Symbollocks

Comment on Metafilter, December 9:

For those of us who want to work as little as possible, office work works.

Well, to an extent I agree. But something I’ve come to realize is that stuff (“watch YouTube, share music, play Flash games, and kill time”) is ultimately not really fulfilling (and although I only speak for myself, I know it’s true of many other people I know… /anecdote).

For a while it was fulfilling (I had not had very much exposure to broadband connections). When I started working I used to spend all my down time at work on metafilter, watching TED videos, etc. etc. Then I got bored because I actually wanted to do a lot of the things I read about online (example), things I don’t necessarily have the time or energy to invest in when I’m off work and I’m tending to my relationships, going through all the mundane parts of independent living, and just relaxing.

So I started spending my down time figuring out how best to get out of this… trap? And then I came up with a plan. So now I spend my free time at work brushing up on my math skills, exploring technical manuals and getting ready to become an apprentice electrician. I really want to get a good background on all of the jobs that society could not function without, especially the trades (electrical systems, metal machining, welding, plastics, masonry, carpentry, plumbing/water/sewage systems, etc.) and agriculture which seem the most foundational. Unfortunately there is no university program anywhere that offers anything like a tour of these fields, so I’ll just have to do it myself.

You say it’s easier to smash the system from within, and although i take it that you’re joking I personally find the society (“the system”) we live in to be quite horrific on a number of levels, especially when it comes to how much we work, what kind of work we’re doing, and how that work affects the broader world. Office work is a good start in working as little as possible (in that access to the internet gives you the opportunity to get an education on how the world works and how it could be better) but the only way to REALLY work less is to create a better world in which we don’t have to work as much, and the only way to do that is to get out there and make it. Which is a lot more interesting than anything made possible by working less (hard) anyhow.

I’m wondering if peak oil will ever be recognized as the root of our economic problems. To most people, it’s always something else. We’ll continue to hear about how bankers, political turmoil, global warming legislation, or other small speed bumps are preventing oil production from carrying on at an ever increasing rate. People in 50 years will all still be clinging to their various personal scapegoats. It’s really sad because no one benefits from disinformation spread about peak oil. Not the elites, not any particular political party, not anybody.

Until now I hadn’t realized how hard it really is for people to admit that they were tricked into building the houses of their lives on shifting sands. This situation echoes that of the retired auto workers whose pensions were pulled out from under them. They had no reason (except a good feeling) to believe that the auto companies they worked for could sustain such enormous profit margins for so long. There was no proof. There was no accountability. You might hear these people (rightfully) badmouthing their former employers for breaking those empty promises (although most don’t complain, as even they know it won’t solve a thing), but you will never hear them admit to their own bad decision to rely on those promises in the first place. It’s extremely embarrassing. But people need to talk about it. Take your pick of these recent examples where examining the nature of trust might have prevented people from becoming victims: Bernie Madoff’s investors, the whole mortgage crisis (and every financial bubble in history), victims of “development” scams in third world countries, victims of the “post-industrial” economy in first world countries, etc. etc.

A reasonable painting of the future from Sorry Comics by John Kinhart.

“Consider, for example, the process of running a small, informal brew pub or restaurant out of your home, under a genuine free market regime. Buying a brewing vat and a few small fermenters for your basement, using a few tables in a remodeled spare room as a public restaurant area, etc., would require a small bank loan for at most a few thousand dollars. And with that capital outlay, you could probably make payments on the debt with the margin from one customer a day. A few customers evenings and weekends, probably found mainly among your existing circle of acquaintances, would enable you to initially shift some of your working hours from wage labor to work in the restaurant, with the possibility of gradually phasing out wage labor altogether or scaling back to part time, as you built up a customer base. In this and many other lines of business (for example a part-time gypsy cab service using a car and cell phone you own anyway), the minimal entry costs and capital outlay mean that the minimum turnover required to pay the overhead and stay in business would be quite modest. In that case, a lot more people would be able to start small businesses for supplementary income and gradually shift some of their wage work to self employment, with minimal risk or sunk costs.”

- The Homebrew Industrial Revolution (pdf), by Kevin Carson

The metaphor of alcoholism to our society’s addiction to oil is unbelievably rich, as apparently withdrawal from alcohol can kill you (Alcohol Withdrawal Syndrome):

“Some organs are rapidly swelling while others do just the opposite, restricting blood flow in both directions. At the same time, body cavities are filling with fluids- a normal, 175-180 pound man can swell to 250, 275, even 300 pounds before a vital organ finally, and mercifully, simply gives up. It is a painful, “ugly” death made even less appealing by the complete evacuation of fluids and solids at the time of death. While the body begins it’s organ shut-down schedule (which can last hours or even days), the mind somehow knows what lies ahead, and opts for an early check-out.”

