Sammy is back, and he’s as sweet as ever, but he’s also a completely manic-depressive nutcase. Attempting to find some kind of home remedy to determined nighttime yelping, I ran into this gem, which - while completely useless as a problem resolution technique - at least put things in perspective.
There are so many statements that begin with “If there’s one thing you can’t control, it’s …”
Maybe one of the hardest things to do in day-to-day life: to attempt to do the best and right thing, with no control over reactions to those attempts.
If you tread too lightly, you lose your effectiveness because the threats of a negative response overwhelm your desire to take a pointed action.
If you forge ahead, you expose yourself to any reaction one might decide to produce. And you can’t just worry about the reasonable reaction to anticipate, you have to worry about the chosen reaction.
Because if there’s one thing we can control, it’s how we react to something. From Pavlov to Machiavelli, we all have our reasons.
When the activists go on and on about “fat cat” businessmen who warm a leather chair and make a mint, just remember how hard it is to avoid pissing someone off, and then imagine trying to make a few thousand someones actually do something for you.
Trying to get into Russia, we hit some roadblocks. But, the best most helpful Russian-based travel agency ever writes:
“Unfortunately, being located in Moscow, we have less chances to contact the consulate in Istanbul that you have. Please make a local call and obtain answers to your questions. Indeed, it may happen that they have a ‘friendly’ local travel company and it is easier for people to obtain Russian visas if the support letters are provided by this company. Of course, this has nothing to do with the law but… the East is the East, you know, and one can hardly argue with the consulate.”
We have since redirected our efforts and expect a prompt victory.
The East is the East!
I am officially halting my interest in internet user commentary, cross-referencing this little gem. With the exception of actually useful opinion (such as that on the programming reddit at times), it’s frankly not worth the trouble.
As I believe I’ve said here before, only a very small subset of people I know have any influence on my opinions, so why should I be seeking out the opinions of strangers?
I used to think that a computer with an OEM Windows license and no restore CD was a dead entity.
Then, I found out you can install either an OEM CD straight from Newegg or a modded Retail CD and pass the OEM license key to the fresh install.
You’re on your own for drivers, but it’s easier than you would think. The vendor-provided stuff, at least normally, should work. I only needed the TI Memory Stick reader from Sony; everything else came directly from the vendors (Intel, RealTek, and Conexant).
Here’s the software load from my fresh install on the Vaio tonight:
Again, I’m much more interested in the behavioral side of climate change and fuel usage arguments than the actual point of the arguments.
I read another one of those bitter hippie comments on CNN this morning to the tune of “Go ahead and enjoy your air conditioning and SUV” while the world burns, etc., etc. I know I just put a value judgment on that statement, and I apologize for that, but sounding hateful on the internet like that is really repugnant to me, no matter what the topic.
As people who work with me in the office might know, the most interesting debate to me is not the cause of the problem, but rather what we might be able to change or do to correct the problem. It follows that, normally, if you are causing a problem by doing something, stopping doing that probably would help slow the problem. So, my argument reduces to the standard argument in the normal case, but I feel it adds some context when the cause is not inherently correctable. This is a problem I have encountered frequently in the Turkish work environment.
With this in mind, I set about using publicly accessible, independently gathered government data to analyze exactly how much of the problem is things like air conditioning and SUVs.
Given the beautiful cornucopia of transportation data available, I like pointing my little water gun of research at that subject.
So, let’s look at AC quickly: first off, air conditioning is generally electric-powered, which means all our great alternative energy technologies could fill this need no-problem if we could find a way to scale them up sufficiently. Nuclear would be fine as well.
This figure, which looks like somebody got out a spirograph after a heavy dose of heroin, says we use around 40% of our total energy load on electricity, everywhere (not household usage).
About 31% of household electricity usage is for HVAC systems, and 50% of HVAC usage is air conditioning. If all central heating in the whole country were done by electricity, of course the percentage of household energy devoted to AC would drop significantly.
And, remember, heating oil, used so heavily in the northeast, is not lightweight stuff, it’s similar to diesel but a bit denser. Nothing like natural gas.
