Wow. This needs to happen here in the US.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/the-uks-progressive-tea-party?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+yes/most-recent-articles+(Most+Recent+Articles+and+Blogs+-+YES!+magazine)&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher
Please pass this link on.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
World War Z and America's reliance on diesel fuel
Victor and I listened to the audiobook version of "World War Z" today for about eight hours of driving through New Mexico on our way to El Paso, again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z
(Compared to last Tuesday, the weather today was much better - sunny - and the temperature was 75 degrees warmer - 60 degrees instead of -15.)
I'm not much of a Zombie fan, but this story goes well beyond the "Night of the Living Dead" stories. It's a future account of a recently completed world-wide decade-long war against Zombies who over a number of years had wiped out about 90% of the human population (or more accurately, had converted 90% of the world population into Zombies).
The story was written by Max Brooks, son of Mel Brooks, creator of such classic movies as "Young Frankenstein", "Blazing Saddles" and my personal favorite (not) "Space Balls" (one of the only movies I ever felt compelled to walk out on). What's most interesting about Max's story is the depth of research he went through on how an actual war like this would be best conducted, including the reconstruction of civilization afterwards. What primarily caught my attention was the initial collapse of society due to wide-spread panic when people realized what was actually happening.
It got me wondering about how quickly American society really COULD collapse with the right pressure points attacked. Shutting off electricity to the entire country - most likely not possible - would be pretty effective. Another method would be to simply stop the supply of diesel fuel to American truckers.
Victor recounted how he's occasionally run into winter storm areas in which thousands of truckers have been stranded for a day or more. When they finally leave, they literally drain every gallon of diesel from the area which then takes a few more days of tanker truck arrivals to replenish. His recommendation for me was to never drive into a storm area with anything less than a full tank (which would allow us to drive another 1000 miles or more). The bigger lesson is that most regions of the country have at best only a couple days supply of diesel.
Consider what is reliant on that diesel fuel, starting with J.C.Penney, Home Depot, WalMart, grocery stores, drug stores, gas stations, home heating fuel and propane suppliers, etc. Most retailers have at-most a week's supply of merchandise. In an emergency and the ensuing panic, grocery store shelves will be cleaned off in only hours.
If I were Al Qaeda and wanted to bring America to it's knees, I'd hit the fewer than one hundred refineries producing diesel fuel - more than half of them in Texas and Lousiana (and easily identified http://www.energysupplylogistics.com/map/. Which makes me think Al-Qaeda is considerably stupider than we give them credit for (or the refineries are considerably better protected than I think).
Bottom line, if you want to get a very realistic and well thought-out vision of how America and the world might react to a catastrophic halt of the economy, and get some hints on how to best survive such an event, I highly recommend World War Z.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z
(Compared to last Tuesday, the weather today was much better - sunny - and the temperature was 75 degrees warmer - 60 degrees instead of -15.)
I'm not much of a Zombie fan, but this story goes well beyond the "Night of the Living Dead" stories. It's a future account of a recently completed world-wide decade-long war against Zombies who over a number of years had wiped out about 90% of the human population (or more accurately, had converted 90% of the world population into Zombies).
The story was written by Max Brooks, son of Mel Brooks, creator of such classic movies as "Young Frankenstein", "Blazing Saddles" and my personal favorite (not) "Space Balls" (one of the only movies I ever felt compelled to walk out on). What's most interesting about Max's story is the depth of research he went through on how an actual war like this would be best conducted, including the reconstruction of civilization afterwards. What primarily caught my attention was the initial collapse of society due to wide-spread panic when people realized what was actually happening.
It got me wondering about how quickly American society really COULD collapse with the right pressure points attacked. Shutting off electricity to the entire country - most likely not possible - would be pretty effective. Another method would be to simply stop the supply of diesel fuel to American truckers.
Victor recounted how he's occasionally run into winter storm areas in which thousands of truckers have been stranded for a day or more. When they finally leave, they literally drain every gallon of diesel from the area which then takes a few more days of tanker truck arrivals to replenish. His recommendation for me was to never drive into a storm area with anything less than a full tank (which would allow us to drive another 1000 miles or more). The bigger lesson is that most regions of the country have at best only a couple days supply of diesel.
Consider what is reliant on that diesel fuel, starting with J.C.Penney, Home Depot, WalMart, grocery stores, drug stores, gas stations, home heating fuel and propane suppliers, etc. Most retailers have at-most a week's supply of merchandise. In an emergency and the ensuing panic, grocery store shelves will be cleaned off in only hours.
