A silly rant...

... but perhaps indicative of profit seeking corporate culture.

My MacBook needs a new battery. Fine. I'm not happy but I'll deal. I also don't have a car so I either walk or take public transportation. Also fine, I deal. But when I called the Apple store to ask if they had the battery in stock, you know, so I didn't have to trek all the way over to the mall for no reason... guess what?

They can't talk to me on the phone because I don't have a service contract!

I ended up going to a small independently operated computer store. They had to order the battery so it'll take a few days but the personal contact beats the electronic Apple voice any day. Especially when the electronic Apple voice isn't willing to answer a non-device specific diagnostic question.

Revolutions, American style

On the most recent episode of the Economic Update radio program, the host said the following...

“…[~2:30]… I wanna go further because I think the issues at stake for working people go far beyond an improvement in wages, working conditions and so on, important and valuable as those are. And let me explain my point of view with an example. There’s is a movement in this country called the tea party and it goes back to something that happened way back in colonial times when folks in Boston, Mass were angry at the taxes imposed on the tea business by the king of England who was the technical leader of the United States at that time since we were still a British colony. Those folks were protesting what a leader that they didn’t like. But the tea party, dumping the tea in the harbor in Boston went on to become something much more important. People began to realize that they didn’t want to be in the position of asking for more or better deals from somebody else. They wanted to be in charge of their own economic wellbeing. And we went on, as a nation, to  revolution against being a part of the British Empire and to become independent. We fought a revolutionary war and we declared our independence because we wanted to be in charge of our own economic destiny. Let me take a second example of where I’m going, slavery. Sure, in the period of slavery in the United States in the southern states, there were many efforts by slaves and others to improve the conditions of slaves: to get them better fed; to get them better housed; to get them better clothes; to save their families from being ripped apart in the slave market and so on. But at a certain point both slaves and those interested in their situation decided that the issue wasn’t appropriately framed as getting a better deal from the master, just like the colonist decided the issue wasn’t just getting a better or lower tax from King George. The issue was: not being a slave, not being a colonial; breaking free of a system that was unacceptable so that you’d be in more charge of your own economic wellbeing as a community. So the issue became not a better deal for the slave; the issue became: let’s end slavery. We can and should have a different system just like the colonists did. And I want to argue that we too face the same kind of situation. That the needs of American working men and women go beyond a better deal and become a question of a better system…”

Richard Wolff, a Marxist economist, proposes socialists models of economic organization as the solution to the inequities and disequilibrium in the current economy. As an economist, he limits his line of sight to the realm of 'the production and consumption of goods and services' only so far as it pertains to human activity.

But, as anyone who has read my series of essays on Econology understands, economies cannot be isolated from their environment. The health of one is directly linked to the robustness of the other.

What's interesting about this examination of the American Revolution and the Civil War is how each conflict is an economic revolution (in addition to armed warfare). The American Revolution overthrew the yoke of taxation by a distant 'kingly' overlord; the Civil War overthrew the yoke of slavery of African Americans in the Confederate south. Both resulted in a massive reorganization of the economy. In many respects, the FDR's New Deal staved off another economic revolution (thereby saving capitalism) by installing some social checks on the excesses of capitalism that resulted in the Great Depression.

The excesses of capitalism which lead up to the Great Recession and ongoing debt crisis in the European Union and Puerto Rico have yet to be checked. The ongoing economic stresses of this inaction and the looming threats of environmental catastrophe on many fronts (climate change, water shortage, pollution...) places ever increasing pressure on the economic/geopolitical system to respond. But regardless of the response of policy makers, economic revolution will occur... the question is whether by force (armed revolt); by movement (geopolitical revolution); by environment (forced adaptation to degraded environment). The choice is up to us, as voters, as consumers and as workers.

Economics of overpopulation

Many years ago, at a presentation about human overpopulation, the speaker mentioned that a big unanswered question in the field was why did the human population which had increased very slowly for the entirety of humanity suddenly start to grow at ever increasing rates. There was no observable correlation to social/cultural/technological/medical advances. While I can't recall the time/years being referenced, it was definitely between the first and second millennium.

Ever since that presentation, that puzzle would tickle my fancy whenever I came across an interesting historical fact. And now I am curious how human population correlates with economic advances - economic advances in the broad sense of any major innovation that substantively improved surplus production. By this definition, economic advances includes development of farming, domestication of animals for labor and food, currency, wage labor, and so on up to modern technology.

The advent of wage labor transformed people into economic units of production which means larger families had an economic advantage over small families. Was the increase in rate of population growth related to this form of economic pressure?

