Engineer, heal thineself

The reason this blog exists is to both celebrate,
and warn against, technology. That's because
I saw that tech was taking over our lives,
slowly, and yet it was wasteful and unnecessary,
very often.

This article, below, has helped to express the
ideas I've had about over-teching. Pretty soon,
people will be second class citizens, with the
robots being first.
I just saw an ad for a tv show called "what if"
where one guest was saying how robotics will
take over much of our lives, soon and he seemed
happy about it.

I think we're already too far removed from
nature. It also precludes us ever changing
the horrible political system, because
we'll be too busy working our apps to
get our robot to do backflips, or some such
stupidity.

So, if anybody is truly reading this, the
really advanced engineers will truly improve
life and not the P/E ratios of Apple. Society
will  have to deal with the detritus of every
failed or surpassed technology.


checkit:  new statesman

What happens when engineers run the world?

The global tech over.

By Aditya Chakrabortty Published 09 April 2013 8:34

the 2 books:

Who Owns the Future?

Jaron Lanier

Allen Lane, 384pp, £20

To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don’t Exist

Evgeny Morozov

Allen Lane, 432pp, £20

On Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a Northwest Airlines plane wearing customised underpants stuffed with explosives. As Flight 253 approached Detroit, he tried to blow himself up – along with nearly 300 other passengers and crew. It was the biggest flop in the recent history of Islamic terrorism. The baby-faced bomber succeeded only in setting his trousers on fire and burning his legs, before getting doused by fire extinguishers and being sat on by some intrepid souls in economy class. Not even Ryanair dishes out that kind of treatment.

Landed with a huge story, the papers dutifully cranked out their journey-to-jihad profiles and searched for a motivation. Abdulmutallab had been a pious introvert. “Sex torment drove him nuts,” suggested the New York Post (“The bomb wasn’t the only thing burning in his pants”). The most intriguing explanation, though, came from a couple of academics. Whatever else could be said about the failed terrorist, he’d recently graduated from University College London with a degree in mechanical engineering. That, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog wrote, slotted him into a gruesome tradition summarised in the title of their paper: “Why Are There So Many Engineers Among Islamic Radicals?”

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Mohamed Atta, 9/11’s mastermind and one of its ringleaders, were both engineers. Imam Samudra, the plotter of the Bali nightclub bombings of 2002, was an engineer. Kafeel Ahmed, who in 2007 charged a Jeep into Glasgow airport, had an MPhil in aeronautical engineering.

Analysing the backgrounds of 178 jihadis, Gambetta and Hertog found that 44 per cent had studied for an engineering degree – while engineers comprised an average of only 3.5 per cent of the male workforce in their home countries. Most of the standard explanations for this vast over-representation are no doubt familiar to diligent New Statesman readers: graduate employment across the Middle East is hard to find and, as Jean-Paul Marat could tell you, frustrated ambition is often a catalyst for radicalisation.

While that accounted for the preponderance of degree-holding jihadis, it did not explain the dominance of engineering. For that, the social scientists turned to what they called the “engineering mindset”. “Engineering is a subject in which individuals with a dislike for ambiguity might feel comfortable,” they wrote. According to a US survey, engineers were “less adept at dealing with the confusing causality of the social and political realms and . . . inclined to think that societies should operate in an orderly way akin to well-functioning machines”.

Had the sociologists panned their lens across from the Middle East to the west coast of the US, they would have found that same mindset not confined to the political margins but flourishing in the commercial mainstream. If this age belongs to any profession, it surely belongs to the engineer – not in the term’s historical sense of builders of dams and railways but in its new sense of makers of technology and software. Look at the Forbes billionaire list, published in March: of the ten richest people in the world, three – Carlos Slim, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison – made their riches through engineering. Run through the companies that have become household names in the past 20 years and they are, at root, engineering companies: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter.

Three things have converged to make this batch of engineers more prominent than those of previous generations who worked at such venerable giants as BAE or General Electric. First, rather than making bits of public infrastructure – power plants and bridges, for example – this new lot are in your personal space. They produce the iPhone in your pocket or the social media sites you check over lunch.

Second, the IT revolution has triggered a wave of inventions and innovations. Look out for Google Glass spectacles that enable you to browse the web and film what you’re watching. Wearers have already been given a nickname: “Glassholes”.

Finally, the politicians and the commentariat, as well as business executives, increasingly defer to the needs of those in engineering. Think of how David Cameron cosies up to Google or consider how the coalition government has cut public funding for all university teaching except in science, technology, engineering or mathematics.

