Neapolitan

2012-01-22T08:52:00.000-08:00

Follow this link:

http://biodieselhauling.blogspot.com/

If you are reading this post, that probably means you are subscribed to this blog.
Well, this is the last thing I will ever post here.
Not there is anything particularly wrong with this one, but it is not, and never really was, mine. It was meant to be a shared project, but never really got off the ground, and I didn't want to litter it with all of my old stuff, which meant the old stuff was trapped on MySpace, sad and lonely and unread.

So click the link above for more great random content from the brain of Bakari Kafele (and the old content, better organized and more readable)

At the top right you will find easy buttons to subscribe to the new one via email or RSS.

Enjoy

Finally upgraded to my own blog

2012-01-18T08:58:00.001-08:00

http://biodieselhauling.blogspot.com/

I have known I should do this for years, but I have been too lazy.

My business website's blog server has a ridiculously restrictive 4000 total character limit, which makes it practically useless.

My main content has been MySpace since July of 2006, back before Facebook even existed, when I finally gave into making an account so I could blog, thereby ending my very bad habit of reading and writing and responding to posts on CraigsList Rant 'N Rave section.

I also have content on the blog section of FairCompanies.com (who filmed and host my most well known thing on the internet, the video about living in an RV in order to save both money and natural resources: http://www.faircompanies.com/videos/view/living-small-when-home-is-a-150-square-foot-rv/

And I have been sharing a blog with my friend Beth who now lives in Taiwan, though neither of us has been very active on it.

Having been inspired by a request for a used bike buying guide and having no good place to post it, I have finally started my own blogger account.

After this, I will then be gradually moving all my old content - as a word document, 352 pages worth - to this new, much easier to navigate, more user friendly site.

http://biodieselhauling.blogspot.com/

I have long since come to understand that the reason I have never had any sort of consistent readership is because, much like in real life, I have nothing even remotely resembling a theme. People subscribed to blogs because they cover a topic they are interested in detail. My writing spans politics, science, social commentary, religion, bicycles, my own personal life, environmentalism, race, economics... the list goes on.
I am interested in a lot of very different things.
I like to know a little of everything, even if it means being expert in nothing. I feel you gain a better understanding of the world and life as aa whole when you can see how all the pieces fit together.
This has not been the best financially, as I have gotten bored of nearly every job I've held and quit within a year (I'd had over 30 jobs by the time I started my business at age 27) eliminating any potential for benefits or 401Ks or raises that come only after a probationary period.
And it is no good for building a blog audience either.

But you know what? That's ok, because I didn't start writing for the fame anyway. I write to get ideas that are stuck in my head out of there.

But now at least, when someone does happen to be interested in something I've written, it will be easy to find and easy to read, and I will never have to suffer through the embarrassment of sending someone to MySpace again.

Dramatically reduce unemployment - with no cost to government - by instituting a 35 hour work week

2011-10-25T13:20:00.000-07:00

NOTE: The White House webpage is buggy. It has some issues related to Flash and/or Javascript, and you may not be able to sign up smoothly. I assure you, however, that it does in fact work, even if it takes more than one try.

Please sign my federal petition: http://wh.gov/TWN

If it hits 150 "signatures" (clicks) it will be featured on the White House's petition page. Then it will take another 25,000 to be guaranteed to be viewed by the Obama Administration and given an official response. Whatever the response is, it will at least bring this issue to the attention of American politics which is the first step toward action.
It may never happen, but it will get people thinking about things they take for granted; like the purpose of the economy, production, employment, unemployment, distribution of wealth, etc.

It has become common practice when talking about the economy or the market to treat them as though they were an end in and of themselves, and inherent good regardless of their effects. We seem to have completely forgotten that the whole point of having an economy in the first place is to serve and better the lives of actual people. Over the past half century improvements to the economy have not translated to improvements in the lives of the majority of Americans. We all need to stop, step back a moment, and ask the question: in that case, what is the point?
When individual citizens are asked to make sacrifices for the sake of "the economy", that means citizens are here to serve the markets, instead of the markets being here to serve the citizens.

The petition website has a character limit; here the original text I wrote for it:

A 35 hour work week will create 22 MILLION jobs without costing the federal government or tax payers anything.

There are currently 14 million unemployed American's, so this will eliminate all unemployment, and then it will push wages up as employers are forced to compete for a limited labor force.

Literally ALL arguments against a 35 hour work week (that it would hurt business or make America less competitive, etc) can be countered by the simple fact that those same arguments were made against the 40 hour work week, and none of those things happened.

The 40 hour work week dates back to the early 1900s, with it becoming federal law in 1932.
Since that time productivity per worker has increased well over 1000%. This means each US Worker produces more than ten times as much in an hour of labor than when the current work week was created.
This has not manifested a corresponding 10 fold increase in average wages.

Productivity has increased over 400% since 1970 alone. In that same time, total GDP has increased even more dramatically, by 1400%.
And yet, since that time, wage income (adjusted for inflation) has been completely stagnant.

The reason for this disparity is that literally 100% of the additional profits made possible by new technology and globalization have gone to corporations and investors, while 0% have benefited the working and middle classes. The average worker produces approximately $100 thousand a year in output, yet receives less than $40 thousand in wages.

While many employers will object that they can not afford it, the enormous increases in productivity per worker and total GDP prove indisputably that they can. Income inequality is at an all-time high, and thanks to patent, tax, and labor laws there is no longer any correlation between income and how much an individual contributes to society or how hard they work. The unprecedented profits which have gone to corporations and investors between the time the 40 hour week was created and today are more than enough to cover the minor costs associated with taking the next step to a 35 hour work week.

The 35 hour work week must apply equally to hourly wage AND salaried workers, and even to commission based employees. In our current system millions of people are forced to work unpaid overtime hours because they are paid salary. These people should be entitled to overtime at a rate of 1.5 times their weekly pay (annual pay divided by 52) divided by 35 hours. This needs to be stated explicitly in the law to prevent abuse by employers. No industry should be exempt, the only exception being if an individual or union VOLUNTARILY chooses to waive their rights.

In order to protect the lowest paid workers, a 35 hour work week must be coupled with an increase in minimum wage so that full-time employment at minimum wage constitutes a living wage. A minimum wage of $11.50 would equal $20,000 a year (before taxes, assuming 10 days of holidays, vacation and/or sick days per year).

Finally, in order to protect American jobs from outsourcing (and reclaim jobs which have already been outsourced), the 35 hour work week could also be coupled with a tariff on any goods sold by a US based company, which was manufactured or assembled in another country.

A 35 hour work week would give hard-working families a much needed and deserved break, while creating enough jobs to end unemployment completely.

I have already received a number of very good questions about this idea - but I have answers for them.

Legitimate point:
"I am payed for 40 hours, I actually work around 45 to 50 per week for the same pay. Sometimes I work even more, nights and weekends for the same pay... If we have a 35 hour work week, I loose 20 hours of pay/mo and still work 45-50 hours, nights and weekends. I am on a salary... Won't work for me"

My Response:

In CA at least (except for a few specifically exempted professions) people on salary are still entitled to time and a half pay for hours over 40 in a week. The fact that this law is almost never followed has more to do with the decline of unions than probably anything else.
Regardless of the length of the work week, there should be a law on the federal level that explicitly states that overtime laws apply to workers on salary and commission. Not only does it demean human dignity that money is put above everything else in life, but an overworked workforce is less productive per hour anyway. Forced overtime should be illegal for everyone.
So, I also propose to explicitly include salaried and commissioned workers in the 35 hour week. Even on salary, anyone who went beyond 35 hours would be required to be paid time and a half based on what their weekly salary divided by 35 hours works out to. So a person in your situation would actually benefit even more than wage earners, as you would either get much more free time or a substantial boost in pay.

Legitimate point:
"The French tried that already, and it didn't accomplish what it was supposed to. They eventually gave it up"

My response:

There were some differences between France in 2000 and us today. One of the more significant ones is that French employers are not allowed to lay off workers when business is slow, which makes them even more reluctant to hire new ones than our fixed per worker costs.
Another difference is the size of our economy, and how much tangible goods we manufacture and export.
Overtime after 35 hours is as little as 1.1 times regular pay in France (as opposed to our 1.5), so employers had less incentive to hire new workers rather than just pay existing ones slightly more for 4 hours a week.
Plus, apparently the way they set it up left a lot of big loopholes from the start, (for example, a 5 minute break could be considered off the clock even if it wasn't considered off the clock before the rule, so instead of actually reducing hours, employers could just redefine them). Apparently no one kept any records of how many hours workers actually worked before and after the law, but it is likely to have been a much smaller change in reality than on paper.

In 2003 (2 years after it went into affect) the law was changed so that overtime could be paid at regular wages (making the 35 hour standard meaningless in practice)

Despite all these caveats, 300,000 new jobs were in fact created during the 3 years the law was fully active.
Unemployment dropped from 11.5% in 1997 (a year before the first, voluntary, phase of the law went into affect) to 8.5% in 2001 (a year after the madatory provisions went into affect). After it was weakened in 2003 unemployment went up to about 9.3% for 3 years, dropped briefly, and then was essentially repealed completely in 2008, after which unemployment immediately climbed from its 7.6% low back up to 10% within one year.

http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z8o7pt6rd5uqa6_&ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=unemployment_rate&fdim_y=seasonality:sa&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=country_group&idim=country:fr&ifdim=country_group&tstart=859186800000&tend=1314169200000&hl=en&dl=en&uniSize=0.035&iconSize=0.5&icfg

How much these changes were due to the 35-hour work week and how much to other economic factors is debatable, but the data definitely doesn't support the idea that the 35 hour week hurt employment.

Legitimate point:
"It seems like the current unemployment is the result of an unusually large recession, and the fact that much of our previous boom was built on fake housing prices and borrowing, so the jobs related to that disappeared when the bubble popped. To fix it in a free-market sense, you need existing industries to keep growing ...and new industries to grow. "
and
"I too would like to see a more bell-shaped distribution with a smaller standard deviation. But if the "area under the curve" starts to decrease (GDP decrease), then everyone looses."

My Response:

One of the main reasons I hope to get this idea talked about is to get away from the traditional view of the economy.
Most specifically, I want to challenge the mind-set that "growing the economy" (mainly by increased consumerism) is inherently good and the primary goal of policy, as well as the only way to improve living standards.

The problem with expanding the economy in order to create jobs is that, as a society, we really have everything we need (and then some) already.

The flip side of consumption is production. The whole idea behind encouraging American's to buy more stuff is to "grow the economy". All the stuff that gets produced has to be bought by someone. The environmental impact of 300 million people working 40 hours a week at our current productivity levels is simply unsustainable, because it would necessarily mean an enormous amount of natural resource extraction for the purposes of production, and a corresponding increase in consumption. Therefor I believe it makes more sense to share the work we already have, rather than try to force there to be more work to do - especially since the marginal effect of additional wealth on the happiness of middle class Americans has consistently been shown to be zero.

It is basically Jacob's (of Early Retirement Extreme) "Broken Window" theory of jobs. If someone throws a rock through your window, you have to hire a glassmaker to come and put in a new one. Now that glassmaker has a job and money just traded hands. So, technically, GDP has increased, and supposedly this is good for "the economy" and therefor society. However, nothing new of value has been created. In fact, resources were used up and wasted. This means that, while on paper, society is richer for the broken window, in reality we are poorer for it. The paper accounting and the reality are in direct opposition to each other.
The "service economy" is more or less just economic masturbation.

It reminds me of the story by Kurt Vonnegut where in the future automation had made work obsolete, so the government has people building multiple bridges over the same river, just in order to give people something to do since society is convinced it is morally irresponsible to just give everyone welfare checks even if society can afford to.
Growing the economy for its own sake, once a comfortable standard of living has been established, is actually counter-productive.

Legitimate point:
"1) Why not go further? Research shows part-time workers are more productive than full-time workers per hour, AND, they have better involvement in family and community...

2) Part-time workers need protection for basics like healthcare benefits"

My Response:

1) I didn't go further because I know there would be enormous resistance, both from employees (who would be losing 12% of their salary upfront) and employers (who have some fixed per/worker costs and therefor prefer the smallest possible workforce)
2) Healthcare should be provided by the government.

Legitimate point:
"How does the tariff relate to WTO and such? Is it even legally possible at this point?"

My response:

I don't know the details, but my idea is that you would bypass trade treaties by only applying tariffs to goods made by US companies. If it is a US based company already, then the "imports" aren't affecting the trade balance. The idea is just to de-incentivise employers building factories in 3rd world countries for cheap labor and then shipping products around the world bark to US marketplaces.

Legitimate point:
"The downside of this is fat countries like the US will see a flattening of the wealth curve and regression to the mean which means a lowered standard of living for us while the rest of the world enjoys the benefits of world capitalism. I probably won't live to see the day when human capital will flow across borders as monetary capital has done for centuries. But you might and you won't like it when a desperate kid from the Mekong delta can do your job for $1/hour and be happy to get it. So much for a 35 hour workweek..."

My response:

Even though I personally stand to lose from a lowered standard of living overall in the US, I actually find that to be a perfectly reasonable outcome. We have way more than we need. We have so much that more has no affect on happiness. We are living way over the sustainable rate of natural resources regeneration. And we didn't earn that privileged, we got lucky by being born in the US. On top of all that, nearly all American's could easily maintain their current standard of living with 1/4 to 1/2 their current income, if they just stopped wasting so much of their money. If we didn't have so much excess, we would learn to stop throwing it away.
(I have become a big fan of Mr Money Mustache and Early Retirement Extreme of late)
If I were king of the world, the extreme wealth of the top 0.01% of the US would not be distributed to the American middle class. It would be distributed to the Third World.

Legitimate point:
"for someone who's used to spending $X and desiring more money rather than more time, they wouldn't be happy to have to "sacrifice" their annual flat screen upgrade for an extra 5 hours per week.
A further problem in the US is that hiring extra workers comes with more fixed costs (benefits). It's in the interest of the way the system has been set up to have as few workers working as much as possible. Not a very smart way to do it, but that's the starting point."

My response:

I know that many many people will object - both the workers who lose hours and therefor pay, and employers who have fixed costs per employee. I don't expect it to happen (at least not anytime soon). But I do think it should be something people are talking about, if only to set the stage for the future, or even if only to challenge peoples assumptions about things they take for granted; like the purpose of the economy, production, employment, unemployment, distribution of wealth, etc.
Then again, the 40 hour week must have seemed just as impossible to the people who fought for it in the early 1900s, and it eventually became an almost worldwide standard.

Legitimate point:
"I am more interested in changing the way business reward workers. It'll be nice to be rewarded as a function of economic output instead of the amount of time a person show up at a business.
It drives me nut to sit for 8 hours while doing 2 hours of real work for most of the year."

My response:

I'm with you in principal, but I can't think of any practical way to put that into practice universally. Can you?
Even if it were to be done, my original point - that wages have not kept up with productivity gains - would still be true. You generate more towards GDP in your 2 hours than a 1850 worker did in 12 hours.
Besides, there is good reason to believe that a shorter workweek would actually increase productivity. Note that in Europe, where the average work week is several hours lower than our own, productivity per worker per hour is actually higher.
For a likely explanation of that, see: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/25/the-joy-of-part-time-work/

Legitimate point:
"I am afraid this will be an automatic no-go. Wally*World will never let it fly. Wally hires people "under" a 40 hour week in order to consider them part time. This is why most of the WW people have no benefits."

My response:

Wally already hires people for 34 hours a week, which is still less than 35. They currently offer healthcare plans to anyone over 24 hours per week, so this change would not affect that threshold at all.

I'll add to this list if I get more good objections or questions.

Be Healthy, part 2 (sub-section: fat management)

2011-01-07T19:29:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in the main "Be Healthy", I found when writing it that this subsection of overall health was just too large to fit comfortably in with the rest (no pun intended). While not one of the basic fundamental pillars of health any more than any other specific ailment, given that the majority of individuals in our culture have unhealthy body fat percentages, maybe it is actually worthy of its own essay. Just keep in mind that everything to follow is meant to be considered from within the context of the main "Be Healthy" essay.
(Since blogs are listed with the most recent entry on top, the main essay is immediately below this one. If you have not already, read that one first)
Having below a certain percent body fat does not automatically make you healthy...

*I've been using the term "weight" for the sake of simplicity, and out of laziness. We've all gotten accustomed to talking about weight. The common charts list something called "body mass index (BMI) which considers only height and weight. Weight is not a useful measurement. Arnold Schwarzenegger weighed 260lbs back when he competed. That gave him a body mass index of 33. In other words, he was technically morbidly obese. However, he had a bodyfat percentage of only around 6%. The average American is around 25%(male)/35%(female). The average American is right on the border between "overweight" and "obese"; judged not by weight, but by the amount of the body which is composed of stored fat. A healthy fat percentage is nearly half of what most of us are, 6-12% for men and 14-20% for women (women naturally have more fat than men, even when perfectly healthy). Our friend Arnold, despite being characterized as obese by BMI standards, had half the bodyfat of an average healthy person at only 6%. Muscle weighs more than fat. If you are trying to get more healthy, and not just look a certain way (and hopefully you are) you are exercising in addition to dieting. If you are exercising (at least if you are doing it right) you will gain muscle. Since muscle weighs more than fat, the number on the scale may actually go up, even while you need to use ever tighter holes on your belt to keep your pants from falling off.
Weight means nothing.
It is excess fat, not excess "weight", or pounds, that contributes to a host of diseases, lack of fitness, and lack of longevity. Everyone has heard the list.

Two much more meaningful measures are fat percentage and strength-to-weight ratio. The first can be measured most accurately by being weighed while underwater (fat floats, muscle does not). More feasible and convenient, you can approximate body fat percentage at home with a tape measure and any of several free online calculators.

http://www.healthcentral.com/cholesterol/home-body-fat-test-2774-143.html
or
http://www.scientificpsychic.com/fitness/diet.html
They take different measurements, so will give you slightly different answers, but they will give you a good general idea of your fat percentage.

The second is measured simply by what you can do. How many body weight exercises, such as push-ups and pull-ups, can you do? If the number is zero, you are either too heavy, or too weak, or both. This leaves plenty of room for people of different frame sizes or body types. As opposed to, for example, a list that shows your "ideal weight" based on nothing more than your height, or an arbitrary strength benchmark, it scales to the individual, and it is a reasonably objective measure. Strength-to-weight ratio makes the difference between lumbering through life in a shell that just contains you, or having your body work for you however and whenever you want. The difference between just living and being able to fully thrive. The "athletic skill level" charts by CrossFit listed in part one of "Be Healthy" takes all measurements of strength as a percentage of body weight, which means they are all measures, not of absolute strength, but of strength-to-weight ratio.

Two common mistakes people make when making the decision to take control of their health and fitness is either not tracking progress, or tracking it too often.
Remember that change comes slowly. Because it is gradual, you are unlikely to notice it if you don't keep records. An excel spreadsheet or a notebook with date, weight, measurements, and fitness benchmarks as well as any medical issues, and overall outlook on life, can keep you motivated by showing how much progress you have made when it may feel like there has been none. Taken over a long period of time, looking back at old notes and seeing the trend of improvement can be a major motivator to continue.
The best way to tell, over a long period of time whether what you've been doing is really helping is to keep records. If there are no signs of positive change, keeping records lets you know that you need to do something different.

The other mistake is the opposite extreme, checking too often. Again, change happens gradually. There will be normal fluctuations, both up and down, in both weight and strength, every day. Seeing those can be even more discouraging than not tracking at all. Pick one day a week to do an assessment, and don't step onto a scale in between; otherwise these daily fluctuations may discourage rather than encourage.

It seems to fit in with our general cultural agreement that we should never be uncomfortable, that changing body shape and composition should be easy and painless and relatively quick. We want the sort of solution where we do some very specific thing, and then the problem is solved and we never have to think about it again. We want a quick fix.
When looking at excess fat as a health issue, and not just an appearance issue - as being one small part of the greater issue of fitness in general - drugs, surgery, and extreme fad diets don't make so much sense. They don't actually solve the problem. They, like most medicine, only address a symptom.

Drugs, surgeries, herbs, special foods, exercise classes and exercise machines all make someone money. America is all about marketing.

In truth we have all known the fat loss "secret" all along. It was never hidden. But if someone wrote a new book on weight management that said "the transition will be extremely difficult and uncomfortable, and once you reach your goal you will have to make certain major lifestyle changes permanent", it would never sell enough copies to become a household word; (or even a gym word.)

In addition to the popularity of the "quick/easy fix", there has been growing for a few decades a pervasive "politically-correct" movement which says that the number one priority is not to hurt anyone's feelings. Of course making someone feel bad about themselves for its own sake is not productive. But neither is lying to people. This has nothing to do with cultural perceptions of beauty, or patriarchy, or fashion magazines. Its not about being sexy or being accepted. In part one of this essay I listed a number of examples ranging from everyday life to rare emergencies where fitness makes a qualitative difference in ability and therefor on quality of life. Having a high ratio of fat to muscle makes all of those things more difficult. And of course the list of diseases directly caused by or closely correlated with excess fat is just as long. Despite all this, there has been a cultural backlash against encouraging people to be healthy, where the emphasis is instead put on accepting one's self as is.

Imagine that concept being extended to any other area of life. In order to improve self-esteem, telling young students that if school is hard, focus on accepting bad grades, because it is not a reflection of who they are on the inside. Instead of going to college which is time-consuming, expensive, and has the possibility of failure, just learn to love yourself. Society sets unrealistic expectations for how much money a person should make, so in order to foster self-esteem, stop encouraging people to try to get good jobs. Actually, you could make a decent argument that education and income really aren't that important, that ignorance, stupidity, and poverty really aren't reflections on what kind of person someone is. Perhaps an even better analogy would be encouraging a smoker or drug addict to accept themselves for who they are, despite the substantial health risks that go along with them. People should indeed feel good about themselves. That doesn't mean we should stop encouraging people to improve themselves and their lives within their ability. After all, cholesterol, diabetes and cancer really don't care what societies standards are.

Advice on body fat management geared toward overweight people is occasionally lumped together with "media" which supposedly encourages people (women specifically) to be "unrealistically" or unhealthily thin. The reality is that anorexia is a psychological condition in which an individual sees an alternate reality (looking in the mirror at 10% bodyfat and seeing 30%). Obesity is a physical condition. While anorexia is a serious problem for those who suffer from it, it only affects around 0.25% of the population, while 60% of the population has an unhealthy level of excess fat.

Because so much of the population has excess fat stores, what we consider "over-weight" has been re-normalized - both in terms of the medical definitions, and individual perception. Having just a slight amount of excess fat is considered normal, because "normal" is measured against "average", not against healthy. As a result, many people think of themselves as having less body fat than they actually have - in some cases even people who are clinically obese.

Between these two things - people wanting quick and easy answers, and it being un-PC to say that excess fat is unhealthy, a lot of misinformation has become widely circulated and popularly accepted. Its easy to get away with since most people don't have much background in the chemistry and biology which lie at the heart of understanding nutrition.

The Fundamental Issue

Calorie balance. It's true and undeniable. There are layers of complexity, but in the end it comes down to calories in VS calories out. The human body can not produce fat tissue out of air and water. It just can't be done. It would violate the most basic laws of physics. If a person, no matter what their genetic make-up, no matter what their hormone balance, no matter what their stress levels, stops eating entirely, they will lose weight. Unless one dies (or goes into cryogenic storage) the body burns calories by staying alive. While the body will try to slow down metabolism if you are in calorie deficit, the heart still needs to beat, the lungs still need to expand and contract, the brain still needs to fire neurons, cells need to regenerate. All of these things use calories. If those calories do not come from food, the body has no choice but to start breaking down fat and muscle to provide for basic life functions.

This is not to say that anyone should stop eating all-together for the purpose of losing weight. While long-term fasting can in fact be extremely effective, there are a couple of major drawbacks.

Short term fasting (24-48 hours) is actually very healthy. Not only in terms of aiding in fat management, (even with a healthy body-fat level, where total calories are not restricted), fasting every other day (continuously, one day eat, one day fast) reduces insulin sensitivity, cholesterol, risk of cancer and heart disease, increases stress resistance, and (at least in lab animals) causes significantly longer life spans. In fact, most of us technically fast every night, as it takes only 8-12 hours for the body to switch from using our last meal for fuel to using stored glycogen.

(The word "break-fast" is literally what it is)

Many people have gone on long term fasts (more than a day, as long as a month) with minimal or no ill health effects. However, there are a number of problems with complete fasting. First and foremost, it is just extremely hard. Going against one of the most basic biological drives is beyond the willpower of most people. Furthermore, unless the diet is very deliberately controlled and balanced after ending the fast, many people put all of the fat they lost back on again within a few months.
A significant danger with long-term fasting is that some vitamins and minerals (especially water soluble vitamins, C and B), don't store well in the body. Because of this, fasting is one situation in which daily vitamin pills are actually necessary.
Done excessively, fasting can eventually lead to the sort of malnutrition based conditions listed in "Be Healthy" part 1. Long-term fasting by a person without excess fat stores to burn can cause the brain and vital organs to be deprived of glucose, leading to permanent damage or death.

There are some (extremely rare) cases where a persons body is incapable of turning fat into glucose, and in these cases it may be possible to cause starvation type damage even with excess fat stores available. For this reason, if you have never successfully lost fat in your life, never restrict diet to fewer than 1000 calories a day without consulting a doctor.

The example of 100% calorie restriction is merely meant to be illustrative of the basic principal taken to an extreme. Without going into all of the details (yet), if a person consumes more calories than they burn, they WILL gain weight, (almost) guaranteed

('Almost' only because it is possible for food to pass through the body unused, especially in the case of certain illnesses)

If a person consumes less calories than they burn, every day, they WILL lose weight.

It is easy to find people who object, and claim they have "tried diet and exercise", and no matter what they do, they "can't lose weight". Therefor, they say, it does not come down to calorie balance, but rather to hormone levels or genes or processed foods or...
It is true that some biological factors (such as hypothyroid) will lower the body's resting metabolic rate. However this fact does not change the calorie balance equation. It just means that the lower metabolism has to be taken into account when determining how many calories to eat.
On closer inspection, what many people are doing for exercise tends to be less intense activities, generally done for no more time than is recommended for general health (30 minutes a day, 5 days a week). Many diets may cut out certain foods, but aren't necessarily reduced overall in terms of total calorie intake. If a person does not have an overall calorie deficit, even if a person is technically dieting and exercising, they will not lose weight.

There are simple benchmarks to tell you whether what you are doing really counts as exercise: for strength exercises, you should be sore the next day. If you aren't at all sore, you weren't really working out. You were just doing repetitive movements and killing time. For aerobics the feedback is even more immediate: you should be sweaty and out of breath. If you can hold down a conversation easily, without pauses to catch your breath, you aren't working hard enough!

A few very common things which don't really count as exercise:

-walking
-yoga
-lifting weights so light that you can easily do 15 or more reps without rest
-anything which is supposed to encourage "tone, not bulk"

(women are physiologically incapable of becoming "bulky" without steroids. Don't worry about it.)

-treadmill, elliptical, or stationary bike at a low resistance and/or low speed.

This isn't to say these activities have no value at all. Burning some calories is definitely better than none at all, (and yoga has significant benefits to flexibility and for many people for stress reduction). But they aren't exercise. You could do them for 5 hours a day and you won't increase your aerobic capacity or get any stronger.

An efficient exercise burns as many calories as possible in your limited work out time. Ideally it activates major muscle groups, core stabilizer muscles, and the cardio-pulmonary systems all at once.
A short list of examples of real exercise, (along with the calories they burn if done for an hour straight, with no rest):

Running upstairs/hill .. (1000)
Rock climbing ............... (650)
jump rope ...................... (600)
burpees .......................... (550)
running ........................... (450-700 depending on speed)
boxing / martial arts .... (400-600)
elliptical/stationary ...... (up to 400-600 on high resistance, at high speed)
mountain biking ............ (500)
rowing ............................ (450 at roughly 2min/500m rate)
aerobics .......................... (450)
moving furniture .......... (400)
swimming ...................... (370)
yoga ................................ (300)
sex .................................. (300)
skating ........................... (300)
road bicycling ................ (250)
weight lifting .................. (200)
(note that weight lifting increases muscle, and muscle increases metabolism, so the long term benefit is substantially higher)

All of the calorie burn levels vary by weight and gender and fitness level, but the relative values stay about the same. For gaining aerobic capacity, improving overall fitness, or losing weight, stay near the top of the list (or find other activities which are as much work, like a game of soccer, being a forest fire fighter, or military bootcamp). Again, this is not to say that low intensity exercises don't have value. But don't expect to get results by taking the easy route. It is perfectly possible to make the activities lower on the list intense... it's just that it is very easy to do them less than all-out, to coast on the bicycle, to swim at a relaxed pace. Running up hill or doing burpees is inherently challenging, even if you try to do them slowly.

