Few doctors in other parts of the rich world earn what they could in the US. Likewise high-level management, IT, etc. Yet they are not clamoring to migrate to the US in large numbers.Mondragon is big enough in Spain that it is hardly at this point reliant on some kind of small-scale or even regional Basque solidarity. In any case, Basques are hardly a monolithic group who all weirdly are sympathetic to worker-owned cooperatives.Mondragon should be seen as an inspiration, one with a lot of practical experience, on possibilities and pitfalls. A lot of the skepticism I'm reading hear sounds like excuses and learned helplessness from living in the admittedly difficult circumstances of the US political and corporate climate. Weird that people from what's still a can-do culture are so invested in "no we can't ".
Zyxomma here. I'm behind on my reading (I waited for the library to have the book for me), but I'm loving it. The ideas are everywhere. The Wired article is great. I'm still waiting for my island (Manhattan) to be made ready for the next Frankenstorm Sandy. We need engineers!
Thing is, it's a fair question whether that attack was intended to frighten people in order to get a political outcome, or simply shut down the disproportionately polluting air travel industry by making it too dangerous to continue. The first is terrorism, the second is more akin to defensive military action.
I agree, though, it's horribly misguided and counter-productive. It would provoke a new War on Terror and make climate action "the enemy." A very bad idea.
1) East coast smoke: The West coast says, welcome to our reality. We've been experiencing that for years. Sorry about your lungs, but at least the east coast is finally getting that climate wake-up call that's pretty damned hard to ignore.
3) Blockchain: as I understand it, the major power consumer is crypto-mining. These carbon coins use an entirely different mechanism for creating new currency. It's basically created by an issuing authority in response to carbon sequestration (in the form of never taking those fossil fuels out of the ground in the first place). My guess is that the blockchain itself will require some computer power simply to verify, but there wouldn't be the insanely difficult computations needed to create new coins.
4) David Brin pointed out years ago that surveillance technology and A.I. will basically level the playing field -- NGOs and even individuals will have as much informational resources available to them as governments and oligarchs.
I'm not an expert on Basque culture, or even the larger Spanish culture. But it has to be less diverse than U.S. culture, for example. And that has to make things easier. And there's no question that Mondragon is having scaling difficulties as the global economy becomes more integral to their operations.
Will those difficulties prove to be fatal? Who knows? Pointing out some problems, both real and potential, is not the same thing as writing the Mondragon model off. And calling for future uses of that model to be tailored to the core values of their home culture is intended to strengthen that model against competition from a global capitalist system that considers only financial profitability in its decision-making.
I can get where they're coming from, but wouldn't a more decentralized system require more business travel? There are costs to everything. Many of our climate solutions will cause an increase in GHG pollution within individual sectors of the economy. The point is that total emissions go down.
There are limits to what traditional solutions can accomplish. California turning to moveable settlements, for example, is a non-starter, it's simply not possible unless everything is destroyed and we have to start anew. What we do need to come to terms with is that the urban-wildland interface is inherently prone to fire, people can't safely live there, and critical infrastructure that passes through it needs to be made both resistant to wildfire and less prone to starting them.
I dunno. The middle class in America is disappearing, haven't you heard? That older, poorer suburbs inside wealthy societies can become increasingly slummy is not even a new thing. One of the more shocking aspects of the Watts riots was that to most of the country, Watts didn't look like a slum. But living conditions there were not really any different than the classic, inner-city slums that people were more accustomed to. In some ways, they were even worse. Classic inner-city slums at least have decent public transportation, not the best but at least usable. That won't impress the Third World, of course, but it's still a problem for us.
Anyway, the entire point is that I don't want to tell the Third World to be like the West. If they see labor as an integral part of solving their own problems, fine. If they decide to chose a different way towards the equitable distribution of goods and necessities, also fine. We can best help them by providing as many different tools as we can, they can figure out which ones work best for them.
Some of those tactics, like infecting cattle with mad cow disease, seem like a logical extension of Earth First-type campaigns. Take tree-spiking: They announce that some of the trees in a stand have been spiked, to prevent anyone from taking a chainsaw to them. That can be justified because the goal isn’t to maim or kill people. OTOH, bringing down an aircraft crosses a line
The Children of Kali were right, as long as their program was the quiet, targeted assassination of these planet-destroying plutocrats. We may need to resort to that, because it's almost impossible to fight their money any other way.
That is a strategy that might actually work. I wish I could say I'm surprised that no one has tried this yet in real life, but I'm not. In the US at least, most people don't even bother to vote regardless of what state they live in. And while there is an actual left-wing political party in existence - the Greens - no one bothers to vote for them, instead wasting their time and money on the corporate Democrats. I can't imagine how bad things would have to get before people on the Left become wiling to resort to any sort of armed struggle at all.
That example was a stretch, agreed. But you've hit on the salient point. We need to learn how to adapt to the land and not the other way around, and that's going to look different in every location. The British idea that no matter where in the world they went, everyone should live exactly like they do on a small, rainy, North Atlantic island was absurd, and yet that's what they decided to go with.
Spiking trees is actually very similar in purpose as the drone attacks on airliners. The problem is that passive sabotage on airliners in an effort to make them too dangerous to use is almost impossible to carry out.
