I am writing this essay on a cheap netbook I bought over 5 years ago. I bought it used and it cost $100 then. I type in a quick command and see that 371 of 487 mb of ram are being used. I thought I had a gig, no wonder it’s been running slowly browsing with chrome. But I’m using a simple text editor now so no troubles.

I type in another command and see that I am using 18 of 50 gigabytes of disk space between my 2 largest partitions. I have another 100 gb of unpartitioned space. I was going to install a second OS, but gave up on that.

My ram usage is high enough to make me uncomfortable, though it’s still running smoothly. I don’t use the disk a whole lot on this machine, so there’s plenty of free space.

When I execute a command, my cpu, the thinking brain of the computer, jumps up past 40%, 60% or all the way to 99% usage but then quickly drops back down to 99% idle.

If I were to run a program that requires persistent cpu usage it would be about 30 seconds or less before my fan turned on. The bottom of my machine would quickly become hot to the touch.

I took computer science classes in college, so I know that every transistor and component in the machine is getting a constant small supply of voltage. There are billions of tiny transistors that form logic gates both to store memory and run the CPU.

When these transistors are idle, they use very little electricity. Ideally they would use nothing while idle but there is in fact a tiny flow of electrons through them flowing from negative to positive. Once they are required to perform logical operations or recall memory bits, a significant stream of electrons must flow through the circuits to allow them to perform that task.

I love machines. As much as I like people too, I’m more of a machine person than a people person. Humans are amazing and have value and needs that you can’t really compare to a machine, but there are parallels. Excuse my machine loving mind for drawing these analogies. Later we will discuss the needs of humans and the economy.

Personal computers work best when most of their resources are idle or unused most of the time. My personal rule is that I like to keep everything below about 50% utilization when I can help it. That way if there is a sudden increase in demand I have the resources to handle it. I like to use even less cpu time because that involves, power, and more importantly it creates heat.

Even powerful server computers in climate controlled environments need some unused memory, disk space and cpu cycles or they start to operate very inefficiently. When ram memory gets full things must be swapped to the disk, which takes about 100,000 times longer to recall as ram memory. When cpu cycles are all used, operations get backlogged and may not be performed when they are needed. You get lag and timeouts and all sorts of problems. Frustrated users keep refreshing their browser which only further taxes your system.

Modern disk filesystems are pretty efficient at organizing data, but as they get very close to full it becomes hard to find open chunks of memory to put new stuff.

So with machines, idle resources are what you want, but every part of the machine is serviced and taken care of equally to meet its needs.

The sentiment in the computer world is that hardware is cheap. You always want to have more than enough physical hardware to cover your needs and you don’t want to have to struggle through complex, mind bending puzzles trying to make things work with insufficient resources.

Humans are very different than computers, but I think the paradox that too few resources leads to inefficient resource usage applies to us as well. If you struggle to survive you’ll need expensive health care or dental care or cause other physical or mental problems that are taxing on both the individual and society.

With abundant resources there is no pressure to conserve, so it is possible to get wasteful and inefficient behavior. But with computers we have learned how to keep things efficient even when we have resources to spare. I think it’s simply a matter of choice.

Having everyone employed is a cultural assumption and expectation. But once I started to learn a little bit about computers years ago it seems ridiculous to me. If we need everyone working 40 hour weeks to meet our needs adequately then we are working very poorly and very inefficiently.

The tragedy is that most of the environmental problems and burdens we place on people come from a struggle to work that is a relatively recent cultural invention. We use the most fuel commuting. People can become physically and mentally exhausted from the effort to put food on the table. If our employment activities aren’t enriching, rewarding, and essential, what we are asking people to do is manipulative, inappropriate, and unfair. The default argument to support this arrangement seems to be “This is the way things are done” “You can’t change the system” “Everybody needs to work and take care of themselves and be self sufficient”

Let’s talk about self sufficiency. What does that even mean? Does the average american consumption driven lifestyle really qualify as self sufficiency? When oil prices are a significant factor in voting attitudes and the state indulges your dependence or you throw a fit? Does that sound like self-sufficiency? Oil concerns lead to terrible foreign policy, terrible domestic activities that hurt the environment, and global environmental destruction. Until I learned MMT I didn’t understand how important fiscal policy is in dictating the lifestyles we live. At that time I thought it was only regulatory concerns that significantly limited our lifestyle options, but fiscal decisions carve out the economic space that is available for us to live, in the same way cities and infrastructure carve out the physical space that can support living for larger populations. A few individuals, highly skilled and resourceful could perhaps live without dependence on public support and infrastructure, but “living in the wilderness” a la thoreau would require policy support to work for a large population.

