across a range of areas. The cuts in mental health, physical health and
social care will affect the life quality and expectancy of many people.
They are murders but they didn't mean to do it. They're not as bad as
GPs but they're still pretty bad.
After a talk at the RSA I rediscovered a good concept: fuck the blame
game. The example given by the speaker was from the airline industry. A
senior executive said that if there was a fuck up and someone said "who
did it?" then there was something really wrong. Mistakes happen and they
need to be fixed. The lack of a blame game and a culture that values
admission of failure has produced the exceptionally low failure rates
the airline industry can be proud of.
There's also the issue of Hanlon's Razor. It was incompetency, not
malice, that drove GPs to kill old people using antipsychotics. It's the
same with the bankers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
It's the same for many people though. Lots of people fuck up out of
stupidity rather than any form of malice. Even you. The problem is when
the result is death. It's not enough to accept people's stupidity when
other people die. 1,800 people a year is a huge death rate and it should
strike fear into the public more than the fear of psycho killers off
their antipsychotic medication. Old people with dementia should fear
their doctor.
Anyway, what's important is how to stop these things happening again.
The recession will be over in 5-10 years. In 15 years there'll probably
be another boom period driven by China and India. However in 30-40 years
there will be another crisis: an energy crisis. It's around this time
that profitable reserves of oil, gas and coal will run out. It will cost
significantly more to mine these natural resources from the remaining
deposits. These forms of energy have a particular quality unavailable at
the moment through nuclear or renewables: coal and oil power stations
can very quickly increase their output to meet peak demands whereas
other types can't. usage at the moment means there are two massive peaks
in the morning and in the evening related to the 9-5 work culture. There
isn't enough battery storage yet to meet these demands.
The 4 year cycle of democracy in the UK means there's lots of short term
thinking. The European Union are taking a long view and putting money
into developing JET - the Joint European Torus - in the hope that
harnessing the power of the stars can provide safe, clean energy for
humanity. However I'm not sure that this technology can ramp up it's
output like the carbon-based power stations. From what I know the
strategy at the moment is to develop the European electrical grid so
spare power from the UK can go to France to meet demand (which works
because of the timezone thing) however energy transfer across these
large distances is inefficient.
From my conversations with climate camp protesters there's a simple yet
virtually impossible idea: change the 9-5. The standard office hours
worked by everyone in any time zone creates the problem of the peak in
energy. If people can come in to work at different times and leave at
different times the staggering effect will reduce the peak demands. It's
a simple idea that would take monumental change in society to implement
but may be totally necessary as one of many ways to save humanity from
the next major financial crisis.
It's this sort of long term thinking and willingness to make radical
change in society that's desperately need to avoid the fluctuations in
the markets that create the crises. The bankers themselves also need to
change the herd mentality that precedes every recession. It's always
caused by the bandwagon and the belief that the bubble will never burst.
Even the regulators forgot this when it came to the mortgage market. The
fundamental problem is the abstraction from true value. Speaking to
bankers they talk in terms that have no meaning to reality. They're as
mad as any psychiatric patient and a lot more dangerous.
No comments:
Post a Comment