accumulation vs. use: an inventory

how much of what is in those containers on the mired ship hold things the farmer might need ( need here as opposed to desire, engineered or otherwise...what would they contain that is critical to his continued existence )...

that is a question i cannot answer...the farmer might...if he had a detailed inventory of what is in those steel boxes...i don't...nor does he...so it is unlikely we would ever be able to find out...however it does bring to mind another question and that is how much of what i have do i need...what is there that would be critical to my continued physical and mental wellbeing in the material goods i possess? and, as a corollary to that, how much of what i have do i actualy use? so i have decided to take an exhaustive inventory of the physical articles in my room...just the room where i spend time in when i am home...not the whole damned house...and attempt to come up with a percentage of what is heere that is actually used...this promises not to be all that short term a project...one bookshelf ( there are three ) has 105 books, a stack of vinyl lps...some cds and dvds...and all the assorted stuff that gets stacked in front of them and sidewways on top of them...the three file boxes are going to be a chore...the desk drawers...the elegant wooden boxes my son has made for me ( not to mention the framed art and ceramics ) and the stuff on the floor...it may end up being a more organized room...or a collyer brothers shambles...the results will not be overnight in any case...they may prove enlightening...for me anyway.

hubris is immune to critical thought

a cascade failur the rubs the flat worlders' noses in it...hubris begetsa it share of problems...however the hubris will never realize it is the problem...

sand storms...faulty pilot...human error...freak winds...failed equipment...everything but the actual cuase of the problems...one could credibly cite greed as first cause here...the hegemons would never believe that...they are, after all, the superior beings...and so...BAU and gradual extinction...and complete disbelief at the whole thing..."this can't be happening"...denial as praxis.

white sky thinking

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/business/carbon-capture-bp.html?referrer=masthead

you will need to copy that link if you wish to access this...

which is part of what triggered this line of thought...elon musk has hopped on the "carbon capture" bandwagon saying he'll put up $100 million prize for the "best" carbon capture technology...exxon mobil is dumping $3 billion into developing the same sort of technology, and bp amoco is working on building a test system in brittan to "...divert pollutants before they can escape and bury them deep in the ground where they can do no harm."...why? guilty conscience over years of producing the raw materials for those "pollutants"? and are they sure that by burying them "deep under ground" 1.) that they won't escape, and 2.) that they won't do any "harm" once they are there? no cognitive buias at work here? they have a handle on all the variables? conscience has little to do with it...bp's test area, "...is home to one of the country's largest clusters of polluting factories and refineries. by linking them together, collecting all their emissions, and charging them a fee, bp hopes to achieve the sufficient scale to make a profitable business of tackling the pollution."...ah...a "fee"..."profitable business"...no conscious ameleoration of past behaviors in capitalism...profit...self-interest ( if cars actually do go electric how is bp going to stay in busines? )...consequentialism...there's the cognitive bias ( and "linking them all together"? what could go wrong? )...screw the unseen variables, there's money to be made...what is the sequestered carbon returned on carbon created in this? "bp and its partners propose to build a very large electric power station fueled by natural gas. the plant would help replace brittan's aging fossil fuel burning power stations." what? when did natural gas cease bing a fossil fuel? something counterintuitive i am missing? cleaner than coal perhaps...still a fosssil fuel...and if it is scalable and actually works will it create a sort of jevon's effect...less carbon in the atmosphere and we can burn more carbon and hold station...a zero sum game? all these plans for increasingly complex systems of environmental control are a hallmark of the anthropocene...human efforts to control their environment have led to conditions that require more elaborate ( and costly ) control..things like stratospheric geoengineering that would turn the blue sky white...humans cannot acept their limitations or leave anything alone...they may become part of the sixth extinction yet.

business is business

"There’s never a real carnival except for the shopkeepers, and then it’s deep down and secret. The shopkeeper rejoices at night when all the unsuspecting yokels, the public, and the profit fodder, have gone home, when silence returns to the avenue…that’s when the accounts are totted up, when the shopkeepers register their receipts and take stock of their power and their victims." journey to the end of the night

the clusterfuck of a "major retailer" i find myself working for ( mostly to give contrast to home ) has, again, proven that its public face and its corporate behavior ( perfidy? malfeasance? amorlal grasping greed? ) are at odds...since they were allowed to reopen the "offical" corporate line is the "health and wellbeing of our customers ( always first? see celine above ) and employees comes first"...that is patent bullshit...a close co-worker contracted covid-19...at a meeting held at reopening we were told that if anyone we worked closely with came down with the virus we would be notified...either their definition of "closely" is wildly divergent from mine ( we were in the same area and, at times, well within six feet of one another, albeit masked ) or someone is lying by omission since no one at any level of management informed me of this event...my co-worker did...this corporation is concerned with two things...how much profit it can turn and what the public perception of its operations are...and being a plauge ship ( this isn't the ifrst unmentioned case in the store ) isn't good pr...since, in the consequentialist system capitalism is, what you have matters, not how you got it, misleading your employees as well as the public serves a capitalist ethical good...and that consequentialism is displayed by this as well...

the article ( ny times today ) says, among other things, that the public spirited members of the imperial senate are concerned that "organized workers" would "decimate" busineses...well..what else would employees of a wholly owned corporate subsidiary say? they owe their jobs to corporate cash ( voters are just an necessary evil to lend an aura of "freely elected republican government" to oligarchy )...what organized workers would do is bargain collectively ( a foul word to corporate ears...they want us isolated and unaware of our true numbers ) for, perhaps, higher, if not living, wages...which would put pressure on profits and wealth hates to give away anything it might not be able to take back...oligarchs like gates and bezos and trump stand to lose some of the filthy lucre they have extorted from the economy and the influence it buys if workers could actually make a living wage...the mouthpieces in the imperial senate aren't having any of that...they loathe working people every bit as much as their owners do...look for any expansion of workers rights to be ruthlessly quashed in the upper house... either talked to death or buried under a tableful of other doomed legislation...the house can say it tried...one wonders if that counts when they knew it was a dead issue from the beginning...workers "health and wellbeing" could only be enhanced by a living wage...that does not seem to fall in the purview of "public sevice".