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The Problem With Abundance
GRW writes "Peter de Jager, "a speaker/writer/consultant on the issues relating to the Rational Assimilation of the Future", asks, 'What do traffic jams, obesity and spam have in common?' He answers that 'they are all problems caused by abundance in a world more attuned to scarcity. By achieving the goal of abundance, technology renders the natural checks and balances of scarcity obsolete.' His article is a thought provoking discussion of the unintended consequences of technological change."
Personally, I'm happy to slaughter the sacred cow of "scarcity." Imagine fitting all your porn on a 1GB hard drive. Now scarcity is not so cool.
Today we are surrounded by an excess of food and the body continues to follow a proven survival strategy -- it stores energy in fat for lean days which no longer arrive.
Given Peter de Jager's mugshot I think he has some authority on the matter.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Of course, there's also the issue that if I can't get to McDonalds because I'm stuck in traffic, I'll lose weight.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production
Karl Marx
The Communist Manifesto
Newsflash: society must adapt to changes in its environment. This includes technological changes that render previous assumptions obsolete. At the bottom of the article, the columnist mentions how digital paper might kill the newspaper business, or how easily copied CDs affected the music business. He didn't mention how that motorized carrage invention killed the buggy whip business. If your line of work is being made obsolete by changes in the environment, then perhaps it is time to change your line of work. It is futile to try to change the world, although that doesn't stop people from trying, at best all you can do is slow down the rate of change. I know it will be painful for the people who don't adapt, but that is the way of the world.
I read the internet for the articles.
The problem is that city's and to a larger extent suburbs are designed for cars. I ride my bike to work most days, and I have to do it in traffic because there is no place for bikes. So riding a bike to work is more than just riding a bike to work. I put my life at the mercy of half asleep drivers that are paying attention to other cars and not me.
Subjectively I think I am more likely to be involved in a collision with a car when I'm on my bike then when I'm driving. And I'm pretty sure I'm more likely to be seriously damaged when on the bike.
So lack of bike routes, combined with the fact that most people live too far away from their jobs to make biking practicable (again a subjective observation based on experience in DC, Baltimore and Memphis), means that you won't be seeing a massive shift to bikes any time soon. Plus people are lazy.
i don't like my old sig.
Peter De Jager's Doomsday 2000 article published in 1993 in Computerworld is often credited with starting the whole Y2K phenomena. It was alarmist, but it was also a reasonable warning to industry at the time. In 1993, a lot of Y2K remediation was needed. But by late 1998, Peter De Jager was saying that Y2K would create minimal problems and became an opponent of Y2k hysteria fanatics like Ed Yourdon. He never beleived that Y2K would result in the whacked out scenarios taught by nut cases like Gary North.
It's not even a matter of purchasing a vehicle for fuel efficiency, it's a matter of common sense. The folks who howl at the top of their lungs to try and defend their house-on-wheels purchase miss the point entirely or just don't want to admit (or just don't care) that what they did was incredibly, inexcusably stupid and suggests they have the IQ of a dead muskrat while on car lots.
If you don't NEED (or want) to go stomping through 3 feet of water, up 25 degree rocky inclines, and through 2 feet of snow on a regular basis, you don't NEED an SUV. Even the losers who whine about driving in 6 inches of snow with their SUV just don't get it. There's plenty of 4WD and AWD cars out there that are cheaper, faster, safer, easier to maintain, and handle light and moderate offroad and bad weather duty just fine. My one friend had a 4WD Tempo for about a year. It handled wet, grassy hills, snow, ice, and mud just fine.
If you NEED a vehicle for the family, a minivan is safer, cheaper, equally as versatile, and better on gas.
If you NEED to haul a boat or something similar every great once in awhile, borrow or rent a truck or SUV WHEN YOU NEED IT. There's no sense in driving a truck/SUV/van like a car for 90% of your mileage.
There are certainly the rare few who can justify an SUV/Van/Truck purchase - I know some. They have jobs that require the power of a Dodge Ram or the versatility and all-weather capability of a Suburban (actually, I know a guy who has a Durango solely because he lives in the boonies in a steep-sloping valley and doesn't usually get plowed out for days - he drives the Durango occasionally if it's the only vehicle available and to keep it from locking up in the summer, then drives it most of the winter).
Face it SUV-owners: most of you are fad following losers with no imagination or individuality. I recall a mere decade ago when SUVs were the prime requisite of mud-stomping hicks and were frowned upon by the "new elite businessperson" in favor of Lexus, BMW, and Mercedes sedans. They're a fad - I've yet to question one person who could successfully justify his/her SUV purchase. Stupid. And I will (and occasionally do) maintain that in the face of anyone who can't give me a good reason for their decision.
Oh... and I'm not against them so much for their gas-wasting ways, though that's definitely one reason I don't like them. I'm against them because the people who are dumb enough to buy them without cause aren't smart enough to drive them safely. Bigger vehicle = more responsibility. But, they mostly drive just as recklessly as everyone else anyway. In fact, I kept track for awhile, and I saw nearly twice as many people in SUVs driving recklessly (significantly over the speed limit, rapid lane changes, pulling out in front of people, etc.) as in cars. Although that could certainly be regionalized, I doubt it.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Since the article makes only trivial observations and provides no insights, I guess it's up to us readers. So here's my long rambling attempt:
The article's advice that people should think about the consequences of new technology is sort of worthless, for the same reason mentioned that you can't replace abundance with scarcity because people wouldn't stand for it. If it were normal for people to think ahead about consequences, they wouldn't mind a healthy dose of scarcity that promised them better health, lower stress and greater security.
In the real world, people who stand to profit from something rarely let the impact on others get in their way. At most, they consider their legal liability. When the damage starts to become obvious, all responsibility is placed on the customers who "demanded" the product. Demand, whether real or advertising-generated, is blamed for all the long-term consequences. The fast food industry doesn't accept the blame for creating a nation of lard-asses with heart disease. They just fulfilled the demand and raked up the profits. Those lazy customers did the damage to themselves. And of course, people should eat sensibly.
On the other hand, if you leave a big pile of concrete rubble in your front yard, and some curious kids climb on it and get hurt, you're going to be held liable for their injuries. An unfenced hazard like that is what's called an "attractive nuisance." You don't have to spend billions on advertising to get those kids to wander over and check it out. Merely making it easy to get to is enough to make you responsible for it.
So why aren't people who operate on a much larger scale equally responsible for "attractive nuisances" -- especially when they're handing out billions of toys in Happy Meals? I'm not talking about frivolous lawsuits for spilled hot coffee, I'm talking about people who learn to love products as kids, use them as directed for years and then drop dead at age 50 from the health effects. Apparently the loophole is the fact that almost anything is okay in moderation, and companies don't actually suggest in their advertising that anybody should consume TOO MUCH of their products. But then, the person with the pile of rubble likewise isn't asking anybody to climb on it. The pile is perfectly safe if you merely look at it and imagine the fun you could have climbing on it. So where's the consistency in the law?
I think we're between a rock and a hard place. Liability for future consequences could cripple innovation, or limit it to large companies with litigation war chests. Which is the same thing. Making people responsible for whatever happens to them requires that they have an unrealistic level of expertise and caution. We want a safe world. We want a changing, progressive world. What a can of worms.