Tumgik
#and living somewhere with zero (0) public transportation
bluesey-182 · 8 months
Text
i love how every visit my doctor tells me she hates how much ibuprofen i take and i remind her im in constant pain and ask if there's something else she can give me since she doesn't like how much ibuprofen i take and she says "no <3" and i ask her well okay so where do we go from here bc i have to take something and she goes "just.... try not to take it so often" and im like "cool i already take it way less than I need it bc of these convos so thanks, you're useless"
8 notes · View notes
[Monster hunter] (2020)HD Film Complet Streaming VF en Français
Regarder Monster hunter Film Complet Streaming VF En Français — HD 2020 Voir Monster hunter 2020 Film Complet En Français, Voir Monster hunter 2020 Film Entier En Français, Voir Monster hunter 2020 Film En Français, Voir Monster hunter 2020 Film Complet, Voir Monster hunter 2020 Film Complet VF, Voir Monster hunter 2020 Film Complet Streaming, Voir Monster hunter 2020 Film Entier, Monster hunter 2020 Film Entier VF, Voir Monster hunter 2020 Film Entier Streaming, Voir Monster hunter 2020 Film Streaming VF, Voir Monster hunter 2020 voir en streaming gratuit, Image for post
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Monster hunter 2020
Tumblr media
7.3/10 de 1112 utilisateurs Notre monde en cache un autre, dominé par de puissants et dangereux monstres. Lorsque le Lieutenant Artemis et son unité d’élite traversent un portail qui les transporte dans ce monde parallèle, ils subissent le choc de leur vie. Au cours d’une tentative désespérée pour rentrer chez elle, le brave lieutenant rencontre un chasseur mystérieux, qui a survécu dans ce monde hostile grâce à ses aptitudes uniques. Faisant face à de terrifiantes et incessantes attaques de monstres, ces guerriers font équipe pour se défendre et trouver un moyen de retourner dans notre monde.
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
▶https://tinyurl.com/2dc3zb3c
▶ Voir Monster hunter 2020 Film Streaming VF💯
Sortie: 2020-12-03 Durée: 99 minutes Genre: Fantastique, Action, Aventure Etoiles: Milla Jovovich, Tony Jaa, T.I., Ron Perlman, Diego Boneta Directeur: Paul W. S. Anderson, Paul W. S. Anderson, Paul W. S. Anderson, Jeremy Bolt, Robert Kulzer
Il y a de cela fort longtemps, au royaume imaginaire de Kumandra, humains et dragons vivaient en harmonie. Mais un jour, une force maléfique s’abattit sur le royaume et les dragons se sacrifièrent pour sauver l’humanité. Lorsque cette force réapparait cinq siècles plus tard, Raya, une guerrière solitaire, se met en quête du légendaire dernier dragon pour restaurer l’harmonie sur la terre de Kumandra, au sein d’un peuple désormais divisé. Commence pour elle un long voyage au cours duquel elle découvrira qu’il lui faudra bien plus qu’un dragon pour sauver le monde, et que la confiance et l’entraide seront essentiels pour conduire au succès cette périlleuse mission. 31 mars 2020 / Animation, Fantastique, Aventure De Don Hall, Carlos Lopez Estrada, Paul Briggs … Avec Kelly Marie Tran, Awkwafina Nationalité Américain Monster hunter Monster hunter vf Monster hunter grand rex Monster hunter sortie france Monster hunter youtube Monster hunter telecharger Monster hunter age Monster hunter durée Monster hunter bande annonce Monster hunter casting Monster hunter sortie Monster hunter au grand rex Monster hunter affiche Monster hunter à partir de quel age Monster hunter avis Monster hunter avant premiere Monster hunter au cinema Monster hunter age minimum Monster hunter a telecharger Monster hunter age conseillé Monster hunter âge Monster hunter bande annonce youtube 🔮 THE STORY 🔮 Sci-fi is like dream, aside from stories in this classification utilize logical arrangement to explain the universe that it requires place in. It for the most part incorporates or is focused on the assumed impacts or repercussions of PCs or machines; travel through space, time or imaginary worlds; outsider living things; hereditary designing; or other such things. The science or innovation utilized may or probably won’t be completely explained on; stories whose logical components are sensibly point by point, well-informed and viewed as generally conceivable given current information and innovation are regularly known as hard sci-fi. Writing that objectives posses, criminal associations that give a degree of association, and assets that help a lot bigger and more specialized criminal exchanges than an individual criminal could accomplish. Criminals will be the subject of a few motion pictures, especially from the period somewhere in the range of 1930 and 1960. A restoration of criminal sort films happened since the 1990s with the blast of hip-jump culture. Dissimilar to the sooner hoodlum films, the more current movies share comparative components to the more established movies yet is more in a hip-bounce metropolitan setting. An experience story is around a hero who excursions to epic or removed spots to perform something. It could have a considerable number of other classification factors included inside it, since it is an open type. The hero incorporates a mission and faces hindrances to get to their objective. Additionally, experience stories as a rule incorporate obscure settings and characters with valued properties or highlights. At first proposed as a classification by the makers of the pretending game Children of daylight, dieselpunk alludes to fiction propelled by mid-century mash stories, predicated on the style of the interbellum period through World War II (c. 1920–45). Like steampunk however especially observed as a the ascent of oil power and technocratic discernment, fusing neo-noir factors and sharing subjects more clearly with cyberpunk than steampunk. Despite the fact that the striking quality of dieselpunk as a classification isn’t totally uncontested, portions which range from the retro-advanced film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow to the 2001 Activision computer game Return to Castle Wolfenstein have been recommended as quintessential dieselpunk works of fiction. A style when an entertainer acts before a live crowd, talking straightforwardly to them. The entertainer is generally alluded to as a comic, professional comedian, professional comic or simply a hold up. In stand-up parody the entertainer ordinarily discusses a relentless progression of amusing stories, short jokes called “pieces”, and jokes, which comprise what’s regularly called a discourse, routine or act. Some professional comics use props, music or sorcery stunts to improve their demonstrations. Stand-up satire is regularly acted in parody clubs, bars, neo-vaudevilles, schools, and theaters. Outside of live execution, stand-up is typically circulated monetarily by means of TV, DVD, and the web. like customary activity; instead of utilizing hand drawn pictures, stop movement films are made with little puppets or different articles which have their image taken regularly over a grouping of little developments to make liveliness outlines. Models are The Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline, and Corpse Bride. 🔮 COPYRIGHT CONTENT 🔮 Copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to make copies of a creative work, usually for a limited time.[1][2][3][4][5] The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itsDemon Slayer the Movie: Mugen Train.[6][7][8] A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States. Some jurisdictions require “fixing” copyrighted works in a tangible form. It is often shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license the work, and who are commonly referred to as rights holders.[citation needed][9][10][11][12] These rights frequently include reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and moral rights such as attribution.[13] Copyrights can be granted by public law and are in that case considered “territorial rights”. This means that copyrights granted by the law of a certain state, do not extend beyond the territory of that specific jurisdiction. Copyrights of this type vary by country; many countries, and sometimes a large group of countries, have made agreements with other countries on procedures applicable when works “cross” national borders or national rights are inconsistent.[14] Typically, the public law duration of a copyright expires 50 to 100 years after the creator dies, depending on the jurisdiction. Some countries require certain copyright formalities[5] to establishing copyright, others recognize copyright in any completed work, without a formal registration. It is widely believed that copyrights are a must to foster cultural diversity and creativity. However, Parc argues that contrary to prevailing beliefs, imitation and copying do not restrict cultural creativity or diversity but in fact support them further. This argument has been supported by many examples such as Millet and Van Gogh, Picasso, Manet, and Monet, etc.