If I were Al Qaeda and wanted to bring America to it's knees, I'd hit the fewer than one hundred refineries producing diesel fuel - more than half of them in Texas and Lousiana (and easily identified http://www.energysupplylogistics.com/map/. Which makes me think Al-Qaeda is considerably stupider than we give them credit for (or the refineries are considerably better protected than I think).
Bottom line, if you want to get a very realistic and well thought-out vision of how America and the world might react to a catastrophic halt of the economy, and get some hints on how to best survive such an event, I highly recommend World War Z.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Living in the present
Forming a startup company in 2008 has made my life an emotional and financial roller coaster. I admit, entirely self-induced. My initial hope in 2009 that we'd get the big funding we needed in 2010 was dashed by both the lack of winning any of the grants we'd submitted proposals for and the lack of interest from any big investors.
We sent proposals for four more grants in 2010 of which we've been turned down for one so far in 2011, but we're still hopeful about the other three.
In the meanwhile, for mental survival purposes, I've had to adopt an attitude of living in the present and taking each day and week as it comes - the entire 'river of destiny' idea - because one day one of these weeks may change my entire life again and I honestly have no way to influence when or if that may happen. It's an interesting situation to be in. I wouldn't call what I'm doing as 'living with hopelessness' but this article has some pretty good advice about doing so.
http://www.utne.com/Spirituality/Ten-Things-Feeling-Hopeless-Dave-Pollard.aspx
From a big-picture perspective, if you don't think America and all of human civilization is in a pretty hopeless situation, please let me know what gives you that optimism. Seriously.
We sent proposals for four more grants in 2010 of which we've been turned down for one so far in 2011, but we're still hopeful about the other three.
In the meanwhile, for mental survival purposes, I've had to adopt an attitude of living in the present and taking each day and week as it comes - the entire 'river of destiny' idea - because one day one of these weeks may change my entire life again and I honestly have no way to influence when or if that may happen. It's an interesting situation to be in. I wouldn't call what I'm doing as 'living with hopelessness' but this article has some pretty good advice about doing so.
http://www.utne.com/Spirituality/Ten-Things-Feeling-Hopeless-Dave-Pollard.aspx
From a big-picture perspective, if you don't think America and all of human civilization is in a pretty hopeless situation, please let me know what gives you that optimism. Seriously.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Old guy dancing
I'm sitting in the Salt Lake pub I've become something of a regular at - the Green Pig - and there's a band playing a nice mix of blues, rockabilly, zydeco and rocking country, complete with female fiddle player.
A guy who looks like he must be 80 years old, no taller than 5'2" with his bent back, white hair and rumpled cardigan is up there dancing with chicks young enough to be his great granddaughters. And doing a good job of it.
I spoke with him. He's actually turning 69 this week. He's had Parkinson's for the past twelve years.
Inspiring. I can't stop smiling. What a day.
A guy who looks like he must be 80 years old, no taller than 5'2" with his bent back, white hair and rumpled cardigan is up there dancing with chicks young enough to be his great granddaughters. And doing a good job of it.
I spoke with him. He's actually turning 69 this week. He's had Parkinson's for the past twelve years.
Inspiring. I can't stop smiling. What a day.
Economic Measurements or Gross National Happiness?
In chapter 30 of “Life on the Mississippi”, Mark Twain describes a town on the banks of the river –
Helena is the second town in Arkansas, in point of population- which is placed at five thousand. The country about it is exceptionally productive. Helena has a good cotton trade; handles from forty to sixty thousand bales annually; she has a large lumber and grain commerce; has a foundry, oil mills, machine shops and wagon factories--in brief has $1,000,000 invested in manufacturing industries. She has two railways, and is the commercial center of a broad and prosperous region. Her gross receipts of money, annually, from all sources, are placed by the New Orleans 'Times-Democrat' at $4,000,000.
It got me thinking about our current methods of economic measurement with Gross Domestic Product (GDP) leading the pack. Back in Twain’s day (1882), I’d argue that economic measurements would be good indicators of the prosperity and happiness of the population. However, today many people are making a cogent argument that GDP is not the number we should all be watching to track prosperity and that GDP has nothing to do with the happiness of a population in western societies.
Bill McKibben’s book “Deep Economy” first clued me in to this idea – apparently, once people rise above the poverty level, economic improvements have little to do with the happiness of a population. (My recent personal experience – now that I’m again earning a paycheck and just can’t stop smiling - would corroborate that data.) The argument is that once a person has the basics taken care of – food, shelter, health, companionship, family, security, justice, etc. – every additional dollar of income contributes little to personal happiness. Donald Trump may be able to fly off to Paris or Hong Kong whenever he wants (though I bet he doesn’t), but statistically he’s no happier than a potato farmer in a small village in Bhutan.