While I didn’t find or look for commercial data, given the heavy intensity of lighting in office and retail environments, and heavy energy requirements of technological and manufacturing equipment, etc., I would assume commercial AC usage intensity is similar in terms of proportion.
The report from above suggests to me that efficiency has probably overcome any over-usage on the part of long-time users, and the growth in usage is more from new users. Given the number of elderly people who die each summer from overexposure to heat, I think we can say a higher penetration of central AC (or even modular units) is a general growth in the standard living of our society. Plus, it’s fueled by a relatively clean, potentially renewable, and highly efficient source. So, while keeping it down at 68 F might not be the most responsible, let’s say AC is a valid and well-proportioned part of modern life.
So, for the fuel usage, I busted out more numerical data.
To start off (and this is really critical), we can conservatively say the US population (1970 to now [neat Google query response, by the way]) has grown about 50%. All my transportation data is coming from here.
From this, we can see that passenger vehicle fuel usage has grown by 5% since 1970. Of course, the warming arguments date far before 1970, but my point is that we haven’t exactly switched from lines to eight-balls of car-fuel petroleum addiction in the recent modern era.
Over the same time period, passenger car share of vehicular fuel usage is down from 74% to 42%, driven by a significant up-ticks in “other 4-tire 2-axle vehicles” (397%) and big rigs and tractor trailers (224%).
Big rigs and tractor trailers have increased their share from 12% to 22%.
While it’s really hard to break down that “other 4-tire” category, their increase in usage share went from 13% to 36%. We can probably assume SUVs and commuter tough-guy trucks are falling into this “other” category (it’s at least a conservative assumption).
In all, per-vehicle fuel usage has generally dropped a bit while miles per vehicle have skyrocketed. We see an interesting little bump in fuel usage per vehicle in the late-90s to early-2000s, which might actually be SUV-related, but who knows for sure.
It’s important to remember that pickups and SUVs in some cases actually have utility, as you can assume GM’s “We Are Professional Grade” in some way suggests that pickups and utility vehicles are actually being used for constructive commercial purposes, maybe most often construction and farming.
We’re in a standard of living corner again, because fuel usage per vehicle has remained flat or decreasing over my period of study, but the share of these heavy vehicles has increased significantly. This leads me to believe that, while SUV and pickup fuel efficiency may be lower than the current average passenger car, and despite their increasing share of penetration in the overall market, generally their unit impact is mitigated by across-the-board efficiency improvements.
To me, this suggests that, while every little bit matters, the only way you’re going to really make a dent in the overall picture is to stop people from buying and driving vehicles. Overall efficiency will continue to improve at a decent clip, and a relatively wealthy segment of the population (increasingly wealthy as fuel prices continue to increase in excess of GDP growth) driving fancy low-efficiency vehicles will only slow the rate of improvement slightly (as evidenced by my theory about the 10 years surrounding 2000, if it’s correct).
A big surprise for me was the relatively small fuel usage on the part of airplanes. I thought this would be more shocking, although it has increased by 67% since 1970.
I’d be really interested on people’s comments and corrections regarding this data. For now, I need to get out of this hotel room and catch our taxi!
We’re actually here right now, strangely enough.
As I plod my way back and forth to and from work I occasionally think about climate change. While I would obviously yield to the statisticians regarding the overall heat of the summer, it just doesn’t seem that hot to me this year. Maybe that’s just me getting used to brighter sun than I’ve seen anywhere else, maybe I’m just flat out wrong, or maybe it really is statistically not so hot outside this year.
My point is that it doesn’t matter. The observation is that global warming has become akin to a counterproductive, corrupt religion.
Probably coinciding with Al Gore’s activism, global warming reached a state of what I might call “institutional acknowledgement.” Christianity reached this when Constantine had his battlefield conversion (link mainly for the shout-out to Hagia Sophia mosaics).
As is the case with any controversial ideology, institutional acknowledgement is both raw potential and raw danger for its faithful. In Cosmo terms, what’s out instantly becomes what’s in. So what are you as a leader going to do with that shift of energy?
