One of my favorite Springsteen songs back in the days when, well, things weren't going so well. Anyway, I installed MacOS Sonoma 14.3.1 this morning to fix a text entry problem that Apple inflicted on everyone, and now Hazel isn't running.

I'm going to guess it's not an incompatibility introduced by the update, and something to do with a setting somewhere. Noodlesoft offers a troubleshooting guide, but I just wanted to post a pic and write something. Now I have to do troubleshooting. So, I'll put that aside for the moment and write a post without a pic.

How's that!

I'm beginning to notice an awareness of the looming peril creeping into places I wouldn't normally expect to find them. Obliquely, tentatively. It sparks something in me that I decided to think about a little bit during the prolonged period while my iMac did its OS update thing.

When I was a young elementary student, I was very average. Sometime after puberty I became "smart." Often, "the smartest kid in the class." And there are a whole set of behavioral rewards in a classroom environment for demonstrating how smart you are. (There are some decidedly unrewarding aspects as well. But let's not dwell on those.)

"See something, say something." Yeah, well, in the "country of the blind, the one-eyed man is"... not welcome. And it's never certain if that one eye is seeing clearly anyway. But the stimulus-response, conditioned reward reaction remains. But I'm a little wiser now, and it's a feeling and I know feelings pass.

But I do wonder what's going to happen as our situation becomes more apparent over time? I know there will be enormous efforts to forestall catastrophe. I think someone's going to propose building a fleet of Musk's Starships to launch solar power satellites. That'd be cool.

Won't work, but it'd be cool.

It's going to get crazy before it gets really bad.

But I keep coming back to acceptance. It's a terminal prognosis. Nobody gets out of here alive. "Everything that has a beginning has an end." About the best anyone can do is just... be kind.

It's not anyone's fault. It's an emergent outcome of a complex, non-linear dynamic system, of which human behavior, human nature, is an inextricable piece. We aren't that smart. We definitely aren't that wise. We couldn't help it.

We knew.

But we couldn't help it.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:30 Saturday, 10 February 2024