I don’t disagree with John Michael Greer on much, but I strongly disagree with the below.

Sooner or later, probably in the next two decades, the United States will be forced to default on its national debt, the way Russia did in 1998.

No. People misunderstand why Russia defaulted. It did so because it had extremely high foreign-denominated debt obligations, which the US does not and likely will never have. And because of war, the empire collapsing and numerous other factors.

If the US fissures, all bets are off. But in the next two decades? I doubt it. Eventually, though, everything fails. That’s not a prediction; that’s a certitude, a tautology, so I don’t pay attention to that.

The US is a sovereign nation with a fiat currency. It can always pay its own debt in its own currency and would be utterly foolish not to do so.

No, the US’s failure mode will be different, but I can almost guarantee that it will not involve defaulting on its national debt — which isn’t really debt at all as most people mean it.

If you own two wallets and take some money out of one and put it in the other wallet, does the first wallet owe debt to the second wallet? They’re both your wallets. To whom or what is that debt owed? You still have the same amount of money as you did before, it’s just in a different wallet.

This is why “national debt” is meaningless how most people — including Greer — use it. The US monetary regime is not like your checking account or savings account (or even like your wallet, despite my metaphor above). It’d be nice if it was, but it just isn’t.

The problem I have with the writings of people like Terry Pratchett who are supposed to be “clever” is that it all feels like a cheap parlor trick for me. Any trick you can do probably feels that way, I’d imagine.

I once had a teacher who would not listen to any piano music that she could play herself. Being a very good pianist, not much remained for her ears. But I understood what she meant, and I understand it all the more now.

Though I am a bit more liberal in my writing consumption, I do have trouble reading writing that I’ve effectively already produced myself in copious amounts. When I was younger I thought folks like Pratchett were worth of emulation, artful in their wit, adroit in their manipulation of language. So I wrote like them.

Then I turned 10.

I’m not saying that liking things like Pratchett is childish. Taste is taste. No accounting for it.

What I’m saying is that it does not appeal to me because it is my métier. I don’t need someone to show me how to make the shoes. I’m already a cobbler. I turned 10 and could write like Pratchett with one hemisphere tied behind my back.

These days, I appreciate works more subtly constructed, where the writer is not at the forefront, not dancing on the stage crying, “Look at me, look at how clever and fun I am!” I select art that I could not have forged from any fire within myself: Adrienne Rich and Dante, Annie Dillard and Battlestar Galactica, Yeats and Rimbaud and Jo Walton.

Like my teacher from another life, another place, another me, I appreciate works that I couldn’t have created, and sometimes could not even have imagined.

The problem with experts is that if they are interested in stealing the contents of your wallet — as they often are — then trusting them is a huge mistake.

Since much expertise in the US these days is aimed at such auric annexation, distrusting professional experts is extremely wise from a risk-reward perspective.

Health care: experts stealing your money. College: Same. Economists: Yep. Auto mechanics: Yep. Career training: That too. City planners: See above. Etc.

Though it will lead you often down bad paths with climate change expertise being a prime example, the contents of your pocketbook remain unmolested if you reflexively mistrust expert opinion. That is one reason why it is attractive to do so.

Hey, GitLab, want to hire me? For six figures I can save you from losing seven figures or going out of business completely.

I’ve never had a production data loss past RPO in any company I’ve ever managed the IT for.

Recently saved a small company I consult for from vital data loss due to encryption ransomware because I had good backups. This data loss would’ve set them back months. Was also on a team at a much-larger company — where I still work — that revamped backups for a 3500+ server 2PB environment (yes, that is petabytes. I bet you don’t even have that much).

Also, a backup strategy that is never tested is worth precisely nothing. You have no backups, as you are discovering.

I’m experienced with cloud operations, too – Azure mostly, but AWS isn’t exactly rocket science.

One thing I can guarantee is that if you hire me, you’ll have working, foolproof backups within three months. Within six months, you can destroy all your disks in your main data center and I’ll have you back running in less than an hour.

Will it cost money? Yes. But you’re finding out it’s worth it.