added some work in progress posts

7 files changed, 161 insertions, 14 deletions

diff --git a/fict-book.txt b/fict-book.txt
index ecc6660..ad34e51 100644
--- a/fict-book.txt
+++ b/fict-book.txt
@@ -1,11 +1,6 @@
-A lone sailor leaving his deindustrial dark age village to voyage into the unknown
-A plucky young girl (16-22) overcoming societzal pressures
-Mad scientest seeking to appease the gods for his transgressions
-Young man leaving behind soceity to pursue a life of knowledge, understanding
-Wizened unintentional shaman dispensing knowledgeo
-The illegitimate son of the shaman in deindustrial dark age village
+Her breath was a thin wisp leaking out her nostils, she slowed it even more, listening to her heart beat one two three four and then she slowly inhale and held it one two three she came around the tree saw the flicker in the corner of her field of vision, pivoted toward it and fired. 
 
-discovers
-sails away from
-sails away toward
+The biggest one fell, the other two leaped forward as she half turned and fired again. The smallest hit her square in the chest, but was dead before they hit the ground together. The last wengon stood staring, sniffing, trying to decide. It walked closer, standing nearly over her hand, sandwiched between snow and fur, still curled around the handle of the pistol. It leaned foward and bit into the wengon lying on top of her. She twisted her hand to the side and fired straight up through it's belly. It recoiled and turned to run, ut she was up and final shot, brought it down.
 