Acknowledgement will generally introduce a lot of greenhorns, relatively incompetent members. When it’s not cool to be you, chances are “you” are well-informed and convicted about your beliefs. At the point MTV decides you represent the preferred norm, the relative fanaticism and involvement of your adopters begins to drop.
So, influx of idiots is one danger. You never know what they’ll say or do on your behalf but not at your behest.
Another danger is that your key apologists will become defensive rather than offensive, more focused on holding position than developing understanding. If you look at articles around unseasonably cool summers and cold winters, as well as (unbelievably enough) discussions about the Icelandic volcano, you see apologists in a reactive mode, attempting to frame each new development as proof or confirmation.
While many a good Christian could frame the sunrise as a daily miracle, putting out a God-confirming press release every morning is not the way to operate. This puts you on your heels. Institutionalization focuses the critical public eye on your framework, and any mass media event becomes a challenge to the norm.
Being defensive often forces you to compromise your primary message.
These pressures tend to weigh down your leadership. This is really where the integrity of your movement is tested. As we saw with the Climate-Gate bunch, sometimes it’s just so much pressure you start to bend the rules so your house can remain in order. And you will get caught, somehow, no matter how popular you remain. The more flexible your methods and beliefs become, the more inherently political your movement will become. Definitions and regulations become the operative bastions and weapons of power. Instead of promoting moderation and conservation, you begin fighting over the proper modeling techniques for “urban heat islands.”
While there must be boundaries, politicization nearly guarantees these discussions will drift from their original ideological basis.
It seems to me that Christianity has had or is having equivalents to all three of these problems. The Dark Ages had all of them at once.
Christianity was provided with a very simple message: one must love God, self, and neighbor in an outpouring of the enabling grace of Christ’s sacrifice, so that we might reconnect ourselves with God despite the obstacles of our past failings.
I can assure you that entire weeks of politico-philosophical conversation could chatter on without a single mention of this simple axiom.
The fact is, while convictions can run all the way through a person, perfect verification is an elusive goal. We believers have personal reasons to be sure of our faith. Quoting regulatory doctrine rarely comes into play in these discussions. Global warming “believers” have a lot of good reasons to be confident in what they see as fact.
And like any juicy, contentious doctrine, the only chance at receiving objective proof for either of these probably comes too late to reap the benefits of believing.
Stepping slightly back from my previous perspective on the faith, the important thing is not to shun politics. As said, reaching a level of acceptance has its own power, which must be managed rather than forsaken. Rather than getting elected to city council, note how Jesus played the powers of the Romans against those of the Pharisees throughout his ministry. This is leveraging the stick without wielding it.
And, above all, don’t let the fundamentals of your message become marginalized by the external pressures of visibility. It’s a sure recipe to gain numbers and lose integrity.
It’s true that deficit hawks could seriously F our C (that’s for you, EZ-E!) if they curtail spending during this very unsettled time for the economy.
But don’t people realize that the next logical step after cutting spending would be cutting taxes, which in turn (especially if the corporate tax were lowered) would allow more job creation? No negative multiplier effect if you do this right.
If you want, we could even provide increased tax credits to end our fossil fuels addiction! Maybe then I could really power my Christmas lights with solar energy.
Lower tax percentages generally produce higher tax revenue, so – while individual take-home income would increase – the deficit would be reduced even while scaling down spending and tax rates.
We spend all this time talking about the complexity of economics, and then all arguments are reduced to a single simple sentence with no consideration of the next step.
Bah.
While being cautious to avoid descending into a physics discussion like last time, booting my work computer on battery this morning consumed 12% of my available charge, leaving 1:03 as the estimated time before battery exhaustion.
And don’t think for a moment that low time was due to the hectic booting process: I just checked my e-mail and wrote this blog and I’m down to 81% (0:59) now, just a few minutes later.
Windows 2000 is a horrible battery manager, but using crappy refurbished laptops with aging batteries (billed to the department at the new computer rate) might be the bigger problem.
I think my department has seen three laptop hard drive failures in the last year. I wonder why…
Proofreading has me down to 78%…