[15] 🔮 ADAPTATION 🔮 Sarah Paulson is my top choice, yet this film isn’t her best. I trusted that months for this will come out and I’m left asking why I was so energized. The trailer parted with everything. You knew the entire story before it even began. There was practically zero character improvement and everything just felt like it was 0–100 with no pacing at all. Likewise, the cosmetics office for Sarah’s last look-the hellfire would you say you were folks on when you thought of this? I really snickered when I saw her. It was an alright film. One that you’d be pissed on the off chance that you burned through cash on. Nothing new, normal, worn out acting. Additionally, no one realizes the proper behavior an asthma assault. This film had so many plot openings that it seemed like a parody. The mother can simply take an infant from the clinic? She harms her little girl for quite a long time and no specialist actually sees this during her regular visits? How did she manage the postal carrier’s vehicle? No one minded the postal carrier was absent? For what reason did the girl never get one of the numerous sharp or gruff articles around her and hit her mother? The mother leaves all her significant reports in a container sitting out and marked? For what reason would she tie up her girl’s wheel seat and not her girl? This is the means by which the entire film goes. The main redeemable nature of the film was Sarah Paulson’s very frightening acting. Likewise, this story has been done so often. I would not burn through my time watching this. Run is unsurprising and not extraordinary. The acting is phenomenal, while the story is fair. The story makes a magnificent showing of being exciting, yet it chiefly doesn’t go anyplace. I knew all that planned to happen despite the fact that I knew nothing. Nonetheless, There was one scene I appreciated where Clare says, “you need me.” The acting was only exceptional in that particular scene. In general, it’s a one time watch that you’ll most likely fail to remember. This is another film on Hulu by Aneesh Chaganty (and co-composed by Sev Ohanian), following up their realistic presentation Searching (2018) with a spine chiller including a mother and her 17-year-old little girl brought into the world with a few confusions (arrhythmia, hemochromatosis, asthma, diabetes, and most effectively loss of motion). I will say that it’s conceivable this film is superior to I preferred it, yet in the event that so it would be for its coordinating and acting, and less so about the composition. I felt like there were openings all over the place, and maybe an excess of is tossed at us too early for us to appropriately think about the characters and their circumstance. This sort of film has been done previously, absent a lot of new added to the table short the wheelchair perspective. There were a ton of components set up for what might have given a more grounded finishing conveyance and punch, yet the greater part of those beats were one-note and spent prior in the film as opposed to associating a solid inward weaving as Searching had the option to do. I went in visually impaired, and it’s possible better that I did given that the trailer is fairly uncovering. I don’t think it had a sufficiently high roof in any case to overshadow any wild absence of desires I previously had. My solitary desire was in the possession of the makers, and the most saving grace this film will probably have on crowds is I expectation they become mindful of Searching and see it sooner or later… which is the thing that I expectation the greater part of all of you can detract from this. That was my #1 film of 2018, and Run will tumble to the wayside as fairly convincing yet totally forgettable. The story and pre-assembled relationship just needed more squeeze once the credits rolled. This film was average, best case scenario. Try not to accept individuals giving it 8 or 9. The plot has been seen ordinarily, it was excessively unreasonable, and the closure failed. They attempted to showcase it as a loathsomeness/spine chiller however nothing about it is exciting. It’s a dramatization completely. I will say however, the entertainers did astounding with what they were given. Sarah Paulson was her standard sDemon Slayer the Movie: Mugen Train, great, not honor commendable. Be that as it may, Kiera Allen truly captured everyone’s attention. She made the film (which delayed for what seemed like 2 hours) watchable. In the event that you appreciated The Act or have nothing else to watch, give it a go. What’s the point of messing with this poop. It resembles a low lease endeavor at a spine chiller yet you definitely know the closure. The faltering endeavors at tension are more irritating than anything. It’s a terrible lifetime film to be straightforward. Furthermore, I like lifetime motion pictures! It’s additionally excessively coordinated, the music is exhausted and the acting isn’t incredible
2 notes · View notes
tubaterry · 5 years
Text
FSo one of those financial news outlets posted this goofy shit
Tumblr media
And good lord.  
“Struggling”
(First: this is a hypothetical family of four, generated to represent “high earning middle class” living in an expensive area)
But then I got curious and actually dug in.  So, aside from the lazy proofreading errors (few hundred bucks off), and the weird pile of disorganization that I have to guess comes from the fact that this was built by people who have never had to think about what it costs to live... (you know, aside from giving financially  comfortable people an escape from having to think about how far they are from average and how precarious average is)
fuck that was a run on
Anyway....
the numbers themselves, at least for the cost-of-living? Honestly, they’re feasible.  Not average, but somewhere like San Francisco, realistic.
Except for the mortgage payments, that seemed wicked low.  I jabbed the numbers into Zillow until I got near the claimed value:
Tumblr media
Which sent me on this weird side tangent where I compared a bunch of data points from most of the “Relevant Cities” line at the bottom.
Tumblr media
That whole page is entirely unsurprising:
No matter how you crunch the numbers, the median income (two income household) in at least these major markets cannot realistically/safely get you a median house. 
Even better: In order to save up enough to get close to the safe zone for buying, you’ve gotta save probably about 2 full years of income.  
Even bester: rent is fuckass ridiculous more expensive than buying in most of these markets (Except, surprisingly to me, Denver, where it’s a toss-up)
...
...
Right, where was I?
Oh yeah, “middle class” and “struggling” on $350k.  Fuck off with that.
I finally got back on topic.  I dumped that budget into my own spreadsheet and did the same locality comparison there.  But I also reorganized it a bit - pay for your necessities first, then whatever’s left have fun, right?
Feed the kids, get to work, pay the phone bill, whatever.  As I looked up the numbers, this hypothetical family spent more than average but again, not wildly outside of norms.  (I did notice the $6000 on entertainment tho. what the shit?)
But then I started filling out the details for each of those cities again, based on local averages.  
Woof.  New York City.  The average person there trying to own the average house has $1000 left after paying for food shelter.  A YEAR.  And again, owning is cheaper than renting.
Taking care of the kids? Trying to getting transported around?  Honestly I gave up.  I didn’t even bother trying to look up public transit prices because like... ditching the car, at best, got you back up to ZERO.
Tumblr media
Bah, whatever.  Here’s what I finished: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iqkt1WrF93jExFUo0aclIiX1Qn6guJaY3kpKwNdNA3c/edit#gid=0
I spent like 4 hours on it (thanks ADHD hyperfocus), which is about 3 1/2 longer than Marketwatch spent writing that shit article i’m not even gonna link.  A bored nerd did better digging than that particular paid journalist.  Good job finance people.
(Side note, also today, Tesla’s stock took a bad turn because, despite record manufacutring, they didn’t hit their targets.  Finance people realy love claiming they have their finger on the pulse of the world and they know what’s going on, but Elon Musk’s been around too long for the entire finance world to lose their shit at a Musk company failing to meet promises.  That dude is constitutionally incapable of making a promise that can be met fully.
Also, unionize everything he’s ever touched.  fuck him and his overworking, underpaying, self-centered face)
5 notes · View notes
antoine-roquentin · 6 years
Link
One of the pretenses of right-wing energy policy is that conservatives support a “level playing field,” upon which energy sources can compete without subsidies. Let the market decide!
As I have written many times, this is a juvenile notion. Markets are powerful tools for directing private capital and innovation, useful in the right circumstances. But the idea that there ever has been, or ever can be, an open, unbiased, “free” market for energy sources is a fantasy that should stay in the college library with the Ayn Rand novels. It is analytically inert; it does nothing to illuminate whether current markets are working or help us decide how best to use markets to serve our greater goals.
The fundamental reason the “free market” ideal is unhelpful in energy is that it’s impossible to ever truly settle what is and isn’t a market-distorting subsidy. Some subsidies, like explicit cash grants or tax breaks, are easy enough to identify, but beyond that there is a whole complex world of implicit subsidies.
