A Hippie and Me

Walden Pond, MA, where Henry David Thoreau spent two years of his life living as naturally as possible. Work of QuarterCircleS, license: c.c.a.s.a 2.5 gen

One of the great joys of riding Greyhound is all the interesting people you meet along the way.

On my way from Atlanta to Seattle, I believe the Missouri portion of the route, I met a man who lives his principles every day. A radical environmentalist, not of the political sort but the real kind, he was on his way to a commune that his friend had set up in the mountains of Colorado. There they import nearly nothing, live almost totally off the land, and recycle every last thing they can.

They use no electricity and have no modern communications except a single old telegraph line to the ranger station reserved for emergencies. There are no roads near where they live, and they wake up every morning to a Rocky Mountain sunrise and a day of their own maintenance. He has been living this way for 40 years now, and is extremely satisfied with his life, where he eats the fruit of his own hands and sleeps under the roof of his own construction. He works FOR no employer, but rather works WITH his friends. He has little material wealth, but lots of heart, and a high quality of life.

As you probably know by now, I am not a radical environmentalist. Still, of this kind I can very much appreciate as I suspect anyone can who has an open mind. We talked of many things, about how you can catch rainwater on your roof, clean it, and drink it, about how vegetables made at home are better then the ones you buy at the store (which my family, many of whose members still grow their own vegetables, knows very much for certain to be true) and sensible policies towards hunting. We talked about business ideas, and how to bring recycling and good living to the people of the cities.

I brought up recycling human urine, a relatively easy process and one that can render high quality drinking water. He thought it was a great idea, for people like me. Unfortunately its greatest likely customer, California, probably wouldn't agree. They would think of it as icky, even if it makes sense and gives them cleaner, safer water then their own pipes, which it does, as there is not one ounce of open soil in a closed, above ground machine.

Here's another idea: theoretically, you can put nuclear waste in a highly shielded barrel, and then drop it in a large pool of seawater. The result will be that as the barrel absorbs the radiation, it will heat to a tremendous temperature, and then turn the seawater in to steam. The salt and impurities and all uncleanness will be left behind and you will have as close to pure water as can be acquired anywhere deposited in a pool by gravity, just like the earths own rain. This would provide a great practical use for nuclear waste, and lower the price of water throughout the world while saving the earths aquifers and ecosystems from drainage and tampering by urban water systems.

But California wouldn't do that either.

He thought it was interesting to meet someone on the opposite side of the spectrum from him, someone who works with society rather then removing oneself from it. Unlike the hypocritical SUV environmentalists of California, he had no anger, no venom, no dislike, and no insecurity. He knew he was doing what he was able to do, and he needn't do more. The peace he had inside of himself grew outward, and came to include anyone in his presence.

Perhaps the environmental advantages of environmental legislation are overwhelmed by the spiritual malaise they create. No law, no order, no head of state made my friend become a hippie, he did it out of his own heart, and he desired none, but the people of California grow old in a place where every aspect of economic action is dictated by government, where as a utilities company, I don't have the option of saving aquifers by using nuclear waste to desalinize seawater, because the government has a law against that. I don't have the option to recycle my own urine, because I don't have a license for that, and even if I did I couldn't mass produce the machine so I couldn't afford it. I don't have the option of creating a commune near San Simeon, because the land, though cheap, is off-limits to all development heavier then ranching. I can't collect my seawater, because that would be against zoning laws. I can't raise pigs and chickens in my backyard, because that would be uncivilized. Indeed, we are too civilized, far too civilized perhaps even to live.

One of the unsung virtues of the free market is that it actually creates hippies. This is something Jefferson understood as he confronted a form of big government far more minor then todays in the name of a peaceful agrarianism. Men in black ties and suits, unless they are volunteers, must be forced and manufactured, and business does not have the ability to do this by itself. Train systems only become irreparable when an AMTRAK takes over their routes.

