It's the end of the year, and I'm in some sort of dystopian nether world where my parents are going to a party and I'm going to stay home and watch Soap. Before I start, though, I thought ya'll would appreciate if I started your new year off right by giving you some advice. No, don't thank me. Here are some things I find helpful to keep in mind:

You could die tomorrow. I find keeping this in mind to be really helpful. Fail a test? Well, it's not the end of the world - that's tomorrow, when you get hit by a truck! Win a hundred dollars? That'll pay for part of the coffin! This doesn't mean to be perpetually morbid, just to keep in mind that life is filled with surprises, and one of those surprises is the last one. Pencil in all plans. Eat, drink, and be merry. Incidentally, I discovered this year that my favourite part of the bible, beating even the Sermon on the Mount, is Ecclesiastes.

The only person you have any control over is yourself. Humans like to generalize, because it makes life easier to deal with - if we had to start from scratch with every person we met it would be a huge bother. Imagine not being able to trust your banker until you'd known them for months, or having to introduce yourself everytime you wanted to buy something. However, these generalizations only hold up so long, and sooner or later everybody will be unpredictable. The only person you can really know - and control - is yourself. People might be jackasses to you, but you control whether or not it pisses you off. You choose to be how you are. So basically, be with the people that make you happy, be understanding when they defy your expectation, always forgive anything, and always remember that you control yourself.

People are real, ideals are not. People are weird and wonderful and anything you come up with to model them will fail. The person who thinks that people are evil will be as disappointed as the person who thinks they're good. Always put real live people above ideas and systems. This sounds easier than it is.

Karma is a nice idea, but isn't a law. This means that there are happy evil people and miserable good ones. You can be a good person your whole life and die alone and poor. But it works as a general guideline, so it's best to be a reasonable decent person. Be nice to other people, and generally they'll be nice to you. Help other people, and be pleased when you're helped. You have an effect on the world in which you live. But not control. If the world treats you bad, it doesn't mean you've been a bad person, just that you've hit a patch of bad luck. There's no way the world should be, just the way it is.

I could give lots of advice on how to be happy (hint: good food, good books, good music and a beautiful girl help) but in my experience that's different for everybody. What's important is to do things because you find them rewarding, and to remember that you do not run the world. You only run your own life. You're not even fully in charge of that - you don't get to pick when it starts, you have only marginal control over when it ends, and there are millions of secrets that you keep from yourself. Every day a thousand sins are committed against you which you cannot name, a thousand crimes you can never prosecute. Life is fundamentally unfair.

But it is, at least, equally unfair. Everybody else is living the same life you are, and you're all working to be happier. You might as well work together. Forgive people, be kind to them, don't expect anything of them. Be reasonable. You are capable of being a happy, calm and loving person. Why not?

3:12 PM

Hey! You know that Do Not Call list? I know, I know, it doesn't apply to us - we have cell phones. But sometimes you have to think of those below you, those with landlines. And those poor folks are about to be a-corded (haha! pun intended!) even more misfortune, with the possible weakening of the Do Not Call list rule. If you don't know what the Do Not Call list is, imagine you're trapped in a strange city, and all around you are murderers and rapists, and just as they're closing in some bureaucrat swoops up and fends them all off with a sheet of paper you have signed saying you don't want to be murdered or raped. It's like that, except with spammers.

Now, however, some folks want it to be weakened. Just a little murder-rape. This is a bureaucracy, so it's not like we can vote on it. But what we can do is write comments against the weakening of the rules. Go ahead, make up an organisation - I was Citizens United Against Haste. Then just write something brief, ten lines or so. These things really can have an effect, especially when they come en masse. If you want to know what's going on more in-depth read through the article above. Basically spammers have found a loophole in the FCC's laws, and want to make the FTC add the loophole.

Thanks,
Love,
Alex
12:00 AM

Interesting! The average commute time went from 21.7 minutes in 1980 to 22.4 in 1990 [1] to a whopping 25.5 minutes in 2000! [2]. Experiencing heavy traffic regularly for long amounts of time has been linked to any number of stress-related illnesses (bus drivers routinely retire early for health reasons).

