Archives for posts with tag: Global warming

Surviving Progress

August 18, 2021 //
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Most steps ‘forward’ had been made at the expense of those daring to put one foot in front of the other.
Fernao de Magalhaes and Marie Sklodowska Curie had been but two of the examples.

But what kind of ‘moving forward’ is to find yourself shackled en route to a plantation in the ‘Brave New World’?
Or nuked?

That’s the whole point.
How do you balance the urge to explore with the need to survive?

What convinced Fernao de Magalhaes – and his men, that it was a good thing – for them, at least, to climb aboard those primitive ships and attempt to reach the Indies by sailing towards the ‘wrong’ direction?
What made Marie Sklodowska Curie – and other scientists, overcome barriers previously considered insurmountable in their quest for knowledge? Putting themselves, and us, in great danger?

What made Giordano Bruno cling to his belief?

What made him so sure he was doing ‘the right thing’ when he “finally declared that he had nothing to retract and that he did not even know what he was expected to retract.”?

Fast forward to the XXI-st century.
Following in the steps of de Magalhaes, Bruno and Curie, we’ve explored almost all corners of the Earth, peered into the womb of the Universe, named the entire table of Mendeleev, and reached the present state of civilization.
In doing so, we’ve changed the composition of the atmosphere we breathe, polluted the water we drink, exhausted the soil which grows our food and, the worst, have soured whatever mutual understanding ever existed among ourselves.

After some 75 years of relative peace we’ve become more callous than ever.
Judging by what’s being said on TV, shared on social media… and, most importantly, by how we react when our fellow human beings are in danger. Or in need…

We refuse to wear a mask – because it doesn’t offer perfect protection and it has been mandated by the government.
We refuse to give up fossil fuel – because ‘it has not yet been scientifically proven beyond any reasonable doubt that all the global warming has been produced by us’.
We refuse to pay taxes – because they are ‘theft sanctioned by the government.’

All these in the name of ‘defending our God sanctioned liberty’…

We steal much of the help we send to those in need.
We pay those who work for us as little as we can, regardless of the consequences. And we declare, nonchalantly, that ‘greed is good’.
We continue to notice the skin color of those we interact with. And to pass judgement on them starting from this ‘piece of information’.
We continue to consider that women should ‘behave properly’ and ‘mind their own business’.

We allow ‘spin doctors’ into our minds. We welcome them, even. And let them ‘fine tune’ our biases…

How are we going to survive this huge amount of ‘progress’? That which we’ve brought upon our own heads?
When are the ‘spin doctors’ going to realize the Earth is finite? Not flat. Limited!

What are they going to do when the shit they’ve sown into our heads will finally hit the fan?
Where are they going to hide?

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As much as I love writing, I do have to eat.
And to provide for my family.
Earning money takes time.
If you’d like me to write more, and on a more regular basis, hit the button.
Your contribution will be appreciated!

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, arrogance, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, manipulation, Mutual Respect, Psychology, re-definitions, skin in the game, teleology, Trust

Quantity as Quality

February 27, 2018 //
0

It was Hegel who first noticed that how much of ‘something’ was available at some point in place and/or time was determining the evolution of things.
Later, Marx and Engels ‘hijacked’ the idea and then corrupted evolution into revolution but I’ll set aside that subject for the time being.

“It is said that there are no sudden changes in nature, and the common view has it that when we speak of a growth or a destruction, we always imagine a gradual growth or disappearance. Yet we have seen cases in which the alteration of existence involves not only a transition from one proportion to another, but also a transition, by a sudden leap, into a … qualitatively different thing; an interruption of a gradual process, differing qualitatively from the preceding, the former state”

Georg Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic

According to Ernst Mayr, evolution is a process which weeds out the misfits.
Which ascertains that at any given moment only those individuals/species who can survive the present conditions continue to enjoy life.
Regardless of who’s responsible for any changes in those conditions, of course…

And did I tell you that evolution is an impersonal process? Which has no goal, whatsoever?