The Amish built primitivist towns and small farms in the Midwest centuries before bureaucracy, but bureaucracy today creates Monsanto, Cargill, and other huge agricultural companies that have replaced the small family farmer with legions of Mexican, often illegal, immigrants, who do not even know the language of the land, have no real home or place to call their own, raise their children in a constant, hateful flux, and are entitled to almost none of the fruit of their labors. When they grow too old, they are illegal, so no one can take care of them, and they are illegal because the INS is too big. Monsanto also once patented a new biogenetically engineered seed, and when the wind carried it to a neighboring farm, sued the owner for copyright infringement. The name of that case was Monsanto vs. Schmeiser, a textbook example of the law being right, and the morality being wrong.

The reality is that no matter how we choose to live, like my hippie, we must take responsibility for our lives. If that means recycling our urine to support our urban resources and having factories by our houses, we must take this as the just price for living so well in other ways. The people of California had once seen their standard of living rise, and now that they have stifled their commerce, destroyed their car factories, ruined their peoples creativity, frozen their once dynamic cities and neighborhoods, and plundered their farmland, they demand to keep what they had when they were useful. Not only is this hypocrisy a damnable disgrace, and deserves the very wrath of God, but its consequences are seen in the spirit of the people, now a small, petty people of soft, worthless disagreements, judgmental notions of class, paranoia and hate. I suspect very strongly that these people don't live full lives, and their crime rate indicates a toxic level of personal brokenness. Just like my hippie, we must live with our cities maintained and our nation growing, or leave, with our way of living behind us, to somewhere we can live. Our tenacity is an illusion created by our prosperity, and our prosperity lasts only as long as we work to maintain it.

Taxes & Manufacturing

Launching Liberty Ship SS George Washington Carver. E.F. Joseph of US War Information, Public Domain

Due to the exams I have been studying for, I have not been posting here much. However, as I was studying for my Engineering Economy exam today (all the wonderful accounting rules that Industrial Engineers have to know), I stumbled upon something that was simply beyond the pale in what it means for manufacturers.

Very well known is the role labor costs play in driving manufacturers out of the United States. Less well known is the role government policy and bureaucratic red tape that in no way, shape or form benefits our quality of life overall effects manufacturing, and drives still more manufacturers away from our country. Previously, we have discussed the effect of railbanking regulation, excessive accounting standards and nuclear energy moratoriums (see number 4), but today, I want to talk about the way that our tax system favors an America of pizza delivery boys.

Land, with time, generally increases in value, but the property used in manufacturing and transportation deteoriates. We've all experienced this when we sell a car. When your property deteoriates, but you still sell it for more then the government expected, you are taxed at the rate of corporate or personal income (depending upon how your company files.) But when your property increases in value beyond what you purchased it for, as happens with land, you are taxed at a lower rate, called Capital Gains. Literally, when manufacturers do a good job maintaining their factories, they get taxed more then a pizza shop does when they maintain their land. The only exception is when a manufacturer is finally shutting down, then the land is worth more (manufacturing jobs attract people) and they finally get a capital gains tax.

So we see that the government favors manufacturers only when they've finally decided to close shop. In life, they get taxed more then others for their property, period.

This is not the only example. Property taxes allow manufacturers to die when the community they cultivated becomes too good, as their two or three acres of communally important land becomes too expensive for the amount of revenue they generate a year, and the potential of land fluctuations to drive manufacturers out of business massively increases the risk of them and other businesses that rely on borrowed money. Just like the homeowners in Detroit, their loans breathe down their neck, and the potential of things they have no control over to drive them out of town makes it breathe harder.

Think about that, millions of dollars of borrowed money in jeopardy because you might do too well for the community you are in. Beyond the economics, contemplate the morality of that.

Policies like this hurt upstart and cutting edge manufacturers the most, as they must take the biggest, highest interest, and longest-term borrowed capital in order to even begin to produce, as they have no starting capital to begin with. Their entrepreneurs also face the worst consequences should they fail, as no one may well trust them again since they have no good yet on their record to balance it. In developed countries like America, it will be manufacturers like these that create the fastest and most reliable growth, as they need the support services, development capital, and personal connections that a developed, industrialized country like America has to offer.

