Silicon Valley Ideology Will Ruin Us

The high tech innovators have their own ideas of what "radical solutions" means, when it comes to climate change. A couple of true believers from Miami Dade County are figuring out how to maintain capital accumulation and profit as South Florida gets pounded by hurricanes and the seas continue to rise. According to them, the answers will come from a new "global climate center for climate solutions" being built in New York. This can only happen though, if "it can avoid lengthy permitting processes and resident resistance, which often thwart new ideas, as it experiments with fresh approaches to the climate threat. These so-called sandboxes for innovation are where we can take risks, rapidly learn what options work and commercialize and scale them up." The high techies will save the planet if people and government regulation will just get out of their way. The smart people will go to their incubator and come up with brilliant solutions which they can scale up and "commercialize" and make billions off of. 3D printing sea walls, for instance. Resistance from people trying to protect ecosystems "thwart new ideas". Using crisis to make money is their idea of "radical" but of course it is the oldest play in the book. One of the authors, Galen Treuer, leads climate tech and economic innovation in Miami-Dade County’s Office of Economic Development. So we know what he gets paid to do. Of course this tech management is all dressed up in progressive development speak. We will "create vibrant , connected communities". Not sure who "we " is. It's all about "long-term well-being, which means adapting communities to be resilient, affordable, inclusive and economically viable in deeply rooted ways." These people are deeply rooted in Silicon Valley start-up ideology and have no real answers.

Who's In Charge?

The story is not that Lizz Truss made some bad decisions, the story is that the Market decides who is in and who is out. Not "The People", be they the movement , the mob, the voters or citizens. Or whatever. It is those running the central banks, the big investment firms, you know, Capital. “Markets are calling the shots right now,” Geoffrey Yu, a senior foreign-exchange strategist at Bank of New York Mellon,” told Bloomberg, referring to the mess in Britain. “That’s the bottom line.” Gamblers are in charge. And we all know how stable and rational gamblers are. The tragedy is that people still believe electing new leadership will change something. Some new insanely ambitious and cunning piker will inherit the calamity that is Great Britian. Could be a clown prince like Boris, Berlosconi or Trump, could be a fascist like Bolsanaro or Meloni or Putin. It hardly matters. Managed decline or accelerated decline, there's only a few more bucks to be made before the gamblers have to climb into the bunkers. But they will play till the end.

More Dead Canaries

This from the Times on the crashing snow crab fishery: Miranda Westphal, a biologist with the state’s fish and game department, said on Friday that it was investigating why the crab population was declining. “From 2018 to 2021, we lost about 90 percent of these animals,” Ms. Westphal said. Alaska is the fastest warming state in the United States, according to Climate Central, an independent group of scientists who research and report about changing climate. And rising temperatures in Alaska’s cold waters may be killing the crustaceans. A few more people out of work, another ecosystem collapsing, another day, another dollar. I don't eat crab so without this article I wouldn't even feel the effect but this is how it comes down, a thousand small cuts, an extinction here, an extinction there. And we are only talking about a small degree of warming, a couple of degrees in water temp, thats how fragile the whole thing is. The other thing that isn't able to sink in, that people seem unable to fuly comprehend, is that this is not a strictly linear process. As I've said over and over and over to no avail, there are tipping points. Points where runaway feed back loops become self-generating and the effects cascade. You don't want to get there.

Atavism, Fascism, Chauvinism and Stress

Most commentary describes the rise of the far-right with its blood and soil ideology on downward mobility and declining living standards. From where I watch the world, I'm not so sure about this analysis. I see plenty of right wing extremism coinciding with increased wealth and social status. Where I live, there is lots of new money circulating amongst the white working class along with increasineg expressions of nationalism, authoritarianism, other manifestations of neofascism. Poor people are much less visible but I just don't see the same types of bumper stickers or Trump flags on the old makes and models. Of course poor people tend to be more guarded, less apt to display their politics for fear of retribution in some form. Poor people don't need more enemies. But I also think they see through the ridiculousness of billionaires like Trump claiming to represent their interests. The guys with the seventy thousand dollar pick-ups, new transplants from San Bernadino and Fresno who made a killing on property, they now distinguish themselves as "Ultramaga", not to be confused with regular knuckleheads. I saw a sign on a truck yesterday that said: "Donald Trump: Father of the New Revolution". Trump is the Big Daddy who can say the things they only think. To the degree we can call it thinking. The point is, these guys want to be out on the bleeding edge, but don't have any understanding of political economy. They love their country but fear their government. They drive around with big flags on their trucks, burning gas.