+
+A family father who restores a wrecked boat on the shores of Lake Michigan in order to build a future for his family that will help them rise above their current station in the de-industrial world to lead lives of adventure and daring. he fixes up the boat he found, he makes sails of the skins of dogs, the largest easy to kill animal left in the area. He then takes the extra furs to a town at the mouth of the lock and attempts to sell them and gets laughed off the docks as backward, a yoken with skins in a world that doesn't yet need skins. He manages to get passage through the locks anyway somehow and navigates down the st. larwence river and out to sea.
diff --git a/food.txt b/food.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..62b5941
--- /dev/null
+++ b/food.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
+Nothing is so tightly woven into the fabric of existence on earth as food. Food touches every aspect of life in a way that almost nothing else does. Food powers economies, shapes ecologies, dictates religious rituals, causes wars, drives the explorations of the unknown, determines the size and shape of our bodies, how much energy we have, how much life we have. Food is in many ways the story of everything. This notion is what drew me to food, to cooking, to restaurants.
+
+In the United States there's no holiday that celebrates food quite like Thanksgiving. It's a celebration of excess that's become, perhaps naturally, excessive, and given the future treatment of the native North Americans who made the first Thanksgiving possible, a deeply troubling holiday, but, it's what we got. Sometimes you have to make do with what you have while you search for something better.
+
+For Thanksgiving this year we abandoned all pretense of traditional American fare and went full Mexican -- tamale pie, chayote squash, ensalda pepino and plenty of salsas. This was partly because none of us like turkey anyway and partly because we wanted to eat what was around us. To me if you aren't eating what's around you, if you're always hunting out the familiar foods from back home, you're missing out on one of the best things about travel. 
+
+Food has always been a big part of our travels, even if I don't often write about it. Sometimes we refer to places we've been by which foods were really good there. Colorado, the Palisades peaches. The UP and its cherries. In Mexico it's the guavas and the green apples and the strawberries. 
+
+I tend toward the slow, systematic approach to exploring food. I go find things I don't recognize and start trying them, one at a time, usually starting with fruit because there's really no such thing as a bad fruit. Then I move into vegetables and meat cuts. I'm currently exploring various cheeses, working my way through a variety of queso oaxaca, quesa fresca, and some other round one I haven't even learned the name of yet (let alone what it tastes like or what you do with it). I'm also on the hunt for a good cotija cheese, but I haven't found one yet. It's not just a variety of food either, it's trying it from each vendor to see who has what I like the best, at the best price. I recognize that this is a little odd to most people. 
+
+I head over to market generally every day, partly to get out of the house, but partly because there's still so much there I don't understand yet, so many foods in so many stalls, it'll take me months to get through them all, and that's only one market in one town. It would take years just to even scratch the surface of one place. Because after I figure out what I like and where to get it I like to figure out where it's coming from, who's growing it? What do they do? Why? How? You pull at one tiny thread and you can follow it forever. Like I said, I recognize that this is a little odd. 
+
+Sometimes I really miss Anthony Bourdain. Even though I never had time to watch his show much, it was nice to know that there was someone else out there who loved wandering around exploring markets and tracing food around the world. It made me feel a little less like a weirdo when I do the same. 
+
+Luckily my kids are usually game to go with me and try new foods. I came back from the big market outside of town the other day with a cup full of dried, salted, chili-covered sardines and they all had one. Only one of them actually like it, and in this case, I think she liked them more than me, but it makes me happy that they're at least willing to try them. That's long been my motto: try anything twice.
+
+One of the more bizarre things to me about the modern world is a simultaneous obsession with, and yet a complete fear of, foreign food. Several times I've overheard tourists around here telling each other not to the street food, but yet they go to the restaurant up the hill and sit down to a dinner made from the same ingredients, from the same markets, coming from a kitchen they *can't* see. That's far more likely to get you sick than the stalls in the market where you can see for yourself every step of the process. 
+
+Sometimes it blows my mind how little people understand food and, more importantly, food preparation. I do have an advantage here, having worked in the restaurant industry for about six years, but most of what I know actually comes from just learning the basics of microbiology. All the restaurant experience did was provide practical examples of microbiology in action. 
+
+Contrary to what you've probably seen on TV, most of running a restaurant does not involve cooking. There is some of that, but mostly you stand around and wait, chopping stuff, but after a few years you can do that without thinking about it. So really you're just standing around. Then for about three hours you're so busy and focused it feels like only ten minutes went by, but mostly you wait. You smoke a lot and stand around a lot. And for me, standing around smoking, I needed something to read. There's not a lot to read in restaurant, so I read all the bizarre food industry trade magazines that would arrive every day in the mail. 