Further, the establishment too depends on serving the mavericks in order to have reason to remain here, as otherwise, their costs may well be cheaper in Asia, but they too benefit from industrial buccaneering for the innovation, quality workforce, markets, and new activity it creates. It may not show up every year, but it does show up from time to time, and business people have always been gambling men. Friends, let us compete in what we are good at, and take home our first-world wages while we're at it.

Open Clip Art Library. Public Domain

Food for Thought

How has your state done at creating a good environment for business? This manufacturing oriented business magazine has ranked all 50 states and the district of columbia based on their business environments. Check it out.

The Road of a Million Forks - the unsung benefits of cancer research

In a time when people are increasingly questioning the good of spending money on healthcare, I think it is useful to remind ourselves that cures and safety are not the only gain. Science, like any discipline worth pursuing, creates new avenues for exploration with every discovery made. Today I'd like to tell you about the potential benefits of cancer research that you probably would not have thought of immediately.

Follow this for a while, for you will not see its relevance at first, but it is there I assure you. All organisms have a death clock, a preprogramming for death that ticks on every second of your life, and of the life of every other thing currently alive, waiting for the time when life shall terminate. This clock is in your DNA, a huge molecule. See, all of your chromosomes have a long tale of unnecesary DNA called the telosome that every time one of your cells divides, loses just a few pieces of that DNA off the end. For most of your life, what it loses is not neccesary, is not used in the encoding of any of the stuff that makes you up, but eventually, it runs out of excess rope, and then it starts cutting what you need. This starts with the cells with the highest rates of replication, the blood, the skin and the hair. As the materials that make up your body and the chemicals required for your bodies processes are miscoded, and made improperly, your bodies reactions spin out of control, resources are wasted, cells die quickly, and finally, the whole organism (you) dies.

Recent studies however, and I will get citations soon from my professor, have shown that cancerous cells actually relengthen their telosomes, reversing this clock. It has long been known that aging partially exists as a defense against Cancer - the wasteful and excessive multiplication of cells eventually starving the body of resources - but now we have far better knowledge as to where structurally in the body, the connection lies. Through cancer research, we may find a way to cure aging as well as cancer.

Cancer by its nature is actually very regenerative, organs like the brain that do not normally produce new cells will mass produce them in a tumor, and not only do such ability hold promise for aging, but when properly tamed, cancer may also help to alleviate the suffering of stroke victims, paralysis victims, liver disease, sever ulcers and ulceration, flesh eating bacteria and many other ailments where the body either never produces new cells after birth, or cannot produce them quickly enough. The very thing that makes cancer so dangerous also makes it potentially a valuable tool for ALL healthcare needs, if the ways to handle it properly could be understood and mastered by science. We could even regenerate limbs and eyes, if only the cells could find again their function and cease multiplication when appropriate. This is exactly what we're trying to do with Stem Cells, and with a modified and controlled cancer, this could be done using a patients existing cells as they already are in the body. I know that's a big "if," but it is a good example.

But beyond the healthcare business itself is the nanotech industry, the industry of building things at the molecular level, of creating out of a chain of carbons the strongest material on earth or an engine that can power a tiny robot. Such machines exist in cells, and have forever, and are among the very things a sequence of DNA encodes for. Your body produces such things automatically, without a hand being laid to it, chemically, wasting hardly any chemicals at all, producing its own energy from the sun or from sugars produce by those that use the sun, and multiplying in great number to create a being, out of these tiny machines, weighing between 90 and 250 pounds and standing 4" 10' to 7" 8' with infinite comlexity and abilities. Cancer creates the highest rate of replication, and thus for industrial purpose, producing vast chains of carbon, superfuels, tiny engines and robots, the optimal process for this manner of manufacturing.

Cancer research may also involve radioactive materials, chemicals of every kind, viruses, machinery, imaging, and all manner of things useful outside of cancer and outside of medicine entirely. Through the research, we understand not only the cancer better, but also the machine, as in the case of CAT Scans and medical x-rays adapted for scanning bags at the airport, and also can learn better production methods for existing technologies with the investment put in for treating a deadly disease and improving the lives of millions.

