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Our Ever-Changing Climate

The global warming argument has some fundamental inanities, and I worry because of the duplicitous way the global-warming arguments are presented that at the core of the movement someone knows this — or else there is some sort of naturally co-ordinated “conspiracy” involved.

To be clear: Human prehistory starts hundreds of thousands of years ago, so this could possibly be extended beyond the end of the last glaciation, but —

Ten thousand years ago there was some fairly rapid global warming. The ice sheets covering the northern hemisphere continents went away and humanity spread to fill the newly exposed territory. Humanity had been burning shit for millions of years but they had not yet started the modern program of cutting down all the trees so that they could plant fields of wheat or lakes of rice. They had started cutting down trees to build structures, but I don’t understand exactly how many trees we’re talking about there. Through most of human history it’s the cutting down of trees — and eventually burning them or letting them decay — that is the primary anthropogenic contribution to climate change. Combatting Anthropogenic drivers are the “natural” drivers which are many and generally weak, except for the super-volcanic contributions which are immense and sudden, but generally seem to fade after only a few years or a decade.

All through these 10,000 years of human history and massive global warming there has been a regular cycle of warmer and cooler periods which have had a drastic and evident, and well-documented, effect upon humanity and human-behavior on the societal level. When the poles get warmer the water levels rise and when the tropics get warmer precipitation increases. When the poles get cooler sea levels fall and when the tropics get cooler precipitation decreases. These cycles last for hundreds of years and because that span exceeds the personal memories of humans the current moment always seems to be normality, though they give old people great opportunities to say, “when I was a kid the river froze over every year”, or “when I was a kid we could harvest three bushels of wheat from that field, what’s wrong with you?” The consequences of these warming and cooling cycles are easy to predict and exactly as expected:

Global land-masses are disproportionately northerly, hence Eurasia and North America are the regions with a walkable path from polar to temperate regions, which plays a role in the following. Eurasia has the most well-understood prehistorical records going back to the glaciation, so it’s just easiest to talk about. Presumably similar patterns are visible everywhere that large-scale migration is possible. In Eurasia during cyclical warming periods precipitation increases, temperate growing seasons become longer and farm and hunting yields rise. Populations increase to track increased food supplies. Vast empires form in the most hospitable regions. At the northern edges independent tribes rejecting civilization push and are pushed further north into previously too difficult terrain. This situation progresses for hundreds of years, then it starts to cool.

During cooling periods farm yields fall and empires need to reduce their populations in order to prosper. Of course this doesn’t happen. Instead the typical citizen (or whatever) of the empire becomes poorer, hungry, and desperate. The excess productivity of the empire decreases and thus the political elites who harvest the excess productivity need to reduce their demands — which had been slowly growing for hundreds of years. Of course they do not do this and therefore the empire becomes ripe for rebellion, fragile and unable to respond effectively to sudden and acute challenges. At the same time the northern wastes which we mentioned were inhabited by independent tribes — generally referred to as “barbarians” — become more difficult and the barbarians are forced to move south, where they encounter weakened empires unready for violent highly-motivated assault and then next thing you know Visigoths are sacking Rome, etc.

The next time someone shows you a historical chart of global temperatures, see if it starts around 1890. That’s a weird and distinctive time to start a chart: it’s not some even number of years ago (like 1918 or 1868), nor some obviously even year, such as 1900 (though you’ll see that a bunch too, because it’s close enough). The reason is pretty simple: the northern hemisphere experienced a prolonged cooling, probably cause by humans, that lasted from 1450 until 1890. Before that was a warming period that was probably also caused by humans. Most (but not all) of the warming since 1890 has been a reproduction of that earlier warming process, a reversal of the human-caused cooling that preceded 1890 which is sometimes called “The Little Ice Age”. Charts of global warming generally start in 1890 because they aren’t willing to be honestly compelling, they feel the need to be super-compelling.

Rising water levels caused by polar warming play a role in increased evaporation (greater surface area) and hence increased precipitation, but tropical (and sub-tropical) warming plays a much more significant role. Strangely, tropical warming plays a slight role in rising water levels, because water expands when it warms, but most rising sea-levels are due to polar warming.

When sea-levels rise coastal cities flood and move further uphill. When sea-levels fall they spread down to the new shore, especially as ports develop (ships become more capable) and falling sea-levels impede access to the older ports.

Except for myths of Atlantis and the Flood — which may be related to entirely different phenomena — we never hear anything about global sea-level changes through history and recent pre-history, so you may be forgiven for not comprehending their extent. If you want to find the trace of the shoreline from ten-thousand years ago — where, presumably, the first post-glaciation shoreline cities would have been located if any existed — you will need some serious scuba gear because it is more than 100 meters — more than 300 feet — more than the length of a football field — under the current sea-level. The first known cities post-date the first major rise in sea-levels, some of them very closely, so if you want to imagine them settled by refugees from the great atlantean cities of the floodplains now several hundred feet underwater, their locations lost, well: there’s your story.

If humanity has survived numerous cycles of warming and cooling and a three-hundred foot rise in sea-levels already, why do some people expect it to be in so much trouble from more modest increases in the future? No wait, that’s a question I’ll get back to. The first question will be to beg that question: Why will it be in so much trouble in the near future?

