This loop but for the ever widening grip of [capitalism/"the state"] as it reaches out to colonize existing social resources. https://mastodon.social/media/bv55vUABZ4lvXN07c3g
Actually, we can go more general? Can a series of those looping systems lead to a version of anacyclosis - where the informavores explore frontiers where the old systems have since receded? http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/125-restless-genes/dobbs-text
Sporiate http://bit.ly/2tLwdje
"Ant"isocial theory of gentrificaiton / frontiers are colonized.
People who make beachhead for gentrification are running away from "the system". In doing so they also do enough bushwhacking for the collective to follow?
A reformulation of: "What if ants explore in spirals b/c they get grumpy of the hungry ones complaining in the anthill?" - me
"Usually, it is adventure-seeking explorers who discover/map new territory, but refuge-seeking exiles who settle it. Very different types" - VGR 🤔
"Under-appreciated risk of being social catalyst: causing pain by connecting people who are bad for each other or worse, one victimizes other" - VGR
What if the "colonization" of the internet by capitalistic forces is a result of people trying to build out communistic/socialistic wateringholes? https://mastodon.ar.al/users/aral/updates/380
The commons only gets stolen because it's valuable.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130108201515.htm
Battle for the frontier. https://mastodon.social/media/68G902DpJteJil8jUzY
Don't worry everyone. The freemarket will fix it; just pray harder to the gods of capitalism and the invisible hand.
What if the environment is just another unfortunate externality?
The gods of content beckon. Prostrate yourself on the alter to receive the holy token of worship. The great bringer of advertising will bless you with holly mammon. The economist prophets aren't lying to you at all. I don't know what your talking about
https://vimeo.com/162039610
Capitalism is an ecosystem built on bubbles of life and death over the whalefall we call earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall
But maybe that's ok?
I mean, 'we're just fucking monkeys is shoes'...
https://open.spotify.com/track/2Y8QB1jEYl9b4uMBM07CLH
"The Truth? You fools! [...]
There are only Perspectives.
There are only Narratives."
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/182
"Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system!"
Me? I'm learning how to avoid eating.
"You don't just create evil, you create and help to perpetuate sustainable ecosystems of evil."
Did you know: a policing wavefront ensures tit-for-tat's survival in it's wake.
"If you don’t have Tit for Tat but some other strategy, it cannot do it. It must be a very strict retaliator. But then after you have the switch toward cooperation, it is not Tit for Tat that profits. Its frequency goes up, but then it yields to Generous Tit for Tat. Tit for Tat is not the aim of evolution, but it makes it possible. It is a kind of pivot."
http://discovermagazine.com/1993/may/forgivenessmath212
"For a mathematician, says Sigmund, whether you study molecules or the behavior of animals doesn’t matter. It all reduces to the same differential equations. Mathematically this is really one field: the population dynamics of self-replicating entities. They can be RNA molecules or reproductive strategies or animals preying on each other or parasites or whatever. Success determines the composition of the field, and the composition determines success. It is not easy to predict where this may lead"
Worms are actually bad for forests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icGV8bJRkkg
Wax worms (not actually worms?) eat plastic bags.
https://qz.com/967215/scientists-have-discovered-a-worm-that-eats-plastic-bags-and-leave-behind-antifreeze/
As humans colonize the earth, we bring along interlopers who pave the way.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/01/0102_030102_earthworms.html
This google alert for bee semen I have setup is paying off in spades.
"Honeybees aren't native to America, We brought them here. But the U.S. closed its borders to live honeybee imports in 1922, and our honeybee population has been interbreeding ever since."
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/07/13/536884827/no-offense-american-bees-but-your-sperm-isnt-cutting-it
"I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question..." 🤔
Accidental Genocides, Invisible Oil Spills: The rise of road as a self-colonizing distributed microbiome; The destructive peopling of earth. From Cow Farts to Dust Bowls: how we are poisoning ourselves.
