Bully induced underperformance..

You are runnung across the veldt, the lioness close on your heels, you are making for a group of trees as fast as you can. The lioness has caught you alone - she is stronger and faster than you, your skinny legs pump wildly as adrenaline carries you foward as if on wings of terror. The dry, yellowed grasses flash past you as you get closer to the trees and the lioness gets closer to you.

Suddenly, someone pops up, running beside you, waving an ecenomics textbook and demanding that you write a synopsis of chapters eight to fourteen. Now, thankyou! You look at them as if they are mad. You would, wouldn't you?

I feel that the lack of recognition of how badly bullying effects the victim's system is unfair. People who are under duress are not allowed to sign legally binding documents, but are expected to remember last month's lessons in today's pop-quiz. Being educated in an environment of constant threat is hardly optimal.

I'm not sure that there is any magic bullet to end bullying among students, let alone teachers, but teaching philosophy in schools does help to expose kids to coping methods, and the concept that there are valid perspectives other than their own, and that's gotta help.

The Amish Inquisition.

"No man shall know the day nor the hour" is what the Bible says about armageddon, IIRC. Well, whoever wrote that might just have been onto something. Auditing large systems against corruption and inefficient processes is fraught with difficulty. If people know that they will be audited, and that the auditing process is fallible, and, let's face it, we are working with mortals, they can prepare by hiding the evidence, making a nice escape-plan etc. And then there's the problem of corruption among the auditors. In large organisations, wealth and power can assemble some very tempting bait, and build some very dangerous corrupt individuals whose very existence is firm evidence of their lack of scruples. Do our auditors have loved ones? My infallible Robotic Amish Inquisitors wouldn't.

So for an audit to be effective, it has to come out of the blue and be performed by incorruptible individuals with single-minded devotion to their job. They need to be utterly trustworthy, utterly impervious to threats or enticements of the material sort, and they need to be all over the subject at hand.

The audit would be completely disruptive. I envisage a "Your Life on the Lawn"* kind of process where everyone and everything is removed and is only returned to it's position if it is found to be necessary and effective. They'd never know what hit them. Nooooobody expects the Amish Inquisition. Heh heh.

*Your Life On The Lawn: A home makeover TV show for people with deeply entrenched clutter and hoarding issues.

Yoinkage

I'm beginning to yoink posts from my other blogs into here. Now that I have miltiple blogs for different purposes, I can keep different categories of posts separate.

So if you are looking at some of these entries and think you've seen them elsewhere: Yes, you possibly have.

*waves*

Recognition Rewarded

Today I was driving down a random dirt track, having lost radio reception just as a comedy segment was starting, and I began thinking about PFH's Cauchy/Gaussian humour thing. The idea that laughter comes from the surprise of being led to make a (higher?) mental connection that we were not expecting (or words to that effect).

Why the pleasure?

Making cognative leaps is beneficial behaviour. Making new connections requires effort, and I believe that our biology has developed a pleasure reward for thinking. Just as sugar-rich foods are pleasureably sweet to palates tuned to favour the nutritional benefits of such high energy foods, our brains get a pleasure kick from making unaccustomed cognative connections. I noticed when doing unaccustomed math that the pleasure I was experiencing on a physical level was more than simply being pleased with my own cleverness, or relief at solving a puzzle.

Other animals do derive pleasure akin to humour from play, the equivalent to slapstick, but, not surprisingly, forms of purely cerebral humour seem to be confined to humans.

Even at a very basic level, simply recognising things is a survival advantage. But not all recognition is rewarded with pleasure. Firing up familiar synaptic paths does not give us our endorphin (or whatever) rush. It's new connections that are rewarded.

(Could there be a link between the wash of 'reward' pleasure and the amazing and implausible - and sometimes brilliant - leaps of belief that highly manic people make? I've seen people who've appeared to be stuck at the point of 'amazing realisation' for days on end. Could there be a feedback loop in there perhaps? Hmmm...)