The best answer to this question is probably, “Ouch.” But let me add more detail:

There was no real reason for Rome or any other historical empire to fall to the Germanians or Visigoths or whatever through history. Instead they chose to be defeated, or more precisely they chose not to not be defeated: they chose to do nothing appropriate as conditions changed. As the north polar regions cooled the tribes would move south: this was inevitable. The Romans had three obvious responses: They could welcome the barbarians as climate refugees into their empire, bribe the armies away from their leaders with free and easy food and hence reduce the threat to something tolerable — but this would require increased taxes and privation for the citizens; They could build a wall and staff it strongly by paying additional soldiers sufficient to kill all the barbarians starving in front of the gates — but this would also require increased taxes; or they could move away — though obviously that option was not even on the table, since they had such nice buildings where they were. They ended up choosing a mixture — more of an alternation — of the first two options, both of which carried the latent threat of increased taxes. Unfortunately tax yields (which were mostly realized as a fraction of crops) were falling and after centuries of increasing the tax-fraction to compensate for falling crop yields the ordinary people had little left for themselves and were on the brink of starvation. There’s an obvious step to take — reducing the by then incredible luxuries enjoyed by the upper classes who also made the rules, but they were naturally reluctant to make a rule making themselves poorer and they didn’t and therefore lost everything. If they had distributed their wealth to the masses the masses would have been more willing to defend them and there would have been no singular wealthy target to attract the barbarians — the barbarians would have instead found people little better off then themselves and could have been induced to participate in society instead of burning it.

Fast forward to the twentieth-century, ignoring global warming for the moment, there are already innumerable people starving across the globe especially in third world countries and oddly the United States. This is not because the globe does not produce enough food: on the contrary countries like the United States annually destroy enormous amounts of food simply to maintain demand for crops so as to keep income up for (mostly foreign) farmers. There is so much excess food that enormous fertile regions formerly devoted to food production — such as Silicon Valley — are now transformed to other purposes, such as vegetable oil production or luxury items like Coca.

The word for that process which forces some people to starve even though plenty of food is available is “Politics”.

Now let’s imagine a world where global warming is a reality and absolutely nothing is done to combat it:

Every time farmers encounter a new climate productivity is low until they find the appropriate methods and rhythms and then yields eventually rise. So it should be no surprise that any “global warming” or “global cooling” or migration will temporarily lower farm productivity. This will not be a cause of hunger — as previously mentioned, having plenty of food is no bar to hunger so long as governments want hunger to be present.

Throughout human history rising temperatures — and especially rising CO2 levels, which are great for plant growth — have increased crop yields (after farmers adapted to the changes) and there is no reason that the “ominous” futures depicted by all the various models will be different. Simply opening up vast regions of tundra and Antarctica for farming will immensely increase arable land and hence food supplies. We will re-engineer structures to withstand the greater force of storms — as we have done through cycle after cycle in the past — we will change our growing seasons, we will continue to refine our techniques, we will change which land is farmed and which is not farmed.

Every model which predicts “food shortages” in a warmer climate is one which imagines that farmers will not adapt to changed conditions or that politics will intervene in its usual way.

Rising water levels will of course make current coastal regions uninhabitable and current inland regions coastal, which means millions of people will be displaced. Assuming governments don’t just murder them, they will move — i.e. migrate. It’s up to us whether that migration is orderly, or we just push that issue down the road until it is a crisis. The people in lowland Florida should move north to Georgia, and everyone in the US and Canada could move a hundred miles north to compensate. Or the displaced Floridians could just board a train and move directly to the newly arable Tundra of northern Canada.

But, you may say, “Florida is not a part of Canada, why would Canada let this happen?” And that’s exactly the point. Global Warming is not a disaster, Politics is a disaster. Legacy National Borders are a disaster. I don’t expect China to have such a problem with the new reality: they have a truly National government which legislates on a national level, and they already hold territory that stretches from the current coast to the underfarmed North. I don’t expect Russia to have a problem. The countries of Europe are going to have to get over themselves but the EU is already the first step in that — the people of Holland at least are probably going to need new homes. Mexico is going to need to be light on its feet: it’s likely that increased precipitation will play to its benefit, but all that is very iffy at the moment. Any country that is currently a net food exporter and is not primarily lowlands is likely to be okay, at least for a long while.

That’s the reality of unchecked global warming, which given the nature of governments and the realities already evident is really the way to bet. It’s the Tragedy of the Commons, and nothing is more “in common” than the globe. Of course I did leave open the question of whether global warming even exists, whose fault it is, and whether we could actually do something to reverse or stop it, questions that some people seem to consider worth debating. 

“Global Warming” is a stupid and irrelevant name someone picked for the concept of climate change. If we had a mixture of polar cooling and tropical warming — possible in various models, ask a scientist — then precipitation would increase even as sea levels fell. The “Global” sum might be up, might be down, but would always be irrelevant. There are many other combinations of course. Furthermore individuals and individual nations have no real reason to care about the Globe as a whole — they will always care about what happens to themselves — that’s why we see the constant references to violent winter storms as a contradiction of “Global Warming” in American politics. Try to contradict “Climate Change” with more violent winter storms!

“Who caused Global Warming?” is just finger-pointing. It really doesn’t matter and of course there isn’t a single cause. You could easily argue that the failure of the Earth to provide enough of the right sort of volcanoes as the “cause” — after all, if it *had* then we would be experiencing global cooling — which always causes hunger and migration — and burning fossil fuels in quantity would be saintly behavior.

Furthermore it’s likely that humans have been contributing to and possibly driving all those millennia of cyclical warm-cool periods I started my essay discussing. It’s an interesting question, but only in an Academic sense. It doesn’t affect anything.

That leaves finally the question of whether we can reverse or stop it — though if it turns out we can, that only leads to the question of whether we even should. 

The primary mechanism for anthropogenic climate change in previous millennia has been the planting or cutting down of trees (and also depopulation allowing farmland to become fallow and overgrown with trees). We live in an era when satellite surveillance means that the cutting down and regrowth of trees can be almost individually tracked. We live in an era when genetic modification means that we might be able engineer trees or other large heavy growths to live in currently uninhabited and unforested parts of the world such as tundra or oceans or even glaciers. We already know how to remove carbon from the atmosphere and convert it to fuel. We live in an era where access to space and advanced robotics allows many even more radical options for reducing global temperature such as sunshades or mimicking the cooling effect of volcanoes. And at the rate politics is improving we may yet get to test the theories of nuclear winter.

