[ExI] boomerang

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Stefano Vaj
Subject: Re: [ExI] boomerang

2011/12/26 spike <spike66 at att.net>:
> We think of epidemics and meteor strikes and so on, but what if a 
> catastrophe has a soft landing...in which rich people are hungry too?

>Those are very good questions...A whimper, non a bang, might be the
explanation for the decline and ultimate demise of many or most
technological planetary civilisations...This is not "pessimism". Stefano Vaj



Ja.  Baysian probability theory involves mapping all possible outcomes, even
if it requires grouping into a few categories.  It looks to me like the
world banking systems could become steadily less profitable until they cease
to function, at which time we have no good way to fund progress as we define
it.

Lewis' book Boomerang has altered my view of economics.  A few days ago I
posted about how American banks were pressured into subprime loans.  After
reading Boomerang, my view of that has been altered significantly.  What I
had failed to realized is that the US is not the only country to do weird
things with credit between about 2002 and 2008.  It appears that if
anything, the US followed banking madness, which happened earlier in
Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Spain, and other places difficult to nail down
because financial institutions are increasingly free of any individual
nation's lending laws.  It is now much easier for me to imagine Bankers
Without Borders, a global financial superstructure that loans money all over
the planet and is subject only to its own puzzling and secretive rules and
laws, with the universal truth that it is an industry which makes its living
by externalizing risk of losing other peoples' money.

It would be a hell of a note if our anti-singularity retrograde technology
nightmare is caused not by a lab-created pathogen, unfriendly AI, space
aliens, gray goo nanotech, or any of the other techno-terrors, but rather by
a massive simultaneous worldwide default on debt.

spike