Our society really truly needs cheap energy to continue functioning. Just like with any addiction we’ve gotten used to consuming more and more of our substance of choice. It has done things to us, irreversible things. At this stage in our addiction it is as if we no longer have any money to buy more, and we’ve even stolen to get it. But now we are now left with a dwindling supply, a supply which cannot last much longer at our current rate of consumption. Even if we could continue using at this rate we would eventually die from the very effects of using the substance (aka global warming).

But can’t we wean ourselves off our dependence? This is where it gets really, really sad: We don’t even have enough left to do that. Our problems are too intractible, our population too large, our dependence too complete. All we can do is prepare for the moment that “vital organ finally, and mercifully, simply gives up”.

Fuck.

Impromptu Curry (Aloo Mattar)

Ingredients:

5-7 Red Potatoes (less if using brown regular potatoes)
1-2 Onions
1 15oz Can Peas
1 15oz Can Cut Green Beans
1 15oz Can Diced Tomatoes
1 15oz Can Sliced Carrots

1-2 Tbsp Butter
1-2 Tbsp Oil
Some Water

1 Tbsp Curry Powder
1-2 Tsp Garam Masala
1-2 Tsp Ground Coriander
1-2 Tsp Cumin
.5 - 1 Tsp Chili Powder
.5 - 1 Tsp Turmeric
Salt to taste (I prefer 1-2 tsp)
Pepper to taste (I prefer .5 - 1 tsp)

Instructions:

Everything is optional, except that to preserve the taste you won’t want to do without the curry powder, coriander, and cumin. I would probably also keep in the potatoes and onions, as they are the “backbone” of the recipe.

Saute the onions in a large pot with the butter and oil. While they’re sizzling away (you’ll want to check on them every once and a while), scrub and chop up the potatoes. Chop them into small chunks not much bigger than an inch cube. I usually just chop them up into eighths.

When the onions are starting to brown, put in all the spices except for the garam masala. Then dump in the potatoes in and let them cook for a minute or two. Stir around the mixture making sure the spices are well distributed. Then pour a cup of hot water into the pot with the potatoes, onions and spices. Keep adding water until the potatoes are mostly covered. When you’ve added enough to boil the potatoes in, turn up the heat and put the lid on the pot. Let the mixture boil away for 15 minutes or more, enough so that the potatoes are soft. Add more water depending on how soupy you want the dish to be.

While the mixture is boiling, get the canned vegetables ready. Open all the cans and drain the liquid from the peas, green beans, and carrots. Pour everything in when the potatoes are about done. Add the garam masala at the same time and cook for a few more minutes. Voilà!

Best served with some kind of rice, naan, or flatbread.

I modified this recipe.

Brandon Darby is an FBI informant.

Brandon Darby was a victim of the same game he played with the activists he turned in. The activists he was spying on didn’t have the guts to carry through with their plans, but he himself was too cowardly to simply let it go, to not follow through on the awful obligations he had made to the FBI to catch some crazy kids. Now he is $12,000 richer and the two activists he turned in are going to lose several years of their lives to prison sentences.

He was the one who put them in the position to make the illegal weaponry that ended up getting them in trouble (molotov cocktails) by purposefully having the FBI confiscate the equipment they had originally brought with them (home made riot shields). He took advantage of their idiocy or perhaps he was an idiot himself. He incited their rage. He stoked the fire. And when even that failed to bring many criminal acts to fruition he tried to recoup his losses by ratting on their possession of unregistered firearms out of a subordinate relationship with a deceptive power structure… one of the power structures he once sought to destroy. What a sad sad tale.

What conclusions should we draw from this whole situation? Greater awareness of security culture protocol? Or perhaps a different approach.

From a post on the Ran Prieur forums:

Can we have a quick-check on “corporate farming”? Its a rarity. Seriously. Corporations do not want to own farms because farms fail too often. There’s a complicated sequence of operations in which corporations effectively own and control farms, but the big players are more than happy to let the guy-with-the-land-mortgage suck up the losses.

