The boiling frog theory

Quite a large number of people are complaining about how hot it is nowadays.
So uncomfortably hot that they have to stay indoors until late in the evening.

And no, they are not pensioners.
They work from home, earning enough money to be able to have everything delivered to them.

Which reminds me of my first job, right out of university.
A big factory building where water almost froze in winter and temperatures rose to 41-42 degrees Celsius in August.
Inside that building were, among other ‘run of the mill’ machine-tools, 3 top of the art automated Czech-built lathes.
This story goes back to 1986 and happened in communist Romania.
The lathes were very precise but couldn’t be used all the time. In winter they stopped working altogether and in summer they faltered. No amount of fine tuning could bring them back to yielding usable parts.
It took a few years for the brass to figure-out what was going on. The lathes were designed to work in a ‘controlled environment’. The temperature was supposed to hover between 15 and 25 degrees for the lathes to function normally.
Hence the lathes were ‘sheltered’ in an auxiliary building. A shed built inside the factory. And provided with efficient enough ‘temperature control’.

We, the people, had been left on the outside. Outside the shed but still inside the factory…. freezing in winter and sweat-drenched in summer. Still working, because we were sturdier than the top of the line machinery…

This morning I came across a FB post.

This brought about another memory.

Sometime in 1990-1991 I happened to lay my hands on a Newsweek magazine. Or a the Economist… I don’t remember exactly. Anyway… the article I was going to discuss with you was about the hard life endured by the American poor people. And was illustrated with a color picture.
I’m going to make a small break here and inform you that in the 1990 Romania colored magazines – let alone glossy, were hard to get by.
That picture, taken somewhere in the Bronx, contained a color TV and three pre-teen kids. All of them clad in blue-jeans and wearing ‘sports shoes’. You know, the likes of Puma/Adidas/ you name it.
In those times, in Romania, bluejeans or ‘sports-shoes’ could be had mostly on the black market. Where you had to fork out the wage earned in a whole month if you wanted to buy a pair of each. Or you could buy them in a brand store. For twice the price….

You see, the communist regimes have crumbled because the leaders had lost contact with reality.
The brass in the factory where I had started working couldn’t figure out – nor really cared about, the reason for which those lathes didn’t work properly.
And didn’t care about the fact that the workers had a very hard life. On the factory floor and outside its premises.

The liberal-democratic and capitalist regime has created huge opportunities. People used to live incomparably better there than in the rest of the world. And continue to do so.
On the other hand, in many of the ‘affluent’ countries people have lost contact with each other. The haves have no idea about how the poor live. Nor the poor have any idea about what it means to be rich.

We live in different worlds. In different realities.

Each of us on their own ‘tin roof’.

The problem being that all of them are becoming increasingly ‘hot’.
And I’m not thinking ‘global warming’ now…

Communism had crumbled because the rulers couldn’t understand what was going on. Couldn’t react efficient enough to changes brought about by normal evolution. Because the rulers had gradually lost contact with reality. Which inevitably happens in all authoritarian settings.

We are currently living in different realities. In ‘bubbles’. For now, these bubble still have something in common. We are still able to talk to each other. Sometimes we have a hard time understanding what the other has to say – or don’t really care, but the dialog is still possible.

I’m afraid of the day when the dialog will no longer be possible.

The guys in the pan are so obsessed about the taxes they have to fork out that they actually don’t pay attention to anything else.
The guys attempting to collect those taxes are so obsessed about what they want to do with the money that they actually don’t pay attention to anything else.

Meanwhile, the world is growing apart. The bubbles lose contact with each other. And with the hard core reality…

The cats can always jump down from the roof. Whenever it grows too hot or too cold.
Where are those two frogs going to jump when things will become uncomfortable?

First things first. Click on the picture and read the article.
It is interesting enough, even if it doesn’t say anything you didn’t already know – or at least presumed. That if enough people pee in the pool, the mixture of uric acid and chlorine, which produces some nasty chemicals, could become ‘powerful’ enough to affect a susceptible person.
The really interesting part being the fact that the scientists who have studied the matter do not seem to agree on how dangerous it is and what exactly, if anything, should be done about it.

But do we really need a scientist to tell us that we simply shouldn’t pee in the pool?
Regardless of whether the issuing chemicals would be powerful enough to harm us or not?

Then why do we hide behind slogans like ‘Global Warming is the New Religion’ when we discuss the subject of carbon dioxide being spewed into the atmosphere by the tens of billions of tonnes each year?

OK, I can understand that some of us are not convinced by the data put forward by the ‘alarmists’, specially after some of the scientists studying the matter have changed tack and have become ‘skeptical’ about the whole thing.
“I would say that the global warming is basically a non-problem. Just leave it alone and it will take care of itself. It is almost very hard for me to understand why almost every government in Europe — except for Polish government — is worried about global warming. It must be politics.”

“So far we have left the world in better shape than when we arrived, and this will continue with one exception — we have to stop wasting huge, I mean huge amounts of money on global warming. We have to do that or that may take us backwards. People think that is sustainable but it is not sustainable.” Ivar Giaever, 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics, speaking in July 2015.

So. Cutting down the tropical jungle to make room for palm trees grown for their oil and burning during the last two centuries fossil fuels that have been accumulated during God only knows how many millennia is ‘sustainable’! Yeah, right.

Do you remember the smog that used to hang over Los Angeles until some of us wised up to the matter?

Is it a matter of politics?!?
And money?!?
And what’s new about that? Or is it that some of those who have to gain from us continuing to burn fossil fuels, indiscriminately, have not understood, yet, that we are all together in this? That the atmosphere is nothing but the huge ‘pool’ where we all live?
And breathe…

To me it doesn’t really matter what ‘science’ has to say about this. In fact ‘science’ cannot speak, it’s the scientists who speak on its behalf.
Now, since they don’t seem to agree on this subject we’d better realize that ‘This is too important a matter to be left to the scientists’ and remember the Hippocratic principle which teaches us ‘primum non nocere’: ‘Above all, do no harm!’

If ‘it’s a matter of politics’ how about us telling the politicians how we wanted it solved instead of letting them scheme on it?
And then let the business people take care of the money part?

One other thing and I’ll wrap it up.
I can already see my libertarian friends frowning:
‘He had jumped on the big government bandwagon’.
Not so fast.
In fact this is not a decision that should be made by the government, be it big or small.

We are the ones who should make up our minds about this matter.
We are the ones who should close the faucets, use more efficient cars, collect the trash selectively, etc, etc, etc… and maybe even walk a little.
We are the ones who should instruct the governments we have elected to use some of our tax money to finance some honest research into renewable power sources instead of allowing them to transform the whole issue into another ‘pork barrel bonanza’…

Cats on a hot tin roof

“The boiling frog theory”.

Cats on a hot tin roof

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“The boiling frog theory”.

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