Today, I took advantage of the lengthening days and ran up to Brooklyn, down through Happy Valley, and out to the south coast in Owhiro Bay. A few stereotypical white clouds dotted the sky to the south, and the sinking sun was turning the headlands to the west into dark silhouettes and the rocky coastal outcrops to the east into brightly-lit montages. The white-capped mountains of the South Island were barely visible to the west; a view straight south fell entirely off the horizon, and beyond that, Antarctica.
I ran east along the coast, past hard black volcanic rocks and weatherbeaten houses with rust streaking from every nail, to Island Bay and then back to human things. Berhampore, Newtown, Aro Valley.
Last night we were up in Wadestown, to the hilly north, at a going-away party for a French friend. At a lull in the party, I walked out the front door and ran out of words. The house looked straight out across Wellington Harbour, and it was a dark night. The docks below us cast some lights onto the water. To the north there were the bright lights of industrial Petone. Across the harbour I could see two lines of light - one running completely horizontal on the road out to Eastbourne, and the Wainuiomata grade slanting up into the hills. A few stars were visible above. Every other part of the vista was completely black.
Wellington Harbour, although deep, is wide with a narrow mouth. That, combined with the heavy winds that sweep down through it, keeps chop and waves to a minimum. (On the ferry back from Picton I could actually see the wind cutting the tops off of the waves left in the boat's wake.) So at night, there's very little to distinguish it from the sky above.
Sky above me, sea below, and very little to distinguish the two. Humans were present only in a narrow band of light. I thought about it.
The universe is an incomprehensibly enormous place, and no human has ever been more than 240,000 miles away from the earth. On a galactic scale, that's a rounding error. The part of the earth's atmosphere that is suitable for human life extends barely ten miles above the earth's surface. With short exceptions, we can't live outside that infinitesimally tiny bubble.
Our normal human activities don't go any deeper than the deepest mineshaft (a bit over two miles) or any higher than the average commercial flight (roughly 6 miles). In actual fact, most human life takes place within a thin terrestrial crust that's perhaps 50 feet thick. We don't even cover the whole planet, 70 percent of which is covered with water, and which has one whole continent that is permanently covered in ice. By any reasonable scale, our crust is unimaginably tiny - or perhaps, thin enough to be conceivable by us.
I don't think that there's a system of thought that is truly capable of coming to terms with this extraordinary fact. Our modes of thinking are definitively crustismic.
25 October 2009
23 October 2009
My former high school principal
To my great delight, my mom sent me this story from my old local paper. My old high-school principal, Becky Smith, is on forced leave after seemingly threatening a student with a pellet gun. (Article at Contra Costa Times.)
Translation: She waved a pellet gun in the student's face.
My own experience with Becky Smith has been that she's mendacious, authoritarian, and interested in her own personal aggrandizement much more than the interests of her students. The only time I dealt directly with her was during my senior year, when she advised me to lie on a scholarship application.
It was the Bank of America scholarship; they picked four students for different areas. I was selected for applied arts because (a) I had taken technical classes (Architectural Design) and (b) had a really high GPA. They could have found people better qualified in the applied arts, but never mind that.
Smith brought us in to her office to tell us about the scholarships, applications, etc. In the process she suggested that we improve our chances of winning (and her chances of looking good) by padding our resumes either by exaggerating upon things that we had done or adding additional things that we had not done.
I was quite disgusted by the entire thing. I later learned that one of the girls who did get the scholarship did weasel on her resume. Meanwhile, I kept myself to the facts, and didn't get the scholarship. So my opinion of Becky Smith is quite low, and this worsens it.
The principal of Monte Vista High in Danville is on administrative leave while the school district investigates her handling of an Airsoft pistol in front of a student.
Rebecca Smith has been on leave since Oct. 8 while the district investigates an incident in which she "handled a gun in an inappropriate manner in the presence of a student," said San Ramon Valley school district spokesman Terry Koehne.
