I think the mental toll for what is going on right now is going to appear laughable in the months to come. No matter which way we jump there are going to be ugly consequences. A huge part of not examining the problems and trying to come up with the best solutions is that it is being made into a political debate on whose policies were and should be followed. We at where we're at. What we should be looking at is what is the best way out. We need to triage the situation by deciding what we want the future to look like.
Do we want our children to grow up with the education and employment opportunities that they had six months ago, or do we want to completely minimize the loss of life?
The people most at risk are people with compromised cardiovascular systems and compromised respiratory systems. I also understand that obese people are at high risk. You can conclude that the way these people became compromised is through lifestyle choices. They chose to smoke, drink, and over indulge in food for many years. I'm sorry the bill has become due. But I don't think my children should have to pay the price for their choices.
I know a lot of readers are going to be saying that the greatest at risk group are people over 65. I'm in this group. It is my personal opinion that I would rather my grandchildren grow up with high potential than to prolong my life another few years. In reality I'm not truly concerned because I'm relatively healthy for my age group because of the choices I have made.
Printing money is not the same thing as creating resources. Resources are the backbone of wealth! No resources, no wealth. All resources begin with human activity. No activity, no resources. Reduced activity, reduced resources, reduced wealth. Even hunter gathers had to hunt and had to gather.
If you were to buy an inexpensive product to fulfill a certain need in your life, and that product failed before the need was fulfilled, you would not buy the identical product. You would spring for a more expensive product that would complete the need. You would demand a better product and the manufacturer would command a higher price. That is how the market works. If your workers were walking off the job to goto a job that was less tedious at the same pay, after you spent money on training them, the solution is to raise their pay high enough that they would stay and complete the task of building a cheaper automobile. You would demand a better quality of employee and they would in turn command more pay.
Even modern employers usually require some "character requirements". When was the last time you worked for a company that would knowingly hire an employee who had a record? A drunk and disorderly conviction can keep you from landing a job. In my state flipping someone off in traffic is considered harassment, which a conviction would then bar you from some employment.
When I was "in" 45+ years ago, the most important feature of our packs was the ability to shed them quickly so that we could take cover and maneuver our bodies to attack, fight, and survive.
In the 1990's Bob Pease did a series of articles discussing fuzzy logic and how it compared to conventional control systems, here is a link to the first column.
I often thought that if people were serious about the environment they would grow food instead of lawns. The typical HOA frowns on this though. I was a big fan of John Jeavons back in the 90's. I'm sure he still has a lot of good things to say.
http://www.johnjeavons.info/john-jeavons.html
I live on a ranch. We do not grow any crops, only beef. The surrounding area is a combination of wheat farms and ranches. The reason the ranches aren't wheat farms is because the terrain is just to rugged for productive wheat farming. I can't really speak to the total efficiency but the electrical distribution is very similar to what you have in the city. In fact we export electricity to other states. Water comes from a well and the sewer is a septic tank. That means that the water we use is returned to the water table minus evaporation. I imagine each bovine exported off the property represents some amount of water. Small outfits deal with what is called a co-op to offset the problems of purchasing small quantities of external inputs. This helps us stay somewhat competitive with the large corporate run farms and ranches. Because we work on the place we live, we do not have to drive long distances to work, saving fuel that way. My particular house uses a Ground Source Heat Pump for heating in the winter. In the summer we leave the windows open all night and the house gets down into the low 60's (F). We close the windows as soon as we get up and close the shades on the side of the house the sun is on depending on the time of day. I imagine though I can't really state it as fact, our place is more efficient than the typical mcmansion you see in the cities these days.
Thank you for the link. I suspected it went back further than 1959, but could not come up with a publication for it. I should have searched wikipedia. I had a great interest in the Ice Age in my youth. Most of the books I read on the subject were older than 1959. The idea that the Ice Ages were caused by the green house effect was quite prominent in most of them. They did not extrapolate it to industrial, Agriculture, and individual pollution. Though I do recall a theory I read that the Agricultural Revolution is what ended the last Ice Age.
