The Way the Future Blogs

 

If you’ve ever wondered why Congress seems to be populated almost exclusively by millionaires, wonder no more. They get their wealth from investments. Unlike you and me, though, they don’t speculate in a stock unless they know — not “think” but know, positively and at once — whether the stock is going to go up or down.

How do they get this knowledge? Why, just by doing what we pay them a salary to do: by writing laws that increase the stock’s tax burden, in which case the stock’s price goes down, or ease it somewhat, whereupon it goes up. That is what could be called Investing for Dummies, because you really don’t need a high IQ to make a lot of money that way, and it’s fairly legal.

Is it honest, though? Well, no, it isn’t exactly honest. But do you know of any Congressman who doesn’t do it?

There are a few, and there are a larger number who, at least, don’t make their money the easy way by simply selling the information to outside investors. But if you were in such a position, how long would it be before you yourself decided to become a millionaire?

Shrimp farmed near Golconda, Ill. (Photo by Leah A. Zeldes.)

A few months ago, in the interests of full disclosure, we published a gourmet recipe for lobster bisque which may have made it unlikely that some of our readers will ever eat lobster bisque again. We now turn our attention to shrimp, perhaps the fastest-growing foodstuff we obtain from the seas in this 21st Century of ours.

If you’re not eating a lot more shrimp in your family’s diet these days you are out of step with the rest of the world. Shrimp are not only as tasty as all get-out and a great source of protein but they have proved beautifully easy to farm; over the last few decades the world’s farmed shrimp production has grown from under 100,000 tons a year to well over 3,000,000.

That is, it’s easy if you don’t trouble yourself about “externals” — that is to say, that sometimes large class of business costs that businessmen don’t usually worry much about, since they aren’t the ones who have to pay the bill. (For example, smoke damage to public health or fish-killing runoff from old-fashioned factories. See my essay on the subject, “Fossil Fuels and Bad Bookkeepimg.”)

In the case of the shrimp farms, almost all of which are set up in warm climates on the shore of a saltwater bay, the two biggest externals are ocean pollution (China’s coastal waters receive 4 billion tons of wastewater from industry every year — and 43 billion tons from shrimp farms) and destruction of mangrove forests, which are cut down to provide sites for the shrimp farms. (A bad business tactic. Those mangrove forests are where many kinds of food fish avoid predators in their earliest youth. Absent the forests, the baby fish die.)

Some of the higher externals are the costs that all us animals have to pay — shrimp, mighty elephants, cuddly kittens and you and me. That is, we eat and therefore from time to time we have to, excuse the expression, poop.

You might think that for shrimp that couldn’t matter much. They aren’t very big. In fact, they’re what you might call shrimpy, not that much bigger than my thumb.

But there are a lot of them, you see. And they all keep themselves busy all day long, eating and pooping, and the end result (sorry) is tons and tons of shrimp feces that have to be somehow disposed of.

Something needed to be done, right?

Something was. But before I tell you what that something is, I have a suggestion. If you enjoy dropping in on a Red Lobster on one of their all-the-shrimp-you-can-eat days — and especially if you have a weak stomach — I suggest that you postpone reading the rest of this to a later date. Maybe much, much later.

Continue reading ‘Want Some Seafood, Mama?’ »

Oil slick around Mississippi Barrier Islands (NASA E0-1 Satellite photo).

 
Years ago, in collaboration with Isaac Asimov, I wrote a book on the environment called Our Angry Earth. It wasn’t particularly successful. I have to admit that it wasn’t quite as good a book as I could have wished, either. Isaac got sick almost at the very moment we agreed to do it, and so he wasn’t able to do anywhere near as much of the writing as I had expected — to the detriment of the book.

But there were several parts of the book that were all mine and had always been intended to be so. One of those was the section that demonstrated that many of the problems associated with pollution and environmental damage were simply a matter of bad bookkeeping.