This is bad. Not surprisingly, Atlanta, home of the whatever school of urban planning, showed an increase of over 5 minutes(!) from 1990, up to 31.2 minutes. Design livable cities, folks. I think we should set a national target of reducing average traffic time to 20 minutes and engage a number of programs to reach that, namely:

1. Halting suburban growth at the expense of cities. A corollary to this one, of course, is prettying up cities.
2. Support a better public transportation infrastructure. Make it easy and cheap. Businesses should pay the bulk of money required to buy this, after all, its their workers that will be better off for it.

EDITED LATER: So according to this hard-to-read chart public transit use has declined considerably and regularly since 1960! Gosh, we sure are idiots! I guess the problem is more one of the image of public transit than anything)

3. Plan! Out! Your! Cities! The invisible hand of the market is just great at picking the price for pig bellies but it does a rotton job of arranging cities in such a way that they don't suck souls right up. Assuming technology grows at the same rate that population does (if this assumption is wrong than we will all starve to death anyway, so we might as well assume it) 20 minutes from anywhere in the city to anywhere in the city is perfectly reasonable.

Yes, the government will have to be heavy handed to achieve this. Entire swathes of cities will have to be relocated. It's a flaw in democracy that unpopular and hugely necessary projects like this are difficult to implement, but by doing so we can alleviate many future woes.
4:42 AM

The Economist has an interesting article on the impending dollar collapse.
3:34 AM

I wrote something saying I would be offline, but alas, it does not seem to have posted. To put it neatly, I have many books to read and not much time, so I've disabled interweb on my computer.

Also, interesting article on a report from the Pentagon on how the government has fucked up in the Middle East. The report is surprisingly honest. Check out the direct riposte to Bush's "hate our freedom" nonsense:

“Muslims do not ‘hate our freedoms’, but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favour of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the long-standing, even increasing support, for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and the Gulf states.

I'm sure that Bush and co. will take this with the level of gravity it is due and change their policy appropriately.


While on that site I found this article: ‘Dreadful’ Christmas hits should be banned from high street, says MP.

We need that man in America. I'm coming to dislike Christmas more and more, but I feel sure that cutting off that wretched music would make it much more tolerable.
1:50 AM

I wrote something saying I would be offline, but alas, it does not seem to have posted. To put it neatly, I have many books to read and not much time, so I've disabled interweb on my computer.

Also, interesting article on a report from the Pentagon on how the government has fucked up in the Middle East. The report is surprisingly honest. Check out the direct riposte to Bush's "hate our freedom" nonsense:

“Muslims do not ‘hate our freedoms’, but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favour of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the long-standing, even increasing support, for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and the Gulf states.

I'm sure that Bush and co. will take this with the level of gravity it is due and change their policy appropriately.


While on that site I found this article: ‘Dreadful’ Christmas hits should be banned from high street, says MP.

We need that man in America. I'm coming to dislike Christmas more and more, but I feel sure that cutting off that wretched music would make it much more tolerable.
1:33 AM

Science expanded on an enormous scale in the twentieth century, and shows no sign of slowing down today. Should it ever do so, though, and we're able to look back at what we have learned, I think nutrition will rank as one of the most important new fields. Before the 20th century food and health weren't even really thought of as linked, and the discovery that they are ranks up there with sex and pregnancy in terms of important connections we have realised.

One important thing we've learned through the study of nutrition is that bigger is not necessarily better. The idea of the glutton has never been a popular one, but the idea that gluttony might lead to a shorter life was foreign to a starving world. Now that Western nations have enough food for just about anybody to be a glutton (and enough cars that no one has to exercise) obesity is being recognised for the health hazard that it is.

In the same way we have to recognise that our entire system of management is unsustainable. Currently our society is run by this principle: grow or die. Businesses cannot simply make the same profits as last year, they must expand, conquer more markets, make more money. Popularly we are highly materialistic, and possessing more (money, things, friends, etc) means that you have succeeded more.

