Category: Technology

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I must be getting old

I’ve been going through my computer and deleting stuff, for a variety of reasons.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to probably do a complete rebuild of the system. In preparation for this I’ve been evaluating several factors. One of those is how much software on my machine is actually useful to me today.

There was a time when all the applications on my computer had a function and were used often. Those days are past. So I’ve been purging applications and their associated data from my system.

So far so good.

Then I got to thinking about the fact that Apple’s new silicon runs much more efficiently than their previous Intel based computers. It’s likely that Apple will discontinue OS support for Intel systems within the next few years. That’s not Apple being bad guys, it’s just a matter of consolidating their programming & hardware resources.

Apple did this once before, when they transitioned from PowerPC chips to Intel. I’ve been to this rodeo before.

The question this raised is since I’m going to have to do a complete rebuild anyway should I take the opportunity to move to Apple silicon at the same time?

By complete rebuild, I mean a fresh start of the Operating System. The plan calls for reloading only those applications that actually serve my needs today. I’m going to clean out all the saved passwords from the various password keychains. (Those stored in the cloud and those stored locally on my devices.) It means the deletion of all the weird assed websites and caches, and deletion of all the bullshit accounts that every fucking website wants you to create these days. Then starting over.

The goal is to get as close to being a user that’s never had a computer as possible.

It’s a hell of a task. There’s lots of planning and preserving user ids that I still need, while shedding all the crap that’s built up over time. The worst offenders in this regard are the job search sites. They never have a login site that says plainly who the hell they are. This complicates immensely figuring out what to delete and what to save.

Since I’m going to all this trouble in the first place, does it make sense to make the leap to Apple silicon now and then plan to have a computer that is “Future Proof” for at least the next 7 – 10 years?

I like my current computer. I’m one of the few people who liked the much maligned TouchBar. This preference adds a time element to my decision. It just so happens that the last MacBook Pro that has the TouchBar and has the new M1 chip is also available in the size and configuration that I like. That being said, it probably won’t be available next year.

The advantages to a newer machine are better battery life, (almost double my current machine’s). The processing power in Apple Silicon is approximately double. The newer machine supports WiFi 6, which my current machine does not. The newer machine can give me 2 TB of Solid State hard drive space. The current machine didn’t have that option.

The disadvantages are that I lose 2 Thunderbolt ports. I’ll also lose (at least temporarily) the ability to run VMWare Fusion and therefore Windows on my Mac. Yes, I could use Parallels, but I started thinking about how often I actually use Windows these days. (Not once in the past 3 months.)

The loss of ports concerned me. Then I really thought about it, and realized that I rarely have need of 4 Thunderbolt ports. I think the maximum I’ve ever used is 3 of the four ports and that was maybe once.

I’ve got a Thunderbolt dock from CalDigit. It provides all the ports I need if I really need a bunch of accessories connected to the computer. There’s a CD/DVD drive connected to that dock right now that hasn’t been used in almost a year. My monitor uses Thunderbolt directly so even if the dock were to stop working, I’d just plug the computer into the monitor. The monitor even charges my computer when connected directly.

I’ve got several dongles that plug into my current computer but even then, it’s a very rare occasion that I’ve needed more than 2 at any one time. The dongle that gets the most use is an Ethernet port that lets me connect to a network if for some reason WiFi isn’t available.

What Microsoft applications I use, run natively on Apple Silicon. So there wouldn’t be any of the messy Rosetta application conversion that imposes a performance hit. There are a few applications that would use Rosetta but those are used infrequently enough that they represent a negligible impact.

Basically, moving to a new Apple system at this point would have little negative impact on me. All my accessories for the current machine will work the same on a new machine. All the work I’ve done to prepare for a system rebuild will work just as well if I transition, or keep my current machine.

Apple will credit me $400 if I trade in my current machine for a new one. Apple Credit will give me zero interest for a year and 3% cash back to boot. It’s not a huge savings but it’s better than a kick in the pants.