We are currently witnessing an accumulation of heat on our Planet.
I’m not going to argue whether we are the main culprits or not. I don’t command any expertise in this domain, except that I know for a fact that increasing the relative content of CO2 in the atmosphere does increase the retention of heat by the aforementioned atmosphere.
I also know for a fact that we’ve burned in the last three centuries fossil fuels which had been accumulated during God only knows how many millennia. Releasing a huge amount of CO2 ‘in the aforementioned atmosphere’
Was it enough to raise the level of CO2 to the present figure? I don’t know… Volcanoes are another ‘prolific’ source for this fateful gas…

„Then why are you writing this post? Only to acknowledge your ignorance? Why should we bother?”

Dead saiga antelopes

Dead saiga antelopes in a field in Kazakhstan. About 20,000 of the species were found dead in one week. Photograph: Reuters

„The scientists on the ground pinpointed blood poisoning as the cause, but were puzzled as to why whole herds were dying so quickly. After 32 postmortems, they concluded the culprit was the bacterium Pasteurella multocida, which they believe normally lives harmlessly in the tonsils of some, if not all, of the antelopes. In a research paper published in January in Science Advances, Kock and colleagues contrasted the 2015 MME with the two from the 1980s. They concluded that a rise in temperature to 37C and an increase in humidity above 80% in the previous few days had stimulated the bacteria to pass into the bloodstream where it caused haemorrhagic septicaemia, or blood poisoning.”

You see, this post is indeed about ignorance.
We just don’t know what will happen if enough of something accumulates somewhere.
Until it does, of course.

And to find out we’ll need to survive the ‘happening’…

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Categories arrogance, authoritarianism, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, evolution, Frames of mind, limited rationality, Politically induced fragility, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

Universal Basic Income

January 16, 2018 //
1

I keep hearing about this issue and I can’t stop wondering about how parallel to each other are those defending this idea with those denying its merits.

Pro:

-Robots are eating more and more jobs so more and more people will end up hungry.
-AI will make robots so productive that it will be far more efficient to use robots than human workers.
-A decent income is a human right.

Con:

-This is a socialist move, hence it will end up in failure – no other reason offered.

As it is obvious to all, both sides score big.

Yes, including ‘a decent income is a human right’ and ‘all socialist ideas end up in failure’.

Then what are they fighting each-other about?!?

Let me rephrase that.
WHY are they fighting, in the first place?

Because neither listen to what the other has to say… as simple as that…

Let me discuss some of the practicalities involved.

Robots eating up jobs and AI being able to continually increase financial efficiency are so evident that they do not deserve much consideration.

‘All socialist moves ended up in failure’.
We need to define socialism in order to make sense of this sentence.
Mainly because ‘socialism’ is one of the most abused words nowadays, on a par with liberalism. Sometimes they are even considered synonyms…
Well, ‘liberalism’ comes from liberty and  bona fide liberalism is concerned with individual freedom.
Socialism, on the other hand, comes from social. And is concerned with the the workings of the entire society.
The point being that there are two types of socialism. One which is ‘somewhat’ synonym with liberalism – the ‘reverse’ side of liberalism, actually, while the latter is the exact opposite.

I’m not making any sense?

Let me start from the other side.
All forms of socialism which have failed have been excessively centralized forms of government. And it was because of that excessive centralism that they had failed, not because of being ‘socialist’. The evident proof being that the same thing has happened with all right-wing dictatorships, which had used the very same excessively centralized decision making mechanism – the totalitarian government …

Which brings us back to the problem at hand.

For Universal Basic Income to work – or Guaranteed Basic Income, as some insist on calling it, it has to be financed.
Through taxes, right? Which means that those owning the robots would have to be somehow convinced to give up a huge proportion of their profits… Then why bother in the first place…? Why start any businesses, at all?
We’ll have the government run the whole show? Remember what history teaches us about centralized decision making?

So?!?

Well, not all is lost while there’s still hope!

Let me rearrange the arguments.

We not only live in an inherently limited space, with inherently limited resources, but we’ve also finally started to understand our predicament. Which calls for as much efficiency as possible.
Only for a different kind of efficiency than that we’ve accustomed ourselves to.

Until recently, we’ve been trying to get as much money under our belts as possible. Without much regard for anything else.
That’s why we’ve been cutting down secular forests, feeding almost all the fish we’ve been pulling from the oceans to the domestic animals we were raising for their meat, polluting our breathing air, selling our fellow humans which happened to had a different skin color than ours into slavery… As if there was no tomorrow…

Slowly, we’ve started to realize that this won’t work for very much longer.