+
+One of the things that you learn from reading these bizarre magazines -- which would have cover stories on strange things like how to entice millennials with foods that remind them of their favorite sitcoms -- is that real food poisoning, the outbreaks that the CDC tracks, not the ones where you mistakenly attribute some diarrhea to whatever bizarre food you ate most recently, the real outbreaks, almost always come from vegetables, particularly vegetables that grow on the ground and have to be harvested by hand. Because the people harvesting the food don't get paid enough to take bathroom breaks, so, well, you do the math. From my anecdotal observations, if you really want genuine food poisoning, a bout of salmonella say, eat asparagus, preferably raw. 
+
+Which is why I find it hilarious that so many people here are deathly afraid of street food, but in the next breath tell me how they don't need to wash their veggies because they get them at the organic market. WAT?!
+
+And no, I never say anything. It's not my place to shatter anyone's carefully constructed delusions. Though I did write this. So now you know. Wash your veggies, eat where you can see the kitchen. You'll mostly likely be fine.
+
+That said, I eat unwashed strawberries all the time and regularly get gorditas from a place where they use dirty rags from god knows where to sop up the grease just before handing it to you. But I have a stomach of steel. I don't know which came first though, my stomach of steel or my willingness to eat anything at least twice.
+
+But more importantly than a strong stomach, I eat at that place because I see the people around me doing it too. They're still here so it must be fine. That's the part of food that a lot of people seem to forget -- ingredients are nothing, people are what matter. I could spend the next ten years practicing making tamales, but I'll never be as good at it as the abuelas sitting on every street corner here (don't buy their tamales though, they aren't selling the good ones).
+
+To me that's the point of exploring food in another culture, to get to understand the people growing it, selling it and making it. It's a way into a culture, for me particularly I guess. I'm not always that outgoing so sometimes I can make connections with people through food much easier than through talking. And to me there is no better way to start to understand the daily lives of the people around you, than to go to the local market and see what's there, the food, the people, how it all fits together.
+
+When I first got here I went to the center of the market, bought a couple tacos and a coke and sat and just watched. I watched what people bought, how they examined it, what they picked, what they reject, what they asked the vendor to get, what they insisted on getting themselves. I watched how they handled it, what was delicate, what was not, who was careful with what they were picking out, who was not (the latter were probably buying it for someone else). I came back the next day and spent another half hour watching. Then another. Then I walked around the every stall, looking things over, figuring out who had the best of what, how things changed from day to day, what time the new stuff arrived, how it was rotated, who cared if you grabbed the fresh stuff in the bins under the display and who didn't, who pulled their their borderline fruits and veggies who didn't, which butcher got whole animals and cut them down, which got the halves and quarters already cut. All these details tell you stories about the people behind them, and if you want the best possible local ingredients you have to go out and learn these stories. Sometimes of course you do things even though you know better. I buy most of my fruit from a woman who is slow to rotate things and I have to carefully look over every piece I buy, but I like her, she teaches me the Spanish words of veggies I don't know and I sometimes help her translate words in her daughter's English homework. 
+
+When I finally had a few ideas about what was going on in the market, I dove in. I started to buy all the things I didn't recognize, didn't understand, and didn't normally eat. I figured out how to eat cactus -- it's delicious, though tricky, like a strange combination of asparagus and okra -- then I went for chayote, except that while I was studying it there on the counter at home, trying to decide what to do with it, Corrinne dove in and fried it up with potatoes, onions, garlic and mint. The kids, who had never seen a guava until about two months ago now plow through about 10 a day. At first we scooped the seeds out, but then we noticed the locals never do that so now we just eat them whole, seeds and all. They're also big fans of the *elote*, boiled corn on the cob you can get on just about every corner.
+
+When thanksgiving rolled around we wanted the foods we were excited about and that happened to be tamales, chayote and tomtillos, so that's what we made, and man was it good. So good it makes you thankful that you have the opportunity to explore food rather than be ruled by it, by the need for it, as so many are here and everywhere. Thankful that another country would even let you come to it, let alone have free run of the place to meet it's people enjoy it's foods. Thanks Mexico, we are in your debt.
diff --git a/holidays.txt b/holidays.txt
index 0b67829..a392eb3 100644
--- a/holidays.txt
+++ b/holidays.txt
@@ -1,3 +1,3 @@
 Every year I sit down and the kids and I dig through the photos for the year, pick our favorites, usually around 200, and then we have them printed and put some in a photo book and some get hung around the bus or wherever we happen to be. This year that process trigger more emotion than usual.
 