I’ve convinced myself… I ordered the new machine. It should be here in a couple of weeks…

All of above is what went into the decision.

What makes me feel old is that I’m looking at this new machine as possibly a computer that I’ll use until I’m dead. I feel old too because I’m not that interested in the hassle of maintaining or updating a bunch of applications anymore.

I first noticed this phenomena on my phone, I’ve gotten my phone’s application count down to one and a half pages. There are more applications on the phone that will probably be deleted because the benefit they provide isn’t worth the annoyance of finding them, or dealing with making sure the latest version is on the device.

That philosophy spread to my computer, and iPad too. I’m down to 81 applications on my computer. That includes those that Apple provides for free. The number is about the same on my iPad and iPhone. When the new computer arrives, I’m betting that the number will drop to 70 or so, maybe 10 of which I’ll use daily.

My Apple Watch is nearing the end of its usable battery life and rather than drooling over the rumors of the new Apple Watches, I’m thinking about a plain simple (not flashy) watch. My Rolex is still my favorite but I think I’m going to have to lock it in a safe so that I’m not mugged at gunpoint over it.

I’ve been looking at automatic watches in the 300 to 500 dollar range. Oddly, that’s the same price range as a new Apple Watch. If I go the plain watch route, I won’t have to worry about recharging or the $10 per month cellular fee added to my bill every month.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of the Apple Watch features. But if I’m out camping or hiking for more than a day, power becomes an issue. I can turn my phone off to conserve power and have some privacy, but I kinda like to have a watch when I’m out in the wild. I don’t want to have to carry all the paraphernalia required to charge the darn thing. An automatic winding watch will die 2 days after I do. Rather than die after me wearing it for a day.

Sure, I can carry a solar panel, I’ve got one. I can carry a battery pack, I’ve got one of those too. They both fit in my backpack and work really well. But suppose I don’t want the added weight? Traveling by air with them is a pain in the butt. TSA always seems to have a problem with them. “What’s that? Why do you have it? Why do you need it?” You’d think the TSA agents would have seen stuff like this before, alas, apparently not. I keep waiting for TSA to ask me where my papers are.

I suppose that’s making me feel like I’m old too. I’m eschewing the “Trendy, Modern,” stuff for the old tried and true. As I’m getting older, I have less patience or indeed concern about making sure all the little bits of high technology in my life are working.

If something isn’t working, it might not be that important. The importance seems to be directly related to how long it took me to notice something was amiss.

The funny thing is that I don’t stress over a lot of these things when I notice them like I used to. Now it’s kind of, “huh that’s dead. Do I need it right now? Nope, okay I’ll look at it later when I have nothing better to do,” and move on with my day.

That’s the way my Grandfathers looked at their world. If something wasn’t immediately useful, they’d move on. When I was younger I couldn’t figure them out. They’d chide me about my leap to technology. They both thought I was nuts for using ATMs. I kept wondering, how could they not be annoyed that the TV wasn’t working? How come they’d be so calm if a power drill broke and just pick up a hand cranked one?

I thought they were just old and dumb. But now I’m seeing their wisdom, perhaps because I’m acting just like they did.

They’d realized that you only need one coffeecup, one plate, one glass, one spoon, fork, or knife. Especially if you washed ’em when you were finished using them. They’d managed to see what was convenience, and what was necessity. In that realization, they became particular about what they wanted. That led them to frugality, not because they didn’t have money, but because they wanted to un-complicate and un-clutter their lives.

At the time they died, the world was becoming more connected, more complicated, and busier. I’d enjoy taking with either of them about the world today. I’m sure they’d be simultaneously appalled and amused.

They’d both be holding their sides laughing at me tossing useless crap out of my life. They wouldn’t get the computer purging, but they’d be smiling as they watched me picking up bits of dead or broken technology and tossing it into the bin.