Precedents exist for each of these factors. Didn’t Harold Wilson get excited about the “white heat of technology”? But add the three together and lob in the propulsive force of venture capital and you have a world in which books emerge with titles such as What Would Google Do?and in which the untimely death of the chief executive of a consumer electronics company, Apple’s Steve Jobs, prompts the kind of mass grief that greeted the assassination of John Lennon. A world in which engineers – and the culture described by Gambetta and Hertog – reign supreme.

It’s the implications of this new world that Evgeny Morozov and Jaron Lanier discuss in their new books. Where public debate still struggles to get over the giddiness brought on by all this novelty (look, youngsters in Tahrir Square on Twitter!), both writers want to draw out some of its shortcomings. Yet neither is hard-wired to technophobia. The 28-year-old Morozov confesses that he used to be a digital evangelist: “I remember perfectly the thrill that comes from thinking that the lessons of Wikipedia . . . could and should be applied absolutely everywhere.”

As for Lanier, he was one of the pioneers of virtual reality and now works for Microsoft. He is that odd combination, a member of Silicon Valley’s “1 per cent” and a philosopher who has written widely about the limits of technology. He is also the owner of the world’s biggest flute.

In To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov describes how responsibility for solving social problems has been arrogated by engineers at Google and other private-sector businesses. Need to recycle more? Get BinCam, which photographs your bin’s contents and sends the image to freelancers hired through Amazon. They analyse just how wasteful you’ve been and then stick the results on – you’ve guessed it – your Facebook page for all your friends to see. It doesn’t stop there. Because your pals also have BinCams, soon an entire social network is competing to see who’s the greenest. Result: Gaia is saved. Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and BinCam!

This is a prime example of “solutionism”, as Morozov calls it: the notion that a messy problem sprawling across morality and politics can be resolved with just a little engineering ingenuity and the latest technology. Solutionism is the natural extension of Gambetta’s and Hertog’s observation about the engineer’s desire to turn society into a well functioning machine – and it’s everywhere.

After a gunman killed 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, a residents’ group named the Sandy Hook Promise sprang up, looking for new technologies to increase gun safety. Breakthrough ideas would be put in front of “venture capitalists and angel investors”. The intentions are surely sincere but I can’t help feeling that the most straightforward way to reduce gun crime would be to reduce gun ownership. For the Sandy Hook Promise, however, that smells too much like politics.

Then there’s “big data”, the concept, fashionable across Washington and now Whitehall, that any problem – from underperforming pupils to failing hospitals – can be solved by collecting some tightly focused data, crunching it and making tweaks such as shifting pupils or rejigging nurses’ shifts, rather than dealing with bigger issues, such as the poverty of the catchment area or the spending cuts being made by your local trust.

This is an approach that focuses narrowly on “what works” without ever troubling to ask: “Works for whom?” Its watchword is “smart”, which can easily be appreciated, not “right”, which can’t. Putting trust in highly educated technocrats, it is naturally less interested in public debate. Amplify this by the imperative to deliver financial returns and the result is often easy to admire – and yet to dislike.

In 2010, Google’s chief financial officer, Patrick Pichette, explained how his company “is really an engineering company, with all these computer scientists that see the world as a completely broken place”. Friedrich Hayek would have recognised this sentiment. Over 60 years ago, he observed that the best engineers eventually “develop a passion for imposing on society the order which they are unable to detect by the means with which they are familiar”.

In his first book, The Net Delusion, Morozov rubbished the idea that totalitarian regimes could be toppled by “slacktivists”: Iranian hipsters retweeting badinage about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, say. It was a subtle argument in which both the Belarusian and his opponents splashed around a little too much black and white but Morozov captured how protesters in the internet age often place trust in tools such as blogs and twitter simply because they’re the closest to hand.

The new book develops that picture, suggesting that a cadre of technologists and policymakers is now so depoliticised that it naturally reaches for engineering solutions. The Prime Minister gets a dishonourable mention here, on account of his enthusiasm for nudge policies to prompt voters into eating better and being greener.

All this polemicising is delivered with a delightful bitchiness and Morozov spends much of his book in hand-to-hand combat with some of his “internet-centric” opponents (Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky). The result, though, is that he pays too little attention to why we live in an age dominated by zealous engineers. One answer may be generational – that technological positivism has become the reflex instinct for a post-coldwar generation assured that all the big questions in politics have now been settled.