-Around the same time a friend asked if we missed the bus. Then another. I never really answered, but yes, we definitely miss the bus, we miss a lot about the life we were leading, but right now the reality is that's not where we want to be. It's possible to be doing what you know you want to do, but also wish you were doing something else. 
+Around the same time a friend asked if we missed the bus. Then another. I never really answered, but yes, we definitely miss the bus, we miss a lot about the life we were leading, but right now the reality is that's not where we want to be. It doesn't fit with many of the narratives popular just now, but it is possible to be doing what you want to do, but also wish you were doing something else. 
diff --git a/navidad.txt b/navidad.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..442d0d7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/navidad.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
+I'm working on a backlog of posts right now, so even though this will be dated early December, it's actually Christmas eve. Bells are ringing from several churches, but otherwise it's a quite night, not much celebrating. It could be too early, or it could be that Mexico just isn't that big on celebrating Christmas.
+
+
+
+I've never lived in a culture that was so hard working an so devoted to family. These are things that I grew up hearing people talk about -- hard work and family -- but I've never actually seen it like I see it here. Which is not meant to denigrate people in other places, hard work is not a zero sum game, but here work and life flow together with no real strong boundaries like you'd find in the States, for example.
+
+My favorite example of this is bus drivers. In the United States if you drive a bus, you wear a uniform and, aside from your face and body shape, you are largely indistinguishable from whomever is driving the next bus. Chances are, when you get off you park the bus and go home. It's not in any meaningful way, your bus or even your work, you are by design an meaningless cog in a profit wheel where most of the profits go to someone other than you. I could make a good case that this is an awful way to live, severely limits your humanity, leads to depression and dissatisfaction with your work and life, and is one of the more profound and overwhelming problems in American culture, but we won't get into that here.
+
+Instead consider the Mexican bus driver. His bus is his bus. Her bus is her bus. The dashboard is given over to shrines of La Virgen de Guadalupe, or whomever their patron saint might be, along with photos of family, friends, wives, children, what have you. Usually there's a crucifix and some pithy quotes about god, country and most importantly, family. Mi familia, Mi Trabajo, Mi Vida, was one I saw. I don't know where the buses get parked at night, but I do know that the next day the same person is driving the same bus. Mi familia, Mi Trabajo, Mi Vida. 
+
+For me this helps to make sense of 
+
+> I wanted to test myself. And that long ride nearly beat me. It was so hard. Many times I almost quit but my friends who came with me kept me going. And I kept them going. Many strangers gave us food and a place to sleep. We experienced a big change in our hearts. We learned that our families are our greatest treasure. I want to keep working hard for my family and for Mexico -- Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe! <cite><a href="https://changesinourlives.wordpress.com/2018/12/12/even-blurry-photos-are-worth-a-thousand-words/">a pilgrim quoted on changes in our lives</a>.</cite>
+
+
+k
+Temple to Tonantzin on the hill of Tepeyac
+Before the Spanish conquest, there was a temple of adoration to the goddess Tonantzin, which was attended by settlers from all over the Anahuac country, as the federation of tribes was called. Stories collected by the Spanish friars give an account of this: the Mexicas and other Nahua people believed that on the top of the hill of Tepeyac the mother of the gods appeared:
+
+“The goddess, was very venerated by the natives. According to them, she appeared to one of them at a time in the form of a young girl in a white robe, and revealed secret things to the person “. Fray Juan de Torquemada in “Monarquía India” – 1615.
+
+Cerro del Tepeyac
+
+Fray Bernardino de Sahagún said in his texts that in the mountain called Tepeaca or Tepeyac, they had a temple dedicated to the mother of all the gods, they called Tonantzin, to whom they made many sacrifices; Men and women from all the regions came saying “Let’s go to Tonantzin’s festivity”.
+The Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman warns in some of his notes that by the year of 1530 the Franciscan friars built a hermitage dedicated to the Spanish virgin trying to replace a pagan rite with a Catholic one.
diff --git a/se-renta.txt b/se-renta.txt
index 0f84ee0..6c98a84 100644
--- a/se-renta.txt
+++ b/se-renta.txt
@@ -11,8 +11,51 @@ But here's a rough number for a family of five, barring unforeseen expenses, whi
 