Bhutan is an interesting country because they’ve been measuring and reporting “Gross National Happiness” for some years now and using it to guide all their economic developments. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1016266,00.html
My buddy Nic Sarkozy recently had a couple nobel laureates perform a study on happiness for France, http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2008/01/happiness_is_a_warm_baguette (despite the Economist magazine’s disdain for the effort – ever since I thought I was a neo-con and then went to India to see how well democracy works in developing countries, I think the Economist magazine frankly doesn’t know shit about the real world) and now the UK is following suit http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/nov/14/happiness-index-britain-national-mood
The core question behind these movements is the effort to address this question – "does the economy serve the population, or does the population serve the economy?". Do we go to work, produce and purchase simply to help the economy (as George W. told us in 2006 “I encourage you all to go shopping more”) or is the economy just another thing to measure that has little correlation to our happiness?
GDP has recently shown little correlation to the general happiness of the American population. While officially almost 10% of us are out of work (and the Europeans suspect the number is much higher http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12364507), the GDP today, at $13 Trillion is roughly at the same level it was in 2005. http://www.data360.org/graph_group.aspx?Graph_Group_Id=149 Interestingly, because GDP measures all economic transactions, events like national disasters, wars, outbreaks of disease – anything which requires the production and/or purchase of more goods whether they be guns, sand bags, rebuilding of destroyed buildings, medications, etc, adds to the GDP.
In light of that fact, it seems a little naive to have our elected officials looking so closely at GDP as a measure of the health of the country. As so many managers know, people watch (and try to impact) what is measured. Incent a CEO to raise the company’s stock price and guess what he’ll spend most of his time and effort doing (whether his actions to bring about that stock increase eventually help or hurt the company in the long run). I think the American people have unwittingly let our elected officials focus too long on just the economy.
This is a hot subject for me. More later.
Helena is the second town in Arkansas, in point of population- which is placed at five thousand. The country about it is exceptionally productive. Helena has a good cotton trade; handles from forty to sixty thousand bales annually; she has a large lumber and grain commerce; has a foundry, oil mills, machine shops and wagon factories--in brief has $1,000,000 invested in manufacturing industries. She has two railways, and is the commercial center of a broad and prosperous region. Her gross receipts of money, annually, from all sources, are placed by the New Orleans 'Times-Democrat' at $4,000,000.
It got me thinking about our current methods of economic measurement with Gross Domestic Product (GDP) leading the pack. Back in Twain’s day (1882), I’d argue that economic measurements would be good indicators of the prosperity and happiness of the population. However, today many people are making a cogent argument that GDP is not the number we should all be watching to track prosperity and that GDP has nothing to do with the happiness of a population in western societies.
Bill McKibben’s book “Deep Economy” first clued me in to this idea – apparently, once people rise above the poverty level, economic improvements have little to do with the happiness of a population. (My recent personal experience – now that I’m again earning a paycheck and just can’t stop smiling - would corroborate that data.) The argument is that once a person has the basics taken care of – food, shelter, health, companionship, family, security, justice, etc. – every additional dollar of income contributes little to personal happiness. Donald Trump may be able to fly off to Paris or Hong Kong whenever he wants (though I bet he doesn’t), but statistically he’s no happier than a potato farmer in a small village in Bhutan.
Bhutan is an interesting country because they’ve been measuring and reporting “Gross National Happiness” for some years now and using it to guide all their economic developments. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1016266,00.html
My buddy Nic Sarkozy recently had a couple nobel laureates perform a study on happiness for France, http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2008/01/happiness_is_a_warm_baguette (despite the Economist magazine’s disdain for the effort – ever since I thought I was a neo-con and then went to India to see how well democracy works in developing countries, I think the Economist magazine frankly doesn’t know shit about the real world) and now the UK is following suit http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/nov/14/happiness-index-britain-national-mood
The core question behind these movements is the effort to address this question – "does the economy serve the population, or does the population serve the economy?". Do we go to work, produce and purchase simply to help the economy (as George W. told us in 2006 “I encourage you all to go shopping more”) or is the economy just another thing to measure that has little correlation to our happiness?