All of the above is without reference to and without need for any change in the way we handle excavated hydrocarbons — a problem which will of course likely resolve itself eventually through the extermination of buried supplies, and likely cannot be resolved any other way. Let’s consider: in a world with National Politics every nation must remain “viable” or it will surely be absorbed into a neighbor. Every nation must produce sufficient energy to remain viable. And every nation, no matter how well-intentioned, will eventually paint itself into a corner where that energy must come from the most easily available source — and whether that’s trees, oil, or coal: it will warm the Globe. Of course it’s very easy to manufacture arguments about how we’ll all co-operate, but there is no actual evidence that such cooperation is possible: it certainly has never occurred. Nations agree easily, and the best of them merely cheat effectively.

In any case reducing excavated hydrocarbon emissions to zero globally would not stop global warming without massive changes in the way farming and other human activities are accomplished. Reducing all CO2 emissions to zero beyond humanity’s needs involves killing all other animals: that actually seems possible if not likely. Reducing non-respiration related CO2 emissions to zero is not only implausible, it would have to be completed without some corresponding change in behavior that undercuts it.

It’s easy to be overly optimistic. Carbonated beverages obviously release CO2 as they fizz. Where does that CO2 come from? One could easily imagine them derived from atmospheric carbon. Actually, of course, bottled CO2 comes from the incineration of excavated Carbonates — usually limestone. We are at the end of an industrial era during which the generation of excess “harmless” gases was never questioned and incentivized. Our production is therefore unsurprisingly limitless. There’s a huge financial benefit to emitting a gas into the atmosphere — you don’t need to dispose of the waste some other way. Alternatives to such emissions only become viable when they are equivalently profitable, and they only become profitable when they involve the likewise “free” disposal of waste — whether into the air, into streams, or into aquifers.

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A Uniquely American Psycho — Or Is He?

Bret Easton Ellis recently wrote about Social Justice Warriors and the Political Correctness Movement to great — it can’t be called “acclaim” certainly, but it did get a noisy reception. I would like to be as blunt as humanly possible.

It has been pointed out that any statement from Bret — whether true or false, “inclusive” or “excluding” — comes from a position of wealth and privilege.

There are plenty of women who would make statements much like Bret’s, but they are unwilling to precisely because they lack Bret’s privilege.

There is a profoundly Xenophobic strain in every movement, and hence in every social justice movement, I just want to point it out to you. I will use two examples: Zionism and Misogyny.

The State of Israel is well known and well documented to conduct its affairs in Palestine without regard for the sanctity of innocent Palestinian civilian life. However, within the Zionist framework, any criticism of the Israel, no matter how obvious and well documented, is anathema. An interesting forked critique has developed, an algorithmic critique that requires no thought to deploy, and thus has become easily automated into the language of millions.

If a person is not Jewish and criticizes Israel, then they can immediately be accused of anti-semitism. This raises the completely false spectre that a Jewish person — such as, famously, Noam Chomsky — can criticize Israel in an acceptable fashion. Not a bit of it: should a Jewish person — such as, famously, Bernie Sanders — criticize Israel they are immediately accused — by various Jewish counter-critics — of being a “self-hating Jew”.

What this forked critique makes clear is that what is unacceptable is neither anti-semitism (though that is unacceptable on its own, it need not be present in any one critique of Israel) or “self-hatred” but rather any criticism of Israel.

The origin of such absolutism and Xenophobia is quite obvious in the case of Israel — surrounded by enemies who seek its destruction, there is a natural feeling that anything which might weaken the state is unacceptable. However, a more rational analysis is that what weakens the state most is the fact that such criticisms are true and factual, and, most of all, unaddressed; and that the states presumed natural allies — such as Jewish persons — are better insulted and humiliated and presumably driven away than listened to.

The definition of Misogyny has been expanded in modern liberal thought to include more than just the hatred, dislike, mistreatment, exploitation, etc., of women, but also all those behaviors which encourage or support or in any way contribute to the mistreatment (etc) of women, or of any woman. Many if the effects deprecated in this fashion are subtle, you would think they would be open to some debate. However — and it varies in different parts of the vast society discussing such things — an orthodoxy has arisen. To question that orthodoxy is unacceptable, and we see the same bi-furcated false accusation: if a person is identified (by the audience, not by themselves) as not a woman, then to criticize the orthodoxy is precisely Misogyny. If the person criticizing the orthodoxy is found to be unfortunately a woman, then they are labeled and derided with that simplest and most misogynistic of victimizing labels: they suffer, poor dears, from “internalized misogyny”. What is not possible, within this Xenophobic schema, is to criticize and remain part of the “civilized world”.

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Electing the least weasel

Democrats are a dying breed, and have been for a while. The party is down to less than a third of registered voters, so that's what a Democrat nominee brings to the table: 1/3 of the vote. Republicans are in worse shape of course, less than a quarter.

So the election is going to be decided by Independents. This year that means mostly by Millennials. Millennials are no friends of Trump's, they were mostly for Bernie. That's why Bernie as a Democrat nominee would crush Trump. But the problem coming up without Bernie is that Independents don't have a party. They really need to get motivated to get to the polls, and the Democrat offering is nowhere near as persuasive as the Democrats like to believe. Furthermore, the Democrats, seemingly confident that no one would allow Trump to triumph, are making only the tiniest efforts to win over Independents, to energize them and get then excited. Yes, they finally persuaded HRC that she was an ass to support TPP (which she had until last week), but at the same time she chose a running-mate who is fighting hard for bank deregulation — as if the Great Recession of 2008 were from such a distant past. Believe me, you can't make Millennials forget 2008, that's as far back as their policy memories go.

The final nail in the coffin of Liberal hope is that Trump is of course no real Republican — he's an Independent given a 25% boost by the Republican nomination and he is very good at energizing his supporters and has a very good chance to sweep away all resistance and win the Presidency.

