One of the cool things about hell* is that you’re allowed to break stuff without guilt. Smash the furniture. Write on the walls in your own excrement. Hell is the worst place possible, so anything at all you do there would change it for the better (Like a maximally random jigsaw puzzle could be partially solved by lying on top of it and having a seizure). It’s fun to break stuff, and it’d be a shame to wait until the afterlife to start. Thankfully, I have an incantation that flings the gates of hell wide open:

“Here’s my views on sex and gender.”

Any discussion about sex and gender immediately becomes the worst conversation in the whole world. They all share this status, somehow. Everyone has an opinion, everyone brings emotional baggage to the subject, and nobody ever changes their mind. It is the most shrill, unpleasant, fact-averse topic of discussion on the internet.

That said, if we’re not afraid of breaking thngs…

For complicated reasons, humans have evolved into dimorphic sexes: male and female. Although this is biologically instantiated in our chromosomes, our sex has various outwards signs (bone structure, facial hair, sex organs, etc), which we call a gender.

Why do we need such thing as a gender? Because primitive humans had no way of telling whether someone has XX or XY chromosomes (nor can the average person today) so we needed fairly obvious outwards signs. And it works. Usually you can tell what someone’s sex is without even being aware of what chromosomes are. Diamonds are strictly defined as octahedronal lattices of carbon atoms, but a jeweller doesn’t need to fire up an electron microscope to tell whether something’s a diamond. A diamond leaves outward signs of its own nature.

Sex is the reality, gender is the signal.

But in the case of humans, sometimes the signs don’t match the reality. Sometimes accidents of nature (androgen insensitivity, sexual aphallia) or social choices (Ru Paul’s Drag Race) will leave a male displaying signs of femininity, or vice versa. What do we do in these cases, where the signs don’t match the reality?

Let’s break away from diamonds, and consider ships.

Some ships belong to England, some belong to Spain. To help differentiate them, they fly a flag of the nation that owns them. If you see a ship flying the Union Jack, you assume it belongs to England.

But suppose an English ship takes down the Union Jack, and runs a Spanish flag up the mizzenmast (ie, dressing in drag). What’s changed, exactly? Has it now become a Spanish ship? No. It might confuse other ships into thinking so, but absolutely nothing at the level of reality has changed. It’s still an English ship.

Suppose Queen Elizabeth sells the ship to King Philip (ie, transgenderism). Has it become a Spanish ship?

You can make an argument for or against. It is now subject to Spanish maritime law and can journey into Spain-controlled waters. But there’s a sense in which it’s still not a Spanish ship, and will never be a Spanish ship.

Up until now, I’ve assumed that English ships and Spanish ships are exactly equal, beyond the property of who owns them. That’s not the case for the human sexes. Men tend to be larger and stronger. Women carry more body fat. What if English ships have shallower drafts and narrower hulls, making them better for navigating rivers? And what if Spanish ships have wider beams and more ballast, making them better for navigating oceans? Has Queen Elizabeth selling a ship to King Philip changed anything about the nature of the ship? No, it hasn’t.

Presumeably, if Christopher Columbus asks for a Spanish ship, he doesn’t give a shit what flag is flying on its mast, or what piece of paper belongs to what person. All he wants is a ship that can cross an ocean! If King Philip gives him a purchased English ship, he’s not going to be happy, regardless of who insists it’s now a Spanish ship.

Sadly, I think this is the case for a lot of transgendered folk. Their bodies bear obvious signs of who they were. Women are not normally six feet tall, with hands big enough to palm a basketball. Men are not normally. They can think they’ve changed their gender, and society might decree that they’ve changed their gender, but ultimately, the signs are still in conflict with reality.

The only option is to haul the, hack away and refurbish the hull, so that it kind of looks like a Spanish ship (transsexualism). We cannot do this very convincingly for humans.

*Though it depends on which hell you are formulating. The Bible conceives hell as. Some of these places are dark and cold, others are burning hot. The Islamic hell is more explicitly the latter. “The person who will receive the least punishment among the people of Hell on the Day Resurrection will be a man, a smoldering ember will be placed under the arch of his foot. His brains will boil because of it.” Pure Land Buddhism has many hells you can end up in, the most fearsome of which is Avici. It lasts for trillions of years, and has iron snakes, iron dogs, and iron walls. You can die there but will always be reborn inside. And presumeably you must take a pill, to prove to it that you are cool.

What’s the big advantage of having a monopoly? That you make lots of money?

No. It’s that you can enjoy a quiet life.

Traditional businesses succeed or fail by a power law. When you start one, you are staring down the barrel of a 71% failure rate over ten years. Success will depend on various factors, many of which you cannot control. And even if you succeed, uneasy hangs the head that wears the crown. Your continued success requires luck, skill, ability to respond to market changes, and on a long enough scale all businesses fail anyway. Uber (according to Yves Smith) is apparently “succeeding” by kicking the can down the alley, postponing the date of its inevitable failure until the guys at the top cash out.

But a monopolist is free. Free to grow complancent, free to deliver substandard products and services. When there’s no rivals nipping at your heels, you can walk, or trudge, or even sit down. You can even go backwards.

