crtified

Given that our knowing-and-seeing industry is also the thing which enabled and then desperately shepherded humanity out-of every IT deficiency that has ever existed, our inside perspective is still highly fallible too.

Is not the average life of a non-PhD holder an equally-sustained and long amount of time spent on the intractable problem of reaching whatever incredibly complex state-of-humanity they embody?

So much of human political discourse of late is dedicated to ring-fencing off a particular demographic and presenting them as either The Solution or The Problem.

It may be that some types of academic ('of the Academy') learning predispose their adherents to see that distinct failure pattern, behind all the noise. I hope so.

There might be more awareness if, rather than the mainstream [people and news] narrative of "Oh no, some giant event is building and about to happen!", these financial schemes and their socialised downfalls were primarily, rightly labelled as simply the latest in a clearly repeating pattern of behaviour that we as a species are enabling.

I'm finding it almost hard to feel much angst about this cycle, not due to a lack of compassion, but because of the learned reality that if I spend all my energy on today's Big Finance misadventure, well it seems there'll be another tomorrow anyway...

The libertarian ideals seem to overlook humanity's very strong preference that money be freer to Come In, than to Go Out.

Individual people claiming to have a superior Big Picture for humanity is basically what big politicians are. We assign them, then give them 3-4 years to remake the world in their vision.

And once we have a few dozen of them in a room together, it's the recipe for endless passionate arguments about exactly what Truth is, and what Value is, and what Goodness is, about anything and everything.

One of the biggest challenges is that rules are set by experience, but every new rule is also the start of a new story we've never read (called 'The Future'). And humanity changes pretty fast!

I am not asserting that it applies in the above instance, but...

In broader medicine, one basis that can lead to the above sort of dynamic is compassionate protocol ("we are losing a little money on this deal, but you are in-need and we're here to help everyone"), as opposed to greed protocol ("we medicos are here for the big insurance money, and only charge the True Low Cost when forced").

And on balance, the nature of the people who choose the occupation of medicine tends towards the former.

...while, generally, being thoroughly fleeced by whichever set of wolves (who do understand monetary systems very well indeed) gets wind of the situation and manages to snag the best seats at the feeding trough filled with naive money.

Reviewers have limited data with which to rate longer-term reliability. Nobody can blame them for not doing-the-impossible.

The actual friction point is the subtle divergence of expectations. "User review" is a psychologically powerful concept - an extension of the "my friend/neighbour told me this" trust elevation.

But paradoxically, in today's popular society the reach of any given user review is (quasi) proportional to the amount of commercial involvement driving the exposure. Providing the platform, its userbase, and incentivising the content creator by metric of popularity.

So, now we have entire (minor) demographics in the business of finding new things to review. Class-leading tool of amazing reliability already exists for 10 years and is the benchmark for enduring quality in the field? That is wonderful, but the career reviewer still needs to review 10 new good-bad-and-ugly ones each year. Several will get a positive overall verdict from the reviewer, and some followers who make their purchase choices based upon the latest opinion they've heard from a person-of-respect will go out and buy those ones.

A reviewer who ended every new review for several years with "..but overall, the industry consensus of the Old Trusty 2000 is still the wisest holistic choice" would not be terribly compatible with the evolved world of User Reviews that we have.

Reading suggests that much of the coal-plant building in China of late is purposed as backup-only, and that their vast expansion of clean energy production overall is swallowing almost all power demand in that country. Accordingly, if you look at the figures we have, China's emissions are relatively stable in recent years.

According to the European Commission’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR), China and India combined (~35.5% of the human population) account for roughly 38% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Which is indeed an overshoot, albeit not of terribly epic proportions.

However, per-capita - on both a 100-year-effect and a 20-year-effect timeframe - the USA is easily the leader in emissions per person, and the USA also records the largest absolute increases ongoing.

The figures, which already take the variable potency/effect of different gas types into account, show annual per-person greenhouse gas emissions (in CO2 equivalent) of 17.3 Tonnes-per-person (USA), 11.1 Tpp (China), 5.6 Tpp (EU27), 2.2 Tpp (India) on the 100 year impact scale.

On the 20 year impact scale ("the amount 1 person releases in 1 year will trap the same amount of heat as XX tonnes of pure carbon-dioxide would"), which much better takes into account the balance of current agricultural practices etc, the USA = 21.5 Tpp, China = 15.8, EU = 6.8, India = 4.1.

The United States also recorded the largest absolute increase between 2024 and 2025 (+131.5 Mt CO2eq, or +2.2%), followed by Indonesia (+16.1 Mt CO2eq, or +1.2%).

So, any message which - when translated through the lens of practical reality - is essentially saying to the developing world "Please either tighten your belts, or be less populous" seems a very challenging expectation, if not outright-unviable by almost any other metric or ethic.

The trend is unfortunately active a lot further afield than just Europe or the USA. Similar recent spikes in political polarisation are showing up everywhere. Everywhere that there's been free social media for the past ~20 years, that is.

Whether it's Australia : Pauline Hanson, an anti-immigration nationalist widely lampooned as a walking faux-pas for the past two decades, now virtually leads the polls with her One Nation party, which has gone from about 5% support (when the current center-left government was elected mid-2025) to over 25%! today. In the space of 17 months.

New Zealand : From the globally-lauded center-left Jacinda Ardern, at home she was soon all-but-bullied out of politics by a significant and very vocal portion of NZ males angry at her shortcomings - she lives in Australia now - and NZ has since been led by a coalition of three increasingly-right-wing businessmen doing their best to "crack down" on the poorer classes to "balance the books".

Brazil : The big swing from Bolsonaro on the right to Lula on the left.

Japan : Increasingly fragmented, moving rightward and nationalist, centrist rule threatened for the first time since 1955.

Argentina : The populist president Milei, whose strategy-of-least-thought - rip off the whole bandage, right now - proudly sacrifices the hopes of a generation-or-three to gain a form of Economic Satisfaction post-haste.

That's a fair point.

To clarify my angle, I'm asserting that the effective collegiality shared by people who are successful in those areas begins far earlier in life than university or career.

The dominant factors are socioeconomic.

A shared social history, which over many years cements in place a set of common habits and bonds, is what determines a good collaborative fit within the mainstream of a given field.

That isn't an inherent skill to be 'naturally' good or bad at, as it's the holistic result of an entire social existence to that point.

Those engineers may (or not!) have been especially brilliant at collab&comms, when interacting with people very like themselves - had there been any present.

Yes, it was (and some places, sadly continues to be) the ultimate horror that people can visit upon each-other.

Suffering it, over and over and over, was what led humanity down the natural, logical path to becoming civilised and cooperative.

It's the lesson we need to learn well, if our self-appointed badge of Very Intelligent Species is to actually mean anything more than a pointless, neverending game of forming factions and battling other factions.

A small toy xylophone with each note painted a different colour works by the same principle of abstracting melody into a simple system whose mechanics are already mastered. That kind of device has given children a way to learn Happy Birthday (by simply going Red Red Blue Red Yellow Green.....) for many generations now.

The full challenge however is that "knowing how to play an instrument" in the musical context is a deeeeep, deep well, and that any musician is only as informed as their experience. Hitting-notes-in-order means you've just walked into the atrium of a potentially lifelong learning experience, no matter what the instrument.