If an energy source has negative impacts that are not incorporated in its market price (negative “externalities,” in the jargon), that means other people are paying for those impacts. The source is implicitly subsidized.
Here’s the thing: Every energy source and energy industry has both positive and negative externalities. Deciding which ones “distort markets,” which ones count as implicit subsidies (or implicit taxes) virtually always comes down to a subjective judgment.
And the implicit subsidies dwarf the explicit subsidies, so arguing about the latter while unable to agree on the former is uniquely pointless.
In practice, most political disputes over subsidies just end up obscuring values-based arguments about what kind of future we want behind a veil of pseudo-objective economic jargon. One’s own favored energy sources receive commonsense support; the other side’s energy sources are on corporate welfare. And so it goes.
This week brought an excellent example, in the form of a new paper from Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE), a clean-energy advocacy group composed of retired military and business leaders. It attempts to put a number on one of the great, neglected implicit subsidies for oil: the costs to the US military of defending oil supplies, everything from guarding shipping lanes to maintaining troop commitments in key oil-producing nations.
The number, it turns out, is high: $81 billion a year at the low end, which is almost certainly conservative.
But is that a subsidy for oil? It is certainly one way oil dependence has shaped the country, its history, and its institutions — one of countless ways — but does putting a dollar figure on it and calling it a “market distortion” clarify anything or convince anyone?
We will ponder those questions in a moment, but first, a quick look at the study.
Given that almost any military procurement or deployment has multiple, overlapping objectives, it is obviously difficult to pick out exactly which ones are devoted to protecting oil supplies. Consequently, the methodology for a study like this is going to be full of assumptions and judgment calls. But SAFE did its best to stay reasonably conservative.
Its research surveyed the literature on the costs of defending oil supplies, eliminated some of the extreme estimates on the high and low ends, settled on six core studies, and then updated the numbers in those studies based on current DOD costs. The idea was to get at least a rough sense of how much the US military currently spends guarding oil.
That’s how SAFE developed the $81-billion-a-year estimate, which represents 16 percent of DOD’s base annual budget. “Spread out over the 19.8 million barrels of oil consumed daily in the U.S. in 2017,” SAFE writes, “the implicit subsidy for all petroleum consumers is approximately $11.25 per barrel of crude oil, or $0.28 per gallon of transportation fuel.”
That’s a lot! But it’s almost certainly too low.
One conservative move in the analysis was to exclude DOD’s Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) budget, which basically covers the incremental costs, over and above the base DOD budget, of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. By excluding OCO, SAFE does not count those wars among the costs of defending oil.
Some of the retired military leaders it interviewed questioned that assumption.
“I would make the case that the OCO spending is related to oil protection,” said former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman. “More than half the Defense budget is for the security of Persian Gulf oil.” His comments were echoed by numerous other ex-military officials.
If the OCO costs, or some portion of them, are included in the tally, the subsidy number obviously rises, “to over $13 per barrel or $0.31 per gallon.”
And that’s still only direct military costs, which are just one piece of the puzzle. The economists Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz have done extraordinary work attempting to tally up the full costs of the wars, including higher oil prices, debt service, obligations to returning veterans, lost wages, lost lives, and much else. They estimated the total at somewhere between $4 and $6 trillion.
If you take the midpoint estimate of $5 trillion, “a conservative estimate of the per gallon cost for these wars easily exceeds $30 per barrel (over $0.70 per gallon) over a 20-year period.” And that’s separate from the other $0.28 per gallon SAFE calculated from DOD’s base annual budget.
Add all that up, and it’s close to a $1 subsidy for a gallon of gas. That roughly translates to a subsidy of $100 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions. That’s a lot to pay to destroy the atmosphere!
Now, of course, people of good faith can disagree about the right estimate, whether $81 billion or something higher. Like I said, there are plenty of judgment calls about what to include in the tally.
But no one can justify the current practice of US government agencies, which is to put the cost of defending global oil supplies at zero dollars.
Yes, zero. When assessing policies meant to reduce oil consumption, agencies give no weight at all to the benefits of reduced military spending. SAFE puts it this way, in its striking opening sentence: “According to the calculations of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the cost to the United States of defending the global oil supply is zero.”
Why do they do this? It has to do with the way DOD is budgeted. To make a long story short, the assumption is that if the money wasn’t spent defending oil, it would go to some other military objective. DOD budgets would not decline, and thus there would be no savings to taxpayers. Thus: $0.
Obviously that’s silly. Just because the money would be budgeted to something else doesn’t mean it’s imaginary. The whole point is that reducing reliance on oil would free up that money to do other things.
“If we can reduce our dependence on oil, we could reduce our presence in the Gulf and use the funds for other critical military priorities, like cybersecurity or hypersonic weapons,” said General Duncan McNabb, former commander of the US Transportation Command. “We would make different choices that would make us safer and more secure.”
These are the perpetually overlooked “opportunity costs” of oil — all the other stuff we could be doing if we weren’t hunched over the globe, guarding our black gold.
Federal agencies shouldn’t ignore those costs. Policies that reduce oil dependence should be credited in some way for also reducing the costs of oil protection. In that sense, it very much makes sense to frame oil-protection costs as subsidies for oil.
The language of “subsidies” often obscures an essentially moral argument
But I wonder whether the language of “subsidies” is really the right way to understand what’s going on here. (I have no idea if it’s effective messaging that can sway policymakers or the public; maybe so! That’s a separate question.)
We defend oil because we depend on it, and so does everybody else. It’s the lifeblood of the global economy; controlling it makes us powerful. As Vice President Dick Cheney said in 2004: “Oil is unique in that it is so strategic in nature. We are not talking about soapflakes or leisurewear here. Energy is truly fundamental to the world’s economy. The Gulf War was a reflection of that reality.”
Everything is a reflection of that reality. Because oil is fundamental to our economy and our ability to project power, it shapes our foreign policy in myriad direct and indirect ways. Securing oil supply is not always the proximate or primary cause of what we do — it’s too simple to say we “fought wars for oil” — but it always sets the conditions and limits of our engagement. It’s always a baseline. We simply cannot afford to do things that might seriously threaten our control over the energy that runs our economy and our military.
You can draw a line around some part of that geopolitical and military maneuvering and call it a “subsidy” — for oil producers? for oil consumers? for the military itself? — but where you draw that line will always come down to subjective judgment. Oil powers everything, so everything is, in some way or another, about oil.
To call this maintenance of global status a “subsidy” is to translate the language of security, power, and moral tradeoffs into the language of economics. But does that help us understand it any better? Does it convince anyone?
People these days seem to think the language of economics has a kind of magical power, as though money, in the end, is all people really care about — as though all other concerns must be translated to dollar values to have any weight.
I’m skeptical about that. (I think it has more to do with the outsized influence of economics on American elites than it does with real-world sociology.) I can’t imagine anyone who currently supports the fossil fuel-based global order being convinced to oppose it by the realization that it knocks the equivalent $1.74 off their monthly paycheck.
People come to their political opinions based on stories and narratives, based on identity affiliation and sorting, not based on nickel-and-dime calculations regarding their own household budgets. We are social creatures, not the calculating self-interest maximizers of economic lore.
If I wanted to convince someone that US oil dependence is bad, I wouldn’t focus first, or at all, on the few cents it adds to their daily expenses. I would begin with a moral argument.
To wit: The world’s countries have long been trapped in a corrupt struggle for finite resources that has carried untold colonialist oppression and ecological ruin in its wake. Oil has sullied everything it touches, very much including the US government. It has led us to ally with evil regimes, to empower autocrats, to bully vulnerable populations, to start unjust and pointless wars, to foul our land, water, and air, and to bloat the size of our military beyond all reason — all while we neglect the needs of US citizens at home.