GDP has recently shown little correlation to the general happiness of the American population. While officially almost 10% of us are out of work (and the Europeans suspect the number is much higher http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12364507), the GDP today, at $13 Trillion is roughly at the same level it was in 2005. http://www.data360.org/graph_group.aspx?Graph_Group_Id=149 Interestingly, because GDP measures all economic transactions, events like national disasters, wars, outbreaks of disease – anything which requires the production and/or purchase of more goods whether they be guns, sand bags, rebuilding of destroyed buildings, medications, etc, adds to the GDP.
In light of that fact, it seems a little naive to have our elected officials looking so closely at GDP as a measure of the health of the country. As so many managers know, people watch (and try to impact) what is measured. Incent a CEO to raise the company’s stock price and guess what he’ll spend most of his time and effort doing (whether his actions to bring about that stock increase eventually help or hurt the company in the long run). I think the American people have unwittingly let our elected officials focus too long on just the economy.
This is a hot subject for me. More later.
Team Work and Danger - I love this job.
There’s a scene in the movie “The Matrix” where Neo, Trinity and Link are walking away from the Nebuchadnezzar with their duffle bags, back from a successful mission. I think there’s something in (just?) men that leads us to seek out team efforts heading out on short dangerous missions. It must have started with our ancestors roaming the savannah in small teams hunting for dinner. Put any two men together with a clearly defined mission to accomplish and we’ll quietly and (hopefully) competently bring home dinner.
Strangely, that’s how this trucking gig feels. Every day we’re assigned a new ‘mission’ taking us off on a new life or death adventure – which is only a little exaggerated with the very slick and low-visibility driving conditions over the past few days. Thursday I got to experience the anti-locking braking system (ABS) on the rig – three times. Once as two four-wheelers had spun out on the highway about a quarter mile ahead of me, but at the bottom of a hill. Fortunately I was traveling at only 45mph and I got the rig stopped with about 20 feet to spare – feeling the wheels locking up and repeatedly releasing. But still, I wasn’t sure I’d get it stopped in time. I hate that feeling in the pit of my stomach. Keeping an adequate following-distance, driving conditions dependent, is critical to survival in this business.
Wednesday morning, I-25 between Albuquerque and Los Cruces, New Mexico was closed – after I’d driven those same 200-odd miles just hours before, albeit in pretty scary conditions. We parked in a truck stop with a hundred other trucks waiting for the road to open. By 2pm it was opened and I got to drive and see New Mexico in the daylight – spectacular (but I’ll use that word often describing deserts and mountains).
I crossed the Rio Grande river a few times, got to see Williamsburg, NM – “America’s Spaceport” (http://www.spaceportamerica.com/) and saw very interesting ancient lava flows solidified into basalt and buckled and split like giant sidewalks with tree roots beneath them.
Victor took over at 1am Thursday morning just outside Monticello, Utah and got us back to Spanish Fork just before sunrise. I woke about 11am in the rest area in Glenwood canyon in Colorado and couldn’t stop smiling.
Incredible. I finally got to drive in the daylight the curvy mountain section of I-70 I’d driven almost a dozen times in the other direction but always in the dark. Spectacular!
By the time we got to Denver and had refueled - see the photo - we burn a lot of fuel -
the weather had changed back to snowing and it took us more than an hour to go just eight miles on I-25 with everyone else trying to go south. After the ABS braking excitement described above, I finally pulled us in to the JCPenney parking lot in Pueblo at about 10pm to wait for our 4:30am unloading. I got a cheap steak (I believe my first since July) and a beer at an Applebees about a half mile walk away through five inches of fresh snow. Another high-intensity day, but well worth the effort to see western Colorado in such excellent weather conditions.
It’s now Friday night and I’m back in Salt Lake after waking this morning to yet another glorious day near Loveland pass. For the first time in more than a decade and the first time in my life from ten feet above the road, I got to see in the daylight the entire drive back to Salt Lake from central Colorado. Incredible. Too big for photos. The Colorado River, the Manti La Sal mountains near Moab, the Henries south of the San Rafael Swell, the Price valley, the drive up Price Canyon and over the top of Soldier’s Summit and down Spanish Fork Canyon. Absolutely incredibly spectacular. I was grinning like a crazy person the entire day and it hasn’t worn off yet. And I get paid to do this. I laugh every time I think of it.