Or you could look at two of the societies driving the IT age. The US and India are both marked by small states, in which the aspirant middle classes cannot rely on government support in good schooling, higher education, health care and pensions. Inside your private bubble, why wouldn’t you steer clear of the hurly-burly of democratic politics and go for pragmatic individualism instead?

By not widening his focus to the political context, Morozov is as guilty of internetcentrism as his targets. Indeed, until reading these books, I hadn’t realised how much serious, non-fiction writing now resembles those quarter-hour Ted talks in which smart people rely on nifty neologisms and tidy framing to make an argument. In his book, Lanier’s only index is of new terms he has coined and where they first appear. And To Save Everything, Click Here concludes with a joke about how Morozov should have produced a book with “one big idea” but can only offer “two middle-sized ideas”.

He’s better than that. For someone who was born in 1984, Morozov has done an obscene amount of reading. Early in the book, he imagines a dinner party attended by Michael Oakeshott, Jane Jacobs, Ivan Illich and Friedrich Hayek; and every time he takes on some wrong-headed internet evangelist, he lets you know just how much of their dreck he’s yawned over.

As a result, To Save Everything, Click Here comes with endnotes that stretch on for 50 pages. By contrast, Who Owns the Future? has a bunch of links to blogs and Facebook pages. And Lanier writes as if pretty much all Engine room: one of Google’s eight data centres he’s read is a bunch of blogs and Facebook pages. It is a shame, because his earlier book You Are Not a Gadget was a bracing polemic on how our reliance on IT is hollowing out culture.

......

According to Lanier, our only hope is to charge these companies for the data they gather on us. It is a cheerless future, in which 99 per cent of the population are, in effect, digital welfare claimants: doing nothing productive or independent and surrendering their most intimate details in return for spare change.

Whatever Lanier may think, Google, Apple and Amazon are not forces of nature but businesses with workers and stockholders and supply chains. There is nothing inevitable about Apple outsourcing work to China, especially when research shows that it could make its iPhones in the US and still take a gross margin of 46 per cent – one of the highest in the world. Lanier does not bother with such frippery as regulating our internet companies or nationalising these siren servers. Those would be political solutions and he is an engineer who wants to do what works.

Towards the end of his book, Morozov quotes the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset: “I wish it would dawn upon engineers that, in order to be an engineer, it is not enough to be an engineer.” For all his dissident qualities, Lanier is still stuck in the engineering mindset.

driving a cab through the ground-level chemical soup

I've always wondered why nobody publishes regular ground level
ozone and other airborne chemicals in major cities of
the world, especially in the summer. This is an issue of health.

Here's some of the proof I've been waiting for. It says that
cabbies are literally swimming it. It being the airborne
particles.

Check this: Guardian

Cab users run highest risk of exposure to dirty air
By James Randerson

of all the usual forms of city transport taxis appear to be
the worst for exposing passengers to airborne particles,
finds research by Imperial College London. Using a
device that counts particles measuring 0.02 to 1
micrometre in diameter, Surbjit Kaur tracked 31
central London journeys, synchronising the readings
with recordings made of the journeys with a hidden
video camera. The experiment found that, on average,
taxi rides clocked up 107 000 particles per cubic
centimetre, compared with 92 000 for buses, 80 000
for bikes, 45 000 for walking and 36 000 for cars.

we're all worthless and weak

We all know the Darwinian argument of how things
change over time. Well, we are sentient enough to
be able to see the changes in modern humans, as
they happen, if we're not too wed to tv/Net
diabetic-inducing food, alcohol/drugs or
overwork.

It's obvious that, if you stop doing an action, your
body becomes less able to do it. So, we no longer
hunt with primitive weapons, so we no longer
are able to hunt. That also means we have less
strength, despite what wonders steroids have
brought us.

I've noticed in only one generation of my family
what differences life brings to the architecture
and functioning of a human. My father's family were
subsistence farmers. My dad, although he didn't
show off, was built like an ox, and my uncles
too, except for one. They had to be. Simple diet,
hard life, many chores. bam.
I have been a gym goer most of my life, and I'll
never be that strong. Life did not demand
much from me, physically. I was raised as
a Western suburban human.

I'll briefly recount a night of stupidity that I
caused, that showed me the difference. I took
my father's car to town, drove like an idiot and
got into a minor fender-bender. The crash
meant that the right front wheel was rubbing the
tire when I turned in any direction.
So, I tried to bend it back to no avail and drove
it with the tire grinding every time I turned.
I took the car home. In two tugs, the father
unit had fixed it, with my friend as a witness.
And I mean 1970 heavy Chevy, not the modern
crap.