That would explain why leaps between disparate points and perspectives are the most intensely pleasureable - as long as they are harmless, or at least not immediately threatening. People describe being 'struck by inspiration' or 'realising with a jolt'. I think that in that first instant of making a connection,(if we are not conditioned to expect pleasure by the presence of a known entertainer/comedian or cues of that ilk)the mind has yet to differentiate between good and bad implications of the new realisation. Unless we are primed for it, it takes a moment for the laughter to kick in. Which would explain why there is often a pause after a truly unexpected funny event before people begin to laugh.

Might it have a bearing on why people laugh hysterically - when something unexpected happens that is bad, the mind releases it's pleasure reward for the realisation in that first instant, effectively throwing the wrong switch, inducing laughter?

Delicious. Funny.

A connection with some instances of pica?

Some people find humour in things that are not benificial. Cognative conenction reward gone awry.

Some people find non-nutritional things tasty. Pleasurable flavour reward gone awry.


Meh. Probably drawing too long a bow.

Ooh! Look at the pretty music!

Another mild form of weirdness with which I live seems to be Synesthesia.

"syn·es·the·sia also syn·aes·the·sia (sns-thzh)
n.

1. A condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color.
2. A sensation felt in one part of the body as a result of stimulus applied to another, as in referred pain.
3. The description of one kind of sense impression by using words that normally describe another."
   

When I was in primary school, I believed that everyone experienced the world as I do. When searching for an appropriate word, I'd describe them by their colours and I did get some strange looks: "What's a greener word for anger?" (blank looks) or "It's a word like like 'story' only yellower." (exchange of sidealong glances) and exclamations of "You're weird!"

After working out that not everyone experienced what I do, I learned to suppress references to it, and, to some extent, my own acknowledgement of it. It is of very little practical use, so, like metaphysics, I set it aside from my engagement with the Real World.

Of course, for me it is not weird at all, only weird to try to understand what life must be like for people without it. I have to compare it to my trying to understand tone deafness or colour blindness.

I finally stumbled across the word 'Synesthesia'.
(that word registers as flat, crisp foil texture, coloured red/peach with traces of burgundy, shadowed streaks of pthalo blue and sap green, by the way)

I recognised it as what I was experiencing and the article specified that it was not common to all humanity, but not unique to me. I've spoken to doctors and shrinks about it, and though they say it sounds like synasthesia and appear to find it fascinating, it has never been the core problem about which I've been consulting them, so it's nought more than an interesting aside from their perspective. Fact is that it's never been a problem at all, once I realised that it was not something I could discuss in common with my peers. It only gets out of hand when deliberately and vigorously pushed, so I don't do that.

I'm going to try to describe what I experience. I will not succeed, but it's a genuine attempt. The 'describing in words' part of my brain is a long way from the 'seeing/feeling sounds' part of my brain, so it takes a certain amout of thought to try to convey what I experience to people who don't have similar experiences. I am far more accustomed to suppressing my impulses to describe or remark on what sounds look and feel like than expressing them, but I'll try. I hope it is to some degree effective without sounding too weird.

Okay. So...

Colour associations are pretty predictable. I know that as I have always had them and they are second nature to me, that they will seem obvious to me, but when I have described them to other people, they can also see simple, predictable links between sound and colour/texture. I have noticed an emotional association between sound and word colours, and have occasionally wondered about the possibility that my experience is based on my emotional reactions rather than a direct sensory mis-wiring.

Words have blasts of colour as they are recognised. They land not as a series of letters, but as concepts, and it is the meaning that renders their colour more than their construction, though particularly french sounding words are shadowed with a rose/salmon pink, and recognisably latin words tend to be shadowed in navy blue unless they are botanically associated in which case they are shadowed a sticky dark green like the food colouring I use for cake decorating. There is often an afterglow to a particularly good word useage. When the context of a word changes, as in a pun, the colour does, too, but the previous colour/texture context lingers like a sunset behind a street light.