That no matter whether we’re responsible for the global warming – or if it’s real at all, sooner or later we’ll exhaust the planet.
OK, it is highly plausible that we’ll discover/learn to use new classes of resources.
But this eventuality doesn’t constitute, in any way, a valid reason for us to continue squandering the meager resources we have at our disposal.

Hence the need for increased efficiency.

Only this has to be a different kind of efficiency. The kind that focuses on minimizing waste instead of maximizing profits. The kind that recycles because it makes obvious sense, not because it is cheaper.

Along the same path we’ll discover that it would make a lot of sense to help the less developed nations to catch up with the most advanced ones.
For starters, because the ‘advanced economies’ no longer need cheap workers. They use robots instead.
Secondly, because better living people tend to have less children than those struggling to survive. And we’ve already agreed about the planet being rather limited…

Nothing too fancy… until now, right?

Well, the next item will be trickier..

Remember that Ford had raised dramatically the wages he paid to his workers?
With tremendous results?

OK, his reasons were not the ones, generally but erroneously, attributed to him.
He didn’t do it to ‘encourage’ his workers to buy cars from him… or because of philanthropy…

“Actually, it was the turnover of his staff.

At the time, workers could count on about $2.25 per day, for which they worked nine-hour shifts. It was pretty good money in those days, but the toll was too much for many to bear. Ford’s turnover rate was very high. In 1913, Ford hired more than 52,000 men to keep a workforce of only 14,000. New workers required a costly break-in period, making matters worse for the company. Also, some men simply walked away from the line to quit and look for a job elsewhere. Then the line stopped and production of cars halted. The increased cost and delayed production kept Ford from selling his cars at the low price he wanted. Drastic measures were necessary if he was to keep up this production.”

But, whatever Ford’s reasons were, the long term results have been abundantly clear.
Nowadays people who build cars are being paid well enough to afford buying the same kind of cars they are building. At least in the advanced economies…

What happened was that Ford, in order to keep the assembly line going, paid his workers as much as he afforded to. With spectacular results.
While nowadays most employers tend to ‘compensate’ their employees with as little as possible. Which makes perfect economic sense… doesn’t it?

The same economic sense which used to drive us into “cutting down secular forests, feeding almost all the fish we’ve been able to pull from the oceans to the domestic animals we were raising for their meat, polluting our breathing air, selling our fellow humans which happened to had a different skin color than ours into slavery… As if there was no tomorrow…”

See what I mean?
Instead of attempting to mandate a ‘Guaranteed Basic Income’, calculated by the central government and financed through forcefully levied taxes, how about hiring as many people as it would make sense, let them work as little days per week as they want and pay them as much as we can afford to instead of programmatically replacing as many of them with robots and paying the remaining ones as little as we possibly can?

OK, some of us won’t get as rich, as fast, as our grand-fathers did… So what? None of us can eat even close to what our grand-fathers used to… and food is a lot cheaper, anyway…

This is would be a considerably shorter way to get more people out of poverty than any scheme concocted by any government and it would have the same snow-ball effect as Ford’s wage increase had.

Economists describe this as Rostow’s ‘take off effect’.

 

“For attaining adequate finance for take off it is necessary that:

(a) The community’s surplus over consumption does not flow into the hands of those who will utilize it by hoarding, luxury consumption or low productivity investment out-lays;

(b) Institution for providing cheap and adequate working capital be developed;

(c) One or more sectors of the economy must grow rapidly and the entrepreneurs in these sectors must plough back a substantial portion of their profits to productive investment; and

(d) Foreign capital can profitably be utilized for building up social and economic overheads.”

 

Obviously, any attempt to instate a guaranteed basic income, (except for those too young, too old or otherwise un-able to pull their weight, of course) would grind any ‘take-off’ to a stand-still.

And no, getting people out of poverty is not a valid goal, per se.
Poverty is a relative thing, which relies more  on feelings than on hard reality.
The real problem with poverty is that it reduces the ability of poor individuals to lead meaningful lives. Poor people are a lot less autonomous than self sufficient ones, meaning that decision making ability is impaired by the fact that they need to focus their attention on the short term time span.