We're also losing memory capacity with mobile-
phone -cum secretary. Of course, that started
with the written word, as Socrates had warned.
[I'll find that later]
Anyway, we also don't like cooking. Pretty soon
we'll be unable to avoid starvation if convenience
stores close for a month, or if the superstore which
is your only source of food decides they can't make
money any more, and closes shop. See the
'canuck' blog soon.

["you're all worthless & weak" check 2:15 onward]

Checkit:  Independent

Modern man 'a wimp', says anthropologist

Reuters

Many prehistoric Australian aboriginals could have outrun world 100 and 200 metres record holder Usain Bolt in modern conditions.

Some Tutsi men in Rwanda exceeded the current world high jump record of 2.45 meters during initiation ceremonies in which they had to jump at least their own height to progress to manhood.

Any Neanderthal woman could have beaten former bodybuilder and current California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in an arm wrestle.

These and other eye-catching claims are detailed in a book by Australian anthropologist Peter McAllister entitled "Manthropology" and provocatively sub-titled "The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male.

McAllister sets out his stall in the opening sentence of the prologue.

"If you're reading this then you - or the male you have bought it for - are the worst man in history.

"No ifs, no buts -- the worst man, period...As a class we are in fact the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet."

Delving into a wide range of source material McAllister finds evidence he believes proves that modern man is inferior to his predecessors in, among other fields, the basic Olympic athletics disciplines of running and jumping.

His conclusions about the speed of Australian aboriginals 20,000 years ago are based on a set of footprints, preserved in a fossilized claypan lake bed, of six men chasing prey.

An analysis of the footsteps of one of the men, dubbed T8, shows he reached speeds of 37 kph on a soft, muddy lake edge. Bolt, by comparison, reached a top speed of 42 kph during his then world 100 meters record of 9.69 seconds at last year's Beijing Olympics.

In an interview in the English university town of Cambridge where he was temporarily resident, McAllister said that, with modern training, spiked shoes and rubberized tracks, aboriginal hunters might have reached speeds of 45 kph.

... Turning to the high jump, McAllister said photographs taken by a German anthropologist showed young men jumping heights of up to 2.52 meters in the early years of last century.

"It was an initiation ritual, everybody had to do it. They had to be able to jump their own height to progress to manhood," he said.

"It was something they did all the time and they lived very active lives from a very early age. They developed very phenomenal abilities in jumping. They were jumping from boyhood onwards to prove themselves."

McAllister said a Neanderthal woman had 10 percent more muscle bulk than modern European man. Trained to capacity she would have reached 90 percent of Schwarzenegger's bulk at his peak in the 1970s.

... Manthropology abounds with other examples:

* Roman legions completed more than one-and-a-half marathons a day carrying more than half their body weight in equipment.

* Athens employed 30,000 rowers who could all exceed the achievements of modern oarsmen.

* Australian aboriginals threw a hardwood spear 110 meters or more (the current world javelin record is 98.48).

McAllister said it was difficult to equate the ancient spear with the modern javelin but added: "Given other evidence of Aboriginal man's superb athleticism you'd have to wonder whether they couldn't have taken out every modern javelin event they entered."

Why the decline?

"We are so inactive these days and have been since the industrial revolution really kicked into gear," McAllister replied. "These people were much more robust than we were.

... "At the start of the industrial revolution there are statistics about how much harder people worked then.

"The human body is very plastic and it responds to stress. We have lost 40 percent of the shafts of our long bones because we have much less of a muscular load placed upon them these days.

"We are simply not exposed to the same loads or challenges that people were in the ancient past and even in the recent past so our bodies haven't developed. Even the level of training that we do, our elite athletes, doesn't come close to replicating that.

"We wouldn't want to go back to the brutality of those days but there are some things we would do well to profit from."

our feet were made for running

I've been big on this revolution in human kinesiology
and  moving. I guess I walk a lot and jog and go to
the gym and make those machines work.