The consumer consumes.
A choose your own adventure game for ideology of peopling.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/09/is-britain-full-home-truths-about-population-panic
http://www.npr.org/2016/08/18/479349760/should-we-be-having-kids-in-the-age-of-climate-change
Fringe ideologies also have a stance, but It's a little more aggressive.
"Capitalism led to incredible strides in living standards…It also added several billion people who would have otherwise been eaten by lions."
https://nishikiprestige.wordpress.com/2017/07/15/the-emergence-of-capitaldeath-and-punk-rock-21st-century-gas-chamber/
"Kill all humans" - Bender
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qBlPa-9v_M
"We need to confront an irony here. Gentrification is a pacification process that takes the wild and puts it in frames. I believe that hacking is the reverse of that, taking the ordered rules of systems and making them fluid and wild again. Where gentrification tries to erect safe fences around things, hacker impulses try to break them down, or redefine them. These are two countervailing forces within human society."
https://aeon.co/essays/how-yuppies-hacked-the-original-hacker-ethos
"In the 18th century, Adam Smith was the greatest advocate for the view that replacing monopolies, primogeniture, entail, and involuntary servitude with free markets would enable laborers to work on their own behalf. His key assumption was that incentives were more powerful than economies of scale."
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/7/17/15973478/bosses-dictators-workplace-rights-free-markets-unions
"The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last forty years, against the possibility of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not too late to reverse it."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2017/jul/17/neoliberalism-has-conned-us-into-fighting-climate-change-as-individuals
Ignoring Elephant in the room due to branded guilt complex.
"On its face, conscious consumerism is a morally righteous, bold movement. But it’s actually taking away our power as citizens. It drains our bank accounts and our political will, diverts our attention away from the true powerbrokers, and focuses our energy instead on petty corporate scandals and fights over the moral superiority of vegans."
https://qz.com/920561/conscious-consumerism-is-a-lie-heres-a-better-way-to-help-save-the-world/
"Altruism cannot be learned without selfish rewards, but once learned it can perpetuate itself without them" - @the_lagrangian
Moles tho. Moles are actually good for the trees. They kill the worms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fio1NUxszhY
"The mole runs are in reality "worm traps", the mole sensing when a worm falls into the tunnel and quickly running along to kill and eat it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mole_(animal)
Not to be confused with the treekin. Voles are actually assholes: http://blog.pennlive.com/gardening/2015/12/how_to_stop_voles_from_chewing.html
"But while that may be true for vegetable gardens - and I emphasize may be true because my next guest may even question that knowledge that we think we know about - earthworms are not so good for other types of ecosystems."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9105956
Moles are adorable by the way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toARdZKs-IE
I am now adding them to my head cannon as "dirt fish".
Apparently this will get rid dirt fish, and voles.
https://www.amazon.com/Vekibee-Powered-Repeller-Repellent-Repels/dp/B01LZLVHSJ
I bet this is just a timer circuit, a dc motor+weight and the guts of a solar powered stake lamp.
Direct causal links between my current anxiety and the colonization of the Americas.
This noise is driving me loopy.
http://bit.ly/2uI6F8I
"Conservatively, American lawns take up three times as much space as irrigated corn. The authors mapped the entirety of the nation's turf grass, below. You'll notice that it's basically a population density map of the U.S."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/04/lawns-are-a-soul-crushing-timesuck-and-most-of-us-would-be-better-off-without-them/ https://mastodon.social/media/hV7JKZ17qMe4UCdynos
Landscaping is cheaper with slave labor...
"The goats "had a barnyard aroma" and cost $20,719, including $4,203 for drinking water and a workers' toilet, and $2,560 for monitoring, city staff said in a report to the city council this week.
The cost was nearly five times the $4,245 for a normal parks maintenance man backed by a prison inmate work crew to do the job, the report said."