So what's wrong with the Democrats anyways? To put in simple terms, "Liberal versus Conservative" isn't actually a single axis. There are a number of important axes and the ones I'd like to point out here are "Hawk versus Dove", "Austerity versus Social Safety Net", and "God versus LGBTQ & Abortion", or "military", "economic", and "social", as we see them called in the academic papers. How do the Democrats stand on these issues?

Well, they are definitely Hawks: they are pouring millions of dollars into slaughtering children around the globe. You'll see that this one of the core accusations being brought against HRC by Millennials, the Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and so on. Dems today are Hawks.

They are center-right on economics: not *quite* as laissez-faire as some GOP stalwarts would wish, but they definitely believe that the business of America is Business. For every initiative that seems egalitarian, like the recent push for Obamacare and increased minimum wage, half the party is waffling and a good fraction is arranging handouts to globalization or accepting millions in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs — who as you may recall were the direct and as yet unindicted architects of the crash of 2008. Obviously Obama has been pulling them a bit to the left on these issues, but the point is that the Democrats have to be pulled where Millennials want to go — and whither Bernie was already leading.

And Democrats are center-left on social issues. Obama has had a huge impact here, of course. But until Obama it was always "wait til next year, don't ask don't tell, blah blah blah, always tomorrow, never today." The older Democrats now seeking power seem still dedicated to such incrementalism. But incrementalism doesn't fly with the young: it doesn't energize.

So the Democrats big selling point in this election is not that they are some left-wing party that has appeal to the Millennial Independent voter, it's that they may be a center-right party, but they are by god to the left of Trump, and that's absolutely all that should matter to voters. But is that actually true?

Now we're down to reliability, and here's where Trump has another huge advantage. In 2008 Millennials swept Obama into power along with House and Senate Democratic majorities. But the House and Senate were full of Democrats *exactly like* Hillary and her friends in the DNC, and they did exactly nothing. They refused to act except with the cooperation of the Republicans. But the Millennials did not intend to just elect more Republicans. They wanted more Obama. They wanted people who would fight for what is right. What they got were center-right Democrats. Obama fooled them.

Hillary in the run-up to this election has been literally promising not to fight for any legislation that Republicans don't approve. Please try to imagine how energizing that campaign pitch is. It makes sense, as a center-right candidate with enormous debts to big business, but it's not exciting. Hillary seems reliable, and has been making a blatant point of paying off political debts publically. It's seriously disheartening.

Trump on the other hand, he's not reliable. He promises this, he promises that, he probably means it all when he says it, but he'll probably do something else when the moment comes. He seems shrewd. Much has been made of his alleged debts to Russia, but of course those mean Nothing. Trump has never paid off a debt in his life. Do you really think the President of the United States and CEO of the Free World is afraid of the Russians? I expect we'll make some great business deals with them of course — Remember Nixon in China? — but even I'm not in the least bit concerned that Trump would allow a Russian takeover. So I think in a lot of people's minds Trump, flaky and dangerous as he seems, is no Hitler, and no patsy. So he may seem a superior choice to Democrat incrementalism and the guarantee of a squalid oppressive economy tuned to the interests of baby boomers exploiting the young.

Why are the Dems and GOP both dying breeds? Because they've both been chasing the long ever-more-conservative-as-they-grow-older tail of Baby Boomer votes, while the Baby Boomers have been busy dying off. It will be another thirty years before half the Boomers are dead, but more than a third of them already are, and over-eighteen Millennials outnumber them by a ton. That's what's driving the demographics here.

In the end I think it's going to be the idealistic left-wing dovish Independent-minded Millennials whom the Democrat party has systematically insulted, undercut, and demoralized who are going to decide the election by just not showing up.

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No wait, what about SF Housing??

People keep telling me that there is a “problem” with San Francisco Housing supply, but no one has made a coherent argument that I’ve ever seen. So let’s beat up a few straw men!

FAR MORE PEOPLE SHOULD LIVE IN CALIFORNIA IN GENERAL AND THE BAY AREA IN PARTICULAR

I assume this argument is based on the plentiful supplies of water lying just to the left of California’s western shore. Because it doesn’t seem to be based on the supplies of water being delivered from the Nevada/Oregon border or on the levels of water in any reservoirs. If the douchetrepreneurs in the Bay Area want to disrupt something and earn a warm glow from all mankind, they should try disrupting salinity.

SAN FRANCISCO HOUSING IS TOO EXPENSIVE

No it isn’t. The definition of ‘too expensive’ is that nobody is willing to pay that price. As soon as something becomes ‘too expensive’ the price starts falling. This is pretty basic stuff, kids. Nothing can ever be ‘too expensive’ for long in some general sense. It’s just ‘too expensive’ for some people when it’s ‘just right’ for others.

People whine about prices because they want you to reduce prices, or as in this case because they want to recruit the strong arm of the law to force you to reduce prices. It’s not because prices are “too high”, it’s because they like lower prices.

SAN FRANCISCO HOUSING IS EXPENSIVE

San Francisco housing is so cheap that the number one problem people talk about is people choosing to live there who work in Menlo Park and Mountain View. That’s pretty cheap. If you want to do something about that problem, agitate to make San Jose the fashionable origin. Someone is really missing the boat there. It’s populous enough to support a much more vibrant community than SF can, it just needs some colonization.

SAN FRANCISCO IS TOO EXPENSIVE FOR POOR PEOPLE

No it isn’t. But I’ll help you out a bit: Which poor people? There are all kinds of poor people. There are poor people who live there already. There are poor people who do underpaid labor there but don’t live there so they have to commute from Redwood city or Hayward or some place like that. There are poor people who don’t live there and don’t do underpaid labor there but would if it were cheaper. * — free bonus clue

* — free bonus clue: if you’re reading this, you probably don’t know a single one of the poor people described above.

