Disqus - Friends of MvGuy

Re: Reflections on "India's Rural Poor- Why Housing Isn't Enough to Create Sustainable Communities"

Garrett Connelly — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 17:27:00 -0000

This is a very good article about a subject which more people should be focused on.

I recognize it is unpopular to point out actual reasons for economic disfunction but unless we all start talking plain talk our specie faces an uncertain future.

History is written by militarily victorious cultures while the future is made by quiet people attempting to raise healthy families. Many millions of nonviolent people have been displaced by an economic structure attempting to grow to infinity, faster and faster forever, on our beautiful but finite planet.

Many of those trapped in poverty did not realize the way to riches was to externalize costs and avoid responsibility for cleaning up the pollution left in the wake of a mad conquest for resources.

It will be very difficult for cultures intent on dominion to help those so confused by such an idea that they find it abhorrent and fall into poverty.

Although education is an important first step out of poverty, especially for women, those who plunder and pollute the planet for profit may have attended top universities but they are not educated.

Cordially,

Garrett Connelly

Re: The Arrow of Time in Scientific American

Garrett Connelly — Sat, 31 May 2008 23:28:18 -0000

I have a problem with the idea that the number of possible entropic microstates remains constant across the time line between nearly empty to nearly empty. It seems to me that communication of individual perceptions carries information which can effect outcomes in a blend of eddies that reflect qualitative differences.

Yes, there is a fertile field at the extreme limit which one might refer to as quantum-gravitational microstates, even so, I cannot see why this uniform and featureless blend of perfectly organized building blocks should not be viewed as unstable zero entropy ready to burst with potential qualities expressed as conscious and democratic decisions by perceivers who act as individuals to qualitatively manipulate unfolding physics.

Am I way off course here? It's kinda important to get this part of things straight.

Garrett

Re: Pocket Change

Garrett Connelly — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 08:21:24 -0000

Military spending is about 60% of discretionary spending - now that’s something.

It is often pointed out that the U.S. spends about as much as the rest of the world combined for war department budgets.

As a young graduate student in the late 1960's my thesis covered the impending collapse of the USSR due to excessive military spending, pollution and spiraling costs of surveillance.

Remember when the USSR disappeared from the news? It was quick.

Re: The Arrow of Time in Scientific American

Garrett Connelly — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:23:23 -0000

I want/try to keep my keyboard in neutral and strive to look strictly with other's eyes, yet, in this particular realm, is entropy made any more complicated or difficult to understand by gravity than by the emergence of sentient perceivers?

Brian Greene says the only thing expanding as fast as the cosmos is consciousness. Albert Einstein said our perception of ourselves as individuals is something of an "optical illusion" of consciousness.

These points of view have practical everyday implications that are difficult to bring up most of the time.

Cordially wondering,

Garrett

Re: Small is beautiful (and radical)

Garrett Connelly — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:02:03 -0000

Well thought out and heartfelt. I was there back in the 70's - 90's. I liked that comment that both communists and corporatists have pulled every trick in the book to eliminate a strong and independent agricultural citizenry from their countries. We all know the price of fuel will skyrocket soon and the wages of dispossessed workers are being held down even though productivity has increased, a significant shift is bound to be. From the late 90's to now, I've been organic farming a different crop, people power through practical pedagogy on the web at http://www.ferrocement.com ..... practicing externalized profit instead of costs, a new business form, what goes around comes around, world wide.

Re: Small is beautiful (and radical)

Garrett Connelly — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:02:03 -0000

Re: Anti-jobs 'California Jobs Initiative' crew threatens suit over name change

Garrett Connelly — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:02:22 -0000

Jerry Brown has been one of the most fun, smart and imaginative politicians in all history ! Remember how much more prosperous and fun California was when he was Governor ? Imagine what Jerry Brown would do and say about people opposing an insured and healthy citizenry if he was president.

Re: Anti-jobs 'California Jobs Initiative' crew threatens suit over name change

Garrett Connelly — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:02:22 -0000

Re: A chat with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his new 10 million solar roofs bill

Garrett Connelly — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:02:54 -0000

Senator Sanders is an actual leader and statesman. What a wonderful person ! Why are there so few like him in Washington D.C. ? Change that and we will all enjoy a much happier and more prosperous world.