In today's economy, with the advent of robotic production, people have become units of consumption. But without jobs and the means to earn an income, people have no products or services to exchange for their consumption... does this exert pressure to decrease family size? This is an conundrum that 'business leaders', economists and politicians have yet to respond to.



Update: finally found the graph I wanted to include (original)


Makes me wonder about the influence of institutionized religion on world population growth.

Protests

I've been thinking about how I (as audience member) would/could respond to a disruptive protest like what happened to Bernie Sanders in Seattle. I think if the protesters annoyed me, I would turn my back to them and ostentatiously cover my ears with my hands. The point being to devoid protesters of my unwilling participation.

By the way, this isn't a denunciation of the Black Lives Matter movement. I haven't quite worked out my position... they still have far to go to do what Glen Ford said so well:

"...In terms of the Black Lives Matter shutting down these candidates, I’m totally with that. I wish they would shut all of them down. But I get a little bit confused. If our only demand is that these Democratic, and I guess Republican, candidates for president declare and recognize that black lives matter, so what if they do? What after that? What is the real demand? Are you then going to vote for these same criminals just because they said the magic words, yes, black lives matter? Movements are defined by their demands. And a year after Michael Brown’s death, a year after the emergence of this incipient movement, this movement needs to be about getting its demands together, and that would be something to strategize about and to move forward..."

Carbon free renewable energy…revisited...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) now says we must actively remove carbon from the atmosphere to mitigate the full climate effects of the carbon we've already put out. In other words, there's enough carbon in the air now to warm the planet from 2.5 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit. To not exceed those temperatures, we must have a net carbon emission of zero. To mitigate the damage of those temperatures, we must pull carbon out of the air.

I had previously suggested that offshore energy collectors (any combination of solar/ wind/ wave collectors) could generate hydrogen by electrolysis from sea water. But Elon Musk has said hydrogen is a terrible and inefficient way to store energy. Taking him at his word (knowing very little about the topic), this means we need a better storage mechanism for our putative offshore energy collectors... and it happens that the US Navy has developed a way to synthesize hydrocarbons from carbon in sea water. This means it might be possible to convert the energy collected by floating ocean based energy collectors into hydrocarbon fuels for use on land. Because the ocean is such an efficient carbon sink, this would be a very good indirect method to extract carbon from the atmosphere.

To be clear: synthetic hydrocarbon fuels are net neutral in terms of atmospheric carbon because they release carbon back into the air when used. To get a net negative atmospheric carbon reduction, carbon needs to be sequestered in biomass (grow lots of vegetation in native ecosystems).

Little improved

Over the years, I've had business at the Department of Motor Vehicles in five states...

California
Maryland
Massachusetts
New Hampshire
Vermont

And I can say that with one exception, they have all been unpleasant experiences.

California and Massachusetts both had interminable wait times but their employees were reasonably professional.

Maryland had interminable wait times and unprofessional staff.

New Hampshire had minimal wait but incredibly snide, unprofessional staff.

Vermont was the single exception - minimal wait, very pleasant and knowledgable staff.

What's disappointing is that the advent of computers and databases has not seemed to improve the process. When taxpayers were told the money invested to improve state computation power would improve state services ... there's a big 'when' they have yet to answer.

Perhaps selfish not all bad...

There's a new report out predicting a huge global population explosion...

I try to live a low impact life, little driving, walk as much as possible, low meat diet, minimal consumption... all with the intent of leaving a habitable planet for future generations. What's the point if humans are absolutely determined to outgrow the carry capacity of the planet? If we're going extinct anyway, a few decades won't make any difference in the larger picture. Maybe humanity should just put itself out of its misery and consume the planet to mass environmental collapse.

Swedish injustice

I jut read an article about the years long persecution of Julian Assange by the U.S. by way of Sweden. It seems Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny has been abusing the law to her (and her handlers) end. If the law requires everyone to be treated fairly and impartially, isn't she violating the law and her rules of professional conduct in this campaign? The high ups in Sweden should seriously consider impeaching and disbarring their prosecutor for judicial misconduct.

News triggers

There have been studies documenting differences between liberals and conservatives. And studies have shown a relationship between news source and understanding of current events. Now there's even a documentary 'case study' of the relationship between news consumption and political ideology.

I'm curious if anyone has ever looked to see what emotions are triggered by news source. Do partisan news media deliberately use emotional triggers to skew consumers to their ideology? If so, what emotions? Do liberals and conservatives fear the same issues depending on their source of news? This really goes to the question of the fine line between news/information and propaganda.