And there are poor people who are mostly white, mostly from middle class backgrounds, and who graduated recently from college with enormous student debt. * — free bonus clue

* — free bonus clue: these are the people you are fighting for. Those and the outright rich people.

And yes, San Francisco is probably too expensive for the last category. I’d like to examine the categories in order, but it’s too painful. I’m gonna say something obvious and maybe try to cheer myself up a little

POOR PEOPLE SHOULD BE ABLE TO LIVE WHERE WE LIVE

Poor people (excepting humanities graduates, aka “artists”) don’t want to live where you want to live. They don’t want to live there because it will always and necessarily be more expensive to live there than it will be to live where you don’t want to live. What poor people want is for there to be unfashionable places right next door to fashionable place so they can live near where they work.

Oh yes, and they want the unfashionable places to be where they already live. Because poor people have a lot of secret wealth rich (white, middle class) people can’t understand. Poor people save an incalculable amount by living near their friends and their kin! Who knew? (besides everyone except you.) Middle class white people (and it really does seem to be a white phenomenon) think of themselves as completely interchangeable objects! They move far away from their families and then when they leave the house they have to hire people to watch their children! They think they're interchangeable because they identify themselves with their employment, yet they’re not interchangeable at all, because if they were they’d just hook up with someone else’s parents and get childcare for free. Poor people can’t afford child care, they want to live near their parents so they can get free help. They want to live near their friends so they can take turns watching the kids. They don’t want (sometimes they realize this too late) cheap housing near their jobs. They want decent jobs near their housing. Or cheap conventient and fast transportation.

Which isn’t a complicated thing. Instead of trying to make San Francisco housing cheaper, try to convince douchebags that they’d rather live in Hayward! Oh, wait: the douchebags who actually employ underpaid labor aren’t the sort who would move to Hayward, are they? Instead we'll just get the sort that never employ anyone (because they're cheap rich dbags) and they'll just colonize and render unlivable Hayward. So, never mind.

ALMOST FORGOT ABOUT POOR PEOPLE IN WEALTHY NEIGHBORHOODS

People call cops on gardeners in or near my neighborhood all the time. Cops are happy to comply, because cops are universally racist thugs. You’d think this would get better as the neighborhood gets more integrated, but all the evidence suggests the reverse is the case. Cops in wealthy neighborhoods like Atherton aren’t in the habit of beating up random citizens. They’re out of practice.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE POOR HUMANITIES GRADUATES (AKA “ARTISTS”)

Have you met them? Lower the price of a 600 square foot apartment in the Mission district to $10/month and they may move in. Show them a 200 square foot studio apartment in Oakland for $5/month and they will abandon your overpriced $10/month apartment while loudly crying about your greed. Cheap — like whining — is a way of life, not someone else’s problem.

WE ARE PAYING TOO MUCH FOR UNDERPAID LABOR AND IT IS ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE

This is what I and all the poor people hear when we hear people claim that San Francisco is “too expensive for poor people”. Or teachers. Pay them enough that they can afford to live here, or compensate them in other ways. This is not rocket science.

SAN FRANCISCO IS TOO PRETTY / TOO NICE

This is another basic argument I hear all the time. San Francisco could solve all its problems if only it increased housing density! Which problems, though? This is not something that’s going to help poor people. Helping poor people with project housing has been tried many times and is a very tricky deal. If the housing is pleasant to live in, then it will be occupied by not-poor people. If you pass laws making qualifications for occupying the housing, you’ll discover that rich people who are not themselves clever can hire clever lawyers. If it’s too unpleasant to live in, it will becomes a crime center. If the bloc of housing is too large, the police will get nasty and it will become untenable and a crime center. Also poor people relentlessly try to stretch their dollars by putting more people in a unit than zoning allows (also a product of differing cultural standards about personal space). This generally results in some ‘justified’ friction with police. The last thing you want to give cops is justification!

You’ll also hear crap in the media about how evil San Francisco won’t let “decent people” build skyscrapers right at the water’s edge so that no one else in the city can ever catch a glimpse of the bay without ponying up big dollars. Seriously, do you really think people developers aren’t going to fudge earthquake standards given how overdue the big one is? San Francisco works nice as a city of short houses rising in orderly fashion to its little peaks and should probably stay that way.

JULY FOURTH IS COMING UP / OR READ ATLAS SHRUGGED

Mankind is a totalizing creature. There will be no stopping them (us) until the entire world is a slag heap without a single exploitable resource or sub-dividable square meter of beauty. The original Independence Day movie kind of made this point. But Ayn Rand is pretty graphic in her love affair with slag.

CALL TO ACTION

Here’s where I really want to reference Ayn Rand the way she wanted to be referenced. Stop fighting battles for other people! Especially battles on behalf of people you aren’t willing to talk to!

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Just a few thoughts about Market Priced SF Housing

We commonly hear that “prices” are set through trial-by-combat between “supply” and “demand” here in this American market-priced economy. I’ve said in public that this is a myth. Who is correct? Of course I am. I said it.

There’s a trivial sense we can appeal to: Suppose Alice sells Bertrand an ordinary liter of Dasani water for $1,000. Obviously there’s some trivial sense in which the existence of the transaction — the sale of a liter for $1,000 — proves that there was both a ‘demand’ for a liter of water at that price and a supply of at least one liter of water. We can suppose for the sake of explaining our example that Bertrand is dying of thirst in Death Valley and that Alice is a heartless piece of human excrement.

But when people refer to ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ in the classical idiom, they are supposed to be referring to the idea that “prices fall when supply exceeds demand, and rise when demand exceeds supply”. Obviously in our example Bertrand’s ‘demand’ rose because he was dying of thirst. But we have no evidence and no reason to believe that Alice’s supply of liters of Dasani water was in any way limited. If Bertrand is willing to pay $1,000 per liter, why should she sell for less? Perhaps Alice’s business model is to use drones to find people lost in the Death Valley (generally because GPS has led them astray) and then offer to sell them Dasani for $1,000 per liter. She has Satellite-based GAN so she can process credit card transactions, it’s all very simple.

