When it concerns who can get married, who can serve in the military, what is or is not pornographic, what constitutes a "sex toy" and where it can be sold, what t-shirts can be worn to political events, what can or cannot be taught in school classrooms, what books can be checked out of the school library, better make that all libraries, what things are obscene to say in public, which religious symbols can be put in a public display, what can be worn at school, what length is acceptable for hair and for skirts, what body parts can be shown on TV, where beaches can be clothing optional (nowhere), where mosques can be located, what doctors can discuss with their patients, what health services women can receive, what plants you can grow in your garden, how unions can organize, what unions can bargain for, who can vote and what ID is acceptable at the polling place.
With all that to worry about, who has time for any regulations to do with health, safety, or the environment?
Anthropologists studying primitive tribes in the jungles of New Guinea have determined that they put in about a 15 hour work week. For many tribes, that's with stone tools and no engines or motors to assist them. The only way modern industrial nations can keep everybody employed 40 hours a week is to engage in a wholesale murder contest like they did from 1941-45.
If you look at the inputs required to build a family dwelling, the materials and labor (exclusive of the land) are about equal to two years of that laborer's wages. So how is it that a goodly percentage of homeowners are upside down on 30-year mortgages?
Mechanized agriculture and clothing factories have reduced the human cost of both food and clothing to a small fraction of what it was two centuries ago.
So what has civilization done now that they don't have to work so hard for food, clothing, and shelter? Video games, baseball, the NFL, television, NASCAR, credit default swaps, rock concerts, poker tournaments, Six Flags, cruise lines, and internet porn. None of that stuff was around before 1950. Well, there was baseball, but the players made a few times a factory worker's wages, not a thousand times. And steamship lines were for traveling across the ocean, not pigging out at the buffet.
Capitalism wants to see growth, growth, growth in all of these new businesses, but the people at the top of the pyramid also hoard as much as they can without choking the growth off completely. Sometimes they miscalculate and their wonderful growth engine sputters to a stop.
Capitalism can only keep people employed through the consumption of stuff. Going to watch the kids play Little League doesn't generate much in the way of capitalist business, just the buying of uniforms and equipment. Playing chess with the old men in the park is even worse, some of those chess sets are decades old! Teaching torments the capitalist model even worse -- it requires the matching of a knowledgeable teacher with a motivated student; how can you turn that into a commodity with economies of scale?
Work, when it means one-on-one human interaction, is poorly served by the capitalist business model. All the young people out of work shouldn't wait for the capitalist model to rescue them. It's already ditched them for cheaper workers in China. If they need food, they should learn how to grow it. If they want a house, they are going to have to learn how to build it. The capitalists at the top are not going to allow them entry to the game unless they can hit major league home runs, write hit songs, drive in a circle really fast, or just look stunning.
Lots of stuff can be used as a feed stock to make the biochar, and most of it is getting buried in landfills now. That's another problem that has a solution in biochar; if all the newspaper, cardboard, plastic, and yard waste going to landfills could be converted to biochar, less landfill space would be needed and the price of biochar would come down. Then there would be much less methane (a more potent greenhouse gas) outgassing from landfills into the atmosphere. I don't even have trash service at my house. What can burn gets converted to biochar and what can't gets recycled.
Calculation: the atmosphere is around 390 ppm CO2. This means that for each square inch of the earth's surface, there is .00039 of 14.7 lbs or .0057 lbs of CO2 in the vertical air column. Or 2.59 grams, if you are conversant in metric. Knowing the density of biochar, we can convert this weight to a volume and figure that if ALL of the CO2 in the atmosphere fell down to the surface as carbon, it would make a layer less than an inch deep. Clearly, there is a LOT more carbon bound up in and on the surface of the planet than floating in the atmosphere above it. If we got farmers to spread just one inch of biochar on all the agricultural land, it would make a MAJOR dent in the amount of carbon floating around as CO2.
(1) That Apple is sitting on that much cash means that their tax rate is too low. Same with Bill Gates. Had they been paying taxes at a reasonable and enforced rate, with no avoidance, offshoring, holidays, or deferrals, there would be a lot more public wealth serving the rest of us.