He said the district has determined it was an Airsoft pistol, which shoots plastic pellets that generally cannot break the skin. They are available at sporting goods and other stores. The pistols, generally considered a toy, are not powerful enough for hunting.
Sources have told Bay Area News Group that the incident stemmed from actions before a girls volleyball game, when a player had an inflatable toy that resembled a gun. The student was called to the principal's office, which is where the incident with the Airsoft pistol took place.
Translation: She waved a pellet gun in the student's face.
Smith could not be reached for comment. She came to the school in 1981, working as an assistant principal before becoming principal in 1996, according to the school's Web site.
Her time at the school has not been without controversy. In 2007, a district audit found that nearly $100,000 raised by recent graduating classes was spent for items not approved by students. The funds were raised by each graduating class during their years at the school, with students determining where the money goes, but administrators instead transferred the cash to other accounts and decided where to spend it. Items purchased included computers, landscaping and rugs.
My own experience with Becky Smith has been that she's mendacious, authoritarian, and interested in her own personal aggrandizement much more than the interests of her students. The only time I dealt directly with her was during my senior year, when she advised me to lie on a scholarship application.
It was the Bank of America scholarship; they picked four students for different areas. I was selected for applied arts because (a) I had taken technical classes (Architectural Design) and (b) had a really high GPA. They could have found people better qualified in the applied arts, but never mind that.
Smith brought us in to her office to tell us about the scholarships, applications, etc. In the process she suggested that we improve our chances of winning (and her chances of looking good) by padding our resumes either by exaggerating upon things that we had done or adding additional things that we had not done.
I was quite disgusted by the entire thing. I later learned that one of the girls who did get the scholarship did weasel on her resume. Meanwhile, I kept myself to the facts, and didn't get the scholarship. So my opinion of Becky Smith is quite low, and this worsens it.
22 October 2009
Freight logistics
This title isn't a clever play on words. This is actually a blog post on transportation.
I've been reading an interesting book entitled - don't laugh - The Structure and Dynamics of New Zealand Industries. It's quite dry in most parts, but a lot of intriguing facts slip through the gaps between economic statistics. For example, two firms have controlled virtually the entire beer market since 1970s, and in 1999 about 70% of the beer brewed was something called "brown beer" - "full-coloured, relatively sweet, with a malty taste and an ale-like character... a lager of a type unique to New Zealand." (124)
That fact in turn illuminates another question that has been perplexing me: Why NZers have a preference for Mac's Gold, a truly terrible lager, when Lion Brown is (a) cheaper and (b) tastes beerish rather than like water adulterated with car exhaust. Lagers are relatively new here, and after roughly a century of drinking basically the same couple of types of brown beer, people here are keen to try something, anything else. The American beer market, on the other hand, has long since been built on crappy lagers, and as a result I am happy to try anything else.
But I digress.
Over the weekend, Anne and I went down to Marlborough, where we drank a lot of wine and took all sorts of Victorian-style transportation. We bridged the gap between the islands on a ferry, biked 20 miles to Blenheim, biked around vineyards, canoed, and took the train back to Picton. The train, like all of those in NZ, ran on narrow-gauge tracks, and as we stood up on the open viewing deck we could feel it sway from side to side. (Pretty much every other developed country, and many of the developing ones, use wider tracks, which reduce sway and allow faster speeds. NZ decided to build narrow tracks in the late 1800s in order to get the railway through the mountainous central North Island.)
I think about trains quite a lot. My petroleum geologist dad reckons that we're probably more than half the way through the earth's reserves of petroleum - i.e. the stored sun energy of hundreds of millions of years - and using oil at a quickening pace. When oil runs down, newer means of transport - cars, trucks, and airplanes - will become more costly. Possibly too costly. So maybe more trains are in our future.