The idiots who promote the “intrinsic fairness” of market-based pricing (that’s what supply vs demand is supposed to bring us) will argue that such a profitable situation will cause Alice to soon have competitors, and the existence of competitors, increasing ‘supply’ will then drive down prices. Of course that’s assuming that Bertrand is aware that if he only waited another five minutes he could buy a liter for cheaper ($999!), and it’s assuming the ‘competitors’ don’t all agree that $1,000 per liter is a pretty cool price. but hey, making wild assumptions in order to rationalize away reality is how we defend modern day myths, so get with the program!

Please understand I haven’t started talking about the ‘myth’ of supply vs demand yet: I’m just laying some ground-work!

Here’s some more ground-work! It’s well demonstrated by now that people will pay more for an item if you display a similar more expensive item right next to it. Think about it: in what sense does the existence of additional more expensive Chocobo affect either your need to buy a Chocobo or the supply of cheaper Chocobos? Of course it doesn’t. And yet people keep talking about ‘supply and demand’ as if marketing did not exist.

MARKET PRICING

Back in the old days we didn’t buy goods for money, we bartered for them with goods or labor that we ourselves produce. We lived in little villages and we could look over at the next peep working and see exactly how hard he or she was laboring to produce an item of value. When we traded for it we traded quite naturally in terms of how much labor was involved. I trade an hour of my work for an hour of your work, give or take. This is called a ‘transparent’ market.

With the advent of (cities and) the “marketplace” everything changes. The labor behind an item becomes invisible, but it is still the measure by which we gauge our purchases — that or the “cost of manufacture” which is kind of a proxy. Economists don’t find these facts in their navels so they seem unaware of them, but any time someone can estimate the amount of labor that goes into producing something, that is their go to measure for how much it is worth. Pay attention, you’ll find yourself doing it too (unless you’re a philosopher or economist). Think about times you’ve said or heard it said, “I’m not going to pay X dollars for that widget,” — often sidekicked by “I could make one myself for a tenth that price!” (“How hard could it be!”)

What this leads to of course is a price system that is driven by the “story of effort”. After all, it takes you 7 hours to build a proper little red wagon, you imagine that the handmade red wagon you bought at Williams Simona took some comparable amount of effort and is worth a certain amount. Of course it is, since that’s what you pay; and of course it isn’t because it is thrown together on a production line in Mexico from seven not-very-handcrafted parts at a rate of twenty per hour. The “story of effort” is what determines the price.

Amusingly, Target sells the excess wagons from the production line (without the trademarked Williams Simona label, of course) for a tenth the price and makes more profit than Williams Simona does because they make it up in volume. I mention this just to highlight that the idea of ‘price competition’ is rendered a bit moot by trademark law.

Ask someone about lines of mattresses that are exclusive to certain stores if you’re bored!

A BETTER WAY TO THINK ABOUT PRICES

I hope all the above gels in your mind well enough that you understand that it is never the ‘reality’ of limited supply that drives prices up, but the ‘story of supply’. To put it in the terms I prefer, “prices reflect what people feel comfortable paying”. If you want them to pay more, you need to get them to feel comfortable paying more. A fine example of the ‘story of supply’ and feelings of comfort, what happens when there is a war in the middle east? Gasoline prices at the pump go up immediately. Why, exactly? Well, the reason is because there is a story of limited supply that makes people feel comfortable paying more. The wiser heads among you have probably made the argument that the gasoline flowing from the pumps was riven from the groaning earth several years previously and can’t possibly be affected by the war in the middle east that it turns out only lasted a few weeks anyways — though the high prices at the pumps took more than a few years to return to previous values — no, wait, they never did. As long as people feel comfortable paying more, why would the prices recede?

The converse of this is also true — when people aren’t willing to pay more, prices do recede. You may object that there is some kind of ‘bottom’ — perhaps the price of production — but you’d probably be wrong. Generally if you can’t build a story around an item convincing people to pay more, it’s the kind of item that works well as a loss leader. How much do you pay for tap water, nuts & pretzels, or condiments at a bar or restaurant? They do cost money, but they’re traditionally free, so people don’t pay for them. Toasters, as everyone knows, are free with your new bank account. And so it goes.

Areas with mixed populations present some interesting case studies. For instance San Francisco — being located in California with its Proposition 13 — has many neighborhoods that mix new money with old not-so-much. One of the cornerstones of American life is alcoholism, so bars and liquor stores are always an interesting touchstone. At one and the same time new money needs to assuage its thirst and feels comfortable paying $5 and up for a generic cold one (imports cost more because of some story…), while the working poor also need to drown their happiness but won’t pay more than a dollar or two for a unit of alcohol. How do they make it work? Well, ask them. Of course most poor people don’t drink at all; but some do and it turns out there are a million dodges. The reason I find this interesting is because neighborhood bars often serve the same drinks as expensive bars a few blocks away and often have equally competent — or the same — bartenders. This is especially true given the endless parade of fashionable cheap: PBR, Schlitz, etc. can double in price in a block or two.

A CALL TO ACTION!

Essays are supposed to end with a call to action, but to be quite honest there’s nothing I really care about going on. The whole point is that people may kvetch, but so long as they pay, prices will rise. So, no harm, no foul. If you don’t like the prices, tell a story about how those widgets are way overpriced and someone is making an obscene profit — join the crowd, really. As long as you pay, you will pay more.

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BASIC PHYSIOLOGY

FAT MUST BE EXHALED

Hydrocarbon is the most compact fuel source. Gasoline is hydrocarbon, so is diesel oil, so is vegetable oil, and so is body fat (mostly). Plants make hydrocarbon through photosynthesis, by taking in Carbon Di-Oxide, and releasing Oxygen. They keep the Carbon inside, combine it with hydrogen from water, and make hydrocarbon (vegetable oil) and carbohydrate (starch and sugar).