(2) The function that capitalists serve, and this is what the Communists missed the boat on, is to be a reserve of wealth, or capital. When they stock it up, be it inventory in warehouses or property developments or cash in a bank account, it is wealth accumulated from workers that can be used in times of need. North Korea is poor in large part because all the reserves of wealth get funneled to Kim and his cronies. Ordinary citizens are prevented from accumulating any measure of wealth, be it sacks of coal or crocks of kimchi or a herd of pigs. (see this article about people trying to raise pigs in their small Pyongyang apartments: http://goodfriendsusa.blogspot.com/2011/06... ) In their irrational hatred of capitalists, they have made everyone equal -- equally poor.
In a well-run Capitalism, the excess wealth over what they paid the labor, the profit, is not allowed to accumulate until a fraction of 1% own over half of it. Capital always has the advantage over labor, because it is fungible, capital is easily turned into money (well, maybe not a warehouse of outdated fashions), whereas labor is not. Labor has to be matched to the job at hand because it has another dimension, the level of skill required. For labor to be equal with capital, it needs to be organized and capital needs to have restrictions. Capital shouldn't be free to flit from country to country seeking out the most oppressive labor conditions.
Capitalists are as necessary to a well-run society as teachers are. Teachers are a repository of learning that serves the public good by passing on that learning to the next generation. Capitalists are (or should be) the managers of the property that has been accumulated through the efforts of labor. Somebody has to keep an eye on it and maintain and safeguard it and that is the public good they provide. Unfortunately, the greedy can turn this to their advantage when they claim that their property rights are superior to others' human rights.
And dumb people have a difficult time learning. As far as your assertion that it's by age 2, that is demonstrably false. The only thing native speakers get is an edge in the sounds of the language, but it's just that, an edge. People with good language learning skills, like Jodie Foster, speak an acquired language with no obvious defect. People with poor language learning skills, like Henry Kissinger, are stuck with the sounds of their first language all through adulthood.
Of the six languages I speak, my language and tone shows my history of learning them. Since I went to preschool with lots of hispanic kids, my Spanish sounds pretty standard for northern Mexico. When I speak Polish, I don't sound like a foreigner since I was raised with it. Apparently, I was paying attention when granny was talking and you weren't. Since I learned Russian in a formal school setting (from Americans trained at the Army language school), I don't have those sounds down very well. When I try to speak with Russians, they smile and ask me how long I lived in Poland because of my thick Polish accent. In my travels through France, people are curious where I'm from, because while I don't sound like a native Frenchman, they can't really place my accent and guess someplace like Quebec. When I say I'm an American, they are surprised, saying I don't sound like one.
I have no doubt that if I was plopped down in China, I would have no trouble picking up the tones (but I would have to make the effort and work at it) after a few months. And if I kept at it for a while, you would be able to tell where I learned the language, because I would also pick up the local dialect and accent.
The reason that this misconception about tones and language exists is because as we get older, we are taught that mimicry is rude. Look at Rush Limbaugh's mimicry of what he thought were Chinese tones. That was spectacularly rude because he was doing it to make fun of another ethnic group. But anyone learning Chinese, from age 1 to age 80 is going to have to go through that mimicry step and imitate those tones and have them slowly and carefully corrected by a native speaker. This is true in any language, whether it is classified as tonal or not.
When I teach ESL classes (to all native Spanish speakers), I make sure to teach the tones of English; how to make your 'v's different from your 'b's; to close your mouth when starting the 's' sound so it doesn't come out with the typical Spanish "es". And then there's the English "th", a sound few languages have and which requires regressing mentally to age 1 babbling. If you can get adults over the embarrassment of making and imitating baby sounds and have them practice tha-tha-tha-tha-tha-tha while sticking the tongue out, they pick it up pretty quick. Now, whether they will remember it and make it a habit instead of reverting to what is comfortable in their first language, that's another problem entirely.
