SCAmis's Open Salon Blog

How People Outsmart Themselves About Recycling

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:08:48 -0400

Both Penn and Teller and Cracked.com have explained in detail how dumb recycling is. We can't run out of room, percentage of landmass, it costs just as much money as producing things new, blah de blah treehuggers. Those hippies sure are dumb, aren't they?

Except they are completely wrong about all that, in the same smugly stupid way as people who sneer about the perfectly accurate use of the word "organic" to describe a farming method. They do this because they are convinced that the only correct definition of "organic" is the one that refers to chemistry. It isn't. And if you don't take into account that some words have more than one correct definition, and that someone who is using a word in a way you don't understand might be using a definition you are not familiar with, you wind up sounding like a pompous idiot. If you start out with the basic premise that recycling must be dumb because hippies and/or liberals like it and everyone knows that liberals and hippies are stupid...likewise. You will wind up outsmarting yourself and looking like an ass.

City councils and county commissions and citizen panels make decisions about recycling programs. When they make those decisions, they look at projected costs and alternatives, including how much it costs to maintain a municipal dump or to process waste some other way. Those figures are the only ones that matter; how much it costs to make aluminum cans or whatever new is absolutely irrelevant. Because we are not a collective, there's not a big kitty where all our money goes, and even "government" is not monolithic. There's national government, state government, and local government; and while there are relationships between them, local governments must make decisions based on the resources they actually have available, period, not what resources we might theoretically have available as a nation or a planet. How much it costs to manufacture a can versus using recycled material is relevant only to the people making it, whereas how much it costs to do something with the can once it has been used is relevant to a completely different set of people, and ultimately to taxpayers. The conflation of manufacturing costs (absorbed by business owners) with waste disposal costs (absorbed by taxpayers) as if they are coming out of the same people's pockets is a sign either of very muddled thinking or a political agenda favorable to the manufacturers. In neither case should you trust anything else the speaker says on the subject.

Talk about available land mass and unused land is merely ridiculous. Municipalities and counties don't have access to all of the land mass on earth. They only have access to the land they already control...public property. If they use it for a landfill, that means they can't use it for something else. If they need more, they have to buy it. That's part of the projected cost of landfills, by the way.

Not all land is usable for landfills, either. If your water comes from an aquifer, you do not want a landfill sitting on top of it. Trust me about this.

So, if there's no more room in existing landfills, and no suitable land available nearby, the municipality has to ship trash somewhere. That means someone else has to make decisions about aquifers, but it also means money. Shockingly, there is no trash fairy. If you want to ship your municipal waste somewhere, you have pay someone to take it. You also have to pay to ship it there. That can also mean additional air pollution, but it definitely means additional money.

It's true that recycling programs sometimes mean shipping recyclables somewhere, but that again is a cost figured into the plan. In any case, it is NOT a choice between an expensive recycling program and a nice cheap landfill. Landfills are also expensive, and they are often more expensive than they appear to be because the costs are hidden or are due to increase dramatically once current resources run out. You can't run out of a recycling program. You won't have to buy another one, and the operating costs are relatively stable and predictable. Furthermore, a recycling program extends the usable lifespan of existing landfills because less trash is going into them; so not only are the costs of recycling often compared to the wrong things, the benefits are often artificially deflated. You shouldn't be comparing recycling to landfills; you should compare waste management via recycling plus landfills over an extended period of time to waste management via landfills alone, including the projected cost of building more landfills or shipping waste elsewhere. That's the way to do a real cost-benefit analysis.

If your county or municipality has a recycling program, especially if they've had one for a while, call up someone who knows about the budget and management aspects and ask what they think. Ask how the decisions were made and what they believe the current and projected benefits are. In other words, don't believe everything you see on TV or the Internet, even if the people saying it are usually pretty funny. And if you don't have a local recycling program, call someone up and ask why not.

Right Wing Freak Show

Tue, 4 Aug 2009 22:08:18 -0400

I've been observing the soi-disant "conservative movement" for some time now, and I think I should say something.

Y'all do know the rest of us think you're crazy, right?

I should preface this by saying that I'm specifically not speaking of the self-identified Republicans or other conservatives who still have a lick of sense. I wish to praise and encourage, not disparage them, poor beleaguered souls. Though we might have a word or two about the company you have been keeping.

That's actually just what I want to talk about. Your fellow-travelers. You know. Them.

The birthers. The wingnuts. The people who think Obama is a radical leftist, or an Arab, or a citizen of Kenya. The ones who claim that there's no such thing as separation of church and state, and that the Constitution, against all tradition and the words in the document itself, is based on "'God's law. " Or that global warming is a hoax. I could go on in this vein for a while. Far too long.

