Notes from the edge of civilization: July 21, 2024

Ah yes, the blue screen of death; death by drowning in debt; and why we need parallel systems.

Have you tried turning it off, then turning it back on again?

After a coding error led to a global tech outage this week, millions of businesses using the Microsoft Windows operating system are still struggling to get themselves back up and running. Advice from the IT crowd? Try restarting your computer.

An update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon sensor software, designed to secure clients against hacking, contained faulty code that resulted in perhaps the biggest IT meltdown the world has ever known. Hundreds of millions of computers worldwide were affected, leaving airline and train passengers stranded around the globe and disrupting the services of banks, hospitals, governments, credit card payment systems, broadcasters, street lights, 911 emergency systems, and more. CrowdStrike says it might take weeks before some of these services are back online. Experts warn the error, which apparently could have been avoided if adequate quality checks had been performed, will cost the global economy trillions of dollars.

In a Today Show clip that has now gone viral, CrowdStrike’s CEO — 59-year-old George Kurtz — was noticeably shaken while trying to explain why a preventable coding error could have such a massive global impact.

Co-host Savannah Guthrie asked Kurtz how “one single software bug can have such a profound and immediate impact.” Kurtz choked on the answer, reaching for a bottle of water and mumbling something about the complexity of cybersecurity and trying to stay one step ahead of adversaries before ensuring the audience this was not a cyberattack but simply an error in coding.

What Kurtz was unable to articulate is that our globalized world is now hypercomplex and more centralized than ever. The finely knitted network is a technological marvel when it works, but last week’s coding error showed us that it also leaves us hugely vulnerable.

As our podcast guest

Matt Smith

explained in our conversation a few months ago, this is exactly why there is such a need for parallel systems. “Parallel systems are just ways you can go about getting what you need in your life without having to rely on these centralized services,” Matt says.

You can watch that conversation here:

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In a post on his blog, How to Save the World, author Dave Pollard this week renamed the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to suit our modern times. Instead of famine, disease, death, and war, Pollard makes a case for corporatism, incompetence, propaganda, and imperialism as being the culprits of collapse.

Given the previous story of how an overlooked coding error brought the world to a standstill, we tend to agree with Pollard, especially when it comes to incompetence. He describes it as follows:

Incompetence, the incapacity, due to lack of skill, knowledge, training, experience, resources, and infrastructure, to perform essential tasks: As our societies have become larger and more complex, it becomes exponentially more difficult to develop and sustain the vast array of abilities needed to keep it all functioning and prevent it falling apart. Size and scale, not stupidity, are the primary ’causes’ of our current epidemic of incompetence.

Pollard is, perhaps, a bit more charitable than we might be when it comes to stupidity. But overall we think he makes a good point.

Read the full article here: https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2024/07/18/the-four-horsemen-updated

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Debt. It’s how empires collapse.

But when it comes to size and scale, some things are so big to be nearly beyond comprehension. One example: the US national debt, which is now nearly $35 trillion. On its face we know that’s a big number. But how big, exactly?

Mike Maharrey of Money Metals this week tried to put that into perspective.

That's an unfathomable number. It's meaningless to most people. We simply can't comprehend a number that big.

Maharrey then does a valiant job of trying to contextualize what $35 trillion might look like: “Every U.S. taxpayer would have to write a check for $266,953 to wipe out the debt,” he says, “And that's on top of the taxes we already pay! To put it another way, $35 trillion is more than the total economies of China, Japan, Germany, and the UK combined.”

• If you had spent $1 million every day since the birth of Christ, you still wouldn't have spent $1 trillion.

• If you line up dollar bills end-to-end, you could go to the moon and back around 203 times with $1 trillion. You could wrap them around the earth about 3,893 times.

• If you stacked up 1 trillion dollar bills, the dollar tower would rise to 67,866 miles.

Maharrey’s post is short and succinct and it’s a fun way to try to wrap your head around a situation that is, in a word, vast.

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This week on the Collapse Life podcast, Dr. Meryl Nass — a leading expert in biological warfare and vaccine safety — stopped by to share some of her critical insights into the current bird flu threat. She reassured us that “the bird flu out in nature does not spread person to person. If you are not dealing with sick birds or sick cows, there is zero chance you will get this disease. You do not need treatment. You do not need vaccines.”

She then went into the mechanics behind vaccine development and stockpiling, the true risks of bird flu transmission, the controversies surrounding vaccine safety, and the supranational entities looking to usurp power and control.

You won’t want to miss this! Click the image below to watch the video:

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