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I've got land. Do you?
- Thread starter Les Kern
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The elderly started it
So where did this land-grabbing, resource-gobbling nature of ours originate? Tom Brokaw says that the WWII generation was the "greatest generation," but isn't it really the generation that got the ball rolling down the path of consumerism, suburbanization, automobilization, televisionization, and the wal-mart and strip-mallization of society? The "greatest generation" did indeed turn out a bumper crop of messed up children who turned out, on average, to be the biggest bunch of self-righteous, spoiled, materialistic, immoral, polyamorous, mentally deranged, fickle, have-it-all ****wits the world has ever seen. This is a uniquely American phenomenon -- whereas the middle-aged in most of the rest of the world turned out to be "relatively" well-balanced, in America it's like "Does your house smell like crap? Buy new LYSOL anti-odor spray!" and housewives are like, "Yes, my house DOES smell rather like crap" and buys a can of compressed health-degrading chemical odor to offset the odor in her house. Somehow the Baby Boomers inherited a "stupid gene" from the "greatest generation" and the earth is now suffering as a result. It is clear that we are a permanently damaged, sick, and twisted culture and we may never recover. The only hope for the survival of our race is to use our best genetic material to create two new human proto-embryos, a male and a female, and then wipe ourselves out. The embryos will thaw after the human armageddon, and the earth will be free. I nominate myself and Maria Sharapova to produce this perfect genetic material.
So where did this land-grabbing, resource-gobbling nature of ours originate? Tom Brokaw says that the WWII generation was the "greatest generation," but isn't it really the generation that got the ball rolling down the path of consumerism, suburbanization, automobilization, televisionization, and the wal-mart and strip-mallization of society? The "greatest generation" did indeed turn out a bumper crop of messed up children who turned out, on average, to be the biggest bunch of self-righteous, spoiled, materialistic, immoral, polyamorous, mentally deranged, fickle, have-it-all ****wits the world has ever seen. This is a uniquely American phenomenon -- whereas the middle-aged in most of the rest of the world turned out to be "relatively" well-balanced, in America it's like "Does your house smell like crap? Buy new LYSOL anti-odor spray!" and housewives are like, "Yes, my house DOES smell rather like crap" and buys a can of compressed health-degrading chemical odor to offset the odor in her house. Somehow the Baby Boomers inherited a "stupid gene" from the "greatest generation" and the earth is now suffering as a result. It is clear that we are a permanently damaged, sick, and twisted culture and we may never recover. The only hope for the survival of our race is to use our best genetic material to create two new human proto-embryos, a male and a female, and then wipe ourselves out. The embryos will thaw after the human armageddon, and the earth will be free. I nominate myself and Maria Sharapova to produce this perfect genetic material.
SpaceMagic said:
I won't flame you, but I will say that it COULD be that we're in this mess now because instead of looking at problems and trying to solve them, my dear friends on the right AND left would rather spew hateful rhetoric. What we need is a vision, and we DON'T have it right now. Hold "tough" at the G8 is the LAST thing we needed when we spend the least of any industrialized nation on poverty. Argue if you will, but we're all in this together.
As for the environment, I'd be in heaven if even Nixon came back as president. At least he had the common sense to know the world's resourses are finite. Bush, on the other hand, allows the rape of the planet as long as it generates a buck. Open your eyes.
Bah.
alex_ant said:
Exactly!
The final straw of final straws for me was the disposable toilet bowl cleaner on a stick. Use it once, throw it away! God forbid you have to rinse something out and use it again. We are the most wasteful animals in the world, bar NONE. Even monkeys use the same stick over and over to catch termites, not clear a forest just to have fresh ones. We are destroying ourselves by destroying the box we live in.
MongoTheGeek said:
P. J. O'rourke wrote a book some time ago (All the trouble in the world?) That addresses this somewhat. It went something like this: Bangladesh is proud that they have WAY more jitneys (human powered taxis) than cars. That saves lots of money! Well, if you add up what it costs to feed someone and how many BTU's are produced and add in the lost manpower for important things, THEN compare that to how much energy it takes to power a car, those jitney's are the WORST thing you can do.
Sometimes the obvious is so incredibly wrong.