Strangely, that’s how this trucking gig feels. Every day we’re assigned a new ‘mission’ taking us off on a new life or death adventure – which is only a little exaggerated with the very slick and low-visibility driving conditions over the past few days. Thursday I got to experience the anti-locking braking system (ABS) on the rig – three times. Once as two four-wheelers had spun out on the highway about a quarter mile ahead of me, but at the bottom of a hill. Fortunately I was traveling at only 45mph and I got the rig stopped with about 20 feet to spare – feeling the wheels locking up and repeatedly releasing. But still, I wasn’t sure I’d get it stopped in time. I hate that feeling in the pit of my stomach. Keeping an adequate following-distance, driving conditions dependent, is critical to survival in this business.
Wednesday morning, I-25 between Albuquerque and Los Cruces, New Mexico was closed – after I’d driven those same 200-odd miles just hours before, albeit in pretty scary conditions. We parked in a truck stop with a hundred other trucks waiting for the road to open. By 2pm it was opened and I got to drive and see New Mexico in the daylight – spectacular (but I’ll use that word often describing deserts and mountains).
By the time we got to Denver and had refueled - see the photo - we burn a lot of fuel -
It’s now Friday night and I’m back in Salt Lake after waking this morning to yet another glorious day near Loveland pass. For the first time in more than a decade and the first time in my life from ten feet above the road, I got to see in the daylight the entire drive back to Salt Lake from central Colorado. Incredible. Too big for photos. The Colorado River, the Manti La Sal mountains near Moab, the Henries south of the San Rafael Swell, the Price valley, the drive up Price Canyon and over the top of Soldier’s Summit and down Spanish Fork Canyon. Absolutely incredibly spectacular. I was grinning like a crazy person the entire day and it hasn’t worn off yet. And I get paid to do this. I laugh every time I think of it.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
El Paso, Texas
About sixteen hours after leaving Spanish Fork after 1am Tuesday morning (is it still Tuesday?), we arrived in El Paso, Texas. Fortunately the drive was mostly flat because the driving conditions were sketchy at best. I awoke to this . . .
. . . in Jamestown, New Mexico after Victor had driven nine hours.
I then took the wheel for the next nine hours and an almost continuous snow. I saw three pickup trucks spin off the road in front of me, one police SUV after it had impacted a guard rail, another pickup truck on it's roof in the ditch, a greyhound bus sized RV on its side blocking two lanes of traffic, a little tiny car with it's trunk crushed up against another guard rail, and a few other more forgettable accidents.
As we arrived in Los Cruces, I thought the 35 mph cross-winds were going to knock us over. Strangely, they completely stopped as we crossed the border into Texas. Unfortunately, the snow didn't stop at the border.
I'm now sitting in the local Hooters restaurant attached to the Mall containing our JCPenney, at which I backed the truck up to the loading dock for a 4:30 AM unloading. It's now 11:23pm and the place has cleared out. And fortunately quieted down. Not where I would have preferred to go for dinner, but other than Red Lobster, Hooters is the only place within walking distance on this very cold and blizzardy night. (I was hoping for classic Tex-Mex.) The girls are cute but the outfits are stupid.
I asked the manager what the weather was like yesterday - 70 degrees. Just my luck that we'd arrive on the only blizzard night of the year. Victor is catching as much sleep as he can until he has to help unload at 4:30am. I'm sipping cheap tequila.
Back to Spanish Fork tomorrow. I'll drive through Monticello and Moab. Hopefully get some good photos.
I then took the wheel for the next nine hours and an almost continuous snow. I saw three pickup trucks spin off the road in front of me, one police SUV after it had impacted a guard rail, another pickup truck on it's roof in the ditch, a greyhound bus sized RV on its side blocking two lanes of traffic, a little tiny car with it's trunk crushed up against another guard rail, and a few other more forgettable accidents.
As we arrived in Los Cruces, I thought the 35 mph cross-winds were going to knock us over. Strangely, they completely stopped as we crossed the border into Texas. Unfortunately, the snow didn't stop at the border.
I'm now sitting in the local Hooters restaurant attached to the Mall containing our JCPenney, at which I backed the truck up to the loading dock for a 4:30 AM unloading. It's now 11:23pm and the place has cleared out. And fortunately quieted down. Not where I would have preferred to go for dinner, but other than Red Lobster, Hooters is the only place within walking distance on this very cold and blizzardy night. (I was hoping for classic Tex-Mex.) The girls are cute but the outfits are stupid.
I asked the manager what the weather was like yesterday - 70 degrees. Just my luck that we'd arrive on the only blizzard night of the year. Victor is catching as much sleep as he can until he has to help unload at 4:30am. I'm sipping cheap tequila.
Back to Spanish Fork tomorrow. I'll drive through Monticello and Moab. Hopefully get some good photos.
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