For the ecology and ecosystem, humankind has much to learn about recycling its own resources and conserving for its own needs from the greatest recycler of all, the mother Earth. From mother nature, through medical research, we can find the ways to live on less, and master much more fully on resources, producing strange new materials out of familiar ingredients, not needing mines or finite quantities of fossil fuels, themselves the product of nature now past, and even, in some limited circumstances, reducing or reversing entropy.

"You have much to learn from your friends, and even more to learn from your enemies." (Chinese folk saying) In our fight with cancer, we may win battles we did not realize were part of the same war.

I wanted to get this article out quickly, but revisions will be made over the next few days. If you find it unclear now, come back in a week and if this message is gone you know its better.

A Conservative Plan to Help the Poor

For about 50 years now, liberals have held dominance over the issue of helping Americas least fortunate and reducing poverty. With this dominance, they have done little, poverty has declined minimally, and perhaps, when adjusted for the level of economic growth, even gone backwards, and the states they have dominated the most (like California) have seen their middle classes shrink from some of the largest in America, to some of the smallest.

There is an inherent assumption that economic conservatives, being somewhat less directly interested, cannot help the poor, as if unintended effects of decisions never happen, and yet, it seems to me some of the most vital reforms required to break the ceiling for our poor are, in fact, economically conservative things to do:

1) Eliminate Property Taxes - it is very difficult to help the poor at the neighborhood or small town level when the minute the neighborhood improves, the poor can no longer afford to live there. Not only do current home owners face the potential of eviction if their property values go up, or their income goes down, but the change in rental prices is magnified, leading to those who rent apartments or houses being driven out much more quickly then they need be.

2) Simplify zoning - Simpler zoning laws lead to more walkable communities, by allowing nearly any business to open anywhere that is logical, that can support small, family owned business, and allow the natural expansion of industrial development in poorer areas. Not only does such industry provide jobs for the poor, but it stabilizes land prices by creating small nuisances to couple with gains in more meaningful areas, like education, and provides a tax base for communities that otherwise will receive little taxation.

3) Improve railbanking regulation - Currently, to reopen a closed rail line you must perform an entirely new environmental study and face major injunctions by the local community. Allowing any former line (it was there before, and the world didn't explode) to be reopened at any time, we can improve American freight handling, lowering distribution costs for consumer goods and freight, and increasing the profitability of American industry and the kind of jobs that CAN pay well: an assemblyline worker can easily produce a hundred grand a year of revenue for his business. In addition, the rail construction itself will also increase employment for underskilled workers, as it is largely manual labor.

4) Nuclear energy - Nuclear energy will lower electric bills nationwide, lowering the cost of American made goods, both for our people, and for export. Washington State built an entire industrial economy off of cheap electricity, one that is still growing today.

5) Eliminate ethanol and other subsidies, and pharmaceutical tariffs - These subsidies lower the availability of food and other economic goods that the poor need to survive, while tariffs against foreign drug manufacturers increase the price of health insurance and perscriptions for the people who can already barely afford them.

6) Simplify accounting standards - If you hire an accountant at $20 an hour to oversee the work of five productive workers, for your business to be as profitable, you must effectively take $4 an hour off of those five workers paychecks, as the accountant contributes nothing to the businesses profitability. This also, by lowering the maximum profitable wage, causes layoffs at a lower wage level.

7) Free trade - You have a choice, make the poor buy more expensive goods from ineffective producers who hold a relative monopoly over the market, and retain jobs that produce less, lowering the wage ceiling for the entire country by causing layoffs when the wage gets too high, or allow a few ineffective businesses to go away, and allow those workers to be hired by the companies that are willing to pay a higher wage as the workers here in the US will actually produce at that level, while lowering the price of goods, and thus the effective wage, for all.

There are likely many other examples, but these come to mind.

By focusing on the individual factors that actually hurt the poor and make them in need of help to begin with, we may find that their interests lie in liberty rather then theft that, in the end, finds itself stealing from them as well.