We have our own crazies, it's true. God love 'em. But we keep them where they will do the most good, out on the range and off the grid experimenting with alternative sources of electricity and fuel, working out the bugs so the rest of us don't have to turn off the lights to take a shower when we finally get our solar-powered home.

You run yours for office. Worse, you vote for them. Just for one example, Mike Huckabee sincerely believes that the Constitution should be altered to conform to the Bible. And, well, Sarah Palin. Need I say more?

Barack Obama is not a radical, by the way. You can tell because a real leftist radical wouldn't be caught dead in a suit. Or running for President. Or voting. They think the whole system is corrupt and the only way to transform society is through making their own clothes and barter. You see, I have met actual leftists, and actual radicals, and hung out with them quite a bit. They are more fun than your radicals because they are often stoned, and less worrisome because they think guns are categorically wrong rather than thinking of them as accessories. You should try hanging out with some, yourself. Then you will know better than to mistake Barack Obama for one.

He is also no kind of socialist. He's a moderate Democrat just perceptibly to the left of Bill Clinton. Try not to hyperventilate.

You have been listening to your own talk radio too long. You've lost perspective. You gave up facts and truth and reasoned debate for hostile polemic, and now it has finally come home to roost. You're just lost, and you're following the loudest voices, because they got you some air time and traction a couple decades ago, and it has worked so well for so long, so you thought, because you weren't noticing while the bozo you elected was running the country off a cliff. But the problem with letting the shouty people do your public relations is that they attract more like themselves, and the next thing you know you're losing the middle and kissing Rush Limbaugh's ass. It is not a good place to be.

Don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. I live in Paul Broun's district*, and I know crazy when I see it in my mailbox. In addition to the cracktastic screeds he likes to send his constituents, have you seen his website? This is what you have wrought.

It pains me to bring this up. I love freaks. I live in Athens. But, dang, baby.

*Half of Athens got gerrymandered out of John Barrow's district and now shares a Congressman with Habersham County. Do not speak of it further.

Understanding America

Tue, 4 Aug 2009 00:08:40 -0400

Earlier today, I was thinking about a conversation I had with a fellow academic type about how he could get a job in a linguistics department in Germany but didn't want to. One of the things he mentioned was hostility towards Americans. Now, there are some things people might legitimately be hostile about, but this involved people sneering that Americans don't have any culture. I've heard this before, and it always impresses me deeply with the conviction that the speaker is both an idiot and a jackass. Listen: if we don't have culture, how come everybody listens to our music and watches our movies? What the hell do they think jazz and rock and roll are? Our culture is one of our biggest exports. You can't export what you don't have. They are just jealous because, while they supposedly have culture and we don't, nobody wants to buy theirs.

Inevitably, people who say that sort of thing don't actually know any of their own culture. I can sing a whole bunch of traditional American folk songs and tell a few traditional stories. I also know how to cook my own cuisine and do some traditional crafts. I can identify trends in American literature and philosophy and explain their relationship to the rest of the world. Let's see you do that, with whatever is personally applicable, and then we'll talk about who has "culture." The same people also inevitably don't have any appreciable knowledge of American culture on which to base their sweeping opinions, even (or especially) how it intersects with world culture. For example, Mohandias Gandhi was definitely an important world figure who influenced a lot of people including Martin Luther King, Jr. Gandhi in turn read and was influenced by Thoreau.

Deepak Chopra brought up this canard about Americans' supposed lack of culture at Mythic Journeys in Atlanta a couple years ago. I then got to witness Coleman Barks delivering the smackdown on him for it. All he did was turn to the cello player behind them and say, "Play me some blues." It was a beautiful moment.

The problem with the attitude, other than the fact that it's bullshit, is that it then leads people to not be able to comprehend why Americans do things. This is a problem because, like it or not, we have a lot of weight to throw around* and it might be useful for people to figure us out a little. But no, they think we are just Europe, Jr. and have no culture of our own and therefore are motivated by the same basic worldview that Europeans are. Which is patently untrue and leads to further stupid assumptions. We have a different history and traditions, even from somewhat similar countries like Canada and Australia, and there really is a relationship between that and the peculiar things we think up to do. I swear.

Europeans especially like to project their own ideas about America onto us, and explain us, like we need explaining. They've been doing that since Alexis de Tocqueville, and it's tiresome. You do not find Americans, for the most part, coming up with simplistic theories about what makes other countries tick.** That may be because we're not that interested in anybody but ourselves, but it is also possible that we know you can't just explain people like that. It could be, dare I suggest it, humility on our part.