Piers Anthony once had an editor point out a continuity error, and he defended himself by saying “anything can happen in Xanth.” Monopolies have the same dubious virtue – anything can happen in them! As far as I can tell, this is the central argument to be made against monopolies, they have no reason to be excellent, or to do anything beyond ensuring that they continue to exist. It’s not as simple as the monopolist not having any competitors. I can imagine scenarios where a single monolithic entity produces excellent work. But there clearly needs to be some kind of pressure, otherwise innovation and quality in a market dawdles.

It’s a difficult pill to swallow, because other than this problem, you’d expect a monopolistic business to outperform a business in competition. Global co-ordination. The ability to leverage economics of scale. No wasted resources spent fighting competitors.

You could even argue that a benevolent monopoly would be in the interests of consumers. A big issue with fractured, balkanized industries is that they are susceptible to negative externalities – if I own a factory in Region 1 that pollutes a river running through Regions 2 and 3, sans regulations I might say “not my problem”. But if I own all the factories in all the regions (and hence am accountable to all customers), then maybe I’ll take pollution seriously.

A state can fulfill this role to an extent, but they’re not really anyone’s go-to example of efficiency par excellence (see Shturmovshchina), and an ideal solution seems like a fusion: how do we combine the best features of the free market (competitive drive, innovation, efficiency) without the crappy gridlock and balkanisation?

I don’t know that if this would just be good to have. I think we might need it. I was reading about nuclear power, and what’s stalling it in the US. It seems to be dying a death from a thousand cuts, including ever-changing regulations, competing standards, PR disasters such as 3 Mile Island and Fukushima, and the lack of a stable and reproducible plant model. Looming above everything, like Zeus throwing thunderbolts, is the fact that nobody’s on the same page.

“…our electricity sector is split up among dozens of different utilities and state regulators. As a result, US nuclear vendors had to develop dozens of variations on the light-water reactor to satisfy a variety of customers. “

(They also mention a few interesting things: although high-profile disasters didn’t help public acceptance of nuclear energy, construction of new plants was already tapering away before 3 Mile Island.)

The article also looks at the countries that have gotten this right, they mostly seem to have either state-owned utilities or a single industry working on a single solution. But statecraft also has the ability to choke nuclear power, as we see in France. What’s the solution? A market monopoly over nuclear energy, perhaps? But that introduces another wrinkle – this is really something we really need the regulation of a state over. Success means nuclear power lighting up America. Failure means…the exact same thing.

When I was born, Australia had lots of wilderness and very few computers. I didn’t like this arrangement. But now that we have less wilderness and more computers every day, I’m starting to relax. My side is winning the war.

The years keep coming, and we need all of the computers we can get. They’re under our control. Predictable. Every single one of them has a known state, known behavior, and a known purpose. No more of them exist than we desire to exist. Nobody ever woke up and had to weed unwanted computers from their front lawn.

The world’s getting too big, too complex, and too interconnected for unpredictability. I want every idea, thought, and entity to either submit itself to humanity’s control or die. The big killer in the modern world isn’t technology, it’s wildness – by which I mean chaos, and unpredictability.

Cars are big stupid blocks of metal, exerting only a few hundred thousand joules of kinetic energy on impact. Meanwhile, the United States has thousands of nuclear warheads, each of which would release dozens of petajoules of energy on detonation. Yet cars massacre hundreds of thousands annually, while nuclear explosions have killed nobody in years not ending with “4” and “5”. You know why? Because are nukes are domesticated and cars are wild.

You could invent a disease par excellence, such as an airborn variant of Ebola, and so long as it stayed in a test tube or petri dish it would infect nobody. Meanwhile, 36,000 die per year thanks to the flu. It’s like having a foolproof plan to beat Mike Tyson/Mr Dream and instead you get knocked out by Glass Joe.

There’s a prayer that goes “God, don’t give me a lighter load, give me a stronger back.” Safety follows a similar precept: we don’t need a less dangerous world, we need a better control on that danger. And anyway, the world will keep getting more dangerous anyway, so what choice do we have?

I like the idea of a more mechanized world. Roads with perfect right angle intersections. Hills graded flat, so nobody has to switch gears. Maybe there’s a point where someone recognises me as wildness, but so far the domestication of our autonomous bodies has produced good fruit (glasses, artificial limbs, “Vote for Pedro” shirts for the continuation of one’s virginity, etc) and I’m interested in what happens next..

But there’s a risk: what happens when computers start to become wild? In September 2016, a malware called Mirai spread across the internet, brute-forcing unsecured devices using a table of common default usernames and passwords. The resultant effect was very wild: a large botnet of thousands of devices, capable of crashing web servers with a massive 1Tb/s influx of traffic. At the moment, such chaotic effects are only possible through human mismanagement. At the interface of the computers themselves, a transistor can only be on or off. Not much room for stochasm between those two points.

Maybe one day, we’ll have quantum computers that are capable of spontaneous wildness. They’d be machines par excellence, the highest echelon of computerhood. I’ve always been impressed by how the education of computers the same as the education of humans, just with the direction arrow reverse. They start out sane, and have to learn to be mad.