Sometimes I will be surprised by a word or sound that has an unexpected colour or texture. That's disconcerting, and can throw me off my stride as I try to work out why I am mis-perceiving it, or if in fact I am. Often, when I take time to think about it, I will find that I have some confusion about the meaning or spelling of the word. If I come across a word that, to my mind, has been misused or misspelled, I get orange - stereotypical colour of cautionary warning, but it's what I get. If I have made a freudian slip, I get orange and burgundy and I know that I have said something potentially embarrassing, and I falter as I try to recall what I did say.

Textures can shift depending what I have been doing. Lately, as I have been learing about fabric, different fabric textures are common. When farming, the textures would be those of hay and metal, hide and wire. It seems that newer sensual experiences are 'at the top of the heap', therefore come to hand more easily for textural interpretations of new or uncommon sounds. Still, there are many words and sounds with entrenched textures of their own that don't change according to what I am doing in my life.

Though specific sounds can register every concieveable hue, shade, texture and tone, my default soundscape is predominantly shaded in yellow, cream, yellow ochre, all backing onto white. It's a speckly texture, with the size of stippling and intensity of colour increasing with the definition of the sound. Less pleasant noises enter as shades of grey, again speckles and blotches, but denser and more roughly shaped. These are against a background that shades to warm black/charcoal. I can only use approximate descriptive terms like 'crushed egg-shells' and 'washed roadside bluemetal' to try to accurately describe the sensations of texture that come with sounds.

I find that recognisable sounds take on associated textures and colours. The wooden kitchen chairs being moved sounds of the shade the timber is, and they rap against oneanother with shots of glossy red ochre. The scrape against the floor is a crosscut saw-blade of dull, vibrating white high and to the right. Less obvious are the high-pitched sound of the television in another room registering as threads of vanishingly elongated diamond shaped copper stabbing into a roll of soft, damp grey packing blanket.

Most of the time, the soundscape is somewhere behind my eyes, not intrusive. I tune out the colour and texture of the misty grey computer hum, the porrdigey French Grey fog of the heater, the faint white diamond-encrusted-cotton-bud-stabs of the ticking clock along with the actual sounds.

When I am tired, crazy or stressed - or even extremely relaxed - it becomes more dominant. I don't hallucinate in the Real world, but the visual and textural sensations become stronger, which is very pleasant if the sounds are nice. (I used to think that people saying that they were 'getting a buzz' were referring to similar textural sensations)

I can feel the sounds moving and changing, and I can 'see' the colours and patterns - just not projected onto the world. I don't know what to compare the sensation of seeing inside my head to... It's not simple imagination - I have one of those and it's certainly different. I have had migraine aura, but that does mess with my vision, and sound colours don't.

The best handles I can apply describe a para-space in which I experience the colours. It corresponds largely with my surroundings, but very much reflects my 'head-space', too. The more tired and low I feel, the less defined or smaller (it's hard to say) the field becomes.

The colours and textures play in this field of perception as I experience them. The location in which I see a sound predictably occurs in the direction in my para-world that corresponds to the origin of the sound in the real world, though they do move up or down depending on the quality of the sound. The degree to which I am aware of them varies, mainly according to mood. Sometimes, under exceptional circumstances, the colours and textures resolve themselves into very coherent and well defined patterns.

I have tried to render these in graphic form, but the effort has been extreme, the results unsatisfying and the consequences for my mental state quite frightening. The crazier I am, the more vivid and intrusive the sound colours are. The more I try to capture them, the more they intrude, therefore the crazier I get. Down that path lies madness, as they say.

Aside: Someone I know describes strangely reminiscent experiences when he was ill, delerious and "going off his nut" a few years back. He could see patterns flowing and moving at great speed. As his condition deteriorated, he found it harder and harder to 'come out to check on the real world'. Finally, the real world was not something he could distinguish from his alternate perceptions.

Mainly, as I experience it, it's a pretty screensaver for my brain. I listen to music when I am in a relaxed crazy state and the colours coalesce into patterns and forms, moving, changing... kaleidoscopic is a good description, in a way.

