Hello, It's Me, the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace.


Last Friday's fiasco with Rogers network sure caused a ruckus for the cashless society.  Merchants posted makeshift cardboard signs on their front doors warning customers they better have a valid credit card or cash or else.

The plebs weren't able to hit the ATM to get a few bucks for the weekend. Not what the immediate gratification crowd wanted to hear.

Everywhere it was the slap, slap, slap of the flat-footed from Rogers to the banks to the purveyors of all we need and yearn for to - our political caste. Through the rumble of blame dodging and the smokescreen of "no one saw it coming" emerged the vague outline of the no longer invisible hand of the marketplace and the now familiar sound of shareholder value clashing against resilience.

As I read all the sincere apologies and promises, one name came to mind - Donald J. Kessler. He was the NASA geek who first warned of the mathematical certainty of the destruction of most if not all of our satellite networks.

It's not something that could go wrong but something that, unless we do something very expensive and inconvenient about it, will go wrong as a mathematical certainty. NASA scientist Don Kessler got to thinking about all the junk in low-Earth orbit zinging around at 17,000 miles an hour. He wondered what happens when, eventually, that junk begins to impact other orbiting stuff like satellites. Even a small piece of junk is all it takes for a big satellite to explode into thousands of new bits of orbiting shrapnel just waiting to turn other spacecraft into ever more clouds of orbiting shrapnel. Eventually there'll be nothing left functioning in space and that orbital band will become unusable for, well, generations.

You know that cellphone? Nah, ain't going to work. Neither will your computer or your cable TV. Ditto for your and everyone else's GPS and that includes the military and every airline. Your ATM? Forget about it. And the transportation and distribution networks that keep food on your local store shelves, they'll go down too. If we're lucky our authorities will be able to keep some of our utilities functioning at some level, at least for a while. Then we may have just weeks to figure out how to again live as we did in the 50s.




Comments

  1. Northern PoVJuly 12, 2022 at 7:48 AM

    Don't worry, Mound. Global-heating and general eco-collapse will happen before the space lanes become a roller derby.

    Oh, about that invisible hand?
    It killed off TMX! (Until Dr. Franken-Trudeau bought it back from the grave.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. TroyJuly 12, 2022 at 2:35 PM

    China's apparently the only nation bothering about this as well. Every other nation? "Not my problem! You're on your own!" Perhaps there's some belief that the "free market" will somehow do something about all this even though up to this point, there's been no attempts.
    Maybe there's money being changed hands right about now. Meetings. Discussions. But otherwise, it's just been China yeeting and dredging other satellites so they're no longer threats.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Up in Smoke. 300 Sq. Mi. of Amazon Rainforest Lost Every Day.

Image
  The Amazon rainforest is disappearing at what should be an alarming rate. 312 sq. mi. or 808 sq. kms. every day. Over the past 30 years humans have destroyed a patch of the Amazon equal in area to the states of Texas and New Mexico . The Amazon – historically a great carbon absorber, since trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen – now releases more carbon than it stores, which adds to, rather helps to reduce, our global climate crisis. Deforestation rates decreased slightly from 2004 to 2012. But since then, they’re back on the rise, especially in the past couple of years, since Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil. In 2018, as Bolsonaro campaigned as a patriotic man of the people, scientists predicted that once the Amazon lost more than 25% of its tree cover, it would become a drier ecosystem, all because deforestation changes weather patterns (due to how trees respire), which in turn reduces rainfall. Furthermore, as the forest becomes fragmented, areas surrounded...
Read more

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr...
Read more

Who Asks "Why?"

Every time there's a conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, all we hear is 'why?'  Why, as in, whose fault is this? It's easier to affix blame if you can truncate the event. Pick a convenient start date, something recent. In this case we'll make it either the Israeli eviction of Arabs from Jerusalem or the scuffle that took place outside the mosque in response. If those don't work, let's go for Hamas launching unguided rockets into Israel. That's even better because it tags Hamas with the blame. The nice thing about this approach is you can just keep using it. It goes on and on, just as it has for the past half-century since the '67 war. You can even date this whole mess to the beginning of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Israelis are said to have called these periodic wars, "mowing the lawn." The idea is that, every now and then, you have to take these Arabs to the woodshed. And then you keep your powder dry unt...
Read more