Author: harold

And ACT on it. (part 1, part 2)

Key points:

– The green energy transition is not really happening.

– In practice, the life expectancy of a wind turbine may be less than 15 years. Solar panels may last a few years longer but with declining efficiency, so both turbines and panels have to be replaced regularly at great financial, energy and environmental cost.

Neoliberal economics is ecologically blind. Even Nobel laureate economists argue that we must maintain allegiance to growth and the illusion of “rescue-by-technology” so the next generation has the wealth and techno-mechanics to mitigate the consequences of climate change. Consistent with this illusory reasoning, many national and corporate leaders interpret the threat of climate chaos as an investment opportunity.

It’s awful. But! We can change that. Here’s the plan in 11 steps (emphasis is mine):

1. Formal recognition of the end of material growth and the need to reduce the human ecological footprint;

2. Acknowledgement that, as long as we remain in overshoot — exploiting essential ecosystems faster than they can regenerate — sustainable production/consumption means less production/consumption;

3. Recognition of the theoretical and practical difficulties/impossibility of an all-green quantitatively equivalent energy transition;

4. Assistance to communities, families and individuals to facilitate the adoption of sustainable lifestyles (even North Americans lived happily on half the energy per capita in the 1960s that we use today);

5. Identification and implementation of strategies (e.g., taxes, fines) to encourage/force individuals and corporations to eliminate unnecessary fossil fuel use and reduce energy waste (half or more of energy “consumed” is wasted through inefficiencies and carelessness);

6. Programs to retrain the workforce for constructive employment in the new survival economy;

7. Policies to restructure the global and national economies to remain within the remaining “allowable” carbon budget while developing/improving sustainable energy alternatives;

8. Processes to allocate the remaining carbon budget (through rationing, quotas, etc.) fairly to essential uses only, such as food production, space/water heating, inter-urban transportation;

9. Plans to reduce the need for interregional transportation and increase regional resilience by re-localizing essential economic activity (de-globalization);

10. Recognition that equitable sustainability requires fiscal mechanisms for income/wealth redistribution;

11. A global population strategy to enable a smooth descent to the two to three billion that could live comfortably indefinitely within the biophysical means of nature.

If we don’t do exactly that,

It is a key number in economics.

For small businesses (still the vast majority of businesses around the world), the average profit margin is under 10%. Restaurants are most likely around 3%. What that means is that for every $100 spent by a business, they make $3 in (return) profit. And that’s when things are good. Gas stations hover around 2% profit margin. Shit is rough.

An app store, like the info about Google Play showed us recently, has a profit margin of over 60%. Yup, from every $100 spent, Google makes 60 bucks.

This is, simply put, insane profit margin. Absolutely batshit insane.

You would think that yeah sure, software IS a high profit margin business. True. But over 60% profit margin and they never gave a bigger share to their developers, ever? And then they want to give a bigger share to one developer called Netflix, who doesn’t need a cut because they’re a thriving business? It’s wild. NDAs and “soft” monopolies are enabling all kinds of abuse and supercharging greed.

By the way Apple has a profit margin of 68% on their latest phones, so it’s not like Big Tech is only profiting like crazy on software. To reach a margin that high on a physical, expensive device is another level of ruthlessness: imagine hundreds of suppliers getting squeezed, dealing with single digit profit margins at best, hearing that their client boast how they’re printing money while avoiding paying taxes. Infuriating.

This is why there’s capitalism (mom and pop restaurant trying to satisfy customers and simply be) and there’s capitalism (absolute abuse of power from overly wealthy company to extract staggering, not-shared profit while doing the least possible).

Rare high rises make them a lot more special, just sayin’

I wrote about Broadacre City before. I just saw a great comment about it and its place in our future:

In my opinion, reviewing the Broadacre City as social reform for everyone actually has a lot to offer… Surely, Urbanists insist that density solves all carbon-emissions concerns, but as we’re learning, the world is shifting to more of a "work from home" model, for one thing.. More concerning, at least to me, is the overwhelming research and evidence that modern urban lifestyles are producing unhealthy and stressed out people.
Just to discuss health, it’s now abundantly clear that human beings were evolved to be on their feet, moving around, in the sun, in the fresh air, eating foods that come right out of the ground… Surely, Wright saw naturalism as an aesthetic value and a philosophical one (in the realm of Whitman). But his concept, as it pertains to healthy lifestyles, offers a remarkable amount of equity in primary human well-being.
We talk about future communities that offer fresh, local produce and animal proteins, grown conscientiously by small farmers. We talk about places to walk and run and ride bicycles where the air is clean and there is minimal danger. We talk about schools that have healthy air circulation* and places for children to run around in grassy fields. We talk about obesity and how lack of these things produce it. We talk about mental health problems, and how lack of these things produce it. Etc.

A 100 percent.

Urbanists don’t have common sense. Life demonstrates constantly that people have different ways of living and you want to cram them closer and closer to deal with it? Sounds like you’re not listening.

