Macron

Posted on 29 June, 2018 by alloporus

The French president was in Sydney recently, fresh from his triumph in Washington DC. He was in town for talks and, by all accounts, his signature. Any number of bilateral agreements were made legal.

Just to remind you, this is the French president, the figurehead of the country that the English fought wars with for centuries. Only in modern times have they become best buddies, at least officially.

Only “this is Australia, not England”, you say.

True. But an Australia still run by the remnants of the British, the white heritage dudes who, whilst nodding to the multicultural attributes of the people, keep reminding everyone of the empire and those who died to defend it. The very same empire that colonised and suppressed so many peoples for so long.

And what was the President to say, in French of course, to his Australian host Prime Minister Turnbull. My translation from his speech outside Kirribilli House on a gloriously sunny autumn day with the harbour shimmering in the background was something like…

“We love you bro, and your missus.

We are well chuffed to sign just about anything you like if it makes you feel good.

After all we are miles away up there in the real world and you are far away down here and for some reason you were gullible enough to buy a bunch of our submarines at great expense.

Thanks mate, good on ya.”

Now I am sure that underneath my cynicism there are more conventional messages.

For example, it is always good to be friendly towards foreign powers whether they speak French or not. Bullying or annoying them is obviously detrimental to any current or future bonhomie.

Chatting pleasantly to the French president helps realise the opportunity for really good deals with a European Union just as they are about to look closely at trade agreements once the British exit. Pleasantries might even secure the odd bilateral with France.

The French are good at high tech industry and Australia has thought it might like to try that too, so cozying up to a player in that game has any number of benefits. Defense materiel, si vous plait.

The more mates you have, the easier it is to keep the bad guys at bay and off your internet allowing you to be the main social media influence. Although one has to think that cyber crime and indeed, cyber warfare, are the arenas of the future.

All up, keep the boys club alive and all will be well.

It will not. We need better than this. We need discussion and agreements about refugees, food security, universal income, changing the workforce, technology to keep people alive rather than kill them, and a host of solutions to keeping multitudes of affluent people happy and off the streets.

A couple of would be chums buying and selling arms is not the answer.

Future self

Posted on 22 June, 2018 by alloporus

“Most of us can remember who we were 10 years ago, but we find it hard to imagine who we’re going to be, and then we mistakenly think that because it’s hard to imagine, it’s not likely to happen” Dan Gilbert

I find it hard to remember what I was doing 10 years ago.

After a while I can recall what my job was back then, what my family was up to and maybe the colour of the ever changing feature wall in the living room. Most specific activities are a blur unless I really concentrate on place and where I was within it. Even then the memories are patchy.

As Dan Gilbert suggests, that’s the easy part. We are much better at remembering the past than we are predicting the future.

Memory has obvious evolutionary advantages for long-lived organisms who need to know where the food and shelter can be found when the weather turns bad.

Predicting is much harder. Perhaps because we remember actual things that, at least for us, really happened. Predictions are a guess. A possibility with a likelihood. In other words, events are just as likely not to happen as they are to come to pass. There is a psychological cost to making a prediction that is never paid with a memory. Any prediction we make comes with risk to our self esteem. The further forward in time we project our guesses the more likely they are to be wrong so our ego shuts them down as a form of protection.

Well, that is one rational explanation anyway.

No doubt if I spend a few days trawling Google Scholar I could find out if anyone has positied it formally and maybe even tried to test it.

But let’s consider the consequences of humans not generally being any good at predicting our future selves.

We are easily stuck in the past often viewing it with tinted spectacles.

Our frame of reference is what has gone before, what we know, rather than what could be. Our anxiety over autonomous vehicles is a case in point.

We get very good at incredulity. So much so that we even refuse to believe what is front of our noses because unless we have seen it before it cannot be real. We’ll let the perversity of that logic slide.

It takes a lot to convince us of anything we have not already seen, heard or felt, unless its been on our Facebook feed.

We lose the ability to be rational in the face of evidence.

And we could go on.

Altogether this inability to predict the future leaves us with one binding feeling…

We hate change.