They’d probably get a big laugh out of saying, “Welcome to being old and dumb.”

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I’ll hand it to them, it’s clever…

When I upgraded my OS to Apple’s most recent offering I noticed there were some 3rd party applications that weren’t compatible.

I figured, “No Problem,” especially for the apps in question. Several of them had gone to a subscription model that was too expensive given that I used those apps so rarely. I terminated the subscriptions and then deleted the applications. To be fair, some of these applications were “free” and when I looked at the number of times I’d used them over the past 6. months I concluded that they just weren’t worth the space on my disk.

Typically on a Mac the user drags the application to the trash and that’s the end of it.

Not so with these apps.

In one case I found there was an uninstaller that had to be downloaded which supposedly cleaned the application from the computer. At least in theory…

In reality, it did remove the plugins to messaging and email, but notably there was a stand-alone updater that was still running every time the computer booted up. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem but this updater would then keep running about every 10 seconds and wouldn’t stop.

The problem was that there was no application to update and I suspect that confused the updater. It wasn’t error trapped in a way that would shut it down if it couldn’t determine what version was on the computer and what version was needed.

Just sloppy programming…

Then there were the MacPaw applications. Interesting thing about them was that even though I used their signature application, to delete all their applications. They still left traces and update utilities spattered all over my system.

It’s been a month and I’m still finding their crap in odd places. They too seem to be trying to update non-existing applications and they also appeared to get caught in an endless update loop.

For a signature application that bills itself as a way to make your Mac fast and efficient they sure screwed my system after checking with me several times asking if I really wanted to delete their product. Yes, MacPaw… I really, really, really, wanted to delete your product.

Dropbox is another one that left shit and at least 2 updaters running constantly. It’s also another one where I’m still finding settings, preferences, databases, and god knows what in weird places all over the system. The best one from them that I found was some leftover application that was supposed to ask if you wanted to subscribe to their service. I never saw the question, so I guess that since I used Dropbox so infrequently it hadn’t ever been triggered.

Open PGP did the same thing and this was even after using their deletion routine. They’re another subscription app, I used to use them a lot but fewer and fewer people use them now and even just signing an email always resulted in having to explain that, “No the email message isn’t damaged, no it’s not a hack, no it’s not a virus,” So it got to the point that I wasn’t encrypting anything and I stopped signing anything too. So why pay the subscription fee?

The really nasty thing about it is that all of these remnants would run, then fail, terminate, then run again.

The practical upshot is that they wouldn’t show up on the normal Apple monitoring application as “Heavy” power users. In the moments that they were running, they weren’t heavy power users. But cumulatively they reduced my battery life to about 2 hours from 6 or 7.

Thanks! I really appreciate that!

They were also running the CPU hard enough that my normally cool perfectly functional computer was running very warm.

Again Thanks, guys!

As I was combing through log files noting huge runs of file not found errors, and then backtracking those to the calling application stuffed in weird directories all over the computer it dawned on me.

“If I simply reloaded all these apps, the problem would go away.”

That’s when I began to wonder if this was bullshit by design.

If you think about it, it would be a very clever way to bring customers back and keep them. Most folks would look at the effect and assume that they had to keep the application because they couldn’t effectively remove it and it’s easier to sacrifice some disk space and perhaps pay for a subscription you never use than to have your computer only give you one third of its normal battery life.

Maybe I was being too kind, it’s not sloppy programming… It’s programming designed to trap a customer into paying protection. Just like the old mafia days in Chicago.

But it gets better…

If you didn’t want to dig through the million or so files and directories to manually delete the remnants.

You could flush the operating system format the disk, and restore your system…

NOPE!

Because all these crappy files and ghost utilities would just be restored and you’d have gone through the whole exercise for absolutely nothing except wasting your time.

The only way to remove all these wasteful applications without spending your day in Terminal typing commands, is to format the disk, reload the operating system and then reload all of the applications you want to keep, from their original sources.

