I recently rewatched the movie Pitch Black and it's a nice movie for a lot of reasons but one important detail is that a crisis is created by circumstances rooted in planetary patterns of movement and physics and this crisis is exacerbated by human failure to account for this objective contextual reality.
The plot of the movie involves a ship crash landing on an unknown planet with two suns. The few crash surivors find remnants of a previous settlement and the buldings have no lights.
The character who determines the buildings have no lights remarks that there are no lights because there is no darkness. They have black-out shades on windows to artificially create darkness and no means to artificially create light.
Furthermore, everything is solar powered, so there is essentially no means to light the buildings once the darkness comes.
When darkness does come, it comes from an eclipse -- a large planet blocking out the rays of the suns -- rather than a diurnal phase of turning away from a single sun. It is expected to be an extended darkness and it causes a local species that is injured by light to come out of their underground nests.
Most of the time, counting on solar power and continual light 24/7 works just fine and even is essential to making day-to-day life work as a settlement. When the exception occurs and darkness comes, the failure to provide any coping mechanism for that event is disastrous, killing everyone in the settlement and -- 22 years later -- also killing most of the survivors of the crashed space ship in the movie.
There are any survivors at all in the movie in part because they have clues from the remains of the settlement as to what is coming. There are so few in part because Johns underestimates the threat respesented by the eclipse and the local fauna whose life cycle is influenced by local patterns and places too much ephasis on human factors in a way that is downright stupid.
If Riddick were the big threat, well, he could have been chained back up instead of delaying the retrieval of the power cells until it was effectively too late.
In the world today, too much decision-making looks like the decision-making of the character Johns, a junkie with no ethics willing to wound a child and drag their body behind the group to try to survive now that his previous error has put all their lives in imminent danger.
One of the big issues in Haiti today is the frequent tropical storms, including but not limited to hurricanes, which damage housing. Rather than focus on building housing that can withstand the storms, aid organizations act like Johns and pretend that the entrenched poverty and other issues are due to human failure -- and in some sense it is, but mostly due to humans failing to adequately account for the local weather.
It's especially galling to me because unlike in the movie Pitch Black, this isn't a surprise being sprung on us. We know this is coming year in and year out and we persist in underestimating the impact of local weather and blaming, I'm not sure, laziness of the locals (instead of blatant incompetence of the "educated" people at aid organizations coming in from elsewhere to "help" the "stupid" locals)?
I find industry fascinating because industrial development involves a lot of dealing with the real world for lack of a better expression. You have to build a port where water meets land, preferably in a place with a natural port that takes relatively little to improve for human use. You build a mine and mining operations where the ores are located. Etc.
Commercial development is a lot more neurotic because there is a significant social component to trying to develop commercial products and trying to figure out how to sell them to a large enough number of people to turn a profit and a lot of people in commericial development are big on trying to manipulate people rather than deal with underlying reality.
If you have an undervalued product and you add some of that social expertise, you can make big bucks. If the value isn't there to begin with and you overemphasize that "used car salesman" schmoozer type aspect of the business, you are veering into con artist territory.
You can't really do that in industry. As they say: The king's stamp doesn't make the gold good.
No amount of schmoozing will convince people to buy "gold" that's not really gold if they need it for industrial uses, like developing electronic parts. That shit ONLY works if you are trying to tell people bullshit like "It's an environmentally responsible fashion statement to wear faux gold." when, you know, if you really care about the environment you can just NOT wear jewelry at all.
You can analyze it to death and come up with explanations for why people in aid organizations who come in from elsewhere just keep building housing for the "poor, unfortunate" Haitians that keeps getting knocked down by the weather events any idiot on the planet should KNOW are coming AGAIN, just like LAST YEAR, but this kind of crap has gone on so long our entire planet is in distress.
We have climate change. We have chronic, intractable poverty and the many social ills that go with it in far too many places. We are breeding antibiotic-resistant infections in places like Haiti by actively fucking them over with our obviously failed policies that we nonetheless persist in following and then EXPORTING those infections to other countries and we are ALSO running into antibiotic shortages and inability to effectively develop new antibiotics.
These are human-caused issues largely rooted in the human species acting like Johns and acting like "reality" is not important and playing some blame-game where the victims of our failed polices are presumed to be -- again, I'm not sure -- lazy or something.
