Pursuing praxis

I was thinking this morning about the idea of anti-trust. Beyond the laws, and JP Morgan and Andrew Carnegie and the Rockefellers. What are people getting at when they talk about anti-trust? Well, the first word that springs to mind is ‘monopoly.’ And I think it’s here that ideas really begin to diverge. What is monopoly, where does it come from, what does it mean, can we evaluate it as good or bad, and if so, what’s the answer?

At minimum, ‘monopoly’ means a single individual (or single corporation) is the sole provider of a product or service. Whatever portion of the populace seeks to buy that commodity, all of them buy it from one company. Implicit in this scenario are the ideas that the company is, or once was, a private enterprise (i.e. it’s not the Department of Energy or somesuch), and that the goal of the company is to make money - profits - and the more the merrier. And here’s where I think a lot of people stop thinking, or start making judgements, or have a dozen red flags go up in their mind, which usually center on issues of public welfare, safety, exploitation, and/or competition, the plight of the small business owner, and political/economic power abuse. Then usually comes something about "greedy bastards", the dangers of unregulated capitalism, the robber barons of the 19th century, and possibly something about child labor and poor working conditions during the industrial revolution.

Well, that’s a lot of ground to cover, and typically beyond my pre-breakfast capabilities. Let’s go back to the idea of monopoly, and consider it in the context of laissez-faire capitalism*. When people sniff a monopoly (or potential monopoly), and yell anti-trust, what are they after? They say they want to foster competition, to "keep the market healthy." What good is competition? What end-result makes it worthwhile?** In my book, the honest answer is ever-better products and services for ever-lower prices. So really, we’re after value to the consumer. And, the assumption goes, if one company rules the market, it can charge whatever it wants, screw over the consumers, and actively block up-starts (either by making it impossibly expensive to get started, or by forcibly ousting competitors from the market).

Well, in laissez-faire capitalism (LFC), only part of those are allowed. Let’s think about how one would ‘force’ a competitor from the market. There’s the high road, where the monopolizer produces such a good product, for such a low price***, that an up-start could never compete; a viable margin for profit is only available to a company that deals in mega-gajillion volumes of the commodity. (Remember, in this scenario product quality is the best possible, and it doesn’t vary). If this is the case - what’s the problem? Consumers (which presumably includes the would-be competitor) are getting awesome deals for stuff they want to buy, and the stuff functions really really well. People are happy. The only potential griper is the would-be competitor. But, truth be told, no one has a "right" to be a competitor in any market he chooses. It’d be like saying I have a "right" to be a professional soccer player because, gosh, wouldn’t that be neat, and hey I’ve got legs too, see I can run, plus I come from a long line of soccer players, you can’t push a legacy player out, we’ve always been a family of soccer players, why won’t you let me play?!? Uh, no. There’s such thing as good judgement - in people assessing their own talents, resources, and acceptance of risk in relation to existing conditions, in employers hiring quality employees (athletes or factory line workers or vice presidents), and in what market you choose to ply your skills, in the gamble of making a buck. Nothing’s guaranteed, not for the little guy, and not for the big guy. 

Which brings me to the low-road. What happens when a big company uses its economic and political heft to forcibly prevent the little guy from making in-roads? *ding ding* wrong question. That’s not possible in LFC. In LFC, government and business are thoroughly separated. The government doesn’t regulate business, but neither does it help it. The government, in LFC, exists to protect individual rights, which means dealing with those who violate individual rights. And violation of individual rights happens, broadly, in two possible ways, either directly or indirectly: by physical force, or by fraud. Harming another person (or collection of people, like another business), or defrauding him/them of what is rightfully theirs, is wrong. And the government acts on the same principle as an individual defending himself from physical attack: against someone who initiates the use of force on you, it’s both rational and right to fight back with force. The attacker sought to take something from you which wasn’t his. You, the defender, gain nothing in the altercation, but act to preserve that which was yours in the first place (your life, your property, etc.) while risking injury, which is an injustice. Provided your response is proportional to the perceived threat, you act justly in adequately defending yourself.