 
 
+
+
 We spend just over half that in Mexico, sans bus. 
 
+Part of it is that some things are cheaper here. Though really, not that much cheaper. I'd say food, which makes up the largest part of our budget, is about 30% less here. That's nothing to sneeze at, it helps for sure, but it's not the real reason it's cheaper to live in Mexico.
+
+When I take a hard look at the spreadsheet, and then rotate it sideways to get a new perspective, what really jumps out is the "miscellaneous" category. I don't get real fine grained with categories so miscellaneous holds everything that is not gas, food, lodging or vehicle repair. Basically it hold the non-essentials.
+
+Why is the category larger for us in the US? After spending some time meditating on this I have a very simple answer: in Mexico you are not bombarded with advertising. Mexico has pretty much everything the United States has, but it's no in your face 24/7. Shops do not have windows, most do not even have a way to browse through stuff. Instead you walk in, tell the person what you need, the person asks small medium or large and then goes rummaging around to find what you want.
+
+Everything you buy here comes from your own mind first and is found second. 
+
+In the United States everything is presented and then your mind decides what to buy. 
+
+One of these models will leave more money in your pocket than the other.
+
+I like to think I am immune to advertising, that I am smarter than the advertisers, that I resist the never-ending onslaught of stuff, but my spreadsheet says otherwise. And I don't even own a TV, how much more would I be buying if I watched television?i
+
+And it's not that I'm comparing many years of life in the U.S to just three months in Mexico. Comparing the U.S. to Mexico is not what made me notice this, it was comparing the time we spent in the bus without a car, vs the time we had a car that made it painfully obvious. It's very simple: given a car and easy access to everything, we spent more. Take away the access and we spent less. Mexico also takes away the access, so we spend less here to. But it's not the situations or places, it's us.
+
+I am not immune. You are not immune. We all fall victim to advertising. 
+
+Advertising is a debased form of magic, which is another way of saying it's powerful, but there are things more powerful. The most important of those is your will. If you want control over what you consume, you're going to have to strengthen your will. So long as you are surrounded by signals that are trying to get you to spend money on crap, it is going to be an uphill battle.
+
+If you can I strongly suggest removing yourself from the signals. If you have the ability to travel to somewhere you don't speak the language and is outside the general sphere of western advertising then do it. Spend a month tracking your spending to the penny. Then move away for a month and track your spending again. Observe the difference. Now that you see mediate on why it exists.
+
+If, like most people, you can't pick and move to foreign country for a month then you're going to have to try to change in the midst of the battle so to speak. While possible, this is much much harder. And again, while I like to think I have mastered this, my spreadsheet says otherwise, so take this advice with a grain of salt. Chances are good that this actually much harder than you or I think and you're going to need to put in more effort than I'm suggesting.
+
+The most important thing is to develop your will. I am serious. Start doing exercises to develop your will. For example, force your self up out of the chair right now, turn away from the computer and walk to the nearest wall. Touch it. Come back and sit down. Repeat this at random during the day. Is it pointless? Absolutely. So is lifting weights. The principle is the same. So choose a deliberately pointless thing to do, and do it. Then do another one. Then do the same thing every morning for a week. 
+
+One will-building exercise I do periodically is what I call, for lack of a better phrase, micro travel. It works like this: pick a place at random in the city you live, somewhere you've never been. Choose a time and make an appointment with yourself. Now go work out all the details of getting there, if possible use public transit or walk. Then meet yourself there and make sure you're there on time. Now enjoy a few minutes exploring the area and head home.
+
+I'll leave thinking up other exercises to you, but the point is to develop your will, to have control over your life. It takes a little time to see and feel the effects of this, it's quite subtle, but it will cascade throughout your life in a number of interesting ways, I promise. One will be better control over your impulses. When you walk into, say Target, to buy a new toothbrush your newly developed will will make it easier to walk past everything else and only buy the toothbrush. 
+
+Eventually your will may help you recognize that stores that have everything are too much for your will. It would be cleverer to buy that toothbrush at a smaller store with fewer things, because it's easier to remove temptation than resist it. Think of it like dieting. If you're trying to eat less ice cream it's much easier to not walk down the ice cream aisle at all than it is to walk down it and without buying anything.
+
+This also leads into my second suggestion for buying less stuff: change your habits. It's convenient to go to Target and get everything you need in one place, but chances are you're going to spend more than you intended without realizing it. In fact the entire experience of being in Target has been engineered to increase the chance you'll spend more than you intended. Every time you enter a store you are entering a hostile environment designed to extract your life energy from you. 
+
+Oh sure it's all abstracted so you don't have think of it that way. Still, strip the abstraction and relationship is pretty clear, you trade hours of your life for shit you buy at Target. You get up the morning and go to work. That's a day of your life you just traded for paper tickets. Why do you need those tickets? To put a roof over your head and food in your stomach. Pretty much everything after that is not strictly necessary. So once those basics are met you're in th realm of swapping your existence on earth for stuff. 
+
+The less stuff you buy, the less you need to work. By extension, the less time you spend in places designed to extract money from you, the less of your life you'll have to trade for stuff.
+
+That's a habit you can break -- going to all-in-one-place stores -- but there are other habits you can build that will help immensely as well. 
+
+
 
 One of the things I've been at pains to avoid is making it sound like we don't like the United States. In fact we do very much, it's one of the most beautiful places in the world and has some of the wildest and safest wilderness you're ever going to enter. 
 
@@ -59,12 +102,20 @@ If we keep the bus what needs to be done?
     - Additional solar panels - 160W flex for 280, 100W flex for 205 ~ $600 for 320W or $400 for 200
     - MPPT controller $400
     - 12V fridge - $1000 vitfrigo
-    - rear rack - $300
-    - shelves in closet $100
-    - toilet $150
+    - rear rack - $220
+    - shelves in closet $80
+    - toilet aqua magic iv $120
     - paint bathroom
     - redo area around air-con/shelf with pots and pans
     - counter water damage around sink
     - leaks? 
 
-600+400+1000+300+150+100
+600+400+1000+220+120+80
+
+Travco window seals:
+
+Cr Laurence is where I got mine but when installed I cannot slide the window, but it is closest I have found . I lubed no luck so next step is to take some of the flock out with knife or grind. Another source is dk hardware is where I found my vent window flex channel
+
+John Galloway Sorry the cr Laurence came from dk hardware and vent window flex channel came from Pelland
+
+New headlights: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001G72SKQ/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1&fbclid=IwAR0QSHKWOv2pU8uKkvs_EPP-6kJQeRQORaVkiqvEcCl9OREacIma95WRAzo (as per Paul Zueke)
diff --git a/unused/unused.txt b/unused/unused.txt
index 739500f..a81cdab 100644
--- a/unused/unused.txt
+++ b/unused/unused.txt
@@ -1,4 +1,40 @@
 