For example. Between 1947 and 1977, General Electric dumped some 1.3 million pounds of extremely toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), waste products from the manufacture of electronic devices in two of its factories, into the upper reaches of the Hudson River. GE did this because, although safe disposal of the PCBs was quite possible, it would have added significantly to the manufacturing cost of the devices. Dumping the PCBs in the river cost General Electric little more than the charge for trucking them to the river’s edge.

This is not to say that there were no costs involved in the dumping. There were many costs, and some of them were quite high. The pollution of the river made its fish inedible, causing the cash loss of a commercial fishing industry. The restrictions on even sport fishing meant that fewer vacationers spent their summers there, to the loss of tourism. The health of people living nearby was compromised, at an incalculable cost. Real estate prices dropped as the area lost some of its attractiveness. Put them all together and there were real costs amounting to millions of dollars for the dumping. All those costs, though, were what accountants call “externals.”

That means that they were costs that General Electric didn’t have to pay, because the bills went directly to the rest of the world.

Proper accounting procedures, on the other hand, would have immediately tacked them onto the manufacturing costs — thus making it better business to dispose responsibly of the pollutants.

And thus, if it were common practice to make enterprises pay for their externals, many of the problems relating to industrial pollution would simply disappear. (It is true, however, that the courts finally ordered GE to pay for a partial cleanup of the river. That didn’t heal all the damage done, but at least it was something, and it showed a dawning awareness that externals should not be neglected indefinitely.)

 
It is not only manufacturers that foist their external costs off on the public. The extractive industries, among others, are at least equally blameworthy if not more so. In the oil and coal industries we have only to look at the Gulf of Mexico to see what external costs British Petroleum has imposed on the nearby population. (It is true that President Obama is forcing them to pay billions of dollars in restitution, but it is impossible to make some of the losses whole. Even BP doesn’t have that much money.)

And, of course, the Gulf oil spill is only one, if so far the most severe, among many such disasters. Some of us will recall the Exxon Valdez back in 1989, but in fact there has been at least one major spill — “major” meaning at least tens of thousands, and all too often tens of millions, gallons of oil spilled — somewhere in the world almost every year.

Major oil spills in waterways, last five years, as supplied by Infoplease:

• 2010: BP, Deepwater Horizon, Gulf of Mexico
• 2010: Tanker Eagle Otome, Port Arthur, TX
• 2009: MV Pacific Adventurer, Queensland, Australia
• 2008: Barge, Mississippi River, New Orleans, LA
• 2007: Tanker Hebei Spirit, off coast of South Korea
• 2006: Calcasieu River LA, waste oil spill
• 2006: Israeli navy bombing Jieh coast power station
• 2006: Tanker sinks in deep water, still there leaking oil, Guimaras, Philippines
• 2005: 7 million gallons oil spilled during Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, LA

(Before that, the list is very long.)

All the same, it’s obvious that the costs of an oil well blowing out dwarf other oil spills. BP’s Deepwater Horizon’s oil spill — so far — is estimated at over 160 million gallons. The only other spill that came even close was the Ixtoc. of 1979, also in the Gulf of Mexico. That one spilled 140 million gallons over the three months before it got stopped — by drilling a relief well next to it And there too the party responsible for the disaster was an oil company, Mexico’s Pemex.

So much for oil. What about coal?

The coal companies are, if anything, perhaps a little more rapacious than the oil companies. In the United States, their main unmet external costs are floods, landsides, the conversion of beautiful mountain areas into open-pit mines … and dead miners.

And how do these giant companies get away with it?

The answer is simple: money. The officials you and I vote for to protect our interests are sometimes all too willing, for money, to sell their votes to the very people we most need protection against.. It’s not really a matter of party, either. The Republicans are traditionally a little more friendly to big business than the Democrats, yes. But there are some eight Democratic Senators who are known, for obvious reasons, as the Coal Democrats. And at least one commentator does not believe that in the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico there is a single legislative or judicial candidate of either party who has not received substantial money from Big Oil.

