.
I do play (at) the harp; don’t practice enough to be more than what my teachers call intermediate, but one of our sons took a liking to it in grade school (!!) and played through HS, won a couple of awards.
He noodled around with it in college, and finally went into computer programming instead of music as a more viable career option — a LOT of my programmer cohort in college were also musicians.
Anyway, an enjoyable interlude among the daily crises.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/effort-to-recall-seattle-councilmember-kshama-sawant-leads-with-53-in-tuesday-night-vote-count/

Apparently, if the turnout is what’s expected, at this point she’ll need 65% of the remaining ballots to stay in office.

Now, this is Seattle, so who knows what shenanigans they’ll get up to. But on top of electing the non-whackadoodle candidate for mayor, it would be a nice sign that maybe the insanity has peaked if she’s booted.

Mike Rowe (of “Dirty Jobs” and opera fame) has given some good lectures against the perils of leaning too heavily on “safetyism.” Rather than “Safety first,” His motto is, “Safety third.” https://mikerowe.com/2020/03/walk-me-through-this-safety-third-thing/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimiko_Douglass-Ishizaka

https://kimiko-piano.com/open-goldberg

https://harpcolumn.com/forums/topic/a-bach-fugue-for-the-harp/

Talk about First World Problems when you already have perfectly good keyboard instruments including the proper goddamn Harpsichord as the Good Lord intended.

If Hokusai hadn’t had such a dirty mind he could have done worse than put his octopus to work on this problem.

So what got me off on this weird tangent? This:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz9-REG2djc

Here’s the harpist’s website:

https://parkerramsay.com/

FWIW harp doesn’t work for me here. Also bit suspicious of folks with surnames for given names.

It’s a pretty scary and troubling game to think of all the amazing inventions, ideas, etc. that would never be allowed to develop in our current times for all kinds of reasons. And that is only the past what is not coming to fruition because of safetyism or the inventor is a white male or some other BS reason?

But we got tons of ‘experts’ so I’m sure it’ll all work out.

Yesterday I heard Jordan Peterson state something about Darwinism in conjunction with Economics that really resonated with me. It was such a unique thought that I mulled it around and twisted it into something more that he may or may not agree with, but I do think it is consistent with his original statement. Here’s what I came up with:

4 billion years ago when life began on this planet Nature had a problem. The Earth had been through drastic change in its nascent development and it was going to continue going through tremendous upheaval as it matured from infant planet through planet puberty and adolescence. All kinds of things could and would happen; ice ages, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, asteroid strikes, floods, droughts, hurricanes, typhoons… How to ensure life survives?

What approach did nature take?

High volume of differing experiments assuming a high propensity of failure.
Don’t assume you can accurately predict the future and engineer perfectly for it.
Build a system that keeps throwing mutations out there knowing that 90+% will fail.

And it worked. 99.999% of species that have ever lived on planet Earth are long gone, but the species here today and well adapted for conditions as they are today. And as conditions change that continual, random, chaotic process of high volume, non-planned production will ensure future species are well adapted for what comes next.

You’ve probably guessed where this is going.

What’s the economy going to need next week, next month, 100 years from now? Well, we can get some big brains together in a room and try to guess, or we can make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to produce as many options as possible.

What’s the climate going to be in 10 years, 100 years? Will greenhouse gases cause a temperature rise? Will an asteroid impact or volcanic eruption block out solar radiation? Will we continue on our continued climb out of the last ice age, or have we already hit the peak and are we heading toward the next? Well, we can get some big brains together in a room and try to guess, or we can make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to produce as many clever innovations as possible so we have whatever is needed to meet whatever climate change comes.

In other words, the amazing success of life on Earth, and, in the past 150,000 years or so, human life on Earth, shows that independent freedom and continual innovation are the best methods to ensure life and human life thrive in the future. If we had asked Caesar or Pharoah or the Ming Emperor or Plato or Aristotle or Confuscius or Einstein or Henry Ford or Frank Lloyd Wright or Steve Jobs or Marilyn Vos Savant to design the optimal foods, products, shelters, transportation devices, stores, restaurants… they would have been wildly wrong on many important aspects of living on planet Earth in December, 2021. But we are thriving because we don’t predict, design, build and remain stagnant.

Trying to maintain the status quo (peak oil, peak population, peak meat, peak agriculture, peak temperature…) is not only impractical, it’s a death sentence.

Central planning kills.

(this has been added in an attempt to avoid capture by the rogue spam filter)

That’s incredible!

(And clever screen name!)

It’s near Portland, Maine.