The history of freight logistics in NZ is mainly the history of trains. From the 1930s to the 1980s, New Zealand's government pursued a policy of regulation and subsidies that favored rail transport over most other forms. Rail was preferred in part because, as a trading department of the government, prices and staffing levels could be fixed to meet industrial and employment policy needs. This led to a variety of inefficiencies - of which more later. In the 1980s, this regulated system was rapidly dismantled - the Railways Department was corporatized, and later privatized, and road freight was deregulated.
I am reading Structure and Dynamics in part for the "signs of the times" moments that it provides. In particular, I found this passage fascinating:
This was done mainly to protect the government's investment in costly rail infrastructure. But after its election in 1984, the Labour Party dismantled these controls (and a remarkable array of others - indeed, Structure and Dynamics often reads like "the New Zealand economy après le déluge) in favor of increased efficiency.
Efficiency they got. The new, market driven railways cut staff by 3/4 and managed to carry the same amount of freight. "For example, ten years ago it took seven to ten days to ship goods from Auckland to Christchurch. Today [1995], Tranz Rail offers a door-to-door service in under 24 hours." (193) They did so by getting rid of most of the funny little rules that formerly predominated, such as the requirement to stop trains after traveling a certain distance, which caused the Railways Department to set up tearooms and loading docks in the middle of nowhere.
(Or, as my dad's favorite bit of verse goes, "The squalid tea of Mercer is not strained.")
In short, the "controlled" freight logistics sector made transport of goods much more costly and time-consuming than it could have been. What I'm thinking about, I suppose, is the social world that would tend to produce. In a very basic sense, raising transport costs tends to make local production more economic. (It also tends to raise the costs of goods, and hence reduces their availability to most people.) So in a world of costly, slow transport, one effectively without road freight, we may see more localized economies. People and products would move less, and money would tend to circulate within smaller regions rather than nationally or globally.
So, for example, most rural NZ towns tended to have a cheese factory, as it was harder to transport milk long distances before it spoiled. (As Structure and Dynamics also comments, the level of technology also helped to spread around cheese manufacturing, as refrigerated milk tankers were only developed in the 1950s.) I would imagine that other types of production were also more dispersed.
I don't expect a return to the bad old days of the highly regulated economy. Like it or not, today's standards of governance - openness to trade and capital flows, deregulation, policies to foster competition - are pretty well entrenched. Economists, policymakers and businesses are in agreement on these policies, and other voices are poorly organized and rarely heard within the state machinery.
Governments aren't going to get back into the business of telling truck drivers how far they can ship goods. But I don't think that it's entirely unreasonable to expect fuel constraints to severely curtail the use of road transport. In the absence of major technological change, we might end up having to ship goods by rail or not at all, and at higher prices. This could in turn lead us back to a situation like that in pre-1980s New Zealand - more local production, more expensive goods, etc.
On the other hand, one general principle about the evolution of societies is that, absent a catastrophic exhaustion of natural resources, they tend to become more complex over time. To put it in Frederic Jameson's terms, the ease of cognitive mapping (i.e. representing the social space in a way intelligible to an individual) tends to decline as society expands. The only ultimate limit to this is the the ability of the planet's ecosystems and natural resources to sustain increased complexity.
Progressive change - even of a revolutionary nature - is unlikely to return things to a state of primitivist simplicity, as doing so would undermine its foundations in labyrinthine modern life. Conservative, reactionary, and fascistic change are similarly unable to return things to a "simpler past", in spite of their shared mythmaking around original sin, pastoralism, and racial purity.
On Jameson's terms, there's no turning back - we can shift from trains to trucks and back again, but the general drift will be towards increasing unmappability. All we can do is to widen the gauges of the tracks, and tell bigger and better stories about all of the places to which our labor is flowing.
