Tag Archives: culture

The Utility of Automation

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The International Longshoremen’s Association is demonstrating that, in spades, with its strike and its intent on inflicting maximum damage to our nation and our economy. Here’s the ILA MFWIC, Harold Daggett:

We’re going to show these greedy bastards you can’t survive without us!

Pretty nice business you got there. Pay up, suckers.

People are going to sit up and realize how important longshoremen jobs are. They won’t be able to sell cars. They won’t be able to stock malls. They won’t be able to do anything in this country without my f—ing people.

Automation will make such threats to business’ ability to function at all destructions of the past.

In today’s world, I’ll cripple you[.]

That’s Daggett’s response to speculation that the Biden/Harris administration might invoke Taft-Hartly to force the union workers back to their jobs. In the process of crippling our nation, he’s said he’d include slow-walking every step of every task.

Oh, and robots won’t hold out for a 77% pay raise as a precondition to entering into any negotiations at all.

The sooner this union is replaced with automatic facilities at the docks, the better off we’ll all be—including those dockworkers.

“I Don’t Believe in Taft-Hartley”

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Those were Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s words when a reporter asked him if he’d intervene in the now in progress International Longshoremen’s Association strike against East and Gulf Coast ports.

Q    Mr. President, will you intervene in the dockworkers strike if they go on strike on Tuesday?
THE PRESIDENT:  No.
Q    Why not?
THE PRESIDENT:  Because there’s collective bargaining, and I don’t believe in Taft-Hartley.

Taft-Hartley authorizes a President to intervene in strikes that create a national emergency—such as, for instance, a strike that shuts down all of our ports on the East and Gulf Coasts, a strike that thereby cuts imports of food, vehicles, heavy machinery, construction materials, [and] chemicals as well as cutting off critical supply chain imports needed for those and for other products all across our economy, which is still in a fragile state, for all the headline numbers. The strike also cuts off all our exports to trading partners, friends, and allies that would leave from those ports. Those exports include products like oil and LNG destined for Europe, whose economies are in a fragile state from the reduced energy availability due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

This is Biden is proclaiming his disdain for a law he’s sworn to enforce. That disdain is consistent with his disdain for immigration and border control laws and, by extension, for our laws in general.

This is the Party that wants to reign over us for the next four, and more, years.

Self-Sustaining

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Elon Musk wants to get a self-sustaining colony going on Mars in his lifetime—his current goal is to get that started in the next four years with crewed flights, albeit not yet with colonists along. I agree with him in the goal of a self-sustaining colony and with his rationale—that getting off planet in a sustainable way using only the resources available on the second (and further) planets is critical to the survivability of homo sapiens.

I have questions, though.

What will be the long-term effect of living lifetimes in Mars’ gravity field, which is roughly 38% that of Earth’s? What effect would that great difference have on human (and food animal) gestation?

At the very bottom of human metabolism, of Earth-adapted metabolism in general, are a suite of minerals that plants, animals, essential bacteria need. Many of these are used in trace amounts only, but they seem to be critical. Will all of these minerals be present on Mars? What will be the effect, even if the minerals are present in some amount, on the bacteria on which all the other life depends, and on the plants on which all the animals depend?

And one more question: say a self-sustaining colony has been a going concern for some number of generations. With those generations’ adaptation (focusing here solely on the human population) to Mars’ gravity and to that planets’ mineral suite—especially in the latest generations there—will those folks ever be able to come back to Earth and live and operate in our much higher gravity field? Will those folks even still be homo sapiens, or will they be something different—homo mars? It seems likely the two populations still would be capable of interbreeding, much like homo sapiens with homo neanderthalensis and with denisova hominin.

Getting sustainably off planet will facilitate our ability to survive natural disasters and our own machinations, and thereby extend the life of homo sapiens as a species. But evolution won’t be stopped by getting off planet. That will only generate new pressures that guide evolution, new pathways for evolution to follow. And that includes the evolution of homo sapiens, even here on Earth.

A Hard Question

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It has a simple answer; unfortunately, it also has a gaslighting answer.

A San Francisco shoplifter was fatally shot in the end game of a fight with a store security guard who was trying to recover the merchandise being shoplifted. The headline and the first clause of the subheadline ask the question and gaslightingly answer it:

A Shoplifter Gets Shot Stealing Candy at Walgreens. Who’s to Blame?
More than a year after the killing, the official answer is no one….

The article went into many pixels worth of description of the event, but the question posed in the headline never was seriously answered. The perfectly straightforward, utterly simple answer to the headline question is: the shoplifter is to blame. The shoplifter even had two opportunities through which to avoid the outcome. His first, and most important, opportunity was to not have shoplifted in the first place.

His second opportunity was to surrender the stolen goods when confronted by the security guard instead of fighting with him.

But even in this city’s pretense of tightening shoplifting laws, the emphasis remains on holding the criminal blameless.

Aww, You Poor Babies

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Baby Boomers are at grandparenting age, but their children aren’t having so many children of their own, so the Boomers aren’t getting to be grandparents. They’re not happy about it, either.

It’s true enough that our nation’s birthrate is well below the rate necessary to maintain, much less grow, our nation’s population, and that’s having detrimental effects on our economy and our ability to support Baby Boomers and subsequent generations of retirees in their dotage. It also makes us more dependent on immigration to fill our labor gaps.

But that doesn’t make women their parents’ baby making machines for the sake of those parents’ wishes to have grandchildren.

Professor Rachel Margolis of the University of Western Ontario:

Almost everyone grew up with at least one grandparent, and when you grow up with a grandparent around, you think about that as part of family life[.]

There’s a hint there. Children no longer want their parents living with them, for a variety of reasons both good and bad. Parents no longer want to live with their children, also for a variety of reasons both good and bad. One outcome of that is 74-year-old Ann Brenoff, whose children have no plans to have children:

I want to tell family stories to my grandkids. I want them to have memories of me. I don’t think it will happen. It’s selfish, I know.

That family life was an ideal environment for passing on family lore and for creating memories that include grandparents, especially so for the grandchildren. That family life also was instrumental in providing the mutual support of adult children for (grand)parents and vice versa along with the large advantages for grandchildren from growing up in three-generation households. Now, it’s supplanted by increasing dependency on charity, or government, or nursing homes and “retirement communities” in lieu of “family” support while actual family falls by the wayside.

For future reference (particularly today’s generation of child-bearing age, and the generation just entering that age): you want the part of family life that is grandchildren, then act like you still want to be part of a family and not like you want grandchildren as your personal entertainment. Do that from the moment you have your own children and revive a sense of family responsibility, instead of inculcating, however sub rosa, an attitude of gotta get off on my own as soon as my children are out of the house, and gotta get out on my own as soon as I’ve left my parents’ house.

You bet it’s selfish to want grandkids just for your personal entertainment.