Spend a few days doing the highest intensity exercises for 30 minutes at a time without resting, to get a feel for what real exercise should feel like.

(NOTE: if you are over 40, have been totally sedentary for years, or have medical issues, consult a doctor, or at least a personal trainer, first. Exceeding your limits too quickly will lead to injury.)

Once you know how it should feel, you can substitute pretty much any activity, so long as you do it at a level that is equally as difficult. And it is ok to occasionally do low impact work as well. Just keep in mind that if an exercise is 1/2 the intensity, you have to do it more than twice as long to get the same benefit.

Just as the body can break down fat for energy, it can, and will, break down excess muscle. Overall weight is a simple issue of calories in / calories out, and if a person is far enough obese, it may be safe to assume that any significant weight loss is in the form of fat. If, however, you are in (or close to) the healthy weight range (for your height and gender) but still have excess fat, then the goal needs to be more specifically losing fat. Allowing muscle loss while keeping fat is only going to make the strength-to-weight ratio even worse, and lower metabolism further. Yet another reason why, (even if your goal were just losing fat and not increasing fitness), you still have to do weight bearing exercise. Losing muscle won't make you less fat, even if the scale has a lower number. Exercising regularly will build muscle, which in turn burns calories 24/7, and forces the body to break down fat if it is in calorie deficit.

As with overall weight, losing or gaining fat is dependent on overall calorie balance. The average person burns, about 2000 calories in a day. Of the calories burned more than half is from basic metabolism - heart beat, digestion, thinking, etc. Even if you don't get out of bed all day, you burn (very roughly ) 1200 calories (it varies significantly depending on size, gender, muscle mass, age, and medical conditions). The rest of the calories burned each day are from moving around and doing things. Every time a muscle contracts, whether its pushing a stalled car down the street, or smiling, it uses calories to do it. Obviously the calories burned from movement are variable, and under our conscious control. Mostly.

A lot of our physical movement is actually not under our conscious control. Our brains make decisions we aren't aware of, and then has us do things without our consent. It sounds kind of creepy (at least when I put it that way) but it's true. Similar to the (mythical) "sugar high", having excess calories will tend to make us feel more energetic. We will tend to fidget more. It's one of the bodies ways of regulating itself. If you eat too much or exercise too little, you will tend to tap your toes or drum your fingers. You won't know why you're doing it. You might not even notice. If you are in calorie deficit you will tend to do these sub-conscious activities less. That will make your total calories burned each day go down. Little, non-exercise movements can add up to 350 calories in a day.

While this is largely sub-conscious, we can choose to compensate for it. Little things, like parking father from the door, washing the dishes by hand, taking the stairs instead of the escalator, or standing up instead of sitting, even though they aren't really "exercise", they all add up. Even seemingly minuscule things, like getting up to get something. Playing video games or reading a book instead of watching TV will burn ever so slightly more calories because your hands are moving, and because it takes more brain power - it actually takes more calories to think then it does to zone out!

Speaking of TV and computers, set a timer when doing any of these activities, and stick to a daily maximum. Don't get me wrong - I'm not one of those "kill your TV", "TV kills brain cells" people. I love TV. The problem is just that it is so easy to spend hours a day on it, which is time you aren't spending doing something more active. At the very least, get up and do a Tabata workout during every commercial break, or every 15 minutes.

Keeping the thermostat slightly lower than comfortable, or drinking cold water, means your body has to use calories to warm you up.

(This will be easier to stand if you follow the last piece of advice, and do some brief exercise every 15 minutes.)

I mentioned before that these sort of things won't increase aerobic capacity or strength, but they do all contribute to burning calories and they add up over the course of the day. These deliberate changes can compensate for a body which just naturally doesn't want to move around much.

Metabolism is variable too, but it is (mostly) not under our control. As has been (correctly) noted by the anti- calories-in/calories-out crowd, when a person is in calorie deficit the body naturally slows down metabolism in order to preserve fat.

It does this because we have been evolving for 100,000 years, and until a couple generations ago our food source was never guaranteed from year-to-year. Our biology has never had to deal with and adapt to a world where we have an essentially endless supply of cheap food. If we are in significant calorie deficit, the body assumes an actual famine has hit and there is a danger of starving to death. So it drops as much non-essential calorie use as possible to wait it out until the food supply returns. Key word: "non-essential". There is only so low it can be dropped. It's generally around 20% of total calories normally consumed, minimum. Even if your body shifts into "starvation" mode, you still burn at least 800-1000 calories a day, just by being alive.

In addition to lowering metabolism, and reducing fidgeting, your brain will try to get you to exercise less (by making you feel tired) and eat more (by making you hungry) if it senses a calorie deficit. This is not because your brain wants you to be fat. This is because, just like our conscious minds, the human body fears change. Gaining muscle or losing weight is much, much harder than maintaining fitness once you have it. Let that be a motivator; like giving up smoking, the transition will be really hard, but once you get past it, it will be relatively easy, and you'll feel better overall.

The fact that the body does these things to try to prevent fat loss doesn't make fat loss impossible. It does make it a lot more challenging. It means that, when figuring out how much to eat and exercise you have to take your body's natural resistance into account as well, and compensate accordingly.
Here is an example:
Say you're slightly over-fat, your weight is stable, and you exercise at moderate intensity a few times a week. Perhaps you consume and burn about 2500 calories a day (on average - exercise days it will be higher, rest days it will be lower). You decide to take control of your body, and actively manage your fat percentage as a sub-component of your over-all fitness and health. You force yourself to eat slightly less, and exercise slightly more. You burn 100 calories more each day by exercising a little more (2500+100=2600), and you eat 100 calories less (2500-100=2400).
But at the same time your body is able to compensate for that 200 calorie a day deficit (2600-2400=200) with decreased fidgeting throughout the day and a slightly lower metabolism. Your body uses 200 calories less per day, and your new metabolic baseline becomes 2400. So you are still in calorie balance, and will neither gain nor lose weight. And after 4 months with no progress, you give up in frustration. If you go back to your old habits (eating 2500 calories a day) while your body still only needs 2400, and you end up gaining more weight then if you hadn't done anything at all!

There are two ways around this. One way is to make the calorie deficit very small. If it is only 100 a day, the body will generally not attempt to compensate. This is a perfectly healthy and long-term sustainable way to go about it. However, it is extremely challenging, because with such a small deficit, one would have to be very meticulous and thorough with tracking literally every calorie. 100 calories is one single cookie, cup of yogurt, or 1/2 an apple dipped in peanut butter. Its one banana, 10 chips, or 1/10th of a hamburger. Without obsessively tracking calories, it is impossible to keep such a small margin, and tracking every single calorie gets old very quickly. The other challenge arises because one pound of fat contains 3500 calories. At a rate of 100 calories a day it would take over a year to lose just 10lbs. Most people don't have that kind of patience. One may get bored and/or frustrated far before then and give up.
On the other hand, this is the best way to make changes long term, and to avoid the common "yo-yo" weight loss and gain. After all, chances are it took years to gradually put on extra fat. It is reasonable for it to take as long to take it back off.

The other way is to have the deficit be enough to over-compensate for the body's compensation. This means a combination of an additional 200-600 calories a day less consumed than burned, for a total deficit in the range of 400-800. Even though your body may stop subconscious fidgeting, it can't stop you from choosing to get up and move around and going out to run for 30 minutes a day. Having a deficit of 400-800 calories a day from combined diet and exercise, where food is consciously limited and metabolism is kept high from a combination of anaerobic (intervals, brief sprints at a pace that can not be continuously maintained) and strength exercises, the body's attempts at conserving fat become totally futile.

Note that a calorie deficit of more than 800-1000 calories may limit essential vitamins and minerals to a dangerous degree, and so, like with total fasting, it would be important to take a multivitamin. Also, since this is combined with strength training exercise, which breaks down muscle and requires protein in order to rebuild it, the calories which are consumed on a highly calorie restricted diet should be mostly protein, in order to get enough of it.

The problem with this method is you may feel lethargic - making it even more of a challenge to work out - and you are practically guaranteed to feel hungry.

The Major Caveat to the Fundamental Issue: Hunger

It is un-PC to say so. People have been fighting the idea that fat people are lazy or gluttonous or weak-willed. Because of this, it is emphasized over and over that successful dieting is "not a matter of willpower". It is implied that it is outside of our control whether or not we give into hunger. What would be more accurate would be to simply say that all human willpower is in fact limited, for everyone, much more than most of us want to believe. As Christians have long noted, ALL humans give into temptation of some kind. Some more than others, but it is a part of the human condition. Free-will has its limits. This is true in every aspect of life where we are faced with temptation. If we don't consider drug addiction or giving into lust in inappropriate situations (like say with the really hot person we just met and really don't know that well, or perhaps with our partners, but when we are already running late for work...) to be personal failings of character, neither should giving into hunger or appetite. As I mentioned before, 93% of people who try to stop smoking fail. Nicotine is addictive. We tend to blame the makers of cigarettes for that, not the addict. And with food it is even more complicated, because giving it up cold turkey simply isn't an option. Eating some food is a prerequisite for life. Staying in calorie deficit is undeniably difficult. For some much more so than for others. That is the part which may have genetic or environmental factors: how hungry a person gets and how challenging it is for them to ignore it. Whether or not you choose to call hunger an issue of willpower is up to you.

Consider the meaning of 'brave'. Being brave does not mean feeling no fear. In a dangerous situation feeling no fear is a sign of stupidity. Being brave means feeling fear, and acting anyway. The firefighter going into a fire or cop going into a shoot-out fear for their lives, but they do what needs to be done anyway. Similarly, your genes may decide how hungry you get, and how often, but only you can decide when and how much to eat.

Much research has been directed lately into our obesity "epidemic". There are signs pointing to genetic components, hormonal components, and various food additives. But on close examination, very little of the effect of leptin, the thyroid, or high-fructose corn syrup relate directly to metabolism or digestion itself. What they primarily affect is appetite. None of these things "makes people fat". They make people hungry. Because they are hungry, they eat more. Eating more causes a calorie excess. The calorie excess causes fat gain.

Of all the factors that have changed in American life over the past few decades - how much more we drive, how much more automated our lives are, how much more processed food we eat - none is a larger difference than the difference in how many total calories we eat. Remember, a typical, mostly sedentary person requires (very roughly) 2000 calories a day. In 1961 the average American ate 2882 calories a day (note that people were also more active back then, so this was probably close to balanced). In the year 2000 we eat, on average, 3816 calories a day. That's about a 1/3 total increase. While other things may be factors, none comes close to the simple fact that we, as a nation, eat massively more than we used to - and massively more than we actually need.

Humans never had a really reliable source of food. Being omnivores, we could deal with that, since if one source dried up, we could switch to another. But sometimes its just a sucky year, and there are no good fruits OR bugs around to eat. We, like other animals without a more or less unlimited supply of food, are built to store excess calories in times of plenty to be used up in times of famine.

Because of this safety mechanism, the body doesn't generally object to a calorie surplus. It figures, just to be on the safe side, may as well accept the extra. On the other hand, in a deficit, the body screams at the mind. It can't "make" you eat when it wants, but it can make you feel like the world is coming to an end if you don't listen to it and eat. The problem then, is that for the first time in history, due to both farming techniques and cheap transportation, it is always "times of plenty". Even the poorest among us can afford enough food to get fat.

In fact, ironically enough, the poorest tend to get fatter than average. A common claim is that this is because they can only "afford" unhealthy food. This claim makes no sense. Junk food may be cheaper on a dollar-per-calorie basis, but eating less of it is still less expensive than eating too much. For example, if a burger, fries, and shake costs $3 on the "value menu", then eating just the burger means it costs $1 per meal. $1 is less than $3, and there are much fewer total calories. More to the point perhaps, is that junk food is only cheaper when considered on a per-calorie basis. However, if a person is overweight, obviously they are not in particular need of more calories. If food is considered on a per-nutrient basis, fresh produce is in fact cheaper.

Because we evolved this contingency mechanism which we no longer need, it is easy to gain weight.

The big secret which nearly all fad diet plans willfully ignore is that in order to lose fat, (without the use of drugs or surgery) it is practically guaranteed that you will feel hungry.

The single most important change, one which is absolutely vital to losing fat, is
(to steal a phrase from my internet friend Mr Money Mustache):
"Learn to appreciate mild hunger":

"it’s an unusual feeling for a rich-world person, but once you get used to it, having a slight craving in your tummy can make you feel invigorated and warriorlike. When you are really hungry, eat a good meal. But if you’re just slightly hungry, imagine that your body has moved its suction tube from the usual “stomach” setting, over to “stored fat reserves”. It is now a positive challenge to maintain this mild hunger as long as possible, because you want to keep that suction going for many hours each day. You should still strategically throw in nutrients during this stage, like a plate of celery, cucumber, or carrots. But keep the burn going and build your hunger enjoyment skills – it can lead to a whole new level of control over your appetite, and thus you can maintain any weight you like, right down to the last half-pound."

(By the way, I am a huge fan of MMM, and highly recommend you start reading his blog immediately. As great as I think I am, I think his blog is better. He will help you become rich, both literally and metaphorically.)

If you diet, but don't exercise, your body slows metabolism and burns muscle along with fat. Exercising raises metabolism and builds muscle, in addition to burning extra calories directly. If you exercise without dieting, your body increases appetite, so you eat more to compensate for the calories burned in exercise.
In other words:
It HAS to be both. Of the two, however, the dieting part will play the greater role.

Let's use a hypothetical example of someone who is currently gaining weight, and wants to start losing it:
The average American, remember, eats 3800 calories a day. Basic life processes only need around 1500, and with moving around in daily life, maybe 2500 total. That makes an excess intake for our example of 1300 per day. Since this hypothetical person has a daily caloric excess, they will be currently gaining weight (fairly quickly at that!) In order to lose weight you need a calorie deficit of between 100-800. That means some combination of reduced intake and increased output has to change the balance from the current +1300 to (around) -500.
That's a total change of 1800.

(1300 current excess + 500 goal deficit = 1800 change necessary to go from current to calorie deficit)

This could, hypothetically, come all from increased activity (burning 1800 calories a day in exercise) or all from dieting (eating 1800 calories less each day, which would mean going from 3800 daily to only 2000).

Burning 1800 calories a day from exercise would mean running uphill for an hour and 45 minutes (not counting any rest time) 7 days per week. Seriously; who wants to do exercise of that intensity 2 hours non-stop 7 days a week? Doing a more realistic level of exercise would require 4 hours a day (including resting between sets, at least 5 hours a day)

Compared to trying to burn that much with exercise, creating the deficit by dieting only necessitates eating less. Eating less requires no time at all, and costs less than no money. While it would take about 28 hours a week of exercise to equal 1800 calories a day, it is easy to eat 2000 or more calories in one single meal. Without seconds. Not counting side dishes. Without even a beverage. There are more than a few restaurant meals that come that way:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17349197/ns/health-diet_and_nutrition/

and it is easy to create equally as dense plates of energy at home.

While eating 1800 calories fewer each day then one is used to is a lot more doable than burning 1800 calories more each day, it is still certainly no easy task. Of course, both of these are extremes, and there is no need to do either, since one is both dieting AND exercising anyway. The point of these examples is to show that relatively more of the change in calorie balance will come from the diet component simply because food calories add up much faster than exercise calories do.

This is only an example. Individual calorie needs vary widely. To figure out the appropriate numbers for yourself specifically, the formulas on this website:
http://www.shapefit.com/basal-metabolic-rate.html
will let you approximate your own basal metabolic rate (resting calorie burn), your overall daily calorie use, and your goal calories for fat loss (or muscle gain).
It also has detailed explanations of the terms and formulas.

Note that these formulas do not take individual metabolic rates into account. If you have reason to suspect that (for medical reasons) you have a higher or lower metabolism than other people of your size age and gender, adjust the numbers up or down accordingly.

One of the most common mistakes people make when making these calculations is grossly overestimating their activity level. It might be a good idea to actually keep track for one random, typical day, exactly what you do each hour. Chances are high that you are less active than you guess.

Once you know these numbers for yourself, it is a very good idea to keep track of how much you are actually eating relative to how much you should be, at least for a few weeks. There are many free online tools to help with this. After a few weeks, assuming you see progress, you should have a better idea of what your own goal calorie intake looks like and what a calorie deficit feels like, and you may not need to keep track anymore. If you don't see progress, you can look back over the records and figure out what needs to change.

Losing fat boils down to the simple and long known issue of calorie balance. Why, then, are there about 2 million different diets and tips and tricks and drugs for it?
They are (almost) all about controlling hunger and appetite, whether they say so or not.

Most of them fail because of an over-emphasis on making it easy. Like with giving up smoking, dieting is most likely to succeed if a person goes into it with full acknowledgment and acceptance of the fact that the transition will be uncomfortable, probably very uncomfortable.
Hunger sucks.
While there are many techniques that can help keep hunger to moderate levels, in the end hunger, like all forms of discomfort, is tolerable. Like using meditation to deal with pain, it can help to remember that it is just a sensation, an experience, and a temporary one at that. If you take the stoicism, Mr Money Mustache view, you can learn to actually enjoy the sensation, because whenever you feel it, that means you are currently burning fat to fuel your metabolism.

Perhaps due to a proliferation of public service announcements and after school specials, anorexia has gotten a lot of public awareness. Because of that, there is occasionally a perception that anyone who diets or makes an effort to lose excess fat is exhibiting an eating disorder. It is important to understand the difference between losing fat when a person currently has 40% bodyfat (healthy), and losing fat when one has 5% bodyfat (potentially deadly).
Some aspects of staying healthy require short-term discomfort. Getting vaccinations and blood tests hurt. Dental work hurts. Exercise is exhausting and sweaty and leaves you sore the next day. We don't do these things because we are masochists. We do these things despite the pain because it makes us healthy. By the same token, not eating when you are hungry does not make you a masochist. It does not make you anorexic. Being hungry does not mean you are "starving" yourself. It is in fact literally impossible to starve while a person still has fat stores (more than 5-10% bodyfat).
While it may feel like you are depriving yourself, you are actually taking care of yourself by consciously managing your health.

Hunger, and a willingness to experience it's discomfort, can actually be a tool to assist in calorie balance. As long as the body is functioning normally, hunger is a sign that the body currently has a calorie deficit. If one is trying to lose excess fat, the goal is to have a calorie deficit. Daily tracking of the calorie content of every food and calorie usage in every activity can be rather time consuming and tedious. But the body has its own built in ways of tracking. If, at the end of the day, one has no feeling of hunger at all, that's a pretty sure sign that they have had a calorie balance, (or even surplus), throughout the day. While it is still important to have at least a general sense of how many calories are in each meal, just going to bed hungry implies an overall deficit for the day. Instead of seeing hunger as a sign of self-deprivation, it can be seen as a symptom of losing excess fat and becoming healthier. Not "oh my god, I feel like I'm going to die" hungry, but at least "I could sure go for a light snack" hungry. Once you are asleep, it won't bother you anymore, and your body will turn to fat stores to fuel your dreams.

I can't emphasize this enough. It is OK to be hungry. If you take only one single thing away from this essay, let it be that. It is OK to be hungry. You don't have to eat just because you are hungry. Hunger is a sign of calorie deficit, and calorie deficit is the only possible way to lose fat. Therefor, it will be literally impossible to lose fat without feeling hunger. When you feel it, you have to find a way to deal with it other than by eating.

That being said, and with the understanding that it will be impossible to lose fat without experiencing some degree of hunger, there is certainly still plenty of room for methods to minimize (not eliminate) hunger. It's an important base to start from to accept that change is uncomfortable, but there is not really any need to stop there.
Especially since most of the methods for reducing hunger are actually healthy steps to take anyway!

The body uses a number of different sensors and feedback loops to determine when to send a signal to the conscious mind that says "feed me", and then later that says "ok, that's enough". If you consistently fool one system, sooner or later another one is going to compensate. In order to manipulating hunger long term it may help to pay attention to more than one hunger system.

One way your body decides to tell you it's hungry or satiated is how physically full your stomach is. Another is your blood sugar level. Part of it relates to hormone levels (which are also affected by stress, disease, current fat percentage, age, activity level, and medical conditions, among other things). Yet another is simply the time of day and the pattern the body is used to.

Fill the stomach with things you need anyway, which have zero calories. Having a full stomach makes you feel full, displacing room for food.

-Drink a full glass of plain water before every meal and before every snack. Then drink another full glass after. You need to drink water anyway. Extreme college frat hazing aside, you can't realistically drink too much water.

For the purposes of hydration, any beverage counts. Soda, juice, milk, even coffee and alcohol, count towards your hydration needs. They (obviously) do not help in the context of displacing calories. In fact, they are worse than not helpful - they are a significant part of the problem. Again, going back to human evolution: in nature there are no flavored beverages.
There is only water. The feeling of thirst is designed to get us to hydrate. When we get in the habit of drinking sweet things, we add in extra calories when our body just needed plain water, and as far as your body's hunger sensors are concerned, those calories 'don't count' - you can drink 500 calories (2 standard 20oz bottles) in a minute or two, and still be as hungry as if you hadn't eaten anything. Problem is that in terms of calorie balance, they most certainly DO count.

And it doesn't matter if it is high-fructose-corn-syrup*, cane sugar, honey, agave, or all natural fruit juice. They are all liquid calories. They are all equally bad for you. If you are trying to lose fat, drink ZERO liquid calories, of any type.

*Incidentally, all of the studies on the evils of HFCS invariably compare it only to cane sugar (sucrose). This is sloppy science at best, and dishonest at worst. Honey, agave, and fruit juice (as well as actual fruit) all contain as much or more fructose than HFCS does. Any effects that HFCS has on the body would apply equally to these natural sweeteners as well. The problem with HFCS isn't that it is 'synthetic'. The problem is that it is put into so much processed foods in such massive amounts. Replacing it with any other form of sugar does not change this.

Even synthetic sweeteners such as nutra-sweet or splenda, which have few or even zero calories have been shown to stimulate an insulin response in the body. What this means is that you taste something sweet, and the body thinks it is sugar, and begins preparing for digestion. Once the digestive system is ready, when the calories don't come in after all, it gets all disappointed and annoyed, and responds by making you feel hungry so that it didn't make all those preparations for nothing.

OK, so maybe I am anthropomorphizing the digestive system, but that is basically how it works. Drinking diet drinks will actually make you hungrier than drinking water, indirectly leading to more fat gain.

-Eat lots of vegetables, with every meal. Have some more. When you do eat carbs, avoid starches, and eat only whole grains. The difference between "whole" and "refined" or "white" is mostly whether or not the fiber has been removed. Eat more vegetables. Fiber is good for you. It also can not be digested by the human body. It takes 2 to 4 stomachs to actually extract calories from fiber. (That's why cows and sheep can live off of a diet of grass, and you can't).

-When a meal has multiple courses, always eat the vegetables first. If you end up being full before everything has been finished, its better to end up not eating the calorie dense, low nutrient foods.

-Be aware of high calorie foods and add-ons (like toppings or sauces) which may be dense in calories yet not very filling. Try mustard instead of mayo, spices instead of cheese, sauces that are not oil or cream based. Like with sweet beverages, things added for flavor can sneak in extra calories without the body noticing.

-Eat high protein things, especially at the beginning of a meal and for snacks. Digesting protein (and fat) releases more leptin into the blood stream than digesting carbohydrates (starches and sugar) does.

This is a big part of why diets such as Atkins and Paleo, (although both are based on principals which have little to no scientific or historic validity), end up working for so many people. Atkins claims that carbs are too easy to digest. Paleo claims that carbs are too hard to digest. The truth is carbs are perfectly healthy. However, they don't do as much as protein and fat to quell hunger. In the context of controlling hunger in order to facilitate consistent calorie deficit, anything which provides calories without providing the feeling of satisfaction is counter-productive. Carbs aren't as bad as sweetened beverages in this regard, but they are a close second. Add to that the fact that, unlike with fats and proteins, we don't actually need carbs to rebuild cells, or for any other basic biological process, and it stands to reason that if a person is going to cut back on total calories consumed, carbs are the first things to cut back on.

That being said, take careful note that high-protein high-fat diets have been well established as very unhealthy in the long-term. Cutting back on high density carbs does not mean eliminating them, and it most certainly doesn't mean replacing them with even denser calorie animal products. It means taking the classic food pyramid, and just switching the positions of vegetables and grains, like this:

http://www.munaabuawad.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/foodpyramid-full.png

-Be consistent with when you eat, in order to balance out your blood sugar levels and prevent craving inducing spikes and valleys. Being inconsistent leads to suddenly feeling overwhelmingly hungry which tends to promote binging. Since we know there are limits to anyone's willpower, better to not put ourselves in that position to begin with.

There are different strategies on this, which are basically opposite:

Some advocate eating lots of very small meals, 6 or more, evenly spaced throughout the day, or 4 small meals with frequent tiny snacks between them.

Eating frequently keeps you from ever feeling actual hunger pangs - the brief sharp pain that lasts seconds or less because you are really hungry - which can help prevent binging. In this strategy you eat before you are hungry, because when you are already very hungry there's a better chance you'll overeat. The challenge is that if you miss a single meal, you will be totally unused to ever having any drop in blood sugar, and the temptation to binge will be higher than ever. (Note that even with this strategy, you will still feel hungry if you are in calorie deficit. That hunger just won't be as sharp or sudden)

Others advocate having only one big meal (ideally breakfast, soon after getting up, to fuel the days activities), or even just one single meal once every other day. One advantage is that having one single meal makes it a lot easier to track calories. Another is that once the body gets used to it, it learns to regulate insulin and blood glucose better, reducing the weakness or "brain fog" many people experience from having a meal later than usual. People who alternate-day-fast tend to eat fewer calories overall, even without attempting to limit them, and a host of health benefits occur independent of calorie restriction.

The time of this day you eat this meal makes a difference. If it is breakfast, you have a whole day's worth of activities to use those calories. If it is dinner, all day as you move around you get more and more hungry and end up having a giant dinner - and then immediately go to sleep. Now you are using minimal calories, and the body stores all of that food away as fat - especially once it catches on that it probably won't get any breakfast the next morning either. Skipping breakfast and eating big dinners is a technique that sumo wrestlers use to deliberately put on extra weight for a sport where being massive is a decided advantage. Unless you happen to be a sumo wrestler in training, don't eat at bedtime (including before a nap). In fact, avoid eating anything within a few hours before bed.

Actually, that tip is valid for both methods. One thing that has been noted is a correlation between over-eating and not getting enough sleep. The reason turns out to be because if you stay up later, it gives you more time to eat! Few people can eat while they are sleeping.

(If you do, you should see a sleep disorder specialist. I can refer you. I know a guy...)

When we ignore being sleepy because we have work to do or a good show is on, our bodies - which were preparing to shut down for the evening - eventually decide that if you are going to be up burning calories, we had better feed ourselves to fuel the midnight oil burning. So we get hungry again. That episode of hunger would have never occurred were we fast asleep in our comfy comfy beds. The next time its past bedtime and you get hungry all of a sudden, instead of taking it is a sign you should eat, take it as a sign that you need to stop what you are doing and go to bed. Your work will still be there in the morning. Thanks to TiVo and internet TV, even your show will still be there in the morning. If its something due early, set the alarm to wake you early, instead of staying up late.
Ideally, try to have dinner relatively early every day, if at all, and then don't eat anything else for the rest of the evening.

The end goal is the same, whether eating small amounts throughout the day or just one big meal in the morning - eliminating the blood sugar / insulin spikes and dips which are a significant part of hunger regulation.