If you want to understand Americans, listen to the blues. And then some of our folk ballads. (Most if not all of our popular music has its roots in these two forms). All our most traditional songs are about exile and loss. They are all sad, even the funny ones. Especially the funny ones...in "Clementine," she dies. Then the singer goes on to describe how Clementine, his lost love, visits him in his dreams.

All of this will no doubt be lost on people who want to believe that Americans are just a bunch of shallow, uncultured louts whose main contribution to the world is fast food and pop top cans. We even buy that line ourselves, all too often. I think that, on the contrary, Americans are driven by an immense well of sadness*** which we express in our art and music and writing, and informs everything we do as a collective group. Even the famous drive to succeed and achieve all over everything is linked to that, if you think about it. At any rate, Americans are a good bit deeper than even we give ourselves credit for, and much more so than most people seem to think. Next time someone tries to tell you that Americans don't have any culture, tell them you're sorry that they don't understand it. Then play them some blues.

*I personally think this is Not a Good Thing, but nobody is taking my advice on the subject. In any case, it is what it is.

**The exception that springs to mind is that "They hate us because of our freedom" nonsense and ridiculous attitudes towards the Middle East in general. It's both an aberration and a demonstration of how stupid that sort of thing is.

***July 4, 1776. America is a Cancer. Explains a lot, don't it? I also think this disproves the Secret Mystic Masonic Cabal theory of the Founding Fathers, since if they had been more hip to astrology they would have waited a couple more weeks. America as a Leo would have been much less conflicted. On the other hand, they were all against kings and empires, so maybe they did it on purpose. Perhaps Leo America would have been more of an asshole without the constant desire to make everything better and give everyone milk and cookies and airlifted medical supplies. Perhaps we are all better off with America as a big woobie.

In a democracy, there is no such thing...

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 13:12:20 -0500

...as a person who is above the law.

Vice President Cheney admitted on national TV that he authorized the use of torture (screw those "harsh interrogation" euphemisms) on prisoners. The specific techniques in question are unequivocably torture, unequivocably violations of the Geneva Convention, unequivocably war crimes. There's a list of precedents as long as your arm defining waterboarding in particular as a war crime.

Really, the only question now is: Are we a democracy, or aren't we? Are we still America? Or have we become something unrecognizable? It's not enough that we elected someone who is against all that. I get why nobody wants to open that can of worms politically. However, there is a point where you can't just gloss it over and put a hope-and-change happy face sticker on it. We passed that one long ago. I don't buy the idea that there are more important problems; what's more important than your soul?

In a democracy, there is no such thing as a person who is above the law.

Pass it on.

How to fix our economy, the country, AND global warming

Sun, 9 Nov 2008 00:11:26 -0500

Interested?

I actually made this suggestion on Barack Obama's new http://change.gov/ website. I love that site. Seriously. All the stuff under "agenda"....especially the "Civil Rights" and "Ethics" sections. Equal pay, open government records, public comment, woohoo! I keep hearing people, some of them on TV, complaining that they don't know what Barack Obama is actually planning to do. Apparently they can't read. It's not like he's hiding it. You don't have to have a secret decoder ring or the bleeding heart liberal password to see it. It's right there on the Internet.

Ahem. I was saying. See, the problem is that certain things that President-elect Obama wants to do that really WILL help the economy and create jobs, and which will also solve other pressing problems such as carbon emissions and the fact that our bridges are collapsing and our infrastructure is falling apart generally, also cost a lot of money. The money part is the problem. Congress will balk, if it does balk, at spending more money when our deficit is already so large. So will most taxpayers. There is some logic to this, since even though those things would pay off in the long run raising our national debt would tend to destabilize our economy further. Among other possible hazards is runaway inflation.

However, I have a brilliant solution to this.

During World War II, the United States government sold war bonds. They were sold for a percentage of their face value and had a ten-year maturity. They were essentially a way for the government to fund the war by borrowing money from citizens...and had the added bonus of removing money from circulation and therefore controlling inflation. Lots of people bought them, because it was considered patriotic to do so.

Obama already wants to start a bank to invest in national infrastructure, and he already wants to invest money in "green technology" and clean energy sources. The US government already sells Treasury bonds. We are already borrowing money from various sources (mainly other countries) to fund our various projects and needs. What if you could buy special "Green Economy/Infrastructure" bonds that would go into the pool for investment into technology or infrastructure? People are hungry to do something constructive. This way they could literally "invest in America" and the US government would be borrowing from our own citizens rather than other countries. It would make people feel like they were contributing something and solve several problems at once.

I made this suggestion already myself, but if a few more people did it, the chances of the idea being implemented might increase. If you go to http://change.gov/, there's a way to offer your visions and ideas. I think you should do that anyway, even if you don't plug my idea, because getting involved in your own government...a practice we like to call "democracy"...is a good thing.