Rather than put up tones as an excuse why you can't learn Chinese, you should put the effort into imitating what you DO hear. Here's a video on language sounds http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31zzMb3U0iY... , and while you may not be able to assimilate it in one pass, those sounds CAN be learned. Don't fall for the excuse that you had to learn it by age 2.
According to the NSIDC's latest map, it looks as though the Northeast Passage has opened: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews / The same map on just 4 days ago still showed it blocked. And still two full months to go for the melt season.
It's more a matter of evolve beyond. Capitalism is PRIMITIVE. Primitive tribes of people who still use stone tools and have no written language (think New Guinea) engage in capitalism. They weave baskets, raise pigs and sweet potatoes, do a little hunting and gathering, and when they interact with neighboring tribes, it is to trade this capital for things that are more useful. You can go to any open air market in the third world and see capitalism at work. What you won't see much of is what comes beyond capitalism: schools, libraries, medical clinics, etc.
Capitalism requires no central planning. Just a place to meet and trade your capital, the fruits of your labors, with your neighbors, who have spent their time amassing capital of a different sort from different labors. Just because people on Wall Street wear $2000 suits doesn't make them any more advanced than a New Guinea hill tribesman, they're still just trying to get the bid and the ask to match up and make a trade.
Once you see that capitalism doesn't plan for education, health care, or mass transportation very well, it's time to centrally plan those out for the benefit of all. While you are at it, you can centrally plan where the parks and nature reserves are going to be, how to divide the natural resources of the nation, how to make sure that everyone is guaranteed a minimum in the society.
Feudalism is not much different from modern industrial capitalism, the serfs just have cubicles instead of hovels. Socialism IS different and is an evolution to a higher stage of organization and development. Little wonder that the same people that abhor evolution also abhor socialism.
Rather than allow food stamp/WIC/EBT funds to be used at McDonald's, a for profit private enterprise, what you do instead is have subsidized government owned and operated cafeterias. Cafeterias that serve nutritious, not junk food at very low cash prices and that accept a wide variety of vouchers, coupons, or assistance cards.
This is the idea behind the bar mleczny or "milk bar" in Poland. It was an idea of the Communist post war government and you can still find them (although not as many) operating today. Originally, they served vegetarian dishes along with milk and dairy products, which is how they got their name. Nowadays, with more meat available, they serve all types of dishes, but the cuisine is definitely Polish peasant food: pierogi, golabki, kluski, barszcz, kasza, and lots of potatoes and cabbage. You can get a good meal for a dollar and gorge yourself for $2. When you go into one, you see quite a few pensioners who are probably on fixed incomes and watching their grosz (pennies) closely, but at least they can afford to get a hot, nutritious meal.
I don't know how it would go over here in the United States. Probably would be very popular in places like Buffalo and Chicago and Milwaukee given their Polish population. Unfortunately, here in the U.S., when you go to a cafeteria at a government building, the food service is usually contracted out to a for-profit company, and so the prices are no great bargain.
Numbers look like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 They can be found at the top of most keyboards. Some keyboards have a number pad at the side as well.
For something to be 'quantitative', it has to have numbers. Letters with subscripts are not numbers. An abscissa and an ordinate with some intersecting arcs drawn on them are not numbers. Putting letters and primes on the arcs does not turn a verbally persuasive argument into mathematics. Mathematics is based on axioms and definitions, from which follow lemmas and theorems. Often a useful theorem will spawn various corollaries. The link sited is clear of any traces of mathematics. Just as the picture below is clear of any working aircraft:
Although their plane made of sticks and banana leaves has some nice arcs to it, as does the link you continue to wave at me, it is not aerodynamic and it will not fly. In the same way, this economic argument, typical for what passes for economic thought and what is taught in university economic departments, also will not fly. It is imitation science and mathematics, not the real stuff.
Economists work with quaLitative data. They are no further advanced than long ago physicists or chemists debating how waves propagated in the aether, or how phlogiston was transferred from warmer to cooler objects.