In the mid 1980's I attended a library sale. I bought a collection of Science News magazines that covered the whole year of 1959. For those of you who don't know that was the International Geophysical Year. I don't feel like digging it out right now, but there was a short piece about a scientist who was studying the effects of carbon dioxide on the climate. I did not find a follow up article, but it does demonstrate that this has been going on a long time. Just because your old doesn't mean you haven't considered it.
If you truly believe this, just try asking questions regarding global climate change, even questions that pop up because your trying to grasp the model and see if you don't get smacked down and gagged!
In many situations a manager inherits a team of individuals. He is then judged as a manager by how well he gets these individuals to co-operate and perform. If one of the individuals is totally incompetent, it reflects poorly on the managers employee evaluation if he is unable to bring this employee's performance up. His alternative is to get him promoted off the team. I have seen this on a number of occasions.
I don't know if you are still following this conversation or not. The snow stopped yesterday and I had to go do my work. In case you are, I found this conversation rather thought provoking and wanted to continue for a while. Here is a link to information on agriculture in Colorado:
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2012/Online_...
It does not break things out by ranch or farm, but it does show that overall in Colorado between 2007 and 2012 there was a 1% increase in farms. If you click on the map you can see the breakout by county. In some of the mountain counties farming has decreased close to 50%. In other mountain counties it has increased. But it does show that farming is still a strong industry in the mountain counties.
I must confess that I have not spent much time studying ecosystems. But I live very close to one. I know this, if it takes millions of years for an eco system to evolve, the eco system in the Western United States is completely non-existent. Agriculture has only existed for 12,000 years or so. Most of the crops grown by humans can be viewed as invasive species, same as you are claiming cattle to be. Some studies conclude that the little ice age was caused by the dying off of native Americans (also an invasive species as so we are) after the arrival of Europeans. They were so devastated that the lack of Agriculture effected global climate, or so the theory goes. Now there are a great many invasive species in both flora and fauna that the ecosystem is not what it would have been even 15,000 years ago. The climate has not even been stable for the past million years. So a million year old eco system does not exist.
There are those that point out that the bovine replaced the bison in the ecosystem of the American grass lands. While I can accept this to a point, I do think it at best a near replacement. This I know from direct observation, if you pull cattle off the land for a number of years, the quality of the flora suffers. I can't offer an explanation. The same can be said for over grazing as well.
One of the gripes I have with climate change advocates is that they want everyone else to give up their petroleum habit, but they themselves still drive SUV's. When I had a city job, to support my ranching habit, I used mass transit, and supplemented it with a (TreK) bicycle. I didn't even live in the city!
One last antidote. A Business man and a Rancher hit the same jackpot in the lotto. It was a large sum and they were to split it. A reported asked the Business man what he was going to do. He said he was going to retire and and travel the world the rest of his life, living in hotels and being waited on. The reported then asked the rancher what he was going to do. He replied that he was going to keep ranching until the money ran out!
The major part of burnout is thus caused by HR. HR directs that the way teams are evaluated is that they are compared to one another, and it is mandatory that one team be rated over another team which creates an us vs them mentality. Then members of the team must be evaluated against one another again with one person rated above another which creates a me vs them mentality. If you are rated down, your going to believe that the person doing the rating either can't see that you or your team is working smarter and harder than the rest. They got rated up because they somehow cheated the system and the person who rated them is as stupid as they are. If you or your team are rated first, then obviously they don't work as hard or as smart as you.
Ever heard of South Park? How about North Park? Kremlin is a Ranching community. So was Baily at one time and some of the ranchers still live there even though it is almost part of the Metro area now. Eagle is a ranching community. I could go on. Cow excrement is only fermented grass. I handle it with my bare hands. How long does an animal have to live in an environment before it becomes a part of it.
When range and wild life management is turned over to voters and the educated managers are ignored, it becomes an emotional issue.
Do you ride a bicycle to the grocery store?