This whole thing has long term consequences on societal level.

Remember what I said about centrally planned socialist countries constantly failing.
About all dictatorships eventually crumbling under their own weight, because of too much decision power being concentrated in too few hands?

Excessive wealth polarization produces the same results. Economic decision becomes too concentrated, political decision follows through and…

What next?
The world has already experimented with communism. Didn’t work.
It also experienced two economic meltdowns, exactly when wealth polarization was at relative peaks.

income-inequality-08

When are we going to learn anything from what happens to us?
Why do we continue to waste the accumulated lessons collectively known as ‘history‘?

 

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Categories altruism, authoritarianism, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, corruption, evolution, Frames of mind, human rights, man induced fragility, Money as goal, Mutual Respect, Politically induced fragility, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

Party pooper

June 6, 2017 //
0

“the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, non-governmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage…Rather than deny this elemental nature of international affairs, we embrace it.”

Rings a bell?

Sounds too neoliberal for you?

I’m afraid we are dealing with a huge communication problem here.

For some ‘competition’ has become a dirty word while some others interpret it according to their, narrow, ideology. To fit through their horse blinkers.

To make my point I’m going to use Valentine Wiggin’s Hierarchy of Foreignness. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Orson Scott Card’s work, Valentine is one of the main characters in Ender’s Game.

– An utlänning was defined as a stranger recognized as human from the same planet as a subject, but of a different nation or city. Utlänning means “foreigner” in Swedish.
– A främling was defined as a stranger recognized as human, but from a different planet than a subject. Främling means “stranger” in Swedish.
– Raman were defined as strangers recognized as “human”, but of another sentient species entirely. The term was only ever used to refer to the entire species as a whole rather than an individual member. Although not a common word, it may be constructed in Swedish from rå + män, where rå indicates “coarse,” “raw” or “crude” (not refined), and män means “man” or “person.”
– Varelse were defined as true aliens; they were sentient beings, but so foreign that no meaningful communication would be possible with the subject. Varelse means “creature” in Swedish.
– Djur were non-sentient beings. They were capable of independent thought and action, but their mode of communication could not relay any meaningful information to the subject because the djur itself lacked the capacity for rational thought and self-awareness. Djur means “animal” in Swedish.

It’s simple to understand that this hierarchy is based on the ‘subject’s’ ability to communicate with the ‘foreigner’. But not exclusively! The whole thing also depends on both parties willing to accept the other as a ‘partner’.

In fact the entire Ender’s Game series is about Humankind wagging an all out war with an alien civilization, only to discover that the conflict was produced by a colossal misunderstanding.  Neither of the belligerents had recognized the other as ‘raman’ and, as a consequence, both had treated the other as ‘varelse’. And, eventually, the humans prevailed. The book was written by one of us…
Read the whole series, you’ll have a surprise at the end!

Coming back to ‘competition’, let me remind you that it is nothing else but the most comprehensive form of cooperation.

Not only that the participants do something in common – they all obey the same set of rules and cooperate in throwing out the cheaters – but they also help each-other to become better at whatever they are competing about.

Savvy?

What would any competition turn into if too many participants would no longer obey the rules?

Act as djurs? Obsessed by their own wishes and behaving disdainfully towards all others?

 

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Categories arrogance, authoritarianism, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, Frames of mind, Mutual Respect, Psychology, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

The ‘Blue Whale’ in the Room.

March 29, 2017 //
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trump-epa-er-170328_31x13_1600

“”The president’s been very clear, he’s not going to pursue climate or environmental policies that put the American economy at risk,” said a senior Trump administration official Monday evening. Asked whether climate change poses its own long-term threat to the economy, the official said he was not familiar with research drawing such a conclusion.” (President Trump signs executive order rescinding Obama’s clean energy plans. abcNEWS, March 28, 2017)

“Republican Rep. Kevin Yoder of Kansas parted ways with his Republican colleagues on the issue. He said the privacy protections were “commonsense measures” that would have ensured internet users continue to have control over their personal information.

“We don’t want the government having access to our information without our consent, and the same goes for private business,” Yoder said”.

“The American Civil Liberties Union urged Trump to veto the resolution, appealing to his populist side.