Re: A chat with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his new 10 million solar roofs bill

Garrett Connelly — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:02:54 -0000

Re: A chat with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his new 10 million solar roofs bill

Garrett Connelly — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:02:35 -0000

Senator Sanders is attempting to shine a light on what is possible, it's exactly what he did with the health insurance issue that has become so twisted and weird in congress. We know that no farmer would let 25% of the farm go without health care, simply because the farmer needs full production from the farm; translate that simple idea to the nation and the creative potential of healthy citizens. Now look at solar power : Senator Sanders knows that all life on planet earth depends upon solar energy captured by plants and converted to food in the infinite imaginative ways that earth fosters through cooperative evolution. He doesn't bog us down with facts about how many trillions of dollars are spent on wars to secure a sucker's straw to oil fields in distant lands, he simply leads us to see with our own eyes that the sun makes a gargantuan power flow onto the earth and that the solar power can be harvested in many ways. If the plants can do it, surely humans can figure out a way as well. And when that day arrives, humans will be as free as plants and earn a way of life that flows from the cosmos in ways the future will know more about than we who live our brief lives today. Freedom of choice is on the map here. Do we really want endless war to secure resources for corporations that are granted human rights and seek to grow to infinity on a finite planet ? The alternative is a fun, secure and just life for everything that lives. The good Senator is helping us see there is a choice to be made. Senator Sanders is a giant righteous soul battling greedy little piggies. We should help him with every ounce of strength we have.

Re: A chat with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his new 10 million solar roofs bill

Garrett Connelly — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:02:35 -0000

Re: A chat with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his new 10 million solar roofs bill

Garrett Connelly — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:02:33 -0000

Line loss is an important point being overlooked in these calculations. As much as 50% of the power generated from a distant nuclear or coal-fired power plant can leak from the transmission lines before the electricity reaches its ultimate destination. Zero line loss can be ascribed to solar panels installed on site of use and very low line loss for small wind turbines and wave power generators located near the majority of citizens living near coastal regions. Five to ten of those new nukes or coal-fired generators could be avoided simply by eliminating phantom load caused by appliances that do not turn all the way off, and that's just the tip of the conservation effort that people in charge of their own power production pay attention to when they have their own gauges showing production and use. Line loss and phantom load are huge energy sinks that can and will be avoided when concerned and aware citizens realize the environmental and monetary costs of waste in the power system.

Re: A chat with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his new 10 million solar roofs bill

Garrett Connelly — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:02:33 -0000

Re: A chat with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his new 10 million solar roofs bill

Garrett Connelly — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:02:01 -0000

Nuclear power plants leak when they grow old and emit radioactive pollution every day from the day they are first turned on. The moral failure of US corporations, government and political system can in part be attributed to the con job of convincing people that it's okay to pump poison pollution when only a few extra citizens per year die from the pollution. This slippery slope has led to moral decay so advanced that defenders of corporate rights to ever increasing profit don't even realize that median human income has gone down in the last 25 years even as corporate economic activity has increased. Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed an idea that points toward rehabilitating a nation that has sold out human security to support corporatism and endless war. It really doesn't matter how much more or less a balance of renewable and conservation costs, the advantage or returning power to the people is redeveloping an educated society that regains the ability to enjoy life and care for the beauty and health of the earth we live on.

Re: A chat with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his new 10 million solar roofs bill

Garrett Connelly — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:02:01 -0000

Re: A chat with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his new 10 million solar roofs bill

Garrett Connelly — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 05:02:55 -0000

You folks with the positive and friendly attitudes are way better at exact numbers than me, even so, I lived for twenty years with solar panels, some of which I scrounged used, that was in the mid 1970's. Those panels were used until at least 2005 and many from that date are still in use. I chose solar because transmission line installation was more than the price of the solar panel installation. We tend to forget important issues in these close minded and ideologically rigid US style debates around health, power and war : there are billions of people who need shelter, sanitation, and reading light so their kids can become educated and do their homework. Once educated and out of the anti-social traps of corporatism, they will have smaller families and develop a new economic system based on quality rather than quantity. Small scale power brings power to the people in ways that cannot always be reduced and abstracted to formulaic monetary numerical relationships. Renewable power managed by the people who use it leads to conservative energy use that is good for planetary health as well as human society.