Few doctors in other parts of the rich world earn what they could in the US. Likewise high-level management, IT, etc. Yet they are not clamoring to migrate to the US in large numbers.Mondragon is big enough in Spain that it is hardly at this point reliant on some kind of small-scale or even regional Basque solidarity. In any case, Basques are hardly a monolithic group who all weirdly are sympathetic to worker-owned cooperatives.Mondragon should be seen as an inspiration, one with a lot of practical experience, on possibilities and pitfalls. A lot of the skepticism I'm reading hear sounds like excuses and learned helplessness from living in the admittedly difficult circumstances of the US political and corporate climate. Weird that people from what's still a can-do culture are so invested in "no we can't ".
Zyxomma here. I'm behind on my reading (I waited for the library to have the book for me), but I'm loving it. The ideas are everywhere. The Wired article is great. I'm still waiting for my island (Manhattan) to be made ready for the next Frankenstorm Sandy. We need engineers!
Thing is, it's a fair question whether that attack was intended to frighten people in order to get a political outcome, or simply shut down the disproportionately polluting air travel industry by making it too dangerous to continue. The first is terrorism, the second is more akin to defensive military action.
I agree, though, it's horribly misguided and counter-productive. It would provoke a new War on Terror and make climate action "the enemy." A very bad idea.
1) East coast smoke: The West coast says, welcome to our reality. We've been experiencing that for years. Sorry about your lungs, but at least the east coast is finally getting that climate wake-up call that's pretty damned hard to ignore.
3) Blockchain: as I understand it, the major power consumer is crypto-mining. These carbon coins use an entirely different mechanism for creating new currency. It's basically created by an issuing authority in response to carbon sequestration (in the form of never taking those fossil fuels out of the ground in the first place). My guess is that the blockchain itself will require some computer power simply to verify, but there wouldn't be the insanely difficult computations needed to create new coins.
4) David Brin pointed out years ago that surveillance technology and A.I. will basically level the playing field -- NGOs and even individuals will have as much informational resources available to them as governments and oligarchs.
I'm not an expert on Basque culture, or even the larger Spanish culture. But it has to be less diverse than U.S. culture, for example. And that has to make things easier. And there's no question that Mondragon is having scaling difficulties as the global economy becomes more integral to their operations.
Will those difficulties prove to be fatal? Who knows? Pointing out some problems, both real and potential, is not the same thing as writing the Mondragon model off. And calling for future uses of that model to be tailored to the core values of their home culture is intended to strengthen that model against competition from a global capitalist system that considers only financial profitability in its decision-making.
Fully agree. The difficulty is getting the decision-makers to settle for mere wealth rather than uber-wealth and the power it buys.
I can get where they're coming from, but wouldn't a more decentralized system require more business travel? There are costs to everything. Many of our climate solutions will cause an increase in GHG pollution within individual sectors of the economy. The point is that total emissions go down.
There are limits to what traditional solutions can accomplish. California turning to moveable settlements, for example, is a non-starter, it's simply not possible unless everything is destroyed and we have to start anew. What we do need to come to terms with is that the urban-wildland interface is inherently prone to fire, people can't safely live there, and critical infrastructure that passes through it needs to be made both resistant to wildfire and less prone to starting them.
I dunno. The middle class in America is disappearing, haven't you heard? That older, poorer suburbs inside wealthy societies can become increasingly slummy is not even a new thing. One of the more shocking aspects of the Watts riots was that to most of the country, Watts didn't look like a slum. But living conditions there were not really any different than the classic, inner-city slums that people were more accustomed to. In some ways, they were even worse. Classic inner-city slums at least have decent public transportation, not the best but at least usable. That won't impress the Third World, of course, but it's still a problem for us.
Anyway, the entire point is that I don't want to tell the Third World to be like the West. If they see labor as an integral part of solving their own problems, fine. If they decide to chose a different way towards the equitable distribution of goods and necessities, also fine. We can best help them by providing as many different tools as we can, they can figure out which ones work best for them.
Some of those tactics, like infecting cattle with mad cow disease, seem like a logical extension of Earth First-type campaigns. Take tree-spiking: They announce that some of the trees in a stand have been spiked, to prevent anyone from taking a chainsaw to them. That can be justified because the goal isn’t to maim or kill people. OTOH, bringing down an aircraft crosses a line
The Children of Kali were right, as long as their program was the quiet, targeted assassination of these planet-destroying plutocrats. We may need to resort to that, because it's almost impossible to fight their money any other way.
That is a strategy that might actually work. I wish I could say I'm surprised that no one has tried this yet in real life, but I'm not. In the US at least, most people don't even bother to vote regardless of what state they live in. And while there is an actual left-wing political party in existence - the Greens - no one bothers to vote for them, instead wasting their time and money on the corporate Democrats. I can't imagine how bad things would have to get before people on the Left become wiling to resort to any sort of armed struggle at all.
That example was a stretch, agreed. But you've hit on the salient point. We need to learn how to adapt to the land and not the other way around, and that's going to look different in every location. The British idea that no matter where in the world they went, everyone should live exactly like they do on a small, rainy, North Atlantic island was absurd, and yet that's what they decided to go with.
Spiking trees is actually very similar in purpose as the drone attacks on airliners. The problem is that passive sabotage on airliners in an effort to make them too dangerous to use is almost impossible to carry out.
Book just arrived. Let's see how far I can catch up.
Sorry I couldn't use the Amazon linky though.
OK, I just got to 50 (Part 3); bound and determined to catch all the way to Ch 88 by Friday!
Or do this on the ground first, and then say next time we'll target airliners in flight, have a nice trip.