I've actually worked on ranches in Colorado. Ranchers do graze their stock in the mountains. The other side of the coin is that the habitat for wolves is from sea level to approximately 9800' (3000m). They hunt wherever they can find herbivores. One part of ranching people don't seem to understand is that the rancher (by rancher I mean whoever is working on the ranch) is caring for living animals. That means he is looking out for these animals on a daily basis. I know their are ranchers who don't get attached to their stock, but they are definitely the minority. It's hard to care for anything daily and not get attached. I've seen ranchers in tears over the loss of a single cow, because they've cared for that cow since it was born. From time to time I would take a steer to slaughter so that we had meat in the freezer. The last thing I would do after unloading the steer would be to thank him for giving his life to feed my family. When a pack of coyotes take a calf, it is heart breaking to see the reaction of the mama cow. My neighbor last spring came upon a cow that was struggling to give birth and she was down. The coyotes had killed the calf and were eating it even though it was only part of the way out of the cow. Do you think that might have upset him a little? Now they want to release a much larger predator onto the land he is trying to care for. How do you think that makes him feel? There is more to caring for livestock than money.
You could work in Commerce City and be smelling the hydrocarbons all day, and maybe even getting cancer.
While this is a thought provoking article, it makes assumptions that are not necessarily true. If a person thinks in terms of resources and not in terms of products you can begin to see the fallacies. It is easy for a group with common interests to share resources. The problems begin to arise when the group doesn't have a resource that it needs. As an example, if the Iroquois lived in a region where there was no obsidian which they would want for making tools and hunting instruments, they would need to approach a neighboring community that has access to the material If that community didn't want the Iroquois to have that material because it would upset the balance of power in that this material could also be used for making weapons of war. If the other community already had all the resources it needed to comfortably survive, how would the Iroquois over come their reluctance to give them obsidian? For the Iroquois this is becoming a matter of survival of their people. It they don't have this resource they won't have the tools they need to farm or to hunt. This is just a simple example, with more complex societies the more complex the problems.
In my life time, I have seen people try to sustain "gift economies". I remember the communes of the sixties. On paper they sounded quite reasonable. Most of them didn't survive or evolved into capitalistic economies.
One last point. Slavery was not an out come of the invention of money. It was the out come of the invention of war. What do you do with enemy combatants that surrender? Do you just kill them? Not if your humane. You make them slaves.
I established a wiki where I use to work. I was quite efficient about keeping it up to date and well categorized. I found it quite useful for not having to re-work out issues I had already solved. It was easy to search and correctable. I gave the people I worked with full access to it. Most of my colleagues ignored it. A small handful utilized it as much as I did. Some would even go back and edit articles and make it much more readable. I found it to be a very useful tool which increased my productivity immensely. I was somewhat disappointed by the lack of use it got from the majority of the people I worked with. On the other hand they wouldn't utilize the version control system I maintained for us either.
If someone has completed a process even only once, they may have some insight that an old timer has missed. It's always a good idea to listen to a "noob". You may learn something. Noobs also may have the best ideas about improving a process. They haven't fallen into the "we've always done it that way" mind set as of yet.
As someone who has had far more failures at evaluating candidates than successes, I find it very hard to wade through the BS in a meeting that lasts an hour or two. The strangest people I've met seemed normal for that short of time. I usually have to work with someone for up to six months to get a real feeling of their ability to adjust to new situations, learn new technology, and strength of work ethic.
If you want a good example of government supplied health insurance, go to your local VA hospital, and see if that is the kind of health care you really want.
The first computer I ever owned was an analog computer from Edmund Scientific. It was fundamentally an electronic slide rule. It had a meter that swung from a negative value to a positive value. The operator adjusted some potentiometers so that the meter was nulled. The output was read from the numbers pointed to by the knobs on the pots. At least that is the way I remember it working. I don't recall how exactly the equation was entered, but I think there were some pots for that too.
As far as building your own analog computer, look at op amps. They're called that because they perform mathematical operations, such as summing, multiplying, and integration. Of course they do the inverse operations as well.
Another thought along those lines, is that men tend to try and ignore discomfort. If a man gets a pain in his chest, he is likely to think to himself, "I'll wait and see if it gets worse!" If the same man is living with someone, he might say to them, "I have a slight pain right here!" pointing to his chest. Then that person would begin to pressure him to have it checked.
It is an allegory of the Russian Revolution of 1917. The farmer represents the Tsarist autocracy. In a Tsarist autocracy all power and wealth is controlled by the Tsar (Farmer Jones). This is actually a long way from capitalism. In the end the pigs form what is referred to as an oligarchy.