When it comes to mathematics, they are pre-scientific imbeciles. They have this word they like to throw around, "marginal", thinking it to be a great insight they have discovered, while scientific disciplines realize that the concept of differential calculus was developed by Newton and Liebniz.
Now in Krugman's defense, he spent a lot of time at M.I.T., where ALL freshman are expected to become adept at calculus, so I would presume that he can indeed speak the language of mathematics. The problem lies in the larger academic community of economists, where semi-mathematical hand waving is deemed acceptable and not laughed at like it should be. The small minority of mathematically learned economists has had to tone down their analysis, just as Krugman has done here, to have it be acceptable for peer review.
Even if you look at the seminal works of economists, for example the Black-Scholes option pricing model, you find that it is merely a special case of a partial differential equation that was solved over a century earlier. The reason that economics is such a dismal science is not because they have noisy data sets, or that variables are cross-correlated, or they can't control experimental variables, it's because most economists have not been adequately trained in the scientific method. They engage in a lot of 'cargo cult' science, as Richard Feynman coined it, where emulating the appearance of technology is substituted for the actual principles of science and technology.
I'll say it again, economics is the province of charlatans and frauds. All one need do is look at Milton Friedman and his followers. They have a worse track record than astrologers, phrenologists, and homeopaths, mainly because the astrologers, phrenologists and homeopaths get lucky on occasion with their cures and prognostications.
I'm not going to end this screed without some positive suggestions on how an aspiring economist could actually lead his field out of the Middle Ages and into the Enlightenment. Here are just a few positive steps:
1. Learn some mathematics and use it. That means defining terms, stating axioms clearly, and requiring rigorous proofs. 2. Learn some multivariate calculus and how to apply it to your observations. 3. Learn how scientists propose physical laws and use those techniques to hypothesize economic laws. Then test the hypotheses.
This discussion is fine in the abstract, but to get down to "how is this going to affect my everyday life", I have some things to add. I believe my time living in the former Soviet Union gives me some perspective to comment. The Soviet Union got into space before the US, got into Afghanistan before the US, and fell apart before the US, so everyday life there is probably what we are headed for. There are lots and lots of poor people there, trying to look middle class, and very few wealthy people living in compounds with high walls. The marketplaces are bustling with people trying to sell what they have so they can get some cash to buy what they need. Imagine planning your life around the swap meet, sitting at a stall for 8 hours, and if you have a good day, you bring home enough to get by for a couple more days.
At least the poor there have the small apartment that the Soviet state bequeathed to them when it fell apart. It isn't very big, and being 50 years old or so, the electricity and plumbing always need attention. But there is heat in the winter, a leftover from the Communist centralized heating system, so it's better than living in your car after the house has been foreclosed. Debt, as they mention in the interview, has put Americans behind the eight-ball. At least when the Soviet Union fell apart, each family had their apartment as an asset; when the United States falls apart, American families will be left with a deficiency judgment from the foreclosure sale of their house. That and their consumer credit which the new bankruptcy laws won't be inclined to discharge.
Oil that is on the beach or in the marsh or floating on the water is exposed to weathering and microbial action. Bagged up and stuffed into a landfill, it is never going to decompose. It may have to wait another 65 million years for some other semi-intelligent species to extract it from the earth before it oxidizes completely.
If anyone asks you what to do with toxins in the environment, a safe answer is "oxidize it". Completely. To carbon dioxide. All that methane escaping at the bottom of the Gulf? If you start oxidizing it, methanol is toxic, formaldehyde is toxic, formic acid is toxic, but once it is completely oxidized to CO2, it not a problem (well, forgetting about global warming). That goes for every other toxic molecule in crude oil; once it is oxidized to CO2 and water, the environmental problem goes away.
Landfills are probably the worst environmental "solution" devised by man. They break the closed loop of recycling and allow reactive compounds to accumulate in an anoxic environment. They are nothing more than giant Clostridium ranches, providing miles and miles of surface area for the upkeep of their pathogenic herds. Even when garbage is "hermetically sealed", it never works; glass breaks, metal corrodes, plastic ages and cracks. You can't keep snot from leaking out of a landfill, into the groundwater, migrating through soil, or getting airborne.