The 2nd method will be much harder to adapt to at first because it is so different than we are used to. Many people feel not just hunger pangs, but also cranky, weak, even faint, whenever their blood sugar drops.
This is not an inevitable part of life!
It occurs only because having the luxury of always-available food "spoils" our metabolic system. Transitioning to (for example) a every other day diet, one would have those symptoms frequently and severely; at first. But after a few days, a couple weeks at most, the body will adapt, and no longer will one be a slave to blood sugar levels (with the exception of certain medical conditions like diabetes or anemia).
Particularly if a person has extra fat stores, the body does not actually need a continuous external source of sugars in order to function. It just prefers it. Even more than with hunger, it's important to realize that the feelings associated with low-blood sugar will pass, and if suffered through for a few days may never recur again.

Consider the fact that many millions of people over the course of history have fasted, for reasons of health, religion, or protest, and managed to survive and live life just fine. Its never easy, but it does get easier after the initial shock.

Either way, the point is to not wait until you feel famished, and then eat. Either eat before you are hungry, or set a schedule or eating curfew, and stick to it.

-Eat only until you are satisfied, and then stop. Satisfied means no longer feeling hungry. It does not mean feeling "full". Feeling satiated will almost always come before a feeling of fullness - (although if eating until full is what a person is used to, one may not even notice when they are satisfied). If you eat until you feel full, you have almost certainly eaten more than your body needs. If you eat until you are "stuffed" you have definitely eaten way too much!

Appetite is closely related to, yet quite distinct from, hunger. Hunger is an actual physical sensation, such as the stomach contractions called "pangs" that occur when a person hasn't eaten for between 12 and 24 hours. Appetite is the desire to eat. Hunger is a biological response to the level of calories the body intakes relative to what the body needs. Appetite is an emotional response, which can be due to a wide variety of things. Some people may never actually experience physical hunger, because they always give into appetite before the body even has a chance to get hungry.

One of the main things which affects appetite, obviously, is hunger itself. If a person is in calorie deficit, or if they have a condition (such as hypothyroidism) which makes the body think it has a calorie deficit even when it doesn't, this component of appetite may be impossible to eliminate. The steps above on hunger can help to minimize it.

Beyond actual hunger though, anything which makes a person want to eat is affecting appetite.

Being hungry is something that goes along with weight loss. However, once a healthy body fat percentage and strength-to-weight ratio is achieved, it is acceptable - nay, necessary!!! - to then change from a calorie deficit to a neutral calorie balance (eating exactly same calories each day as you burn, no more and no less). At that point one should never have to feel hungry again!

(excepting for medical conditions that upset the hormonal feedback loops - which can generally be controlled with drugs)

But since hunger isn't the only thing to trigger appetite, the risk of slipping back into the same habits that caused excess fat accumulation in the first place always remain.

The most important life-long life-style habit change is:

eating for one reason, and one reason only: to provide sustenance and nutrition that your body needs.

Many people eat out of boredom, or as a distraction from being sad. Find other things to do. Try a double whammy by exercising for 10 minutes whenever you realize your appetite is emotion based.

One of the most common reasons people eat when they aren't even hungry is because other people around them are eating.
Don't eat just because people around you are eating, just because it's a party or because you are at a restaurant.
Its ok to say no.
Its ok to tell people you aren't hungry.
People may look at you funny, or even resort to peer pressure, but they will ultimately understand. And if not understand, they will at least let it go. And if not, well then nuts to them! Anyone who actually wants to bully you into eating something may not really be your friend.

Seeing or smelling something delicious can make us want to take a bite, even if we don't actually need any calories. Sweet things particularly tend to be extremely calorie dense, so even "one little bite" can go a long way to undermining a diet, (especially if the goal calorie deficit margin is low).
You don't have to try a bite of something just because someone offers.
You don't have to taste something just because it looks or smells good.

People eat just because its "meal time". Don't do that. Don't eat because of what the clock says, if you aren't actually hungry (unless, obviously, that is your method for controlling blood sugar induced hunger)

Its important to be totally conscious and deliberate about each and every thing you consume. Just like with fidgeting, all the little things add up over the course of the day.

It sounds pretty crappy, I know, but remember the purpose of eating is to provide nutrients and energy in order to live. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the food you do eat, since you do have to eat anyway; but, as they say "eat to live, don't live to eat". There are a lot of wonderful things about life besides deliciousness. Enjoy them! Play and relax and enjoy entertainment and social interactions and music and sunshine for pleasure. Eat food in order to provide your body nourishment. Never eat when you are full. Never eat when you are satiated. Never eat if you aren't actually hungry.

Not one word of this should be taken as implying that any particular food should ever be "off limits". No need to ban your favorite food outright.
All foods vary in two important relevant aspects: calorie density and nutrient density. For the purpose of fat loss, all that really matters is calorie density. For the purpose of nutrition all that really matters is nutrient density. For the purpose of health both are really important.
But neither one dictates exactly what you have to eat, nor exactly how much of it. In order to be able to eat a reasonable amount and maximize health, it's a good idea to try to eat foods which have the most nutrients for the least calories.
Its a good idea, but it is absolutely possible to lose fat on a steady diet of junk food.

You don't have to take my word for it:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/index.html
or
http://www.kktv.com/home/headlines/107493128.html
This most certainly isn't a good idea, but it is illustrative. The problem with this diet isn't that it is processed or that it has refined sugars or that it has carbs. The problems with it are 1) it doesn't have enough nutrients, and 2) it will leave you hungrier than a healthier diet, making it harder to maintain.
On the same token, it is equally possible to gain excess fat on healthy foods:
http://www.themedguru.com/20101107/newsfeature/overweight-kids-eat-healthy-food-study-86141584.html
Eating the right things, but eating too much of them, will still make a person fat. Having excess fat, even with healthy food choices, is still unhealthy.

The majority of "diet plans", the ones that have a name (Warrior, South Beach, Atkins, Paleo, The-Fabulous-Famous-Whatever-Diet) usually dictate exactly what, when, and/or exactly how much a person can eat. Studies of dieters indicate this may well be a part of why so many of them end up failing at changing long-term habits. One part of their early success may come from the fact that, by putting enough foods off-limits, one consumes less calories just by default. But sooner or later the body adapts to and craves the new foods, or the dieter falls off the wagon with a chocolate craving, and one way or another total calories consumed drifts back toward the old baseline. Alternatively, by considering only portion control, but not the nutrition of individual food (like Weight Watchers, for example), it is possible to have tiny amounts of extremely rich foods that add up to a lot, while still needing more food to satisfy actual nutrient needs.
The solution to both, then, is to both be aware of calorie density, and be aware of portion size.

Keep in mind that each and every bite consumed is a trade off between it, and something else you could be eating. This does not necessarily mean weighing food and tracking each and every calorie, but at least knowing the general caloric density of the broad types of food, and being able to estimate.

(As mentioned above, it is a good idea to track each and every calorie for a few weeks. This will help you learn to estimate accurately from then on.)

Imagine taking exactly one pound of different types of food. The total weight is the same, but the amount of calories in them will vary wildly. Take these examples:

Foods	Cal/Lb	Cal/cup
High Calorie
Oils	3,900	2000
Potato chips / Fries	2,600	1200
Meat	2,000	1100
Cheese	1,600	1000
Refined Flour	1,800	500
Medium Calorie
Poultry	900	400
Fish	800	260
Eggs	700	210
Whole Grains	600	400
Low Calorie
Beans	350	200
Starchy Vegetables (potato, corn, squash)	350	150
Fruits	250	65
Green Vegetables	100	30

http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/weight-loss-foods-that-make-you-thin.html

These are all rough estimates, because they are broad categories, and weight and volume measurements differ between different foods within them. However, they show the range of relative differences between the categories.
The foods that the vast majority of people's daily diets are primarily based on are 10 to 20 times as high in calories as vegetables, for the exact same amount of food!!

In just one single pound of french fries or chips, there are enough calories for an entire day.

That's less than one large bag. As calorie dense as a burger is, the large fries that comes with it as a "side" may well have even more. The range of calorie density is just massive. Compare this chart to the healthy food pyramid. Contrast it to how most of us eat. (Contrast it also to the official USDA food pyramid, which was largely influenced by the commercial food lobby!)
Notice that oil is almost 40 times more calorie dense than veggies.

Say you start with a healthy, nutrient rich, low calorie salad. Then, for flavor and variety you add in some shredded cheese, croutons, maybe some chicken or bacon bits, and then top it all off with a generous pour of oil or cream based dressing. That dressing which you think of as just a little garnishment for flavor probably has more calories than all the vegetables put together. It may even have more calories than the entire rest of the salad! All of a sudden a meal that you thought of as being down at the bottom of the list has shot up towards the top.

(Don't be like Homer)

For example, there are quite a few restaurant salads which have over 1000 calories - so this one dish, which is sometimes used as an appetizer or side, actually has close to half of one's needed calorie intake for the entire day.

No one is really surprised that long time vegans tend to weigh less than people who subsist on mostly fried foods, but this chart shows exactly why. Aside from oil, most plant foods reside all the way at the very bottom, while animal foods dominate the top.
Not on the list is alcohol, which has zero nutrients, but has more calories per gram than carbs do. Because of this "low carb" beer is somewhat silly, since the alcohol itself is a source of calories. Since it is in liquid form, like soda, alcohol doesn't satisfy hunger, but beer has anywhere from 100-250 calories per bottle.

Another way to visualize calorie density is to keep calorie size constant, and see the size of portions for different foods. The following pictures were all borrowed from: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-does-200-calories-look-like.htm
Click the image for a full size view:
(depending on your browser, you may need to click the image that comes up in a new window as well)

Notice that some foods completely fill the plate, and look like they could actually be a meal in themselves. Others look kind of sad, and wouldn't even qualify as a complete snack. Yet, as far as your bodies metabolism is concerned...
every one of those pictures is the exact same amount of food
(200 calories each - one can of beer is about equivalent as well).

Because there is such a huge range of calorie densities, trying to limit calories by controlling portion size alone is impossible. And simply banning certain foods and then ignoring portion size won't do it either, as a few generally healthy foods, (like nuts, vegetable oils, and dairy) are dense in calories. But looking at food in terms of its caloric density gives the question a new perspective. Imagine you wanted a 200 calorie snack. You can pick anything from those pictures you want. It is absolutely fine to pick the chocolate. Just realize that its a trade off. It's not "cheating". But it does mean giving up the giant bowl of vegetables, fruit, or cereal, or the medium sized bowl of pasta or yogurt. Its up to you if it's really worth it. At the end of the day, you can only eat so many calories while having an overall deficit. How you choose to spend them is entirely up to you. Of course, the pat of butter or shot of Bailey's Irish Cream is not going to satisfy your hunger nearly as much as anything from the top of the list, and they won't give you the same nutritional value.
You have to realize, remember, and keep in mind, that which ever thing you pick is INSTEAD of something else. If you pick the 1/3 of a candy bar, or the little chunk of cheese, that's it, thats the meal. If, in our examples from above, you are starting with a baseline of 2000 calories a day, and trying for an 800 a day deficit, that means you can have 6 items from the plates in the picture above, per day. Total, among all your meals, however you split that up.
Obviously if you choose the bacon, hotdog, shot of liquor, piece of cheese, a two kinds of candy, you are going to feel desperately hungry pretty much all the time. On the other hand, if you chose the vegetables and fruit, and maybe a bowl of whole grain cereal, that amount may actually fill you up and leave you reasonably satiated. Look at that picture again, and the relative sizes of portions that make 200 calories. Imagine only being able to pick 6 of them for your entire days food. That is the trade off you are facing every time you pick a food to eat.

This visualization also shows why the "processed foods VS home cooked food" dichotomy is a ridiculous over-simplification. Yes, there is a lot of candy, junk snack food, and fast food near the bottom. But there are also a number of ingredients commonly used to cook with. Butter, cheese, and oil, are all denser in calories than even the highly-processed sugar-filled candy. If home cooking consists of lasagnas and pies, fried food and mammal meat, or is even just cooked in oil or butter, is heavy on carbs, or is covered in cheese, it will be just as calorie dense as anything purchased ready-made.
Whatever you choose to eat, it is vital to match portion size to calorie density. The denser it is, the less of it you can have.
Everything you choose is displacing something else, so choose wisely.

As I talked about in part one, nutrient density is also a variable. There are certain things we need to eat a minimum of, regularly if not every day; specifically protein, fat, vitamins, minerals, and water. Looking back at the picture, it just so happens that nutrient density more or less varies inversely with calorie density. Vegetables and fruits are higher in vitamins and minerals then meat, dairy, and carbs. How convenient!! Given that you have to eat a certain amount of the type of foods high on the picture in order to get enough nutrients, it leaves less and less room for the crap at the bottom. Since the point of dieting is health, it would be counter-productive to cut out nutrient rich food.
The point is, eat vegetables and more vegetables. And then some fruits. And then even more vegetables. Occasionally a little meat or dairy or oil or whole grains.
Occasionally does NOT mean every meal.
It does not even mean every day. As mentioned in part one, we don't need nearly as much protein as most people think. Until very recently, very few cultures ate protein and fat rich food with every meal. In order to lose fat, 50% of food consumed should be vegetables, absolute minimum.

Of course there are going to be times when you eat things other than vegetables. Even if you manage to make your diet 50% vegetable (which you should, if you really want to lose fat), you will go out to eat with people, others will cook for you, you won't have time to cook, and whatever else. It isn't necessary to cut out high calorie foods completely (or any particular food). Match portion size to calorie density. If something is high in sugar, oil, meat, dairy or refined carbs, eat just a tiny bit of it. Eat as much (non-starchy, i.e. not corn or potato) vegetables as you want.

Controlling appetite is about preventing eating when one isn't really even hungry.
When we do eat, however, it is easy to eat too much; even when one doesn't have an appetite for it.
There are ways to minimize that too:

-Use smaller plates and bowls. Seriously. A lot of this is psychological. We naturally tend to fill a container. And we naturally tend to eat as much as is in front of us. Once we start eating, we may not notice that we are satiated until the stomach actually starts to hurt, and by that time we have already overeaten - by a lot! If you fill a large plate only 1/2 way, it looks like a small amount, and it seems like it won't be satisfying. If after finishing a small plate full you actually are still hungry, you can always go back for seconds.

-Eat slower. Using a small spoon helps you take smaller bites, so that it takes longer to finish. There is a delay between eating and when the body realizes it's full, so eating slower gives the body's feedback systems a chance to catch up. By the same token, be deliberate about chewing, and wait a few minutes before getting those seconds, to see if you really are still hungry.

-Decide on your serving size in advance. Again, you can decide to have more later, but if you don't think about it chances are you just pile an arbitrary amount on the plate, and then eat it all just because its there.

-Don't feel you have to finish everything on the plate! Its totally ok to have leftovers. This is especially true in restaurants, where they typically serve 2-4 "servings" of food on a single plate.

-When eating pre-packaged foods, take a look at the serving size. If it says there are 4 servings per container, don't eat the whole box in one sitting.

-Be aware of condiments and other add-ons. Just one tablespoon of mayo - the amount you might spread on a sandwich - has 110 calories. Because oil and cream based sauces and dressings are so extremely dense, they add up really fast. Just how fidgeting burns few calories, but adds up over the course of the day, a tiny amount of added sugar or cheese or even the oil that sticks to food in a stir-fry, all ends up adding significantly to the days total calories.

-Be especially conscious when eating socially. Maybe its the distraction. Maybe its something about being around other people who are eating. For whatever reason, people eat more when they are around lots of other people. To a lesser extent, people also eat more with distractions like television, when putting fork to mouth goes into autopilot, and the mind doesn't fully register that its been eating all along.

This has been an awful lot of information.
I have deliberately avoided as much of the technical side of digestion, metabolism, the glycemic index, and the like as possible.
And it is only a subset of the bigger picture on health.
Is it any wonder that there are so many attempts to over simplify and take short cuts?

Ideally you should take all this information as a base with which to build your own plan that will work for you.

I will make my attempt at summarizing and simplifying everything I wrote into 4 simple rules, with one vitally important note. This is just one approach, and there are many others that can work just as well, (and which may work better for you).

1) No starches (commonly called "carbs") i.e. bread, cake, pasta, fries, chips, etc
2) No added sweetener of any kind. This includes "natural" sugar, honey, agave, and calorie-free artificial sweetener
3) Zero liquid calories. Drink water. Coffee or tea are fine, as long as they are straight, with no sweetener, cream, or flavoring added.
4) Daily food curfew about 4 to 6 hours after you wake up. This means eating breakfast, and possibly lunch, but nothing at all between lunch and bedtime. (Assuming you wake up between 6am and 8am, this would mean a food curfew at 12 noon.) This gives the benefits of short term-fasting, and also naturally restricts calories without the tedium of counting and tracking.
And the vitally important note is that you WILL feel hungry all the time, and that the only possible success will come from accepting it.

This plan must be done while continuing to exercise. In order to prevent losing muscle mass, it is important to get enough protein. Once you reach your target bodyfat percentage, you should GRADUALLY increase daily calorie intake until it exactly matches the calories you burn each day. At that point you should eat until you don't feel hungry, but never more than that.
The good habits you picked up during the dieting process all need to become life-long habits, or else you will gain back all the fat you lost.
For the first couple weeks I recommend tracking your calories - literally every thing you eat as well as your daily exercise, and using a calorie calculator (use Google) to make sure you are in calorie deficit. Once you have established a pattern, and know what calorie deficit feels like, you may not need to track any longer.

Once you have reached your goal bodyfat percentage, you do not need to tolerate a constant low-level hunger anymore. You should eat until satiated. However, that doesn't mean that just because you are now thin and strong and healthy you have license to eat "whatever you want". If you return to your old habits, you will return to your old bodyfat percentage. The same steps for losing fat happen to coincide with healthy eating habits for anyone of any size. Once you reach your goal, the only thing that should change is total calories consumed. The rest needs to be lifelong.

Don't forget what I wrote in the beginning: everything above is meant to be considered from within the context of the main "Be Healthy" essay!
Health includes avoiding illness, fitness, and nutrition, not just being thin. Whether you or those around you are happy with how you look is irrelevant.

I am not, as you may be aware, a trained professional on any topic remotely related to all this. I'm just an ordinary guy (with a background in science), who likes to stay healthy and loves collecting information, understanding things, and putting together the big picture out of lots of seemingly independent details. I'm also someone who likes to share what he learns from others.
But I don't expect you to take my word for it.

Here are just a few of the sources from which I gathered data for this essay:

http://www.shapefit.com/basal-metabolic-rate.html
http://www.diet-blog.com/07/the_foods_that_made_america_fat.php
http://www.munaabuawad.com/?p=25
http://www.intermartialarts.com/article/sumo-wrestler-diet
http://www.kitchentablemedicine.com/are-you-on-the-sumo-wrestler-diet/
http://www.healthygo.com/articles/averagebodyfat.php
http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/288/14/1723.full
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199910073411501
http://www.annals.org/content/138/1/24.abstract
http://ps.columbia.edu/news/are-normal-weight-americans-over-fat
http://www.diet-blog.com/10/fatorexia_overweight_people_who_deny_they_are_fat.php
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1267883/Fatorexia-In-mirror-Sara-saw-slim-woman-Just-problem-17st-So-deluded.html
http://www.worldhealth.net/news/every_other_day_fasting_may_reduce_cance/
http://www.post-gazette.com/healthscience/20030429lifehealthp2.asp
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5AB4HM20091112
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC156352/
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2003-04-28-fasting_x.htm
http://www.ajcn.org/content/81/1/69.full?ck=nck

There are others as well, but I encourage you to find your own information.
Google is your friend.
When you are done reading, get off the computer, and put what you have learned into practice!

Be healthy, my friend.

Be Healthy, My Friend

2011-01-02T05:04:00.000-08:00

The word "Health" has become almost meaningless.

This is due to a number of factors, but one of the chief ones, I suspect, is marketing.
It helps to sell things as "healthy" if there is no clear idea what that actually means.
I will resist the temptation to get into that whole topic...

What I do want to do is try to remove some of the abstraction, by breaking it down into its constituent parts. While the term itself eludes a single precise definition, there's a list of components that are part of it, and those parts are reasonably concrete.

-A lack of, resistance to, and/or ability to recover from, infection (by viruses, bacteria, protozoa, fungus, or parasite)

Even a healthy person may get the occasional cold, but they will get better more quickly

-A lack of, resistance to, and/or ability to recover from, (non-infectious-agent - such as diabetes or angina)
-A lack of, resistance to, and/or ability to recover from, injury
-Longevity (how long you live)
-General fitness*
-Mental/emotional health - I wholeheartedly acknowledge that this is a very important part of overall health; however there is so much to cover just considering physical health that I won't mention it here any further than this sentence.

Many people seem to get obsessively caught up on just one or two components, sometimes to the complete exclusion of considering the others. And as a result there are raw-foodists who can't do a single push-up, athletes who eat junk food, people who take all manner of drugs and vitamins, and others who take herbs and supplements and "superfoods", both thinking health can be reduced to just what you ingest.

When someone, be it a friend or an ad or even a doctor, claims that X food, Y herb, or Z activity, is "good for you" or "unhealthy" or whatever, ask exactly in what ways does it contribute to health? Which of these elements does it affect, and how? Personally, I suspect that extremely few of the millions of things passed off as healthy stand up to that sort of test.

Just to complicate things again, some of these components can sometimes conflict with others. For example, while strength leads to resistance to injury and pathogens, the process of exercise itself is sometimes the cause of injury, and intense exercise (which is the only effective kind) tends to lower immunity (although only temporarily). Similarly, exercise lowers the risk of most non-communicable disease, but at the same time higher metabolism rates accelerate aging.

Since some components can be considered in conflict with each other, it would be hard to say in absolute terms what is the healthiest a person can possibly be. None-the-less, there is clearly a range, from someone who is sick all the time, can't walk far without being winded, and dies at 50, to the people who are still running marathons at 70.

There was a time when pathogens were the single greatest threat to human life. Undeniably, since the advent of cities, modern sanitation has made all the difference in human health. Closely following sanitation in significance would be the discovery of vaccines. Between these two, communicable disease has gone from the largest threat to all human existence to (at least in the developed world) mostly just an annoyance. While there have been times in the not-all-that-distant-past that viruses or bacteria might have killed 1 out of every 3 people you knew, about the only experience we have with them is getting a cold or flu for a few days a year. Modern medicine has effectively eliminated the risk of death, allowing us the luxury of fighting symptoms instead of the disease itself, and even of (ironically enough) rebelling against modern medicine and deliberately returning to the superstition cures of yesteryear.

Granted, there are legitimate problems with mainstream modern medicine - namely, that it has become nearly 100% for-profit, which means making money takes precedence over making people healthy. Research is biased. Unfortunately, alternative medicine, instead of rejecting the for-profit model, instead rejects science and research in favor of superstition. And so you have little white pills for $10 each made by Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline on the one hand, and homeopathy, acupuncture, and chiropractors on the other. And as it stands today, at least in the US, those are pretty much the only options.

We have come a long long way since Smallpox killed 50% of the population of an entire country. We have basically stagnated, having cured nearly all deadly diseases, and making little progress on the rapidly mutating cold and flu viruses. There is extremely little by way of drugs (pharmaceutical or natural) that can do anything at all about infection. Before exposure, there are vaccines - the opposite of a cure, they are a small sample of the disease itself, and are designed to teach your own immune system how to kill it if it ever sees it again. For bacteria based diseases there are antibiotics. That's it.
For viruses there is nothing. Cold medicine does not fight the cold itself. It fights the symptoms. And the symptoms are actually your bodies way of fighting the virus. You get a fever because viruses thrive at 98 degrees, and don't operate as well at 101 degrees. You get a runny nose because the mucus helps block any other viruses from getting into your body while it's busy fighting whats already there. You feel tired because your body's energy is going into fighting the cold. Your body wants you to lie in bed and recover. When you take something - whether its OTC cold medicine, herbal tea, grandma's secret recipe, or even a netty pot, which reduces the symptoms so that you can feel better (in the moment) you are actually fighting your body. Which means, essentially, that you are helping the virus. The more you fight the symptoms, and try to carry on with life as though you weren't sick, chances are, the longer it will take for you to actually get better. For some reason we have gotten it into our minds that it is absolutely imperative that we feel comfortable at all times, even to the point where treating our symptoms leads to us actually staying sick. The full list of substances which actually make you better, faster, is extremely small. Vitamin C. That's it.

Aside from ‘C’, the things which help our bodies fight viruses are simply sleep and water.

With all of our technology, humans have not figured out a better way to fight viruses than natural evolution already did. Sanitation is really just an issue of us not making things worse. Vaccination stimulates the bodies own immune system. And Vitamin C doesn't actually attack the virus itself, but, again, supports the body's immune system.
While we can't actually cure sickness, what has been shown to prevent it, and minimize it when it does occur, is overall health and fitness*.

There are some things that modern medicine can do better than nature. Before the defibrillator was invented, a heart-attack was a guaranteed death sentence, while now people live on to have several heart-attacks in a lifetime. Vaccines have essentially eliminated the threat of true epidemic. If you have appendicitis, having it surgically removed can save your life. We have invented glasses and hearing aids and prosthetic limbs, antibiotics can cure infection. Prior to the advent of modern medicine, one of the largest killers was being born; a major threat to both mother and infant. For these reasons and many more, access to quality medical care is a extremely significant factor in the ability to stay healthy. However, like with the common cold, the vast majority of medical interventions deal with treating symptoms, not with curing the disease itself. They make the patient feel more comfortable, while not making them any healthier. With limited exceptions, modern (or traditional) medicine can't do better than the 5 billion years of evolution (or God, if you prefer) that created our bodies.

Many (non-infectious) diseases have a large genetic component. Some are entirely genetic. Some are caused or exacerbated by fetal or early childhood environmental conditions. Obviously we, as individuals, have no control over that (and as a society, unless eugenics ever becomes politically feasible, we have no control on any level).
However most of the common ones - heart disease, stroke, diabetes, asthma, and most forms of cancer - are determined primarily by individual choices.

One of the largest factors that determines how quickly a person recovers from a broken bone or a deep cut is age. But overall health is a significant factor as well. In addition, the stronger and more flexible a person is - at any age - the less likely they are to suffer injury in the first place.

Obviously longevity can not be definitively determined in advance. It is, none-the-less still a measure of how healthy you were.

Some people say that they would rather have shorter lives of full enjoyment rather than long lives on dialysis, but in reality, the people who die young have the same health problems as people who die old - they just have them sooner.

Significant caloric restriction is the one and only thing that has been scientifically proven to extend life span (by as much as 40%!). Good news for anyone trying to lose excess body fat, but a problem for athletes eating more in an attempt to gain muscle.

*Fitness is a component of health. But the word has become just as abstract as the term "health" itself. What is fit? How do you determine who is and who isn't? Well, to start with, consider the word itself. In any other context, it is meaningless without context. Something can be fit for a particular purpose. A compact car is fit for commuting. An SUV is fit for traveling off-road. It would make no sense to ask "is this car fit?" without knowing what task you have in mind for it.
In the same manner: who is more fit: a power-lifter who can bench-press 400lbs, an ultra-marathoner who can run 52 miles in one day, a gymnast who can do a double back layout, or a sprinter who can run a 100meters in 10 seconds?

It's a silly question. What would be more telling would be to ask whether the sprinter would be better at lifting weight than the power-lifter is at running; vice-versa and etc.

But what ultimately matters is what a person can actually do in real life. Outside of competitive sports, there is no reward for extreme specialization. The reality is day to day tasks require strength AND stamina AND flexibility AND agility AND balance. Emergency situations even more so.
Going back to the question of "fit for what", the answer is: "fit for real life. Fit for emergencies. Fit for everything."

Getting "in-shape" isn't about one's shape (or at least it shouldn't be). It shouldn't be about appearance or even what your doctor says you should do. It is about quality of life. Fitness can't be measured just in terms of mile times and weight lifting totals, nor in terms of fat percentage or aerobic capacity. All of those things are related, all of them are factors, but it comes down to a question of: what can you do?

Not everyone needs to be an athlete. Fitness is a quality of life issue. A person should be able to carry a big bag of groceries in each hand and walk home from the store. You should be able to sprint two blocks for the bus when you see it pulling up to your stop. To carry a baby around all day. To walk up 17 flights of stairs when the elevator is out. Open a jar that's stuck on really tight, move the furniture around, climb a fence. Join in on a random game of pick-up soccer with your friends at the park. Fitness is being able to land on your feet if you fall off a shaky ladder, or the agility to dodge out of the way when you're crossing the street and a drunk driver runs the red light. Fitness can mean the difference between escape/fighting back and being a victim. Fitness can mean the difference between saving lives in an emergency, or being one of the people who needs saving.