“President Trump now has the opportunity to veto this resolution and show he is not just a president for CEOs but for all Americans,” said the ACLU’s Neema Singh Guliani.”

“”Lawmakers who voted in favor of this bill just sold out the American people to special interests,” said Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo.” (House votes to block Obama-era online privacy rule, abcNEWS, March 28, 2017.)

“Supporters of the proposed constitutional changes say handing Erdogan sweeping new authority is the only way to achieve the stability that society craves and businesses need to thrive. But opponents say approving the referendum is an invitation to dictatorship, particularly since Erdogan, already the most dominant leader in eight decades, jailed or fired more than 100,000 perceived enemies after rogue army officers attempted a coup in July.

“Everybody on the street tracks the exchange rate on a daily basis and Erdogan wins support as long as Turkey can keep the lira stable,” said Wolfango Piccoli, the London-based co-president of Teneo Intelligence, a political risk advisory firm. “But the challenge here is the external backdrop. They can’t really predict what’s coming.” “ (Erdogan Races against the Dollar in Campaign for Unrivaled Power, Bloomberg.com, March 28, 2017.)

“So we now know that Khalid Masood, the 52-year-old Briton who carried out the Westminster attack in London, had a string of criminal convictions. His first was in 1983 for criminal damage and his last was in 2003 for a stabbing. He was also a convert to Islam. Neither fact should come as a surprise.

Attackers apparently inspired by Islamic extremist ideologies are, for all their righteous rage at others, rarely particularly puritanical in their personal lives. A man who earlier this month seized an automatic weapon from a police officer at Orly airport in Paris had traces of cocaine in his blood and a long criminal record, while the attacker who killed 86 in Nice last July had a history of heavy drinking, cannabis use and casual sex. Several key members of the network which killed 140 in Paris in November 2015 had been involved in drug and arms sales. Almost every high profile attack in Europe – and many in the UK – in recent years has involved someone convicted for petty or serious crime.

There has long been a link between criminality and Islamic radicalism. One of the men who killed the off-duty soldier Lee Rigby in 2013 in south-east London had served time as a young offender for his role in a crack ring. Richard Reid, who tried to detonate a bomb in his shoe on a transatlantic flight in 2001, was a juvenile delinquent.

The proportion of Islamic militants with criminal backgrounds has been rising over recent years. One reason is that Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (Isis), which established its new caliphate in 2014, offers adventure, camaraderie, violence, excitement, relative comfort, cash rewards and even sexual opportunity in a way which contrasts dramatically with the asceticism of previous militant groups like al-Qaeda.

A young man from Dortmund or Lyon or Sheffield could thus expect much that a gang back home offered but repackaged. Violence was no longer wrongdoing but resistance, and even redemption. The extremist’s selective teaching of religious texts encouraged former criminals to see themselves as washed of former sins by their commitment to jihad.

The one surprising fact about the London attacker is that most recruits were between 23 and 28 years old. Some were teenagers. There is no evidence that Masood, so much older, has been involved in criminal activity in recent years. Indeed, reports of his unstable, punchy, pub-going persona a decade or so ago are in stark contrast with neighbours’ description of his “devout” and “quiet” lifestyle recently.”  (Khalid Masood was a convert with a criminal past. So far, so familiar. The Guardian, March 25, 2017.)

“According to general data, the suicide wave began in 2015 in Russia, where local media reported about secret communities for teens that invited them to participate in a dangerous game. In each case, the players must complete 50 tasks, beginning with cutting a vein and using a blade to draw an image of a blue whale on their hand. Suicide is the last mandatory task and if not completed, the game creators threaten to “deal” with the player’s family.

One social media user shared the results after he courageously took part in a game.

“I became curious about how this works and why people commit suicide after 50 days. My friend and me created two fake accounts on VKontakte and were both reached by a person for each one of us. Different people were giving tasks every day. The first one was to ‘scribble’ a blue whale on our hand,” which the user said they did with the help of Photoshop, reported Tengrinews.kz.

“We had to choose either ‘to hang ourselves’ or ‘to jump’ on the 50th day. Death is the end of the game. I then replied that I was scared and received a link. The ‘404 not found’ message appeared after I followed the link. After 10 minutes he wrote ‘If you don’t end your life, I will kill your loved ones’ to me, wrote my address and apartment number and I realised how they do it,” he continued in his message.