It's useful to monitor my moods and general health. It's a handy extra dimension to language skill and melody learning. It can be unhelpful when the experience I have of a word in text clashes with that experience in sound. A word in text has a colour and texture, but if the pronunciation is wildly different to what I expect, I have two levels of confusion to deal with - audio and visual/textural.

Hmm. It's been a frustrating excersise to try to write about something so non-verbal. I hope that the above gives some idea of what I experience, or at least a starting point for formulating questions for anyone who is curious about such things.

Fields and Herons

My school bus used to take a circituitous route around the Western District of Victoria. It passed through tiny towns that were artefacts of times past when butter factories were common, each town had a baker, a cobbler, a tailor, a blacksmith. The fields were large and the long, dead grass stood white against the brown-breaking-green of Autumn's new growth. Small coffin troughs stood near windmills. Cow tracks fanned out from watering point and gate. Haystacks full of small square bales - the size dictated by how much a strong man could carry - and there was almost always a pony in the home paddock.

Down the back of the farm, there were acreages of unimproved pastures. Undrained swamps. Stands of gums, tussocks - even kangaroos and emus. The boom of the bittern could be heard at night and the White Faced, the White-Necked, even Great White herons and sometimes even Brolgas stalked surreally or stood utterly still, balanced precisely on their reflections in the marsh.

In the early eighties, a lot of dairy farmers went to the wall. Sold up. Property bought by their more progressive and energetic neighbours. The farmers who stayed had plans. They knew how to maximise production of litres/kilos per hectare. They drained and dammed, cleared and planted, fenced, ploughed, cropped and sowed down the best pasture species available. They installed vast troughs, tracks to cope with the passage of so many hard cow hooves. They rode four wheel motor bikes instead of ponies and named their cattle such idyllic things as 'Red Tag 976'. Not that they were at all bad to their livestock, but there was a diminuition of relationship between individual animal and owner.

It has been ten years since the small, shallow pond I called 'White Heron Swamp' was filled in. Kids passing that point in their school bus will not look for the herons. They will not even likely notice the slightly paler patch of grass where the pond used to be. They see an efficiently kept paddock rather than an absence of habitat.

I thought that there was a balance that could have been struck. I'm still soppy enough to believe that there is room for both fields and herons.

Farmers are like coorporations - obliged to provide returns to the shareholders. Only the shareholders are sitting in a high-chair with cereal in their hair and calling them 'Dadda' or 'Mum'. And the returns take the form of simple living costs. They are not wantonly destroying the environment to screw extra profits out of the land - they are simply doing what they must to survive.

I believe that the differentiation between agriculture and environment is artificial and nonsensical. Saying that farmers are harming the environment is like complaining that loins are killing gazelles. It's not the activity that is harmful - it is the degree to which sustainability of the activity can be achieved that's important. We need a certain amount of agriculture.

Tangent:I recall someone (perhaps in ABC Press Club Luncheon) saying that they'd been in a discussion with an economist who had said that (some country) should not bother going to what he saw as the outrageous expense of looking after the agricultural sector because it was only 4% of GDP and the country could stand to lose it. /Tangent

I say: Protect farmers = protect the environment. I'd even go so far as to propose that farmers should recieve some base payment from the government/people that could be saved and used for approved purposes. If the particular industry sector falls on hard times, there are the funds to diversify. Or to sustain them through without having to sell off irreplaceable bloodlines. Or to invest in an eco-friendly farm redesign and overhaul.

Seperate from that, how about funds to buy back (or rent in perpetuity) areas of farmland that are of ecological value? How about compensating farmers who have land that they cannot legally clear, but that the government will not buy from them. (There are instances of this, where the farmer has purchased blocks covered with scrubby re-growth - having checked with the appropriate authourities that they would be free to re-clear it, then the law changed and the farmer is stuck with land that cannot be cleared and farmed, and is worth 1/10th what they payed for it.)