As those examples demonstrate, fitness itself needs to be broken down into just as many separate categories as the term "health" to be meaningful:

-Strength (of ALL of the major and minor muscle groups, including stabilizers)

-Aerobic capacity

-Endurance
-Flexibility
-Agility, Coordination and Balance

Being fit means having ALL of them. Having a lot of one does not imply having the others. Which means it is very possible to have a power-lifter, ultra-marathoner, or sprinter who isn't really "fit" in the general sense of the word. A great many exercises - including many that are very common - won't improve general fitness. Some don't improve any area of fitness at all.

The thing to look for is well rounded forms of exercise. The key word is "functional". Gym machines and exercise classes tend not to simulate anything you would ever do in the real world. In fact, most gym machines, developed with body-building in mind (which is mostly about looking strong, not actually being strong) deliberately isolate body parts.

The following chart has an absolutely excellent set of strength tests that correlate directly to being able to move around and do things in the real world, and it scales to anyone because the levels are in terms of your own strength-to-weight ratio, not some arbitrarily static number of pounds to lift:

http://www.crossfitnorthatlanta.com/total-capacity-levels/

http://www.crossfitseattle.com/Skill%20Levels%20poster.pdf

Unless you plan to compete in the Olympics, there is really no point in trying to get to 'level 4'. Even level 3 will be out of reach of all but the most dedicated athletes. However, everyone should be able to do the items in level one, just as a minimum level of fitness. Below that will affect quality of life in ways which a person may get used to and notice, but will be significant none-the-less. Once a baseline of fitness is established (if you can accomplish some things on level 1 but not others, focus on improving the weak points before moving on) striving for level 2 is a reasonable goal.

Crossfit is a chain commercial gym (or class within established gyms) which better exemplifies the concept of functional exercise than any other system (not counting their many copy-cats). If you were planning to join a gym anyway, it's what I would recommend. However, you don't have to spend any money to get fit. They have many great resources online (including in-depth essays on the principals of fitness, daily suggestions for exercises, and YouTube videos which show exactly how to do each exercise.) I personally like their style. Whatever you do, the important things are that it includes both aerobic and strength training, and that it vary at different times in order to activate different muscle groups. Stay away from all weight or aerobic machines which artificially constrain you to a fixed range of motion. Focus on exercises which use multiple different body parts at once. Especially if you are just starting out, calisthenics will provide plenty enough resistance without investing in any equipment. Push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, dips, squats, handstand push-ups, lunges, burpees... with zero investment in equipment, classes, or memberships, it is entirely possible to gain well rounded fitness that will improve health and allow you to do more activities in daily life with ease - all from the comfort of your own home. That truth right there eliminates a whole lot of excuses. You just have to do it! I can't make you do it.

There is lots of information online about number of repetitions, sets, ways to make exercises easier or harder (scaling), recovery time, etc. In particular, look up "Tabata", a technique for getting some intense exercise in just 4 minutes. You can do any exercise tabata style. You can get a free tabata timer online:

http://www.beach-fitness.com/tabata/

Truth is, it doesn't matter which theory you end up using, as much as that you actually do it, and do it consistently. Whatever exercise, what ever style you go with, do it intensely and be consistent!

Don't injure yourself working out - if the point is improving fitness and health, injuring yourself by over-training is totally counter-productive. Being competitive can be a great motivator for many people, but it also tends to encourage over-training.

If it is comfortable, you aren't doing it right. If, immediately after you finish an exercise, you can still do more, you weren't doing it right.

Most people - especially those who are sedentary - would be surprised to find out just how much exercise is recommended, not for athletes, but for regular everyday people, just to maintain minimum levels of general health and fitness. Not for competing, not for losing weight*, just to be an ordinary healthy person. The CDC recommends a MINIMUM of 75 minutes per week of intense aerobic exercise, in addition to regular strength exercise. They go on to say that what would be better is 150 minutes of vigorous exercise in addition to strength training. This breaks down to 20 minutes a day, 7 days a week (or 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week), of running, swimming, basketball, etc, plus weight-lifting and/or calisthenics a few days per week, for at least as much time. I say that this should be the minimum everyone demands for themselves.
Every single day?
Yep.
Like, not just until I lose 5 lbs or can run a 5 minute mile, but, forever?
Like clock work.
(I mean, you do brush your teeth every day, right?)
Really, it's not that bad. Think of it as preventative health care.

That volume is to maintain health. If a person is trying to get stronger, or faster, or lose weight*, or whatever, that amount needs to be increased even more.

We want it to be something we do every now and then, when we feel like it, when we "have time". It doesn't work that way.

The truth is, everyone, no matter how busy, has time. 30 minutes a day really isn't that much. Even if a person has a full-time job, is a student, and has a long commute, there are three 10-minute slots of free time somewhere in a day, currently filled by TV or internet or getting ready a little slow or waiting for something or someone. Spend 15 minutes eating on a lunch break, and it leaves 30 minutes for a little exercise. Riding a bike to work or running to the bus instead of walking combines commute time with work-out time.

It comes down to priorities. There are many things we do to take care of ourselves every single day. We don't just skip eating because we don't have time. We use the bathroom every day, no matter how busy we are. We sleep everyday. It is the priority. The other things in life get scheduled around it. We brush our teeth every single day, not because all our teeth will fall out over night if we don't, but because we care about the long term health of our teeth. We make time for it. The health of our bodies shouldn't be any different. If we decide that we are going to exercise 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week, then other things in life have to work around that, and that's just it. Friends come to visit, parents call, boss wants you to work late? You wouldn't skip meals or sleep for them. Don't skip exercise either. Other things can wait.

Total time spent is really important. It can't be substituted for. Doing one really intense hour on the weekend simply isn't enough to provide tangible benefits.
But simply spending enough hours isn't enough either.
Those 75-150 minutes of cardio and 45-90 minutes of weight-lifting or calisthenics exercises per week need to be intense.
A lot of what passes for exercise isn't challenging enough to stimulate improvement in the body.

As the great Hunter Thompson said, if a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing right. No where is that more true than fitness. If you don't put forth the full effort, you won't really improve. And in that case, what really is the point? You end up sweaty and tired, with nothing to show for it.

The potential benefits, not just to fitness, but to overall health, in just about every component, are outstanding! It extends from there to the ease of completing everyday tasks, like the list I had above, which improves overall quality of life. It makes a person feel better about themselves, increases the feeling of well-being in general. It has, for example, a direct, measurable effect on depression - not far behind prescription drugs for effectiveness (and with lots of positive side-effects). And if getting sick less often, being able to do more things, reducing risk of disease, recovering from injury faster, living longer, and feeling happier all weren't enough, as an added bonus it even makes a person look better too.
That's a lot of benefit.

Fortunately, it requires less sacrifice than it may seem like at first. The two main reasons people who acknowledge the benefits don't exercise enough anyway is 1) how unpleasant it is, and 2) lack of time. Time I addressed already. There is always time; the only issue is what one chooses to prioritize. The perception of unpleasantness has some basis in the physical feeling of being exhausted and sweaty and sore, but much of it comes from the sort of exercise that dominates popular culture because they are what make commercial gyms the most money.

A lot of why people burn out on exercising and give it up is because these activities are terribly boring, and on top of that they fail to produce significant results. Fortunately those exercises - repetitively moving weight machines' handles back and forth or going for miles on a treadmill or exercise bike - aren't really productive from a perspective of comprehensive fitness. In fact, even just in terms of burning calories to support weight* loss, they are not a very productive use of exercise time. Good, well balanced, comprehensive exercise tends to be much more complex (and interesting). It should actually be fun. Things like sports or martial arts, rock climbing or CrossFit. For some people, especially if they get endorphin induced "runners high", can zone out and enjoy running. Some people get into cycling for the new scenery or the camaraderie. Whatever it is, it should be something a person looks forward to, not dreads.

Another reason for the sense of unpleasantness is that modern American's, through money and technology, have the option to totally eliminate discomfort from life, and as a generation that has grown up with this option, we feel we should be comfortable at all times. We can get through life rarely if ever feeling too hot, too cold, hungry, thirsty, or tired.

I personally never really noticed how accustomed I am to the luxury of being comfortable until I spent 2 months at military bootcamp. I learned that it is actually quite tolerable to be uncomfortable. You stand in formation in full uniform in 95 degree heat. You stand there, perfectly still, while it is pouring rain and just over 40 degrees with wind chill. You stand and experience mosquito and gnats land on your face, take their meals, and fly off, without swatting at them. At bootcamp when you are hungry, too bad, it isn't meal time. And you deal with it. If it is time designated for running, or swimming, or whatever, it doesn't matter if you feel tired, you just do it. What you feel is irrelevant. And to people who have always had the ability to feel comfort, it may sound like pure hell, but the reality is that it is very easy. It is uncomfortable, to be sure. But it is temporary. It doesn't kill you.

And in the end, when you felt like you might throw-up or pass-out and you just kept pushing anyway, a little bit faster, a little bit farther, and in the end you don't collapse, you make it, you have an unparalleled feeling of accomplishment. It makes the idea of "willpower", of "mind over matter", into a real life thing. It means YOU have control over your life, over what you do, not the whims of your feelings.

I recently read a statistic that said that only 7% of people who attempt to stop smoking actually last a full year smoke-free before relapsing. That says something about our will power. But what was more interesting is that of those who do successfully quit, 80-90% of them quit 'cold turkey'. Quitting cold turkey is more effective than all other methods combined. No drugs. No replacement nicotine in the form of gum or patches or vaporizers. No gradual tapering down to fewer cigarettes over time. The physical withdrawal symptoms are very real, tangible, not only uncomfortable, but with measurable effects on the body. All of the various methods are designed to lessen those withdrawal symptoms as much as possible, to make a difficult process more tolerable. And yet, the people who experience the most intense withdrawal of all are also the people most likely to get through it. Instead of trying to feel comfortable, they acknowledge from the outset that it is going to be hard. They just jump right in and do it. They feel like shit, and they keep doing it anyway, and they come out the other end victorious. It isn't even about willpower, per say. Its about mindset.

The same thing applies to every area of life where modern life makes excess more easily available than it has been ever before in human history, whether it's choosing not to take something to easy cold symptoms, exercise, dieting, or impulse shopping.

Never before in history have humans needed to go out of their way to exercise. In the past exercise would be in the form of getting from place to place (even the bicycle is a recent invention), gathering and chopping firewood, digging and plowing and harvesting in the garden, pumping or carrying water, hunting... today we have machines to walk for us, to do manual labor for us, we have computers and internet that allow us to potentially never leave our rooms - at all! Heck, I'm on a computer right now! We even have remote controls so we don't have to walk all the way across the room to change the channel when we're sitting passively watching TV. We have headsets so we don't have to reach all the way into our pockets to retrieve a ringing phone, and then have to hold a heavy cell phone to our heads. We have power steering so that, even when we already have a car doing our running for us, we don't have to make the effort of turning the steering wheel. We have machines to wash our dishes, our clothes, our cars, and even robots to vacuum the floor. What isn't fully automated, if we can afford it, we hire someone else to do. At the hardware store the other day I found about 200 devices designed to make it easier to open a tight jar. Our technology has made us extremely lazy.

But it is what it is, and we are where we are. The only question is if that is what you want for yourself. Since most of us aren't going to abandon the city and become Luddite farmers, we have to take the time to make sure we get exercise. And if we are going to do that, we may as well do it smart.

The best way to tell, over a long period of time, whether what you've been doing is really helping, is to keep records. Push ups and sit ups in a minute, mile times, weight* and measurements (you need to take measurements to determine fat percentage - weight alone is meaningless because muscle weighs more than fat), maximum press and bench and deadlift and clean weights, even things like medical complaints or overall outlook on life. Taken over a long period of time, looking back at old notes and seeing the trend of improvement can be a major motivator to continue.

In the short term there are simple benchmarks: for strength exercises, you should be at least a little sore the next day. If you aren't at all, you weren't really working out. You were just doing repetitive movements and killing time. For aerobics the feedback is even more immediate: you should be sweaty and out of breath. If you can hold down a conversation, you aren't working hard enough.

A few very common things which really don't count as exercise:

-walking
-yoga
-lifting weights so light that you can easily do 15 or more reps without rest
-anything which is supposed to encourage "tone, not bulk"
-treadmill, elliptical, or stationary bike at a low resistance or low speed

-cruising around on a bicycle on flat roads, coasting half the time

This isn't to say these activities have no value at all. Burning some calories is better than none at all, and yoga has significant benefits to flexibility (and for many people for stress reduction). But they aren't exercise. You could do them for 5 hours a day and you won't increase your aerobic capacity or get any stronger. You would burn a few calories, but less than you would from doing a more intense activity for a smaller amount of time. And there are only so many hours in the day.

An efficient exercise gets you as tired as possible in your limited work out time. It activates major muscle groups, core stabilizer muscles, and the cardio-pulmonary systems all at once.
A short list of examples of real exercise, (along with the calories they burn in an hour of continuous activity):

running upstairs/hill (1000)
running (600-1000 depending on speed)
rock climbing (650)
jump rope (600)
burpees (550)
boxing / martial arts (400-600)
elliptical/stationary (400-600 on high resistance, at high speed)
mountain biking (500 cross-country)
rowing (500 roughly 2min/500m rate, level 5/med)
aerobics (450-500 depending on the class)
jogging (430)
moving furniture (400)
swimming (370)
yoga (300)
sex (300)
skating (300)
bicycling (250 road, flat-lands, non-racing)

weight lifting (150-350 depending on weight)

stationary machine (100-200 at low to moderate intensity)

All of the calorie burn levels vary by weight and gender and fitness level, but the relative values stay the same. Plus, more intense activities tend to raise metabolism for longer and longer times after the activity is over (up to several days!) so that the net totals are even higher.

Muscle burns calories even when at rest, so having a higher percentage of muscle means your overall calorie use rate goes up permanently. For this reason lifting weights (or doing push-ups and the like) considered over the long-term belongs much further up the list.

Rather unfortunate, then, that so many people spend their time on stationary gym aerobic machines at low to moderate intensity for the specific purpose of burning calories. For gaining aerobic capacity, improving overall fitness, or losing weight*, stay near the top of the list (or find other activities which are as much work, like a game of soccer, being a forest fire fighter, or military bootcamp). Again, this is not to say that low intensity exercises don't have value. But don't expect to get results by taking the easy route. And then again, it is perfectly possible to make the activities lower on the list intense... its just that it is very easy to do them less than all out, to coast on the bicycle, to swim at a relaxed pace, while running up hill or doing burpees is inherently challenging, even if you try to do them slowly.

Spend some time doing the highest intensity exercises for 30 minutes without resting, to get a feel for what real exercise feels like.

(NOTE: if you are over 40, have been totally sedentary for years, or have medical issues, you may want to consult a doctor, or at least a personal trainer, first)

Once you know how it should feel, you can substitute pretty much any activity, so long as you do it at a level that is equally as difficult. And it is ok to occasionally do low impact work as well. Just keep in mind that if an exercise is 1/4th the intensity, you have to do it more than 4 times as long to get the same benefit.

Sometimes, though, it makes more sense to do moderate intensity exercises. Say you are going for a hike anyway, or doing some gardening or running around with small children. All movement and everything active counts. Its just that it only counts for half as much time toward the total. If you have an active enough life, such that you spend an hour a day or more doing moderately intense activities (you can have a conversation, but not sing) you can get away with only doing more intense exercise a couple days a week (along with the strength building exercise a few days a week).

If your goal is to not just maintain health but to increase athletic performance and/or lose weight*, than total time and intensity level become even more important. Increase the minimum at least 50%, AND make all the work intense.

***There was originally a sub-section here on managing excess fat. Because it is such a complex subject, and so relevant to the health of most Americans today, it quickly grew too long to just be a sub-section. So, it has been removed from this essay all together, and will be posted separately as part 2

Nutrition is touched on briefly in part 2, because it is especially important for anyone deliberately limiting food intake to pay attention to nutrient density and making sure to get enough of what the body really needs. But everyone needs to eat! It seems the only people who really pay attention to nutrients are dieters, athletes, and those obsessed with health. The latter group, in particular, often seems to think that what one eats is the only thing that determines health, which is just plain silly (hopefully I have demonstrated that by now).

Maybe it is another symptom of our easy answers culture. If health is just a question of eating the right superfoods, we make sure to eat some of it each day, and blam, instant health!

Sometimes it seems that there isn't much room for middle ground - either someone is obsessed with nutrition, or else they don't give it a second thought. Which is unfortunate, because its really important, and its also really simple.

Until relatively recently, most foods which exist in the world weren't available in most places. For most of human history cultures have survived on a small variety of local staples, and for the most part they lived perfectly healthy lives. No one food can possibly be vital if people in most places for most of time have got along just fine without it.

Each time some new food fad comes out, this anthropological fact gets forgotten, as every health conscious person scrambles to buy acai / coconut oil / algae / quinoa / goji / soy / bee pollen / pomegranate / and of-course (though we all know its mostly a convenient excuse) wine and dark chocolate. All of these things are local to a specific region. Until a few years ago, they were simply unavailable in most of the world.

Not to mention a plethora of vitamins, oils, and herbs which are partially the all natural equivalent to the pharmaceutical industry making pills to block symptoms instead of addressing causes, and are partially nothing more than marketing by the companies that make them.

There are some things marketed as health food which have no effect on us at all. A perfect example is enzymes. We do not need to eat enzymes. The body produces its own enzymes. In fact, enzymes which are ingested get broken down by the stomach anyway, so the only function they can possibly have is digesting some food in the stomach before they are destroyed. The only time this is useful is if a person is eating something they have no natural enzymes for; most commonly lactose pills for those who can not digest dairy. Another solution, of course, would be to simply avoid eating dairy.

True, eating vegetables and plants and (low mercury) fish and whole grains - instead of food filled with sugar and butter and mammal meat - will have an enormous impact on just about all measures of health, from disease resistance to fat percentage. But there is no particular magic bean that can do something no other food can do. As long as a diet is well balanced, and contains more food that are dense in nutrients than foods that are dense in calories, a person will get proper nutrition. With limited exceptions, if you need to take anything in pill form, that's a sure sign you aren't eating the right foods.

It is possible for an adult human to stay alive for years on nothing but glucose drippings. It would not be an ideal life, nor would it be healthy by any definition of the word, but it demonstrates that we will not simply drop dead from a few days without any specific nutrient. People have gone on fasts for various health, religious, and political reasons throughout history with no ill effects if done for a moderate amount of time. The human body evolved in a world where no one food source was ever guarenteed, and so, at least to some extent, it evolved the ability to ration. Over the long-run it is important to get all of the vital nutrients. Getting each and every one in every meal is not.

There was a time when nutrition deficits were a genuine threat. Before the days of refrigeration sailors on long sea voyages would get scurvy, from a lack of vitamin C in the diet, because they would eat no fruits at all for months at a time. A severe lack of vitamin D, especially in childhood, will cause rickets. A lack of iron causes anemia and lack of iodine causes goiters. Not having enough B3 in the diet leads to pellegra. Chances are you have never heard of pellegra. This just goes to show how small the threat of malnutrition actually is in this country, even though we have the worst diets in the world.

(American's eat more fast food per capita than any other country)

What we lack in nutritional density we make up for by eating more food total. As long as a diet is at least reasonably balanced we eventually get the nutrients the body needs - it just takes more calories to get there. The body keeps feeling hungry until it's nutritional needs are met, whether it has enough calories or not. The reason for eating nutrient dense food is not that we will be malnourished without it, but rather that we can meet our needs with fewer excess calories.

What those nutritional needs are has been known for a long time by nutrition science, but is still often misunderstood by lay people.
We need two essential macro-nutrients: Protein and fat.

(Carbohydrates are also a macro-nutrient, but there is no essential minimum intake)

We need 13 vitamins: A, B (8 kinds), C, D, E and K. But we only need a tiny amount of each. Ingesting more than the required amount usually won't do much harm (although too much of some can be toxic); but having more than the tiny amount present in a healthy diet doesn't do any good either.

We also need 13 trace minerals, primarily potassium, chlorine, sodium, calcium, phosphorus, and magnesium (in that order). The other 7 we need only in tiny amounts. (4 others, in even smaller amounts, may have some function)

Most of us actually get more of many nutrients than we actually need. The excess just gets filtered out by the kidneys in the case of vitamins and minerals (leading to the quote by a nutrition doctor about American's having "the most expensive pee in the world") or stored as fat in the case of fats and proteins.

Protein, in particular, gets a lot of attention as an essential nutrient, especially by athletes and vegetarians. Its certainly true that we need a certain amount of protein daily. What fewer people know is that American's actually consume far too much protein, at a level which is actually mildly toxic. A full grown adult only needs 60 - 120 grams of protein a day (depending on age, size, and activity level, with the high end only applying to hardcore athletes). There is protein in almost every food, not just the meat and soybeans that immediately come to mind.

If over the course of the day you eat one pancake, a cup of fruit, half a cup of yogurt, two pieces of bread, a 1 ounce slice of cheese, a slice of avocado, a small vegetable salad with no toppings, a cup of pasta, a cup of vegetables, and a baked potato, you have had about 65 grams of protein, already more than enough for most people.

That's without eating a single so-called "protein" source!!
Unless you are vegan, pregnant, a bodybuilder, or anemic, there is never any need to make a point of eating a "high-protein" food with every meal, or even every day.

There are different amino acids (the building blocks of protein) which the human body needs, and which not all plant proteins have. However, unless one eats literally just one type of food, the American diet is varied enough to cover it without making a point of it.

Getting enough of each amino acid is as easy as eating rice with one’s beans, so even for vegans who eat no processed food, it requires only minimal thought and effort.

I personally am vegetarian. To be honest, this is more out of habit than anything else. There are a lot of very important environmental and ethical reasons I could argue for vegetarianism, but this specific essay is about health. There isn't really any health reason to eliminate all meat from the diet. However, the volume American's eat most certainly is unhealthy. Its inclusion in the diet should be limited, sort of like this:

http://www.drlam.com/pictures/pyramid/pyramid_web.gif

(Please note that no diet will keep you from aging. Only a time machine, cryogenics, or some sort of freeze ray can do that. The only thing which has been shown to increase longevity is calorie restriction. Also, as covered previously, a healthy diet should not need supplements.)

or this:

As this pyramid notes, the foods highest in nutrients just happen to be those lowest in calories. Another thing to notice is that it is almost the exact inverse of the typical American diet! Then we make up for it with vitamins and supplements. Or, we make up for it by eating a whole bunch, because even with junk food, once you eat enough of it, you get your nutritional needs met. Eating food which is low in nutrients (even if it is low-calorie "diet" food) mean you need to eat more to get the minimum intake of vitamins and minerals.

Just to show how futile it is to try to find the “perfect” diet, consider the existence of anti-nutrients. These are (naturally occurring!) compounds which destroy or draw needed nutrients such as minerals or proteins out of the body. They are found in otherwise healthy foods. Some, such as bio-flavanoids (the active ingredient of green tea, dark chocolate, and wine, with supposedly magic health powers), have been shown in some studies to prevent cancer… and in others they have been implicated in potentially causing it! Certain vegetables known to be high in calcium may drag more calcium out of the body than they add to it. And yet, despite the contradictory nature of food, people are able to be healthy.

The overall point is that there is no need to stress over the details of nutrition.

Common knowledge covers it. If a person eats a varied diet, based primarily on vegetables, fruit, seeds/nuts and grain, (whether eaten straight or cooked / processed into something) with occasional (not necessarily daily) animal products, one will get their basic nutritional needs met. If a diet has regular hamburgers, pizza, ice cream, comes from fast food restaurants or the snack food section of a convenience store, it will either have to few nutrients, too many calories, or both.

Eating junk food (whether home made or purchased) once or twice every few months won’t do any particular harm. We all know the consequences of eating it more often than that. No one needs some blogger to write a section on nutrition to go into the details.

So that’s about it.

Nothing revolutionary:

Get enough sleep.
Exercise a lot more. For most of us, a whole lot more.
(For a few - those who workout so much as to cause occasional injury - a little less. You know who you are.)
Eat lots of healthy food, and minimize unhealthy food.
Don’t smoke, and avoid most or all alcohol and drugs.
Avoid stress.

Start young, while you are still healthy, because it is MUCH easier to maintain than it is to rebuild!

Skip the 1001 gimmicks that promise to instantly transform your body using the “latest secret” in diet / exercise machine / magnetic massage stress relief…

(seriously, I just saw that in a catalog!)

and the pills and supplements and anti-oxidant drinks.

Use the money saved to invest in a tax-advantaged health savings account in case universal health insurance never does go through and you lose your commercial coverage someday.

Get regular doctor (and dentist) check-ups, just to make sure you don’t have something going on inside that you can’t see or feel.

But if you follow the advice above, the chances are much better that there will be nothing much for your doctor to find.

For many people some of this may seem like an overwhelmingly big step.

If you choose to ignore everything you just read, you’ll get no disrespect from me.

To each their own.

My recommendation is to try it, just for one month. Eat right, go to sleep early, and exercise, 7 days a week, for 4 weeks. If you don’t feel better, physically and emotionally, by the end, write or call or add a comment to my blog to tell me I am an idiot. I may even take you out to the junk food place of your choice (offer limited to people I actually know – also, you have to have actually done it for 28 consecutive days).

Ultimately, no matter what restrictions genes, luck, and age have put onto you, much of your health is in your own control.

Like saving money for retirement, healthy choices is an investment in your future happiness.

Do what makes you happy, but choose wisely.

Be healthy, my friend.

DeepWater Horizon

2010-05-05T09:42:00.001-07:00

As you may have heard, an oil rig has exploded off the Southern Coast of the US, causing a spill almost certain to be the worst in human history, with a potentially devastating impact on the local environment and everything that lives in it (which would be everyone that is alive).

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100502/ap_on_bi_ge/us_gulf_oil_spill

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_drilling_rig_explosion

In the news, and in political emails, and among people's conversations, there is talk about what BP did wrong, how they might have prevented it, whether the government response was quick enough, how consumers should react....

But the truth; which almost no one wants to admit is:

This is OUR fault.
If you drive a car, ever, for any reason, you are personally responsible for the spill.

If you don't own a car, but sometimes you borrow one, or get a ride with a friend, or take the bus, or take a long-distance train, if you fly or travel by ship, that oil was being drilled for you.
If you are a hard-core oil abstainer, never travel long distances, do all short trips by bicycle, nearly everything you buy, food, clothes, books, paper, your bicycle, the computer you are reading this on right now, was both produced and transported with the help of oil.

We don't get to blame oil corporations, or government, or BP executives, and the capitalist economy. It is US. All of us.
Instead of writing angry letters or boycotting a particular company, how about taking this opportunity to use a little less oil yourself. However much that is, make at least a little change, and use a little less.

Buy something used which you would normally have bought new.
Ride public transit, a bicycle, or walk, when you don't have that far to go.
When you do drive, drive a little slower.
And stop accelerating toward red lights - it won't get you where you are going any faster anyway.

Awareness of white privilege VS actually working to change it

2010-04-28T13:32:00.000-07:00

A couple friends of mine are taking a class on being a "white ally" - race awareness and relations, power and privileged, and counteracting racism.

One of them mentioned to me some critical feedback she had offered and it got me to thinking in more detail what has always bothered me about those sort of discussions, but up until now never quite pinned down.