Relationships are terrible these days because people are stressed out by this super intense life, it’s so obvious for people who experienced something else at some point. High urban density (outside extremely homogenous population) is a disaster. They say it’s more efficient in terms of carbon-emission, I’d say it’s making people ultra dependent and more sheepish than ever, which is a good thing for many, many companies. It’s good for business, I get it.

It’s bad for our communities and societies though. And this is where FLW’s city concept is far from being naïve or idealist.

I grew up in the countryside, and then in the suburbs. I lived for ten years in a top 10 denser cities in the world. Now in the infinite suburban Los Angeles, I enjoy everything that I enjoyed previously: quiet field of grass if I want to. Busy skatepark if I want to. Fancy restaurant if I want to. Huge movie theater, a bicycle ride, a car ride, I can do it all and I wish that to everyone. It’s the best. Suburbia is queen.

Now give me a small, FLWish house with radiant heating floors and I’m golden, making bloopidy bloops in my workshop.

I mean,

If billions of dollars are spent on AR/VR for decades to show how no one is using it in 2021,

If a company with a failed AR set can still raise $500M in 2021,

If companies can hide billions of dollars in taxes all the time,

If hundreds of people playing games on camera are millionaires,

If the state of California hit by a pandemic, somehow ends up with a surplus of *checks notes* 24 to 75 billion dollars,

If people can pay millions of dollars for a .jpg file “certificate”,

If people can “invest” in crypto and get scammed in the millions of dollars range,

If Los Angeles still allocates $1.76B a year to police when crime is at its lowest in over 20 years,

If Panama and Pandora leaks demonstrate that most world leaders (often demanding austerity from us, citizens) are hiding staggering amounts of wealth all around the world,

What is money, and why are we acting like it’s part of the periodic table? It’s totally made up, foh.

I was talking about how innovation doesn’t drive anything anymore because we pretty much have everything already, capitalism’s end of the road, etc. Well, another example of that (HN comment):

My last company tried really hard to pitch AR/VR projects. Using headsets, phones even the Bose sunglasses. It was a huge struggle to find anything compelling to do with AR even when it worked. We ended up selling a few nifty marketing experiences and artsy installations but they were like 30 second experiences and not useful for anything. The tech "works", it’s just not very compelling.

Think about phone AR which works very smoothly and Apple/Google have been investing in hardware upgrades to enhance AR experiences yet it’s been 5 years since Pokemon Go and no one has figured out another interesting thing to do with it.

It’s not that we can’t innovate, it’s just that that innovation goes nowhere because human beings are completely satisfied, in so many ways. VR/AR don’t bring anything that we don’t already have. Decades, billions of dollars and we’re still facing laptops most of the day because those not only are enough, they’re just perfect for what we do.

Then we leave them on a desk, close them and go do human things around, in the sun maybe.

Alexandra Souverneva, who is suspected of starting the highly destructive Fawn Fire in Shasta County last week, was trying to boil bear urine so she could drink it. The 30-year-old Palo Alto resident’s bear-urine-boiling fire is what allegedly ignited the blaze that scorched more than 7,000 acres and forced hundreds of people to evacuate. [BB]

I very much agree with the assertion that our economy is getting less dynamic, in the sense that everywhere you go in the US it seems like everything, and i mean everything, is being steamrolled by bigger and bigger corps and morphed into a bland, dumbed down, mass appealing corporate monoculture, designed (probably by MBAs) exclusively with profits in mind and no actual interest in developing any sort of soul or true differentiation. Random example, walk into a hardware store (everywhere you go its either lowes, home depot, or maybe ace, cross country) and tell me if there’s a real difference between any of the tool manufacturers. On the one hand, the convenience of cheap and fairly durable goods is great. On the other, it seems like everyone is afraid to stray too far from what works to really innovate or compete. Most cars look pretty similar. The same restaurants exist literally from coast to coast, everywhere you go the US is starting to look more and more generic.

Mostly it probably has to do with economies of scale, but at this point I’d rather spend an extra 10%+ on goods and services if it meant a return to true differentiation and a wider variety of consumer culture.

You guys are not getting it. Capitalism is done. There’s pretty much zero innovation because there’s no need for it. There’s zero new market, there are no new needs. The past twenty years have already been about recycling capitalistic ideas. We went through it all and back in the past forty years. We have too much of everything, and when I say too much I just mean it is grotesque at this point. 30 different cereal, sure. Do we need a new one? Absolutely not. Lately we even created artificial scarcity with tech! The best proof of our collective capitalistic insanity here.

Capitalism is done because capitalism won. It’s not a perpetual cycle and wasn’t meant to be. There was to be an end, and we reached it. Now, let’s freaking redistribute wealth properly, shall we?

The best part about having to go outside for a smoke is you end up standing next to people outside of your normal work hierarchy. You get to have 1v1 conversations with OTHER managers, and people higher than you – whoever at a very casual level. The benefits of this are enormous. I certainly talked more to our director of IT by smoking than I ever did with my own boss.

HN comment. It’s true. The day I stopped having smoke breaks with other folks at companies, is the day my opportunity rate tanked badly.

I chose health over socialization but didn’t know that it would mess with work like that.