We have reached a point where "grow and die" is more appropriate. The average American household owes over 8 grand in credit card debt alone (14,500 total debt, not counting mortgages!), and a remarkable 40% of families spend more in a year than they earn. Real wages, on the other hand, have fallen continually since 1973. People are spending more while earning less. They are taking out loans to buy junk.

(As an aside, I think the primary cause of this is TV. Commercials cover a wide range of topics, but they all have the same basic message. If it was reduced to a comic it would be:

Panel 1: Here's Ted, and his life sucks. (PROBLEM)
Panel 2: Here's Ted buying something (SOLUTION)
Panel 3: Here's Ted with his new possession, and now his life rocks! (RESOLUTION)

The problem and resolution vary, but the solution is always the same: buy something.

With the exception of premium channels and pay-per-view commercials are the main reason for most of TV to exist. Instead of selling a product to their audience they're now selling their audience to a product. With a propaganda system for buying more running 24 hours a day it's not really surprising that people buy more even though they can't afford it.)

Global markets meanwhile are increasingly interconnected (see above: businesses must find new markets to conquer). Say hypothetically that some day the present debt crisis comes to a head, and America goes bankrupt. This will lead to so many catastrophes that I can't list them all, but some of the more important ones are:

1. The WTO will collapse as the US loses the luxury of following its rules. The IMF and World Bank will also collapse without the US able to contribute.
2. Developing countries around the world, especially East Asia will find themselves with no market to sell to.
3. The EU will also be severly hurt, though obviously not as badly as developing countries.
4. Africa will be fucked, but this is the case now and I doubt anyone will notice the change.

A worldwide depression will have other nasty consequences that will make the 'Islamofascist threat' seem minor in comparison with a return to regionalism and authoritarianism everywhere. As well disease will become more rampant when the current luxuries staving off ordinary germs and making new brands of supergerms are cut off. As it is I understand the WHO is predicting an influenza pandemic soon, and if this happens to a world in depression it will dwarf all previous flu pandemics.

If GE crops become widespread before the depression there is serious cause to worry about major famine. GE crops create a monoculture that needs watching after. Evolution must happen, and when we take over the initial creation we must also take over the evolution. If the corporations which made these crops go bankrupt, there will be nobody to do that, and pests will evolve to eat pest-resistent crops, and diseases will evolve to infect supposedly immune crops - and since there is not as much variety among a GE crop as a 'natural' crop the diseases and pests will sweep through on an unprecedented level.

If the US is able to delay or lessen the effect of this debt crisis (neither of which I think is very plausible, especially since our current strategy is to stick our fingers in our ears and repeat the national anthem loudly and insistently until the problem goes away) the incessant growth of markets is still going to cause some severe problems. Chief among these is the toil the industrial revolution continues to take on the environment.

I recognise that the issue of global warming is a controversial one, and so before I discuss it I'll make sure to provide the argument of those folks who think it's a myth. Basically their argument goes like this:

Global warming doesn't exist, because it would be really really inconvient. The 90% of scientists who say otherwise are crazy.

A few of the more audacious individuals add that even if it was happening, they personally like heat, and can't wait for it to get warmer.

Obviously these people are idiots, and so I'll proceed with the assumption that global warming is happening, and is caused by humans. The world is getting a fever because we are placing massive stress on it. We are using tons of non-renewable resources every year, and farting tons of unhealthy and unhappy gases into the air (America releases 20.1 tons of CO2 into the air per capita!).

Generally it is hoped that these problems will be solved by technological advances (besides growth we require faith in growth). After all, before environmentalists started whining we had folks like Malthus predicting inevitable widespread famine as growth outstripped production, and technology saved us from that). However there's an essential difference between famine and environmental catastrophe - food is a short-term need and so people will pay for it, but a good environment is a long-term need and so people will ignore it. If you pay 5 dollars for a loaf of bread you are curing something that ails you right then - food is the easiest cure to the natural and persistent disease of hunger. However paying a 5 dollar premium for an environmental product has no tangible benefit, and so in a free market 'environmentally friendly' products will continue to be unpopular.