However, in the back of my mind was the idea from
documentaries and the movie The Gods Must
be Crazy that the way the bushmen walked was
interesting. If you think about it, they walk in the
way that our ancestors did when in the bush
hunting animals. People walked and ran on
the front pad of the feet mostly because it
was most efficient and painless, if your foot
pad is tough.
BTW I know that many places in Europe where
the early 20th century was a time of great
barefootedness.
Anyway, it turns out that running on the pads of your
feet is the best. forget the fancy shoes. try sandals
like the Tarahumara Aboriginals:

Lots of runners who strike the ground with their
heals are causing problems to their bodies and
particularly their knees.
I could even say that heel -striking walkers are
doing the same. You are probably do harm to
yourself by heel-striking excessively.
For 5 or 6 years now, I've changed my walking too.
Most days, I feel like a teenager. This is not
quite like being light in the loafers or pad striking
like an autistic person. It's actually mechanically
smooth, and feels easy.
Apparently you need to be careful because such
changes to your walking can mess up your calf
muscles.
It seems to have a relationship with the use of
heels in footwear, which is the norm for
most adults. It gives the same "imbalance"
to the foot and the body when walking. and
for gals, it sure makes their calves look
good, which makes their thighs and
hams look good and lastly ending up
where the eyes usually go , to the
butt.

[video here] Russian chicks & their ball handling

Also, for the mechanics of running,
watch Usain Bolt run in slow-mo.
Watch where in his stride that his
foot hits the ground.

[video here]

Checkit-
Here's a short blurb in the Metro:

Springy step: Forget that pricey pair of sweatshop
-made trainers, it seems you're better off running
barefoot. More than 75 % of us who run while
wearing shoes heel strike, impacting leg joints
1000 times each mile. But, barefoot runners use
the arch of  the foot as a spring, reducing the impact
of each stride. "Our feet were made for running"
said Harvard's Prof Daniel Lieberman.

How to build a rib sandwich

I think McDonalds took to building the
McRib in the way that Nasa built the
space shuttle.

Does it work?     people buy it & eat it, too
Is it high tech?   70 ingredients stuck together
Is it made with rib meat?   no

 

[Natural Society] http://naturalsociety.com/mcdonalds-mcrib-sandwich-a-franken-creation-of-gmos-toxic-ingredients-banned-ingredients/

Daily double: Prune juice and some blood

Yes, well, in the Era of the Vampire, where we
find ourselves, this story makes sense. I know
it's the era because of the all the Vamp shows
and Son of Vamp, and Camp Vamp, the Gay
Siphon.

Anyway. Apparently old folks are helped by
getting transfusion of young blood. I know
it has kept Keith Richards alive and looking
almost life-like, that pastey white Englishman.

Keith: gimme a shovel an' some drugs, pffelft eehhh

I've been a blood donor since I was young, and
did so because it was a gift to hospitals. we have
public health care in Canada, so far. Then I heard
it was good for you because it keeps the blood-works
busy, creating replacement blood.

But this is much more ghoulish. Enjoy:

checkit: AlterNet
By Laura Gottesdiener 
Amazing Medical Discovery: Transfusions of Young Blood Appear to Rejuvenate the Elderly

Looks like vampire movies are on to something. So far, it's just mice.

October 18, 2012  

   Human history-altering newsflash: Scientists have demonstrated that injections of youthful blood carry semi-magical, rejuvenating qualities--at least for gray-whiskered mice. The researchers believe that the same might hold true for humans, suggesting that diseases like Alzheimer’s and indeed aging itself might be prevented through the transfusion of the youth’s vigorous lifeblood.

To clarify: No, this revelation is not the premise of the next blowout romance-vampire movie trilogy. It is a real scientific discovery made in Stanford University’s laboratories and presented earlier this week at the Society for Neuroscience conference in New Orleans.

 The study showed that 18-month-old mice who had been received eight transfusions of young blood had a much easier time making it through a watery maze than the old mice who had not received any transfusions. 

 "They were 18 months old but they were acting much younger, like a four to six-month-old," said Dr. Villeda, one of the lead researchers.

 The study also demonstrated that older mice who had received the blood transfusions also began to grow new synapses in their brain--connections which are essential for the retention of memory.

This result holds promise far beyond solving the plight of grandparents accompanying their grandchildren through those pesky Halloween hay labyrinths. The researchers said that this information could, in the future, be used to prevent mental aging itself. 

 "Do I think that having young blood could have an effect on a human? I am thinking more and more that it might,” said Dr. Villeda.

 If the same does hold true for humans, this discovery could become a major scientific breakthrough at a time when the world’s elderly population is growing exponentially. Scientists predict that by 2050 global population over 60 will reach a dizzying two billion people, which could cause a massive health care and economic crisis as societies struggle to care for these seniors. Some scientists have said that this explosion of Alzheimer’s alone could cause a “ looming medical-care disaste r is beyond comparison with anything that has been faced during the entire history of humanity.”