That’s the main other contribution I tried to make in Our Angry Earth. We individuals do not have anywhere enough muscle to deal with thee giant corporations. Only government can protect us from their worst excesses.

And what is the key to controlling government?

It’s called politics. If those among us who would like to see less corruption and misconduct among elected officials would get even a little bit involved there would be wonderful changes.

What do you have to do to get a little bit involved?

You give up Dancing with the Stars for one evening and go to the next League of Woman Voters-sponsored candidates’ debate scheduled in your neighborhood. (They’re listed in your local paper. If you can’t find one, call up the League yourself and ask them what they’ve got.

When you see a candidate you’d like to vote for, introduce yourself and ask if he needs a volunteer to stuff envelopes or the like now and then. Then, if later on, you decide you don’t like it, or don’t like the candidate, you can always just walk away. It’s a free country, after all.

And the more you do of that sort of thing, the more you help to keep it that way.

Those among us who don’t want to be active in politics because it’s a dirty game just help to make it dirtier.

John Diebold
 

Isaac Asimov and I often argued, though seldom rancorously — it was our idea of fun — but on questions of fact I knew better than to disagree with him. He had a wonderfully retentive and accessible memory, which allowed him to speak extempore a lot more comfortably than I. From time to time we discussed the question of which of us was smarter, especially when we were speaking on the same program.

On one occasion when we had been discussing collaborating on a book about the environment. I said, “It shouldn’t be too much trouble. Between the two of us, we know everything there is to know about the environment already.”

And Isaac cut me down to size with, “And what is the one fact about it that you know and I don’t?”

With all the lecturing we both did, we wound up now and then on the same program, frequently at a science-fiction gathering, but pretty often at almost anything that inspired groups of human beings to want to listen to someone talk about possible futures. Business and management groups in particular seemed to have an unslakable appetite for what we had to say, and one of the most high-end such groups was run by a man named John Diebold.

I was always glad to take part in a Diebold event, because you met such interesting people, but there was one in particular that is particularly vivid in my mind for three reasons: 1) It occurred while the first American rocket was landing on Mars. 2) In my after-dinner talk I made two of the wrongest predictions of future events that any human being has ever made. And, 3) it was the only time in my life that I ever saw Isaac Asimov drunk. (Maybe the only time he ever was.)

That particular John Diebold event was in one of the big Boston hotels, and for once in these as-I-remember-it recountings, I can tell you exactly when it happened. That is, I can if I’m correctly remembering which flight it was. I believe it was Mars 3, and I believe the meeting took place on 12 December 1971. The first American spaceship to make a soft landing on the planet Mars was going into its landing maneuvers while we were getting ready to sit down to our dinner. No one else in the room seemed greatly worried that they were missing a historic event, but Isaac and I were yearning to get to a TV. As soon as we could we sneaked out of the conference rooms and headed for my room on an upper floor of the hotel.

Our timing was splendid. The spaceship was on its way down with its cameras pointing toward the area where our Eagle was to land. Although the ship was still high in the lunar sky it and its cameras were so close to the Martian surface that we were seeing more detail than any previous human eye, with even the greatest of modern telescopes, had ever been able to make out.

One of those previously unseen details drew a yelp from Isaac. “Look at those craters! But I didn’t ever talk about craters on the Martian surface!” Come to think about it, neither had I.

We lingered until the spacecraft was down. (It was what you’d call a partial success — made an exemplary soft landing but seconds later stopped transmitting for good. Still no other spacecraft, U.S. or U.S.S.R. had done even that well at that time, so we were cheered,)

But then I had to get back because it was my turn to be the after-dinner speaker, and that is where I made a fool of myself twice in a single talk.