Perhaps at one time it could have been argued that the benefits outweigh the costs. But climate change has settled that argument, as has the plunging cost of energy alternatives. We now understand that the costs oil dependence are potentially existential and that the costs of freeing ourselves from oil are manageable.
i like how this article begins to grapple with the notion that military control over oil is how america maintains a global empire, but backs off before it realizes that all this military spending is really a net surplus for america because it ensures the dollar is the global currency sovereign, thus america can just print whatever it needs to buy whatever it want because other countries are obligated to get their hands on it to buy and sell goods on the international market.
61 notes · View notes
ffairytalevillain · 2 years
Text
Hometown isolation really hits hard damn.
Moving away from your hometown really is the best thing you can ever do, specially if you’re like me and live in a tiny village with a 98% white population and basically 0 infrastructure.
Like exploring and moving away with the best thing I ever did. I lived in Derby, London, and Bognor Regis [for a month]
BUT finishing uni meant moving back home cause renting in this economy? no thanks. but it meant leaving London, somewhere with so much an going back home where I can get one bus an hour to take me to the slightly better town with slightly more shops. The nearest bigger town is 45 mins away and the nearest city is 2 hours away.
and of course all my friends all up and moved away too so I don’t have any friends back home either. So i’m stuck with zero access to anywhere because the public transport sucks, i have no friends around here, so i’m stuck with my family only.
It’s so much more isolating than you think it can be. just being stuck with only the internet for company and even then, the people on the internet don’t wanna talk to you.
1 note · View note
wannabe-placemaker · 4 years
Text
University Galleria?
Tumblr media
If you’re anything like I was in middle school (and hopefully you’re not for a ton of reasons), when you think of college you think of 4 years on a manicured, historic campus where you’ll be groomed into the next titan of industry, whatever industry that may be. You assume that a bachelor’s degree will cement a quality of life that will be better than your parents’, or if they were college grads, a life that will as comfortable as they had. That’s the basket of goods that has been sold to pretty much every American born since Animal House was released. That promise is no longer a guarantee thanks to ballooning costs and a one size fits all solution to creating a competitive 21st century workforce.
Personally, I spent hours upon hours researching schools because my parents were zero help when it came to choosing a college. Their advice had always been “work hard so you can get into a good college” without any definition of what defined ‘a good college’. They’d bought the same basket of goods that everyone’s been sold. I knew that my family had the means to help me out with my tuition no matter what. My mom would work 3 jobs if it meant I got to go to the college of my dreams because that’s just the way she is. I of course didn’t want that, so I focused on school’s that meant 100% of demonstrated financial need and that had a good return on investment (% of students with jobs after graduation and high incomes 15 years out). This wasn’t supposed to be a Colgate University shout out, but that’s where all of my experience comes from so here we are.
What I really wanted to get at here is that Colgate University is the model of college that everyone expects: beautiful campus, quality professors, opportunities for learning and social development galore. The thing is, a Colgate model is really only accessible to the ‘top tier’ of students. (Top tier could also mean Daddy’s money, but with a 23% acceptance rate it’s still a top tier in terms of resources.) We need options for those that can’t afford $30,000 a year bills while also giving up 4 years worth of income. I know we’ve all seen the graphs that show that giving up those working years is made up for with higher salaries down the road, but from what I can see those salaries are too far down the line for people that are drowning in debt now.
We need options for adults to gain more skills across the board that is accessible and tailored for regional economies. There is often a rural ‘brain drain’ where the brightest kids from poor areas leave as soon as they can, which leads to skill gaps in local and regional workforces. Those gaps often go hand in hand with population decline, which wreaks havoc on former commercial strongholds like the shopping mall. Anchors are leaving left and right and there’s a swath of empty space across semi-rural America. What if there was a Federal block grant that could be used for adult education in local and regional areas? I’m sure some type of program like this exists on a small scale, but if it does I sure haven’t seen it working. Imagine taking an old Sears at the end of a mall and breaking it into classrooms, maker spaces, computer labs, or whatever else a community needs to train workers that could be utilized locally.
For example, my hometown is Erie, Pennsylvania; it is known for having one of the poorest ZIP codes in the country, population/economic decline, the pizza bomber, and great sunsets. Our primary mall, the Millcreek Mall, is the commercial keystone of the area. If you need anything in that city, you go to where Peach Street meets I-79 and head to the mall with the 4th most leasable retail space in the US. It consists of 5 anchor sized spaces, many of which have changed hands over the past decade. Having good foot traffic from tourists (0% sales tax on clothes and a short trip from Canada) keeps this mall alive, but the mall serves tourists better than it does the local community. Erie also has 5 universities and there are talks of a community college. This community college project has been debated since I was a baby, and I don’t believe anyone has actually taken classes yet.
When the next anchor inevitably leaves the Millcreek Mall, I imagine the gut reaction will be to find another large retailer to fill the space as that occupancy is tied to the leases of the other tenants. As opposed to another retail space that will provide low paying retail jobs and medium priced goods that tourists want sans sales tax, what if we used that space to train workers that Erie could actually use? At one time, GE Trains was the largest employer in town with other manufacturing making up the bulk of resident’s employment. The largest growing industry is healthcare, generally driven by UPMC and tourism driven by wineries and Presque Isle beaches.
Who am I to say what skills Erie’s workforce needs most? I’m not an employer and I don’t even live there anymore. All I know is that people there need options. So many of my friends are saddled with mountainous debt for degrees they aren’t utilizing as they work retail in the mall. For those that are graduating high school in Erie, many of them working in that mall like I did, are going to go to college without any idea why other than they’ve always been told that’s the key to a better life. If an option was literally right in front of them, that was low cost and taught them skills that local employers are demanding, couldn’t that save them a lot of time and financial hardship? They can’t repo knowledge, but they will still take your car. There’s an aging population and a growing healthcare sector; what are skills that are not taught in K-12 that would be valuable to the industry? Things that don’t necessarily require four years of classroom learning. With Erie Insurance being the only Fortune 500 employer in the area, perhaps they could teach courses on insurance coding or underwriting or risk management that could be applied to multiple companies. Getting employers involved in the process will be key to actually producing workers that will be valuable for the area. The city of Erie school district faces newsworthy financial hardship to a point they had to close and sell a school. I don’t really trust them to be teaching students about fiscal responsibility or personal finance, so having civic courses that teach folks how to do taxes, apply for a loan, not live on credit cards, register to vote, could also be included as gen ed courses potentially in this space.
People graduate college and have nothing from it but a mountain of debt and a piece of paper. Many don’t even get that far and drop out with too much debt and no piece of paper. Heck this space could also function as a college prep place. Somewhere to go before you commit to college. Personal opinion, but we should be prepping Erie for climate change. We’re going to be in a prime position with our access to fresh water, open space, and a climate that should be suitable for agriculture and people. We’re going to need infrastructure improvements, construction, transportation solutions that get us away from personal automobiles, environmental workers that shore up our beaches to prevent erosion and to protect our wildlife, urban planners, community activists that can shape the future of Erie for people in Erie. There are levels of thinking that go into all of these things, which means we’ll need folks with Master’s degrees probably, but I guarantee we’ll need skilled workers on the frontlines actually getting things accomplished. People think ‘no college required’ means ‘no skills required’ but we all know that’s not the case. Whether it’s customer service, stocking shelves, trading stocks, digging ditches, building a rocket, or picking up roadkill, there’s skill and often art involved in quality results. Tapping into the talent across the country does not require that everyone go to a four year public university for free, it requires giving localities the resources to create citizens that want to make their world, and hopefully their communities, a place they’re proud of.
0 notes
bren-mc-bcu · 6 years
Text
City River Blues
Went to the river Seeking inspiration, Saw dead fish floating Dead men boating And condoms galore. Sat by the river Wondering, From where cometh Dat bloody smell, For if I waz wize And I could tell The world would know. This is our river It runs through our lives This is our river Our shit-coloured river, It’s had it But it’s ours.