The following is not a commentary on that class in particular, as I know essentially nothing about it, but rather a critique of a few general ideas I have heard and read on the topic in the past:

1 There is no such thing as "people of color"
-The impact of past racism (including slavery) and present racism does not effect all races equally, nor all in the same way.
- A black american and a white american likely have more in common with each other than with a fresh-off-the-boat Vietnamese person. A white american whose family has been in the US for generations likely has more culture in common with a black american than with a first generation eastern european immigrant with whom they share skin color.
-The very term "people of color" encourages white people to think in terms of a false dichotomy of 'us' (all white people) and 'them' (everyone else). It not only homogenizes all other races, it also makes everyone not white into an "other".
-Lumping all non-white cultures into one category, while giving white an entire separate category in itself suggests a type of superiority.
-This dichotomy also discounts the existence of mixed race individuals (officially 2% of US society, but really much higher - most surveys, as well as society, force people to choose one identity, even if they are in fact mixed)

2 Historical racism is the single largest cause for modern black poverty, and poverty does generally correlate with crime. However no historical or sociological factors can excuse individual behavior. No matter what circumstances a person is born into, they have a choice about their own behavior. Apologizing for, ignoring, discounting, or explaining away black crime rates, drug rates, or general anti-social behavior (e.g. boombox on a crowded train) does nothing to increase equality, and does not bring less conscious white people about as allies.

3 Discrimination is explicitly illegal. Talking about "institutionalized" or "systemic" racism does not address the issues which are most relevant today. While there are still white supremacists in the US, their view has become as unacceptable in mainstream society as it once was only among civil-rights activists. The president of the US is 1/2 African. This does not mean that the conversation about race is over. However, it does mean it is time to change that conversation.

For example, talking about power hierarchies is mostly nonsensical today. If racism = racism + power (as is often claimed by race activists), this does not imply that only whites can be racist, because whites do not have any particular power over other races. There are minorities in the role of police officer, judge, congress person, boss, professor, etc. as well as whites in poverty, in jail, or otherwise powerless. If you ignore all individual circumstances and look only at the whole society, then no one can be racist, because society is no one person.

4 Rarely is it explicitly acknowledged how much - and in what way - individuals (primarily, but not exclusively, white) continue to benefit from past racism. This nation was taken by force from the American Indian, built largely by African slaves (as well as Asian indentured servants) and thanks largely to not only racism, but also inheritance and locally funded education, past disparities directly result in present disparities. Even if one's own ancestors never killed Indians or owned slaves, the mere fact of living in this country means you personally benefit from those who did.

5 Not all non-white people are poor. Not all white people are middle class or wealthy. Class and race are not interchangeable. To speak about them as if they were interchangeable represents a stereotype - it implies a universal truth based on a statistic. The implication itself is racist.

Replacing discussions of poverty, economics, and class with discussions of race is a tool those with power (white, yes, but a special subset of white people - wealthy conservatives) use to polarize the working class. They emphasize criminals and welfare recipients (read: blacks) or immigrants (read: hispanics) and leave unspoken as a given the unity between white Americans of different classes. This helps prevent what should be a natural alliance of the lower class against those who exploit them.

6 What keeps the racial status quo in our society is not a social issue, but rather an economic one.
What too few people talk about is the way in which the condition of one generation affects the next.
After slavery blacks were supposed to get land. This was not a hand-out, but merely a way to compensate, to allow them to begin to catch up. This never happened.
Since poverty is inherited just as surely as wealth, the only way to level the playing field short of paying reparations (with 145 years interest) today would be a strict inheritance tax on not only the wealthy, but the middle class. This would include not only cash, but things such as houses and family businesses.

The single largest factor in predicting an individuals success in life is their education. Pre-school is the best indicator of how well a child does in school. It will be impossible to ever have a equal society without universal, mandatory, publicly financed pre-school. Schools in America are funded 50% or more by local taxes. This system guarantees that schools in poor areas are underfunded and schools in wealthy areas have better resources and an easier time keeping good teachers. Locally funded public schools is an amazingly effective method of retaining the status quo, while appearing on the surface to be neutral and fair. To counteract generations of inherited poverty, ignorance, and a cultural mindset of being separate from society, America should be offering fully funded college for all low-income high-school graduates. And because poverty and ignorance are inherited no matter one's color, this should be extended to anyone who can't afford it.

Racism, in the sense of individual people with power holding stereotypes about a race and acting on that prejudice against individual members of said race, is a relatively small factor in modern America. Formally institutionalized racism is a thing of the past.
Were all of society, at all levels, to suddenly become "color blind", the trends set in motion hundreds of years ago would continue none-the-less. For this reason educating individuals about the existence of "white privilege" can not do much to change anything. If energy is going to be invested into change, it should be invested where it will do the most good.

Its one thing to be aware of culturally insensitive language. It is another all together to recognize that the economic system we take for granted perpetuates the impact of slavery, and that no matter how aware one is in their personal relationships, you directly benefit from the current system - and then work to change that system, even if it means undermining your own economic advantages.

This would mean advocating significant increases in middle class taxes, to fund more social programs. This would mean taking the time to counter the "tea-party" people, pointing out that true justice demands a redistribution of wealth. It would mean protesting to get colleges fees raised, in order to pay for scholarships. This would mean, instead of donating money / time / materials to your own children's school, donating that same time and money to the poorer district a few miles away.

Me personally, I have been called ni**er on more than one occasion. But (not counting by other black people who use it casually - that is whole different topic) it has been in each case by a meth addict (one disowned by her family, and the other evicted from a trailer park). These are people with no power, no influence. These are people so low on the social strata, all they have left to feel even mildly good about themselves is to find someone to hate, for any reason they can. As much as it roils the blood to hear it, they are harmless. The people and ideas that maintain the status quo - including associations of particular races with poverty, drug use, crime, etc - are not overtly racist; in fact, in most cases not even necessarily sub-consciously racist. Racism set up the status quo, but economics is what maintains it. Capitalism, the free market, individualism, and the republic system of government (as opposed to true democracy) all play a part in maintaining the present as it was in the past. If we want a just society, those are the things that we need to look at first.

Response to "Turning Hustlers into Entrepreneurs"

2010-04-27T17:10:00.001-07:00

"Turning-Hustlers-into-Entrepreneurs" discusses the possibility of increasing micro-credit in order to support independent "black market" business people. As someone who has been running a successful off-the-books business for several years, I believe the major obstacle is not a lack of credit, but rather a government which is geared toward big business.

As the examples in the article illustrate, people are already doing what they are doing, without capital. What they lack is official legitimacy. Many entrepreneurs, such as myself, would love to "go legit", but it is not a realistic option.
I understand and support the idea that government regulate business to protect consumers. The problem is that government does not take the size of a business into account in the requirements it imposes on operating legally.

For example, a single guy with a pick-up truck doing local deliveries pays the exact same state license fee as a company with a fleet of semi trucks. The least insurance available to him is a million dollars of coverage with a 1-2 thousand dollar annual premium, even if he never comes close to transporting a million dollars worth of goods. Every city he works in requires its own separate business license. If he needs to hire a subcontractor on occasion, he needs to buy worker's comp insurance at a minimum, and possibly more. Being self-employed, he pays an additional tax (which an employer would otherwise cover). And of course by staying underground, he avoids paying any income tax on his business revenue.

All of this can easily add up to thousands of dollars. That sum may be inconsequential to a corporation with annual sales in the millions of dollars, but to a small independent, going legit would cost me about 20% of my entire net revenue, more than two months income.

The solution to this is not to finance small business to help them pay for theses fees - these fees are annual, and taking loans only increases risk. The solution is to have license fees proportional to net revenue, instead of being fixed amounts, requiring insurance companies to offer a full range of coverage options, including (potentially less profitable) low limit policies, and restructuring tax code so there isn't a penalty to being self-employed. Similarly, laws making it difficult or illegal to run certain types of business from home could be relaxed, (for example, allowing small scale retail in otherwise residential districts), eliminating the need for a dedicated store-front, a major on-going expense.

Reducing the government imposed costs of running an independent business legally would , without the additional risk incurred (for both the investor and the entrepreneur) by accepting loans or the costs incurred by providing grants. It would also increase tax revenue, by encouraging existing underground businesses to come above the radar and join the mainstream economy.

Global Warming Revisited

2010-04-26T15:34:00.000-07:00

The following was a "letter to the editor" I submitted to a progressive magazine in response to articles on global warming:

In "American Psychosis" you point to the many people who acknowledge global warming, but do not change much, if anything about their destructive lifestyles, and in "Hot Air" talk about the point of view of skeptics and deniers.

I run a certified green hauling business. I modified my delivery truck to get 30mpg (from 15mpg) and run it on 100% biodiesel made from recycled veggie oil. I also work part time supporting people who bicycle to work (at a business which runs at a loss because our main service is free). I live in a 250square foot home and use less than $5 worth of electricity most months.
I also have some background in science, including degrees in earth science and biology, and generally track down sources for claims I read.

Having read arguments on both sides, I am not convinced that humans are significantly contributing to climate change. While I admit I haven't kept up with the latest research, I have yet to see several points addressed:

1 The climate naturally goes through cycles of extremes. The current climate reflects roughly where it is expected to be. Our methods of determining past temperatures are not precise enough to tell us the rate of change over small periods of time in the past, and so it is difficult to determine if what we see today is abnormal.
2 Geologic data suggests that in past periods of climate change, temperature has always changed first, with CO2 levels changing as a result of temperature change, not the other way around. This does not necessarily indicate it is what is happening this time, but it could account for what we are seeing.
3 Climate predictions are only as good as the models they are built on, which in turn are only as good as the computers that run them. We simply do not have computers powerful enough to accurately model something as complex as the earth's climate. Last I heard, in order to reduce complexity to a manageable level, most models omit details such as water vapor (arguably the single most important variable) all together.
4 Human caused climate change is frequently referred to (particularly in liberal media sources) as having "scientific consensus". According to Pew Research center 86% of scientists concur. While 86% is clearly an overwhelming majority in a democracy, in science 14% is too large a minority to simply ignore.

But here's the thing:
It doesn't make one bit of difference if humans are contributing to global warming or not.
Whether we are causing it or not, its happening (that doesn't take predictions, just measurements - its happening)
Therefor we should prepare for it.
Even more important: independent of global warming, our lifestyles are harming the ecology of our planet. Even if an individual feels no moral reason to care about life other than humanity, it is undeniable that we are totally dependent on the environment for our own survival.

Regardless of climate change, our driving and electricity generation cause air pollution, which in turn causes cancer, asthma, acid rain and many other air quality issues. Drilling for oil and mining for coal (or uranium) causes massive destruction - when things are running as they should - never mind the occasional catastrophic accident. Vehicle manufacture itself takes an enormous amount of raw material (as well as energy) all of which must be mined/refined/transported and which carries an ecological price tag. Auto accidents are the number one killer of all Americans below 40 and remains one of the top causes of death and injury at all ages. Their is evidence that the lack of exercise associated with driving is the number one factor in the obesity epidemic. The fact that we consume far more energy than we can produce domestically puts us at risk, both politically, economically, and militarily.

All of these problems would remain if we switched to electric (or fuel cell) cars. Most would remain even if we discovered cold-fusion or some other unlimited supply of cheap energy.
And of-course all would also remain if humanity decided to combat global warming with a grand geo-engineering project.

The exclusive focus on "human-caused climate change" makes it easy for people to write off environmentalism, because the science is not, in fact, conclusive (as of yet). It also encourages the idea of using technology to "solve" the issue, with potentially unintended consequences. And it completely ignores all of the other real, urgent, indisputable problems that our lifestyle has created.

Whether it turns out humans are accelerating climate change or not, our course of action needs to be the same:
One way or another, the earth will eventually get warmer, and people need to be ready to adapt.
One way or another, the American lifestyle is destructive and unsustainable, and we need desperately to downsize our extravagances: give up the car, stop flying, eat vegetarian / organic / local, cut electricity use, buy less stuff, shop locally (when buying is necessary), waste less water, and live in locales that are naturally hospitable to humans (i.e. not the desert)

We can either focus on gradually changing those things now, voluntarily, or we can ignore them and have them changed for us in the future, in which case the change will be very unpleasant, and likely include violence.
Addressing climate change does little to address any of those issues, and where it does it is only incidental.
While I understand the good intention behind keeping environmental issues on the forefront of everyone's minds, I believe that the single-minded focus on global warming is actually counter-productive - even if it does turn out to be true.

Christmas Lights

2009-12-14T20:22:00.001-08:00

So many people, when the subject of christmas lights come up, they acknowledge they are nice, but go on to add "but they are a waste of energy".

As someone who feels strongly that American's use of energy and resources is morally unacceptable, I would like to be very clear about this:
Christmas lights are NOT a waste of energy.

That 80% of car trips have only the driver or a driver and one passenger, yet seat from 5-7 people is a waste of energy. That we live, on average, 20 miles from our jobs is a waste of energy. Uninsulated attics and unweather stripped doors and windows in houses and power steering and air conditioning in cars, all electric kitchens, and cars that weigh 50% more than they did 20 years ago and have 200% more power are all enormous wastes of energy.
Buying enormous amounts of crap that no one really needs and that get shoved into a closet or thrown out after a few weeks wastes energy in manufacture and transport.

Not one of those things provides any significant increase in quality of life. None of them make people happy to be alive. At most they provide a tiny increase in convince. At worst they do nothing but cost money. None of them create joy.

In a land where profit is considered the only motivating factor for nearly everything in life, filled with people who don't know their neighbors, where 50% of people can't be bothered to take the effort to use their turn signals, for a few weeks a year people do something with no financial benefit, no increase in comfort or convenience, no direct personal benefit.
You don't even see them from inside the house. Everyone else passing by sees them.
They turn an ordinary neighborhood into a magical place.
They create joy.
Which makes them one of the few valid uses of energy in this country.
Because ultimately, making it enjoyable is really the only point there is to life.

So go ahead and enjoy those giant flashy displays and don't for a second feel guilty about it.
Put up your own even.

You can get a strip of LED lights for less than $10 that use less than 5 watts of power, (far less than a single florescent light bulb).
I even found a set for under $5 that runs for days on just (rechargeable) AA batteries.

But LED or no, the lights are worthwhile and good.

A world without christmas lights is not a world worth saving.

The Wine Barrel (population and parenthood)

2009-12-04T17:40:00.001-08:00

The Earth has been around about 5 billion years, life about 4 billion.
Half a billion years for animals, 200 billion for mammals.
200,000 years of humans.
For the first 192,000 years or so, the human population was under 10 million people world wide.
Increasing 10 fold took 6000 more years.
We rocketed from 100 million to a billion in just over 2000 years.
The next billion only took 120 years.
And then 30.
And since the 1950s, we have added a billion people every 13 years or so.

We are at around 6.75 billion people now.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Population_curve.svg

Its estimated that it will hit 9 billion in about another 30 years.
That new 2 and a quarter billion people will be our children.

We like to point to the 3rd world, to Asia and Africa, but in the measure that matters, the US is by far the most overpopulated country in the world, as well as one of the fastest growing.

Population is only an issue because of the finite resources the Earth can provide. If we had unlimited resources there wouldn't be any reason not to keep increasing indefinitely.

If everyone used the same amount of water, land, and energy, and caused the same amount of pollution as the average person in the third world, we would all be ok for a long time to come. Due to lack of ability, what we call poverty, people in the third world tend to use less than their share of world resources.
The average person in the first world uses 5 times more than the overall world average.
The average American uses 20 times more. Each of us uses about 20 times more water, 20 times more fuel and electricity, 20 times as much land to produce our food, produces 20 times more waste and pollution.
Which means that in the big picture, each of us counts for 20 people.

So our 305 million population may as well be 6.1 billion, far more than China's 1.3 billion. They would have to increase some combination of actual population and consumption per person by far before we could legitimately point the finger at them.

It also means that each child we have counts as 20 people, turning our fertility rate of 2.1 (already above the replacement rate of 2) into the equivalent of 42 per woman, 6 times higher than the highest rate of any third world country - and almost 17 times higher than the world average.

In the US alone there are 200,000 children waiting to be adopted.

It is one of the most basic and universal desires is to reproduce. How could it be any other way? Because if that drive weren't passed along genetic lines, our ancestors wouldn't have bothered, and we wouldn't be here to think about it.

There has been a widespread assumption that because it is natural and universal that therefor it should be considered a human right.

Our modern world does not resemble the savanna we evolved on. We also have biological instincts to eat whenever food is available in case it isn't tomorrow - and the result is rampant obesity - and a good number of us making the conscious choice to go against instinct and manipulate ourselves in ways that take into consideration the reality of our world. Violence is natural and universal, but we agree as a society that the costs are not acceptable and make the conscious decision to repress it, both as individuals and as communities.
Because, we can do that, we can think, and make choices.

To make wine or beer, you start with grape juice or grains and add microorganisms.
For them it is an incredible feast! Sugar and carbs as far as the eye can see, no predators, no competition, perfect weather. So of course they have a really good time, girl fungus meets boy fungus, there's plenty to feed the babies and things just couldn't be better. And then after a while they literally die from drowning in their own waste products as the population gets completely out of control.
(And then we drink that waste product, but that's another topic entirely)

Human beings, in theory, are a lot more intelligent than yeast. They don't even have brains. As individuals we can choose not to have children. But as a whole, an outside observer would not see much difference between the species. As a whole, we continue to breed at a rate related only to the resources available today, with little or no regard to how sustainable those resources are.

A great many people - including liberals and environmentalists and those who are childless by choice - become indignant when this topic is brought up. Reproduction is considered by many to be a fundamental (God-given?) right, and suggesting otherwise brings to mind eugenics programs, or the murder of female infants when China first instituted its one-family/one-child program when sons were the only form of social security the society had. Those are not inevitable outcomes.

As a specie all societies choose to discourage some of our natural instincts in such a way that slight personal restrictions result in a far happier society over all. It may be perfectly natural for me to want to punch some annoying person right in the face, but the government isn't going to give me a tax break for doing it.
Just the same, it is only natural that I want to have my own kids, related to me by DNA, but if it is going to end up making life that much more difficult for all of the people who are already here, perhaps a tax penalty is more appropriate than a credit.

Average cost for fertility treatment is $12,000, and 12% of US couples seek it. In about 1/2 the states this is covered by insurance.
Given the 200,000 existing children who need homes, I find this immoral. Think what medical services could be provided to people who are already here with that $4 billion.

Governments could encourage this simply by removing tax breaks for kids.
I don't actually think that is going to happen.

But you and I can still choose on our own to act, even if everyone else isn't likely to fall in line. Its been calculated time and again that simply having a baby has greater impact than all the imported GMO processed food and single-person commutes in SUVs could ever hope to have. From an ecological standpoint, it would be better to drive a hummer and eat at Mickey Ds but adopt your child then to live the hippy lifestyle in a solar powered yurt with a grey-water garden and create 3 brand new babies of your own.

And now we get to the real crux of the matter.
Being aware of this, just how much personal sacrifice are we willing to make? I want the experience of creating a child. I also want to avoid being an amoral hypocrite. (A moral hypercrite? Yes. I aspire to be a hypercrite someday.)
Like most people, I have developed a defensive rationalization to allow me to not feel guilty about doing what I wanted to all along, even though I really know better.

The way I see it, I personally can't be expected to be held responsible for or make up for the excessive consumption of everyone else around me. I couldn't if I wanted to. I personally have a sustainable ecological footprint (i.e. if everyone on the planet used the same level of resources as me, we'd all be set indefinitely). If me and my hypothetical future partner have 2 kids, once we die, overall, the population hasn't gone up. If we have just one, its gone down by one. That seems like a decent compromise to me. I'd like to have one, and adopt one. (As a bonus, I can choose to have one of each gender, and more precisely choose the age spread).

Many people object to ideas around population control as an emotional response to implied guilt about already having children, and feeling defensive about kids that are already here. A potential person has nothing in common with a real human being who is actually here. Acknowledging that resources have a finite rate of renewal is not a personal attack on you. No one is saying your child isn't wonderful or that you made any "wrong" choices. All I am saying is, however many blessings you have, stop now.

Similarly some people in these discussions suggest that if any one who advocates population control should kill themselves if they really mean it. This equates the mere idea of a person, a hypothetical, potential person, with an actual specific person who is here right now, thinking and breathing and feeling. We aren't talking about abortion here. Not having a kid is not killing by any definition. Any discussion about who a person who does not exist might possibly become is equally ridiculous. That kid who could someday be is no more likely to become the next president than it is to be a serial killer who enjoys torturing victims.

Bottom line is, having less children today will be much less painful than wars of dwindling resources some number of decades in the future.

Spoiled: The Economic Downturn, Luxury as Necessity, and "Struggling" in the Modern Economy.

2009-09-26T15:37:00.000-07:00

My original comment was not meant to imply I don't believe that there are tangible effects on people (most notably unemployment, which is certainly up compared to a few years ago).
All I said was that media and politicians largely made it up. I think it is a self-fulfilling prophesy to an extent, where in people hear constant messages that times are tight, therefor they cut back on consumption, therefor retail markets fall, therefor manufacturers cut back, and employers start laying people off. Which fuels the beginning of the cycle even more. This is why business analysts track "consumer confidence". In fact, to a large extent it is what the stock market is all about. Its less a question of how well a company is doing and more one of how popular are they. If people think its doing well, they buy, which itself drives the stock price up. It works both ways, so if everyone is convinced the market is doing bad, they sell so they don't lose too much by waiting, and then companies don't have the capital to invest.

-

I think it is totally unreasonable to adjust what it means to be "poor" based on those around you.
If we did that, billionaires could claim to be poor if those around them are multi billionaires. In fact, everyone except for the single richest person in the world would be "poor".
Clearly there should be some objective standard of poverty.
I think the only reasonable one is the point at which you have a reasonable fear of not being able to provide the basic necessities for oneself and family. Food, shelter, clean water. If you can afford so little food that it affects your health, you can claim to be poor.

It doesn't have to be a "big" car. If you own a car, you aren't poor. Period. Never mind that most people in the world couldn't even afford the up-front purchase price of a car. Much higher than that in the long run is costs for fuel, insurance, parking and tolls, maintenance, tickets...
For hundreds of thousands of years of human existence even the wealthiest people in the world could not buy cars.
Only in the US do people honestly believe that they are a "necessity".
All over the country people claim to be struggling who are paying for cable TV. They eat out and buy $2 cups of coffee. They have cell phones and internet connections. These are things most people and the world can't afford. They are not basic necessities.

Supposedly a person in the bay area needs 3 times the federal poverty level in order to live "comfortably"
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/oct/17/business/fi-wages17
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/10/17/MN0ISQEFP.DTL

They take it for granted that everyone needs a car.
And since when does every 6 year old need her own room?!
In the case of the 2nd article, I have no contempt for the person they profile. She (rightly) considers herself middle class.
(Hopefully, after having been interviewed she doesn't change her own standards).
Now, going into collection, obviously a problem. Thing is, that is another of those uniquely American things: living beyond your means.
The whole recession started because of people deliberately buying beyond their means with interest only loans. The whole idea being, buy something you can't afford and assume that the market will go up enough to cover it. Then, surprise! The people who were living beyond their means defaulted on their loans.
Consider that the size of an average new home has increased 250% over the past half century.

Then banks didn't want to lend. "Credit crunch". Well, again - the solution to a credit crunch? Don't live beyond your means. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-moroz/forget-the-squeeze-the-mi_b_263100.html

Thing is, poor people don't get lines of credit extended to them in the first place. Because they are poor. The people who go to Labor Ready for temp work, the people who live here in the trailer park, they don't get loans for houses or new cars. They don't have credit cards. Most of them don't even have bank accounts. They pay rent with money orders and bring paychecks to check cashing places.

This is poverty: http://www.utne.com/Politics/Squatter-Villages-Tent-Cities-Informal-Urbanism-Economic-Crisis.aspx
And it was around long before the foreclosures on sub-prime loans started piling up.

In my line of work, between my low rates, and my green focus and good reputation, I end up having a huge range in terms of the incomes of my customers (hence the sliding scale idea).
I get students and people on SSI who genuinely can't afford more than me. I get others who live in 6 bedroom 3 story houses in the hills. I have been nonchalantly handed $100 tips on more than one occasion.

I also work with day laborer sometimes. These are people who will work for pretty much whatever you offer to pay them, work incredibly hard, and never complain. I ask them about work, about home, they invariably tell me: they are getting very little work here. Very little. But it is still better than the situation back home. That's why they are here. They work for less than minimum wage since they lack language skills and legal papers.
A customer yesterday mentioned her mother used to work for Nike in Vietnam. The company ships the product clear around the world because the people will work for a fraction of the US minimum wage. But she said it was a very decent salary compared to other options available to the people there.

The worldwide average income for an adult is roughly $7000.
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2006/MateNagy.shtml (note, this is over a decade out of date - the inequality has grown since)
That's including the 1st world; including the US.
This is in "purchasing power parity" - accounting for not only exchange rates, but what you can actually buy with a given amount locally.
$7000.

Over 80% of the worlds population has an annual income below that rate.
The world median income is $1700.
http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2007/10/07/average_earnings_worldwide/

So, yeah, I do think that is pretty much just the homeless who have a legitimate claim to poverty in this country.

There are plenty claims that the economic downturn hits the poor hardest: but then, they are putting people who own $290,000 4-bedroom townhouses in the category of "working class"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/16/AR2008101603605.html

The truly poor don't have far to fall. A recession can not possibly affect them as much as someone who has tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of annual income to potentially lose.

-

The last thing I wanted to mention is about how profit distribution ties in to unemployment.
In this country it has always been accepted as a given by almost everyone that 100% of the increase per worker in productivity due to advances in technology goes to the owners of the company, and not to the employees.
For example, say someone invents a machine that allows a worker to produce 2 times more widgets per hour.
What happens is (since the market for widgets hasn't grown, so they don't need to produce twice as many) the company lays off half it's work force, produces the same amount of widgets, sells them at the same price, and increases its profit substantially (paying half the wages, but making the exact same revenue).

There is no inherent reason that they couldn't instead reduce all of the workers hours 50%, while increasing wages 100%. Neither the employees nor the company loses any money. They both make exactly the same as they did before. The only change is the workers have half the work hours, and can use the rest of that time however they choose.
In the 2nd option no unemployment is caused.

In actuality productivity per worker has increased roughly 20 fold over the past century.
Over the same time (adjusted for inflation) wages have only increased 7 fold. The entire rest of that increase has gone to profit - ultimately to the upper class, who own the means of production.

Profit is after business expenses and costs and taxes, after wages, even after salaries to the CEO and upper management, often in the millions (even among companies that are losing money - even ones that got federal bail out money paid million+ salaries.)
Profit is what is left over after that. It goes to people who do literally no work for it at all.
There are industries which make as much as 20% profit margins.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2009/performers/industries/profits/

So when companies claim they "have to" lay off workers because they are making less revenue, I say they are full of crap. If they are making ANY profit, anything over breaking even, they have no justification for laying people off. If they are paying upper management 6 digit incomes, there is no justification for laying off their lowest wage earners.
In many European countries (and Canada) that is actually illegal. The government can (and will) sue a company for laying off workers unnecessarily. In these places it is understood that the whole purpose of the economy is to serve the needs of the people, not to make people with investment capital even richer.

We could reduce unemployment to the minimum possible by having overtime kick in at, say, 35 hours a week. Then to maintain current levels of production, companies need to hire 15% more people just to get back to the level they were at before.

There is nothing inherently good about creating wealth (or widgets for that matter) just for its own sake.
Going from multi-millionaire to billionaire will cause no overall long-term increase in happiness.

But instead of increasing the income of the destitute and struggling up to the level of secure in basic necessities, as a society we have been allowing - even encouraging - all of the increase in wealth to go to the top levels of society. The ranks of middle class conservatives and libertarians push for this hardest of all: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090128071009AADfUVw
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/09/snapshots-tea-party

-

It's human nature to want more than whatever one has, and to want more than everyone around you.
And everyone wants to believe they earned what they have, no matter how strong the evidence against it, because its easier on the conscious than admitting being greedy and amoral.
Its what explains the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" myth.
You can see it in everyone who rallies against illegal immigrants. They will insist it has to do with following laws for the sake of laws, but suggest making all immigration legal, and you find out its really about allowing them government benefits and taking American's jobs. The only way to justify it would be to claim that some people "earned" being born in a first world country. (People always have the "us vs them" xenophobic mentality that makes benefiting at the expense of others ok as long as they are "others")
I think that, just like with laws to discourage violence, or the use of birth control, discouraging some of our basic instincts is better for everybody; the desire to always have more, on a planet with finite resources, is what makes people who live extravagant lives in this country think they are poor. I think that's not ok.

The economic downturn means that people who lived excessively unsustainable lives now live moderately less unsustainable lives. It's actually not enough, but its a start.
I think that's a good thing.