Instead of keeping it around for decades, the mess needs to be oxidized -- now! The burning at sea has been pretty ham-handed, but at least it reduced the volume of toxic goo. What needs to be done is to soak it up on plant matter and let it decompose. Even give the decomposition a little assist, if possible. Why, it could even be done in such a way as to improve the environment. For years, barrier islands have been disappearing from Louisiana, due to the lack of nutritious silt. Now there is an abundance of material that can decompose and nourish plants. Take all those oily straw booms and fix them in the shallows of Barataria Bay. Inoculate them with microbes to break down the oil. After the breakdown is well under way, plant mangrove seedlings on them. Mangroves helped the environment in Naluvedapathy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naluvedapathy it's worth a try in Louisiana.
It's really interesting to watch how people work very, very hard to do exactly the wrong thing when faced with a problem. I put myself on mailing lists of volunteers to help out with the BP oil spill, and today I was notified about this cleanup in anticipation of oil moving their way:
Dear Volunteers,
Thank you for your patience in allowing us to respond to the BP Oil Spill with a coordinated and safe volunteer program. We’ve received numerous emails asking why volunteers haven’t been mobilized to assist with oil removal at this time.
The first step in the fight against oil is to reduce the amount of debris in the potential impact zones to the west of the current oiled shorelines. Debris and trash that collects on our shorelines can potentially get covered in oil and make the clean-up of these natural areas even more complicated. In anticipation of oil moving westward, we are planning a Beach Clean-Up project in Cameron Parish.
This project will include the removal of debris, both natural and anthropogenic, from the shoreline to make the removal of oil less difficult and reduce the amount of hazardous material we will have to dispose of once affected by the oil spill. In addition to picking up trash, we will be raking and moving the organic debris from the waterline to past the high tide line. The last volunteer project in Lower Jefferson Parish was a complete success and turned out to be a great asset now that the Grand Isle area is being affected. This is a pre-landfall clean-up; there will be no handling of any oil contaminated material or wildlife.
(shortened somewhat from the original, but relevant sections intact)
All of the beach response I have seen so far has men in HAZMAT suits scooping it up into plastic bags, probably to be chauffeured to some landfill where the oil can take its time to leach into the ground water. The volunteer effort above is going to make their job easier by removing anything that could soak up oil that washes up on the beach.
Let me take all of you back to Chem 1 and let's review some remedial chemistry. Crude oil is toxic mainly due to its reactivity, and what is the one way to remove all the reactivity in a barrel of crude oil? That's right, completely oxidize it. Burn it. Turn it into CO2 (forgetting about global warming for a minute). Put it in a pile where aerobic microbes can metabolize it.
No, don't clean the beach. Bring in dumptrucks FROM the landfill. Spread cubic yards of yard waste to soak up the oil: tree trimmings, lawn clippings, newspaper, cardboard, hay (like the two yokels on YouTube are proposing here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZsMxQOiLQU ). Keep dumping it below the high tide line until oil and the tide have pushed the mess up to the high tide line. Then you can take care of it. NO! Put that plastic bag down, send the garbage truck away empty. We are going to rake the oil soaked mess above the high tide line and do some chemistry here, an oxidation reaction.
We could just burn it, but that would be a dirty, smoky, sooty fire spewing dioxins for miles. No, it needs to oxidize on its own time. Inoculate it with microbes which will break it down. Think of it as a BIG compost heap contaminated with a small volume of crude oil. (Now you see why we need LOTS of yard waste on the beach.)
What will happen if we follow this course? There will be berms of mulch decaying above the high tide line all along the affected coastline. You will feel like you have to walk through a landfill to get to the beach. But then an amazing thing will happen. Microbes breaking down the oil (and the vegetation) will sporulate, insects will eat the spores, birds will come and pick the pile over for insects and crap out seeds on the pile. The seeds will germinate and plants will grow. After a few months, the pile will turn into a berm of life.