Les Kern said:
Of course, we have to look at entire systems and try to find ones that use up the least amount of resources, or even better are designed specifically to be reused. Furthermore, we have to look at what systems can be used now as well as later. For anyone who's interested in this idea, I would suggest Cradle to Cradle a really interesting book by a chemist and an architect that talks very succinctly about the inherent problems in current design, in both manufacturing, architecture, and urban planning.
I will suggest, as I have before, that the US begins an immediate Manhattan-style project to research and build new energy sources. We need to explore Wind, Solar, Tidal, and Nuclear energy with the same zeal we once did in hunting for oil. We also need to stop subsidizing Big Oil, and turn that money towards burgeoning and workable energy sources.
The solutions are there, but there are so many vested interests in keeping things the old way that we're stuck.
SpaceMagic, the minute you wrote 'left-wingers' I lost a little bit of respect for your opinion. Look, we've got a problem, all histrionics from SFGate and Rolling Stone aside there is lots of climate data, local environmental data, etc. to suggest that oil is a problematic resource and the supply is dwindling. It was never very good to begin with for the local environment, it puts the US in alliance with dangerous people, and we're going to have to fight harder and harder for it. We need a new source of energy and we need it now. Haggling with the G8 only succeeds in keeping the status quo and if you've paid attention to history-class you'll notice that change is inevitable.
Lacero said:
Absolutely correct. Complex hydrocarbons are so handy, they can be transported, and then burned when and where needed to release heat energy. The carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide that result unfortunately are not quite as useful for human endeavors. They will eventually get recycled into trees which will create new coal and petroleum fields. In a few million years.
And that's the problem. We are currently engaged in an uncontrolled experiment with a planet which has accelerated the conversion fuels to energy and byproducts to a rate staggeringly higher than the planet's ability to convert them back. We don't know the outcome, but we are gambling all our chips on the consumption number anyway.
The planet will recover (it's essentially a closed system) but one outcome might be it may need a few million years time out with no life on it to do so. Welcome back to the primordial soup...
Aren't jitneys more efficient though because the jitney drivers don't have to lug around 2000+ pounds of steel to go places like a car does? People are gonna eat anyway (well maybe not necessarily, since they're Bangladeshi), so why not eat a little bit more to get the energy to be a human taxi. Plus, what goes in as food and doesn't get used as energy comes out as poop, which can be used for fertilizer. Ford, GM, are you listening? SUVs are yesterday, jitneys are where your future is. I learned a new word today, too.Les Kern said:
I can just hear Charleton Heston right now, "You can tell everybody. Listen to me, Hatcher. Youve got to tell them soylent green is people. Weve got to stop them somehow." At least thats how these articles seemed to be painting the future to look like. These articles are just a rehash of the 70's doomsday movies. Because every one was panicking over gas prices. Well in the 70's I think gas quadroupled in price from $0.25 to about a $1.00 in the 70's, I don't know I wasn't born yet. So this is just going to be another adjustment for the economy. From $1.25 a few years ago to $5 real quick. So what America will get richer. We'll get use to $5 a gallon until 2025 to 2030 when it suddenly jumps to $30. At this point we'll start bitching and whining again. 
What about another resource that Americans use in a disproportionate amount that is also a major cause of pollution? Milk. Have you seen the government studies of how much methane these milk factories release into the atmosphere? It's insane. At least car exhaust is countered by trees. Anyone know anything that involves methane as an input in its respiration cycle? Maybe the solution to global warming isn't fewer cars but more barbeque.
velocityg4 said:I can just hear Charleton Heston right now, "You can tell everybody. Listen to me, Hatcher. Youve got to tell them soylent green is people. Weve got to stop them somehow." At least thats how these articles seemed to be painting the future to look like. These articles are just a rehash of the 70's doomsday movies. Because every one was panicking over gas prices. Well in the 70's I think gas quadroupled in price from $0.25 to about a $1.00 in the 70's, I don't know I wasn't born yet. So this is just going to be another adjustment for the economy. From $1.25 a few years ago to $5 real quick. So what America will get richer. We'll get use to $5 a gallon until 2025 to 2030 when it suddenly jumps to $30. At this point we'll start bitching and whining again.
actually you should read kunstlers book about declining oil supply. it's not the mad max or the soylent green scenario. instead, life becomes intensly local. there is a sharp divide between rural and urban. if your not growing crops then you will have no business living outside of the city. air travel is only for the super rich (forget going to paris). quality of life (in the usa at least) depends on which part of the country you live in. the northwest does best (close to agriculture, good weather, fishing....), the great lakes states are able to use the water for transit and become closer to canada. the areas that do worst involve places like las vegas and phoenix (no resources to support the existing infrastructure and they become ghost towns. the south becomes feudal. cali is overrun by the collaps of mexico.
it's a good read.