We just want everything to stay the same. It’s what we know, what we remember and what makes life predictable, reliable, certain and, please god, comfortable.

Only as Dan Gilbert points out, there is a problem. It’s called time.

“The bottom line is, time is a powerful force. It transforms our preferences. It reshapes our values. It alters our personalities. We seem to appreciate this fact, but only in retrospect.”

Many a post on this blog has ranted on about the consequences of time, what’s coming over the horizon and how poorly we are prepared for it.

If this difficulty in imagining our future self is pervasive, it offers a proximate explanation for many of these rants. We simply just don’t know how to see the future so we stay stuck in the past overestimating the wonders of the present and scared to death of change.

Heaven help us.

Ecological grief

Posted on 15 June, 2018 by alloporus

Research shows that people increasingly feel the effects of [these] planetary changes and associated ecological losses in their daily lives, and that these changes present significant direct and indirect threats to mental health and well-being

So goes the introduction to an article on ecological grief by Neville Ellis and Ashlee Cunsolo, young academics interested in the mental health consequences to people living in the Anthropocene, the geological epoch man has created.

They suggest that we feel the ecological change going on around us so profoundly that we grieve for the loss of its more comforting attributes.

Bullshit.

There is no way that the average city dweller en route to a job they hate after grabbing a pop tart that will give them indigestion at best and yet so happy to be out of the house where all they seem to do is argue, is grieving over the loss of Amazonian rainforest and 2 degrees of warming.

Not unless you unfurl a hugely long bow and claim that all this angst is, actually, ecological grief manifest.

Sorry, I don’t buy it.

The stress people experience in their lives starts much closer to home. It is their ego propelling them into chaos. Whilst it is true that the ecological cliff we are hurtling over adds to the problem, it seems unlikely that our insatiable needs for wealth, recognition and personal power all have their origins in grief.

There is far too much basic evolutionary biology that can explain these human drivers. It’s just that the selfish gene has spectacular psychological and emotional expression in the Anthropocene.

Ecological grief is an enchanting concept though. I have no doubt that we all feel it even if almost all of those good folk on the 7.32am from Barking never make the association.

So my challenge to the inventors of the the term, is to figure out how much of this grief exists and is it strong enough to influence present and future behaviour.

There are glimpses that it might be. The zero waste girl who lived for a year without generating any garbage. Or the global movement to ban single use plastic bags. But there is also endless examples where, if people are grieving, it is not changing their behaviour.

Unless, of course, this is their grief.

Ah, such sweet tautology.

Little gem – more hopeful

Posted on 11 June, 2018 by alloporus

TED talks have been around for a long time now, since 1984 as it turns out. There are over 2,000 of them, most in that punchy, smart format that makes even challenging ideas accessible.

Here is a collection of eight of them that Kara Cutruzzula selected on how to be more hopeful

They have these messages…

Shift your expectations
Recognize that you can change your life at any point
Look for meaning in the most challenging moments
Listen to another person’s story
Return to your home base
Add some wow to your world
Remember the essential goodness of humanity
Think about your death (yes, really).

A good list, a little gem, and well worth a look.

Difficult thought

Posted on 8 June, 2018 by alloporus

When I first read this article on the White House bible study group that is apparently attended on a regular basis by many members of the US cabinet and presided over by an unelected pastor, I thought…

OMG.

Ironic I know.

Incredulity welled up, slowly at first and then escalated toward anger.

Here we had decision makers responsible for the immediate well being of 325 million Americans, not to mention a whole heap of global economic and diplomatic flow on, who bashed the bible in that truly fundamentalist way. On company time, they were learning the gospels as interpreted by an individual whose political and moral agendas are unknown.

This cannot be right.

It cannot be objective or balanced.

And it cannot be in the best interests of a nation made up of people with a myriad of beliefs and values when leaders focus on the interests of just one particular and often narrow view of the world.

Then I checked myself.

Religion is a reality.

Belief in one god or another is an ever present in many people’s lives and has influenced leaders, governments and policy ever since leadership was invented. People in power invariably have religious beliefs and simply because they are in power, inevitably foist those beliefs on their subjects.

