Archive for the 'Waste' Category
Friday, September 9th, 2011
TCT’s Purpose
TCT reader Nick asked me to explain our basic views. I thought I’d repost my answer, in case any other readers want to add their thoughts.
Here’s what I said, with a few additions and amendments:
Hi, Nick, and welcome to TCT. You ask excellent questions.
The immediate purpose of this blog is to show people how corporate planners (on behalf of the overclass of wealthy shareholders who remain the primary beneficiaries of big business) manipulate “free time” experiences and choices, and to demonstrate that corporate capitalism requires this manipulation, on an always-expanding basis.
The secondary purpose of this blog is to get people to think about how radically unsustainable this arrangement is, and to encourage movement toward a decent alternative. The work you are doing sounds vital. My only complaint about local solutions is that many of their architects tend to forget about the larger levels of reality. But that is certainly not a necessary part of making new local arrangements. And any adequate macro-level changes are certainly going to require radical reconstruction of our towns.
As for my objection to the way people talk about culture, those are of two kinds.
First, a great many supposedly radical thinkers begin from a sophomoric and unscientific definition of the word. Culture, properly defined, if the set of learned habits and behaviors prevailing among a population. As such, it is a very large-bore concept, close in scope to “society.” Meanwhile, many “cultural” theorists use it as a stand-in for one part of life only — free time, or personal life. Often, they shrink it even further to mean merely entertainment. In making that move, they build their attempts at explanation of reality on quicksand.
My more specific complaint about culture is that it is so often twinned with the bias-word “consumer,” to make the doubly stupid concept “consumer culture.” Social science (and the humanity and democracy it exists to serve) demands that its practitioners take care to make their concepts and data as free from bias and as descriptively valid and neutral as possible. To accept the word “consumer” as a valid equivalent for product-using human beings is to forgo the possibility of powerfully and accurately describing people’s product-related activities.
“Consumer” is a capitalist’s narrow view; nothing more, nothing less. It is a rank and destructive bias, poison to objective description of reality and its determinant institutions and processes. It is an ongoing tragedy that social science has swallowed it, without so much as a hiccup.
We live in a capitalist society and a capitalist culture. To choose to call it a consumer society and a consumer culture is to deny the cardinal facts and to confuse and insult the potential audience.
Jettisoning the word “consumer” is a first necessary step toward getting serious about describing humanity’s extremely dire crisis of economic waste and injustice.
The second step is to stop yammering hot air about culture, and to start examining and explaining the details of existing institutions and processes.
Alas, these both remain micro-ghetto endeavors, for a host of reasons.
Wednesday, June 1st, 2011
Electricity: Not Magic
The official story is that the “electric” car is going to save capitalism.
I put “electric” in quotation marks because electricity is always made from something other than itself, usually fossil fuel combustion or nuclear fission.
But it is also important to notice that denial of sources is not the only layer of magical thinking inherent to the growing cult of the electric car.
The second layer has to do with the inherent inefficiency of electricity generation and use.
To understand that, take a look at this excellent article by Kris De Decker at Low-Tech Magazine. De Decker explains the basic physical facts about the inescapable problems with burning energy to make electricity:
First of all, it is important to know that generating electricity is far from the most efficient way to apply pedal power, due to the internal energy losses in the battery, the battery management system, other electronic parts, and the motor/generator.
These energy losses add up quickly: 10 to 35 percent in the battery, 10 to 20 percent in the motor/generator and 5 to 15 percent in the converter (which converts direct current to alternate current). The energy loss in the voltage regulator (or DC to DC converter, which prevents you from blowing up the battery) is about 25 percent.
This means that the total energy loss in a pedal powered generator will be 42 to 67.5 percent (calculation example for highest loss: 100 watt input = 80 watt after 20% loss in motor/generator = 57.5 watts after 25% energy loss in voltage regulator = 37.5 watts after 35% loss in battery = 32.5 watts after 15% loss in converter = 32.5 watts output = efficiency of 32.5% or energy loss of 67.5%).