 Scientists are excited about the potentials of this study. 

 Chris Mason, professor of regenerative medicine bioprocessing at University College London , told The Guardian , “Even if the finding leads only to a drug that prevents, rather than reverses the normal effects of ageing on the brain, the impact upon future generations will be substantial – potentially outweighing other wonder drugs such as penicillin."

 As significant and surprising as this study is, the results are supported by past research. Last year, the same Stanford researchers demonstrated that injecting young mice with old blood led to mental deterioration in the rodents.

 This research led them to undertake this more recent experiment to see whether the reverse could be true.

 Moving forward, it is unlikely that a vial of youthful blood itself will become the treatment for aging. Instead, scientists say that the new challenge is to identify what compounds inside young blood carry this rejuvenating effect--potentially allowing researchers to extract or replicate these particularly chemicals.

the definitive history of stuff

In a consumer-led economy, buying useless stuff (from China)
is doing harm to us in two ways, at least.

Lost jobs. The need for a bigger house for our stuff.


check it and see:

ANATHEMA TO STUFF

Guest Post: Is Anybody Else Tired Of Buying And Owning Stuff?

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/07/2012 11:56 -0400

Submitted by Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds

Is Anybody Else Tired Of Buying And Owning Stuff?

We are suffocating in stuff, physically, psychologically and spiritually.

I know this is a sacrilegious question, but is anybody else tired of buying and owning stuff? Is anybody else tired of dealing with all the junk cluttering up every corner of the room/house/nation?

Has anyone else noticed we have surplus stuff coming out our ears? And that therefore we don't really need any more stuff? Has anyone noticed the psychological consequences of constantly buying and managing possessions? Here is how correspondent B.D. recently put it:

    Kids have a melt-down when they don't have the latest iteration of the (insert trendy electronica here) or if they are asked to tidy up the gargantuan collection of "stuff" they are slowly suffocating themselves with. Most kids these days don't have bedrooms anymore ... they have a small warehouse of goods in which they have a sleeping space.

Everybody has a warehouse of goods, even "poor" households. Of the four households on my block with one-car garages, we're the only ones who actually park a car in the garage. Everyone else's garage is jammed with stuff. And this is not an upscale neighborhood, it's working-class/renters.

Have you been to one of the many gigantic swap meets recently? You know, the kind with hundreds of sellers hawking everything under the sun. Our young friends (newlyweds renting one bedroom in a house, they don't own a car, both seeking fulltime work but currently living on one-part time job) recently described their visit to just such a sprawling cornucopia of over-consumption.

People are selling any and everything to raise some cash: birds, snakes, used iPhones, laptop computers, clothing, furniture, you name it. A guy was selling a guitar for $15. Our friend offered $5. The seller took $8. $8 for an acoustic guitar. Granted it was a cheap one, but $8? Was it even worth hauling it to the swap meet for $8? A set of strings costs $4.

"Almost new" bicycles--again, cheap, poor-quality versions--were being sold for $35. You can't even buy a replacement bicycle wheel for $35.

Were these stolen goods? Our friend asked the seller how he could sell bikes for so little money. The seller replied that he buys the contents of abandoned storage lockers for a few dollars and then sells the contents. (Apparently there is a reality TV show based on this process of acquiring the contents of abandoned storage lockers.)

This raises an interesting question: why bother stealing stuff when it is basically worthless? Smash-and-grab burglars are only stealing electronics (and jewelry if it is laying around in plain sight). Nothing else is worth stealing. Bicycle thieves abound, of course, but they're picky as well: a rusty made-in-China bike with a cheap (and easily snipped) cable lock will be left untouched; only the expensive bikes will be ripped off.

As I keep saying: what's scarce is not stuff, it's cash and reliable income streams. People are trying to convert stuff into cash, but it's tough because there is a surplus of stuff.

No wonder organizations that promote giving stuff away such as Freesharing.org are so popular. People are giving up trying to get any cash at all for old TVs, etc.; they are delighted if someone hauls it away for free.

Is anyone else sick of the "buying experience"? No wonder online buying has become so ubiquitous--the experience of shopping to acquire stuff is a form of torture, at least to some of us. Getting there is a nightmare (unless I can bike to the store), parking is a hassle, clerks generally don't know much, and the selection is often limited or skewed to the high end. The "fun" is in leaving empty-handed.

I suppose other people can't wait to get a new mobile phone; I live in dread that my old "dumb" phone will expire and force me into buying another one. Ditto for everything else we own.