So be it, my calming self thought.

It is what it is.

Whoever is in power, be they elected or simply the pastor brought into the inner fold, will have beliefs. It is impossible to find a true neutral. Even the atheist believes in her disbelief. In all cases of leadership the people who lead will bring beliefs and a value set to the process of leading. Values will influence their decisions and how they make them.

Now if those values may seem to me odd, extreme even, my option is not to vote for them. Perhaps even persuade others to do likewise.

If I don’t have a vote or the system is not exactly democratic my options are less comfortable but I could still make my disagreement known, even if only to myself.

My problem with the White House bible group is who runs it and how they got there.

The process of influence through the tradesman’s entrance is a dangerous precedent. It allows beliefs and ideas that really haven’t been through the public mill to ingratiate the source while many other equally valid beliefs and ideas try to muscle their way through the Fourth Estate.

Again this is nothing new. This process of influence is as old as politics itself but we should be more concerned when it is a brazen as this for it suggests that very few people even see it as free influence.

Add to this the ’fake news’ corruption of the media and getting through the back door becomes even more of a bonus.

So here is the thought.

When you next hear a politician speaking about policy, a rarity I know, think about where the policy came from, who influenced its formulation and what values are affected by it.

This can be quite a salutary exercise for the benefits of preaching to the inner circle stretch way beyond theology.

Cost shifting

Posted on 1 June, 2018 by alloporus

I guarantee that at some point in your day you shift a cost.

Something done will benefit you at the expense of someone else and, in far too many instances, ultimately impact on the environment.

But don’t feel too bad for you are not alone. We all do it.

Every day I put waste items in the garbage. When the kitchen bin is full, I empty it into the dustbin that each week is collected. My garbage is transported to a landfill where it is covered with layer after layer of trash from my neighbourhood and periodically capped with soil. In time my garbage decomposes and releases methane to the atmosphere and a smell to the surrounds.

I trust that the landfill facility is well managed so that any smell is contained and that nothing too toxic leaks into the groundwater.

I know that my garbage is going to be in the ground for a very long time carrying risk of contamination so I also hope that the landfill site is well chosen and remains contained.

Of course I pay for the collection, transport and management of my garbage that in modern times might include the capture and flaring of the methane. But these costs are really to cover the collection actions and not the long-term contamination risk.

That risk is external to my transaction. I do not expect to pay if the structural engineer got it wrong.

What if I wanted to do something about this external cost? It is impossible to live in a modern city and not generate at least some garbage.

I might compost any green waste at home. This would be good, as would diligence in filling up the recycling bin. I could separate all the plastic bags and send them to a recycler. And, of course, take reusable bags to the grocery store. And even if I were diligent in these things there would still be some packaging around the cheese or the preschitto that would need a bin.

When I’m out and about there is coffee, the muffin, the business lunch, the snacks my wife so lovingly packs into my man bag and goodness knows how much garbage from Tuesdays take away sushi.

The reality is that there is a packaging externality created in our modern world. Just now we are beginning to realise that the oceans are copping most of this cost as huge plastic gyres and then surreptitiously returning some of it to our bodies in the seafood we consume.

The truth is that every resource we consume creates an externality somewhere. Greenhouse gases, ozone depletion, water pollution, smoke, dust… You get the idea.

Human ingenuity changes the way ecosystems function and we are not always sure by how much or with what consequence. When the consequence is the depletion of function that humans find useful then it is a cost. And if we’ve ignored the cost by assuming its either of no consequence or absorbed by the system without undue pain then we have shifted it.

Shifting costs is pervasive and hard to stop. Everyone does it all the time, individually and collectively.

There is little point in beating yourself or a drum on this though. It is impossible to live as a modern human and not shift costs. It is an inevitability built into our lifestyles and the commerce that creates them.

However, it is possible to become much more aware of this reality and at least give some thought to the external costs of the things we do.

In time, thinking might even change us a little bit. Perhaps enough to stop the gyres accumulating out of control to rise out of the water and take over the world.