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-oregon-goats-idUSKCN0W002D
"Then again, given the alternative of sitting in a jail or prison cell all day, being able to leave – even to do manual labor for little or no pay – is seen by many prisoners to be an improvement. Corrections officials rarely mention the monotonous and sometimes onerous conditions of confinement that contribute to prisoners’ “eagerness” to participate in work programs."
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2012/may/15/prison-slave-labor-replaces-freeworld-workers-in-down-economy/
Direct-to-Household lawncare workers in USA: 533,810
Annual Mean Wage: $28,200
"Workers typically perform a variety of tasks, which may include any combination of the following: sod laying, mowing, trimming, planting, watering, fertilizing, digging, raking, sprinkler installation, and installation of mortarless segmental concrete masonry wall units."
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes373011.htm https://mastodon.social/media/QTtiYhCoIaebDP62GCU
Another study [2017] on worms vs maple trees: talks on why they were overlooked. Notably mentions rise of sedges (grass/field) as consequence.
"Biotic soil disturbance (mainly by earthworms) have likely occurred in other areas reporting maple dieback, but the impacts by these organisms are usually not the study focus. [...] Earthworms have long been established in areas
of the eastern U.S. and therefore may not have been considered as an exotic species"
https://sci-hub.cc/10.1007/s10530-017-1523-0
via @AChimera
QuackGrass.... Invasive unless you wanna grow cattle. And guess what causes it's rhizomes to spread? Biotic soil disturbances (by worms?).
https://newfarmerproject.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/outsmarting-quackgrass/
This stuff is all connected.
"Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour,"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-internet-gaming-scam 😦
"Looking at these land, water, fertilizer and soil costs together, you could argue that the corn system uses more natural resources than any other agricultural system in America, while providing only modest benefits in food. It’s a dubious trade-off—depleting natural resources to deliver relatively little food and nutrition to the world. But it doesn’t need to be that way."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-rethink-corn/
"Furthermore, it would include conservation tillage and organic farming practices that improve soil conditions by restoring soil structure, organic content and water holding capacity, making farming landscapes much more resilient to floods and droughts. The overall result would be a landscape better prepared to weather the next drought, flood, disease or pest."
"Sheep were brought to graze in the White House lawns in order to save the manpower required to mow the expansive grounds. Wool from the sheep was sold as a fundraiser for the Red Cross."
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/photos/sheep-graze-on-the-white-house-lawn
"President Wilson is having no end of trouble with the flock of sheep he purchased recently to graze on the White House lawn," a May 12, 1918, Washington Post article reported. The problem: The sheep were scared of the cars that had started to appear across the District of Columbia in increasing numbers."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/white-house-sheep-a-history/453405/
"Every system, whether it is a single mind, a family, a business, or a country, develops a hegemony of powerful interests that first promulgates rules and policies for the good of the system and eventually promulgates them for the good of the hegemony."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/feeling-our-way/201507/the-tendency-smugness-in-the-culture-psychology
"In 1918, Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West. Today the word “decline” is taboo. Our politicians shun it in favour of “challenges,” while our economists talk of “secular stagnation.” The language changes, but the belief that western civilisation is living on borrowed time (and money) is the same."
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/nov/17/is-western-civilisation-in-terminal-decline
"The media’s desire to psychoanalyze members of generation W is natural enough. They want to know why these people are acting in a way that they, members of the corporate media, would not. But sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; if there are psychological motivations for whistleblowing, leaking and hacktivism, there are likewise psychological motivations for closing ranks with the power structure within a system"
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality-of-systemic-evil/
"the watershed has retained and even bettered its purifying capacities over the last century.