De Decker also touches upon another decidedly non-magical aspect of electric machinery — the ecological and energy problems with batteries and steel:
[T]he embodied energy of a 150Wh lead-acid battery (like the one offered with the Windstream pedal power generator) is at least 37,500 Wh, which equals 250 full charges of the battery (more sources: 1/2). In other words: if you can deliver 75 watts of power to the battery, you have to pedal for 500 hours in order to generate the energy that was needed to manufacture the battery. Because the life expectancy of a lead-acid battery can be as low as 300 discharge/charge cycles, you are basically pedaling to produce the energy required to manufacture the battery.
Lead acid battery Of course, it also takes energy to manufacture a pedal powered machine that does not take the intermediate step of generating electricity. This concern lies mainly with the production of steel, and quite a lot of it. The commercially available Fender Blender mentioned earlier weighs 25kg (55 pounds).
If made from recycled steel, and using these figures to calculate the embodied energy of steel, this comes down to an energy cost of at least 41,625 Wh, slightly more than the battery needed for the electricity generator. If freshly made steel is used, the embodied energy is at least 138,750 Wh (3.7 times the embodied energy of a single battery).
De Decker’s conclusion?
When operating a bicycle generator you are basically pedaling to produce the energy required to manufacture the battery.
All these costs apply to automobiles, too, despite their indispensability to capitalists. Imagine how that pencils out!
Wednesday, March 30th, 2011
The Basis of “Private”/”Free” Enterprise
History shows that, stunning as the thought is, state legislatures in the USA are more, not less, dominated by business lobbying than is the federal government. And that dominance is certainly even greater in the South, where white people remain staggering deluded about themselves and the realities of their society and world.
So, it’s really not very surprising that North Carolina legislators are presently strangling public, not-for-profit provision of internet services. Clearly, the reason is that such services are a mortal threat to corporate revenue streams. The simple fact is that telecommunications services can be more efficiently, effectively, and cheaply provided by the public than by capitalists.
So, the North Carolina legislature is simply going to pass a law that artificially imposes all the irrationalities — and more — of the private sector on the public sector.
Remember this the next time you see some wanker talking about the supposed naturalness and glory of “private enterprise.”
Monday, March 28th, 2011
Now, This Makes Sense
It’s about damned time! Finally, marketing is reaching into our glorious world-leading prison system! And this, God’s chosen country with its obviously best of all possible socio-economic systems, simply cannot afford to miss out on all those opportunities to build brand-consciousness.
Tuesday, January 25th, 2011
The Ultimate Form of Waste
Waste, these days, is alleged to be a creature of public, not private, enterprise.
The suppressed fact, of course, is that this is a huge case of excessive protestation. Corporate capitalism, with its scattered McMansions and its 95 percent idle 4,000-pound grocery fetching machines and its omnipresent packaging-for-marketing efforts, is 2/3 waste.
And the waste isn’t confined to the use of materials and space, either. In a nation of billowing, softening, clogging bodies, with vast fields of work needed in reconstructing towns and rehabilitating ecosystems, how sick is this?:
If you count the “Part time employed for non-economic reasons”, you get 126.8 million Americans who are unemployed, underemployed, working part time or “Not in the labor force”. That represents 53% of working age Americans.
Hat-tip: Doug Pressman
Monday, May 17th, 2010
40 IQers and a Fool
So, like, Las Vegas, the poster child for late capitalist heedlessness, is totally wrecked and doomed. So, what are the local sellers and chasers doing down there?
Home prices in Las Vegas are down by 60 percent from 2006 in one of the steepest descents in modern times. There are 9,517 spanking new houses sitting empty. An additional 5,600 homes were repossessed by lenders in the first three months of this year and could soon be for sale.
The price declines in Las Vegas have been so brutal that most homeowners with a mortgage owe more than their home is worth. If they must sell, their only option is a so-called short sale done with the approval of the lender, which can be a lengthy and frustrating process for all concerned.
Yet builders here are putting up 1,100 homes, and they are frantically buying lots for even more.
Las Vegas is trying to recover by building what it does not need. It is an unlikely pattern being repeated in many of the areas where the housing crash was most severe.
Leave it to The New York Times to call this standard late-imperial effort to make a symptoms into a cure “unlikely.”