Part of a citizen’s contract with the state (i.e. what it means to be a citizen) is that you delegate the use of force (in self-defense) to the government in all but the most immediate situations. The downstream determination of wrong, of punishment and of recompensation, becomes the job of the government. So, if your neighbor decided to turn his backyard into a used-tire incineration service center (zoning laws notwithstanding), what would you do? Call the police and complain, hire a lawyer and sue his ass for making the air on your property unbreathable and a health risk, for junking up the walls of your house with burnt-rubber byproducts and soot, for ruining your furniture with stinky-rubber smell, etc. His actions have harmed your life and your property. That’s (an indirect) use of force, a violation of an individual’s right to life and property.

Same goes for a factory - next door, or next county - that’s polluting the air (or water or whatever), emitting toxins that hurt people, etc. This is what most pro-government-regulation people want - protection of people’s health and safety - which they don’t think capitalism ensures, because "look around you! Businesses are evil, exploitative dangers to public safety!". They’re wrong - public safety is what LFC ensures, but a mixed economy does not. Only in a mixed economy, where businesses can essentially buy government protection (lobbying, anyone? Lobbyists are white-collar goons), and buy, solicit, or hijack the one thing government has a monopoly on - the use of force. A mixed economy creates a market for trading of government favors, and the cost-benefit analysis for violating individual rights (to more or less a degree), becomes a factor to be determined situationally. It’s the principled, honest businessman that takes the high road right out of business - in a mixed economy (or in any state-run economy). This is where you get back-alley pressure against competitors, under-the-table dealing, extortion and blackmailing critics, buying off judges and politicians, and (at the farthest extreme) businesses run like the mob, where upstanding but nosy employees and their loved ones get RIP passes to dirt beds (like in The Firm) while in-the-know public defenders turn a blind eye, play dumb, and hide cash in their freezers. Throw their sorry asses in jail, that’s all illegal in LFC.

But, it’s important to note where the line is drawn in LFC. Most people concerned with public safety and welfare don’t actually protect individual rights. Well, first, they don’t use that term. It’s non-sensical in their worldview. They speak of ‘human rights’ which include a long litany of things they ‘feel’ are right, but which lack a rational basis (but not rationalizations): food, water, shelter, clothing, education, healthcare, a job, equal opportunity; in Europe this extends to a college education at least; if you’re in Sweden, this might extend to a car, a house, dental and vision care, and I don’t know what else.

These "rights" of humans are incompatible with individual rights of individual humans - which, remember, means the protection from the use of force (or fraud; fraud is basically mental force), or "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". Why are they not the same thing? Just ask, to anything in the list above, this question: how? Which, at the end of the day, translates into: at whose expense? "The government’s"? Where does it get its money? That’s right: your wallet. Your paycheck, your investments, your savings, your inheritance, your profits, your property, your time, your energy, your life.

And a government that gives things to even a single person without your consent is violating your individual rights (to your money, proerty, time, energy and life - redundant, but good for emphasis - the things that are absolutely yours until you choose to part with them). Why? Because if you said, "Hey! I didn’t say I wanted to pay for Mr. Jones’ daughter’s education, or Crazy Bob’s medication, or Senator Williams’ junket to the Bahamas! Give me my money back! No? Well don’t expect any more money from me. I withdraw my involuntary contributions to the government. From now on, I’ll keep what’s mine, and determine myself who and what I spend my money on. Yes, it’s a bit more work for me, but that’s my choice. Please notify the IRS they may close my file; I will not be paying taxes this year." *ding ding* wrong answer. If they don’t seize all or part of your property, you too will find your sorry ass on the cold floor of a jail cell. That’s because the government has a monopoly on that kind of force - which is good, if someone has actually used force against someone. But if your neighbor leaned over the fence and asked for a thousand bucks so he could install a new sprinkler system in his yard, and you declined to help him, then he busted down your door, impounded your car, pocketed your wallet, raided your safe, and then held a gun to your head, and marched you down his cellar steps and locked you in a closet for your insolence - that’s practically Hollywood! But that’s what the government is allowed to do. And that’s what your neighbors do do, and what you do, when you vote for another tax. You’re simply hiring the government to do the dirty work of robbing your neighbor for you. It doesn’t change the nature of the action, but people feel less guilty if they don’t have to do it themselves. What if we all had to be our neighbor’s tax collectors?? In the absense of a water-tight constitution, it’s the voters and politicians that decide how far to extend this impersonal power over each other - legitimately, or illegitimately, it’s anybody’s ballpark.

LFC (which was implied in principle, but never systematically implemented in the US (or ever in history, actually), because of some loopholes and inconsistencies in our constitution) properly restricts the function of government to punishing those who initiate the use of force against others. No other government does that. The fancy juggling of a mixed economy distracts people from noticing which direction the juggler is inching towards - statism. For the uber-liberals and remaining Marxists, their version of statism would amoung to some variant of "To each according to his need, from each according to his ability."  Look around you. You, the producer, would be your brother’s keeper, no matter how undeserving, unambitious, disrespectful, hateful, lazy, dishonest, or mean he was. And he would be your keeper. And in this kind of world, the cockroaches eat the lions for lunch, and the dishonest rise to the top as they (fabricate and) claim the greatest need of all, while the able, strong, honest, innovative, pioneers and pillars of an achiever’s society perish in "service to others." And soon after, all the cockroaches perish for lack of food.# Or, statism can be theocracy or dictatorship, which simply differ in their rhetoric and employ more obvious militaristic means of oppression ("For the glory of God/Allah! For the good of the Motherland/Fatherland/Wilderness!!).

But back to monopoly. What’s wrong with it? The government is what’s wrong with it. Monopoly+govt clout = bad, bad news. Monopoly + LFC = the best quality products at the lowest price till someone figures out a better, faster, cheaper way of doing it. The real equation is LFC + the best, fastest, cheapest way of making X = monopoly (till someone takes your place). If someone has a monopoly in LFC, they’ve earned it, and consumers have voted them (with dollars) into the position, and can vote them out at any time. Cuz consumers with ambition and creativity and work ethic are the single greatest source of a company’s stiffest competition. And if they can’t wedge themselves into your market for a profit, well then they’ll find another market to shave a few pennies off of in order to make millions - or create a new market. As products improve in one area, they feed back into markets using those products, passing on increased savings and improved performance. And think of performance - pretty soon "better performance" means "new function" (I just bought a new cell phone today - just think of what they were like 10 years ago!!), and "new function" = "new market." There’s never a shortage of jobs in LFC. The rate-limiting reagent is simply the (voluntary) use of each individual’s mind. A monopoly, in LFC, represents a tremendous achievement, but one that must be actively maintained.

*Laissez-faire capitalism is not the economic (or political) system that we have today. Today we have a mixed economy, which is kind of a juggling act between a free market and government control/regulation. There’s no real equilibrium; you’ve just got to keep stuff going fast enough (either the changes to the system, or a large enough volume of turnover) that it’s deemed "good enough". Whatever that means, to whoever makes those decisions (*cough* voters). Usually it just means don’t change too fast; lacking any principles, there’s no rock-bottom or glass ceiling. So long as you don’t rock the boat too hard, too fast, you can sail pretty much anywhere. Isla da Muerta, anyone?

**But, ask yourself - can you imagine, say, Eliot Spitzer asking this question? No. He, and many others, garner the mantle of self-righteousness and "public defender" without asking why competition is right, or what makes it worthwhile - what we are protecting when we "foster competition." But systematically pusuing and prosecuting companies within striking distance of monopolies, without answers to these question, means the primary criterion for prosecution (i.e. suspected guilt) is success. In effect, or even in principle (depending on the self-honesty of the "public defender"), they seek out the achievers and prosecute them for achievement, on the assumption that they can’t have done it honestly, and even if they have, it’s in principle (thanks to anti-trust laws) wrong to be the best at what you do. If, however, you suck at providing added value to the consumer (i.e. you can’t maintain a viable marketshare), well then you’ve got the public defender’s ear. You might be entitled to some of the intellectual or material property forcibly taken from the evil monopolist (which is what anti-trust laws do), to help you secure a foothold in the market (at the expense of the market leader), to provide that essential bit of competition that the market leader has already vanquished to the benefit of himself and the consumers (and his competitors, as individual men). So really, the short thought of this post is "Anti-trust laws aren’t about benefit to the consumer, health of economies and markets, or long-term innovation; they’re about punishing the able for being able, by valuing the incapable more than the capable. And if people think LFC leads to forcible monopoly, that just goes to show people don’t know the first thing about LFC. They think they do - we all learned it in high school - but they don’t. So few do."

***Here I’m thinking of my fragmentary knowledge of the Microsoft anti-trust case. What was the problem? As I understand it, they were packaging Internet Explorer, a web browser, as a standard feature of the Windows operating system. Previously, you had to buy it separately, which meant added cost, plus the hassle of installing it. By packaging it with Windows, they were giving out a free product. If they upped the price of Windows to accomodate that - well, it just shows people were 1) willing to buy it and 2) it didn’t bother people bad enough or long enough to create sufficient time for someone to develop, market and sell an operating system that cost less (with or without a web-browser). So what if there’s a bit of a time and money cushion for Microsoft? It’s not indefinite. And consumers aren’t stupid. If you sell Windows "With Free Internet Explorer 4.27!!!" but it costs twice as much as Windows did before IE was packaged with it, it doesn’t take a genius to say, "Heyyyy, wait a minute - why’s this cost so much?? I dunno if I need Windows XTPME afterall…." And a company has its reputation and integrity to market as well. Take advantage of the consumer, his wallet, his trust, and his credulity a time too many, and a company with a great product can lose market share to a more reliable "safer bet" company without the economic clout, experience, or quite as much gleam on its product.

Another example I just recently heard - those PlayStations that just came out, which everybody was buying. What did they cost? $300? $500? I don’t remember. I heard one went for $25K on ebay. Anyway, I heard that the company was actually selling them - at peak demand! - for a loss. They expect to make up the difference - and make their profits - on game sales. Swallow that one, anti-capitalists: the company deemed it in their best, long-term, financial interest to sell their top product at a loss. But long-term, financial interest, with a goal of making profits, isn’t a loss, and it most certainly isn’t a sacrifice. 

#I’m surprised  how often people are surprised to learn that communism has killed over 100 million people - and not from wars. About 60 million people died under communism in the Soviet Union (from political purges, starvation, disease, or other state-mediated death; and in communism, everything is state-mediated). Another 40 million have died under communism in China. That’s right. Same deal. And how horrified are you that Hitler was responsible for the death of 6 million Jews? How noble must an experiment be to sustain the death of 100 million people while retaining its nobility? To all those who say communism was never given a proper try ("it’s never been fully implemented!"), I say, if it’s that hard to implement, if it takes over 100 million dead people to "still not have it quite right yet" - how noble can it possibly be? Not at all. Not in principle, not in practice, not ever. The anti-bourgoisie absconded with the word "noble", but not with its concept. If Stalin read aloud the Declaration of Independence - it wouldn’t make him a friend of freedom, or imply he had any grasp of the concepts implied.

–

Eastern Oregon is how I imagine wine and cheese and beer to be - not quite an aquired taste, but something you have to sit with for a while before you see it’s utter beauty and value. Like going from the glitz and glam of a Romantic concerto to a single thread of drawn out cello notes. It requires the attention of a different part of your mind, an active attentiveness, and then the value jumps out and commands your attention. Bleak? Not the high desert. Just the cold, clean breath of a stoic landscape that waits. It’s a land of opportunity for men willing to work, and keep the products of their labor.

Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur cartoon is a staple in my family. Ok, for Dad and I. Mostly Dad. On certain occaisions Wiley strikes quite close to home - Danae and Lucy (the Pygmy Clydesdale) can at times quite fairly approximate the relationship I had with my horse Aerial (who was a fair approximation of a Pygmy Clydesdale at least in terms of agility and wit, and who, despite her name, wasn’t much for jumping; eating was the only activity she actively sought out).

Another great one is Wiley’s Obviousman series. And, with the same fists-on-hips, spandex-gleaming, cape-snapping-in-the-wind-for-the-camera kind of way, it occured to me at dinner tonight (we had Thanksgiving a day late), that no matter how full you stuff yourself, you can’t possibly eat the year’s worth of production that you’re giving thanks for; otherwise you’d be hoarding it instead of feasting. So if you find yourself at the table, dig in with reckless abandon. It’s impossible to "over-do" it, unless of course you find yourself in the emergency room, having sailed right past all those stabs of gastric pain signaling the end of "demand" and the start of "surplus". But then you’ve overdone it with respect to your physiology, not a year’s worth of money/food/goods produced. It’s kind of cool to think that a holiday created by production, one that has joyful, earned meaning only in a society of trade, can’t be undone by the forces that create it - the laws of supply and demand. I find this amusingly satisfying. Not that I suspected otherwise, of course. Not when my stomach has adapted to an Odwalla bar counting as breakfast-lunch. Oi. All this food has taken my system by surprise. And, on a related note, it is my peri-professional opinion that drawstring-scrubs (thanks, Karen) beat elastic-waisted pants every day of the week and thrice on Thanksgiving.

Here’s to the producers of the world. Cheers.

Lesee, where was I….

Oh yes. We’ve said buh-bye to Stanford and Davis, Silicon Valley is either soggy or has moved to high ground (not without considerable cost), SF is now two islands instead of one, Berkeley’s enjoying fresh fish n’ chips… what about the precious salt-marshes, and the 12,000 breeding pairs of god-knows-what birds (let’s call’m schmatzels; I never had a Polish grandmother)? And the three recently-identified sub-species, upstream on the Sacramento River, that (now that we know about them) are also threatened?

Now, let’s take an historical perspective on marshes too. A marsh, being a combination of certain kinds of plants, and a certain depth of water, is highly subject to changes in water level. Too much water, the plants drown, and you’re left with more bay/lake/river/ocean/whatever, and the critters using the marsh are SOL (for that marsh). The SF bay is a fairly recent phenomenon (c. 8000 years it started trickling in), so all the marshes here (or that were here in the 1800s) are a pretty darn recent phenomenon. And given that most established species last on the order of 100,000- 1-million years, 1) 8000 years is a drop in the bucket even for species, and 2) it’s reasonable to infer that most organisms have ways of moving (individually, and between generations) and repopulating (even if a region of critters gets wiped out). That is, a lineage of organisms *not* capable of withstanding and/or accomodating (over the long haul) significant change would be highly unlikely to get beyond the toddler phase of specieshood.

And in fact, the long-term pattern of ecosystems is one of colonization, expansion and adjustment, stabilization, destabilization (several reasons), collapse/transformation, repeat. And most lineages of organisms suffer regional extinction one or more times, only to recolonize from populations elsewhere and do it all again. In fact, regional death and re-colonization can be part of the meta-strategy/niche of the group. Hard to tell. More research is needed (way way way more research) before we determine that holding things still as best as possible is the best feasible short-term solution to a long-term problem. It makes a lot of effectively arbitrary assumptions about the biological world, many of which are suspect if not false on their face. That’s what scientists *aren’t* supposed to do.

So the SF Bay marshes are an historically recent phenomenon, and only about 5% of marshes (from the 1800s) remain. Understandably this crimps the style of a lot of marsh-using critters, and it’s therefore expected that there are fewer critters than there used to be. A lot fewer. Only 12,000 breeding pairs of schmatzels or whatever. But, it’s not like these marshes were always there, and in terms of biotic and abiotic history, they represent an unprecedented regional surplus of opportunity for marsh-dwelling critters. So really, maybe we’re looking at the whole "low numbers" problem the wrong way. Maybe we’re coming off a local maximum of bird population numbers, and effectively returning to the norm of the last 40,000 years or so.

Well, the bird aspect of this story was the topic of a seminar attended by our hero in the not-so-distant past. The historical aspect of this story, extending beyond 250 years ago, was part of what our hero discussed in seminar yesterday, and a perspective he conveyed to the ornithologist at the end of that talk. The ornithologist, visibly agitated by that challenge to the welfare of local schmatzels, eventually burst out with, "Won’t you leave!!" Our hero pressed his point, and the angry ornithologist spouted forth with, "I don’t give a shit about the last 4.5 billion years, and I don’t give a shit about the next 4.5 billion years!!" A little more discussion, and our hero got the A.O. to admit that he didn’t care about anything after his own death. Being a conservation biologist in addition to an A.O., this is eyebrow-raising to say the least. Then our hero learned that not only was the A.O. not a graduate student (as he had assumed), but he was the chair of the department!

God save the schmatzels. With folks like this making policy recommendations, He’s the only one who can.  

But, then again, seeing’s that schmatzels have gotten along without the aid of god for… well if you trace it back, you’ve got 3.5 billion years of life continuity, without His divine non-existent help. Not only can the schmatzel take care of itself jim-dandy-thank-you, a few informed scientists and rational policy makers can make sure both humans and schmatzels are here well into the next centi-millenium.

 
Next time: "Hitting bottom, or, Why the Bay might not be totally fucked: A perspective from benthic foraminifera, Pleistocene to Present."

I’ll be here all week. Don’t forget to tip your waitresses. 

Fortuitously (given yesterday’s rant on rhinos), and hilariously, the following anecdote came up in a seminar today:

The speaker, (micropaleontologist and world expert on shelly protists, foraminifera, a deep thinker on deep time, and funny as hell to boot), recounted how he was attending a conservation biology seminar, where the speaker was talking about endangered birds requiring marsh habitat in the bay area if they are to survive. Something about only 12,000 breeding pairs of X species locally.

Back up a sec, and let’s talk about the "recent" history of the SF Bay area. Recent in geological terms means the last 125,000 years. Or even 8000 years, since that’s when the first humans (probably…) arrived, and started leaving giant mounds of clam shells around the bay area. Around 125K years ago, the earth was doing it’s glacial cycling, where you have a little ice age followed by warming, and it does this like 5 times or something, over 10s of thousands of years. And in fact the ocean levels were a bit lower than they are today, when this was happening. Then about 40,000 years ago (or was it 11000? nuts…) we had a glacial maximum, and everything was #@*$ing cold. Like, the line practically bored through the bottom of the graph. That cold. (haha).

Now, to step this out for the kiddies, that means there was a lot of ice. And ice is made of water. And that’s a lot of water. And that water has to come from somewhere. That water comes mostly from the oceans, since most of the water on earth is in the oceans. And when you freeze up a bunch of water at the poles, that means there’s less left for everywhere else. This means that ocean levels fall - quite a lot, actually. In the SF Bay area, they were about 360 FEET lower than they are now. That is, if you stood on the easy bay mountains and looked out where the Golden Gate Bridge is across the bay - you just MIGHT be able to see the water on a clear day. And this was normal, for a long time.

But, the good news is (well, not good - it’s just news, cuz it’s just the facts) since that glacial maximum is in the past - everything’s been warming up since then. And the interesting facts are these: Unlike the previous lukewarm-cool cycles that were happening 125K years ago, it’s been an almost continuous increase in ocean levels since that maximum cold. None of that up-down cycling bit, although there have been greater and lesser plateaus. And, some 8000 years ago, there was really just this piddly little body of water that was where the bay is now. Just pathetic. And it’s been slowly increasing ever since. By about 2000 years ago, we crossed the previous high water mark (of 100K years ago, give or take). In comparison to the last 125K years, sea levels are the highest they’ve ever been - but just a little bit (probably within 10 meters). This is also at the tail end of a very long upswing in sea levels. (I should probably point out the obvious and say that sea levels and global temperatures are positively correlated). And it is true that the slope of the graph is a bit steeper over the last little bit (500 years? 1000 years? Bit hard to tell on a graph covering that amount of time), than say 5-10,000 years ago.