John Diebold had asked me to talk about the future of business, and I was explaining how wise America’s heads of major corporations had become. As an illustration, I mentioned some planning sessions I had recently sat in on at one of General Motors’ subdivisions, perhaps the one that specialized in transmissions. I had been impressed by the free and easy discussions and by the way each executive seemed to be familiar with the problems, and solutions, of all of the others. After telling my audience about some of the things I had observed I added, “That’s why I have confidence in the future for General Motors. If something should happen so that they couldn’t make cars and trucks any more they would transition quite smoothly to some other kind of business — maybe even some kind we’ve never heard of before, like importing Martian artichokes — and they would make a great success of that, too.”

2008 conclusively demonstrated the folly of that asinine opinion, which was probably brought about by the amount of time I had been spending with B-school graduates with their pernicious doctrines. (“If you’re on a search committee to find a new president for a grocery chain, you don’t want to hire an expert grocer to run it. You want someone skilled in business management who will have expert grocers under him.”)

The other stupidity was even worse. I called it the Corporate Leisure Time scenario. When successful businesses reach a certain stage in their development, I said, they often decide to devote at least a small fraction of their corporate energy on projects that are not directed at making a profit but are good for the community — underwrite college courses; support libraries and theaters; Forbes has its open-to-the-public art galleries; AT&T allows its scientists at that jewel in the diadem of American research facilities, Bell Labs, to spend part of their time working on pure science problems, etc.

Anyway, my point was that American business was doing what it could to make the world better, and I anticipated it doing more and more. (Oh, so wrong! What actually happened was that the practice of giving enormous bonuses to top executives even if they lead their businesses right over the cliff sopped up all the money and there wasn’t any much left for making a better world. Bell Labs still exists, though in diminished form, and much of the other business generosity to the community has simply disappeared. )

That was my record for wrongness in a single evening. I’ve been even wronger now and then, but not in public.

 
When my talk was over, the hotel waiters brought out the wine fountains. Those were a sort of cute example of modern technology that was just becoming popular around then, and Isaac was intrigued. He watched to see how it was done, then picked up a glass and filled it under the red-wine stream. He drank it down, then got in the white-wine line and refilled his glass. He saw me standing there near the red fountain and came over. “The red wine is good,” he informed me, “but I like the yellow better.”

Then we were talking to other people and then, a while later, I saw him standing by himself, holding onto the back of a chair and looking concerned. And that was the last I saw of him that night, though someone said he’d lurched up to his room. When I saw him the next day I asked him how he’d liked the wine fountains. “Interesting,” he said, and would go no farther, and I never saw him touch an alcoholic drink again.

    John Lindsay
 

There was another Diebold occasion that I remember well, although I’m not sure whether Isaac was present at it or not. This one was a party at the Diebold home on East End Avenue. Among the guests was New York City’s mayor, John Lindsay. He was one of the few Republicans I admired, and he and I found ourselves chatting as the party wound down.

I had been explaining to him that a plan he had just announced for curing some of New York City’s ills was unlikely to work, because the city had become too big, and too divided, to be governable in that way. He put his watch away and frowned. Then he asked, “Did you say you were going to Penn Station? I’ll be going right past it, so why don’t you let me give you a lift?” So after we had said our good-byes and got into the mayoral limousine he politely and friendlily explained to me the numerous ways in which I was out of my cotton-pickin’ mind, with twenty or thirty minutes of statistics, polls and quotes that lasted him until we pulled up in the station — and not in any crummy old taxi rank but in the police entrance that took us right into the heart of the structure.

Lindsay had been plausible and persuasive, and he fairly nearly convinced me I was wrong. All the same, I think I may have won the argument. About ten days after that, I picked up a paper and discovered he had just announced that he wasn’t going to run for reelection after all.

 
Next installment coming up when I write it.

