Blackcap Blog

Published at 09:57 on 10 September 2016

No, I don’t have any hard evidence to back up that suspicion, but I feel pretty safe concluding that Christe Todd Whitman is lying when she claims nobody knew how dangerous the air was in Lower Manhattan 15 years ago. The reason is asbestos.

I remember being astounded at the time that people weren’t super-concerned about asbestos contimanation. The towers were built at a time when asbestos was still a very popular material. Aside from its carciogenicity, asbestos is a wonderful material with many advantages (fireproof, excellent elecrrical and heat insulator, not subject to decay), one which one can obtain for literally just the effort of digging it out of the ground. So quite naturally it found wide use.

I was once system and network manager in a building that was built before the nasty truth about asbestos became widely known. It made running new network wiring a constant headache; one couldn’t so much as drill through most walls in that building without spending thousands of dollars to protect against liberating asbestos fibers.

Those towers were obviously full of asbestos-containing building materials, so naturally so was the dust left by their collapse. Any claims the dust was not hazardous were obviously baloney. If any initial measurements indicated a lack of hazard, that was reason not to abandon extreme caution but to suspect the quality of the measurements.

Published at 01:54 on 7 September 2016

Voices I normally respect a great deal are chiming in against the carbon tax initiative in Washington, I-732, because of race and class justice concerns. This leaves me conflicted, because global warming is clearly the most profound danger we face, thus urgently needs to be addressed, and a carbon tax appears to be one of the most simple and logical steps we can take to this end.

The question to ask, I think, is: How much harm will the proposed law actually do? Note that this is a very different question from asking how far it falls short in addressing race and class issues, even though global warming almost certainly will harm the disadvantaged more.

Addressing the latter really isn’t the purpose of the legislation. Such issues should be addressed, of course, but the proper way to address them is via other, separate actions. On the other hand, if the measure does itself do harm to the disadvantaged, then that is a valid argument against it.

Published at 08:09 on 29 August 2016

Wishes like this are just plain stupid:

But Lord Rees added that there is also cause for optimism. “Human societies could navigate these threats, achieve a sustainable future, and inaugurate eras of post-human evolution even more marvellous than what’s led to us. The dawn of the Anthropocene epoch would then mark a one-off transformation from a natural world to one where humans jumpstart the transition to electronic (and potentially immortal) entities, that transcend our limitations and eventually spread their influence far beyond the Earth.”

This is the case for a variety of reasons. Here’s a few:

• The more technologically sophisticated a society is, the more it is dependent on specialized knowledge.
• Extreme specialization is a form of repression; our minds evolved to deal with a world in which we performed a variety of tasks. Already, most people are dissatisfied with their jobs, despite having a freedom of choice in a career; this is because the allowed choices simply have no good answer for most.
• A society more dependent on specialization is more difficult to understand and question in toto, thus such societies are more difficult to successfully rebel against. Since revolution is the ultimate guarantor of freedom, such societies are highly unlikely to remain free.
• The possibility of creating transhuman intelligence raises the possibility that those intelligent beings would treat humans the same way humans treat animals: with a range of options between vermin to be exterminated, farm animals to be ruthlessly exploited, or companions to be doted on and controlled like small children.
• It is the rich who could best afford to transform themselves into long-lived or immortal transhumans, thus crystallizing the capitalist class hierarchy into a permanent evolutionary outcome.
• Immortality, while at the first glance appealing, is probably the worst of all possible outcomes, as it raises the spectre of a ruling elite that could last indefinitely. Gone is the presence of death as the great equalizer, from whom even the worst tyrants and plutocrats cannot escape.

Published at 20:33 on 24 August 2016

The US and Turkey have imposed a “red line” on the YPG that makes it impossible for them to unite the few cantons they presently rule. Not surprisingly, the YPG consider that unreasonable and as such are ignoring it. But they’re small, and vastly outgunned by Turkey and the USA. So not a good situation.