A huge multi-ton tree does not get all those tons of mass from the ground — if it did the ground would be hollow and the tree would sink into it like a carrot. Instead trees get all their weight from the air; it takes a long time.

When a person loses fat they are reversing the same process: they are burning hydrocarbon by combining it with inhaled Oxygen and then exhaling Carbon Di-Oxide. In order to lose ten pounds of fat a person needs to exhale about ten pounds more air than they inhaled. This is why it’s impossible to lose more than a few pounds of fat a week (without surgery). It takes a lot of heavy breathing.

CARBOHYDRATE IS FAST ENERGY

Carbohydrates in plants can have many forms, but in people most carbohydrate is Glucose, a simple sugar which is also found attached to itself in a long chain called Glycogen, or “animal starch”. Simple sugars all have the same chemical composition, and are distinguished by their shapes. Each simple sugar is just six Carbon atoms, six Oxygen atoms, and twelve Hydrogen atoms.

If you think about it, burning a six-Carbon hydrocarbon means turning it into six molecules of Carbon Di-Oxide (CO2): six Carbon and twelve Oxygen. So a simple sugar seems like a six-Carbon hydrocarbon that has been partially burned. However, it turns out that a carbohydrate is more like a hydrocarbon that has been “prepped”. The amount of available energy per Carbon atom is almost exactly the same, but the extra Oxygen makes the carbohydrate much easier to burn, while at the same time it makes a simple sugar more than twice as large and heavy as a six-Carbon hydrocarbon. An ounce of hydrocarbon has more than twice as many Carbon atoms as an ounce of carbohydrate, and also more than twice as much energy.

That’s why an ounce of Hydrocarbon has 240 calories, yet an ounce of carbohydrate has only about 110 calories. This makes Carbohydrate seem like an attractive alternative to hydrocarbon for people who are trying to lose fat, however people don’t ordinarily eat a certain number of ounces of food, they eat until they aren’t hungry any more, and this means that the trade-off between “carbs” and “fat” is more complicated.

CARBOHYDRATES ARE HIGHLY REACTIVE

Water is a “polar” molecule, which means that one side of it is positively charged and one side is negatively charged. Polar molecules attract each other. Hydrocarbon is neutral all over and isn’t attracted to polar molecules, which means that when hydrocarbon is put into water the water molecules cling together and end up pushing the hydrocarbon away. This is why when we put oil into water they remain separate. Carbohydrates like sugar and starch dissolve into water because they are polar all over. Protein is also polar, though only in tiny regions.

Most of the human body is water, which means that bodily fluids readily dissolve protein and carbohydrate, but not fat. Hydrocarbon that is being transported through the blood is held in a sack of protein called a “lipoprotein” which allows it to submerge in water.

Nonetheless hydrocarbon plays a vital role in physiology. Each cell of a human body is actually coated in a layer of hydrocarbon (“lipid”) that keeps the cells from dissolving into the body fluids. Without hydrocarbon layers an animal body would turn into a puddle.

Polar molecules are attracted to each other, but because most of a protein molecule is not polar, all protein molecules don’t stick to each other all the time: they have to align a certain way and fit together in order to stick.

Glucose molecules are polar all over and often stick randomly to protein molecules, a process called “glycation”. Glycation is a major cause of damage to body proteins, which is one reason the body has a sophisticated insulin-triggered system to reduce blood glucose levels. Other simple sugars such as galactose and fructose have the same composition but different shapes, and they also seem to be ten times as quick to damage protein through glycation. Presumably this is why all sugars get transformed into glucose before the body uses them.

GLUCOSE IS A TOXIN

Everybody knows that sugar is fast-acting energy, and that high levels of sugar in the blood (hyperglycemia; diabetes mellitus) are dangerous, but most people don’t realize how extreme the danger is.

Glucose is a small molecule so it can slip in places, it dissolves readily so it gets there, and it damages proteins if it is allowed to sit with them too long or in too great a concentration. Glucose is toxic, so the body has many emergency measures to lower glucose levels. Yet Glucose is useful for quick energy, so the body does keep a small amount around. Whenever the level of glucose in the blood rises above this low level the pancreas immediately releases insulin which is a chemical signal telling the muscles and fat cells of the body to remove glucose from the blood.

One can read many places that the optimal blood glucose level before a meal (“fasting”) is around 80 “milligrams per deciliter” (mg/dl), and that a level of 126 mg/dl before eating is the definition of diabetes. If the level reaches 200 mg/dl even for a few minutes, that is very bad news. Numbers like that don’t really help us understand the danger, however.

The typical human body has about 5 liters of blood. Five liters is 50 deciliters, and if you multiply that times 80 milligrams you get 4,000 milligrams, which is just 4 grams, or about 15 calories. It’s also about a seventh of an ounce, or around a teaspoon full.

Fifteen calories of glucose is enough to fill your blood up to a healthy level, but of course your body has already taken care of that. Healthy people wake up in the morning with fifteen calories of ready glucose in their blood.

It takes about twenty to forty more calories of starch or sugar dissolved into the blood to make them deathly ill. Two slices of bread or a small serving of rice easily has hundreds of calories, and they’re easy to digest so they are getting into the blood within half an hour of eating them. Sugar — especially sugar simply dissolved into water as with soda-pop — is almost instantaneous. So the body responds instantly by releasing insulin to get the glucose out of the blood.

The problem of course is that most of the glucose from the bread or rice or soda-pop goes directly into fat cells. But the fat in fat cells is what you are trying to get rid of.