Platts and other information services have pleanty of published information on resource outlook. The general trends are always interesting and more short-term than you'd think. This information goes into the economic decisions regarding LNG need and siting, pipeline size and molecules to pack the pipe with, type of generation to build. In the Northeast, their is a real push to LNG terminals b/c with "load growth" (which is what we call the expanding rate of electricity use), generation mix (coal, fuel oils, nuclear, natural gas and renewables), we only have sufficient nat gas reserves to meet demand out through - I think 2009 was the last chart I saw. That is a combination of reserve production declining (a trend we already are seeing out of Maritime province production that feeds the NE down through Maine) in conjunction with load growth. LNG is seen as the way out of this bind, and economic given where natural gas prices have been over the past few peak periods but is recognized as a solution to pursue while we look at something better.
To the folks who speculate that there somehow an infinite fuel resource - we're certainly not seeing that in resource . reserve predictions from drillers, who now model based on much better technology and taking into account the modern economics that justify the expense of exploring for smaller reserves.
That said, I'm struck by how we've been able to put so much stuff into the water in the last 150 years, wether it bacteria, mercury and other heavy metals, fertilizers, PCBs, etc. The US is filled with water ways out of attainment with clean water standards (many of which are not very safe and are based on exposure rates that are less than what folks might expect - for example, the certain concentrations of a compound are considered safe in fish assuming fairly low rates of consumption. When you see the warning signs regarding fishing in rivers, like the ones you'll see along the Potomac, those levels have even been exceeded. Certainly, even safe levels are only safe for some populations as those of you with kids know from when your wife was pregnant.
Development is also amazing - when I was in DC, folks would tell me about when they came their in the 70s and what are very close-in parts of the city were rural. The Post had a story last week about the last little farm within the beltway being sold to developers. Growing up in the West I was amazed that in 90 years (this was in the 80s) we'd gone from the very last of the Indian wars to amazing development seperated by national parks and arid waste lands. Now 1 in 8 American's lives in CA, the 5th largest economy in the world and that was acheived so quickly.
Given the effect on other species and the fact that - much as we not like to think so - they are a good barometer for our helth (not only do fish have rising toxicity levels, the levels in people have been studied to be on the rise over the past couple of decades), I'm not as optimistic that we're smart enough to work around it. Humans have a relatively short history, and think about modern times where we've had even more the view of controlling the environment which has been fairly limited (George Washington would have had much more in common with the technology of Rome 1800 yrs. prior than us, 200 yrs. latter). That control and mass production has made us successful (with the world population more than doubling from the time that JFK was president in the 1960s) for a time, but I'm not sure that's a trend that can continue.
To the folks who speculate that there somehow an infinite fuel resource - we're certainly not seeing that in resource . reserve predictions from drillers, who now model based on much better technology and taking into account the modern economics that justify the expense of exploring for smaller reserves.
That said, I'm struck by how we've been able to put so much stuff into the water in the last 150 years, wether it bacteria, mercury and other heavy metals, fertilizers, PCBs, etc. The US is filled with water ways out of attainment with clean water standards (many of which are not very safe and are based on exposure rates that are less than what folks might expect - for example, the certain concentrations of a compound are considered safe in fish assuming fairly low rates of consumption. When you see the warning signs regarding fishing in rivers, like the ones you'll see along the Potomac, those levels have even been exceeded. Certainly, even safe levels are only safe for some populations as those of you with kids know from when your wife was pregnant.
Development is also amazing - when I was in DC, folks would tell me about when they came their in the 70s and what are very close-in parts of the city were rural. The Post had a story last week about the last little farm within the beltway being sold to developers. Growing up in the West I was amazed that in 90 years (this was in the 80s) we'd gone from the very last of the Indian wars to amazing development seperated by national parks and arid waste lands. Now 1 in 8 American's lives in CA, the 5th largest economy in the world and that was acheived so quickly.