Our indulgence in oil is not arbitrary, it comes from a compulsion to embrace soundbite moral values in conservative politics and neglecting or wholly denying real apocalyptic issues. Yes, terrible foreign policy can lead to global war. Yes, environmental neglect has a dollar price-tag and more importantly is a threat to the survival of communities, cultures, political entities, humanity, and ultimately most or all of life on earth.

Many contemporary liberals are guilty as well for permitting this while only verbally express regret about the nature of “contemporary political imperatives”. Libertarians show enthusiasm for facilitating individuals pursuing alternate lifestyles including eco-friendly frugal lifestyles, but are ideologically blinded from seeing the great value of public action on these issues.

When I was 14 years old I went and spent a couple weeks with my grandpa who was still an active farmer at that time. I helped him out with his farm work. There was some hard work involved, which I had been told plenty about, including its moral merits. But what surprised me was that we weren’t working at 100% the whole time. It seemed quite a nice lifestyle, sometimes demanding, but it also let you do things at your own pace.

Now it could be that my grandpa was getting closer to retirement and that he was taking it a little bit easy. Probably true. But at the same time I don’t think that’s the full picture.

We would wake up at 4am and drive to the farm and then spend an hour or two early moving pipe. Some of his irrigation lines were basically self moving with motors but others had to be moved manually. My older cousin would help us out and we could get going rather quickly.

There were lots of random tasks and chores, and after we finished in the morning nothing was quite as demanding the rest of the day. Lunch was eaten early and there was a 2 hour block just for napping in the afternoon. We would drive tractors and other equipment. We would service tools and machines. I didn’t have a full picture of everything we were doing and why, but it was enjoyable.

There’s a period during harvest season where farmers are really busy and can use all the help and labor they can get. I wasn’t there at that time, it was much more laid back and flexible.

That was over 10 years ago, but it still involved modern farming tools and techniques. We took care of a lot of land and grew much more crop than the people working could possibly consume. I’ve heard that the trend has since then has been moving toward larger and more profitable farms and there are fewer middle class family run farming operations like what my grandpa did.

Going back in history I think most people have been mostly idle most of the time. If you’ve ever watched a nature documentary on lions, most of the time you just see them chilling in the shade. The male lions don’t even hunt at all.

Early man(and women) probably led a similar lifestyle.

Hunter-gatherers and early agrarians would have had daily tasks and chores, but even with their primitive technology there was no need to work continuously.

In the modern world with our tech we have dramatically improved our productivity, but somehow that has led to an expectation that we must work and produce more.

I think basic income proposals are a simple and creative solution. In a way it would be organizing our economy and society the way we organize a computer system. You give resources to each part according to what it needs to perform optimally, and then you allocate tasks when stuff needs to get done.

At the same time, I really like the organic distributed nature of human society. We are part of small local groups first, as small as families, and then larger communities and then states and countries. We have a position and role in all these overlapping entities. Our highest priority obligations are first to serve and care for ourselves and then each successively larger group takes next priority because that is the scope of our influence.

Perhaps each level of hierarchy of society could help provide needs and share resources. If the basic income is allocated from different levels of government then each level shares discretion and responsibility.

There are lots of options to dramatically improve the way we organize and get things done.

Sometimes the best answers when you look at the big picture are the opposite of what you would expect when looking at the small picture.

Most of the time, I enjoy being idle. I like doing something engaging and useful on a daily basis, including social activities and things that help other people. But there is no reason why it has to look like a paid job or an employment relationship, which we take for granted but are actually relatively recent inventions.