I'm just going to call this post Pitch Black because the only other title idea I can come up with is about how humans are clearly insane and I doubt that will go over well with ANYONE. And hit publish.
The plot of the movie involves a ship crash landing on an unknown planet with two suns. The few crash surivors find remnants of a previous settlement and the buldings have no lights.
The character who determines the buildings have no lights remarks that there are no lights because there is no darkness. They have black-out shades on windows to artificially create darkness and no means to artificially create light.
Furthermore, everything is solar powered, so there is essentially no means to light the buildings once the darkness comes.
When darkness does come, it comes from an eclipse -- a large planet blocking out the rays of the suns -- rather than a diurnal phase of turning away from a single sun. It is expected to be an extended darkness and it causes a local species that is injured by light to come out of their underground nests.
Most of the time, counting on solar power and continual light 24/7 works just fine and even is essential to making day-to-day life work as a settlement. When the exception occurs and darkness comes, the failure to provide any coping mechanism for that event is disastrous, killing everyone in the settlement and -- 22 years later -- also killing most of the survivors of the crashed space ship in the movie.
There are any survivors at all in the movie in part because they have clues from the remains of the settlement as to what is coming. There are so few in part because Johns underestimates the threat respesented by the eclipse and the local fauna whose life cycle is influenced by local patterns and places too much ephasis on human factors in a way that is downright stupid.
If Riddick were the big threat, well, he could have been chained back up instead of delaying the retrieval of the power cells until it was effectively too late.
In the world today, too much decision-making looks like the decision-making of the character Johns, a junkie with no ethics willing to wound a child and drag their body behind the group to try to survive now that his previous error has put all their lives in imminent danger.
One of the big issues in Haiti today is the frequent tropical storms, including but not limited to hurricanes, which damage housing. Rather than focus on building housing that can withstand the storms, aid organizations act like Johns and pretend that the entrenched poverty and other issues are due to human failure -- and in some sense it is, but mostly due to humans failing to adequately account for the local weather.
It's especially galling to me because unlike in the movie Pitch Black, this isn't a surprise being sprung on us. We know this is coming year in and year out and we persist in underestimating the impact of local weather and blaming, I'm not sure, laziness of the locals (instead of blatant incompetence of the "educated" people at aid organizations coming in from elsewhere to "help" the "stupid" locals)?
I find industry fascinating because industrial development involves a lot of dealing with the real world for lack of a better expression. You have to build a port where water meets land, preferably in a place with a natural port that takes relatively little to improve for human use. You build a mine and mining operations where the ores are located. Etc.
Commercial development is a lot more neurotic because there is a significant social component to trying to develop commercial products and trying to figure out how to sell them to a large enough number of people to turn a profit and a lot of people in commericial development are big on trying to manipulate people rather than deal with underlying reality.
If you have an undervalued product and you add some of that social expertise, you can make big bucks. If the value isn't there to begin with and you overemphasize that "used car salesman" schmoozer type aspect of the business, you are veering into con artist territory.
You can't really do that in industry. As they say: The king's stamp doesn't make the gold good.
No amount of schmoozing will convince people to buy "gold" that's not really gold if they need it for industrial uses, like developing electronic parts. That shit ONLY works if you are trying to tell people bullshit like "It's an environmentally responsible fashion statement to wear faux gold." when, you know, if you really care about the environment you can just NOT wear jewelry at all.
You can analyze it to death and come up with explanations for why people in aid organizations who come in from elsewhere just keep building housing for the "poor, unfortunate" Haitians that keeps getting knocked down by the weather events any idiot on the planet should KNOW are coming AGAIN, just like LAST YEAR, but this kind of crap has gone on so long our entire planet is in distress.
We have climate change. We have chronic, intractable poverty and the many social ills that go with it in far too many places. We are breeding antibiotic-resistant infections in places like Haiti by actively fucking them over with our obviously failed policies that we nonetheless persist in following and then EXPORTING those infections to other countries and we are ALSO running into antibiotic shortages and inability to effectively develop new antibiotics.
These are human-caused issues largely rooted in the human species acting like Johns and acting like "reality" is not important and playing some blame-game where the victims of our failed polices are presumed to be -- again, I'm not sure -- lazy or something.
I'm just going to call this post Pitch Black because the only other title idea I can come up with is about how humans are clearly insane and I doubt that will go over well with ANYONE. And hit publish.