Ah, it would be lovely to have infinite taxpayer dollars to distribute at my whim.

But I believe that farmers are the environment, the ecology. When the land is stressed, they are stressed, so when the land most needs their stewardship is when they are least able to perform that duty.

Protect farmers, protect the environment.

Fish in shallow water...

My thoughts escape me like fish in shallow water, sending up rills of disturbance and confusion as they dart and dodge to avoid my grasp.

I woke up a couple of days ago excited by a new take on time. Time is energy. Literally. A form of energy linked to but possibly not derived directly from matter. Time stopping an impossible amount of matter existing in one instance or something. Time being driven by - metred by - the densest objects in the universe. Unable to be denser, they distribute matter through a fourth dimension as successive instances rather than having too many instances trying to occupy the same space simultaneously. Some mass-driven clock rate for the universe. *sigh* It made sense at the time. I want to understand this stuff.

And people wonder why I want to study sciences.

Small, sand coloured fish against sand, visible only by their shadows to my eyes, fleeing faster the harder I pursue them.

Speaking of metering, I've been contemplating PFH's idea that overclocking in humans is hazardous. Essentially, I agree, but I also believe that we are designed to allow for fluctuations. Sustained overclocking is definitely detrimental to wellbeing. I suspect that people have trouble identifying their optimum clock rate. Perhaps associating with and competing with people who are overclocking and appear to be coping and being brilliant and fabulously productive leaves us feeling inadequate if we heed our body's cues to slow down. We know that we are not getting enough sleep. We can feel ourselves getting run down, strung out on caffienne, less reliable, less functional - yet we keep it amped up because to slow down feels like weakness.

I'd like to advocate a meme that there is strength in knowing one's optimal firing interval and keeping bursts of overclocking in reserve.

Ooh - maybe meditation is a way to restore clock rate default settings?

Hmmm. Elastic clock rates in computers? Allowing for 'sprints', even 'walks' for more effective and efficient performance? What if your computer could sense when it had an influx of work and could overclock, just for a few moments, then slow down to normal when the crisis had passed, and even slow further if anyone could think of a reason to want it to?

Some kind of programable overclocking, instead of physical. Maybe it exists, maybe it's impossible, maybe it's an entirely silly idea. I'm learning more every day. One day I will be able to answer my own questions, and have long and edifying conversations with myself.

Salt water dripping from my hair, I stand in the estuary. Hands full of sand. Not a fish to be seen.

I took The Political Objectives Test. Three times, actually, as every time I tried to go back to it to copy my results, it seemed to have lost them. First time through, I was a moderate. But that would be some weird new useage of the word 'moderate' that I am unfamilir with. Second and third times, I was:

"Social-Liberal
You scored 78 Equality, 78 Liberty, and 21 Stability! Your commitment to both liberty and equality puts you in the hazy area that exists between the Liberal and the Socialist. You value liberty particularly in cultural and personal life. You also value government intervention to promote equity in economic life while still supporting private enterprise. For you liberty and equality are two parts of the same condition. Everyone has to be free to pursue their own way-of-life but in order for that it happen everyone must start with a similar basic standard of living."

Interesting that I seem to have modified my political vews to avoid a label I don't like. :-P

Weird ramble. Cobblers, bakers and veggie gardens.

Once, people lived in tiny houses with large gardens filled with vegetables, fruit and herbs. Now we live in vast houses and buy our vegetables fruit and herbs shipped in from other countries. When transport again becomes too expensive to do that, food will have to be produced locally and prices will have to rise. Simple sustenance will again be valuable. Derelict fruit trees that now spend Autumn standing on a skirt of their rotting, fallen fruits will instead be pruned, netted against birds, fenced against raiders and eagerly harvested.

Ah, peak oil. Thy potential ramifications are many.

