Rob's all-purpose Writing Blog

Love this campaign in the US urging people to vote (being a midterm election coming up and all). It’s cute. Here in Australia we shoot you if you don’t vote. Kidding. We actually pretty much do nothing – but we do ask you for a good reason like, ‘I was napping at the time’. They can fine you for not voting, or at least not turning up at the poll booth anyway. Not so in the US of A where apathy is your demo-o-cratic right!

The Frozen Peas video is cool.

There’s money in cars, isn’t there? Carconnection.com reports:

Toyota Motor Corp. continued its unprecedented profit run by reporting a 39-percent jump in income for first quarter of its new fiscal year. Takeshi Suzuki, TMC senior managing director, said the results, which included a 13-percent increase in revenue from the same period a year ago, were the result on the plans for the growth the company had set in place. “We posted substantial increases in both revenues and profits, achieving record levels. We believe this is a result of the company-side efforts to implement the plans that we set at the beginning of the fiscal year.”

Wow. Over 11billion US dollars profit. I have some thoughts here.

One, how the mighty US car makers have crumbled. GM and Ford have been selling assets to prop up ailing businesses over the last few years. You look at their products and think: too fat, too truck-centered, too thirsty. Then you look at nimble, efficient Toyota. Able to match anyone with trucks, 4wds, big, medium or small cars…hybrids as well. They have the production processes, the speed of design and development and the low cost manufacturing needed to survive down pat. I suspect only a few car companies can compete, possibly only the Koreans, the Chinese and the Indians will have the wherewithal to survive in the global marketplace, with local markets aggregating into perhaps one or 2 European and US manufacturers, propped up with subsidies. Everyone else will go niche or go bust. There’s a lot at stake here, including national pride and loads of jobs.

Which brings me to my next thought. What if global climate change and the effects of rising water levels and fiercer weather can be proven, or at least sufficently so that a case against can be made? Will we see liability cases claiming damages against the big, profitable oil and automotive corporations for continuing to make ridiculously inappropriate products in the face of diabolical climate effects? Does this leave GM and Ford off the hook (as they are unprofitable, or look pretty shaky at best) or will such damages claims actually sink their collective ships?

Maybe Toyota will need its ‘war chest’ of cash to pay some future ‘social responsibility’ claims?

Crikey just sent me an email, as they do. In part, it reads…”What generally prevents commodity shortages doing major damage to the economy is the price mechanism. As things get scarce, their price rises, and that provides incentives to (a) produce or discover more of them, (b) find or invent substitutes for them, (c) use less of them, and (d) recycle them or use them more efficiently. The combination of these effects minimises dislocation and allows us gradually to shift to different ways of doing things. But if governments are so short-sighted – or just plain stupid – as to try to keep petrol prices artificially low, then none of this will happen. Instead, we’ll continue happily consuming cheap fuel until we wake up one morning and discover we’ve run out, just as the “peak oil” people say.”

Well d’oh! It’s not that complicated, is it? So why are we waking up in 2006 to the need to price resources properly and avoid market distortions? We pump millions of public dollars into shared infrastructure like roads, seemingly unaware that this is subsidising road transport. We whinge about road tolls. We pay enormous sums in public medical care for car accident victims. We even (in Australia at least) make driving and leasing cars a tax saving!We are subsidising cars in the name of freedom, left right and centre.

The oil took aeons to make, it lies in pools underground. It was always going to run out sometime. Some of the pools are large, some small. Some are easier to get to than others. Some are dirtier, some cleaner. Some are on shore, some off. Some still pump at high pressure, some are losing oomph. More than likely we have found the easiest, cheapest places to pump oil and only with higher prices will it become profitable to extract it. As the price rises it gets cheaper to use not only harder-to-get-to oil but also smaller bodies, gas bodies and finally other alternatives like coal, oil shale and so on. With higher prices we can stretch this out 100, maybe 150 years?

Let’s not forget that it’s not just transport that uses oil. The petrochemical companies use it to make plastics, for instance. Indirectly but pretty importantly tourism is a big current user, too.
But the bottom line is that these are all fossil fuels. It’s not just that we may or may not have reached peak oil, we always knew that would happen. Nor is it that our governments are concerned about price hits and may do something silly like cut excise on the damned stuff. These are all climate-changing fuels. If we keep consuming and pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere we will dramatically alter our climate and wreak havoc all around – if we haven’t already done so.

