Category: Uncategorized

In browsing the NYT website today, I came across 3 environmentally related articles (2 of which require the browser to pay).

One was an overview opinion piece on obtaining oil independence and reducing CO2, and thus global warming. That article was pollyannaish, with ginormous techno-optimism, and no discussion of lifestyle factors which contribute to the problems, or possible economic consequences of adopting different standards. Nor did any of them provide any perspective by saying like “x/y/z% of energy is used for industrial/residential/commercial purposes. Plans 1, 2, and 3, will reduce emissions by a, b, or c%”. In broad strokes, it’s technically correct, but if I had a few free hours, I’d nitpick it out to at least 2 or three times its original length.

When urban dwelling apartment/condo residents with roommates who commute by train and recycle (how I wish chicago’s head were not up its ass on this one) are not differentiated from SUV commuting suburban residents with 2 to 3 times the floor space, and the enormous energy consumption that results, it irks me. I don’t think people are aware enough of those issues. Not nearly.

John Tierney wrote a piece in his column denying that population growth was a problem. And suggesting that efforts to control population growth (like China’s draconian regulations) created more problems than they solved. I’m iffy on population growth as a problem. It has caused serious problems in the past (e.g. Rwanda). And more people do consume more, leading to the increased side effects of such. Many of which have serious externalities.

The story on population problems is tricky. Malthus predicted that since nobody was making more land, agriculture, and thus productivity had a natural limit. And as people approached that limit, no one would have an individual incentive to breed less, so people would have less land, and thus less food. The US as a whole is nowhere near a Malathusian crisis at this moment. Fortunately, Manhattan is able to justify its existence to the parts of the world that export food. The world as a whole is closer than the US, but not quite there. Parts of the world (like Rwanda, as Jared Diamond convincingly argues in Collapse) have already experienced Malthusian crises.Others have existed for a very long time at stable population levels, without continual geographic expansion. I’d prefer not to push the envelope on this one. It’s very tricky.

I don’t equate continual population growth with happiness. Stabilizing the population seems like a good idea to me. Sooner or later, birth control, abortion, infanticide, famine, drought, plague, war, or genocide will get the job done. Imho, the earlier on that list, the better.

The final article was not from the opinion section, unlike the other two, and didn’t demonstrate the same techno-optimism, even if it did demonstrate a woefully inadequate understanding of economics. They talk about how demand will outstrip supply, and the headline, “A Power-Grid Report Suggests Some Dark Days Ahead”, doesn’t talk about rising prices, it talks about decreasing supply. That’s not the goddamn same as rising demand. I’m deeply skeptical of the alarmist claims that we’ll have a shortfall on energy. Distribution difficulties, perhaps. But if the aforementioned suburbanites, requiring 10 times as much wire per person to get their electricity, are not charged based on the distribution costs (I really don’t know whether they are at present, but I kinda doubt it) then maybe we will have some dark days.

On my flight from hawaii to LA, someone finally noticed my tiny bottle of eyedrops and two mini lube packets. They’ve been in there since before I left for europe. That means I’ve flown to & from baltimore, as well as to oakland and hawaii with those in there and TSA never noticed. I mean, they’re small and all, but still I was breaking the rules (I honestly hadn’t remembered). 4 flights. But as the TSA guy was putting them in a ziploc baggie he made some inane comment about how they were all eye care products, and I responded that 1 of them was. To which he verbally plugged his ears and said “nyah, nyah, I’m not listening”: “Yup, they were all eye care products.”

You know, if you’re going to be digging through people’s bags for a living, a couple lube packets seems like something you should get used to real fast.

Also, on the supershuttle from ken’s place, I happened to share a ride to LAX with the CTO for the ubuntu linux people. He gave me a promo cd and encouraged me to check it out. I may just. I’ll have to get an lcd screen first, though…

PS, I left before the earthquake, and none of my family got hurt in the earthquake. Just in case anyone was worried.