Then you have to move all your documents, music, photos, etc from a known good backup.

Basically, it’s a compete rebuild of your system from scratch. Because in effect these application programmers have corrupted your backups too.

Super NOT COOL!

I will not even hazard a guess as to why Bit Defender (An anti virus program) keeps creating a Google Directory, With a Chrome subdirectory and some kind of json file in at least 2 places.Most people regard Google as evil, and Chrome as a security threat.

Although looking at the file, it may be that they’re using the json file as a delivery mechanism for virus updates. Nonetheless, I work really hard to not have Google stuff of any kind on my devices. I don’t appreciate an antivirus program loading anything through Google or creating Google shit on my system.

Then there’s Microsoft Office. I don’t use OneDrive, I don’t use the Microsoft suite. I use Word and Excel. I’ve deleted the Microsoft applications that I don’t use (PowerPoint, OutlookMail, OneNote etc). They’re bloated applications that take more than a Gigabyte each. I personally find that kind of code bloat obscene. Especially so, since I remember when Word fit on a 720K floppy disk in its entirety.

That being said, all over my Mac are bits and pieces of OneDrive, and the older version SKyDrive. Microsoft, you could at least clean up after yourselves when you update your application names.

The Microsoft subscription is another one that I’m strongly considering cancelling. Apple’s Pages does just as nice a job. It can even read and write Word Files. The same is true of Apple’s Numbers. Both are free and come with the dang operating system.

There are times more often than not when I just use a text editor not a word processor to flesh out blog posts or emails. The resulting output file is clean with no application specific formatting.

I guess that sounds like I’m “retro” but the KISS principal still applies. BBEdit or Sublime do a bang up job, even if I choose to embed formatting in a document.

Then there’s this little oddity. As I’ve been manually cutting the remnants of deleted applications out of my system. I’ve recovered almost 4 Gigabytes of storage. Really? 4 GB in useless bullshit that should have been purged when I removed the applications but wasn’t?

Thanks again programmers!

I’ve got a 1 Terabyte drive in my computer. I’m not hurting for space. But damn, just because storage densities have gone through the roof (remember when 20 megabytes was huge,) it doesn’t mean that programmers have a license to burn space for no good reason.

What ever happened to clean, compact, elegant code? Do programmers even know how to use CASE or reusable subroutines anymore?

Humans flew to the moon and back on 4K of RAM. The Shuttle only had 16K of RAM. I think they had near line storage made out of static column RAM, (not hard disks due to vibration) that was measured in Kilobytes as well. RAM was super expensive, and RAM that could take the radiation was… Astronomically expensive.

Honestly, I miss the my days working with programmers who would engage in competitive coding to see who could write the smallest program to do the job.

Ah well, those days are gone.

My immediate problem is to go back through the logs to see if I missed any other “Ghost” programs and delete them then see what effect I’ve had on my battery life.

There’s supposed to be an OS update soon. I may wait for that in case Apple screwed up and is running some processes too hard. If I’m still having problems I’ll probably go nuclear on my system and do a complete rebuild.

What I can say is that nothing from MacPaw, Open PGP, DropBox, and only select Microsoft programs will find a home on my machine.

I think I’ll also take a directory snapshot of the OS before I load anything. I’ll store that on my server and if this happens again, I’ll have a guide to assist in figuring out what can be deleted.

Maybe I’ll write a Python Script that will show me just the differences and paths between the original install and the point at which I’m trying to troubleshoot. Huh… I wonder if the recovery partition has a complete OS version. Maybe I could use that as a template…

Hi, this is Siri. The writer of this blog has just wandered off into the digital woodland. Thank you for reading. Good Night.

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This outta be fun to watch…

Apparently the board of Twitter has decided to accept Elon Musk’s offer to purchase the company.

I’d imagine that a lot of liberal Twitter employees are shitting themselves right about now. Especially those who have been so invested in outright censorship. They’re out the door!