Given the effect on other species and the fact that - much as we not like to think so - they are a good barometer for our helth (not only do fish have rising toxicity levels, the levels in people have been studied to be on the rise over the past couple of decades), I'm not as optimistic that we're smart enough to work around it. Humans have a relatively short history, and think about modern times where we've had even more the view of controlling the environment which has been fairly limited (George Washington would have had much more in common with the technology of Rome 1800 yrs. prior than us, 200 yrs. latter). That control and mass production has made us successful (with the world population more than doubling from the time that JFK was president in the 1960s) for a time, but I'm not sure that's a trend that can continue.
alex_ant said:
LOL, jitney's are the future...
But seriously, I can't think of anything less efficient - give that man an education and a desk job and he will produce far more value.
CanadaRAM said:
You ignore that cost because it is (literally) nothing. The future generations don't exist. One musn't go around abrogating the rights of real, living human beings to enjoy their lives and drive their SUVs in the name of ... nothing.
Mr. Anderson said:
the future is now... I just passed a gas station in Carlsbad (CA) yesterday: $2.99 9/10 for premium. Ouch
broken_keyboard said:
That's an interesting way of looking at it, but I think it has an inherent problem.
See, when you make an investment you understand that in the future you will be rewarded with more money than you initially put in. If you buy a stock, you believe the company will make more money and that this will cause the stock to rise, you sell the stock and make a nice profit. Simple, and entirely dependent on the notion of 'future value.' We do this every day with lots of things in the economy. We make decisions about future value, the notion of credit, the notion of even the value of currency based on gold, is entirely focused on future value. Car prices, houses, college education, are all based on judgments that proscribe a future value to each thing.
Your system assumes that investments are worthless because the future provides a zero-sum investment. But, this isn't true at all.
In fact, the entire idea of long-term construction (highways, pyramids) depend on the idea that the future will make this worthwhile. We built the Interstate Highway system not for the cars of the day, but the cars of today. We also built our nuclear arsenal not for Korea or Vietnam, but the future war we believed would happen as World War III.
See, the future has value because we're going to be there soon. So, we don't just build for future generations, but also for us. We assume that in 5, 10, 20 years we will still exist and therefore we want the same things around, or we hope for things to be better. You make the assumption that the future is invalid and I would argue that not only is the future valid, but that the future is more valid than the present and certainly more important than the past.
Furthermore, if we were able to stop using cars our air would become clearer, thus resulting in cleaner air for us and maybe a slowing of terrorismless money for the Sauds means less money for al-Qaedawhich means we could get a tax break, which means more money to spend on a new Macintosh. You see, the future comes quickly. Sooner than you think.
The fallacy here is considering the BTU as the work unit --- being as the automobile pumps out 1000's of BTUs of waste heat to move 2 passengers from A to B. Of course gasoline is more efficient at storing and releasing BTUs. But what is the resulting work? Moving 2 people from the hotel to the market square.Les Kern said:
So the argument boils down to "you can waste more thermal energy for fewer dollars with a car, so the car is more resource efficient" which is topsy turvy.
It's like saying you get more computer for the money with a Wintel machine because you get all those viruses for free.
If you start counting the rickshaw driver's breakfast as an input, you have to count the taxi driver's breakfast as well, and the person who pumped the gas, and the truck driver who delivered the gas to the station, and the crew on the ship who...
Oh, and ask the residents of LA or Mexico City whether the exhaust of automobiles truly has no cost, just because nobody charges people for producing it.
Besides, it goes back to my original contention. You can make the equation add up to anything you want if you selectively omit some of the inputs.
Which is what the free market economy does. Which is why price is no measure of resource use.
I used to have land (and a house), but sold it so that we could afford to have my wife stay home with our baby for a while. Now we live in an apartment, and it's kind of nice not having to worry about keeping up with yard work on the weekends. Oh, wait... this thread wasn't actually about whether or not I owned land...
atari1356 said:Oh, wait... this thread wasn't actually about whether or not I owned land...
It's not? Oh well, here's my backyard
hulugu said:
I'm not assuming that. I fully acknowledge it's possible to act now on the basis of future value.
My point is: why should my present day value be lessened to increase value for some stranger in the future? You want to lessen the value of my SUV today, by saying I can't drive it as much - in order to increase land value to some coastal landowner in the future who won't have to build a dike.
Why should I reduce value for him? Why not the other way around? He doesn't even exist.