Where the Wild Things Are

Kindergarten in the woods. Wish that was around when I was young. If the fact that most social change isn't brought about by one side winning but by the opposition dying then these kids who are growing up among the wilderness will be the "winners" of the climate battle. One can only hope.

When It Rains, It Contaminates

NYT has a pollution series or "Has science been good or bad for the world" or "No matter what we do we still lose". Today was on our lackluster sewage system.

Quick breakdown:

One goal of the Clean Water Act of 1972 was to upgrade the nation’s sewer systems, many of them built more than a century ago, to handle growing populations and increasing runoff of rainwater and waste. During the 1970s and 1980s, Congress distributed more than $60 billion to cities to make sure that what goes into toilets, industrial drains and street grates would not endanger human health.

But despite those upgrades, many sewer systems are still frequently overwhelmed, according to a New York Times analysis of environmental data. As a result, sewage is spilling into waterways.

Upgrade fail. But we punish those failures right?

But fewer than one in five sewage systems that broke the law were ever fined or otherwise sanctioned by state or federal regulators, the Times analysis shows.

Punishment fail. This points out two things: 1) we can't fix the problems we have, 2) we can't enforce the laws we have that were made to enforce the fixes, and/or 3) we don't have the balls to admit how we live is wrong. It's all three.

Prescription: We need to get over ourselves and move toward a more reasonable existence.

The Joke's On Us

Example of how we kill the planet: Man drives 1680 miles round trip to take a 3 hour improv class. Let me count the ways. A person with no vocation can drop $150 a week on gas to go to a improv class. I'll say it another way. A person who contributes nothing still has enough money to conjure up enough hydrocarbon slaves to transport him at least 2/3 the distance it took Lewis and Clark to travel in 1 year in about 15 hours so he can take an improv class. WTF.

He'd probably have a better shot spending the $150 on lottery tickets and in the mean time taking a class in Dallas (you're telling me they don't laugh in Texas?) and then when his ship comes in move to Chicago and take the class full time. Or hell, if you figure 4 x $150 is $600 I'm sure he could find a studio apartment in or around Chicago and take some public transportation to the class. Whatevs.

But the moral of the story is that someone who produces no directly measurable physical good (not necessarily meaning economically; he could volunteer in a hospice or soup kitchen) has enough resources to trade for the power to travel quite rapidly (compared to previous human history) to learn a career that has a lottery winner's chance of actually making a wage. Yep, that is a barometer of our times.

That is the answer to the "should Chicago lease it's water" question. Doing this is terrible for any lessor (?). Didn't work in Bolivia. Didn't work in Atlanta. Water is a right. You cannot live without it and should not have to do anything to earn it. Period.

Here are some quick hits of how bad water leasing is:

Mayors from Homer Glen to Urbana are threatening municipal takeovers of their local water systems, moved by complaints about skyrocketing rates and lackluster
service from corporate operators. Fort Wayne, Ind., already wrested away part of its water system and is seeking to buy back the rest after accusing a private operator of putting shareholder interests before those of customers.

And the Grand Marshall of U.S. Water Lease failures, Atlanta:

"Water is critical to a city's future management and growth," said Rob Hunter, Atlanta's commissioner of watershed management. "It's not something you want to turn over to somebody else."

That from their current mayor who is a bit wiser than the previous mayor who signed the leasing contract and is currently in jail.

The Curse of Ayn Rand

Krugman diatribes about the fetid unemployment in the U.S. versus how it was handled in the E.U., in particular, Germany, where even thought both were hit during the "Great Recession, Collapse, Pt. 1", Germany was able to keep unemployment very low.

Here's how the former Nazi's did it:

Germany came into the Great Recession with strong employment protection legislation. This has been supplemented with a “short-time work scheme,” which provides subsidies to employers who reduce workers’ hours rather than laying them off. These measures didn’t prevent a nasty recession, but Germany got through the recession with remarkably few job losses.