I’d also imagine that the remaining libtard snowflake Twitter users are having meltdowns because they may soon be seeing things in their feeds that they personally don’t like.

Oh well!

Twitter stock is shooting up and I wish I had the money to invest in it right now. I’d love to ride the wave up.

Hell, I might even consider opening a Twitter account again. It might be fun to watch the meltdowns realtime. What are the fragile little snowflakes gonna do when real freedom of speech smacks ’em upside the head?

I left Twitter a couple of years ago, precisely because the censorship and Twitter Mobs attacking someone who questioned the “Approved” narrative was so disgusting.

I’m not talking about someone saying that world was flat. I’m talking about someone asking about the legitimacy of Hydroxychloroquine. Simply asking a question about it could get the person banned. Then there’s the Hunter Biden laptop, or people correcting false narratives about Trump, by posting unedited raw videos

Something like… “Hey, here’s the whole video and this is what he really said or did.”

Yep, that was enough to get you banned.

The cockroaches should be scattering like those in a filthy kitchen when you flip on the lights. It couldn’t happen to a finer group of people. I’d bet there’s a lot of left leaning H1B1 employees freaking the fuck out right about now.

Hey assholes… Pack your bags! In a very short time Twitter on your resume will be toxic if you’re trying to find another job in a liberal “woke” company.

No doubt it will take Elon a while to wrangle the purchase, take the company private again, and fire all the shitheads. So improvement won’t happen over night, I’m sure there will be sabotage from the shitheads on their way out.

This news is a ray of hope and frankly I needed that right about now.

Hmm I wonder when they’ll be hiring replacement workers? Gotta keep my eye on that.

Elon, may be able to make Twitter actually profitable. Musk buying an existing company that already has global reach and attendant infrastructure means that newer competing platforms may also take a hit. That will be interesting to watch shake out.

I wonder what Apple is going to do about it. Will they ban Twitter like they banned Parler and Gab from the Apple App Store? That may be a nasty headache for Tim Cook. How’s Apple going to justify banning those applications while allowing a Twitter that’s all about free speech?

Alternatively, if Apple tries to ban Twitter they’ll face the wrath of the liberals who’ve come to rely on Twitter to coordinate their BLM and ANTIFA rallies. Or if they’re in LA, coordinate their smash and grab looting.

I do hope Elon has complete control before the Midterms. I’ve wondered how much sway Twitter and their censorship really had on the 2020 election. I might just be getting my answer.

Twitter, Gab, Parler, MeWe and others allowing conservative posts and real discussions to take place versus the echo chamber of censorship on FaceBook, Google, and Youtube…

I can hardly wait for some perpetually aggrieved “Woke” moron to complain their feelings got hurt on Twitter. The digital thud of everyone else saying, “Yeah? So what?” Will probably be heard in the physical world!

Like I said, this should be a lot of fun to watch.

Thanks Mr. Musk… If you need someone to wander through the halls of Twitter like the Angel of Death… I’m totally available and have an extensive technology background.

I promise I won’t make them suffer too long!

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Well that’s interesting…

I upgraded to the latest version of MacOs and immediately started noticing that my 7 hour battery was only lasting about 2 hours.

The computer was running warmer than normal too. In computers, heat equals lots of work and a lot less battery life.

It took a bit of digging but eventually I think I figured part of it out. The Mail application was sucking up 46% of all the CPU cycles. WOW!

While digging around I found that there were a ton of email account duplications. I suspect that this happened due to changes Apple implemented in the password system. Not sure about that. I’m led to this conclusion, by the fact that when I deleted one of the duplicate accounts both accounts were deleted.

The accounts appears to be linked in some way that was not obvious. i wonder if mail was hammering the servers, essentially checking for mail over and over again .

When I re-added the accounts, only one was added. So clearly there was something wrong.

So If you’ve been noticing that your computer is sucking up power after the upgrade to Monterey 12.3 check your email accounts. That may be where the problem is.

