Category Archives: Opinions

Futurism

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The hourglass graphic posted here the other day did not include the link to the original article by Max Roser at Our World In Data . His article is excellent, he discusses our future which may be excellent, or then again, possibly not so good. The future itself is vast, and our responsibility is tremendous. If you thought the hourglass was intriguing, then you should read the full article:

ourworldindata.org/longtermism

In the above article, Max Moser points us to an article written by a group called “80,000 Hours” by Benjamin Todd about existential risk reduction (quoted and pointed to below). The not-for-profit company “80,000 Hours” has a funny goal of trying to help figure out what we can do with our career to make the world a better place. It seems like this group should be reviewed, especially by the younger people.

The full article below is said to be a 25 minute read, but a podcast is included. Perhaps commuters could listen to it.

Here’s a suggestion that’s not so often discussed: our first priority should be to survive. So long as civilization continues to exist, we’ll have the chance to solve all our other problems, and have a far better future. But if we go extinct, that’s it.

80000hours.org/articles/existential-risks/

Statistically speaking, I wonder how many people even give a damn about this stuff. Perhaps these articles might make a difference.

”The future is ours to win. But to get there we can’t just stand still…” – Barack Obama

Stand with Ukraine

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Things change over time.  About 55 years ago, my college required one semester of a foreign language for graduation.  Since I was majoring in math and physics, I wanted a language besides English that most scientific papers were being written in.  At that time, Russia was the most “scientific” country other than the United States. So I took a semester of Russian!  Let’s face it, I got a C for the class.

Я не говорю по-русски.
  
Pronounced: YA ne govoryu po-russki. 
Meaning: I don’t speak Russian.

Time marches on. These days, Russia is no longer a scientific powerhouse, even if they do help support the International Space Station.  If I were to apply the same logic today, I would have to choose Mandarin Chinese! 
 
Russia has become a failed state. The future was theirs to have, and they blew it.  What a shame.  Let that be a lesson to folks in the USA.  We too must learn to cooperate with our world neighbors.  There is room for both Capitalism and Socialism.

We should all de-militarize and spend all that saved money on climate change solutions. Otherwise, 55 years from now the world will be a different place for everyone!

cancel-culture and more

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The new mini-series on Netflix named “The Chair” is really quite good. It stars Sandra Oh who portrays a college professor who gets caught up in cancel-culture’s impact on life in a university.  Perhaps I wouldn’t have understood if I hadn’t just  finished reading “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth” by Jonathan Rauch. His book is primarily about truth within democracy and recent attacks on our society from the media, right wing pressure groups, lobbyists and even politicians.  I highly recommend it to anyone who values preserving truth and freedom within our democracy.   

Jonathan Rauch was able to finally explain clearly to me how it is that some “truths” that are supported by a majority of people can be ignored, run down, and voted out of existence by just a few.  Some of these truths cluster around the climate crisis, financial inequality, racism, jobs.  I have always blamed lobbyists, conservative media, evangelical religious groups, etc.. I have felt impotent and powerless when things that were obvious to me continuously were defeated. At least now, Rauch has helped me understand the mechanics of these many distortions of truth that are pushing our society towards the brink of autocracy and fascism.

The following is a portion of a paragraph quoted directly from his book.

“A field known as “public choice” concerns itself with the ways in which narrow pressure groups can out-organize and dominate much larger majorities. Consider American rice farmers. From 1995 to 2019, U.S. rice subsidies cost almost $17 billion. The benefits were concentrated on a small set of farms; two-thirds of the money went to the biggest 10 percent of the farms, each of which received an average of almost $1.3 million. You could be sure they were organized, resourced, and determined to defend their subsidy, and woe unto the legislator who would try to zero it out. Meanwhile, the cost was spread over the whole U.S. population. Rescinding the entire amount would have saved each of about 140 million taxpayers about $120 over the period, or less than five dollars a year: too little to notice, much less to organize against. lf a group opposing rice subsidies did manage to organize, the rice lobby would pull out all the stops to defeat it. But usually, as the economist Mancur Olson showed, the asymmetry between concentrated benefits and diffused costs is such that the majority interest does not organize at all. Over time, pressure groups accumulate, capturing resources which might have flowed elsewhere. If the process is not checked, entire economies and societies can calcify and rot.”

This example really affected me.  Many years ago, I watched my Uncle cry over losing his farm to big-business farmers and no one seemed to care.  Rauch’s book has a chapter with suggestions for us to resist, fight back, and defend the Constitution of Knowledge. I highly recommend that you read his new book. Understanding contains the beginnings of solutions.

Wanted: No War

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The longer other countries, such as Iran and North Korea, are not allowed to have nuclear energy, the longer they are dependent on oil!

As The Guardian said “The establishment assumes that Iran can never possess nuclear weapons, yet the United States lives with nuclear-armed adversaries like Russia and China and aligns with the nuclear-armed military dictatorship in Pakistan.”

The Climate Crisis almost demands that we enable the building of more nuclear power plants. We have learned from our mistakes how to build them safely now. We should offer to build nuclear facilities for any country that wants them! Especially Iran and North Korea.

But Big Oil, with their fossil fuels lobby, holds tremendous economic power and influence on politics, particularly in the United States. They continue to scare the public over anything nuclear.

We need to fear Climate Crisis more than War. Iran having the ability to build a nuclear warhead is not nearly as dangerous as Trump having control of the US arsenals.