Okay, here’s the brief form. You can’t make money selling large amounts of ag product on the open market. There are reasons for this, mostly related to market development- farmers just can’t find anyone who will pay to drive out and pick up their quinoa or broccoli. Outside of a few valleys, in South Texas and California, there isn’t much of a vegetable packing, storage, and distribution infrastructure capable of handling more than a single truckload or two to the local farmstand or specialty restaurant. Specialty grains and pulses are even harder to unload, because the packing and redistribution points are few and far between.

The upshot is, farmers have to grow what the local elevator will take, and for virtually the entire continental US, that means the Archer-Daniels-Midland elevator, and it means corn, soybeans, rice, wheat, cotton or tobacco (which technically goes in a barn, not an elevator.) So Joe Farmer, who inherited three hundred twenty acres and some equipment, has to either go to business school and start his very own quinoa packing, warehousing, distribution, marketing and sales empire, or he has to sell a commodity product to an ADM elevator.

Now, commodity prices are artificially deflated in this country. That’s why we don’t spend much money on food, and why corn syrup is so cheap they put it in canned tomatoes. The difference is made up for with government subsidies, which are on a per-acre (rather than a per-bushel) basis. There are a zillion different subsidies covering everything from water conservation to feed corn, and farmers put more time into understanding how to fit the subsidy rules than they spend driving tractors. The catch is, to qualify for subsidies, you need crop insurance, and to qualify for crop insurance, you need a crop plan.

Now, what’s a crop plan? A crop plan involves telling the insurance agent what you plan to grow, where, when you will plant, what equipment you will till, disc, and seed with, what herbicides you’ll lay down, what fertilizers you’ll amend with, what seed you’ll plant, when you’ll spray and how and with what, and when the harvest is. The insurers look at your crop plan, say either “this makes sense, looks reliable, and we expect you to succeed, here’s a cheap rate” or else “this looks risky and weird, you might get eaten by armyworms, we’ll charge you more to cover the increased risk” and there you have it- something to collect on if your crops fail. You take that insurance to the feds, they cut you a check, you pay off the land mortgage, and you’re in business for another year.

Oh wait, did that sound rational? I forgot to mention that the company that insures your crops also sells herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, seeds, land mortgages, and financing on those chisel plows and seed drills. Think they’re going to accept your crop plan if it doesn’t use their products, in copious and expensive quantities? Fuggedaboutit.

So who needs insurance, though? Why not just save seed, plant a crop, sell it and take your chances with floods and blights? Nobody is stopping you- but you won’t qualify for subsidies, so you’ll have to sell at commodity prices which are, did I mention, deflated below the cost of production. And when you go back to renew your mortgage, because you won’t have earned enough to make payments, well, do you think the guys you snubbed on insurance, not to mention chemicals and seeds, are going to lend you any money?

So fuck the commodity crops. Why not grow lettuce- its worth a fortune on a small plot, no? Yes, but assuming you don’t also own a fleet of trucks, a refrigerated warehouse, and a team of marketing agents, what will you do with the other three hundred and fifteen acres? Land taxes cost money, y’know.

What about growing commodities, but growing them better? Sweeter sweet corn, tastier edamame-quality soybeans? Heirloom wheat? Could you charge more? No, you couldn’t- you couldn’t even sell them to the local elevator, because guess who owns that too? Making stuff come out of the ground is easy- making it go away on a truck, and have money come back later in the mail, that’s the hard part of farming.

So after fighting that for years, and watching the GMO crops come up the year after you tried to rotate them out because of the armyworms, or watching the price on glyphosate go up and up and up (seriously- ask your local farmer what he’s paying for roundup this year) , or watching the margins on an acre of potatoes (or peanuts, or whatever your local commodity specialty might be) get narrower and narrower, then some guy comes to the front door of your house- or trailer- in a suit and offers you eight million to build a subdivision on your land. And you think, holy shit, I could get out of this company-store racket for good, maybe take my family someplace with a decent school system and less meth, and you walk downtown to sign the papers. And what greets you? A bunch of college kids damning you to hell for selling out the independent spirit of the American yeoman, for giving up the sacred stewardship of The Land (and you can hear the capitals when they say it) and they call you a corporate overlord bastard and tell you your crops ain’t fit to eat and we’re a nation of slaves.

And you hate them. They’re right.

That’s a “corporate” farm.