My machine is now lasting longer on a charge, but there’s still something running down deep in the bowels of the OS that is consuming a lot of CPU cycles. That’s going to take more time to identify. The machine is still running warmer than necessary given the obvious active tasks.

I’ll have to dig into the UNIX subsystems and see if I can figure that out. I might be successful, I might not.

You might be asking why I put myself through this… A valid question.

I adopt early because of the other half. Sometimes, they just can’t resist clicking upgrade when their computer says, “There’s an update…”

Adopting early allows me to at least have a fighting chance at fixing their machine when they start complaining about a problem.

I’ll try to update this post as I discover more.

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We’re all writing our lives in Sand

Years ago, I was speaking with a Professor friend of mine, extolling the virtues of digital books.

In my idealism I was bubbling over about the elimination of the high cost associated with college text books. I saw this as a new age where everyone would have better access to higher education and as new discoveries were made, the new data could effortlessly be inserted in the text books so people wouldn’t have to buy the revised editions of a hard copy.

My Professor friend nodded and conceded that if things worked that way, it would improve education and could make higer education somewhat less costly.

He said simply, “Sometimes the best ideas, built on the best of intentions, don’t work out like we think they will. I’ll stick with my dusty paper books for the time being.”

At the time I envisioned a world where everyone had access to the sum total of human knowledge and that we would then all be playing on a level field. Naively I thought that the best angels of humanity would rise to the top and we would enter a new age of cooperation and creativity. I thought equality and harmony were just around the corner, built on free exchange of information and thought.

I WAS A MORON!

Yep, at that time in my life I was leaning pretty left. I thought the vast majority of people would choose light and temper their natural selfishness because the promise of everyone being happy, healthy, and productive would be so alluring.

Looking back from 2021, I have a bitter laugh. There’s also a sadness, humanity could be so much more, but the opportunity may have passed. Now I think we’re heading for another “Dark Age”.

Five years, or so later, my friend and I were having a similar discussion. This time the discussion started because He was having to incorporate EBooks into his curriculum. He was dealing with variations in some of the books. It turned out that many of the Ebooks, even though they had the same ISBN number contained different text and there was no notation of when revisions had been made. To make things more confusing the Ebooks didn’t match the hardcopy text books that could be purchased from the campus book store.

That was when I realized that an Orwellian component had come into play. In my innocence I’d never considered that anyone would prefer censorship or alteration of the facts in a book, to fit a narrative. I actually believed that we as a species had grown beyond that.

Truth rings like a bell. You might not like it, but Truth stands on it’s own merit.

Knowledge, and understanding may start out flawed, but there is a logical step by step refinement that is driven by the truth of new undeniable facts. We should be able to see that process, to chart it, and books provide the evidence of our journey towards understanding.

If we can look at the old books and theories contained within, we have a view into how knowledge evolves and how new data can, and should trigger re-evaluation of a theory or belief.

I always believed that books, and the written word were somehow sacred. That is why the Nazi book burnings were so abhorrent to me.

During our conversation, discovering that books were no longer being treated with any kind of reverence, it dawned on me perhaps digital media was too ephemeral to be trusted with the knowledge of our species.

Maybe a better method would be to have books start out as digital, collect the data and facts then publish a hard copy (a snapshot if you will,) that would be placed in every library all over the world. Then you’d publish addenda in hard copy as warranted.

But even as I had that thought, I knew the genie was out of the bottle. People will always choose convenience over having to do the actual work of locating a book in a library stack and opening it. The books would simply rot to dust on library shelves.

That was the beginning of my journey toward a more conservative view of the world. That journey continued the more I became aware of subtle changes to books. Specifically Ebooks.

I bought into the convenience of having a book on my phone or computer to read at lunch. I purchased a lot of Ebooks but as I read them there were changes. At first it was small corrections, reasonable edits that corrected a typo or made a sentence read better.

