So Why Do We Bother?

Incisive comment.

Institutional Christianity decided a long time ago that hypocrisy is in god's image.

 

Indeed. Large groups of people supporting the decimation of programs designed to benefit them, encouraging policy which distributes wealth away from them, and removes protections which they, themselves, benefit from the most.

 

But, if we hadn't swept all the social and environmental costs under the proverbial rug by calling them 'externalities; we wouldn't be making as much 'profit'.

Also, the average person might see the fatal flaw in assuming exponential growth is indefinite, and then where would we be?

I hope by the time we apply biomimicry to economics, there's enough 'bio' left to count.

 

yeah.. we just re-watch Idiocracy.. family night with kids

 

Joe Six Pack is paying a high price indeed for voting his resentments rather than his interests.

The hell of it is - the Dems (or enough of them to matter) have still not figured out that identity based zero-sum politics (gender, race, orientation, origin etc. etc.) ALWAYS sucks - no exceptions. Stick to wealth, please.

Until they do, they'll continue to piss off Joe badly enough to keep him voting against his own (and our) best interest.

 

to make it more ironic Soviet's views on personal morals, sex, etc were the mirror image of conservatives. With equivalent dose of hypocritical behind the scene doing of cause.

Add the totalitarian craving à la Patriot Act, the executioner Perry, "reload" rhetoric and you start wonder if the ideology meant that much after all

 

I have always thought that Bush was our first Soviet President.

Cold War joke:

"A man ran into Red Square yelling "Brezhnev is an idiot!"
......He got 6 years in the Gulag - 6 months for calling Brezhnev an idiot, and 5 and a half years for revealing a State secret"

Bush = Brezhnev

 

The cited article lays it out clearly:

"We need collective action -- so yes! write your Congressmen, organize your local community, demonstrate, protest (and yes, keep buying local and all that, too!) -- we just can't stop at isolated individual good deeds and pure intentions. Tick, tock!"

So:

1) You lack the moral high ground and/or look like a hypocrite if you don't walk the walk. So failure to conserve prevents you from agitating effectively for collective action. Look at how much crap Gore had to take over his electric bill (despite green-sourcing the power).

2) You help re-define normal. Most people are sleepwalking into the future. They just try to be normal. Your behavior helps to redefine what is normal. I biked to the bank yesterday and, lo and behold, there was another person, at the ATM, on a bike. Hey, maybe this is becoming normal. The younger generation now looks at enormous SUVs as fuddy-duddy cars for old people. For them, it's not normal.

3) You get in shape for a likely future. We could reasonably be expected to face an extended power-down scenario within my (expected) lifetime, so this is good practice. Maybe I was scarred by the 1970s oil embargoes, but I can still remember even/odd license plates and lines for gas. (Though that was back in an era when the government actually tried to make it so that poor people could purchase some gas -- the inefficient rationing was a side-effect of that fairness-oriented policy. Now, we'd just raise the price and screw 'em if they can't afford it. Far more efficient.) Who's to say that couldn't happen again? If supplies get short, better to have already arranged your life for efficiency. "Fortune is infatuated with the efficient".

4) Think globally, act locally, and the Prisoner's Dilemma. While I, as an individual, have zero impact on anything globally, I must keep in mind the key lesson of the Prisoner's Dilemma. In a one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma game, it is stupid to cooperate. In a repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game, it is stupid not to cooperate. Eventually, even the stupidest will learn to cooperate in the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma. By voluntarily reducing energy use, I'm not the stupid guy in the one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma (acting irrationally), I'm the smart guy in the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma (acting rationally), because I know that other smart people will be doing the same thing. The net effect is that I'm not alone, there is an entire class of individuals who respond to these incentives just as I do. This is not classic micro-economic marginalist thinking, but that kind of thinking never seems to get beyond the one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma. Classic marginalist thinking flunks the test of the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma.

4) It buys time. And so, we, as a class, help stretch out the timelines for exhaustion of resources and for the impacts of global warming (e.g., turning the entire Midwest into an uninhabitable dust bowl, currently scheduled for circa 2050 or so under business as usual, see: Climate change: Drought may threaten much of globe within decades | UCAR). In that way, we provide our progeny with some small additional time either to try to flee to whatever arable land remains, or to work out some type of massive geoengineering fix.

5) It's mostly cheap. When I looked in 2005, after figuring in the cost of fuel, the Prius was simply the cheapest new car I could fit into comfortably. CFLs way pay for themselves, and US household electrical use continues to drop, e.g., Business | Shocker: Power demand from U.S. homes falling | The Detroit News), attributed largely to CFL use. Sealing cracks, weatherstripping, all that has large paybacks. Arranging your life so you don't commute by car has a lot of mental and dollar paybacks. Bicycling you errands has demonstrable health paybacks. And so on.

6) It's the wave of the future. Just look at (e.g.) prices for solar panels, and you realize that big changes are afoot. (Module Pricing | Solarbuzz). Do you really want to be remembered by your grandchildren, should any survive, as the guy who drove that ludicrously large vehicle and lived in that ridiculous McMansion? It'll be like being remembered for having dressed in a leisure suit. Worse, if the drought scenario plays out, with 20-20 hindsight, you'll look somewhere between stupid and criminally stupid. Whereas if a miracle happens and limitless free clean energy suddenly appears -- in hindsight, a more energy-efficient lifestyle will merely look heroically eccentric, like the hardships faced by the pioneers.