Good News

2009-09-22T13:00:00.001-07:00

A few days ago, coming home from work after dark, a neighbor came over to ask for a jump.
I took the alternator out of my truck, but the charger I use in its place has a quick charge / jump start option, so I brought that over.
While we waited for it another neighbor, someone new I had waved to but never met, came over to see if we needed any help.
Somehow we got onto the topics of being "green" and the recession.

The neighbor with the dead battery has been involved with a local semi-official flea market. The people running it are conscious of the fact that, along with being a way to make money, selling things second hand is also environmentally responsible. They are actively looking for ways to be more so, for example sourcing "plastic" bags made of plant materials. She had never heard of plastic island, but understood how it happened and the significance as soon as I described it.
The new neighbor talked about the house of cards credit schemes that led to our economic situation, about concentration of wealth, government and banks and the stock markets roles.
While I had plenty of my own to add, I found myself agreeing with nearly everything both of them said.

This in contrast to interactions with neighbors over the past couple years: the neighbor in the 10ft long trailer who blamed all the countries problems on "the liberals", the neighbor who couldn't see any possible reason to run bio-diesel instead of petrol when it costs more - even when I pointed out that even if he doesn't live long enough to see environmental harm affect his life his kids might, not to mention the narrowly avoided fist fight and the 3 year old who buried his dads meth needle.

Like I have written, its funny that global warming is the thing that finally got peoples attention - even though there isn't hard scientific evidence that human activity will change it in a significantly more dramatic way than the natural climate cycles already do - when we have known for many decades that our use of resources is totally unsustainable.
But whatever. Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is better than not doing the right thing at all.

Now combined with economic changes, ideas I have been thinking about all my life are becoming more and more popular. What will life be like after the credit based economy has its debts called in, and we no longer have the capacity to exploit natural resources at an unsustainable level, (as is absolutely vital for the American way of life as we know it)?
Of course there were always others who imagined it coming someday, with varying levels of serious - movies like Six-String Samurai on the one end, cults and militias on the other.
But now I am finding it everywhere.
The Gubbins Experiment, a blog I read about a guy who has given up not only driving, but also accepting rides in any motor vehicle for a year, wrote his most pessimistic post ever. My boss, a small business owner with a contract with BART to run the BikeStation seemed to imply that the end of civilization as we know will happen within the next 20 years, and that it will hit dramatic and fast when it does. I met my most recent friend in part via (literal) dreams of a post-apocalyptic future.
And now, even here in the trailer park, people are thinking in global terms about sustainability and economics.

Contrast it also to discussions I have had recently with some single issue activists, who I found by and large narrowly focused on not just one issue, but one side of one issue, unable or unwilling to consider other points of view, ignoring historical and current contexts that don't support a pre-determined conclusion, and offering more criticism than real solutions.

Maybe I had it wrong all along.

Maybe it is the general public, the random ordinary everyday people in whom our potential salvation rests.
That is the most encouraging possibility I have come across in many years.

strengths and weaknesses

2009-09-14T00:56:00.000-07:00

Like anyone else, there are some things that I do pretty well. For example, I’m a quick learner; I seldom do more to study than quickly review my notes and brush up on one or two of the more difficult concepts covered in class. I also have never had trouble with my weight; Though peers have complained about keeping their weight down or up, and calculated the calories of their foods, the only time I usually notice a problem with my weight is when it’s too low (and there have even been people who have told me that, for a girl, there is no such thing). Things like this, that I do well in, have often earned me praise. And although earning high grades and conforming to society’s standards of body composition pleases me, I don’t actually get a deep sense of satisfaction from earning “easy As” or being skinny. When I’m complimented on these things, I am always uncomfortable; especially about my weight. I know that these things are strengths of mine only because they are exceptional, and through no hard work on my part. Other strengths I possess, such as a loving nature, loyalty, and passion, have much more to do with my own choices and personality. But it is still the things I don’t have to work hard at that get me the most attention from those who don’t know me well.
It’s harder to think of things that I don’t do well. Many things I struggle with, such as paying my bills on time or keeping my apartment clean, I can disguise through compensatory behaviour. Social problems, such as over-emotional reactions and antagonistic speech, are so off-putting that I’ve rarely been approached directly about them. As a result, I take my shortcomings much more to heart than I do my strengths, even those that are self-created like lovingness and loyalty. While I attribute even these things more to my situations and genetics than myself, I tend to attribute my weaknesses to personal faults. Rather than viewing them as challenges, I become anxious when they are revealed and defensive when they are discussed.
Although I know that, in principle, I am the same as anyone else in that I have both strengths and weaknesses, I have a very dichotomic view of them; I rank many of my traits as “strength” or “weakness,” with a corresponding value of “good” or “bad.” And because I attribute many strengths extrinsically and weaknesses intrinsically, I find it hard both to enjoy the first and to conquer the other. Also, the fact that it is so much easier to disguise my weaknesses gives others the false impression that it is possible to be smart, skinny, loving, etc, without having a dark side of faults and struggles.
I don’t think it’s only me that sees things this way. I think this false dichotomy of strengths and weaknesses is the way our society is ordered, and the way we are taught to look at things. While it is true I am able to somewhat hide my struggles, they are easy to be seen by a discerning eye. But the fact is, the eye of society does not want to look directly at weaknesses. Although it is easy to get compliments about positive qualities, people often avoid the conflict that results from talking honestly about negative ones. As a consequence, our society has an unbalanced focus on what it means to be a whole human being.
This focus, which sees strengths clearly and yet avoids weaknesses, sets up an environment that is especially difficult for those who find that strengths - according to society’s standards - don’t come easily to them. I am a victim of this attitude as I squirm under compliments about my looks, but I am also a perpetrator of it as I turn it in upon myself and thus unavoidably tint my view of others. It is no wonder that, in such an environment, those with disabilities have struggled so long to overcome prejudice. When we falsely divide ourselves up by “strength” and “weakness,” we set ourselves up to be unable to see the strengths in our weaknesses, and vice versa. We also set up not only intolerance within ourselves for our own struggles, but with other people as well. We can really only see ourselves honestly, and grow together, when we embrace our qualities - both the ones that make our lives easier and those that make them harder.

Racism is Perpetuated by Anti-Racism", or "Refusing to Acknowledge the Effects of Race Inhibits Interpersonal Relationships", or "Rainbows Are Pretty"

2009-08-14T19:07:00.000-07:00

Every single person belongs to a certain race. This fact is unavoidable, as racial differences are clearly visible. However, race is often an issue which is avoided in polite conversation since it is considered a controversial topic. Emotions run high when overtly discussing racism because people identify so strongly with their race; after all, what is closer to you that your own skin? Because it is so visible, race is also one of the most immediate ways we judge each other. First impressions are not only made by our handshake, the amount of wrinkles in our shirt, and the sincerity of our smile. No matter how much we would like people to judge us based on such personal details, the unfortunate truth is that stereotypes are formed about race just as readily as they are for such things as gender, disability, and age. But, like other ways we tend to group people, looks can be deceiving: Although being part of a particular ethnicity means you are more likely to be informed by the accompanying culture, this is not necessarily true. Race is merely an externalized likelihood that someone interacts with the world in a particular way, but it does not define who we are as individuals.

I live near San Francisco, a mecca of liberal politics and socially progressive policies, but even here we are not immune to the effects of racism. This spring, I worked in a program where I was one of only two white people in a room filled with 27 students and staff. I never experienced obvious racism in my students, but I did experience it with my fellow co-workers. One day as we had a music activity, I modeled different kinds of dancing for the students, focusing on maintaining rhythm and controlling body movements. A fellow coworker (who I didn’t get along with) danced by me, saying “You dance like a white girl!” The comment was surely meant innocuously, but I didn’t experience it that way. I experienced it as a judgement and an accusation, and it made me feel even more estranged from my coworker. While it wasn’t constructive of me to ignore the effects of race and culture on my students’ dancing and my own, my coworker’s comment was surely destructive. I never interacted with her in a meaningful way again.

Racism is not simply demeaning another race. It is any judgement - positive or negative - formed about someone purely because they look a certain way. By judging a person based on their heredity - something they have no personal control over - racism alienates people and inhibits relationships. Introducing the divisiveness of racism into interpersonal relations makes a personal connection nearly impossible, since it makes it clear that there is nothing the person you are interacting with can do to change your mind; You have judged them based on the color of their skin and the shape of their bones - things they did nothing to receive, and over which they have no control. Examples of the effects of racism abound: they can be found in personal anecdotes, cross-cultural studies, economic opportunity, and even art.

One piece of art I experienced recently was Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel, “Shortcomings.” In this book, Tomine deals with the effects of racism on relationships by illustrating the characters’ ideals and (more hypocritical) behaviours concerning race. Two main characters, Ben and Miko, have been in a long-term relationship but they are clearly becoming increasingly distant from each other. Part of the reason for their distance is Ben’s lack of awareness about racial issues and their effects on the experiences of the people around him.

Although some cases of racism are obvious, some are not so clear. For example, “Shortcomings” begins as Ben and Miko watch a movie about a girl who has assimilated into the American culture, and as a result feels distant from her immigrant grandfather. As they leave the theater, Miko notes that the movie was the best of a series of submissions for an Asian film festival, and Ben gripes that it was actually a poorly done movie. He rants that it only received accolades because it had an Asian director, and that it didn’t deserve any recognition since, on the whole, it was not a good movie. Miko, who helped organize the festival, is clearly upset at his criticism. As Ben continues to complain about the quality of the movie, Miko accuses him of being racist, saying, “it’s almost like you’re ashamed to be Asian." While Miko is proud to be part of increasing the legitimacy and opportunity for people of her own race in the film industry, Ben refuses to view the movie within the context of race. This kind of discrimination is insidious, but not entirely misplaced. I agree with Ben: art is art, and good art should not be defined by culture or race. However, denying the effects of race is not the complete truth either. The fact that the best film in an Asian film festival was not of a high-enough quality to be shown in a theater may not indicate that Asians are bad directors, but rather that their opportunities in the field are inhibited by discrimination. However, this idea was not addressed in the book. Just like I never had a conversation with my coworker about how her comment about my dancing made me feel, Miko avoided pursuing the issue. Rather than initiating a discussion about race and its influence on opportunity, Ben and Miko simply stopped talking.

This failure to pursue the mine-field of racism is not peculiar to Tomine’s book. Even in situations where you would think an open discussion would be encouraged, it does not always happen. This summer, I took an upper-division ethnic studies course. One day I brought up an issue I was confused about; I repeated something I had heard about an ethnic group, and asked why it was true. My professor became upset, and said that it was not true at all, and that the stereotype I had repeated was the result of intolerance, or judging one culture in the context of another. But she did not elucidate beyond that. I became excited, and since it was a college class I expected that the discussion would continue beyond “right” and “wrong.” However, like Miko, my instructor refused to continue the discussion. Rather than pursue the nature of the discrepancy, thereby possibly ameliorating a racist belief I myself held, she perpetuated a segregation of ideas. Both my professor and Miko were more aware than Ben and I to racial judgements and barriers, but neither one of them helped to further any sense of understanding. In this way, they both played a complacent part in continuing the racism that they seem to be trying to combat.

While most people may be able to agree that racism should be ameliorated, it is difficult to completely eradicate because it is actually part of human nature. Everyone is more comfortable with their in-group than they are with anyone else. For most people, this in-group is made up mostly of people who look like them, and act like them, and think like them. This type of behavior is not racist or intolerant or mean; it is simply the way people negotiate interpersonal relationships. Ben has lived most of his life with Asians. His girlfriend is Asian, his best friend is Asian. Even his arch-enemy in college was Asian. Ben’s lack of racial awareness is not only a result of his self-absorption (although that certainly encourages it), but also the fact that he doesn’t have a very diverse in-group. Ben’s intolerance is a product of his environment as much as it is a product of his insensitivity.

Like Ben, we are all a product of our environment. If we continue to segregate each other not only by race but also by “right” and “wrong,” we cannot hope to overcome the misunderstandings and incomplete truths that water the seeds of racism. Overcoming racism will not be achieved by merely stating opinions or truth-telling. Because it is an attitude that is intertwined with very human instincts, open dialogue and validation of everyone’s experiences is most effective in directly addressing racism. Avoiding the topic by encouraging “color-blindness” is not enough. Advocating for minority rights to the exclusion of acknowledging the experiences of the majority is not enough. Attributing harmful stereotypes to individuals without awareness of cultural biases is not enough. What is enough is to keep talking; to continue the conversation as we explore ourselves and our experiences together. Ben and Miko lost their relationship because they couldn’t communicate with each other. May our own society avoid the same fate.

Slow down. My philosophy for life also applies to the road.

2009-08-05T08:37:00.000-07:00

I have been requested to post something positive.
In light of that request, I am putting a positive spin on what I was going to write anyway.

While I am generally good at pointing out problems and at complaining, I don't generally offer much by way of solutions.
This time I have a very concrete solution, which is within easy reach of ordinary Americans, with no risk, no cost, and a negligible amount of inconvenience.
It is something you, the reader, can do.

But first, a short history lesson:
In October of 1973 a group of nations got sick of the US "foreign policy" of military intervention, and, knowing we had developed a lifestyle totally dependent on oil, they agreed not to sell us any.
This caused massive and immediate affects throughout the US economy. Buying fuel, at any price, meant waiting in long lines - on those days you were even allowed to buy gas at all (hmm, so maybe Soviet era lines for goods were not caused by the distribution system of communism, but by a plain lack of resources...)

The government took steps to encourage conservation, which (unlike sourcing new oil) could be done immediately, such as banning Christmas lights.

Another major step they took was to enact a national speed limit of 55mph.

The reason for this is that at higher speeds air resistance increases exponentially* relative to speed. Going twice as fast requires 4 times the energy. This is as true of modern vehicles as it was in 1973. All vehicles, small or large, gas or alternative fuel, use more energy at speeds above 60mph. In fact, going from 55 to 70mph typically uses between 20% and 25% more fuel to go the same distance.**

Next, a physics lesson:
Similar to the relationship between wind resistance and speed, momentum varies with the square of speed.
Energy=1/2mass*velocity^2***
This means that if you are going twice as fast, it will take 4 times as much force to stop - and therefor 4 times the braking distance in an emergency.
It also means that if you do end up in a crash, at twice the speed you will have 4 times the impact. At 4 times the impact, crumple zones and airbags can't stop your organs from hitting your ribs hard enough to explode.

I realize (from the almost universal comment I get when I mention I have a motorcycle) that people actually believe they are safe when they are driving a car.
The number one cause of death of youth in the US in car crashes. It causes more deaths among young people than murder, suicide, cancer, and heart disease combined. It is the number one cause of death up until age 40, at which point it is still in the top 3.
We don't hear about it much in the news precisely because it is so common. There are roughly 16,500 accidents significant enough to be reported in the U.S. EVERY DAY. Of these, roughly 1/3 result in permanent injuries. Every 12 minutes, an American dies in a car crash. Every time you get into a car, you may die.

The number one factor in causing all of these deaths and injuries? It isn't alcohol. It isn't teen drivers or cell phones. Its speeding. Speeding is the single largest factor in injury and fatality collisions. Contrary to popular belief, driving slower is safer even when other cars around you are speeding.****

Note a couple studies on the issue:
"risk of involvement in a casualty crash, relative to the risk for a car traveling at 60 km/h, increased at an exponential rate for free traveling speeds above 60 km/h [37mph]"**

“First, the probability of a crash is approximately proportional to the square of the travel speed. Second, in a crash, injury risk is approximately proportional to the impact forces on a person, which in turn are proportional to the square of the impact speed. These two effects can be summarized in a general rule of thumb: When travel speed increases by 1%, the injury crash rate increases by about 2%, the serious injury crash rate increases by about 3%, and the fatal crash rate increases by about 4% “**

There is, of course, an obvious drawback to driving slower: it takes more time to get somewhere. If you do the math, you discover that slowing down from 75mph to 65mph means it will take you an additional 7 seconds to go a mile. (Slowing down to 55 will cost another 10 seconds)

What all this means is, over a 10 mile commute, you will waste 25% more gas (which also means you spend 25% more money), and increase your risk of death by 160%, all to save 2 minutes.

I am not asking you to give up your car and rely solely on bicycles and public transportation.
I am not asking you to buy an experimental electric or alternative fuel car, an expensive new hybrid, or even a smaller more efficient car.
I am not suggesting you go to the lengths I do and remove your power steering pump and alternator, or drive 45mph on the freeway.

All I am asking is that you slow down.

If you value your own money.
If you value the environment.
If you value national security and energy independence.
If you value the lives of those around you.
If you value your own life.

You don't even have to care about all of those things. Any one of them of them is reason enough.

Leave the house 2 minutes sooner, and slow down.

This will not, all by itself, save the world. But it will make a difference.

Thank you.

"No one can cut you off if you choose to slow down and let them in"

*Disclaimer for math and physics people: I know, technically the curve is parabolic, not exponential, but if I used that term no one would know what I was talking about

**You don't have to take my word for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_automobiles#Speed_and_fuel_economy_studies http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/driveHabits.shtml http://eartheasy.com/live_fuel_efficient_driving.htm http://www.lawcore.com/car-accident/statistics.html
http://casr.adelaide.edu.au/speed/exec.html http://www.tsc.berkeley.edu/newsletter/winter2008/speed.html

***Mass mean the weight of the car. Velocity means speed

****The chance of a fender bender may be higher if you go slower than traffic around you, but the chance of a crash which causes injury or death is lower.

Hate, in a rainbow of colors

2009-08-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

A number of things I have read recently have had the same saddening undertones to me lately.

Whether its queer folk expressing prejudice against heterosexuals, feminists who hate men, or people of color claiming that white activists who have no money coming into their neighborhood is a gentrification issue. http://www.anarchistnews.org/?q=node/8794

I hear about "gentrification" here in Oakland too.
Oakland has rent control, which means no tenant can be forced out or have their rent raised dramatically just because local property valuations have gone up.
Raising the average income in an area serves to increase the tax base, lower crime, and is not bad for a neighborhood. If, thanks to rent control, no one is being displaced this means that, like in the clash between anarchists in Pittsburgh, what people are really fighting for is something activists spent years trying to dismantle: segregation.

Bigotry which comes from an oppressed group is still just as much bigotry as it is when it comes from wealthy straight white men.
In all cases it is counter-productive.
Activists, please - stop alienating your allies just because they look different than you.

That is exactly what they want us to do.

Race (whites are still winning)

2009-07-28T19:05:00.000-07:00

Recently a friend of mine suggested the only topics I haven't addressed are racism and sexism.
As it happens, I did write on sexism not long ago ("...feminism is nothing more than the "radical" notion that women are people. Not that women are men. Not that women are capable of being men...Claiming that women are capable of doing anything men are is also the suggestion that men should be the standard by which people are measured.")
I had my own ideas of what to write about next, but in light of another recent conversation, it looks like he was right. Its time.

I have a few (white) friends who have complained to me on different occasions about how unfair it is that ...insert some random instance of perceived "reverse" racism here...
I am, perhaps, the friend that people can point to and say "I am not racist, some of my best friends are black", and being that friend apparently my word carries extra weight if I support them in their argument that 'such and such' is unfair.
(Never mind for now what it implies about me that such a disproportionate number of my friends are white...)

Well, first of all, you are racist. You, reading this right now. Just admit it. I'm not saying you don a white hood on the weekends, but in the very first fraction of a moment you see someone new, you make some assumptions about them based on what they look like, and skin color plays a factor in that. You may not ever act on it in any way. You might be totally willing to look past that initial assumption and give each person a fair chance to show who they really are. But it is part of how the human mind works to seek patterns, and living in our society it is impossible to not be at all racist. I know I am.
Some researchers at Harvard built a test to try to get at subconscious initial reactions, and put it online where you can try it.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/
If you are one of the exceptions, and score neutral, it really doesn't change anything overall. The issue is bigger than you; and the fact is that the majority of people make the same assumptions we expect. And so long as its true in society as a whole, every white individual in the country directly benefits from it.

A most simple example of what some could see as unfair is Affirmative Action.
When I was younger I saw it as just that. If we want to get past racism, we shouldn't be using race as a criteria, for anyone.
Thing is, pretending that there is equality doesn't make it true.
To call affirmative action (or whatever else) reverse racism is to ignore both history and the reality of today. Being color blind does not, can not, will never, solve existing problems, because we aren't starting from neutral.

First of all (and I wrote about this years ago, but before I had any significant readership...) reparations were never paid. This country has virtually unrestricted inheritance.
(I thought about trying to summarize, but I actually wrote pretty much exactly what I wanted to say here back then. So take a moment to read that one)
http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=97022263&blogID=155790185&Mytoken=C60E0EDC-69F4-4713-B590C570555060FA65212392

Prejudice against blacks by whites has affected a dozen generations of people, and continues to have an enormous effect on millions of people right now, today. If we start from right now, and eliminate all racism, it would STILL have an enormous effect on us, because the effects are inherited.

If someone in your ancestry immigrated more recently the same issue of a non-level playing field applies, because the US generally does not admit immigrants who can't show some level of existing financial security. One way or another, they aren't starting from zero.

So suppose your own parents were drunks or gamblers and you got nothing from your family but food and shelter, left home at 15, had to fund your own education.
You then might get the mistaken idea that you didn't have any advantages.

But the truth is, although you would never notice it, you have had plenty.

You can't tell by just watching individual situations. Because it is more subtle than that.
But you can tell by looking at the overall trends.

You can see society wide racism in the fact that a black person is 5-20% (depending on the offense) more likely to be sentenced to prison time as a white person for the same crime.
(Many studies attempt to account for this by factoring in prior sentences, but this is a circular argument. If you are more likely to be convicted the first time, obviously you are more likely to be convicted the 2nd time too)
Once convicted, Blacks face 10-15% longer prison time.
For drug offenses:

"African Americans make up approximately 12 percent of the population and are 13 percent of the drug users, yet they constitute 38 percent of all drug arrests and 59 percent of those convicted of drug offenses...Nationwide African American males sentenced in state courts on drug felonies receive prison sentences 52 percent of the time, while white males are sentenced to prison 34 percent of the time...When sentenced for drug offenses in state courts, whites serve an average of 27 months and blacks an average of 46 months" - Justice on Trial: Racial Disparities in the American Criminal Justice System, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Leadership Conference Education Fund, 2000

You can tell from college admission rates - with or without affirmative action
http://www.jbhe.com/news_views/56_race_sensitive_not_helping.html
http://www.jbhe.com/news_views/56_b_w_disparities.html
http://aad.english.ucsb.edu/docs/op42.html

You can tell from the Black unemployment rate: consistently about twice the average for whites.
Or from the percentage of Black CEOs or congress people (1% of the Fortune 500 - the highest # ever; 40 out of 435 in congress and 1 out of 100 senators - these numbers in comparison to almost 14% of the general population.)

There are two ways to explain that difference. Either Black people as a whole actually are less capable and hard-working, or else the affects of society-wide racism are still as relevant today as they ever were.

If we can point to these examples and show statistically that, even accounting for individual intelligence and work ethic, Black people are overall at a disadvantage, another equally valid way to say the same thing is, all other things being equal, White people have an advantage.
Every college application. Every job interview. Every time you walk into a store. In that very first moment that someone takes a look at you, somewhere in the back of their mind is a prejudice in your favor. You will never notice it. You will have no way to know. But it's there.

Having a (half) Black president (who's African ancestry didn't descend from slavery but immigrated here) doesn't change anything of significance, so long as there is that fraction of a second of assumption that people make when they see someone new for the first time.

It's no different than if an Aboriginal American were to make some blanket statement about Americans taking the Indian's land. I am an American. I was born here. I worked for what I have now and am a generally good person. I never harmed an Indian American, never took anyone's land, never deliberately spread disease.
But the fact remains that every day I directly benefit from the people who did do those things.
I have no intention of giving up my own property or abandoning my home on the grounds that Oakland should rightfully be inhabited by Aboriginal Americans, but I certainly have no grounds to be indignant or self-righteous about the issue. As far as the actual effects go, I benefit just as much from Europeans having committed genocide against the people who lived here before them as someone directly descended from them. And merely by choosing to accept that benefit which I was born into, in a way, albeit small and indirect, I share in the responsibility for the fact that Aboriginal Americans today are by and large confined to reservations of land that no one else wanted, living largely in poverty.

We may not be directly at fault, but we are all complacent in receiving the benefits, which are at someone else's expense. So if an American Indian makes a blanket statement about Americans (which includes me) which may be technically unfair, all I can say is "your right, and I'm sorry". I have no counter-argument. I have nothing to complain about. I have no right to be indignant.

And so to, if someone makes a blanket statement such as "white people are racist" or "white people repress others", you don't get to be offended. You don't get to point out the logical flaws in generalizing. You don't get to call double standard or reverse racism.
It may be "unfair" that you are born into being seen as an oppressor, but it is even less fair that I have to prove myself just that much more than you do.
I have had friends "jokingly" say that I am not "really" Black, or not "that" Black because of how I talk and dress and act. Those same associations, those stereotypes, they are racism, even if they aren't inherently negative, and accepting any one association implies all the others to be valid. The fact that I can trace my own family lineage directly to American slavery on both sides of my family makes me Black. The fact that every time I meet someone new, for at least an instant they will make certain associations and therefor assumptions about me makes me Black.

Have I experienced racism first hand? Not overtly. It would be hard to know for sure, since the person it was coming from is likely not conscious of it. Chances are, not so much. All it takes is a few minuets of talking to me and I can dispel any stereotypes pretty thoroughly, make a case for myself as an exception even with someone who is generally (subconsciously) racist, and I live in a place where it being overt is unacceptable (I learned in my travels that this is far from universal in this country).
But the point is I shouldn't have to.
Between being thought of as an oppressor and actually being oppressed, you have the better end of the deal. So suck it up and get over it.

Being color blind is not a solution. It is a cop-out. Pretending that slavery didn't happen, that racism has not been an enormous factor, and just focusing on the basic equality of man will not do anything to change things. If you need to here everything logical and fair, take a logic class, or a justice class, or a love everybody class. If you don't want to hear people say white people are racist and that's a bad thing, don't take a racial studies class.

Is it unreasonable for people to make blanket statements? Yeah, of course it is. But focusing on it isn't much different from telling a holocaust survivor that some Nazis didn't hate Jews, or stopping a conversation about rape because of improper grammar.

I don't want to end without offending everyone equally, so now is as good a time as any for another rant I have.

This one is directed to Black Americans.
Stop acting like jackasses.
We have centuries worth of stereotypes to put behind us.
Don't deliberately jaywalk extra slow just to make people wait for you.
Don't evade the fare on the train.
Don't drink or smoke weed in pubic.
Don't play music on the bus. When is the last time you saw a white person playing a boom box in the back of the bus?
Don't get into fist fights. People tried to make the shooting of Oscar Grant by BART police into a race issue. There were no white people involved in fist fights on the train. If he wasn't fighting on a crowded train, he wouldn't have gotten shot. Simple as that.
I have a 400watt stereo system with a separate powered sub-woofer behind the seat. I like my music loud, and to roll around with my windows down and my system bump as much as anyone. But when you are in a residential neighborhood at 11pm, turn that shit down. What the hell is wrong with you?
Years of oppression and poverty don't change the basic rules of being a decent respectful human being.
Remember earlier when I pointed out I have to prove myself each time I meet someone new? That's not because of a legacy of slavery. That's because of you.
People build impressions based on what they see, and each time you act a fool, it makes us all look bad.
Its true that Blacks are given disproportionate prison sentences, but it is also true that Blacks commit a disproportionate amount of (non-drug-related) crime
So when there is a statistic like 35% of the prison population is Black or 1/3 of black males between 18-29 has been, is, or will be imprisoned, part of that is systemic racism, but part of it is Black people committing crimes. It seems it has become un-PC to say so.
That's not OK. No amount of history or social issues can excuse individual behavior.
Obviously this behavior is the minority of the Black population, (although it is, inherently, a very visible minority). But if it isn't you, chances are its your friends, or your children, a family member or neighbor. And if you don't say something, no one else will. The single best way to change the perception of us is to eliminate unfavorable associations at the source.

