Thinking of the “Old McDonald had a Farm” nursery rhyme Also “for want of a nail the kingdom was lost” Complex systems are a bitch to shut down. Essential services = ripples of dependence extending outwards from the most time-bound in time and social graph space.
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The question of min viable tech stack/civilizational scale required to sustain modern standards of living has interested me for a while. Follow-up new question: how much can we shrink those minima if humans can rewild ourselves a bit. Not full-on solo survivalism, just like... 5%
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Alt way to phrase that question: how can we increase max duration entire world can pause without critical systems failing or people dying? Right now it’s probably 1 minute. And that would take intense coordination and advance planning. And luck (nobody needing CPR for 1 minute)
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Problem gets easier if you segment it. A shark sleeps one half of its brain at a time. Humans sleep about a third of the planet at a time. But human *systems* with min-viable staffing never sleep. But maybe an entire city could figure out how to sleep, systems and all, 5min/week?
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When this shit is done, this might very well make for a good next Apollo mission for humanity: teaching our world how to truly sleep. On purpose. Regularly. From top to bottom. Around a minimal definition of essential achieved with maximal automation.
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Seems like a deep and important complex systems habit. The best we can do now appears to be relatively shallow regional rituals of “public holidays” and “weekends”.
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End of conversation
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Bold statement. A civilization with an implicit (exponential) growth assumption is all you've ever known. With a finite resource base, eventually growth runs out, and then collapse is inevitable for the exponential civilization. Am I to take it you're a fatalist on that front?
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Many doctors, nurses working this hour = a few cafeteria workers and janitors working today
= delivery services (laundry, supplies) working this week
etc
Wakefulness rippling outwards in time and social graph