I've been reading an interesting book entitled - don't laugh - The Structure and Dynamics of New Zealand Industries. It's quite dry in most parts, but a lot of intriguing facts slip through the gaps between economic statistics. For example, two firms have controlled virtually the entire beer market since 1970s, and in 1999 about 70% of the beer brewed was something called "brown beer" - "full-coloured, relatively sweet, with a malty taste and an ale-like character... a lager of a type unique to New Zealand." (124)
That fact in turn illuminates another question that has been perplexing me: Why NZers have a preference for Mac's Gold, a truly terrible lager, when Lion Brown is (a) cheaper and (b) tastes beerish rather than like water adulterated with car exhaust. Lagers are relatively new here, and after roughly a century of drinking basically the same couple of types of brown beer, people here are keen to try something, anything else. The American beer market, on the other hand, has long since been built on crappy lagers, and as a result I am happy to try anything else.
But I digress.
Over the weekend, Anne and I went down to Marlborough, where we drank a lot of wine and took all sorts of Victorian-style transportation. We bridged the gap between the islands on a ferry, biked 20 miles to Blenheim, biked around vineyards, canoed, and took the train back to Picton. The train, like all of those in NZ, ran on narrow-gauge tracks, and as we stood up on the open viewing deck we could feel it sway from side to side. (Pretty much every other developed country, and many of the developing ones, use wider tracks, which reduce sway and allow faster speeds. NZ decided to build narrow tracks in the late 1800s in order to get the railway through the mountainous central North Island.)
I think about trains quite a lot. My petroleum geologist dad reckons that we're probably more than half the way through the earth's reserves of petroleum - i.e. the stored sun energy of hundreds of millions of years - and using oil at a quickening pace. When oil runs down, newer means of transport - cars, trucks, and airplanes - will become more costly. Possibly too costly. So maybe more trains are in our future.
The history of freight logistics in NZ is mainly the history of trains. From the 1930s to the 1980s, New Zealand's government pursued a policy of regulation and subsidies that favored rail transport over most other forms. Rail was preferred in part because, as a trading department of the government, prices and staffing levels could be fixed to meet industrial and employment policy needs. This led to a variety of inefficiencies - of which more later. In the 1980s, this regulated system was rapidly dismantled - the Railways Department was corporatized, and later privatized, and road freight was deregulated.
I am reading Structure and Dynamics in part for the "signs of the times" moments that it provides. In particular, I found this passage fascinating:
Prior to 1961, trucks were only allowed to move freight up to 30 miles (50 kms). In 1961 the protection limit was raised to 40 miles (67 kms). At this time several commodities were exempt, including livestock. The revised limit was further increased to 94 miles (150kms) in 1977, and the exemptions were increased. (191)
This was done mainly to protect the government's investment in costly rail infrastructure. But after its election in 1984, the Labour Party dismantled these controls (and a remarkable array of others - indeed, Structure and Dynamics often reads like "the New Zealand economy après le déluge) in favor of increased efficiency.
Efficiency they got. The new, market driven railways cut staff by 3/4 and managed to carry the same amount of freight. "For example, ten years ago it took seven to ten days to ship goods from Auckland to Christchurch. Today [1995], Tranz Rail offers a door-to-door service in under 24 hours." (193) They did so by getting rid of most of the funny little rules that formerly predominated, such as the requirement to stop trains after traveling a certain distance, which caused the Railways Department to set up tearooms and loading docks in the middle of nowhere.
(Or, as my dad's favorite bit of verse goes, "The squalid tea of Mercer is not strained.")
In short, the "controlled" freight logistics sector made transport of goods much more costly and time-consuming than it could have been. What I'm thinking about, I suppose, is the social world that would tend to produce. In a very basic sense, raising transport costs tends to make local production more economic. (It also tends to raise the costs of goods, and hence reduces their availability to most people.) So in a world of costly, slow transport, one effectively without road freight, we may see more localized economies. People and products would move less, and money would tend to circulate within smaller regions rather than nationally or globally.
So, for example, most rural NZ towns tended to have a cheese factory, as it was harder to transport milk long distances before it spoiled. (As Structure and Dynamics also comments, the level of technology also helped to spread around cheese manufacturing, as refrigerated milk tankers were only developed in the 1950s.) I would imagine that other types of production were also more dispersed.