 
Related posts:

• Isaac, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
• Russians, Jews and Isaac

Lefty, the Cat

Turns out that cats, like people, have handedness. Females are more likely to be southpaws, males righties, but it can go either way. If you want to know the leanings of the Felis domestica in your house watch it the next time it has a one-paw job to do, like fishing something out of a jar,

 
You’re Never Too Poor to Swindle

The bloodsuckers are up and about and their specialty now is seeking out the people who are already in terrible financial shape, to whom they promise help. Which, of course, they don’t deliver, preferring to vacuum out and appropriate whatever crumbs of cash the impoverished may have left. (Bernie Madoff was a great villain, but at least he stole from the rich.) So I went back through my files and came up with “Financial traps are flourishing: Tough times have bred five costly come-ons” in the March ’09 Consumer Reports. So if you, or someone you know, has been hit with threats of foreclosure or evaporation of your 401K or the like, you should take a look at it.

I’ll give you just one example. If all your credit cards had been taken away and nobody would give you a new one, Continental Finance Classic MasterCard was more obliging. You probably don’t want its help, though. The maximum chargeable credit line was $300, and by the time the customer got the card $250 had already been taken out of your balance to pay for the account processing fee: $50, and annual membership fee, $200. The $50 of credit that was left you could use as you liked, bearing in mind that an account management fee would have had to be paid every month, with other fees coming due later. So beware!

So long, Fertile Crescent

The Fertile Crescent, which is the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, is the place in the Middle East where our planet’s civilizations were born. It was the home of the world’s greatest early cities — Sumer, Ur, Babylon and more — and it fed them from its rich and well watered soil; it is where many of the stories in the Bible took place and where they invented beer.

It is projected to become a full-fledged desert by the end of this century. There’s a brutal drought going on in the region, but the real enemy is dams — the big ones Turkey has erected along the Euphrates and the ones Iran has installed along the tributaries of the Tigris. Both countries have indicated they’ll go right on building them. Already some of the smaller rivers are running dry.

 
The Bush-Cheney Alumni Association

No, we didn’t make that up. It’s real. It’s what it says it is, an association of the people who were most closely connected with President Bush and Vice President Cheney over the last eight years, and its purpose, they say, is “dedicated to setting the record straight.”

Maybe so, but I can’t help thinking it’s more like getting their stories together so they’re all giving the same answers to the hard questions. Questions like: When you had the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden and all of Al Qaeda licked and running and it only took one more push to put them away for good, why did you pull the troops out to invade Iraq? And when you did go ahead and invade, why didn’t you immediately seize all the Iraqi explosives and weaponry instead of leaving them unguarded for the terrorists to steal and kill American soldiers with, as they’ve been doing ever since? And about forty other questions about the doings of the most wrong-headed administration this country has seen, ever.

Related post: Little Known Fun Facts

IQ, Do U?

Lewis Terman

Remember the Terman kids? The high-IQ teenagers Lewis Terman collected in the 1920s to follow through their adult lives to see whether getting high marks on the test (their average IQ was 150) really did mean intellectual success as a grownup? In the end, two of his candidates wound up as Nobel laureates, but they didn’t show up on his results. Terman had dropped them from his study. Their IQs weren’t high enough.

 
If It Hurts, Talk Dirty

Psychologist Richard Stephens (UK’s Keele University), working with volunteers, applied pain stimuli to them and told them their audible response would be recorded. He instructed some, randomly selected, to avoid bad language while the rest were permitted to let the censorable words rip. On analysis of the results, the foul-mouthed sufferers turned out to be able to handle pain better than the prissy ones.

 
‘Stocks That Win If the Health Protestors Win’

That was a headline on Fox for one of its financial-advice guys the other day — for which I have to say:

Thank you, Fox! You’ve finally come clean! As was true all along. those “spontaneous” demonstrations of screaming or bellowing demonstrators, which have made it just about impossible to have a meaningful public discussion — the ones that you and all the other right-wing wheeler-dealers have been so assiduously nursing along — have just one real purpose: to prevent the passing of laws that would threaten the exorbitant profits of the giant so-called “health” providers.

Related post: More Little Known Fun Facts