Established Foothold

1. This is about procedure

I wrote that in 2009, off the top of my head, whatever came. Reading it back, it turns out to be about procedure — about what size of chunk you cut work into before you stack it.

A foothold is the temporary anchor a climber hammers in on the way up a steep face. When the next move goes wrong, you don't drop to the ground you started from. You stop at the anchor.

The same thing holds for any work a human does that can't be finished in one breath and has to accumulate. If you never stop to mark how far you've actually settled things, then the moment something goes wrong you either start over from nothing or retreat to some vague spot halfway back — and short of that, you just keep repeating the same failure.

That vague spot halfway back is a foothold too, in a way. Nobody secured it on purpose; you found it by groping through memory. But it loses to an explicit foothold on every count. Clearing your head and putting all of it into the climb isn't even a fair comparison between the two.

2. The Bs and the Fob in Bs2Fob

I write under the name Bs2Fob. The Bs is short for Base and for Basic at the same time. Tabula rasa — Locke's blank slate, every perception and every notion wiped off — is the first Bs. Nothing is assumed known. You start from what you observe, from the abductions those observations support, and from checking whether those abductions hold. Every examination stacks up from there.

Fob is the military shorthand for forward operating base. Games use it the same way, and I took it as it comes. That's the term that maps onto the established foothold from the passage above.

What splits the two is whether anything has been settled. BS has nothing on it. FoB has results that survived checking. So the body of any task is this: set out from BS and get a FoB standing.

3. An FoB becomes the next BS

And the whole thing spirals. A FoB that has stabilized becomes the BS of the next cycle, and the next Fob gets built off that Bs. A foothold you've established isn't a destination; it's where you empty your head again and keep going for everything above it. What you secured this time becomes the floor the next round stands on, and the results carry forward as material that cuts down the next round of trial and error. Recycled and raised, with no ceiling on it.

That's the job the 2 does. It's the shorthand that copies the sound of "to". Bs2FoB isn't naming two places. It's naming the motion of one place crossing into the other.

4. Finishing and perfecting

The passage above takes "finishing" and defines it fresh, apart from the ordinary word "perfection", and leans on it at the close. Perfection means there's nothing left to fix. Finishing means something else: you secure the best available at this point and take your hands off. That's the verdict. And the point of the whole piece is that as long as you're aiming at perfection, the work never ends and no foothold ever goes in.

So finishing starts by cutting off the compulsion toward perfection. The cut comes first, the securing second. Flip the order and the cut gets deferred forever. You settle what can be settled, say what you got and what's still open, and move on — and writing down what's still open, in a form you can actually come back to, is part of the securing.

5. Signs you aren't establishing footholds

If you're stuck on one problem, running at the same spot over and over, you're not establishing footholds. It isn't that the attempts fail. It's that you never built a place to fall back to, so every failure makes you climb the same stretch again.

6. What's left behind

You top out, pull the rope up, and the anchors are there along the line you climbed, and that arrangement is the record. Fine — but that's a figure of speech, and it assumes a single fixed goal that can actually be reached. Within that assumption it isn't wrong: standing at the end and looking back down the footholds, you can see where you came through, and you can go over it again.

Living, though, has no arrival. It's closer to a run from zero toward infinity, and on the large scale arrival means progress has stopped — another word for dead. Plenty of memeplex outfits dress this up as salvation or enlightenment and run a shop on it. From where I sit they don't read as anything past kindergarteners at play — delusional make-believe, role-play for its own sake.

This site exists as a window for writing and piling up a series called <Cognitive Axioms 000>, and the work here can't help running the Bs2Fob way either. That's why this piece got picked and posted first.

※ A word about fertilizer

History calls the last two or three centuries the age of the modern scientific revolution. What got built in that stretch, and the way human civilization has all but plowed over the entire surface of the planet, outweighs everything from the fifty thousand years before it — or the ten thousand years in which you find anything worth calling civilization. At the root of that sits the Bs2Fob approach described above, scaled up into how a whole group thinks. I'll come back and work through this part properly later, but it comes out of the printing revolution, the university arriving alongside it as a place built for teaching and research, and the journal system that shares results, sends them out for peer review and checks them. Depth of examination went up, and then it went off.

Count only the modern humans who have lived in that stretch and you already pass the total for the fifty thousand years before it. That ties back to Haber-Bosch, another product of the same revolution. The fifty years leading up to it had the guano boom, and running guano dry is what created the conditions for research into fixing nitrogen straight out of the air by chemical process. The race between those labs is what produced Haber-Bosch. Once we could answer cropland nitrogen loss on our own terms, a chain that nobody before us had been able to break came apart — at least for now. Population booms, cropland runs out of nitrogen on its own, harvests fail because they have to, famine follows, disease and death follow the shortfall in ATP, and the political answer to all of it is a fight over cropland, a war for more territory, and the massacres and deliberate culling that come with the war.

Wars kept happening after that and the massacres did not stop, but look at the headcount from far enough back and nothing on the scale of a Thanos snap has happened since. The number of humans on this planet, and the mass of the chickens and pigs and cattle raised to feed them, has not merely gone past anything on record — it has gone somewhere insane. Human bodies and the animals we raise to eat now account for more than 90 percent of the combined mass of every mammal and bird on the planet. Run the mass out and what is left in the wild is barely 5 percent of the mammals and under 29 percent of the birds. As of September 2026 the world holds roughly 8,316,680,000 people.

The UN started keeping systematic world population figures and projections (World Population Prospects) in 1950. Counted by decade from there, on the medium projection and official estimates, it runs like this.

For 1500 the estimate is around 500 million, already a decent recovery after the Black Death. 1600 comes in under 600 million, 1700 under roughly 700 million. The real climb starts around 1800, under a billion, and 1900, under 1.7 billion — and that 1900 number was reached because the guano boom held cropland nitrogen off for a while by mining biological sediment. After 1900 the Haber-Bosch era opens properly, and by the early 1960s the figure has already doubled the 1900 mark.