This river speaks Every boot had a body Every shirt had a friend, And the old boys Say they shall all meet Where every river ends.
Here by the river Joe Public wrote songs And ships came From far away, Capitalism lived here, Ships left from here, To cheat someone, Somewhere. This river is on the map The Queen came here, The King came here, Hitler bombed it, Joe Bloggs bombed it, A hundred factories Bomb it every day, But this river won’t go away, They say.
Went to the river Seeking inspiration, Got eco-depression, Got stopped and searched, Got called a coon, Got damned lunges, Got city river blues. from Propa Propaganda (Bloodaxe, 1996) - Benjamin Zephaniah
ANALYSIS
Context (what else was going on in the world at this time?)
23 to 26 January – Much of Britain is struck with sub-zero temperatures and snowstorms. Schools and transport are disrupted.
5 February – The first genetically modified food products go on sale in the UK
17 April – the Duke and Duchess of York are divorced after ten years of marriage and four years after their separation.
11 May – Manchester United win the FA Cup for a record ninth time by beating Liverpool 1–0 and also become the first team to win the double of the league title and FA Cup twice.
26 June – England's hopes of being European champions of football for the first time are ended with a penalty shootout defeat to Germany after a 1–1 draw in the semi-final.
12 July – South African President Nelson Mandela visits the UK.
30 July – Alan Shearer becomes the most expensive footballer in the world in a £15,000,000 transfer from Blackburn Rovers to Newcastle United.
14 August – Unemployment has fallen to 2,126,200 – its lowest level since the summer of 1991.
5 September – Matthew Harding, Vice-Chairman of Chelsea FC, makes a £1,000,000 donation to the Labour Party – the largest donation made to the party by any individual.  
Meaning
The Poet went to the Birmingham city river for inspiration and what he found is what he expected but at the same time surprised. What he found was an urban grimy scene of disappointment. He’s disgusted but he appreciates that it is his cities river. He then starts to distinguish the history of the river by saying what items belong here and who partners that item. He then delves further into more topical times, saying that capitalism has lived there, the queen and king from different eras have been there. He then lists the people who have bombed the city and sums up that the industrial city of Birmingham even though it was bombed, the river still stands!
He then concludes at what he experienced at the river He went there for inspiration but what he experienced was totally flipped; he got eco-depression from what smell and scenery of the river. He got stopped by police and searched and then had racist abuse lashed at him He doesn’t say if this is linked but it makes you think that the whole racial profiling stigma based on today’s society. He then goes on to say he suffered from damned lungs, this suggests the smell was horrible and maybe even there was pollution of tobacco and factories. Furthermore, he said that he got City River Blues, linking it back to the name of the poem. This suggests three things to me, water is normally blue but from what he said about the colour then we can gather that is not what he means from that. So in conclusion the poem links to the Birmingham colour blue which is used for the BCFC’s jersey colour and a nickname for the club and fans. But the real meaning I believe is that he meant he got the blues from seeing the river which also links to the previous line “Got eco-depression”, showing that he was severely depressed from what he seen. Therefore the title/poem is very strong as there is a lot of meaning behind it with the links of the city and depression, the use of word-play is very smart and overall is a great poem.
 Syntax
The way the poem is ordered is like a story from when he got to the river, then tells us what he has stumbled upon, describes it and then comes to an end by saying what he witnessed and what he’s taken away from it.
2 notes · View notes
Photo
Tumblr media
New Post has been published on https://fitnesshealthyoga.com/8-minimalist-vacation-packing-tips-i-absolutely-swear-by/
8 Minimalist Vacation Packing Tips I Absolutely Swear By
Tumblr media
I’m an under-packer by nature. I try to travel with one carry-on only (usually a backpack)—even when I’m leaving the country for a while and even when I’m traveling with my 3-year-old son. Sounds crazy, I know. And while it’s true this method has occasionally led me to seriously questionable hiking footwear (and definitely led me to 10 days in Scandinavia with only one pair of pants), for the most part, it is a truly liberating way to travel. Doing a one-backpack trip forces me to sit down and think about what I—and my son—truly need and what we can live with out. It almost turns last-minute packing an hour before the airport drive into a moving meditation on materialism and our existence as a human society… almost.
But even with the most minimalist of packing, I usually end up on a vacation with a decidedly un-minimalist schedule—and an overburdened frame of mind. There are hotels to book and tours to take and sights to see and reservations to make, not to mention inevitable souvenir shopping that completely undoes the whole one-backpack logic in the first place.
And after a week or so of that plus who knows how many flights/hours on the road? Well, I end up back home needing a vacation from my vacation. Sound familiar?
That’s why I decided it was time for me, the minimalist packer, to become and actual minimalist traveler—to plan a vacation that involved bringing, using, planning and doing as little as possible. Enter the plastic tiny house, a 170-square-foot energy-efficient home chilling (or rather, heating up) in the desert outside Phoenix, Arizona. (It was designed by Tiny House Nation host Zack Giffin, NBD). Just by the nature of choosing this as my temporary home, I was already hopping on the minimalist bandwagon. This particular 170-square-foot and super-energy-efficient tiny house made of plastic is a testimony to how little we can use if we just think creatively (and a sink that feeds gray water directly into the toilet system doesn’t hurt).
Tumblr media
Image: Courtesy of Tony Marinella.
That’s right. I headed to the Arizona desert in August to spend my vacation in 170 square feet with the bare necessities, no other humans and certainly no restaurant reservations. And just to make my minimalist vacation extra-official, I brought: one pair of shoes, six items of clothing (including underwear) and a toothbrush/toothpaste. And that’s it. And it was the best vacation I’ve taken in a long time.
Image: apedelman/Instagram.
So if you’re the type who thinks travel has to involve endless planning, scheduling, packing multiple suitcases, booking hotels, tours and dining options, think again. This is how deciding to take that minimalist vacation to a tiny house in the desert, packing essentially nothing, changed the game for this traveling mom.
Image: Courtesy of Jennifer Verrier.
Why you should take a minimalist vacation
It’s cheaper
That part’s a given. If you’re doing less, you’re spending less. Aim to spend on the bare-bones.
Lodging: No hotels! Aim for an affordable Airbnb, or better yet, arrange a free home exchange through a site like Kid & Coe.
Transportation: Bonus if you drive or take public transport to your destination rather than flying.
Food: Groceries, not restaurant bills.
Leave the entertainment part of the budget at $0—and see where it takes you.
It requires less planning beforehand
With an entertainment budget and schedule set at zero, you can save your at-home hours before the trip and those frantic last-minute Google searches for places to stay/eat/see. Instead, let your vacation “plans” involve walking out your door in the morning and seeing where your stroll takes you.
The getting-there part is way easier
Embarking on a six-hour (or 16-hour) flight is exhausting enough already. Do you really need to add multiple pieces of luggage and a trip to baggage claim to your already (literally) burdened shoulders? No. Pack only the essentials—and then remove five things from your bag before you go. You’ll be surprised what you can do without.
It forces you to be resourceful
I stand by the statement, “You’ll be surprised what you can do without.” That said, for my tiny house trip, I wildly under-packed—on purpose, of course—and in my minimization discovered two things I hadn’t packed it turned out I sorely missed, especially in the dry Arizona summer: a hair tie and lip balm. But you’d better believe I scavenged through that house to find an old elastic tag that I used to tie my hair up for the whole trip. Oh, and I absolutely put kitchen olive oil on my lips every night. #NoRegrets
It forces you to focus on yourself (for better or worse)
Guess what. When you’re alone in a tiny house in the desert (or a cabin in the woods or a yurt on the mountain or whatever your preferred solo-minimalist vacation locale may be), you cannot just keep busy and la-la-la your way through life and ignore whatever it is you really need/need to work on/need to give up. Your shit will rise up to the surface, and you will have to confront it. But hey, the only way out is through, baby.
