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Date Stuff: 7/3/1988

This would be a good time to remember the 224 adults and 66 children who were killed when the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, seemingly to teach Iran a lesson or something about respeck, or something. Flight 655 was an Airbus 300 commercial airliner that was flying along its usual route shortly after taking off from Iran's Bandar Abbas International Airport, It was flying over Iranian territorial waters and was transmitting IFF squawks in mode III, indicating that it was a civilian aircraft. A helicopter from the Vincennes had managed to provoke warning fire from an Iranian speedboat sailing in Iranian waters, whereupon the Vincennes sailed into Iranian waters and blew the airliner out of the sky even though it was a clearly identified civilian aircraft flying a known commercial route. Those are the known facts. The US, however claims that the Vincennes' crew believed that the Airbus 300 was an F-14 Tomcat attacking the warship, because that's what we would do if a foreign warship entered our waters, right? Of course, we wouldn't use a single aircraft, let alone a fighter instead of an attack aircraft, but USA! USA! USA!, amiright.

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This is a follow up to an OT posted on 6/26 here: https://caucus99percent.com/content/626-open-thread-time-degrowth#commen... and here: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/6/26/1865986/-6-26-Open-Thread-Tim... . That OT cited a May 29, 2019 article By Shayla Love on on Vice.com titled:
The Radical Plan to Save the Planet by Working Less, which can be found here: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bj9yjq/the-radical-plan-to-save-the-p...
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A To-Do list for us all: Articulate a clear comprehensive goal, realizing that it will evolve. It must be desirable by the bulk of the populace or one that they can quickly come to desire. Plot a course to get there and articulate that. Start and build consensus as we go. Eschew coercion.
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Decentralization and distribution are good, concentration and even efficiency are not. That latter is because the price we pay for efficiency is often not worth it. CAFO's are efficient, but unnecessary and devastating in their impacts, for example. The efficiency generated bu many other types of mega-scale facilities comes at a price of over-centralization, excess resources consumed in transportation, crappy land use, concentration of waste streams and energy drains and a mass scale blight upon the landscape when obsolescence strikes. In addition there is that whole alienation of the drones problem which is mitigated when more people are more involved in more facets and aspects of the activity, regardless of the inefficiencies caused thereby. The eventual goal is to live the good life, not necessarily the most "productive" life.

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Think of sectors.

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Start with Ag because ag surpluses, meaning food security, are what has historically enabled civilization. Instead of one person with a ton of machinery and mountains of chemicals producing enough for 10,000 people, try to aim for 30 to 40 with no chemicals and minimal machinery feeding 1000-5000, in a local, sustainable and organic manner using permaculture, aquaponics and the like. Farm in the cities, towns and suburbs as well as the outlying areas to reduce transportation times and costs as measured in resource consumption and utilization. Disperse the ag production among the population, including community gardens, indoor farms and gardens and growing wall/vertical garden "technology" This is basically a land use shift, so aim to eventually include connected open space linear parks and green zones including water harvesting and catchment and a lot of trees. Incorporate water farming and harvesting throughout the entire ecosystem/environment.

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Energy should be distributed but linked and redundant. Interlinked microgrids based on solar, wind, and, where feasible, non-disruptive hydro and tidal. Make maximum reasonable use of rooftop solar on dwellings, office, factory and multi-use buildings. Try to minimize the need to devote otherwise open space to energy production.

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Water is getting critical so plan to incorporate water harvesting and storage in all aspects, rooftop rain harvesting and collection can be channelled down to below ground cisterns or water table/aquifer recharge.

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Fulfilment As many of us know, it is possible to obtain a sense of fulfilment and satisfaction from one's employment. Possible, but neither necessary nor certain. For most of us, the alienation, in all senses of the word, of the worker from the product of their labors is the predominant characteristic of most employment most of the time. Furthermore, where the management introduces teams. team building and team success and self-congratulation as an intended cure, if fails to cure zip shit except, possibly an occassional desire for donuts. On June 21, Meteor Blades in his Open Thread for Night Owls at Daily Kos drew attention to this article and the study reported on therein: https://www.salon.com/2019/06/20/researchers-say-eight-hours-of-week-is-...
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The study in question drew upon a different study, drawing data from the UK, if I read the abstract at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953619303284?... correctly, though I don't know why that should be overly relevant. We are presented with the issue at hand clearly and directly:

“There are predictions that in the future rapid technological development could result in a significant shortage of paid work,” the researchers write in the abstract. “In this context, two important research questions that have not been asked so far are: what is the minimum amount of paid employment needed to deliver some or all of the well-being and mental health benefits that employment has been shown to bring? And what is the optimum number of working hours at which the mental health of workers is at its highest?”

The answer, we are told, is as follows:

“This study found that even a small number of working hours (between one and 8?[hours] a week) generates significant mental health and well-being benefits for previously unemployed or economically inactive individuals,” they write. Moreover, “the findings suggest there is no single optimum number of working hours at which well-being and mental health are at their highest — for most groups of workers there was little variation in wellbeing between the lowest (1–8?[hours]) through to the highest (44–48?[hours]) category of working hours.”

So, spread the fulfilment and satisfaction, such as it is, around by having more folks work fewer hours. This also meshes well with the fact that decreasing growth and consumption enough to generate a contraction will, in theory require less total production. That should be a certainty, but if it is coupled with publicly funded and provided public and social services such as education, health care, housing, utilities, including telecoms and data distribution/internet, etc., that might pick up a lot of the employment slack without overly spurring greater consumption of resources.

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Details and Implementation Details are largely missing because we will all need to work together to figure this out and fill them in as we go. I never played sim city or anything remotely like it, and do not have the answers. I'm just some dumb generalist trapped on a world being driven stright to hell by a culture that is a perfect analogue of cancer in its desire for uncontrolled growth and consumption. The details, of course, will have an effect on the implementation as well, which I see as taking in place in overlapping phases. Initially, we all have to work to cut our own waste and sonsumption and to spread the idea of the necessity of so doing, as well as the actual behavior change if we can, to all of our friends, family, acquaintances, groups and organizations of which we are members and the like. We futher need to enroll all of those persons and groups to push the program to other individuals and groups as well as at the town, city, county and state levels. At the same time we need to refine the overall goal and goal statement and fill in the details as best as we can by proposing and suggesting ideas to fill in pieces of the puzzle, and adopting some such as community gardens, neighborhood ag, water harvesting and the like. We need to get various levels of government and government bodies involved as much as we can, especially as to permitting and assisting with community based endeavors like urban gardens, microgrids, large scale tree-plantings and the organization and programs to care for them and the like. Lastly, we need to redirect Federal spending away from the military and into necessary public services from housing to medical care, possibly a minimum base income, and the like.

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Image is an oversize reproduction of a coke ad on a matchbook cover by Warhol, photo by author.

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Its an open thread so have at it. The floor is yours
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Go up, up, up to Donner Pass and there I hang a left to wander off north to where no signals reach. There's birds and bugs and trees and rocks and dirt and annoying small mammals, and, about the time this posts the dawn chorus will be fading out. Everybody do your thing and have a good time, because I sure am.
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