25 Random Things About Me

1. I’m neither an optimist or a pessimist. Regarding the half glass of water example: It’s water in a glass. Based on your perspective you can choose whether to view the glass as half-empty or half-full. Neither of these are “true” in the same sense that we know there is water in a glass. I’m observant enough to see these are both valid perspectives and I would be limiting my awareness to say one or the other is “true”. Regardless, I think both perspectives are valuable and that being able to compare these perspectives internally is a very important skill.
2. I don’t use shampoo (except maybe once a month). I rinse my hair, but prefer to let the natural oils build up, especially when my hair is longer than an inch or so. If I use shampoo I’ll get dandruff.
3. I am anarchist and by extension an anti-statist. I believe the pursuit of power is unethical.
4. I can appreciate most music. I don’t enjoy much popular music, but I can bear it. I don’t have a favorite band or type of music, it varies constantly depending on my mood.
5. I don’t own a car for a lot of reasons, primarily because it’s easy for me to do since I live less than a 10 minute walk away from work. I walk, bike, bus, and bum rides when I want to go somewhere.
6. I didn’t have a girlfriend until after high school. While I was in high school I was bitter about that. But now I can see that most girls avoided me for pretty good reasons: I was arrogant, I didn’t know how to make myself talk (shyness) and couldn’t talk to people well, I had low self-esteem (yes, AND arrogant), I was not outgoing at all, and I was SO AFRAID OF EVERYTHING (of girls, ending up alone, coming off as obsessive, talking to people, etc. etc.).
7. I have been with my girlfriend, Jennifer, for a little over 6 months at this point. We’ve talked about getting married by sometime next year. Though we’re not officially engaged, we’re officially pre-engaged.
8. I had planned on going on a long open ended trip to begin this past May. I have cancelled that trip in lieu of the girl mentioned above, but we plan on travelling together after we’re married.
9. My early childhood (0 - 7) was spent in the inner city of Indianapolis. I remember it as one of the happiest times of my life.
10. My late childhood and teenage years (7 - 18) were spent in the suburbs of Indianapolis. I remember it as one of the most disturbed times of my life.
11. I dropped out of college after freshman year and have been happier ever since. I don’t really regret it, which many have told me I would (or in their minds, should). I value education and learning, but not schooling.
12. I feel a sense of urgency about the future of our world. I feel that our civilization is on a self-destructive path and that as a whole we’re still in denial about it. I hope it’s not too late.
13. I read voraciously, but I go through periods of almost no reading at all. The reading I’ve done in the past couple years has been focused on making sense of the world, trying to understand it better.
14. I do my best to act confidently on the knowledge I’ve acquired. I’m doing my utmost to create the world I want to live in. I think doing anything else would be a waste of my life.
15. When it comes to voting I’m utterly independent. I also reserve the right not to vote. I dislike arguments to always vote or to never vote, in fact…
16. I dislike puritanism. Puritanism is an intellectual crutch that is condescending towards the complexities of reality. Puritan outlooks smack of righteousness, shame, blame, and general “finger-pointy”-ness.
17. I think ideologies are intellectual crutches and that a fixation on a single one is unhealthy (puritanical). Of course, we need crutches when we’re weak, but we should be hunble enough to admit it.
18. I think defending your right to shit on people and the things they cherish, also known as snarking, is a serious personal deficiency possibly representative of extreme righteousness and arrogance.
19. I like attempting to reconcile differing political sentiments. “Liberals hate cars because they destroy the environment.” “Libertarians hate government dependence.” An agreeable solution would be cutting off subsidies for auto-makers/roads and abolishing zoning laws that force businesses to be located out of walking distance of residential neighborhoods. See?
20. I’m a computer programmer, and it’s an alright job, but it’s not as amazing as some industry people might make it out to be.
21. I used to consider myself a geek. I don’t anymore, mainly because “geek” tends to imply obsessiveness or single-mindedness, neither of which describe me much anymore.
22. I mostly don’t like to listen to music when I’m out and about because I highly value the small interactions with the world around me. Headphones often seem to just get in the way, and send an anti-social vibe.
23. I’m (usually) very patient. Lulls in conversation don’t bother me. Sitting in traffic or standing in line is a joy. These occassions give me the opportunity to literally stop and think, which is asolutely a blessing in our fast paced society.
24. I’m an introvert (and read this article to refresh your memory about what exactly that means). Social interaction is exhausting to me. I’m an idea person, not a people person. I am fairly good at suppressing my introvertedness, but that tends to be even more exhausting (and stress inducing) in the end.
25. I claim no religion. However, I feel there is something very spiritual about existence itself. I was raised in a Mennonite Church, and this has had a pretty big influence on my life, particularly when it comes to violence.