I do want to note here that I don’t equate a minimalist vacation to “roughing it.” Any sort of camping/backpacking/what-have-you trip that involves trekking through the woods, setting up a tent, conjuring up a fire and all your meals and hauling ass to some dark bug-infested corner of the forest in order to “go to the bathroom” is all very admirable—but it’s not quite what I mean by minimalist. Because that shit involves work. Camping/backpacking, strangely like taking a fancy multi-hotel tour of Europe, does involve a lot of planning and preparing (isn’t that literally the Boy Scout motto?) and pretty much constant effort to keep that whole staying-alive-in-the-wilderness thing afloat.
For me, in this moment, I wanted a trip that still landed solidly in the vacation category of travel: somewhere warm and habitable with pre-appointed (indoor) lodgings and an actual toilet. You know, the basics that roughing it doesn’t quite provide. And I lucked out in that my tiny house was pre-stocked with some basic food as well: milk, coffee, eggs, butter. All of this is to say that this precise midpoint between roughing it and your typical vacation got me exactly where I wanted to get: the middle of the desert with absolutely nothing to do.
Image: Courtesy of Jennifer Verrier.
So, how do you take a minimalist vacation?
Book early
This is key both for planning-stress levels as well as pricing.
Pack light (duh)
See above re: items of clothing, toothbrush, sunscreen. I promise you can do it.
Don’t pack shoes—I mean it
This is my No. 1 packing tip for all forms of travel, but especially if you’re aiming for minimalism. You’re not going to a wedding here, nor are you climbing Everest. Whatever isolated locale you choose, plan to wear—not pack—one pair of sturdy, oh-so-comfortable footwear that will actually last you the whole week or however long you’re gone. If you’re heading to the hills, hiking boots. If you’re beaching it, Birkenstocks. As long as they’re comfy, who cares what they look like? Nobody will be looking at your feet anyway.
Get outside your comfort zone with food
Yes, sure, you have favorite meals and favorite recipes and favorite restaurants. But what’s something super-simple you can cook just for yourself literally every day for a week? Make yourself one big epic pot of soup and see how long it lasts or dive into the wondrous world of kitchari. It won’t be fancy, but you will be full. And just see how much brain space you end up with when you’re not thinking about meal planning every single day.
Move your body in new ways
This whole thing goes out the window if you sit in your tiny house like a rock for a week. You will not feel good if your minimalist vacation involves being horizontal the entire time. But no, you will not have access to SoulCycle or a hotel gym. So get creative. Take a walk, a hike, a run, a jump-around-the-lake-five-times. Try your hand at a solo at-home yoga practice even if you’ve only ever taken two classes before. Get in your body and see what feels good. Bonus points if you really see what feels good. You are on a solo vacation, after all.
Expect to go without
So, you’ve never gone a week without makeup? Or shampoo? What about deodorant? I see you cringing. But remember, this is your minimalist vacation. You are likely all alone—or as is so often my case, “alone” with a child in tow—and nobody cares about how your hair looks. Of course, this is not to say you should go a week without key prescription medication or brushing your teeth. But that hairdryer/concealer/five-step facial-moisturizing system? Leave it behind. And while you’re at it, see if you can leave your social media accounts behind too. I dare you.
Do pack one (tech-free) thing to “do”
Whether it’s that poetry book you’re reading (or writing!), a journal, a sketchbook or even your knitting, there will be times your mind needs a break from all that quiet time with itself. Give it one that will also fuel it.
For me, in my borrowed tiny house, the sheer lack of stuff to do—no tent-setting, fire-building, bear-repelling, or shit hole-scouting, but also no sightseeing, navigating, appointment-setting or museum-hopping—left me no choice but to face what I had come to face: myself. I wrote. I meditated. I walked. I cooked some eggs. I took the longest shower possible because, as opposed to my showers at home that are hastily sandwiched between dishes, laundry, lunch-packing, school drop-off and the workday (it’s a wonder working single moms shower at all, honestly), I had no schedule to rush off to, nothing to be inevitably late to and no reason to feel guilty or ashamed for happily standing under hot water for half an hour. Other than, you know, water waste and the environment. Damn it.
On my minimalist vacation, I had zero plans. I had to—I got to—face many small, strange situations and feelings that are entirely alien in my regular life: silence, solitude, boredom, ease, freedom, peace.
And guess what (this is the sixth and possibly most important reason to take a minimalist vacation)…
The effects extend way beyond the trip itself
All that solo soul-searching? You will definitely carry the aftereffects home with you. There’s nothing quite like a trip that’s based on packing/planning/paying/doing/using less to inspire you to take stock in your life and think about what you actually need going forward—you know, out of the tiny house and back into real life.
One thing’s for certain: You’ll never again forget to appreciate the value of a hair tie.
  Originally posted on SheKnows.
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function()n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments);if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n; n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)(window, document,'script','//connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); // Insert Your Facebook Pixel ID below. fbq('init', '1130306277008218'); fbq('track', 'PageView'); (function(d)var id="facebook-jssdk";if(!d.getElementById(id))var js=d.createElement("script"),ref=d.getElementsByTagName("script")[0];js.id=id,js.async=true,js.src="https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js",ref.parentNode.insertBefore(js,ref))(document)
Source link
0 notes
Link
One of the pretenses of right-wing energy policy is that conservatives support a “level playing field,” upon which energy sources can compete without subsidies. Let the market decide!
As I have written many times, this is a juvenile notion. Markets are powerful tools for directing private capital and innovation, useful in the right circumstances. But the idea that there ever has been, or ever can be, an open, unbiased, “free” market for energy sources is a fantasy that should stay in the college library with the Ayn Rand novels. It is analytically inert; it does nothing to illuminate whether current markets are working or help us decide how best to use markets to serve our greater goals.
The fundamental reason the “free market” ideal is unhelpful in energy is that it’s impossible to ever truly settle what is and isn’t a market-distorting subsidy. Some subsidies, like explicit cash grants or tax breaks, are easy enough to identify, but beyond that there is a whole complex world of implicit subsidies.
If an energy source has negative impacts that are not incorporated in its market price (negative “externalities,” in the jargon), that means other people are paying for those impacts. The source is implicitly subsidized.
Here’s the thing: Every energy source and energy industry has both positive and negative externalities. Deciding which ones “distort markets,” which ones count as implicit subsidies (or implicit taxes) virtually always comes down to a subjective judgment.
And the implicit subsidies dwarf the explicit subsidies, so arguing about the latter while unable to agree on the former is uniquely pointless.
In practice, most political disputes over subsidies just end up obscuring values-based arguments about what kind of future we want behind a veil of pseudo-objective economic jargon. One’s own favored energy sources receive commonsense support; the other side’s energy sources are on corporate welfare. And so it goes.
Various oil subsidies that oil fans don’t consider subsidies. (OSI)
This week brought an excellent example, in the form of a new paper from Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE), a clean-energy advocacy group composed of retired military and business leaders. It attempts to put a number on one of the great, neglected implicit subsidies for oil: the costs to the US military of defending oil supplies, everything from guarding shipping lanes to maintaining troop commitments in key oil-producing nations.
The number, it turns out, is high: $81 billion a year at the low end, which is almost certainly conservative.
But is that a subsidy for oil? It is certainly one way oil dependence has shaped the country, its history, and its institutions — one of countless ways — but does putting a dollar figure on it and calling it a “market distortion” clarify anything or convince anyone?
We will ponder those questions in a moment, but first, a quick look at the study.
Given that almost any military procurement or deployment has multiple, overlapping objectives, it is obviously difficult to pick out exactly which ones are devoted to protecting oil supplies. Consequently, the methodology for a study like this is going to be full of assumptions and judgment calls. But SAFE did its best to stay reasonably conservative.