There is so much stuff floating around America that we end up with stuff we didn't buy or even ask for--old laptops, bicycles (abandoned on our property, left by neighbors moving away, left to us by elderly neighbors who passed on, etc.) and clothing, to mention but a few of of the things that we have "inherited."

I make a point to be a "good citizen" by taking outdated printers, modems and other electronics to the recycling yard; others aren't so civic-minded, as proven by the piles of high-tech detritus that litter street corners and dumpsites around the nation.

When the university students leave town in May, dumpster after dumpster is filled with broken Ikea furniture and old mattresses, many of recent vintage. It isn't worth hauling any of it home. They will buy more future-landfill at Ikea when they settle down somewhere else.

My new mantra is "please don't give us anything we won't consume in a few days." What with all the insecurity in the world, a lot of people have assembled stashes of precious metals. Quite frankly, I don't want physical wealth I have to store, manage, protect, etc. I am not at all sure I want any "wealth" at all other than the "wealth" of productive land, a functioning infrastructure / civil society, and the "wealth" of freedom of movement and choice.

I just want to get rid of stuff, not acquire more. I welcome the digital age because "entertainment" no longer requires physical collections. I have already accepted that most digital stuff will be lost with time, just like physical stuff. Who wants to lug around 50 years of digital files? Yes, it might fit on a small drive, but who will sort through it all or even look at it/listen to it?

The clutter of all this stuff, physical and digital, clouds the mind and spirit. I think it was Sartre who noted that our possessions own us, not the other way around. I am tired of being possessed by possessions, of any kind or nature. I would be delighted if the can of WD-40 in the toolshed lasts the rest of my life. If it doesn't, then I will replace it, grudgingly.

More than likely, I will find an almost-full can in somebody's trash, along with everything else anyone could possibly want. The only thing missing from sorting through all that's been abandoned is the drug-like "hit" of the purchase. Sadly for a consumerist society, some of us are immune to that potent drug.

Many others will suffer consumerist withdrawals as the cash and credit needed to complete the purchase become increasingly scarce.

redpill

I fucking hate shopping.  I'd rather spend the money on a massage.  I could throw 3/4s of the shit in my house in the garbage tomorrow and not miss it a bit.  And then there's the kids toys....arrrggghh grandparents constantly giving them big bulky plastic shit.

Anyway, there is a solution to this.  Repeal the 16th amendment and replace the income tax with a revenue-neutral consumption tax on new retail goods and services.  Poor people can save money buy buying things second hand.  People would save more, and think more before they consume because they would have a choice in how and where they would pay tax.  They would take better care of things and sell them to others who would take better care of them.  People would be rewarded for saving, and punished for being wasteful.  It would not only help solve our addicted-to-Chinese-crap problem, it would be a boon for our economy to have more savers.

Rick Blaine

Absolutely...

It's now at the point where I specifically ask my family not to buy me anything for my birthday or Christmas...well, besides a gift card or cash.

Even a lot of the stuff I buy for myself, which I initially think I want/need, basically gets wasted.

One of my favorite things to do now is look through my stuff for things to give to charity...

...which is a solid indicator of how meaningless my life has become.

FEDbuster

Checks and gift cards to restaurants is what we exchange.  Once and a while some wine or interesting food items.  NO MORE STUFF! 

If something we use breaks, we fix it or replace it.  That's it.  Stuff we don't use or wear we get rid of, sell it or give it away.

The only exception is long term storage food (seems like you never have enough).  The accumulation of Chinese made McShit is over for us.

i_call_you_my_base

Everyone can be poor if you define it as a matter of degree. Poor to me means you can barely afford food and are constantly on the verge of being thrown out of your rental. That is poor. Poor people do not have "a surplus of stuff". Poor people don't have shit, and if you want to see what that looks like, you can go to Detroit, Philly, or Baltimore, or the backwoods of West Virginia if you prefer a more natural setting.

Umh

Many poor people have a surplus of stuff. Mostly because they can't resist the urge to buy stuff they can't afford when they should be paying their rent and buying better groceries.

ParkAveFlasher

The concept of minimal possession resonates within me as well, trust me.  I'd rather build than buy, I'd rather sweat than hire.

However the problem is not in "materialism", the problem is the manipulated view on the real value of anything.  Blaming it on "materialism" is obfuscation.  Like blaming our economic woes on "capitalism". That's like blaming "geometry, mass, and conservation of motion" for stubbing your toe on the coffee table.