Re-emergence of villiage life is one such prospect. Easy and affordable transport has seem massive centralisation and economies of scale, and the drainage of populations from smaller hamlets into larger towns, thent he larger towns drain away into the smaller cities, which fill and flow over onto the remnants of the derelict villages, immersing the bluestone churches and red-brick halls in a sea of cheek-by-jowl McMansions, the inhabitants of which rely on bread from supermarkets supplied by distant bakeries whose flour is supplied by yet more distant flour-mills whose grain is supplied by far-flung growers from all points of the compass.

Local production is such a strange term to contemplate these days.

If all that transport is not cost effective, local shops will sell bread made from flour sourced as nearby as possible, made from flour sourced as nearby as possible, made from grain sourced as nearby as possible.

Shoes would be a better example. People would not be able to go to BigW and buy a pair of Chinese import sneakers for ten dollars. The cost of getting them here would make them unreasonably expensive. So there will be locall made shoes again. Possibly very locally made, as if people are walking more due to expense of transport, a cobbler could get very busy very quickly in a heavily populated area. (Secondhand may become more expensive as fashion would be less important than functionality and affordability. Who cares if it's last year's shade of mauve if it fits comfortably, and a new, cobbler made pair of shoes will set you back weeks wages?)

Blah. Weird wild ramble. Butchers, bakers and candlestick makers.

Pink petri dish.

The petri dish is infected with two kinds of bacteria: pink and purple. Each spreads in random clusters across the dish, the pink bacteria patches and the purple grow quite happily over top of oneanother. Both kinds grow faster exponentially, but then the growth rate of the purple bacteria slows down drastically as the growth rate of the pink accellerates steadily.

What colour do you expect will fill the petri dish in the end?

The culture (if you will excuse the pun) that reduces population growth to static or shrinking will be rapidly supplanted by the culture that promotes population growth. Meme die-out? Probably. Will the reduced population growth meme inevitably recur? Not likely given the dwindling resources at our disposal. There may not be time - and less time if a larger population/fast population increase culture prevails.

How is wealth imaginary in economics?

Daniel: "I will return to my webpage designer just one more time. They live in a house (from which they work). They wear clothes. They eat food. They have a computer which runs on electricity. Just by living a modern life they are having an impact on the environment. What they then do for a living utilises only those things they consume just by living and as a result is only as environmentally degrading as them living. Nobody says they have to work this way. They could have had some other job that has its own additional environmental impact. But they do a job that arises merely from a small modification to existing home life."

and

"The webpage designer gets an income from nothing but it is an income others are happy to pay them and that others are then happy to take in exchange for other products."

The web-designer of your example is not paid nothing. The web designer does not make something from nothing. Simply by saying that the web designer uses specific resources to make something instead of making nothing does not mean that they have not used resources.

That someone uses the same resources and produces nothing deos not mean that the resources that that person used cost nothing. The resources have to be paid for by someone, somewhere along the line. And that's where the social security thing comes in. Recreational surfing cannot be compared with income generating work, even if it is of the same ilk, simply because the discussion is about levels of industry, and not about working longer hours or making hobbies pay.

That they are paid to make something using the resources means that the resources of someone, somewhere, is covering the cost of their wage. If the productive value of website more than covers the cost of it's inception and maintenence, then someone, somewhere reaps a benifit. But the benifit they reap, be it by way of customers choosing their product or service over that of another provider or if the website generated previously non-existent subjective human desires for the advertised product or service, the discretionary spening thus gained is diverted from elsewhere in the economy.

Integrating economics energy and the environment.

They are one and the same.

Currency is a representation of value. Time and energy have value. Matter has value. Time and energy spent making matter more suitable to our needs adds value to the matter.

We harvest matter from the environment to use to our ends. We sustain ourselves by reaping the Earth. We are compelled to groom for status. We are compelled to learn for culture and status and self-preservation. We are compelled to believe that 'I'm me and I'm special.' because if we were just the same as everyone else, then the brutal things that happen to them could happen to me, and that's too scary to function with the knowledge of. We are compelled to believe that there is higher meaning. Hope. Some reason to strive. Because if we don't, we will rapidly be out competed by our more zealous kin, increasing the odds that our tendency to despair is not passed on to future generations.