Its research surveyed the literature on the costs of defending oil supplies, eliminated some of the extreme estimates on the high and low ends, settled on six core studies, and then updated the numbers in those studies based on current DOD costs. The idea was to get at least a rough sense of how much the US military currently spends guarding oil.
That’s how SAFE developed the $81-billion-a-year estimate, which represents 16 percent of DOD’s base annual budget. “Spread out over the 19.8 million barrels of oil consumed daily in the U.S. in 2017,” SAFE writes, “the implicit subsidy for all petroleum consumers is approximately $11.25 per barrel of crude oil, or $0.28 per gallon of transportation fuel.”
That’s a lot! But it’s almost certainly too low.
But which mission? Steven Jaffe/AFP/Getty Images
One conservative move in the analysis was to exclude DOD’s Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) budget, which basically covers the incremental costs, over and above the base DOD budget, of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. By excluding OCO, SAFE does not count those wars among the costs of defending oil.
Some of the retired military leaders it interviewed questioned that assumption.
“I would make the case that the OCO spending is related to oil protection,” said former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman. “More than half the Defense budget is for the security of Persian Gulf oil.” His comments were echoed by numerous other ex-military officials.
If the OCO costs, or some portion of them, are included in the tally, the subsidy number obviously rises, “to over $13 per barrel or $0.31 per gallon.”
And that’s still only direct military costs, which are just one piece of the puzzle. The economists Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz have done extraordinary work attempting to tally up the full costs of the wars, including higher oil prices, debt service, obligations to returning veterans, lost wages, lost lives, and much else. They estimated the total at somewhere between $4 and $6 trillion.
If you take the midpoint estimate of $5 trillion, “a conservative estimate of the per gallon cost for these wars easily exceeds $30 per barrel (over $0.70 per gallon) over a 20-year period.” And that’s separate from the other $0.28 per gallon SAFE calculated from DOD’s base annual budget.
Add all that up, and it’s close to a $1 subsidy for a gallon of gas. That roughly translates to a subsidy of $100 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions. That’s a lot to pay to destroy the atmosphere!
Now, of course, people of good faith can disagree about the right estimate, whether $81 billion or something higher. Like I said, there are plenty of judgment calls about what to include in the tally.
But no one can justify the current practice of US government agencies, which is to put the cost of defending global oil supplies at zero dollars.
Yes, zero. When assessing policies meant to reduce oil consumption, agencies give no weight at all to the benefits of reduced military spending. SAFE puts it this way, in its striking opening sentence: “According to the calculations of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the cost to the United States of defending the global oil supply is zero.”
Why do they do this? It has to do with the way DOD is budgeted. To make a long story short, the assumption is that if the money wasn’t spent defending oil, it would go to some other military objective. DOD budgets would not decline, and thus there would be no savings to taxpayers. Thus: $0.
Obviously that’s silly. Just because the money would be budgeted to something else doesn’t mean it’s imaginary. The whole point is that reducing reliance on oil would free up that money to do other things.
An alliance we’d have more time for if we weren’t mired in the Middle East.
“If we can reduce our dependence on oil, we could reduce our presence in the Gulf and use the funds for other critical military priorities, like cybersecurity or hypersonic weapons,” said General Duncan McNabb, former commander of the US Transportation Command. “We would make different choices that would make us safer and more secure.”
These are the perpetually overlooked “opportunity costs” of oil — all the other stuff we could be doing if we weren’t hunched over the globe, guarding our black gold.
Federal agencies shouldn’t ignore those costs. Policies that reduce oil dependence should be credited in some way for also reducing the costs of oil protection. In that sense, it very much makes sense to frame oil-protection costs as subsidies for oil.
But I wonder whether the language of “subsidies” is really the right way to understand what’s going on here. (I have no idea if it’s effective messaging that can sway policymakers or the public; maybe so! That’s a separate question.)
We defend oil because we depend on it, and so does everybody else. It’s the lifeblood of the global economy; controlling it makes us powerful. As Vice President Dick Cheney said in 2004: “Oil is unique in that it is so strategic in nature. We are not talking about soapflakes or leisurewear here. Energy is truly fundamental to the world’s economy. The Gulf War was a reflection of that reality.”
Everything is a reflection of that reality. Because oil is fundamental to our economy and our ability to project power, it shapes our foreign policy in myriad direct and indirect ways. Securing oil supply is not always the proximate or primary cause of what we do — it’s too simple to say we “fought wars for oil” — but it always sets the conditions and limits of our engagement. It’s always a baseline. We simply cannot afford to do things that might seriously threaten our control over the energy that runs our economy and our military.
You can draw a line around some part of that geopolitical and military maneuvering and call it a “subsidy” — for oil producers? for oil consumers? for the military itself? — but where you draw that line will always come down to subjective judgment. Oil powers everything, so everything is, in some way or another, about oil.
A heartless ghoul, yes, but the man knows the value of oil! Photo by Tom Benitez – Pool/Getty Images
To call this maintenance of global status a “subsidy” is to translate the language of security, power, and moral tradeoffs into the language of economics. But does that help us understand it any better? Does it convince anyone?
People these days seem to think the language of economics has a kind of magical power, as though money, in the end, is all people really care about — as though all other concerns must be translated to dollar values to have any weight.
I’m skeptical about that. (I think it has more to do with the outsized influence of economics on American elites than it does with real-world sociology.) I can’t imagine anyone who currently supports the fossil fuel-based global order being convinced to oppose it by the realization that it knocks the equivalent $1.74 off their monthly paycheck.
People come to their political opinions based on stories and narratives, based on identity affiliation and sorting, not based on nickel-and-dime calculations regarding their own household budgets. We are social creatures, not the calculating self-interest maximizers of economic lore.
If I wanted to convince someone that US oil dependence is bad, I wouldn’t focus first, or at all, on the few cents it adds to their daily expenses. I would begin with a moral argument.
To wit: The world’s countries have long been trapped in a corrupt struggle for finite resources that has carried untold colonialist oppression and ecological ruin in its wake. Oil has sullied everything it touches, very much including the US government. It has led us to ally with evil regimes, to empower autocrats, to bully vulnerable populations, to start unjust and pointless wars, to foul our land, water, and air, and to bloat the size of our military beyond all reason — all while we neglect the needs of US citizens at home.
Perhaps at one time it could have been argued that the benefits outweigh the costs. But climate change has settled that argument, as has the plunging cost of energy alternatives. We now understand that the costs oil dependence are potentially existential and that the costs of freeing ourselves from oil are manageable.
Oil used to be seen, rightly, as inescapable. But not any longer.
We know very well how to begin reducing our consumption of oil, through incremental policy steps including the one SAFE has relentlessly supported, fuel economy standards — the very ones the Trump administration is attempting to freeze.
We know of plenty of other steps we could take to get started, from increasing the cost of gasoline to increasing urban density and building out multimodal transportation systems.
And we know how, eventually, to squeeze oil almost entirely out of the economy. It won’t be simple. There’s no one-to-one trade between oil and renewable energy. We will need to electrify the economy, especially the transportation sector, and get current fossil fuel applications hooked up to an increasingly cleaner grid, so that all sectors have a path to zero carbon.
No oil involved. (Shutterstock)
But we know how to do it. We know how to get started and we know how to keep going. And we know, as the SAFE report lays out in painful detail, the incredible costs of persisting with the status quo. Every step we take down the path of reducing our reliance on oil is a step we take toward releasing ourselves from the debauched and exploitative power dynamic the world’s countries have been locked in for centuries.
A crash course in oil independence — something like the Green New Deal everyone’s talking about — would do more than quiet our cities, clean our air, stimulate our economy, and help slow climate change. It would free us to engage with the world with our best foot forward, unchained at last from the violence, oppression, and moral compromises our dependence on oil has forced upon us.