You should want things.  You need things to live. Cats have claws and fur, and sharp eyes and ears, we do not. You need practical things.  You need practical things of a certain material quality that makes them practical for a long time.  In fact it is in the practice of proper valuation that wealth is unlocked.  You can not behold this unless you first crawl, walk, fly, limp, or lurch through materialism.

Western society has forgotten what "value" is.  Our food comes in boxes.  Our lives come in boxes.  Our work is on paper, theoretical.  We export time.  Our manufacturing is done elsewhere.  Our "wealth" paradoxically equals our "debt".

"Value" is further confused with "price", itself the victim of that arbitrary, sliding-scale denominator of  fiat money.  "It is a high price, therefore it is valuable".  In this statement, lies the great confusion of our times.  The confusion of "value" is enforced and dispersed via fiat currency.

There are material things that have value.  This value must be unlocked.  It is an active process.  It is soul-searching, it is experimentation, it is study. However in the value of things, upon unlocking this, what may be reflected is the value of endeavor, the value of human action.

laomei

Here's a tale from when I lived in the US.

I had a cheap decent Jetta.

I lived in a neighborhood that I believed was incredibly convenient. 5 large supermarkets. 2 western, 1 discount, 1 chinese, 1 korean.  Great food at good prices.  Go a little bit further and hey, even more great supermarkets that are even cheaper.  Cheap clinics, pharmacies nearby, basicaly lots and lots of options... even a Fry's!

One day, the alternator dies and just my luck, there is a sale at the local autoparts store.  I can get a recertified, trade in the old one for credit on the core charge and another $20 off.  $35 for an alternator? Score!

Just so happens that my housemates are all away for the week.  No biggie I think, I'll just take the bus, it's only a 5 minute drive. After walking 40 minutes to the nearest bus stop, I find that I missed it by 5 minutes according to the schedule that is only posted at the bus stop and nowhere else.  Next bus? 1 hour later.  I wait.  The bus finally comes, I have to take that bus to another station so I can transfer onto another bus that will get me where I'm going.  The hitch in my plan however is that the second bus wasn't running that day.  After getting off at the station and learning from the schedule (which is only posted there) that it's not running, I wait 30 minutes for a different bus which will take me another 5 miles down to road to meet up with a 4th bus that IS running and makes that stop.  3rd bus gets there just in time to meet up and I don't have to wait. 4th bus gets there after doing a stupid route that takes an hour.

So after 4 hours I am finally there.  Fortunately they knew me from the last time I was in, and as they were closing up shop anyways, I scored a ride home from someone who worked there for $5... the buses were stopped for the night anyways, so I was kinda screwed.  Only takes 5 minutes in a car going 85 (which is typical there), but that's 7 miles each way.  Sorry, zero intention to walk 14 miles in the summer cali heat.

It was this experience that got me to realize how utterly retarded the system is.  Not a city bus either, it was privatized.  They just killed all stops and routes that they deemed unprofitable.  Try to go shopping when you have to rely on the bus.  Taxis will eat you alive.

Over here, subways are everywhere and being built up further.  Buses are everywhere.  No stupid time schedules either, they come when they come and you are rarely left waiting more than 10 minutes for one.  Taxis are cheap and everywhere as well.  The taxis actually receive a subsidy from the government to keep the fares low in light of inflation and gas prices.  The buses operate at a net loss, as does the subway system, but they are state-owned and operated and are public services.  Their existance enables far more commerce and economic activity than the operating loss created.  Our highway system has distance-based tolls.  Add in the cost of gas, and unless it's a car of 4, it's just cheaper (and faster) to take the train or fly... or even take a long-distance bus for stupidly cheap.

Driving here is a luxury and it's really not required until you get really really remote and most small villages will have regular buses and motorcycle taxis to the nearest town and neighboring villages.  A personal car SHOULD be a luxury, not a requirement of basic life.  In the US you are slaves to cars with the rare exception of a handful of cities that actually have semi-functional mass transit.  Actually living in those cities, you are either rich as hell and can afford property, or you are renting a slum and/or sharing with a roommate or two, or three, or more.

laomei

I advise investing in learning all about molding/casting and welding.  Tools are cheap, materials are cheap.  And there's something that's just satisfying about it.  Don't even need top-of-the-line tools to do it either.  Basic soldering skills and learning how to etch are also great investments.

NotApplicable

Reminds me of a coworker who, "OMG, I just saved $100!" after paying $120 for a Coach purse.

Carlin stuff