THE HUMAN BODY DOES NOT NEED ANY DIETARY SUGAR OR STARCH

If a person is on a hunger strike or stranded on a desert island with only water, they can live for about a month. Right until the end if you measured their blood glucose it would still be ten to fifteen calories. Where does this glucose come from? After twenty days without food they’ll also be getting pretty skinny, which is the hint: when blood glucose is allowed to fall below 80 mg/dl, the body starts converting fat into glucose. In fact it does that for almost everyone every night.

It is almost impossible to lose fat from fat cells unless the blood sugar is allowed to fall below 80 mg/dl.

Of course a person on a hunger strike has other symptoms, but none of these symptoms come from carbohydrate depletion, because, as we just noticed carbohydrates are never depleted. Instead the symptoms come from protein and EFA (essential fatty acid) deprivation.

A person who wants to remain the same weight and eats a diet with adequate protein and EFA and various trace vitamins and minerals would probably need some extra energy food in in addition in order to keep from losing weight. Whether the extra calories are carbohydrates or hydrocarbons won’t matter from the energy-balance standpoint, but it will matter as far as damage to the body is concerned.

Carbohydrate intake has to be exactly matched to energy expended or blood glucose levels rise and the danger of glycation and protein damage rises.

Hydrocarbon intake is much more forgiving. The optimal human body has about 5 grams of fat packaged in lipoprotein and dissolved in the blood (100 mg/dl). Since fat has a higher caloric density than carbohydrate, this works out to be about 42 calories. If the blood lipoprotein rises to five times that level — 210 calories — the person doesn’t go into a coma. No bodily emergency protocols are activated. They just have high levels. If the levels eventually go back down again then even doctors don’t consider this alarming.

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i used to way 250 lbs. Now i don't

I need to talk about “losing weight”. Losing fat, really, or at least re-balancing the proportion of fat in our bodies. Re-balancing is important, because that’s the secret to maintaining “weight loss”.

HOW TO START REBALANCING YOUR FAT LEVELS

I’m going to start with what to do, because that’s the least a person needs; then discuss why; and then if I don’t run out of steam answer some frequent questions or objections.

BURN THE SUGAR OUT OF YOUR MUSCLES

When you wake up in the morning, before you start eating, you need to burn the sugar out of your sugar-burning muscles. This doesn’t have to take very long, only a couple minutes.

Sugar-burning muscles are needed for strong and quick motions. A lot of your “standing around” and “walking” muscles don’t burn sugar, so standing around and walking won’t help. Anything that feels like exertion will do. Pushups, pull-ups, jumping jacks: they’re all good. Just for a couple minutes.

My favorite exercise is twenty jumping lunges. That just means stepping forward with one leg and kneeling with the other, then pushing hard to jump up to a standing position, ten times on each side. Lunges are my favorite because the thighs are the largest sugar burning muscle. When I used to be really fat I couldn’t do that because it was too hard on my knees. Simply flexing the knees and jumping up a little into the air is a good start.

So that’s the morning routine. It will make you sweaty until you achieve a certain level of balance, so take a shower. I usually take a shower in the morning anyways.

If it doesn’t make you too sweaty and uncomfortable, you can burn the sugar out several times a day, especially right before or after eating, or after sleeping.

EAT ABOUT AS MUCH AS YOU NORMALLY DO, BUT DIFFERENTLY

The best food is naturally-fed meat: meat from animals that eat the kind of food they eat in the wild. Don’t eat “lean” meat, eat regular to fatty meat. Eat it as much as you can without sauces, but it’s all right to put lots of spices on it, just not sugar.

The second best kind of food is any other kind of meat.

If you really must eat vegetarian try to emphasize protein and fats/oils and avoid carbs. Avocados are great.

Go ahead and eat leafy greens, hot peppers, salads, stuff like that, but continue to avoid restaurant or store-bought sauces and dressings. What can you put on a “Spring Garden Mix” that tastes good but isn’t “dressing”? Different people like different things. Oil and vinegar is good, but you must not use “Balsamic” vinegar. Some people like Tabasco, some people like butter. If you really can’t find a way to enjoy leafy greens without sugar, eat broccoli or brussels sprouts instead.

Don’t eat fruit, don’t eat anything with sugar in it, don’t eat anything particularly sweet unless you know it doesn’t have sugar in it, don’t eat rice or bread or anything else made from grain. Don’t eats carbs, neither sugar nor starch.

This sort of food may be more compact (‘rich’) than you are used to. Enjoy it. I literally do not limit the amount of steak or chicken I eat.

DRINK ENOUGH WATER

Water is the solvent your body uses to dissolve fat in one place and move it to another place. Your body uses water for everything, and most people don’t drink anywhere near enough. It’s physically possible to drink too much water, but it’s really hard. Drink at least a gallon every day, and spread it out through the day.

There are two common beverages that are actually dehydrating: caffeine and alcohol. Drink extra water if you drink any caffeinated drinks. Every unit of alcohol should get at least two extra pints of water, so a shot of whiskey needs two pints, and a pint of beer needs another additional pint of water. Of course, avoid drinks with sugar in them, such as most liqueurs and most big-market beers.

STOP EATING WHEN YOU FEEL FULL

This seems kind of obvious, but in some ways it is the hardest rule. Some people do not even realize what “full” feels like. Do not eat so fast that you zoom past “full” without even noticing. Sometimes there’s a certain amount of food given to you, and it’s too much to eat at once. That’s all right, save it and eat it in an hour or two. Eat the best parts first. Just don’t eat when you’re not actually hungry. Don’t eat to pass the time, don’t eat because someone bought you food or cooked it for you. Eat when you’re hungry, eat whenever you’re hungry, and eat tasty, fairly rich, food.

If you know you’re going to eat something anyways, eat it first. You know you want to.

THAT’S IT

Seriously, if you just follow the above rules your body will begin to rebalance itself. As your body rebalances it will actually get easier and progress faster. You won’t become “skinny” this way, because skinny is a little unbalanced, but you will stop being fat.