He called upon others to spread the post in the hope of preventing possible tragedies. He is confident while many might have refused the final offer, the gamers know where the child lives once the link has been followed.” (Suicide games raising concerns in Kazahstan, The Astana Times, February 15. 2017.)

“Police today warned Devon parents to be on their guard against a sick social media challenge which encourages youngsters to cut themselves. At its most extreme, the so-called ‘Blue Whale’ challenge encourages teenage suicide.” (Devon police issue warning over new ‘suicide challenge’ being spread on social media. Devon live.com, March 13, 2017)

What we have here is piled up evidence that we, as a species, have been focusing too much, for already too long,  on short term goals. While setting aside, or simply ignoring, any possible consequences of our ‘binging’ habits.

We elect our leaders based on their promises that they will ‘fix’ everything. As if any of them ever did. Go back to the history book and show me a single authoritarian leader who didn’t disappoint his followers. And yet we still ‘invite’ them to lead us.

Furthermore, we allow them to convince us that our present actions cannot possibly harm us, or our children, in the future.
Madagascar, one of the poorest nations on Earth, is taking steps to ‘clean up their act’ (“eliminate defecation in the open air; a practice still rooted in the culture and in the Malagasy society“) while the President of the US believes that “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” And acts according to his convictions.
Why?
Simple. People living in Madagascar have finally figured out, like many other people before them, that careful management of ‘human waste’ drastically reduces the incidence of diarrhea – which mainly affects the children.
What must happen for the American public to understand that we cannot burn, in two short centuries, the carbon accumulated in hundreds of millions of years without having to face any consequences?

During most of our history, most people have been mainly preoccupied with the welfare of their children. For a very reasonable motive. Having children at your bedside is the most efficient manner to ‘enjoy’ a decent death.

No more. Nowadays we buy life insurance to supplement our pensions and plan to hire ‘outside help’ to wipe our arses,  if and when the ‘time will come’.
And in order to get ‘enough’ money we, or at least some of us. are willing to transform even personal data into ‘merchandise’.

This very obsession with money is the reason for which we care more about the promised stability of the exchange rate than about the character, and past actions, of the person who makes the promise.

This is why we no longer keep in touch with our children. Not even with the under-aged ones who continue to live with us.
This is why some of them become ensnared in ‘challenges’ which ‘inspire’ them to commit suicide.
This is why some of them fall prey to fundamentalist preachers. Islamic, White Supremacist, you name it. Yet another ‘reason’ to commit suicide…

Now, after too many wretched souls have become ‘radicalized’ – some of them even without any outside intervention, and after so much innocent pain has been inflicted, time has come to ask ourselves ‘why is this “blue whale” lurking around in the room?’.
And ‘why haven’t we noticed it before?’.

blue whale

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Categories authoritarianism, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, Money as goal, Psychology, Social justice, The kind of world we are building for our children

“The aliens are silent because…”

January 26, 2016 //
0

CSIROParkesradiotelescope

“…they are extinct.” says an article just published in Astronomy.com.
“In research aiming to understand how life might develop, scientists realized new life would commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets.”
Here’s another plausible explanation.
We have ourselves evolved to such an attitude that we leave the natives of the Amazonian forest alone – unless we covet their land, of course. We no longer impose our (technological) civilization on everybody who is unable to resist us – like we did to the Incas, for example.
How about the ‘surviving aliens’ keeping mum while waiting for us to grow up some more?
The next step being for us to stop killing each-other…
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Categories Choices we make, effective communication, Frames of mind, limited rationality, Mutual Respect, Psychology, The kind of world we live in

Are we nuts? As a species, I mean…

June 16, 2015 //
5

Deutsche Bank is sitting on more than $75 Trillion in derivatives bets — an amount that is twenty times greater than German GDP.

Both the next 3D printer and Deutsche Bank derivatives portfolio were designed by us, the human people.
When are we going to get our act together?

“We research and develop groundbreaking, cost-effective robotic technology with which we can 3D-print beautiful, functional objects in almost any form,” wrote MX3D on the project Web page. “The ultimate test? Printing an intricate, ornate metal bridge for a special location to show what our robots and software, engineers, craftsmen and designers can do.”