7) That said, without some sense of the quantities involved, you can certainly mislead yourself into thinking that you're doing something useful, when all you are doing is greenwashing. My favorite example is driving to the grocery store with reusable bags. I think I once calculated that the oil in the typical grocery bag is enough to drive a Prius about 600 feet. Just redid the calc and came up 450 feet. Split the difference -- call it ten bags per mile. Useful savings, but better not to drive a few miles. CFLs reduce home lighting use -- but lighting is 8% of typical household electricity use (http://www.eia.gov/emeu/reps/enduse/er01_us_tab1.html). So CFLs are a nice start. And so on. Don't let a few token actions cover up for an otherwise inefficient lifestyle.

 

Right, right, right, and RIGHT, chogan!

I summarize your advice thus: Do not waste, and consume the least harmful choice that has about the same lifetime cost of ownership as a more environmentally harmful choice.

For some deviant reason, people expect smart eco choices to save them money. All it should really have to do (and this is a low threshold) is not cost more. I use cost here ignoring externalities.

 

Or maybe the young have no one to vote for for programs that will actually help them, and the old just cynically pull the donkey lever.

ancient song lyrics. The Kennedy conspiracies have become 9-11 conspiracies, and the politicians on both sides don't care at all about the people.

The patriot act still is in place, and Bush/Cheney attempt to take our rights away was kept by new president and a democratic congress.

But Roosevelt gulag, I mean his Japanese concentration camps, and Nixon's wage and price controls seemed more soviet.

Emissions went down under bush in spite of the policies. But the policies were more environmental than under clinton/gore. They are even better under obama, who has just reversed some epa controls. Its up to the people to lead, for the government sure won't.

 

how about Abu Ghraib? the Bush NSA phone scandal? is it less soviet? meh?

BTW you cannot really compare the Japanese camps, Guntanamo or even Abu Ghraib with Konzentrationslager or even Gulag from attrition rate point of view.

 

Then Nixon and Roosevelt yes. Really nasty stuff that we should be against and not do again.

No none is as bad as the soviets. My grandparents came from there.

The Japanese camps were the much worse policy. People were rounded up simply because of race. Gitmo had abuses, but did not rise to this level. Abu Garib was much more mild than things nixon did in vietnam.

This is comparing bad to worse, and ignoring the worse.

 

technically not race, ethnicity; chinese were not rounded up, were they?

Either way Gulag was definitely bad but you don't give germans enough credit for Konzentrationslager. If you have any doubts, read on holocaust or visit museum.

 

How about, in an attempt to steer this bck from the political we look at the use and misuse of e word "decimate". Most of us ten to use it to express the notion of something being "wiped out" when in fact, the word means to "kill one in ten". Originally thought to be the punishment meted out for deserting or cowardice soldiers.

Decimate - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary

So to say for example that the floods from huricane Katrina "decimated" New Orleans" is not correct.

Just saying,,,

 

That hasn't stopped a few of your compatriots (like the fellow who flew his personal aircraft into an Austin IRS office, or a professor who shot up some of her colleagues). Yea, you've just about earned the ignore list with that comment, hopelessly partisan in that you think the Dems are actually leading you to some land of milk and honey while the Repubs are plotting to destroy you. Both parties have moved in the direction of control and centralization of power and I can only hope you'll reach the same conclusion before it's too late.

All manner and form of wealth redistribution needs to be brought down a few pegs, don't you think? Creating an entitlement class that continues to vote for promises that can't possibly be maintained is no less disastrous than letting corporate lobbyists continue to infiltrate the highest political chambers in the land.

And I openly blame the 3Rs (and the complacent and guilty D who signed it) who moved to repeal the Glass-Steagall act and made us all more susceptible to the unbridled game of Wall Street Russian Roulette. Reinstatement of such protections instead of new circumventing regulations is a more prudent approach. Glass-Steagall served us well enough for decades.

I do know that there is a form of totalitarianism alive today where might is apparently right, and the EPA is being used as a tool against those who don't have the lobbying clout of corporate America, like in this scenario: Family Farmers and Ranchers: 'Enough Is Enough' - of Obama Administration's Agriculture Policies - Salem-News.Com

This is just to point out that voting DEM doesn't necessarily mean one is voting in their self-interest, and the partisan tunnel vision needs to brought to a halt.

I saw there was an attack on Christians above for being prone to greed and social hypocrisy (let's falsely pretend for a moment that the most generous charitable organizations are not religious-based); a false generalization that I'm sure appeals to many here. In any case, politicians who wear their faith on their sleeve should not be taken at face value (so many have failed to learn from the Bush mistake) and those who are being wooed by Perry's false appeal to the devout do make me shake my head in disgust (but the media is partly to blame, when they ignore, belittle or denigrate certain candidates whom the establishment fears). And to whomever said Russia was not communist but totalitarian...the former only works when those entrusted with the power don't abuse it. Communism and human nature are just not compatible.

I apologize for the rambling, as it's been a long night. I know my kind is not welcome here, so I apologize for polluting the data channels, etc.

 

dupe

 

I thought you just deleted the posts you didn't like.