The ocean (or my own carelessness) struck a blow on behalf of Rice. I dropped my cell phone in the ocean. I’m letting it dry out before I discover whether or not it still works. Good times.

Dammit, I miss this place every time I come out here. Or, more to the point, I miss the people. I’ve been pathetically lazy, and despite plans otherwise (which, to be fair, the other parties couldn’t make, one flaked the other had a legit medical excuse) I never made it to the other side of the bay. I barely made it out of oakland. But I had a fabuuu time. Saturday was awesome. A 10 hour gaming party? Yes, please! Jeremy, Simon, Lili, me, , , and . Awesome. Tichu, Mu (okay, they’re not board games, whatever), a deduction game (think clue, but different), staying up late chatting. Yay.

Then sunday Simon, Lili, and I had lunch with and dinner with . Monday I had lunch with Rice, and a gangbang dinner (no actual banging occurred) with Simon, Lili, & his man, and .

I won’t jump ship on chicago or the gao without a job, but that’s a far cry from saying I won’t look for a job doing environmental policy in the bay area for a slightly more flexible and relaxed employer. =)

I was checking out Current TV, Al Gore’s user-generated-content media venture. And the first thing I saw on it was a video of a guy paying experts to waterboard him. Holy shit.

Sometimes I’m disturbed by my dispassion. This was probably one of those cases. I should not be resigned about this. This is something worth marching in the streets over. Why am I not out there? Why isn’t anyone else?

There was an okcupid test about “what role would you have played in Nazi Germany?” It said “you would think of your old Jewish friends from time to time, be a little sad and wonder what happened to them.” And at the time it stung. As someone who strives and at times sacrifices to avoid groupthink, that definitely stung. And yet, I wonder how inaccurate it is…

I’m too pragmatic to be a paladin. I will not pit myself against the current, I’ll just step out of the river. It’s a bit sad to think of myself that way, but that’s the reality of the situation.

A phenomenon I encountered while at the Berkeley Free Clinic makes me think a bit about what Al Qaeda, and perhaps a certain Iranian president might be doing. Let me ‘splain. At the BFC, we were always trying to recruit people, and unsurprisingly, we got alot of idealogues. And there was alot of talk about empowering the people to make their own medical decisions, and down with physician tyranny. But the truth is, we loved and trusted our physicians, and were pretty heavily oriented towards the scientific method-tested ways of doing things. We got funding from and worked with government health boards. So, why the “down with the medical establishment” talk?

It’s a recruiting trick. Our organization did alot of good work, and we did have an ususually democratic decision making structure. But we didn’t really do anything too radical in terms of challenging the system.

This brings us to terrorism, “the greatest threat to western civilization” (it’s far, far from it). And the rhetoric that surrounds it. Whether it’s our own leaders saying the terrorists would destroy us if we weren’t doing our very best to brutalize them in any way possible or bin laden talking about how he’ll ultimately bring us to our knees, there’s alot of highly overblown rhetoric involved.

Let’s be clear, pollution and congestion cause more problems in the united states than terrorism did. This was true before, during, and after september 11th. It’s just diffuse.

The first goal of terrorists is not to kill. It’s to get attention. If all 3,000ish people that died, 5 years ago, had died of unexplained natural causes in their bed. If twice that number had, the terrorists would not have been happy. Our deaths are not goal. They are a means to an end. Remember that. Terror is the goal. Panic, destabilization. It’s a psychological game. And they are winning the game on their terms. We don’t seem to know the terms of our game, and that more than anything else, is why we are not winning.

But telling us “they pose a serious threat to us” is a) false. We kill more of our own in car accidents and destroy more dollar value in property in any year than they have in their top year. Did I pull that out of my ass? Yes. Do I doubt it? Not in the slightest. b) fear mongering of the first order.

Do we have things to fear other than fear? Of course. But it doesn’t do us any good to fear them. And sweating your odds of dying in a plane crash is just plain stupid. The last thing we should be doing is buying into their overblown rhetoric. We don’t want to be playing the game by their rules.