I think its actually pretty simple and straight forward. We just need to eliminate all forms of inheritance, standardize education from preschool through university for everyone, make all hiring blind, and change young Black culture to emphasize respect of others. Those 4 steps and all this will become a non-issue in no time.
And when that happens, then we can finally have a purely logical and intellectual discussion on the subject.

The last one; anarchists this time

2009-06-25T21:30:00.000-07:00

I posted my essay equating the free market with anarchy on a discussion board for anarchists. The following is the comments it generated.

(I am David Craig Hiser. All the other comments are various random anarchists. Many comments were off topic, and are not shown here.
All of the comments, as well as my original essay, are here: http://www.anarchistnews.org/?q=node/7038)

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Submitted by Ofelas on Thu, 2009-04-02 01:18.

Is this fellow trying to say that capitalism (with leaders and all) and anarchy/anarchism are all one and the same? Cuckoo Cuckoo.

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Submitted by DavidCraigHiser on Fri, 2009-04-03 22:52. [I am David Craig Hiser]

More or less, yes.
Capitalism has no leaders.
Capitalism has only the market.
Democracy (or rather, what we call democracy, actually a republic) has leaders.
Our political system is the only thing which stands between our (the US) system and true capitalism / free markets.
Each move toward deregulation is a move toward economic anarchy.

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Submitted by communanarchoco... on Sat, 2009-04-04 02:28.

Seems you're forgetting bosses. economic hierarchy. Anarchism is against hierarchy (hier-ARCHy).

You're equating anarchy - as in, a lack of laws - with anarchism - a classless, stateless society.

Capitalism is brutally authoritarian. It depends on police and armies to keep the masses of workers from being able to take the products of their labour from those who are robbing them (their owners, the bosses).

Capitalism is the antithesis of anarchism. It is the single most hated ideology amongst every authentic anarchist. I understand you want to call yourself an anarchist because its a cooler label than being a capitalist, but sorry, you may not use it. Actually, I'm not sorry. Anyone who supports all the evils of capitalism must be a douche, and I don't apologize to douches.

Go read the Infoshop FAQ and learn what anarchism is. Read the section on 'so-called anarcho-capitalists'. Go post on an Ayn Rand messageboard.

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Submitted by David Craig Hiser on Mon, 2009-04-06 11:04.

You have greatly misunderstood my own position.
I am in no way advocating capitalism.
I am totally opposed to capitalism.
The reason I am opposed to anarchy is that I believe capitalism can (and likely will in the modern world) arise from it. That was the point I was trying to get across.

I am not forgetting bosses. Being employed by someone is a voluntary relationship. An employee can quit, and even open a competing business. The occasional "American dream" story not-withstanding, people generally can not choose to join the upper class.

I am claiming you can not have a classless society without a mechanism to enforce equality. You must somehow prevent individuals from accumulating wealth.
If individuals have complete freedom, sooner or later someone will accumulate wealth, and then they will be able to take advantage of that accumulation, which is capitalism.
If society prevents that from happening, then individuals are not free to do as they like, even if their actions do not directly hurt anyone else, and this entails some form of authority.

I believe the latter, while dangerous, is the better of the two options. I believe that having classes is the greater detriment to humanity than lack of complete freedom.
Communalism, by nature, requires a loss of freedom.
If individuals care for, help, are responsible to, family, friends, neighbors, each other, than they must consider their actions in relation to everyone around them.
In a global world the actions of every person affect everyone else in the world (us in the US most of all). If every decision impacts others, and we have any sense of morality, then we can not be free from coercion. Unfortunately, not everyone is moral, and so the presence of some force to prevent some people from harming others (the state) becomes a necessary evil.

I don't consider myself an anarchist.
That's why I posted in this section.

I have not heard any one theory I agree with completely.
I am a secular humanist.
I am socially libertarian (anarchist even)
I believe in economic fascism.
I know that is a huge knee-jerk word, especially among Americans, and ESPECIALLY among anarchists, but if you are interested in a more indepth explanation, you can read it on my blog here:
http://apps.biodieselhauling.org/blog/?e=6126&d=11/19/2007&s=Global%20Warming%20vs.%20Fascism%3B%20or%2C%20why%20NASA%20wouldn%E2%80%99t%20have%20stopped%20Apophis

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Submitted by Rowan Duffy on Thu, 2009-04-02 03:56.

"It also means "justice" via the lynch mob."

No it doesn't. I've never heard an anarchist advocate that. As such, it's a straw man.

"If they have no family, or for whatever personal reasons have lost their family's sympathy, they starve."

Your critique is a critique of anarcho-capitalism, not anarchism. Anarcho-capitalism can not exist peacefully for any length of time for the reasons you describe. This critique does not apply to anarchist communism however as all of the problems you mentioned are not problems with communism where needs are freely satisfied by society.

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Submitted by DavidCraigHiser on Sat, 2009-04-04 00:21.

"No it doesn't. I've never heard an anarchist advocate that. As such, it's a straw man."

I'm not talking about some theory. It is not a straw man. It happens. It has happened countless times in the real world. It doesn't matter what you advocate. It is what will happen. It is what DOES happen in places where law breaks down due to civil war or natural disaster or whatever.

I am claiming Anarcho-capitalism is the natural state of anarchism.
Communism requires organization, cooperation, and some sort of property management system, and it requires that some people be coerced in some way to do things which they would not necessarily want to do.
If the less privileged are to be taken care of, and there is no state, WHO takes care of them? Specifically. By what mechanism are the needs of the disabled taken care of?

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Submitted by anon on Fri, 2009-04-10 09:39.

"I'm not talking about some theory. It is not a straw man. It happens. It has happened countless times in the real world. It doesn't matter what you advocate. It is what will happen."

You need to demonstrate that it occurs more in anarchistic societies than capitalistic ones.

"It is what DOES happen in places where law breaks down due to civil war or natural disaster or whatever."

I'm pretty sure this has already been pointed out, but anarchism is not equivalent to lawlessness - it's opposition to hierarchical laws.

"Communism requires organization, cooperation, and some sort of property management system..."

Again, anarchism is not incompatible with those things.

"...and it requires that some people be coerced in some way to do things which they would not necessarily want to do."

How so? Also note that anarchism cannot remove all coercion - no human is truly free, being as we are slaves to our passions and needs - it seeks only to remove illegitimate coercion i.e. from centralized authority.

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Submitted by DavidCraigHiser

"You need to demonstrate that it occurs more in anarchistic societies than capitalistic ones."

-Granted. I'd say this is the best counter-argument I've gotten here!
I'll have to look into that one.

"I'm pretty sure this has already been pointed out, but anarchism is not equivalent to lawlessness - it's opposition to hierarchical laws."

-In a true, pure democracy, laws are not hierarchical. Note, what the US commonly calls democracy has very little in common with the real definition of democracy.
A simple example: 4 students are assigned a group project.
They each have a different idea of what to do it on. They have to pick one idea. It is obviously unrealistic to believe you will get 100% agreement 100% of the time. However, if they do not come to an agreement, they may all fail the class.
If 3 of them agree on one idea, and the 4th gives in and goes along with it, that right there is democracy.
No one student has any more say than any other. No hierarchy.
There is no coercion involved. No force or authority.
Their participation is voluntary. They could drop the class. [in the equivalent to this example on the nation level, all laws are followed voluntarily, because the US does not prevent citizens from leaving the country permanently if they so choose]

If you have laws, either they were made by one person or group (which implies hierarchy) or they are made collectively, which by definition is democracy.

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Submitted by Autumn Phoenix on Thu, 2009-04-02 15:49.

I'll just assume the author has never read anything about band societies, the non-hierarchical (anarchic) mode of existence that humyns lived in for 99% of our existence on the earth. Maybe you could read James' Woodburn's "Egalitarian Societies" http://www.paleo-life.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=436&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=&sid=bd75f2b800d44c28f702f349b668ee0f

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Submitted by anon on Fri, 2009-04-03 18:01.

I suppose we COULD go back to that 99% of human history and live like cave men/women again. That would be great fun huh? People sitting around fires, eating dog, and speaking in made up localized dialects without any communicability between the tribe 5 miles away...

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Submitted by DavidCraigHiser on Mon, 2009-06-22 09:47.

Even if we wanted to go back to not having modern society (and I admit, its not a bad idea) it isn't going to happen.
Pandora's Box has been opened, Prometheus has made his delivery, and those things can't be undone.

Given that the vast majority of people in the modern world do not wish to give up the technology they already have (are we really even having this debate on the internet?) it makes more since to deal with the way the current world, with technology and 21st century mindset is likely to deal with various political and economic systems rather than pointing to examples from times past.
History is very important for teaching us, but just because we dismantled the government doesn't mean people would go back to nomadic foraging.

Aside from that most people would be unwilling, there are far too many of us, and we have done far too much environmental degradation for the natural level of productivity to support us. [For all its faults, the fact remains that industrial agriculture can feed many more people with an acre of land than hunting/gathering can]

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Submitted by DavidCraigHiser on Sat, 2009-04-04 00:18.

1) the article you linked admits there is generally some form of leadership or at least informal democracy, as group decisions sometimes need to be made (for example in deciding when to move the camp). Communism is (in theory) non-hierarchical. Democracy (real democracy, not what the US calls democracy) is non-hierarchical. That alone does not make it anarchic. The article also points out "Many hunter-gatherers have social systems in which there is very marked inequality of one sort or another, sometimes far more marked than the inequalities in certain simple agricultural or nomadic pastoral societies."

2) the lifestyle described necessitates that there are abundant and easily accessible resources, such that everyone, regardless of age, gender, strength, etc is able to acquire enough food water and shelter to survive without help.
Which is wonderful if you are lucky enough to live in a place with an ideal climate and habitat. 99% of human existence there were fewer than 100 million people in the entire world. We now have 6.5 billion (and climbing).
Barring WWIII, it will never be possible for the entirety of human society to live as described.

3) as someone else pointed out, very few of us would be willing to give up all forms of technology (besides those we can make ourselves by hand from trees and rocks)

4) "There are instances in which the Hadza have abandoned the seriously ill when they moved camp, leaving them with their possessions [note, even if this most extreme example, they have possessions] and with food and water but knowing that they were unlikely to be able to provide for themselves. I was very surprised by the neglect of a previously popular grandmother in one of the settlements when she became senile..." This was one of my original points. Just because a certain system can work does not necessarily mean it is desirable overall.

5)"...there are sanctions against accumulation." Sanctions by whom? Of what sort? How are these "sanctions" decided in any particular case, and how are they carried out? It may be only sloppy language, just meant to imply it is generally frowned upon in general. Or, might it be that the author glosses over the details in order to maintain the premise that there is no control over anyone? If each individual is free to do as they choose, they can choose to accumulate. If some social force prevents them from accumulating, that is a form of coercion.

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Submitted by Wolverine on Fri, 2009-04-10 22:49.

David if I may ask why the fuck are you so obsessed with the weak, the weak must be protected, have you ever thought that your reifications of the weak create more weaklings?

Also capitalism is nothing more then a behavioural paradigm as landuaer said. Yes there are places in the world where a vacuum creates your haitis but it is precisely because of the behavioural paradigm. We end capitalism by behaving differently, in terms of conflict resolution, nothing will ever be perfect, yes there may be cycles of revenge and killing that break out I'm sure it happened in pre civilized contexts but better that then a system of confinement with the surrounding enforcement agents.

With the flawed delicate little species of ours you take the good with the bad and as the french say let it run, the right way that is bourgeois ideology aside.

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Submitted by DavidCraigHiser on Mon, 2009-06-22 09:28.

Obsessed? By the same token I might ask why anarchists are so obsessed with authority.
If we accept "survival of the fittest" as a legitimate view of human society, then perhaps the lower class is exactly where it should be, naturally subjugated by the more powerful and capable people above them.
This is exactly the argument so called "social-darwinists" make.

I agree, nothing will be perfect, and a lot of it stems from mindset.
I don't believe the ideal comes from any one dogma. I believe there are positive elements to be drawn from the ideas of anarchy, socialism, democracy, fascism, and libertarianism, but any one of them applied without question causes problems which could easily be solved with a more open minded approach.

My point in writing this post was to point out some of the problems inherent to pure anarchy.

Part 2, gas tax digression

2009-06-25T21:04:00.000-07:00

This one was on my hypermileing forum, and began as a question about gas taxes.
That quickly degraded into an argument about taxes in general, and from there fell further to a general condemnation of government.
Since it was the off topic message board anyway, I decided to weigh in:

(original, including what I am responding to, here: http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthread.php/over-80-oppose-raising-gas-tax-8319-6.html)

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Of course 80% oppose raising gas tax. Not because they think it won't work, but because they personally enjoy the luxury of driving an inefficient vehicle. It has nothing to do with the cost of a hybrid. Trucks vans and SUVs make up 1/2 of new car sales, and all of those buyers knew they were buying gas guzzlers. It would cost less money - not just in gas, but upfront - to buy a small (non hybrid) car.

Quote:

I am for the freedom of choices that we all have in this country. In my opinion, you cannot tell me what to do if I am not hurting anyone else.

1 You do have total choice if gas prices are raised. You can choose to buy whatever car you want. In fact, even if CAFE standards were raised you would still have choice, because they only refer to fleet average, not individual models. The only way anyone's freedom is restricted is if it became illegal to buy a car that got less than XX mpg.
2 Buying a big car DOES hurt others. In addition to the fact that they do far more damage in an accident, there is this little thing called "global warming" (to be honest, I am not 100% convinced, but it is undeniable that burning fuel does environmental and health damage to all living things, including ourselves.)

Quote:

I oppose all taxes. period.

Forget about social programs and libraries.
Government pays for things which are not profitable, and which the free market could not provide, or which are essential and the free market could not provide equitably. Things like roads, harbors, airports, bridges, military, police, fire services, courts. How long do you think it would take for private security to turn into mercenaries? If you want to go back to living in teepees, maybe, but giving up government in the real world means who ever has the biggest gun and most friends gets to do whatever they want.

Quote:

Originally Posted by theunchosen

(because 50% of government spending goes to those programs).

Last I checked, the top three uses of federal tax money was:
1 the military (we spend literally as much as the rest of the world combined)
2 payments made to private health care companies (contracted medicare and health care for government employees)
3 interest on the debt.
(Social security is basically a mandatory savings account. You get back more than you pay into it. It isn't counted as part of the federal budget; although unfortunately in order to pay for massive budget deficits the government has been illegally "borrowing" from it which is why the fund is in trouble)

Quote:

A government that rewards the lazy (welfare for fat slobs with no intention of getting a job, and pumping out children they are teaching that lifestyle is okay)

Welfare makes up about 1% of the budget.
Even before Clinton's welfare to work program, the average welfare recipient received benefits for less than 2 years. Currently, after 2 years, if you don't get some job - any job - you get cut off, even if they are in college at the time. So it encourages people to get minimum wage jobs instead of actually bettering themselves and getting a job which might actually support their family.
Look up some data, and turn down the Rush morning show.

I wonder how many of the people who propose alternate taxation schemes have actually crunched the numbers (or consulted a reliable unbiased source).
I haven't, so I won't say they are all impossible, but they mostly sound like fantasy to me.

Quote:

to say that you are for higher gas prices means you are not for a free and open market, which requires the gasoline and other products to set their own prices, via supply and demand.

When the US military is assigned to guard pipelines (which is a lot of what they do in both Iraq and Afghanistan), that is an oil company subsidy. 100s of billions of dollars of subsidy, which never get counted for what they really are on the oil companies bank sheets.
Our over-sized military budget is what allows our gas prices to be artificially low (several times lower than what any other net importing nation pays).

If you want to cut taxes, instead of cutting social safety net programs which are a insignificant amount of the budget, start with reducing the military budget to no more than 10% more than the next highest spending country.

Quote:

military is what keeps the enemies that want what we have away.

If we were not exploiting the 3rd world, we wouldn't have so many enemies in the first place. Scandinavia has a higher standard of living than the US but no one is invading there or blowing stuff up.

Next nationalize all health care. Believe it or not, most projections actually show the government would SAVE money by giving free health care to everyone. This is because, as it is health care is the governments 2nd highest expense, but much of that money goes to the shareholders of insurance companies, for-profit hospitals and drug companies, not to actually providing services to sick people.

Then balance the budget. This might mean *gasp* raising taxes! In the long run we have to pay for all those interest payments on our loans. It should go without saying that living on credit is unsustainable, but for decades conservatives have ignored that obvious truth by pretending that that "growth" would absorb the deficit. It didn't.

Quote:

Alright pal, why attack the wealthy? They are those that create wealth. Without wealthy people (not rich), there is no capital to create jobs and continue functioning as an effective entity on this planet.

You got it right about the rich inheriting their wealth, but the idea that the wealthy contribute their fair share is a stretch too. If you own a factory, you aren't creating the jobs. If that same factory was a coop, the jobs would still be there, the same work would get done, the only difference is you wouldn't be able to skim some of the profits off the top. If a few people didn't hoard most of the resources the same capital would exist, it would just be spread out a little more. If a landlord hadn't bought a particular house, the house would still be there for people to live in. They aren't actually providing anything. If someone invests in the stock market they have not actually produced anything of value. Anyone who uses money to make more money is a leech on society, just as much as welfare recipients. Only differences are they live alot better than any of us, and we glorify them.

Quote:

Government has 0 provisions for interfering in the market, and Adam Smith would tell you you're always worse off when they do.

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.''
"The pretense that corporations are necessary for better government of the trade is without any foundation. "
-Adam Smith.
His argument against government was the EXACT OPPOSITE of modern libertarians. He was opposed to the corporation as something which interfered with the free market. To Smith the market consisted of INDIVIDUALS freely trading with one another, not companies, and certainly not corporations. He was opposed to government because of its tendency to protect and support corporations.

In the past 20 years GDP has grown steadily. Over that same period (accounting for inflation) median income has decreased. This disparity is because all of the increase has gone to a very small portion of society. The reason for the historic levels of inequality is a direct result of deregulation under our last 4 presidents, Regan and Jr. in particular.
Its the ideas that the wealthy must be more valuable to society and any increase in economic activity is inherently good which lead to the state we are in now.
The top 10% holds more wealth than the entire 90% added together.
Those 10% don't have to work, because they can invest instead.
The rich have not been working harder. US multinational corporations have just been able to consolidate and outsource at unprecedented levels.
This is the modern reality of the free market and deregulation.
It hurts American workers.
It hurts the middle and working classes (ie the vast majority of the population).
It hurts the federal budget.
It hurts 3rd world economies which are forced via predatory lending and threat of military action to open their markets.
It benefits one group, and one group only. Those who have the resources to live entirely off of stock dividends. They make us believe our interests coincide with their own by pointing out our 401k is in the stock market. However if not for their manipulation of the economy for their own benefit we could have higher wages and less inflation, less taxes and more stability.

Consider the Great Depression
Consider CA electricity market after deregulation (prices soared, service became terrible)
Consider Enron
Consider the recent bank bail out

Ford likes to ***** about the costs of union benefits, but they paid their CEO $21 million in a year they did terribly, lost money, begged the government for help. Meanwhile Toyota, which is doing far better in every way, paid their CEO less that 1 million. Follow that trend for the assistant CEO, the CFO, the president of the company, the president of the board, the lead project manager, etc.
The reality speaks for itself. The trickle down theory does not work.

Quote:

...gas is an essential...

Why do people, even here, keep claiming gas is a necessity?
Food, water, clean air, a place to live, shelter from weather extremes, these are necessities.
People in places with no cars survive.
Before cars were invented, people lived.
Cars are no more a necessity than cable TV.
This is a free country. Nobody forces you to live in the suburbs.
Actually, I lived in the suburbs for a year, in a place where it snowed all winter and rained all summer. I didn't have a car.

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For decades they've been preaching conservation, handing out rebates for "energy star" appliances and the like, and what has that gotten us? Double the household electricity use of 20 years ago?!?

As it happens, back 40-50 years ago utilities were literally giving away tank based water heaters just so that people would use more electricity and gas (solar and instant water heaters already existed back then) so they could sell more. The campaign was extremely successful.
Its only fairly recently that utilities haven't been able to keep up with demand and environmental concerns made people rethink the idea that maximizing consumption is inherently good, and began trying to persuade people to conserve.
However, even "energy star" rated appliances consistently use far more power than we have the technology for. Consider how often a fridge has its hot coils on the bottom, where the heat will just rise back into it, instead of on top. They do it cause it looks nicer.
Even so, individual appliances have been getting more efficient, but Americans have been upsizing everything for for the past 20 years. The average new home size is more than twice what it was 30 years ago. That means twice the area to heat and cool and light. TVs are bigger, sound systems louder, computers many times faster. If the technology is 2 times as efficient, but everyone uses 4 times more of it, you double your energy demand. Just like with cars. Engine technology is far better than it was back then, but car companies and consumer choose to use 100% of those gains to make cars faster and larger.

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I promise you what will happen is states that have strict emissions and specialty registrations will see a sizable exodus to states that have no such policies

uh... the car companies have been making CA specific models due to additional air quality restrictions for decades. Either that or they just make all of their cars to CA specifications to avoid having to make 2 versions. No one is exodus-ing away. Unless they are selling at a loss, companies aren't going to overlook any market.

Quote:

Still wanna trade?

Quote:

(progressive taxes heavily burden the rich)

If you tax someone with a $10,000 income 10%, he is left with $9,000
If you tax someone with a $100,000 income 80%, he is left with $20,000

Even at that rate, the person with the high income is doing far better, and is "burdened" less.
And of course in the real world the higher tax brackets are stepped and only apply to the income above the threshold, not the entire amount, (so a 80% income tax would only be 80% of the money above some amount, say 90k - the first 10k would still be taxed at the 10% rate. In other words, he would keep much more than just 20k at that rate)

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Unless someone drives more than 100 miles a day every day changing vehicles in light of fuel expenses is never an economical decision

No one has to go out and buy a new car tomorrow. Eventually people buy new cars. When they do, then they can buy a smaller one. They save money upfront AND save money in gas.
This could take some time, but the idea is to look long term at the big picture. If we act only for the moment we will regret it tomorrow. Individuals and corporations often can't see beyond instant gratification, and that's (hopefully and in theory) one of the useful things that large scale organization (ie government) can do.

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[key points of the response to the above are included in my next reply]

Quote:

the number one expenditure of government is welfare spending, which you failed to mention completely.

Budget of the United States Government: Historical Tables Fiscal Year 2009

Define "Welfare"
If you choose to count SS as "welfare", maybe, but the benefits people get from it are directly proportional to what they paid in. Same goes for unemployment. If you don't work, you don't get social security or unemployment. These things are revolving funds which legally the government doesn't get to spend (although they do anyway). Part of the category of human services also includes education. Education is an investment that pays for itself by having an educated workforce. Veteran's benefits, which should properly be classified as military expense, are also lumped here.
Most of all, medical payments is counted under the same category, which I addressed earlier, and is by far the 2nd biggest sub-component after SS.
Yes, if you count all of those things as "welfare", then it adds up to more than the military.
But if you are looking only at direct AFDC payments to poor families, it is less than 1% of the budget.
If you have a source that says otherwise, please feel free to share it.

Quote:

Military spending only makes up 1/3 of all government spending. With the expenditures lately. . .its not even remotely close to 1/3.

If you remove SS (which is a trust fund, not a government handout) from the budget, "national defense" come to well over 1/3. Check the numbers at the link I provided above if you don't want to take my word for it.

Quote:

Ford never asked for any money. You lose all credence when you post overt fallacies.

Ford's bailout plea to include pledge for smaller cars

Ford CEO on bailout opposition: Past is past - CNN.com

Quote:

Back to the top, you can throw all of those things the government provides away and allow for the private sector to pick them up. Bodyguards pick up where police forces are useless.

So, in other words the wealthy should be protected, and no one else should. I didn't say it was unviable.
What I said was, in the absence of law, body guard = mercenary. Whoever has money can buy guns and take what ever they want from those who can't afford a mercenary force. I'm not saying it is impossible, I'm saying that isn't a world any of us want to live in.

Quote:

Look at situations in which there is no military to speak of. Rich families in Mexico have their own para-military body guard service. They pack automatics body armor and bullet proof vehicles. They don't hold trials and they don't take prisoners.

Yeah. Exactly. That's my point. Besides, there IS a military and police force in Mexico. The Federales carry sub machine guns and ride around in pickups with 6 guys in the back.

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A justice system that provides quick and immediate punishment to murders, thieves and what the CIA classifies as "abrasive" crimes or "assualt" crimes typically has fewer of them and it costs far less. I don't have to hold criminals in jail for months before trial feeding them and I don't have to put up with appeals and other issues. If someone breaks into my home there will not be a trial. I might have to go into a civil case with their surviving family but as I live in the south I know my local judges will throw it out and the appelate judges will also throw it out.

Sounds like someone hates America. There is this thing called the "constitution" - they put it there for a reason. Thing is, sometimes innocent people are accused accidentally. You do realize that, right? And sometimes people accuse the innocent on purpose, out of spite, or to draw attention away from themselves. Trials are not to coddle criminals. Trials are to determine the facts as best as possible so that the wrongly accused aren't punished.

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Adam Smith did not argue that the government was out to protect the poor from the rich. If you read your quote again he said that government is necessary to protect those who have(corporations) from those who dont(employees).

He didn't say it was "necessary". He said that's what actually happens. He was not suggesting it was a good thing.

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At Smiths time the East India Trading company were a racketeering organization that stole from honest traders by imposing their own taxes on their goods so that they wouldn't be attacked by privateers. Smith was against this practice.

Exactly. He further suggested that corporations only exist because governments create them, and that they are inherently anti competitve.

Quote:

He obviously was not against a corporation in and of itself because he had his own.

An individual can not have a corporation. Their is a difference between a corporation and a company.

I won't repeat all the points about how libertarians distort Smith's work, because someone has already done it for me:
The Betrayal of Adam Smith
SimpleUtahMormonPolitics.com: Adam Smith Hated Corporations

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Jacob do you honestly believe that taxing one person 80% is fair and one person 10%?

That was an example to show the numbers involved.

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If you do I'm leaving Ecomodder. What you are saying is. . .because I work 2 full time jobs and 2 part time jobs I should only be allowed to have 2x as much as someone who works never and gets a welfare check? I put in 80 hours a week(2 full times) I mow for 6 hours a week and I work for a neighbor for about 5 hours a week. You are saying that some slackass that works 0 hours deserves the same amount of money I get when I work vastly more hours than he does(90 compared to 0 and he gets the same amount as me)?

That's not what I am saying at all. First of all, someone who works 0 hours pays 0 taxes, no matter what the tax rate is. Someone who works 2 (or 4) jobs likely does not make that much per hour (or else why would they be working so much?) and so isn't going to be in a top tax braket no matter what.
What I am saying is NOONE earns a million dollars a year through working. It can't be done. You have to understand just how rich the rich are. There was a guy who owned a chain of casinos who made one million dollars an hour on average for a year. He didn't have to work. He added nothing of value to society. He didn't build the casinos. He didn't even pay to have most built, he bought them. So he didn't earn that money, which means he didn't "deserve" any of it. Bill Gates took open source (free) software, made a few minor changes, and patented it. He was not an innovator. He was a predatory businsess man who made exclusive deals with hardware manufacturers in order to form a monopoly. Now he pays other people to come up with (often inferior) software, and he gets to skim some of the profits. He is not creating jobs. If Microsoft weren't there, those same people would be working at smaller companies.

The market does not assign wages based on how valuable the work done is to society. Consider an ad company executive. The ad company has big clients which don't make the best or cheapest product, but have momnetum on their side. The ad companies job is to convince people to buy their products. This in no way betters society as a whole, but its valuable to the corporation that hired them. So they make big bucks. Meanwhile someone who does a job that actually creates something valuable, say the day laborer that builds a house, a auto plant assembly line guy, a public school teacher, makes a tiny fraction of what the ad guy makes.

Damn straight I think people who work hard for little pay should be taxed less than someone who makes their money on the stock market, or by being a landlord, or any other job where you make a lot of money without doing any actual work!
I think you should pay less taxes.
I think anyone who makes over 200k a year or has more than 2 million in assets should pay more taxes.

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[several less relevant posts]

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Quote:

I'm somewhat looking at it as likely as a small business owner.

Laws which help corporations and the wealthy hurt small business owners.

Quote:

The moment someone says they want 60% of my income I'm working to profit you not me and I'm going Galt to get under your tax bracket and I won't make a dime more.