I don't expect a return to the bad old days of the highly regulated economy. Like it or not, today's standards of governance - openness to trade and capital flows, deregulation, policies to foster competition - are pretty well entrenched. Economists, policymakers and businesses are in agreement on these policies, and other voices are poorly organized and rarely heard within the state machinery.
Governments aren't going to get back into the business of telling truck drivers how far they can ship goods. But I don't think that it's entirely unreasonable to expect fuel constraints to severely curtail the use of road transport. In the absence of major technological change, we might end up having to ship goods by rail or not at all, and at higher prices. This could in turn lead us back to a situation like that in pre-1980s New Zealand - more local production, more expensive goods, etc.
On the other hand, one general principle about the evolution of societies is that, absent a catastrophic exhaustion of natural resources, they tend to become more complex over time. To put it in Frederic Jameson's terms, the ease of cognitive mapping (i.e. representing the social space in a way intelligible to an individual) tends to decline as society expands. The only ultimate limit to this is the the ability of the planet's ecosystems and natural resources to sustain increased complexity.
Progressive change - even of a revolutionary nature - is unlikely to return things to a state of primitivist simplicity, as doing so would undermine its foundations in labyrinthine modern life. Conservative, reactionary, and fascistic change are similarly unable to return things to a "simpler past", in spite of their shared mythmaking around original sin, pastoralism, and racial purity.
On Jameson's terms, there's no turning back - we can shift from trains to trucks and back again, but the general drift will be towards increasing unmappability. All we can do is to widen the gauges of the tracks, and tell bigger and better stories about all of the places to which our labor is flowing.
21 October 2009
The 21st century Tolstoy
I can't believe we just spent over an hour watching all 22 episodes of R. Kelly's Trapped In The Closet. It was like a social-realist novel for the 2000s.
Now pause the movie cause what I'm about to say to y'all is so damn twisted, not only is there a man in his cabinet, but the man is a midget.
Now pause the movie cause what I'm about to say to y'all is so damn twisted, not only is there a man in his cabinet, but the man is a midget.
08 October 2009
Grape expectations for globalization
It's Anne's birthday. Happy birthday Anne.
In a follow-up to my post about trade policy and vermouth, I offer this:
Yes, it is actually called Grape Expectations.
We bought this bad boy today, for reasons which I can't explain, at the liquor shop. It's a two-liter bottle of what is described as "medium dry white", with an 11% alcohol content. And did I mention that the bottle is plastic? It's approximately 25% cheaper than our budget favorite, box wine.
As it turned out, the bargain basement is not a good place to buy wine. The smell of the wine, which wine connoisseurs call "the nose", was slightly winey, with overtones of diluted urine. As we are conozers rather than connoisseurs, we forged on ahead.
The taste itself was complex and varied, although not in any good way. At first, it was slightly sulfurous, with hints of wine. Then we tasted nothing at all. Then, a strong tang of plastic, and, finally, with a grimace, industrial alcohol. In short, it was the most vile wine I've ever experienced - although Anne said that she's had worse, which worries me.
Aside from the hideousness of the liquid itself, what's remarkable (to me at least) is what the bottle tells us about current trade policies.
The pre-1984 trade regime raised high barriers to foreign goods in an effort to promote local manufacturing and employment - i.e. to keep money circulating within national boundaries when possible. This led to some absurdities, naturally - manufacturing liqueurs and labels in Italy and assembling them in bottles in Auckland.
Since the liberalization of trade worldwide, which has taken place partially through multilateral World Trade Organization talks, and mainly through countries choosing to drop tariff barriers on their own (or being strong-armed into doing so by the International Monetary Fund), production value chains have proliferated across the world. In practical terms, this has made it much easier to design products in one country, manufacture the various parts in several other countries, and assemble the final good elsewhere. (This has been done by multinational corporations in an effort to lower the costs of production - often through labor arbitrage.)
