Thread by @homemadeguitars

What I'm doing, with my writing, is I'm dreaming.
I'm a repairman. I don't do any original research or anything, I just gather up trouble reports and from them form a hypothesis of the nature of the system failure, and how to correct it.

When you're a system repairman, you don't view trouble reports as discrete events, you view them as data points defining a cause event.
You compare the report items to a properly functioning system, and observe the difference.
Action sequences radiate through the system.

3. Where those action sequences come together, is your failure point.
To see that you have to understand the flows of energy through the system, how the thing works, where energy goes in, how it travels, where it comes out, where it missed the failure point.
Understand Enough.

4. So - it's not a set of negotiating points I'm proposing. It's a hypothesis. It might be wrong. It might be right. But - it's a thought exercise. Well, it's also an action plan, which I am executing in real time in public view, but - a thought exercise.

5. That's why I'm so impatient with discussions of whether it's a good idea, whether "People would."
It's like saying, "People won't gravity." Well of course they will.
And like any system view, it is impossible to see all, or even most, of the possible variations in detail.

6. As an example which might make sense if I can tell it clearly...
When I worked in the Hedrick Central Office in Johnson County, Kansas, you could physically trace a call through the office, running up and down stairs, finding relays operated, consulting a chart, running

7. To another part of the machine two or twenty or fifty aisles apart, do it again...
The path, which wires your voice traveled on, was physical and could be viewed.
Say you wanted to call your friend across the street. You'd dial her number, and the machine I worked in would

8. Take specific actions with each number you dialed. Relays would operate and release, the machine would find an available path through itself from the cable pair the came from your house, to the cable pair that goes to her house, connect it all together, and ring her phone.

9. Our machine directly served, hard wired into it from their houses, roughly 40,000 subscribers, 40,000 telephone numbers and lines.
From XXX-0000 to 9999 is ten thousand lines. We had 4 exchanges in our machine.
The number of different paths to connect your house to hers,

10. Was some vast, but calculable, number of different paths. Ten times the first hop, maybe 20 times the second, a 40-choice third hop, another 20, another 10, and the final one choice to directly across the street from where you live, one specific twisted pair of wires.

11. The entry conditions plus the requirements define the steps necessary to reach the output condition. But many of those steps lay parallel, this one or that one would get you where you need to go.
For instance, I talk donkeys, and donkeys are the energy ideal, but

12. In the United States if we woke up tomorrow morning and tractor fuel was not available, what we would have to hand would be cattle.
And cattle work. Cattle have worked with humans since way long ago, maybe as long as donkeys or camels, probably way longer than horses.

13. People could buy weaned calves and by the time they were grown they could pull plows and wagons.
Think "People won't"?
People might be damn grateful to.
I don't know what tomorrow brings, but surprises have been coming pretty regularly lately.

14. But anyway - that just demonstrated what I'm doing. I don't have a TV, you know, and I've gotta do something.
So I think stuff up and tweet about it.
🤷