Re: A chat with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his new 10 million solar roofs bill

Garrett Connelly — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 05:02:55 -0000

Re: The N of an era: America’s nitrogen dilemma — and what we can do about it

Garrett Connelly — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:03:48 -0000

80 - 85% of what we eat turns into sewage and then pollution. The land was taken from the people by corporatists using federal taxes and subsidies. A return to smaller scale agriculture which utilizes human sewage for fertilizer will empower all citizens and help restore cultural balance with nature. Education is the long-time, well known solution to excessive population. There is no difference between huge communist farms and giant corporatist farms. Well educated citizens working smaller farms can be good friends with well educated urban citizens who work in the trades as well as professional fields.

Re: The N of an era: America's nitrogen dilemma -- and what we can do about it

Garrett Connelly — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:03:48 -0000

Re: Why are we propping up corn production, again?

Garrett Connelly — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:03:35 -0000

Adverse social and economic impacts of US agricultural subsidies and their devastating impact upon the poor and small scale farmers in other countries are well documented. Yet nobody ever mentions that these practices were perfected internally in the US and that agricultural land has already been transferred from US citizens to corporations. In other words, what is now being done world-wide by corporatist pirates with US government assistance has already been done to US citizens, with US government assistance engineered by both political parties and backroom lobbyists.

Re: Why are we propping up corn production, again?

Garrett Connelly — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:03:35 -0000

Re: Why are we propping up corn production, again?

Garrett Connelly — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 02:03:45 -0000

@Non-wonk

No apologies necessary. You have listed many of the well documented major problems associated with subsidized agriculture. The adverse impact of corn subsidies on Mexican farmers is painful there right now, and we have seen how destruction of the Haitian rice industry currently burdens that country's efforts to recover from the earthquake. Another subsidy rarely mentioned is the endless war expense to secure cheap oil, as well as the direct subsidies to oil that keep the price of energy low enough to distort our culture toward giant machines, pesticides and corporate seed monopolies. All these subsidies distort the free market toward giant agricultural enterprises which are measured as efficient in a false cost input matrix.

Drive through the Salinas valley to gain a better picture of the agricultural concentration which has already been accomplished. Inheritance taxes were used in the middle of the last century to move land from family scale, some fairly large, to corporation scale. Corporations never die, they don't pay inheritance taxes, but once that technique was no longer needed, when land ownership was already concentrated, inheritance taxes were lowered. So, back to the Salinas valley, view out into the fields, past the spray rigs being reloaded by people in hazmat suits and migrant workers in the fields wearing tee shirts, dotted among the fields are the unoccupied farm houses that people used to live in. There were once farmers living in those fields who inspected their crops and decided to spray when they saw a problem. Now corporate execs have their assistants schedule prophylactic spray based upon helicopter availability.

Here I move to remedy, rather than go on forever mentioning my impressions of how all this adds up to a form of agriculture very similar to the large state corporate farms of the old Soviet Union. How do we actually recreate the efficient agriculture that once characterized this important US industry?

Inclusion of all externalized costs into the cost structure will transform agriculture to genuine efficiency rather than propaganda. Step one is remove all direct subsidies to agriculture, and at the same time help foreign nations which have been so devastated reestablish their own agriculture. The second step is eliminate indirect subsidies, this path leads all the way to removal of tax deductions for advertising; there is no free market theorem that requires free speech by advertisers to be subsidized with tax deductions. Step three is establishment of externalized cost mitigation via market price adjustment based upon evolving study by the brightest young scientific minds our nation can assemble. The third step is a longer term exercise to rationalize the free market so it can accurately reflect true product costs in the price structure. Here's an example : Atrazine & Frogs, we are fairly certain that Atrazine is causing male frogs to become female enough to lay eggs. Rather than wait for US human males to become more soprano, my suggested method of scientific study will project a cost of feminization of human males and incorporate that into the free market price. Everything reduces to money. Right ?

Re: Why are we propping up corn production, again?

Garrett Connelly — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 02:03:45 -0000

@Non-wonk

Re: Debunking the "you'd be a great green parent" argument

Garrett Connelly — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 21:04:52 -0000

Child-free is fine for some, one or two is good for others; each of these options helps bring the population gradually lower. The ultimate riddle pointed out by this idea is how to have prosperity with a shrinking population and economy. Although all current economic systems are based upon continuous growth even though the planet is obviously limited, this does not mean that human genius will not figure out a way to thrive as both population and economic activity per person decline. Quality of life can grow forever. A healthy planet and healthy neighbors will become a human goal when we mature beyond our primitive urges to acquire more stuff by any means at any cost.