one's easier -- just live it up, have a nice boom, and hope that the bust happens to our kids and grandkids instead of us.  yippee, party hearty, discount the future, damn the torpedoes.

one's harder.

now, now with yer binaries!

conceptually, it's easily that stark, but down in the real world ^TM too much hairshirtism leads to atrophy of the will.

as for partying hard, that can be more or less sustainable...

 i think of those african tribes out in the desert, barely two sticks to rub together, but still doing a boogie round the fire under the stars.

get too far out and no-one but the already initiated can relate to you.

sometimes you have to let it all hang out, or the efforts to be exemplary can cause a nasty stress of its own.

both/and. this era is tragically funny, and horribly hilarious.

still something good to celebrate there, for want of better choice...

the very meaning of the word 'growth' has to change, from that of a (once-benign, but now metastized) tumour to intellectual growth, since that's what makes us different (if not yet better!) than the rest of mammalia.

that might be your cup of tea, De.

drunk out there rocking on the water under the banshee moon.

;)

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

I'm satisfied with his framework, but you'll notice rdf ends his diary with

Since I've been a big fan of his goals and a critic of his lack of implementation ideas, this seems a good step forward.

we're boxed into the "go back to freezing in caves by candlelight" story. Half the battle of getting there from here lies in persuading people they want what's proposed.

....preferably without them having to freeze outside a cave without any candles first, before they get it.

it's taken millions of years to get this stupid!

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

And what makes you think a human culture or economy is not dissipative?

The brainless should not be in banking -- Willem Buiter

 If, by that, one is postulating a dynamic system where all State/Condition variables and constants give rise to a dynamic stasis.  The key word there is "dynamic."

intriguingly paradoxical.

it brings to mind a comment someone made to me that there was a long period of british history where not much happened, all the records are there, and inspection reveals a normal, humdrum period of peace in the shires.

meanwhile the continent was knee deep in carnage.

something to do with being an island, i guess.

anyway, i was speculating how to the brits, that period wasn't dull at all, there was plenty to do and reasons to do it, without invaders breathing down their necks, or social upheavals. in fact the everyday might have been much more fully lived in a healthy way, without those unpleasant distractions the history books are so full of.

a steady state society would aim for this, consciously, imo.

in some discussions here, i seem to remember taking away a figure of 4% as annual natural yield resource multiplication, if those resources are stewarded responsibly.

if we learned to be happy with that, we could have our precious growth, just like if banking returned to being boring, they could still live well without scamming us.

looking at the way things are panning out now, 4% seems amazingly generous, but in a global atmosphere where madoff-like profits were touted as the new norm, it seems like....b-o-r-i-n-g.

eating the seedcorn, burning the furniture, all about us, wanna wanna wanna.

what will it take to make us grow up and harmonise our existence with our habitat, instead of cudgelling it into subjugation?

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty