The Finite World

It's not done by any means, but I'd still appreciate your feedback none the less.  Send it to my Gmail Account - ssn139@gmail.com

1/29/2010 - I have a new super-secret project that's been taking up all of my free time as of late.  It is thematically related to The Finite World, but has a radically different approach. 

For now, I'll just say this - it combines two of my favorite topics on this blog: resource management and money. 

I'll post more soon, and hopefully a real article after that.

(1/03/2010) - Though its so pervasive in our lives, I find that the nature/essense of money is tremendously hard to pin down.  On a physical level it is fairly useless – paper, cheap metal, or more often than not, electronic signals and magnetized ferromagnetic material.  You can’t eat, wear, or sleep in money (note to literalists – you know what I mean).  Yet in the experience of much/most of the world’s population, it provides you all these things and possibly much more.

On a very basic level, we can think of money’s value as a symbol for goods and services it can purchase.  For example, lets say I received this twenty dollars for mowing my neighbor’s lawn.  My neighbor works for Google, and received the money to pay me by working approximately 30 minutes developing web applications.  I can trade my twenty dollars for some apples, milk, a chocolate bar, and a movie ticket.  Each of these products was produced and brought to me by the work of hundreds, if not thousands of people. 

In our everyday experience, money is interchangeable for goods and services.  But at the same time, money is not equivalent to goods and services.  For example, the six dollars in my pocket is not a rain check for 2 gallons of milk or a used shirt.  If a plague kills half of the country’s dairy cows and the price of milk spikes to $10 a gallon, I’ll be out of luck.  Prices change for a huge number of reasons.  And there are hundreds of ways to acquire money.  For many Americans, money is acquired in exchange for paid work.  But there are other ways to acquire money – investing, bank interest, relatives, robbery, etc. 

(12/27/2009) - A few months ago I wrote that, "The thing that I think makes me a liberal is that my position is almost always opposed to the entrenched interests that are trying to leverage their power to maintain their dominance."  I think the "almost always" might have been an overstatement, but the sentiment remains accurate. 

Then a few days ago, I had another thought that I think makes my point clearer - it's easier to define my liberalism in the negative - what are the reasons I'm not a conservative?  When I say "conservative," I don't mean in the sense that the modern Republican Party is considered "conservative."  This is more of a branding thing.  In many ways, they are not.  For me, conservative political ideology is based on the idea that the way things have been done in the past is the correct way to do them. 

So instead of just taking positions against entrenched interests, my liberalism is based on the idea that I think we can always be working on changing things and improving them, and the argument that "we've done things for a hundred years and things have worked out fine" is not persuasive. 

(12/9/2009) - Ta-Nehisi Coates has a post up on writing.  He's one of my favorite writers/bloggers (though not the most accessible - take a few weeks with him before you pass judgement), and I think this post hits on something I've felt a lot, and one reason why I've stopped/put on hold my desire to write for large amounts of monetary compensation (we'll have to see where life goes to see which one of these options comes true).  Writing is scary, and if you write something read by a lot of people, it can have tremendous power. 

On one level, I'm attacted to this idea.  This is why I write - to share with people how I see the world in what I guess is a bit of a vain hope that they will begin to see things as I do, or at the very least share with me what I'm missing. 

On another note, I'm sorry that the writing hasn't been happening recently.  I have an article about 3 pages long that's on hold because I'm really stumped on what I want to say - what reality I want to try to express.  Plus work is a killer - holidays and all that. 

(11/19/2009) - One of the main tenants (if not the main tenant) of mainstream “conservative” economics (i.e. those supported by large, pro-business organizations like the Club for Growth of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), or the Republican Party, but not necessarily all that consider themselves conservatives) is that the world works better when Government stays out of people’s business.

One of my main problems with these organizations is that they tend to be very selective when complaining about government-supported projects.  They are, for instance, usually in favor of increasing military spending.  The programs large conservative groups tend to focus on do have one thing in common – they are issues supported by many economic liberals.  Trains, social welfare, unions, support for bike lanes, the US Postal Service, climate change – these issues and organizations are perennially by conservatives as punching bags. 

The problem is that when “liberal” and free-market economic principles align, the big conservatives groups tend to grow silent because their existence seems dependent on opposition to liberal values.  It’s a shame.  It think the country could be improved greatly if they allied with liberals on common agendas, but that would make Obama and liberals look too good, so I don’t expect to see it happen.

(11/03/2009) - Last summer, with gasoline selling well above $4.00 a gallon and the presidential campaign in full swing, energy policy was the rage.  From chants of “Drill, Baby, Drill!,” to advertisements by T. Boone Pickens for a natural-gas and wind-led future (now on indefinite hold due to a collapse of financing and commodity prices), to a boom in investing in solar, wind, biomass, and tidal energy sources, energy was everywhere you look. 

I know that I still think about these things a lot, but like the war in Iraq, it all seems to have left the front page.  Its last year’s news.  But like Iraq, the war is still on, and plenty of companies, researchers, and politicians are working to solve problems presented by global warming and other future energy-related problems we’ll probably have to deal with (of course, the extent of these problems is still very much within our power to change).

I recently received a copy of the North American edition of Renewable Energy World.  I thought that I’d pick out some interesting news to share, and show that things are still very much alive in the energy revolution.

From the Mineral Information Institute.  All averages of course, and not determination. But still scary.

(10/10/2009) - If I had to pick one of my essays that I liked the most, Is Nature Natural?  would have a good shot at winning.  Over the past week, I’ve been glued to the pages of Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, and flashes of my argument in Is Nature Natural kept coming back to mind.  Not because Mann addressed them directly, but because

In Is Nature Natural? I basically argued that the duality between Man and Nature is highly dubious, and that moral arguments that rely upon this duality are wrong.  And, because the Man vs. Nature duality is often foundational in the arguments put forth by conservationists for the protection of nature, their arguments are wrong:

(Read the first part of this article here)  (9/21/2009) - How can we build a new economic system that could, eventually, lead us to sustainability (I say “could,” because I’m not convinced that anything resembling our modern way of life is sustainable, but I try to be optimistic about things I don’t know)?  I recommend taking elements of 20th century ideologies – specifically capitalism because it has the most to offer and is the most palatable in the current political environment – and using these as a basis for a new ideological system.  By taking proven aspects of a previous intellectual tradition, you not only take advantage of work that has already been done to others, but you can also position the new system as a continuation of an ideological system with brand power.

The first element of modern capitalism that I want to incorporate into my new economic ideology (I’m accepting name suggestions) is the use of individual incentives to drive a large scale system.  This, I believe, is one of the most compelling insights of capitalist ideology – the idea that individuals acting in their own self interest can often push forward the interests of society better than any centralized planning agency or bureaucratic structure.  Don’t get me wrong – Smith’s “invisible hand” isn’t better at central planning for everything, but for a specific and critical set of activities.  We need to recognize – and to some extent, systematize – the situations where the invisible hand works well, where it doesn’t, and what role a strong, fair, democratic government can and should have in establishing incentives.