This, in turn, produces its own forms of absurdities. Take, for example, these lines on the label of the bottle of "Grape Expectations":
WINE PRODUCT OF ARGENTINA
Bottled in Australia from
Imported Ingredients
In short, grapes were grown in Argentina, and presumably rejected for being too godawfully repulsive to go into Argentine wine. (Given the things I've drunk out of rectangular cardboard boxes in Argentina, this should have warned me off this beverage.) They were then turned into wine anyway, and shipped to Australia, where sulfur and preservatives were added (but why???). Finally, the product was put into plastic bottles, made out of oil that had come from somewhere else entirely, and the whole concoction was shipped to New Zealand.
Doesn't this sound like a really complicated way of making exceedingly fucking terrible wine? I suppose that this spirit is the inverted double of the decades-old vermouth I previously encountered. The promise of globalization (which I will define loosely as the lowering of trade barriers and the rise of global systems of production) was that it would make things cheaper. It never promised to make the world any less complex, or to make it make any more sense. Indeed, we've only replaced one type of non-sense for another.
Indeed, our only expectation going into the future is that things will get increasingly nonsensical if we examine them closely.
In a follow-up to my post about trade policy and vermouth, I offer this:
Yes, it is actually called Grape Expectations.
We bought this bad boy today, for reasons which I can't explain, at the liquor shop. It's a two-liter bottle of what is described as "medium dry white", with an 11% alcohol content. And did I mention that the bottle is plastic? It's approximately 25% cheaper than our budget favorite, box wine.
As it turned out, the bargain basement is not a good place to buy wine. The smell of the wine, which wine connoisseurs call "the nose", was slightly winey, with overtones of diluted urine. As we are conozers rather than connoisseurs, we forged on ahead.
The taste itself was complex and varied, although not in any good way. At first, it was slightly sulfurous, with hints of wine. Then we tasted nothing at all. Then, a strong tang of plastic, and, finally, with a grimace, industrial alcohol. In short, it was the most vile wine I've ever experienced - although Anne said that she's had worse, which worries me.
Aside from the hideousness of the liquid itself, what's remarkable (to me at least) is what the bottle tells us about current trade policies.
The pre-1984 trade regime raised high barriers to foreign goods in an effort to promote local manufacturing and employment - i.e. to keep money circulating within national boundaries when possible. This led to some absurdities, naturally - manufacturing liqueurs and labels in Italy and assembling them in bottles in Auckland.
Since the liberalization of trade worldwide, which has taken place partially through multilateral World Trade Organization talks, and mainly through countries choosing to drop tariff barriers on their own (or being strong-armed into doing so by the International Monetary Fund), production value chains have proliferated across the world. In practical terms, this has made it much easier to design products in one country, manufacture the various parts in several other countries, and assemble the final good elsewhere. (This has been done by multinational corporations in an effort to lower the costs of production - often through labor arbitrage.)
This, in turn, produces its own forms of absurdities. Take, for example, these lines on the label of the bottle of "Grape Expectations":
Bottled in Australia from
Imported Ingredients
In short, grapes were grown in Argentina, and presumably rejected for being too godawfully repulsive to go into Argentine wine. (Given the things I've drunk out of rectangular cardboard boxes in Argentina, this should have warned me off this beverage.) They were then turned into wine anyway, and shipped to Australia, where sulfur and preservatives were added (but why???). Finally, the product was put into plastic bottles, made out of oil that had come from somewhere else entirely, and the whole concoction was shipped to New Zealand.
Doesn't this sound like a really complicated way of making exceedingly fucking terrible wine? I suppose that this spirit is the inverted double of the decades-old vermouth I previously encountered. The promise of globalization (which I will define loosely as the lowering of trade barriers and the rise of global systems of production) was that it would make things cheaper. It never promised to make the world any less complex, or to make it make any more sense. Indeed, we've only replaced one type of non-sense for another.
Indeed, our only expectation going into the future is that things will get increasingly nonsensical if we examine them closely.
01 October 2009
Tonight in conversation
I said: I'm thinking of abandoning the beard and going back to my original plan of a driver's license.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