Now, this raises a few very practical points, the insanity about global warming not withstanding. Because earth temperatures have been warming (period) over the long haul, and because the rate of increase is slightly steeper more recently, we might reasonably expect temperatures to increase slightly over the next 50 years. And, reasonable projections indicate a rise in bay water levels of maybe 3 feet. 50 years and 3 feet are chump change for paleontologists, but even paleontologists are land-owners and (usually) law-abiding, tax-paying citizens, and have some investment in the 100 years of their existence on this hunk o’ rock. So, applying our knowledge of historical patterns, and looking at a detailed topographic map of the bay area water levels, present areas of settlement, industrialization, and major economic import (including the marshes - I haven’t forgetten about the story), the following is indicated:

Some of the most important companies of Silicon Valley, which evidently have arrayed themselves along the western shoreline of the bay, including Sun Microsystems and others I recognized by can’t now recall (BIG names), fall within this 3 foot span. Yessiree, it’s true. 3 feet of water - for any reason, and "NASA, we have a problem." Gone, guys. Unless these companies pick up shop and move, they’re toast. Of course, they won’t go without a fight, but even dikes (or is it dykes? I can’t remember) and levees and seawalls are short-term fixes for a major problem - a gagillion cubic tons of water pressing in from the bay, non-stop. Better to re-locate uphill than fight such a brainless behemoth. Hopefully that’s what they will do - becuase unless it’s a tsunami or something, 3 feet doesn’t happen overnight. Still, this is a major, major economic drain for a very, very important sector of the global economy. I expect stocks to rise in the dredging industry, however. 

But wait, it gets better. Our valiant speaker informed us that, without a doubt, 3 feet of water will wipe Stanford off the map. Simultaneously, the island of SF will be cut in half with a straight of water running NW-SE through Colma. Next goes UC Davis, which sits well upstream on the Sacramento (I think) River, but will nonetheless be subject to the effects of higher water levels, and will get swamped. The hikes uphill on the Berkeley campus do indeed have a long-term benefit beyond my heart, quads and ass: Berkeley will remain untouched. In fact, there’s this nice little restaurant about five blocks down from the western-most border of campus that, with a slight shift in its business strategy, is exellently located to exploit the "fresh fish n’ chips" corner of the market. New student hangout?? We’ll see…

More later… must run. The fate of the marshes and the character of a prominent conservationist remain to be seen…. 

 I looked up the various species of cattle, buffalo and bison. I thought this might be one of the southeastern species, but as far as I can tell, this is just a breed of Bos taurus, though I don’t know which one. Not what you’d call brilliant, any of them, but quite interesting. I like drawing old people for the same reason I like this picture - wrinkles give interest, personality, expression, definition.

Not just an alternative lifestyle

Why?

The choice to choose

Choose

Focus

Think

Knowledge

Power/efficacy

Action

Purpose

Life

Another comment from the Dawkins/God discussion over on Evolving Thoughts. Interestingly, after I posted this, no one commented on it. Not even a reference. Maybe it was too late in the game. Maybe no one knew what to do with it. I don’t know.

Seems the various positions can be summed up in a table tracking one’s view/position on the existence, idenitity and efficacy of God. (Many apologies for the icky formatting; no tables in WordPress). Follow the arrows for trains of thought.

Person:             God’s existence      God’s Identity               Any effects?

