What can I say? We skied. A lot. It was great.
Trish’s skiing is coming along nicely. She can keep up with me at my preferred pace, even if she is a little out of control at that speed. But she’s tough! Got airborne and hit a fence. Trish 3, Fence nil - both cross-members and paling broke, and Trish got up and skied away. Impressive.
I improved too. As usual the big improvements came right in the last minutes of the last day. I guess this is because my holiday is over anyway and I’m prepared to take more risk. I shared the lift with a fellow who took off with such confidence and good technique that I decided to follow and learn. He charged aggressively down a face I normally handle somewhat uncomfortably and at much lower speed, and I threw caution to the wind and gave chase.
That particular face is full of small moguls that are a bit crusty from refreeze, but charging down it much faster than common sense would allow was – surprisingly – easier.
It was very interesting how much “softer” the run was at a much higher pace. I can only surmise that it’s a bit like driving on corrugations: there’s an inertial limit to how fast your body can go up and down, and if you go fast enough even the unsprung portion starts to float over small stuff. So the refrozen crud stops mattering.
Of course, I can’t claim all the credit. Kate is a very good instructor and her coaching got my posture and balance on the mend in just one session. Next season I think I’ll start with a couple of days’ warm up and then another session. And then I’ll try a much higher pace.
Kate taught me a few things to do with balance and posture, which is what I asked for, but it’s more… dynamic. The right place to be depends on a lot of things not least among which is what’s going to happen next. When you leave the groom and get aggressive there’s no single right answer, except possibly “keep your options open”.
It’s about returning to the neutral position and gathering yourself to surge up and over each turn. It’s more energetic, but it’s so efficient you just rip along! On the groom in big lazy arcs each flowing into the next, and in the pills going up and like a cross between a jack-in-the-box and a machine-gun. No more excuses, now I have to be a lot fitter. I can do this. Now I want to be able to do it without breathing hard. Without breathing quite so hard.
I’d like to go back to Mt Hotham. I suspect I would enjoy it a lot more now. And Thredbo… I reckon I’d carve it up now. Or it might be disappointing and somehow smaller. You can dream, but you can never go back the way you came.
Back in the day, the US made things. Lots of primary, secondary and tertiary production. Food, cars, tools, industrial machinery and so forth. Equipped with everything it needed to go from ore-in-ground to product-on-shelf, and providing all the knowhow and labour, and even a large market to consume the produce, economies of scale translated more or less directly into profit.
It was not strictly necessary to sell at a profit. This placed the US very nicely to destroy any competitors by selling at a loss for as long as it took. Once competition had been eliminated, prices were raised and losses recovered. The US was hardly the first nation to behave like this, but it was probably the biggest and most effective.
But the US no longer exports much of anything, except possibly guns and political trouble. This is a bit of a worry for us here in Australia: lingua franca literally means language of money, and US was the economic mainstay of the English speaking world. The British Empire is long gone, the American star wanes and trade winds, I fear, all blow east.
This may be mitigated by the face that alphabetic languages are far better suited to use with computers, and by the fact that English is better suited to rapid technological change.
Western nations use elected representational government (ERG). The notion behind this type of organisation is that people, grouped by geographic region, elect representatives - people whose task it is to determine and further the will and interests of their electorate.
Winston Churchill is famous for saying that democracy is the worst of all possible systems, except for all the other ones. It is more than reasonable to assume he meant ERG, but ERG and democracy are not the same thing, and so I categorically disagree with him. Believe it or not you can have democracy without any government at all. No, I don’t mean anarchy, I mean administration. We’ll get to that presently.
The precepts of ERG are in general noble, but the fact remains that any government is such a concentration of power that it begs for exploitation. Thus we get political parties: semi-commercial groups whose explicit purpose is to exploit that concentration of power.
Membership in a such a group is a gross conflict of interest. It used to astonish me that such people are eligible to hold office. Then it came to me that this is much the same as legalising the personal use of marijuana: if we embrace the inevitable, we can have orderly public use rather than a clandestine debacle.
There are a number of problems inherent in ERG. We will examine some of them, then consider an alternative that has the qualities for which ERG is prized, yet is exempt from its most profound flaws.
- ERG encourages corruption by providing significant opportunity and motive.
- ERG is a form of government rather than administration.
- The party-based implementation of ERG is not and cannot be representative.
- ERG selects from the pool of people who run for office. The people who want to tell other people how to live are exactly the wrong people to give such power.
- ERG inexorably slides from freedom-to to freedom-from.
Elections stop the nation and cost a mint, so ERG uses “terms of office” of several years to mitigate the overheads. Unfortunately this means there are long periods in which the incumbent party members do not feel particularly beholden to their constituents, and make little or no attempt to represent their will or interests.
Party politics quantise policy. When there is a change of ruling party, there is a large and abrupt change in policy which is disruptive and very expensive.
Parties are far more able to afford and manage large scale PR, severely inhibiting the election of anyone lacking party affiliation and making genuinely representative government extremely unlikely.
There are two sorts of freedom: freedom-to and freedom-from. ERG tends to devolve into what has been called a nanny state. The reasons are many and complex but since ERGs the world over exhibit this pattern the specifics lose relevance and the shift from freedom-to toward freedom-from can reasonably be regarded as intrinsic to ERG.
The degeneration to freedom-from is perhaps the most diabolical issue with ERG. Every attempt to make things better only makes them worse. It were never more true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Quite frequently the members of an ERG government are even aware of the problem and actively resisting it, but the change is an emergent quality of ERG and is inevitable and inexorable.
The only way out of this trap is to restore all responsibility and power to the individual.
But individuals can’t built cars or bridges or spacecraft. That takes many acting as one. What can we do?
Rostering. Everyone cyclically rostered to hold a post in the administration. And everyone rostered out again, putting every would-be scoundrel at the mercy of those previously in their power and making “do unto others…” into a behaviour with real and immediate survival value.
The key is to make cheating profitless, and cooperation the safest, most pleasant course. There will be a level of self-indulgence, but everyone will have their turn and those who fail to show some restraint will soon wish they had, incidentally serving as a lesson to anyone who hadn’t figured it out.
No big-bang changing of the guard, but progressively overlapped terms of service so that at any moment there are a few old-hands, many who know what they are doing and a few greenhorns.
No elections means no pork-barrelling. Projects that aren’t glamorous might stand a chance since they don’t have to be sold to the electorate, and constant new blood will inhibit cronyism and bring a stream of new ideas.
For the first time in human history we would actually have rule of the people by the people. Sometimes I worry that the people aren’t up to the job, but then I realise they couldn’t do a worse job than the self-centred cretins currently in charge, and they just might do a better job of it – especially since taking responsibility will make them grow as people, and they will have a sense that what they think and do does matter.
Finally, no Them. No “They ought to” or “there ought to be a law” because there is no Them, it’s just you and me. The buck doesn’t stop here, but it’s up to me (and you) to hold it for a while, to polish it up and to proudly pass it on.