Tax rates apply to a bracket of income. a 60% tax bracket does not mean they take 60% of your income. It means they take 60% of what you make over a certain amount.
It a bit like people saying its not worth in to win a lottery because the government takes 2/3rds. That means you keep 1/3. Thats better than not having 1/3.
If you don't want to work anymore because you feel its too high a rate, fine. Why is that a problem?

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Our military is very streamlined as far as how it manages cost effectiveness.

I won't dispute that, because I know nothing about it. I am saying its total size is unnecessary, regardless of how efficient it is. It is also the largest single expense, and so where we could save the most.

Quote:

And honestly do you want them cutting money from the system that protects you

What are they protecting me from? The "terrorists" want to steal my old 1983 truck? They want to force me, personally, to become Muslim? We have only had one foreign terrorist attack here - ever. The last time a country attacked us was at Pearl Harbor.
Our military budget is 5 times larger than the 2nd highest country in the world. We have nukes. We have unsurpassed technology. We are capable of doing more with a dollar of spending on military than any 2nd or 3rd world country (read China and the Middle East). I can see no justification for spending as much as the entire rest of the world combined unless we plan to literally invade every country in the world at the same time.
The military budget is about imperialism, diplomacy via unspoken threat, predatory free trade, and protecting corporate interests abroad. To tie this back to the original thread, the taxes you pay is what keeps our gas prices so low (again, US troops protecting pipelines in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

Quote:

or from the system that allows people to sit around and do nothing?

I already addressed this. 1) AFDC makes up about 1% of the budget (vs over 33% for the military). Cutting it won't make a dent in government spending. 2) welfare recipients can not sit around doing nothing. Finding work is MANDATORY. If you aren't actively looking, you get cut off. There is no exemption for students. I know this because my mother was cut off when she, a single mother, was working towards a masters degree from UC Berkeley and refused to cut classes to attend their job training seminars. No matter what happens, they cut you off after 2 years.

Quote:

If a private sector had to make a road its like a nuclear power plant, its very expensive up front and it takes a good bit of time to pay for it, but after that its dirt cheap.

The ancient Roman and German roads you mentioned were all built by government.
No nuclear plant has ever been built that was not heavily government subsidized. Private industry will not go into something with such a high initial investment which takes such a long time to show any return. Why would they, when there are so many other more profitable opportunities? A corporation is not concerned with what happens in 400 years. It is concerned with the quarterly report and shareholder dividends.

Quote:

Social security is a ponzi scheme. Its not an investment. I have several relatives now drawing social and they are going to draw far more than they ever put in even with inflation and whatever else.

An investment means you can draw more than you put in. Its called interest. In addition, baby boomers not-withstanding, it is generally a valid assumption that there will be more workers each year than the one before, so the pool should consistently grow.

Quote:

If you fired all the bureacrats, didn't pay all the politicians

I posted a link to federal spending. You can check exactly how much is spent on various things, and therefor how much could be saved by cutting any particular thing.

Quote:

and just made the tax code simple(and fired all IRS agents)

see example above of what happens with a flat tax.

Quote:

you would be taking one huge leap towards reducing deficits. If you then took another leap and cut any form of social safety net systems

Good way to create a whole lot of desperate people who will do anything to survive. You can either spend a little on education, job training, unemployment, and healthcare, or spend a bunch more on police and prisons. This has nothing to do with morality or personal responsibility, it is just a straight forward realistic cost/benefit analysis.

Places with more of a social safety net have lower crime.

Quote:

the private sector could do everything else more cheaply.

I am not totally anti-private sector. From what I have read education would be greatly improved and the costs reduced by privatization. However with healthcare, every other 1st world nation has universal healthcare, and most have both higher quality care and more simplicity, yet the US spends more per person. There are some things the private sector is good for, and some it isn't.

Quote:

can make a profit much easier and are able to sell their products for less.

why would anyone sell their products for less?

Quote:

Some things in effect will cost the same whether its a tax or a toll, but I would bank on the service always being superior(go to a DMV).

haha, granted!

Quote:

In some cases though(maybe in alot of cases) the toll would be less than the tax and the service would still be superior.

I would agree with "some".
But I don't think money is the only issue.
The real reason government is necessary is the phenomenon called the "tragedy of the commons"
The classic example is a lake open to the public. It has 1000 fish. If everyone just takes 1 every once in a while, no problem. They breed and replenish. But how long is "once in a while?" How many people are there? What if I take 2, one for me and one for my family? No one person is responsible for taking an unreasonable amount, but sooner or later, there are no more fish.
The free market can not responsibly allocate a finite amount of resources in the long term w/ no external regulation. The free market leads to massive environmental degradation, massive wealth inequalities, and a disregard of the value of anything other than money.
Consider the formula from "fight club", for decideing whether to do a recall for a fatal design flaw:
"Take the number of vehicles in the field, (A), and multiply it by the probable rate of failure, (B), then multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement, (C). A times B times C equals X...If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
This is a real job. There is actually a specific dollar value attached to a human life (if I remember correctly, it is generally around 2 million)

I don't mean to say I support everything about the current US political system - not by a long shot.
I just think total deregulation and total trust in a market economy will make things worse than they already are.

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[The response from the other guy]
You said why would anyone sell their goods for less(I'm not quoting because the quotes are getting long lol and I don't want to snip).

The reason is because I am greedy. I see you have a business that makes 40% on its product(you used to make 10% and now with lower taxes you make an extra whatever percent), but I have a crappy job. I take out a loan get some investors and start a business model doing exactly what you do, but I sell mine for 75% of what you do so I make only 30% profit per item. All of your customer switch suppliers because I am cheaper. You undercut me and this continues until someone like walmart shows up and sells the product for .01% profit but sells trillions of items. Thats Free market.

And it is beautiful. If there is enough money to be had the single greatest force in human innovation and production comes to play. Greed. Beyond a shadow of a doubt its the most powerful force on the planet. Its predictable and powerful.

If there is enough room to make a profit better than what I am doing now I will do it. So if that means undercutting my competitors because my business just became cheaper to do and driving all their customers into my queue well then thats what I am going to do.

It is natural selection at work. The leanest most efficient wolf will be the one to survive. The bloated fat pig will be the first one eaten, because its too slow, inefficient and has too much excess weight to rapidly restructure its survival patterns.

If you believe in evolution you have to believe in a free market. Yes there will be "robber barons"(I prefer Captains of Industry) but there will always be some clever little fellow(Aptera vs GMC) who can outmaneuver you because he's not carrying baggage and your profit margins got wide enough for him to squeeze in between you and the customers. It might not be a big profit compared to your business. . .but what matters is, is it more profit than he had working for someone else or running a competition with some other industry.

Every other country in the world has universal health care. Ask someone who lived in a Foreign country if they like it. I have family(in-laws) that lived and grew up in Italy. He moved here married into my family and loves Healthcare in the US depsite the fact it comes out of his paycheck. Thats my anecdotal evidence, and I've seen a few interviews with Canadians that much prefer US healthcare. I'm sure people will speak out about it, but all I can say is I have been to a French Hospital(friend got hit by a car while in Paris) and it wasn't impressive by any means. It was far less technical than a visit to MSHA(Mountain States Health Alliance, Johnson City's Hospital) or my own personal experiences with surgery here in the US.

Looking at the fight club example. . .there is always a cost of human life. Free Market systems just tell it like it is. They don't try and hide it behind systems to make everyone feel comfortable with it. Free Market is about market value. I know you will agree with me that each person has a value. If you don't think everyone puts a value on anyone else think about it this way. You have a sniper and terrorists plan to kill some hostages. Your sniper has to chose which terrorist to kill first, the terrorist with his gun pointed at 10 civilians or the one pointed at 1 civilian. After the first shot there are no guarantees the other can be killed before he fires on his targets. Obviously you shoot the terrorist guarding the 10 people because 10 people are more important than one. If you have one person in the hospital and it will cost 10 mil to make them completely healthy and live to die of old age and you have 10 people that only need 1 million each. . .what do you do? Free Market dictates you spend 10 mil and save 10 people. Universal healthcare by definition(provide the aide people need) you spend money on whoever gets there first. So 10 mil boy gets there and the other 10 people die while waiting for the funds to do their transplants.

Market Value is true blue transparence. We don't like to admit that we would just assign a value to someone's life because that seems shallow. . .but we do. A doctor who is capable of saving lives through medicine or a painter? You have to chose. Market value and Free economy dictates you save the doctor because directly he can save more lives than the painter(assuming he's not a superhero). In anything less than a Free market there is no justification to rescue someone who is dying already rather than a teenager or some young doctor.

In all honesty there are more valuable people than others. Bill Gates has done more for the human race than I have. Bill Gates simply put if I had to chose between which of us existed. . .I would have to chose him. I won't revolutionize the world. You can play "if" history all you like and say that Bill Gates didn't do anything but we don't know, we do know that since he did what he did we arrived here today, whether its his fault we can't say. Free Markets require comfort with perfect honesty, what is something worth to you, what are you willing to do for it?

I prefer completely deregulated Free market because it allows true honesty in market value rather than fixing a price because you feel that some moral induced idea that that product is bad(sin taxes on cigarettes and gas). The product is worth what people will pay for it no more no less, whereas in regulated systems. . .its what you say its worth and who dictates who choses values? what if I get to pick? What if I say you're favorite brand of soda is an unneccesary good because its harmful and got bad flavor(Gas is harmful and not the most efficient mode of transport).

-----------------------------------------

[me again]

Evolution has nothing to do with the free market. We are all the same specie. Nature has no end of examples of individuals within one specie working cooperatively instead of competitively. If you really want to live in survival of the fittest mode, it does not imply the free market. It implies me shoving up at your door with a shot gun and a bullet proof vest, and whichever of us has the most training gets to keep all your stuff.

The WalMart model is beautiful - unless you are one of the local business run under, or one of their employees who now has to take a minimum wage WalMart job, or one of the people who used to supply the local business who is undercut by outsourcing, or the worker in a 3rd world country making 1/2 a cent per hour. What you save as a consumer you lose through repressed wages.
The only people its really beautiful for are the WalMart shareholders.

Your examples of choosing 10 peoples lives over 1 has nothing to do with my example of choosing profit over people's lives.

I disagree that it is ok to knowingly cause the death of anyone because you can make money from it - any amount of money.
Thats not about honesty. Its just a basic level of morality.

You did read my comments about Gates, right? I wasn't making that stuff up. Look it up. You still think he is more valuable than you?

It isn't just an arbitrary application of morality, but a question of democracy. If the market decides everything, than the more money you have (and as someone - I think it was you - pointed out earlier, the very richest often got their money from inheritance) the more influence you have over society.
That is already too true as it is.
Basically, the real result would be a return to serfdom, with the working class (ie you and me) being reduced to peasants.

I said an awful lot you didn't address to claim that I "hung myself" with an argument.
Explain how the market can resolve the tragedy of the commons.

----------------------------------------

[He responds again, basically acknowledging his view is amoral, but that this is the cold hard reality of the world. He expresses faith that the market can solve the tragedy of the commons - that in fact someone can get rich from the threat of environmental destruction itself, but does not offer an explanation of how that might happen. At this point, given that his comments seem to me to be mainly based on faith, I did not continue responding to the specific points, but after having a dream the next morning in which I came up with a very suitable analogy, I closed with the following]

Quote:

the single greatest force in human innovation and production comes to play. Greed.

Here is another incredibly powerful force: the nuclear attraction between protons and neutrons. That force can be harnessed to power aircraft carriers and entire cities. But if it is not very carefully managed and regulated, that same force gets out of control and produces Chernobyl and 3 Mile Island. In some cases its destruction is deliberate, and you have Nagasaki and Hiroshima. In the greed model, you and I are the citizens of Hiroshima, and the top 1% of society is the bomber plane. The Great Depression, CA electricity market after deregulation (prices soared, service became terrible), Enron, the recent bank bail out - these are all examples of what happens when you give up government control in favor of totally free markets. Everybody ends up losing.

Capitalists, libertarians, and anarchists; oh my!

2009-06-25T20:37:00.000-07:00

I have been arguing with anarchists and libertarians lately.

I can not think of a good way to consolidate my arguments without the context of responding to something specific, so it occurred to me that, given how much I've already written, it would be simple to just use what I already have.

I feel that given how much influence these ideas have had on the direction the US has gone in over the past few decades, and that we are the most powerful nation on Earth, this topic is one of the most important social issues there is.

Because there is a lot, I am breaking it up into several pieces.

The first (actually the last chronologically, but the first I am posting) was a blog essay which an anarchist friend sent me a link to attacking democracy. (He mentioned the caveat of not supporting the market economy. I have already written before here about how a market economy will naturally arise in the absence of government regulation.)
While the arguments here are not necessarily universal among anarchists, libertarians, and capitalists, some of them are common, or are at least similar.

I don't have the responses here, but that's mainly because there really weren't any substantial responses, just general insults and links to other people's writing. If you are interested, you can read both the original essay and all of the comments here:
http://libertariananarchy.com/2008/12/against-democracy/

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When I use the word “democracy”, I am using it literally. You do not vote “for someone” under democracy. What the author is making points against is a “republic”. Specifically the US version of republic (no one else has ever fought wars to “make the world safe for democracy”) In fact, what is really meant when politicians when they say that is making the world safe for free markets – the very thing the author is supporting – because open foreign markets (ie not regulated by each foreign countries government) means cheap labor and goods fo the US.
Further, democracy is a political system, not an economic system. The author treats the two as if they were interchangeable. They are not. The economy can be one of the things which government regulates.

Majority rule does not imply violence anymore than any decision making process does.
If you are in class, and you have a group project, and each person has a different idea of what to do it on, no student fears his classmate will attack him for his opinion. They may argue about it, but ultimately which ever idea is most popular will win out. There is no coercion or threat involved.
That is democracy.
Not everyone gets their way, but it is understood that it is a group project, and things have to be decided or else everyone is going to fail.

The argument that anything which applies to one circumstance must apply to every possible circumstance is stupid and i am reluctant to even respond to it, but for the sake of argument, I will anyway.
In order to say that riding a bike to the store is good, you must say riding it everywhere is good. It is not good to ride a bike from your bed to the living room, nor is it good to ride it from Oakland to Japan. Since it isn’t good in every imaginable scenario, it must not be good for anything at all.

Democracy isn’t about the majority getting to “outvote” any minority about everything, its about an equitable way to make society wide decisions that need to be made for the benefit of everyone which the free market simply will not provide. Things like roads, disaster relief, environmental protection, and health care. Our country is a great example of what happens when you trust health care to the free market. If police and fire services were not public, only the middle class and above would have fires put out or protection from attackers.

A free market society is far from a consensus society.
A free market society means the richer you are the more “votes” you get.
He suggests roads could be maintained privately. There is no model to support that idea. Existing toll roads take decades to pay for themselves (and, incidentally, the toll roads I have been on in Ohio were much worse maintained than average). Bridges never pay for themselves. No company would go into a market with so low a return when there are other options available.
He suggests also that all market interactions be based on contract.
Who enforces those contracts?
How do they enforce them when there is no public court or police?
If courts are private, what stops them from siding with whoever is paying their fees (as we see happen consistently with arbitration companies and which is the reason almost all corporations prefer to use them)

A minimum wage does not force employers to lay off workers.
They could just as easily cut hours of everyone equally. Better yet, the company could be worker owned, in which case they can divide up the amount of thier own labor which was diverted to the managers and owners who do not do any of the actual work yet make far more of the income.
For all the bitching Ford does about employee costs, its CEO made $21 million – in a year they had huge losses and needed government help. Meanwhile Toyota, which is doing far better, paid their CEO less than 1 million.
That 20 million would have gone a long way to paying union wages, health care benefits, or retooling factories to make more efficient cars.
And that is not counting the CFO, the assistant CEO, the president and vice of the board of directors, product managers, or any of dozens of top level manager with million plus annual compensation.
If a company can not afford to provide a living wage to its lowest paid workers, than it is expanding faster than it sustainably can, and it needs to stop.

The authors comments on rent control are ridiculous. He doesn’t bother to give any indication of where people who can’t afford market rates should live. That’s the basic problem with all libertarian theory. It gets around the immorality of it by claiming that anyone who can’t afford, say, the market rate for food or water, must have made bad choices so it is their own fault they are poor so fuck them.
In the real world the rich are rich due to inheritance, the middle class send their kids to private school and college, and poverty is inherited the same way. Under the free market (or anarchy) their is no provision for the poor, the elderly, the disabled, or the abandoned young. Individual charity alone does not have the resources to help these groups.
The solution to rent control is to outlaw all ownership of rental housing.
You should not be able to charge someone just to live on a space on the Earth. You should not be able to make money when you are not actually doing any work. If every rental were put on the market at once, buying a house would become affordable.
I believe land ownership other than the land you yourself live on, for the purpose of profit, is inherently immoral, as is any other way of generating money without producing something of value to society.
If you personally built the house (not put up investment money, but got out there with a hammer and nails) then charge whatever the market will bear. But buying something because you have the capital just to charge someone rent? You are not providing anything of value because the house was already there, and if you didn’t “own” it the same tenants could be living there for free.

If this guy wants to stop voting, great! That means my vote has just a little bit more weight.

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[excerpt from a response to my comment] "Economics is a logical-deductive science and can’t be falsified by empirical data."

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Theory separated from the real world is meaningless and useless.

Anything which is unfalsifiable by empirical data has a special word: “faith”.

Aristotle used logical-deductive reasoning, and made conclusions about gravity. Newton proved them false with empirical data. Aristotle was a brilliant person, and his theories may have been logical, but when reality differs from theory, real science discards the theory.
Something which is purely deductive is not science. A scientific theory has to be able to make real-world predictions given a set of circumstances, and when implementing those circumstances, the predictions observed.

While linguistically no rule may not inherently mean no rules, in the real world, with no one to make rules, no one to enforce them, and no consequences for breaking them, there can be no distinction. In the real world you will never have unanimous consensus on all rules. If you make rules by general (majority) consensus, then that is, by definition, democracy. If rules are followed voluntarily, then they are suggestions, not rules. Its funny that you should point to that article, since I made the same argument that the one here made: the free market and democracy are incompatible.

Many, perhaps even most, public goods can be provided by the market (although not equitably or universally). There are a few that could not. Public streets and sidewalks in a city in front of everyone’s house and business. The modern economy couldn’t function without them, and there is no practical way to toll every single block independently.
Another is the legal system. A arbitration company has no way to enforce the ruling. A private security force, without any police or law, would be indistinguishable from a mercenary force.

Really, I have a much simpler retort.
Four words:
Tragedy of the Commons

We live in a finite world. There is a finite rate of regeneration of renewable resources. A free market does not regulate its rate of consumption, nor does it take into account externalities.
A failure of intelligent long-term regulation will hasten humanities trail along the wake of the yeast in a beer barrel – drowning in the waste of our own gluttony.

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[the person responds that I should read the work of Ludwig von Mises, and again claims that I must not understand economic theory]

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Just because I disagree with it doesn’t mean I am unfamiliar with it.
I actually agree with much of what Mises says, and believe he makes valid points which many on all sides often fail to acknowledge.
I agree entirely with his position on government induced inflation and on patents, for example.
However, he does make some fundamental errors which invalidate some of his conclusions based on them.

Ch1, Acting Man, of Mises book begins with “Human action is necessarily always rational.”
This is demonstratively false.
The only irrefutable action axiom is that humans act. It can not be taken as axiom that humans act rationally in their own long term interests, particularly when the optimal outcome requires a level of individual sacrifice.

In game theory, many situations create an incentive for individuals acting in their own best interest to cause a worse outcome for the group as a whole (which of course includes the individual as well.)
For example: http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=12202559
http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2009/01/06/why-the-secret-to-speedier-highways-might-be-closing-some-roads-the-braess-paradox/

Even assuming individuals acted rationally in any individual moment, they neither take into account the effects of their individual choices aggregated over a large population nor the long-term effects. Because of this, even though as individuals we have the capacity for reason and the ability to make conscious choices, when allowed total freedom as a group we do in fact act the same as yeast.

The tragedy of the commons is a real phenomenon, which holds both in theory and in practice.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/162/3859/1243
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/284/5412/278
Pricing alone does not solve the problem, because it does not take externalties (such as pollution or a finite rate of resource regeneration) into account.

Then again, it is very easy to show that individuals do not even act rationally in the simpler terms of their own personal best interests either. Look at the success of casinos.
It goes far beyond gambling however:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_researches_happiness.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html

Again, something which is purely logical-deductive is not science. It is philosophy at best, and faith at worst (since any deductions must be founded on assumptions about reality – in this case, the ultimate rationality of individual humans).

If you can find an example of law, local roads, or police being provided both efficiently and equitably purely by a market historically, or even describe a scenario in which it could even hypothetically arise, I would be very interested to read about it.

Now, aside from the dependence on individual rationality for faith in the free market, there are additional questions:
Mise does address externalites, for example injuries to employees
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap23sec6.asp
blaming them on market interference by governments which “allow” them to be unaccountable. However, he fails to explain who, in the absence of any government at all, would enforce labor standards, and how. If the problem is caused by a lack of regulation (or “deficient laws”), how would removing all regulations solve the problem? (Later Mises does implicitly acknowledge that this is neccesarily the role of government: “governments are [in a hypothetical ideal world] devoted exclusively to the task of protecting the individual’s life, health, and property against violent and fraudulent aggression.”
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap24sec5.asp).
This then begs questions of the form and structure of said government.

In the same section he makes the exact sort of external valuation of commodities he objects to in the opening chapters (while also showing his own racism) in saying “Many of the richest deposits of various mineral substances are located in areas whose inhabitants are too ignorant, too inert, or too dull to take advantage of the riches nature has bestowed upon them.” This in the context of objecting to government intervention conquest of land/peoples, and claiming war is the result of protectionism.
Even were a government to allow free trade, the dull ignorant natives might still choose not to extract and sell a resource at any price – yet the other nation would still have desire for it, no less than if it were a protectionist policy which kept them from it.
In other words, if a population chooses, for whatever reason, not to utilize a natural resource, it is acceptable, or even ideal, for them to be taken by force by those who would utilize them.

On a similar issue, his solution to the tragedy of the commons is to privatize everything
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap22sec5.asp
Aside from the practical impossibility of privatizing extremely large public resources (the ocean, the atmosphere, a large river (anyone dumping or fishing in their “own” section of river affects everyone downstream of them ) there remains the question of how initial prices of commons are to be set, who they are paid to, and if there is no such entity then how the distribution is to occur.

Mises claims that unemployment (of the employable) would be zero in a purely free-market system
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap35sec2.asp
but offers no evidence, either theoretical or examples, to support it.

He suggests that the alternative to the gross inequalities inherent in capitalism is welfare.
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap35sec1.asp
I won’t argue the merits of welfare for the overall benefit of society here, but instead point out that regulations to ensure equality does not necessitate any form of welfare.
It is possible to eliminate (or at least reduce) inequalities simply by taking steps to level the playing field. A major omission is the issue of inheritance. People who inherent wealth do not earn said wealth by contributing something of value to humanity. They just get lucky in which parents they are born to. Similarly, education, living environment, etc are not in an infants control, and these factors incontrovertibly have a direct effect on the individuals access to the means of wealth generation later in life. This itself is an external privilege, no different from the caste system (which he says restricts the market)

“What those people who ask for equality have in mind is always an increase in their own power to consume. In endorsing the principle of equality as a political postulate nobody wants to share his own income with those who have less. When the American wage earner refers to equality, he means that the dividends of the stockholders should be given to him. He does not suggest a curtailment of his own for the benefit of those 95 per cent of the earth’s population whose income is lower than his.”
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap35sec3.asp
Actually, that IS what I suggest. The American middle class consumes far more than it’s share of world resources, at the expense of the rest of the world, (upheld only by having a military budget equal to the rest of the world combined).

“Many who are aware of the undesirable consequences of capital consumption are prone to believe that popular government is incompatible with sound financial policies. They fail to realize that not democracy as such is to be indicted, but the doctrines which aim at substituting the Santa Claus conception of government for the night watchman conception.” - Ludwig von Mises
Exactly.

“Even those who look upon the inequality of wealth and incomes as a deplorable thing, cannot deny that it makes for progressing capital accumulation. And it is additional capital accumulation alone that brings about technological improvement, rising wage rates, and a higher standard of living.”
I do not deny those. I question whether they are ends to themselves past the point where a society has obtained security in the basic necessities of life, and if they are in fact so desirable to be worth the trade off of gross (unearned) inequalities.
Realize that I accept that inequalities will exist due to differences in how hard a person works or how innovative they are.
It comes down, ultimately, to a moral issue.

And it was morality which the original blog entry was commenting on, not the method by which a society can most raise its average standard of living.

All this time we have been discussing only economics, while you ignored my points on democracy – as much the original focus as economics.

In my first comment I made a simple example: 3 or more people need to work together to get something done. If they don’t come to an agreement, there are negative consequences for everyone. It is not possible to have unanimity in every possible instance. If one or more people agree to go along with the majority consensus, that is democracy. It does not require coercion or threat of force.
This same situation, on the level of a society making large scale decisions, is all true democracy is.
It might be contrary to a maximization of wealth generation that a society collectively decides to enact an economically restrictive law. However, that is their choice.
In fact, in both the group and any true democracy, no one is forced to go along – however, if they do not, they can be ejected from the group because their association by other members is voluntary. As such, if someone objects to the laws of the US, they are free to move permanently to another country.

Bakari's introduction!

2009-04-27T20:57:00.001-07:00

My first step is to figure out this new interface.
If you are reading this apparently I figured it out.

I have been told to write a short bio.

Hello all!
My name is Bakari Kafele (ok, I just misspelled my own name and had to erase and retype it - twice! Maybe should be getting ready for bed instead of typing) but I often go by Jacob Aziza on the internet.
I am not really a writer. I am just some guy who writes stuff sometimes. I don't have any sort of schedule or goal, and no interest in becoming better or more coherent. I do think I occasionally have a sensible idea or two, and enjoy sharing those ideas. Also, this is my one form of self-expression; about as close as I come to art.

I have done a lot of different things for income over the past decade; bicycle messenger, lab assistant, armed security guard, medical research subject, factory worker, carnie... the list is at least 30 long. I have finally settled, running a small independent certified green moving hauling and handyman service, as well as working part time for a non-profit bikeshop.

I consider myself an environmentalist. I lean towards liberal, but I think in some ways fascism is the only way to deal with the tragedy of the commons. I am a businessman (with an econ degree) who opposes capitalism. I live in an RV. I have a big truck, a small motorcycle, 3 and a half bicycles, a good pair of skates, and a wheelchair. I was married for almost 7 years (in practice at least, legally only for the last 2 of them), and started dating for the first time in my life at the age of 28. I have a cat named Fushi who is sleeping on my lap as I write this. Sometimes I call him Chairman Meow.

I started blogging as a way to keep me away from the Craigslist RnR and discussion groups, where I was reading and posting compulsively for a while. Sometimes I get ideas stuck in my brain. Then I have to write them down in order to get them out of there.
I have opinions on lots of stuff. I try to be objective. I try to shake up universally accepted but totally unfounded assumptions. If not for being totally obscure and unknown, I bet I could generate a fair amount of controversy, but it is always for the sake of stimulating thought, and almost always something I really do believe to be accurate.
I may add to or change this in the future. Or I may not.

Beth's Introduction

2009-04-01T22:43:00.000-07:00

So, I work as an educator; I write and think a lot about issues related to that field. In this blog, I intend to engage in a discussion with my co-authors (as well as, hopefully, readers) about social issues: both my own topics of interest and theirs. I'll work on writing more regularly, as well as more thoughtfully and clearly. Also, I'd like to find a way to incorporate the voice I have in my fictional writing in my works of nonfiction: because truth cannot be found in facts without heart. As most of my projects are, this one is ambitious. I hope that, a year from now, it will serve as a testament to my growth and maturity as a writer.

I'm gonna keep this brief because I don't really know what to say, and to be honest I don't really know what I'm doing. Please feel free, as a reader, to say whatever you like in response to my posts (and I'm sure this is true of the other authors in this blog). In fact, I implore you to. It may take a village to raise a child, but I doubt that village disappears once the child comes of age. Be my village.