Railbanking

Union Pacific Rail Trail, Summit County, UT. Public domain, by GreenGlass1972

According to the Rails-to-Trails conservancy, 1500 former railroads have been transformed (1250 since they started up) in to trails for bicycles and pedestrians. Western Washington is a classic example of places that have been transformed by Rails-To-Trails

Soon to be included in the 1500 Rail-Trails is the former loop around the Lake, one of the oldest railroads in King County, just shut down in the past two years, that comprised the railroad backbone for the Eastside of Seattle, shutdown a local business that was becoming an important part of their culture (The Spirit of Washington dinner train) and makes bypassing Seattle on rail nearly impossible for most routes (as the NP Railway goes too far South), negatively affecting industry to the North and South. Also included were the railways running to Issaquah, despite the fact that there is still a reasonable amount of industry there, and all the railroads running to the rich farming regions of the Snoqualmie Valley and the far east of King County, except for a few miles of shot-haul railroad between two towns used for entertaining tourists...

Canadian National Railway in the Chicago Suburbs recently acquired a series of rail corridors with the intention of creating a belt line to divert traffic around Chicago. As usual, they also cried environmentalism. State Senator Holmes (D-Aurora) called upon Obama to make staffing decisions "that will protect communities from the unnecessary safety and economic concerns that can be caused by railroad expansion." Nowhere in this reasoning was the economic benefits that railroad expansion can bring, that was nowhere addressed. Nor, for that matter, was the "unneccesary" backed up with good solid reasoning, and I know exactly how shaky their understanding is first hand.

A little under a year ago, I took an AMTRAK train from Atlanta, GA to Seattle, WA, along three rail lines: The Crescent to DC, the Capitol Limited to Chicago, and finally, the Empire Builder to Seattle. When anywhere near Chicago or the Great Lakes, the train would be stopped for an hour at a time waiting for freight trains to pass it. (And to think this was during a recession, when there is less cargo to carry...) As for "safety," how can putting that many large metal objects travelling at 60 MPH on the same piece of rail be safe? And as for "environment," train collisions can leak toxic chemicals all over the landscape, and freight traffic being more expensive on rail leads to more of it on the roads in the form of trucking. The situation is clear, they want to interfere with the free rights of a railroad company to operate in order to shift their burden environmentally and safety-wise to other communities, and increase it. They want to beg their neighbors for $6 to avoid paying $5 themselves!

And as for economic benefits - increased cargo capacity and cheaper freight transportation, not too much higher rail speed will benefit industries of every kind set up along the tracks, creating good, solid work for Americans of every educational level from high school dropout (the assembly line) to PhD Engineer (advanced design work) and consulting services of every kind. Every aspect of society will benefit from more manufacturing. And for the environment, more track and more ease of use makes for easier high-speed and passenger service, possibly, if regulations become light enough, even with private money.

Update 3/15/2010: This New York Times Editorial about Acela is very informative regarding the state and growth restraints of rail service in America, and especially along the Northeast Corridor. It's also a short read.

Update 10/15/2010: This local story from Ballard, Seattle, WA is about a successful shortline railroad that has seen its traffic increase signficiantly in the last couple years and is expanding its business. Excerpt:

"Traffic on the Ballard Terminal's railroads was up 47 percent in 2007 and Cole predicts 2008 will be even better. This is due in large part to businesses reassessing the cost benefit of using rail for their transportation needs. According to Cole, each rail car can carry 100 tons while an 18-wheel truck can only carry 25 tons. Trains are more efficient as a freight engine can move one ton 400 miles on one gallon of diesel fuel while a truck can only move the same weight only 75 miles."

It is worth noting that trains can also be electrified, a technology that reached its zenith in the 1930's and has since been in decline. This article speaks in more detail about railroad electrification and why it never materialized to the degree that it was originally envisioned. Cheap electric costs through relatively non-polluting sources such as nuclear, geothermal and wind could once again make railroad electrification an attractive option combined with rising gasoline costs.

Photobucket. Image of Ballard Terminal Railroad on Shilshole Avenue.