I argue from the belief that humans do not adequately allow for environmental degradation in the cost of goods produced. I believe that in our own self interest, if for no other reason, humans need to perform an environmental analysis from which to form plans for cohesive global environmental management. We need to know how much of the Earth's surface, how much of the Earth's various systems, need to be preserved for the whole to continue to function to a level that provides us with a liveable ecosystem. We need to decide what standard of 'liveable' we are prepared to settle for, and (barring a tipping point) work to prevent ourselves from falling below that standard. As a planet. As a species.

I'd like world leaders - and individuals in the street - to stop waging wars about whose imaginary friend is stronger than whose. No more bickering over culturally constructed biases, please. We are all stuck on this rock until further notice, and we will live or die together. Sooner rather than later, if we don't grow the hell up and work together.

All resources are finite. I'm certain of that.

Human habitat takes up space. Environmental preservation tracts, too. Agriculture. Mining. Industry. All take up space. Indefinite expansion is not an option. As residential and industrial requirements increase, agricultural land will become more scarce, therefore more valuable. I know that the more a farm is optimised for agriculture under current farming practices, the less ecologically useful it becomes.

I am pertty sure that the following questions have answers. Probably many different answers. How large can cities get before the sprawl impairs the capacity for food production? How much forest can really be cleared before it irreversably impinges on the climate to an extent incompatible with human existence? How closely are we prepared to pack human accommodation together to preserve agricultural tracts and bushland?

Farmland can be intensively and rigorously optimised for efficiency whilst improving it's ecological value, but it takes knowledge, plus the time and energy to make the transition from traditional farming methods to more sustainable ones. Farmers are unlikely to have the resources necessary to make that transition. In fact, they are usually skating so close to the brink that they have no margin for accidental error, let alone to take a risk like adopting non-traditional farming practices.

Waste must be minimised far below levels we see today. Recycling is heavily promoted, but where are the incentives for manufacturers to use less packaging? They may exist, but we need more than token awards. Personally, I'd like to see sanctions brought against manufacturers who over-package, especially for greedy cosmetic reasons designed to make the product look larger to boost sales.

The work that the environment does is not factored into the prices we pay for goods and services. I believe that if it were, and the funds thus raised were chanelled effectively toward mitigating environmental damage, it would go a long way toward preserving our species.

We are reaping the riches of the planet, and squandering it on shipping lettuce from China to Oz. We are using up irreplaceable oils to mass manufacture and ship insanely cheap bizarrely shaped dolls guarranteed to be broken within minutes of being taken out of their thirteen layers of packaging. Making a website promoting the sale of the dolls, or a massage, or a flour mill is paid for somewhere along the line. The money represents energy. Is energy. And energy cannot be made from nothing - Money is energy represented in a readily exchangeable form.

If a CEO is given a million dollar bonus without producing a million dollars worth of efficiency, it does indeed come out of someone elses pocket, not out of 'nowhere'. The producer and/or the consumer has to pay for every layer of middlemen. The middlemen are only really worth what they make the producer or save the consumer. If they do not cover the cost of their own existence, the environment pays.

Test, test. Is this thing on?

Bloggity blog blog.


Why not, indeed?

I'm a radical apathist, agnostic bordering on apatheistic, passionately indifferent, despairingly exuberant, vigorously passive, sincerely humorous, quietly outspoken... okay, enough of that.

I think and wonder and dream about the nature of space-time, the state of the planet, the fate of humankind and other trivial things. I often wake with a head full of profound revelations and important ideas which resolve into meaninglessness with my first cup of coffee. Setting thoughts down in text is a marvellous way to crystalise recurring themes that would otherwise haunt me indefinitely.

If you are reading this, please don't judge me too harshly. This is an informal blog. I write what's on my mind, even if I know I'm agitated or that it's not properly thought out, then I post without editing and throw myself on the mercy of the reader.