(Where environmental products have succeeded it is situations where they prove to be cheaper, such as hybrid cars. This only really applies to objects like cars that directly draw on non-renewable fuel, and it just allows the gas economy to grow. It is a hopeful sign, but generally it will be cheaper to rape a girl than buy her flowers, and the same applies to the earth - as long as we're concerned simply about it being as cheap as possible the wisdom of the act will be ignored)

By the time the environmental crisis has reached the point that it cannot be ignored I fear it will be too late. Especially when one considers the likelihood that any major environmental crisis will also provoke a political and economic crisis, possibly setting off the debt crisis mentioned above. A world ravaged economically will be in no shape to deal with a world ravaged environmentally.

America is the fattest country in the world. We are leading the world in obesity and we are leading the world in the ideology of growth. Some concrete steps need to be taken to reduce both our obesity and our unhelpful ideology:

1. Abolition of commercial TV. TV should be split into two categories: local access tv and premium tv. Local access will be funded by the community and will have locally produced tv. And no ads. Premium tv will be channels like HBO. There cannot be product-placement on either one.

2. Abolition of credit cards. Credit cards are causing most of the worst cases of debt in our society. They're a way to get loans without having to get approval. But they also cost a fortune - the average credit card purchase ends up costing 112% more than if you just used cash.

3. Abolition of cars. This won't be popular, to put it mildly. But cities today are designed for cars, not for people, and this is reflected in how little people actually walk - and how fat they're getting as a result. Obviously this can't be done all at once, and will require a major redesign of how our communities are organised - they will have to be much more decentralised, and the distinctions of rural, suburban, and urban must disappear. Many roads should be destroyed, with some remaining for buses and ambulances. Along with the abolition of TV this will improve people's health dramatically (especially when millions aren't killed every year by cars).

4. Decentralisation of food production. Did you know that modern agricultural techniques have led to a 90% drop in crop diversity? This makes them more and more vulnerable to disease. For instance, it is entirely likely that the currently dominant banana strain will become extinct within 10 years, because a disease is spreading through it. This has happened before (with a different strain, obviously), but bananas only became more monocultural. The dominant strain still only accounts for 10%, but if current trends in biodiversity aren't reversed this will become a larger and larger problem.

5. Abolition of QWERTY. C'mon people. There's a better way.

6. Restructuring of health away from consumer-driven solutions. Right now both prevention and treatment are consumer-driven, and this needs to change. This is part of the problem-solution-resolution path of all consumerism, and buying something - whether it's anti-bacterial soap or a check-up at the doctor is always presented as the solution. This is leading to more monoculture in terms of immunity, and more and more 'supergerms' which we are unable to resist will arise as a result. It's also contributing to long-term diseases, like obesity, going untreated, since there's no easy solution and you can learn to live with it. Good eating and exercise - a generally healthy life, instead of short cures to unhealthy living - must become the dominant modes of putting off death.

These are all just a few specific instances of the major change that needs to be made. I have no doubt that it would be easiest to implement them with an authoritarian world government, but governments are inherently against diversity, which is obviously what we need. Whenever we are wedded to a single ideology - whether it be one of growth, of order, or of liberty - the vulnerabilities of that ideology will hurt everyone.

If we are not to destroy ourselves we need to make one more important discovery: the world is weird and wonderful just as it is. People are weird and wonderful. We must commit ourselves to accepting diversity. I don't mean diversity in the shallow way PC apologists do but real actual diversity, not just of people but of production, medicine, food, and all other ways we interact with the world.

This means unprecedented democracy - if you oppress someone (whether economically or violently) you're depressing diversity, and thereby weakening humanity. Right now many of our interactions involve treating others as objects, not actual people. To a certain extent that's inevitable (and even useful!) but when it becomes the dominant mode of interaction it stifles innovation and diversity. We must live in a world of people, not objects.
1:29 PM