Let’s not quibble about the economic effects of peak oil, let’s look at the bigger picture of our global addiction to cars, and probably air travel as well. Just making cars consumes energy resources, covers arable land in concrete and tar, and adds to the overall carbon problem – without even driving the damned things. We need to wake up and have a really good think about what we want here. And ask what’s sustainable. And price our resource use not just on what they cost to extract plus a margin, but on what they cost in terms of all effects, including climate change and biosphere damage. Unfortunately we are so dependent on selling complex manufactured goods, and cars are such a good employer of people and such a wonderful empowerer, that we all want one. (Indeed I guiltily have 3.)

But is there enough planet to go around?

Tom Yager, in his 2002 column “Losing My Religion”, called it technology attachment disorder: “an unshakable, impractical devotion to a brand, platform, product line, or programming language.” Such devotion is a kind of religion argument, like Windows vs Linux or Christian vs Muslim. It doesn’t have to be so, surely, but sometimes it gets aggro. John Udell comments on this subject (starting with the Mac vs PC debate) in his Infoworld blog and brings the philosopher Daniel Dennett into the story. Dennett’s recently been exploring religion as a product of evolutionary processes in the domains of biology (genes) and culture (memes).

As Udell notes, group performance of ritual song and dance is a central feature of religious activity. This may be rooted in oral culture, as Dennett apparently points out, where there was only such majority consensus available to provide any sort of accurate transmission of messages. To avoid the ‘Chinese Whispers’ effect. However I would suggest that the Greek and Roman orators had their own tricks in order to preserve stories intact – look at the story of Ulysses as just one example. It’s been handed down to us by word of mouth over many generations before being committed to the written word. It’s not necessarily just religion that needs or solves this problem. Indeed, all of our technology, our entire civilisation, was passed down the line in some oral way for thousands of years before writing was even developed or popularised. It wasn’t just religion that solved the accuracy problem.

Anyway, Dennett apparently builds upon Richard Dawkins’ thinking. Dawkins’ books have pushed the line that evolution can be usefully regarded as competition among genes as well as competition among the organisms they encode and that ideas, beliefs, or behaviors – also called memes – are the cultural analogs of genes. Dennett’s extension apparently – I’m relying upon Udell here – considers that the meme pool survives in the face of relentless selective pressure, just as does every gene and its phenotype. Thus every idea, belief or behavior must deliver an adaptive benefit or be lost. And whilst these memes may assist us, as in generating a fully formed living ‘religion’ and successfully passing on moral precepts generation after generation, sometimes only the memes benefit.

Udell likens this to successful marketing spin. For example where Macs are seen to “suck” and PCs are seen to be “cool.” It’s important to understand, he says, how this all works – it could be useful at least to unravel some of these meme-driven myths. Linux vs Windows. ID vs Evolution. Ford vs GM. Newtonian vs quantum physics. 11 or 13 dimension string theory? Our sometimes feral and driven attachment to ideas can seem pretty illogical at times. Is it our memes at work?

When Floyd Landis won that bizarre stage when he broke away and caught a bunch up ahead and then dropped them all, finishing alone, I didn’t think “drugs”. I thought “angry”. Angry at his own mistake the previous day, when he “lost” all chance. I also thought “stupid” as in ‘it is stupid letting him take all this time back’. Just at it appeared foolish when Oscar Pereiro’s breakaway was allowed 28 minutes or so. Now it was the making of Oscar and it appears to have been the unmaking of Floyd. But why testosterone? And why test positive just on that day?

It doesn’t make sense that testosterone would give Landis the boost he needed to make that one break. Testosterone is generally applied as a course over time to make longer-term physical improvements. One dose won’t do it. It may have given him a psychological boost, but not a physical one. Maybe it made him angrier, but not that angry, surely?

So has he been set up, or is he in denial? Is he lying? Is the lab wrong? Both labs, I mean. If he is guilty as charged then a look back through the records should reveal a longer term change in his testosterone levels. All the more reason to use baseline testing of athletes and their blood, so a longitudinal record is kept. Any change that shouldn’t occur naturally would then be investigated. There must be trust in the process and the labs, as well as the athletes. Alround, it’s just sad.