I'm sure Glenn Beck and all his "Tuk er Jerbs" people would say that spreading the work force or individuals sacrificing work time, as in we all work 4 days a week so we can all still be employed instead of don't touch my job or fire me so I can work full time somewhere else, as a manner of socialism.

How do the manly U.S. leaders want to accomplish it? Let's ask Larry Summers, grand-poo-bah of derivatives and boot strap thinking:

Lawrence Summers, the Obama administration’s highest-ranking economist, was dismissive: “It may be desirable to have a given amount of work shared among more people. But that’s not as desirable as expanding the total amount of work.”

That's right. Fire the fat and then rehire them when we have expanded back to normal. Right. Well, the stocks have expanded back up but that doesn't help Americans when most of the expansion is based on the growth of overseas markets.

Yes, an Ayn Rand follower declaring that you will work when we find you work. Chances are those with the stocks are not the ones complaining about job loses. The new, lean companies are only working in their favor.

We should arrest the Dept of Treasury for running a giant ponzi scheme.

Get up, Stand up

Wisconsin farmers are being taken out behind the wood shed. Agribusiness is doing nothing for them and they should stop doing anything for agribusiness.

For example(s):

-Conventional farm milk prices have dropped by nearly 50 percent over the past year. Dean Foods controls 80 percent of the fluid milk market in some states and 40 percent of the market in the U.S. Their net profits more than doubled in the last year.

-When the farm price for beef cattle dropped $0.08 per pound, consumers were paying $0.17 more per pound at the supermarket. Average retail beef processing margins across all companies increased 13 percent over 2008.

Any asswipe economics guy will say that the economies of scale offered by the reach of Dean Foods and agribusiness ilk makes more sense for farmers to suckle to the agribiz tit but as we say "the numbers don't add up".

More on the Garbage Island

Maybe when you think of visiting a Pacific Island you can make your stay on new garbage island that's formed out of old toothbrushes and plastic bottles.

Something is Happening Here

Maybe years from now in a burnt out city, scrawled in ash on a wall of tiny bastion of rationality will be the words "Krugman was right." The few survivors with half a brain will remember posts like today's Paranoia post as a grim harbinger of the deservedly terrible future of people who happen to inhabit the central part of North America.

Ayn Rand is the Devil

A lot of people cringed when the fictional character Gordon Gecko declared "Greed is good." in Oliver Stone's Wall Street.

Ayn Rand who perpetuates and perpetrates selfishness throughout each of her novels and as an example of the sickness of our society, she has been a major influence on most of our economic and monetary policymakers, not to mention corporate CEO's. So when these guys go bankrupt because of "free market" occurrences then we can all blame a jilted Russian Jewess who fled their communists, adored a serial killer, two-faced all her cult-followers and who's dogmatic beliefs encourage the destruction of Main St. for corporate greed. And was a smoker!

"What a Tough Season"

"What a tough season." That'd make a great chapter title for a Ken Burn's doc if he were still making doc's in 50 years when global warming is really kicking our ass. That quote if from a Wisconsin farmer describing the utter nightmare that this season has been.

"It's all because of the weather," Lauer confirms. "July -- corn's big growing month -- was one of the coolest ever, and from mid-September on it's been damp and cool."

This is from a separate article also commenting on the potential for a moldy corn harvest or to having to leave the soy in the fields if it were to snow. Is the strange weather patterns a sign of global warming? There's a good chance of it. Though not all farmer's agree.

Grain harvest is late this year, and it's all because of the cool spring, summer and fall. "We need a little of that global warming we hear so much about," a Dane County corn grower recently said. "I really want to get the corn and beans harvested before the snow flies."

Is this not like saying Candyman five times into a mirror? I would only wish this kinda weather on Wall Street execs.

Everybody Pwned!

I post this not so much as I hate Superfreakonomics and the dust storm of crap climate throwdown it's received but so much I've never seen a more complete and extensive use of the word pwned in the proper situations. If anything it just illustrates how much total crap floats around this world waiting to get called out by anything will balls to do it.