+
+
+
+The place we're staying in at the moment is on one of the main streets leading up the hill the Paroqia area, the main church and town square[^1]. It's the main way out of the city to the west. 
+
+
+
+To pick a very simple example, if you're American you "know" that you drive on the right. If you go to Britain, or a former British colony, that's no longer true. That's a tiny, not too difficult to overcome, example. 
+
+Imagine that sort of undercutting of your knowledge happening for just about every single thing you want to do in the course of living day to day and you can imagine what it's like to go abroad for an extended period of time. 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The United States is not a good value for the money.
+
+I happen to really enjoy this sort of adventure, which doesn't mean it's any easier for me, but it does help if you enjoy it since it's at least somewhat enjoyable even as it's both physically, mentally and emotionally draining.
+
+
+All binary reductions are wrong. That said, there are, broadly speaking, two basic approaches to life:
+
+Adapt the world to you. 
+Adapt to the world.
+
+Contrary to what some people will say embracing either of these approaches exclusively is a bad idea.
+
+Generally speaking is more difficult to adapt the world to you. It typically requires much more money, time and effort on your part. Still, if that's what makes you happy, then by all means. And good luck.
+
+At the same time, there are some things that you simply cannot adapt to. Lack of potable water for instance is not something you can adapt to
+
+[^1]: For those unfamiliar, almost every town in Mexico, and most of central america is centered around a Catholic church of some sort and a main plaza area, generally, though not always, referred to as "centro".
+
+---
+
 This was really the first time I started thinking about the shirt as anything more than something for shock value. Once you get past that initial shock though, the shirt raises more questions than it answers. What is our society? Who are we? The shirt is deceptive in that way. At first is seems like banal, simplistic view of anarchy, "fuck capitalism" or the like. But it's not. The shirt isn't picking out some part that's wrong, it's saying fuck *everything*. Everything? Everything.
 
 This is not the political anarchy of historical figures like Emma Goldman, Rudolf Rocker, Alexander Berkman, Hannah Arendt or other names your probably white, probably bearded professor put on a syllabus. Most of them said *fuck what's wrong*[^1]. 
diff --git a/why.txt b/why.txt
index d53c10b..6ac8f3b 100644
--- a/why.txt
+++ b/why.txt
@@ -12,6 +12,7 @@ Still, there’s another aspect, and it’s one that the essay by Douglas Coupla
 I’ve talked about two of these possibilities at some length in posts here. The first can be summed up simply enough in a cheery sentence:  “Collapse now and avoid the rush!”  In an age of economic contraction—and behind the current facade of hallucinatory paper wealth, we’re already in such an age—nothing is quite so deadly as the attempt to prop up extravagant lifestyles that the real economy of goods and services will no longer support. Those who thrive in such times are those who downshift ahead of the economy, take the resources that would otherwise be wasted on attempts to sustain the unsustainable, and apply them to the costs of transition to less absurd ways of living. The acronym L.E.S.S.—“Less Energy, Stuff, and Stimulation”—provides a good first approximation of the direction in which such efforts at controlled collapse might usefully move.o
 
 In the early days of this blog, I pointed out that technological progress has a feature that’s not always grasped by its critics, much less by those who’ve turned faith in progress into the established religion of our time. Very few new technologies actually meet human needs that weren’t already being met, and so the arrival of a new technology generally leads to the abandonment of an older technology that did the same thing. The difficulty here is that new technologies nowadays are inevitably more dependent on global technostructures, and the increasingly brittle and destructive economic systems that support them, than the technologies they replace. New technologies look more efficient than old ones because more of the work is being done somewhere else, and can therefore be ignored—for now.
+
 This is the basis for what I’ve called the externality trap. As technologies get more complex, that complexity allows more of their costs to be externalized—that is to say, pushed onto someone other than the makers or users of the technology. The pressures of a market economy guarantee that those economic actors who externalize more of their costs will prosper at the expense of those who externalize less. The costs thus externalized, though, don’t go away; they get passed from hand to hand like hot potatoes and finally pile up in the whole systems—the economy, the society, the biosphere itself—that have no voice in economic decisions, but are essential to the prosperity and survival of every economic actor, and sooner or later those whole systems will break down under the burden.  Unlimited technological progress in a market economy thus guarantees the economic, social, and/or environmental destruction of the society that fosters it.
 
 the more complex and integrated technologies become, the more externalities they will generate. It’s precisely because technological complexity makes it easy to ignore externalized costs that progress becomes its own nemesis.