True believer:              Yes        –>    Yes, whatever    –>     doesn’t matter

Pragmatic believer:     Yes        <–   doesn’t matter    <–        It works

Irrational athesit:        No         <–   doesn’t matter    <–       No evidence

Rampant skeptic:  Can’t know    <–     Can’t know       <–  doesn’t matter and/or can’t know

Empiricist:    Depends on the data <– matters, don’t/can’t know  <–  No evidence yet

Rational atheist:         No         <–  ID matters & is invalid <–   No evidence and it matters

Rational believer:      Yes          <–  ID matters & is valid   <–    Yes/no and evidence matters

Semi-rational believer  Yes      <–  ID matters & is valid    <–   Evidence doesn’t matter

So really it boils down to an investigation of both the evidence for and concept of God (or insert any other supernatural being here). Although I won’t let loose a whole rant on the formation of the concept of God, and valid concept formation in general, I’ll just say that the concept of a supernatural being is broken, no matter how many people hold it. This is because it was formed without accurate, thorough-going reference to reality and proper conceptualization (which is a very common thing to do), so it cannot legitimately claim a referent in reality. Like Santa Claus.

Reflecting on my knowledge in and enthusiasm for philosophy:

I wasn’t always into philosophy. Experience was the teacher that changed my mind. It also ingrained in me the fundamentals, in less than six months, without looking at a book. Today I wrote down, for the first time, the views I formed during that time. The points below constitute my personal revolution, my enduring motivation, and the points of reference for my entire life. These are things I know to be true. I’ve seen their fundamentality, their power, and what happens when you don’t take them seriously: people suffer and die miserably. I observed and concluded that:

Life is the unarguable, ultimate value.
"Why live?" is a invalid question with only two meaningful answers: "To live," or "Don’t."

I want to live.

This is a choice each person makes alone.
No one can choose anything for another person.
Similarly: no person can think or act for another person.
Human relations must be independent associations between freely choosing individuals.

Reason is absolutely necessary for survival. Therefore it’s an unarguable value.
Purpose is absolutely necessary for happy survival (i.e. life as a human being). Therefore it’s an unarguable value.
Self-esteem is absolutely necessary for survival, and therefore an unarguable value.
Self-esteem is the recognition that your life is your ultimate value and that you have chosen it.
Pride is knowing that you have worked to achieve your life, that you have done it, can do it and therefore deserve it.
I have chosen life, worked for it, and earned it. I deserve to live.
One must have purpose in order to have self-esteem; genuine purpose requires reasons for that purpose, and reasons require reasoning.

Reality is real. It just is. You either accept this or you don’t; no amount of argumentation can "prove" this demonstrable FACT.
Accepting reality precedes all other considerations.
The fact of human finiteness and fallibility is not lamentable. It’s just a fact.
Omniscience is an impossible, and therefore bad, standard for certainty.
Every person must have a way of dealing with uncertainty - that is, each person needs to have reason to think that his knowledge says something true about reality.
Some methods of knowledge-formation are better than others.

We can validly know things about the world by experience and by extrapolation. This is induction.
It is impossible to live without induction - that is, without being able to make generalized knowledge with confidence from previous experience.

There is no mind-body dichotomy. We are one, whole, integrated organism.
By this physical fact, rational, emotional, and physical harmony is a possibility for a normal individual.
Feelings aren’t a method of knowing about the world. They tell you something about yourself in the world.
You have to use reason to figure out what that is.
Good feelings make life worth living. Bad feelings suck away the perceived value of something, including one’s life.
Therefore: being happy is a requirement of life. The deeper one’s happiness, the fuller one’s life.
Reason tells you how to live; feeling makes it worthwhile.
Therefore: Reason and emotions in principle go together, and must in order to truly live. They are not contradictory.
But neither are they the same. Do not mix them up.
Therefore: A process of thinking that fails to consider (or is in opposition to) emotion, is disconnected from the facts of reality, and is therefore incomplete and irrational.
Irrationality is a prelude to pain.
Unchosen emotional and physical pain are preludes to death.

Ideas are life-or-death matters. It’s just a question of rate and time.