Published at 18:50 on 23 August 2016

Last spring, I had serious doubts my current job was a good match that would (or should) last. Some changes were made, it got better, and I persevered.

Recently, however, it’s been increasingly evident that’s not enough. I’m not really culturally a good match for where I am, plus the work, while better than it was, is still not as good a match as it could be. Plus I have some real doubts about the long-term viability of the place; it would not surprise me much if things suddenly collapsed, and in a way that tainted all current employees with a stench of failure.

Yesterday, in fact, I had been planning my exit during commute hours. I was going to break the news to them next month that I wanted to depart some time in the fall. Instead, they broke the news to me today. Nothing’s happening very soon, but it looks like my ideal target date of sometime in the first week of October will be my last day. There’s a final project I want to wrap up; once that’s in place I’ll be able to depart on good terms, having made a positive contribution during my tenure.

I don’t have anything lined up to replace it. First, the nature of my current job means I really haven’t had the time to do a good job search (I’ve done some, but not much). Second, I really feel I need some time to decompress. The risk is pretty low in my field, so I’m not that worried.

Even if the worst comes to past, my whole exercise of buying a house and trying to settle down was something of an experiment that I wasn’t sure would work, so even that would not be a huge shock. It will be nice if it works, but it won’t be the end of the world if it doesn’t.

Actually, the “worst” won’t come to pass; the real worst would involve me lying and saying I’d be happy to do the old work that bored me to tears so I could stick it out there (thereby throwing more of my life away doing something I absolutely hate).

Published at 08:15 on 19 August 2016

This is totally not a surprise. The Google indexing of my site is broken (something that a newly-created sitemap will hopefully soon fix) but I once wrote that the capitalist system exploits families by holding children hostage so as to blackmail their parents. You may want to quit that awful job, but it won’t just affect you; it will make your wife and children suffer as well.

Why wouldn’t breadwinners suffer stress under such a situation?

Published at 19:12 on 17 August 2016

Here, particularly this post, wherein a physicist runs a few basic equations and explores how fundamentally stupid mainstream economics is (because so many of its unquestioned premises are, quite frankly, preposterous).

Published at 07:54 on 15 August 2016

We interrupt this presidential campaign (and my numerous pontifications on it) to remind you of the essential nature of bourgeois politics:

“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament.”  — V.I. Lenin

Yes, yes: I know. The guy was a major-league authoritarian. No disputes there. That still doesn’t make his observation above any the less valid.

And yes, the wording above is Lenin’s, not Marx’s, though Lenin wrote it while paraphrasing Marx. You can find the source here.

Published at 10:17 on 14 August 2016

Not much going on. Parents are visiting, as are both of my sisters, which means this weekend is the first time all five of us have been in the same place in a long time.

As is typical, my parents made a heat wave materialize when they came. They must think temperatures in the 80s and 90s are normal here, based on their experiences during visits.

Published at 08:28 on 11 August 2016

A few days ago Fox News had an article complaining about media bias against Trump.

And guess what? They’re right. The Establishment media have never been unbiased. For example, they’ve long been systematically biased for free trade arguments (strong, logic-based cases against same have only rarely been allowed to appear, giving the impression that it’s a world of strong arguments for and weak ones against).

The mass media consists disproportionately of private, for profit organiazations owned by the capitalist ruling class. It should be no surprise that it acts in the interest of that class. And Trump has gotten so extreme that ruling class politics (which is not confined to the GOP and its enablers; Hillary Clinton is very much part of the acceptable political spectrum embraced by the elite) has now rejected him pretty much wholesale.

So yes, the media are biased against Trump. Which, to me, is just fine. I’d much prefer a media run on the principles of economic democracy, which would have prevented the root causes (systematic propaganda designed to brainwash the masses into embracing a class system that disadvantages them), of course. But such a thing can’t be created overnight, the Trump threat (and it is a real threat) is here now, and needs to be fought now.