And why do we need the pope to remind us that the Earth is the only home we’ve got?


“Scientists weary after years of often vicious opposition by doubters of their climate-change findings see this year as crucial to the planet’s future because of a religious document expected from Pope Francis on Thursday. The rare encyclical, or teaching letter, expected to promote climate action as a moral imperative could do more to slow global warming than international negotiations this year to limit greenhouse gas emissions, scientists say.”

Oh, I forgot. Right now we are still under ‘the spell’, we have somehow convinced ourselves that having money, loads of it, trumps every thing else.

We’ll get over it, sooner or later. Francis Bacon has already warned us, all we need is to remember.

Or, even better, we can ask ourselves:

What is money, instrument or goal?

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., Choices we make, Economy, Frames of mind, Money as goal, Psychology

Global war-n/m-ing or global meddling?

August 27, 2013 //
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Image

This is a NASA satellite picture of the forest fire currently raging in California.
How did things became so bad: “An average of 5 million acres burns every year in the United States, causing millions of dollars in damage­.”?

It all started more 100 years ago: “The 1910 fire—fanned by hurricane-force winds called Palousers and known variously as the Big Burn or the Big Blowup—scorched 3 million acres of Idaho and Montana, killed 78 firefighters and nine civilians, turned entire towns to cinder, and darkened sunsets all the way to New York City….   The Big Burn ….  “was one of the main drivers, if not the main driver, of the Forest Service getting deadly serious about fighting fire.” The horrific maelstrom produced a public outcry to suppress future forest fires at all costs.”

Only recently people started to understand what really happened: “Fifty years of aggressive fire suppression by the U.S. government has hindered fire’s natural and beneficial processes; many areas have become choked with brush, and other kinds of trees are competing with the large species that formerly dominated the forest. The U.S. Forest Service tried to solve the problem by allowing timber companies to log more of our National Forests. However, the logging companies take only the high-value timber — the largest trees whose thick bark naturally resists the small periodic fires that sweep through forests, leaving behind saplings and massive piles of sticks and debris called “slash.” The forest floor dries out more quickly and temperatures can get much hotter, turning slash piles and debris-strewn clearings to fire-friendly tinder.”

What should we do?
About the fires? I don’t know, I’ll leave this to the specialists. The problem is that I recently saw the picture above on the FB.  My  comment was:
“You wish…
‘Too big to fail’ is a human concept, not a natural occurrence.
Watch what happened to the dino’s  and last time I checked elephants and whales weren’t doing that well either.
And while we didn’t have anything to do with the fate of the dinosaurs it was us who hunted the elephants, the whales, the dodo birds and so on…
The Earth is not at all too big to fail but rather it should be too important for us to meddle with!”

Another issue: The so called Global Warming.
– Everybody agrees that carbon dioxide is indeed a ‘hot house gas’ and that we produce huge, and growing, amounts of it.
– England has seen a resurgence of commercial wineries.
– French, Spanish and other grapes have so  much sugar that wines reach now an alcoholic concentration of 14-14.5% on a regular basis.
 And the list can go on.
Yet we not only choose to ignore the deluge of carbon dioxide (chlorofluorocarbons, another class of hot house gases were only recently banned) we unleashed onto the Earth’s atmosphere but also try to deny what’s going on around us: ” “Global Warning Has Stopped”? How to Fool People Using “Cherry-Picked” Climate Data”.

Now what am I driving at? That we should go back in time and live in caves like our fore fathers?

Certainly NOT!
Actually for the time being I’m not that worried about the global warming – the heat spell that transformed the the southern Greenland into the pastures where  Erik the Red fed his sheep had been probably more intense, the same places are not (yet at least) green again.
Moreover the contribution of the carbon dioxide to all this is debatable and debated. (The chlorofluorocarbons were banned because they destroy the ozone layer, that’s another human contribution to the well being of the planet.)

BUT WHY RISK IT?

We strongly need another economic ‘seed’ – like wool clothing and then steel were for England and like the automobiles and airplanes were for the US.
So why not transform this potentially dangerous situation into a win-win situation and turn the global economy around by building a carbon dioxide free future?

Tags , ,
Categories Economy, Psychology
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