These changes were within what I considered, the realm of reasonable. I could see an author making those changes in the Ebook because it was simple and didn’t require an entirely new press run. The changes would be folded into the printed copies of the book as needed.

But the edits became more plentiful, and far reaching. Soon some of my favorite books diverged in their Ebook form from the hard copy I’d had for years. Then I started seeing it in movies.

The weirdest example was in “Alien”. A friend had a laserdisc version of Alien. When we’d seen the movie in the theater we’d noted that the Nostromo’s shuttle had a name. When we’d purchased the movies on videotape there wasn’t a name on the shuttle.

At the time, we thought it was probably something to do with the resolution of the videotape. When my friend purchased the laserdisc version of Alien, the name once again appeared on the shuttle. But DVD and Bluray versions, the name was gone again.

This suggested that there were multiple versions of the movie and there was no way of telling which cut you actually were purchasing. Shortly after our “discovery” multiple cuts of movies were being repackaged as “New” xyz cuts, thereby maximizing profit to the studios. I think at one time, this friend and I had 6 different cuts of Alien and who knows how many other movies between us.

I lost my DVD / Bluray collection and all of my books in a house fire. At the time, I chose to invest heavily in streaming movies and Ebooks so that I’d never have to face the heartbreak of losing collections again.

Except that’s not how it works.

Movies and books available online can disappear suddenly and with no explanation.

Gone with the Wind,for example now has a whole Social Justice disclaimer before you get to watch the movie.

Looney Toons collections have Whoopie Goldberg reminding viewers that some of the depictions in the cartoon are representative of an era when racial relations were horrific. She even has to comment on Bugs Bunny having a go at German and Japanese soldiers.

All she needed to say was that those cartoons were propaganda from World War II and in context, they were supposed to give theater goers of the time, a laugh and bit of hope. But instead we’re subjected to the whole Social Justice Warrior education about a 6 minute cartoon.

If you’re sitting down to watch Looney Tunes, you’re not looking for any deep political lessons, you’re looking for some mindless goofy antics to put a smile on your face.

The point here is that if everything in malleable, if everthing can be edited and altered then we risk corrupting and losing our global knowledge.

If we eliminate dissenting opinions, we eliminate healthy discourse that could lead in new directions. If we censor comedy, or free speech, in my opinion we accelerate the decline of civilization.

If all that you believe is given to you in little spoonfuls of “Approved” narrative then you shouldn’t be surprised to discover that almost nothing you know is true.

We all know that a large percentage of the population will be surprised, then angry, then possibly violent. When that happens… Well, you have book burnings, and stuff akin to the fall of Rome.

This time, it will be worse than the dark ages. Because libraries have fewer and fewer books, some libraries are even destroying books rather than curating them.

A large percentage of late 20th and early 21st century information is digital only. After everything is burned, the power goes down, the internet doesn’t work, and the cell towers go offline what resources will be available to rebuild from?

We’ve written our knowledge and history in the sand on a beach. When the tide comes in, it will be lost.

Just as a lot of old knowledge had to be rediscovered when the Dark Ages waned, humanity will have to claw their way back from the abyss and start over.

For just a minute, imagine what this world would be like if the industrial revolution had started 300 years earlier. What might we know now? The people of Greece, Rome, China, MesoAmerica, and Egypt were all equal in intelligence to us. What they lacked was knowledge, science, and resources.

All of these civilizations were working on those problems when they fell. We’ll never know how much was lost or suppressed. But we do know they contemplated the stars, and studied mathematics. We know they could build massive structures and grasped art, literature, and rudimentary physics.

An argument could be made that had these civilizations conquered their greed, need to control each other, and war, choosing instead to work together we’d be a lot further along in our development than we are today.

Then again, I’m reminded of the line from The Fifth Element, “Everything you create you use to destroy.”

Perhaps that kind of cooperation would have just reduced the population.