That freedom is, dare I say, priceless. We can put a dollar value on the costs of the status quo, and call those dollars “subsidies” — such language can be useful in certain contexts, especially when conservatives are waxing poetic about free markets — but we should not lose sight of what is fundamentally a moral argument.
We have been in a deal with the devil for a long time. Now we know how to get out. So we should.
Original Source -> Putting a dollar value on one of oil’s biggest subsidies: military protection
via The Conservative Brief
0 notes
coindex · 6 years
Photo
Tumblr media
How Blockchain Revol
How Blockchain Revolution is Going to Make Global Economy More Fair: Federico Pistono Interview Federico Pistono is a charismatic writer entrepreneur researcher angel investor TV presenter and public speaker who routinely tours around the world lecturing on exponential technologies and their economic impact on society. In 2012 Pistono wrote the book "Robots Will Steal Your Job But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and be Happy" which became an international success. Recently he published another book Startup Zero to help his compatriots Italians get a better understanding of the startup culture. In addition Federico has more than a decade of professional experience in different fields that vary from IT Management and human machine interaction to screenwriting and directing. We speak with Federico Pistono about his views on how Blockchain could really change the current global economic model that is unfair how close we came to the AI ruling the world and how could we find our place in the emerging paradigm. CG: How did you get involved in the fintech industry? FP: Computers always fascinated me and systems in general and just learning new things.I have a background in mathematics and computer science so that was double spending and operating research data structures algorithms. Those were things that really interested me at the mathematical level. To then think that those principles could be applied for social change it was kind of a love at first sight of blending these things together. I started programming when I was 12 or 13 and got into Blockchain around 2011 when I read the Bitcoin whitepaper written by Satoshi. At the time I was very interested in the Byzantine generals problem. Then I was one of the first people to get into Ethereum and from then on it just grew more and more. Now I am leading the Blockchain theme at Hyperloop Transportation Technologies which is this new tech thats essentially a supersonic speed travel on a train. So you have an evacuated tube you got a tube you suck out the air you put a capsule inside with about 30 people and then you have got magnetic levitation-passive magnetic levitation its called Indutrack. And you can just move this thing at super high speed- supersonic so more than 1200 km/h. CG: What would you say about the relationship between AI and Blockchain? FP: Regarding AI and Blockchain I would say one of the biggest issues probably is how we decide to structure the algorithm and the incentive mechanisms that we put into the system because in the end you get your reward. AIs today and probably for the foreseeable future are not really intelligent in any sort. They perform narrow tasks and they optimize for specific things that we tell them to do and so we dont know really know how to give them the right constraints. If we just say hey make profit and do this they may find all sorts of ways around to perform that task very well to optimize for that factor. Now we have a system where there is a huge centralization of power centralization of capital centralization of risk and in particular the big players are de-risking everything by hedging the risk on the small guys particularly in developing countries. I think every time that you have a shift in technology or dramatic shift you have the ability to change things by creating a new incentive structure by changing the rules of the game. Right now that is that moment that seismic event that can change the incentive structure and the mechanisms underneath. The Blockchain is a way to do it distributively securely and I think we can do great things but they dont come by themselves we have to actively pursue a specific goal and to agree on how to design these new systems. CG: Are we ready for above-mentioned inventions or do we have to evolve further? FP: I think currently we are not ready for this change. Well first of all the technology isnt ready. We havent figured out still so many things about Blockchain systems. We are still in the very very early stage of the protocols and of the mechanisms that we are building. I mean we dont know how to scale we dont know how to do it securely we dont know how to do it fast enough. We really dont have the game theory behind it; we dont know how all these things are going to be put together. We dont have the social infrastructure and the technological infrastructure. But its a feedback loop its a system of systems so by interacting with the system by allowing ourselves to make mistakes and to do it faster and faster we create resilience in the network. Where a single entity might die or go bust the overall network captures some of that value and then you can increase the value again again and again. Hopefully we can find something thats not just resilient but its anti-fragile so that by stressing the system it becomes stronger- something like your body. When you go to the gym and you do exercise you actually stress your muscles and you break them apart and because you break them apart they become stronger afterwards so thats an anti-fragile system. We should do that for the economic system and also for decision-making and everything. Since we know that we are going to make mistakes- we should design a system that gets better as we make more mistakes because we learn from them instead of just repeating the same shit over and over and not learning from it which is mostly what has been happening recently. CG: Tell us about your books FP: I wrote a few books. First one is called Robots Will Steal Your Job But Thats OK. I wrote it six years ago. Kind of unsuspected time I was told I was a charlatan I didnt have a PhD in economics I wasnt a professor from MIT or Oxford I should just stick to my computer science and not talk about these things how little do you know. Then two to three years later professors from MIT and Oxford have written the papers that say exactly the same things with exactly the same numbers but using different methodologies so they were kind of validating everything that I was saying. Thus I went from a charlatan to an oracle. It was kind of weird but you know same stuff just has caused different reactions from people. Then I wrote another book a fiction book this time called Tale of Two Futures. Its a short sci-fi. It shows two different paths we can take. One where things have taken the decentralized open source model and a more sensible approach on how to use technology to better society and the other is this hyper-capitalistic narrowly focused mindless repetitive work that leads to a dystopian society. The third book I wrote was a book for Italians about how to build startups because in Italy no one knows how to build startups. Very few people know and the few people who do they leave the country and go elsewhere and they never tell anyone back in town. Now they call startups everything like if a pizzeria were a startup. No thats not a startup- a startup is something else! So I wrote this most recent book thats called Startup Zero.0. To kind of give the idea that we are not even step one we are at step zero we should get the basics first and understand them. So I have been doing that a lot of that. I also have a TV show in Italy on national TV its called Codice La vita è digitale it means Code Life is Digital. We have had about two or three mln people watching it every week. First it was just about Blockchain and Bitcoin. We went to BitFury China Japan we interviewed Roger Ver; we had a bunch of people there. I think it was very well done the episode on Blockchain. We did one on IoT smart cities the cognitive revolution artificial intelligence robotics synthetic biology genetic engineering. We are bringing these emerging technologies to the wider audience. Also I am an angel investor. I invest in about 20 companies so far- mostly in Blockchain but also I am moving to the medical sector things that I think will help humanity in one way or another. I try to give my contribution in some way. Now I am spending most of my time doing Hyperloop. CG: What does that mean Blockchain Revolution? How will it change the globe? FP: I think one of the biggest opportunities we have is to use autonomous agents to automate all things that should be automated particularly in bureaucracy and in how systems interoperate. There is no reason why I should go ask a person to verify my identity or to stamp something and wait for months for a paper to come back or fax it somewhere I mean some places still need a fax machine. A lot of this stuff is because you dont trust the computer to verify that transaction or that information that is being conveyed. Now the Blockchain can solve that. Not only can it solve it but it can solve it systematically securely and for anybody. Also its censorship resistant not just the government censoring information but also a company not releasing some of the data that maybe you should own. For example from all the social networks the only one that gives you the contacts is LinkedIn. Everyone else doesnt allow you to export the contacts. They are your contacts! Why shouldnt you be allowed to have your own contacts and information about them? Its crazy but this happens! Think about all the corruption that happens throughout the world- trillions of dollar worth of value and hundreds of millions of people in distress who can be forced into doing things because they have no legal recourse. The Blockchain can help all these people. Before it helps the First World it can help the long tail of the supply chain thats now being held hostage by the owners of capital who have an unfair advantage in that game. They can be less efficient than them but still win just because they have access to cheap capital. That is really unfair. All the risk is on these people who have no power no legal recourse and their lives are miserable because the game is tilted. The game is unfair. Blockchain can allow for that to change but we need to actively pursue that goal because it will not come automatically by itself. I think thats a moral responsibility that we have. I think we have to step up and take that responsibility. Follow us on Facebook
http://ift.tt/2A4OePm
0 notes