“That’s the good news. The bad news is 91 percent of that land is privately owned, meaning it could be converted to nonforest uses whenever the owners make that decision. It’s their land,” he says."
http://digital.vpr.net/post/study-new-england-loses-65-acres-forest-day-development
"Removing lawns may sound like a small, wonky step, compared to building dams. But the green turf in American yards actually stands as a worthy target for water savings, a public enemy in the eyes of many during a drought such as California's five-year-old one."
https://www.usnews.com/news/news/articles/2016-10-31/in-california-a-350-million-social-experiment-over-lawns
"But once again things get conflated – the critique of Capitalism and the call for its downfall is not one and the same as Tyler’s offered model of masculinity/nihilism. Tyler’s masochistic ideology is not feasible – he gets fucked in the end because he is just another damaging ideology that traps you in a sick cycle. So in this manner, Tyler isn’t always an opposition to capitalism, but a parallel to it."
http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2011/08/23/were-the-all-singing-all-dancing-crap-of-the-world-or-youre-doing-it-wrong-the-fight-club-identity-crisis-by-brianna-berbenuik/
"It is extremely difficult to demonstrate to the average person the reality and value, and especially the money value of an intangible thing. The motion model makes this value apparent and impressive. It makes tangible the fact that time is money and that an unnecessary motion is money lost forever."
http://www.e-flux.com/architecture/artificial-labor/153913/simfactory/
“The person who’s out-innovated loses. The winning innovation brings more value to society. It’s destructive when someone competes but doesn’t out-innovate, or they undermine and destroy the existing marketplace; they just steal the technology and produce it in a developing country without regard to human, civil, or property rights, because of safety and environmental precautions.”
https://www.manufacturing.net/article/2012/12/david-vs-goliath-%E2%80%93-stealing-innovation
"Fundamentally, the problem with the web ecosystem is that consumer choice is limited. Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other tech giants "own" a large part of the social graph that both powers the core digital connection goodness and sustains the momentum that they will keep owning it, due to something called Metcalfe's law. If you want to connect to people on the internet, you have to play by their rules
[...]
The Metcalfe momentum has become a gravity black hole."
http://clutchofthedeadhand.com/decentralization/
I just realized that all my clothing is dead plant material picked by slaves in India and made by machines and sold to line the pockets of unidentifiable corporate shareholders. https://aeon.co/essays/this-is-what-slavery-looks-like-today-in-the-eyes-of-slavers
This seems to be a system stemming from the 1800's industrial revolution - slaves pick cotton and then ship it to the mills where energy is cheap to run the machines. Now with more global shipping to hide the commodity fetishism.
I guess I have capitalism to thank for these cheap clothes.
"Buy Local!" you scream at me!
Sorry, but the only sustainable clothing I can find near me is bearly able to support selling to the declining middle-class because of artisian bullshit. To paraphrase all the local businesses involved in sustainable clothing: "we cater to the bourgeois and as such we can afford Vermont's high energy cost and make you feel good about it in the process"
And the sustainable stuff is all wool - which leads to large scale pasteurization.
http://digital.vpr.net/post/19th-century-vermont-merino-sheep-bred-controversy-australia
Body Horror Show more
Earlier I said "this seems to be a system stemming from the 1800's industrial revolution..."
As far as I can tell, this might actually be what's happening in a way. It seems we are watching India's industrial revolution -> young workers from poor impoverished farmer villages are migrating en-masse to work at the clothing factories in Bangladesh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6T1MvHyUic
Parallels even include insane amounts of pollution
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/15/world/asia/bangladesh-pollution-told-in-colors-and-smells.html
Is happening in China too? https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/6283-The-denim-capital-of-the-world-so-polluted-you-can-t-give-the-houses-away
"What's behind a t-shirt.
It's a world.
A world.
A person with dreams and hopes, who wants to get ahead.
People with many needs, humble, but also with many dreams."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9Amsk9_dJc
My T-shirt was made by Gildan somewhere in South America, likely out of cotton grown in Arizona or Texas.
The basic T-shirt was sold to "Comfort Colors by Chouinard" in Honduras. Comfort Colors then used a special dyeing process that also softens the clothes.
It was then shipped to a network of resellers where it was eventually sold to 'Birth of the Blues' in West Lebanon, NH.
In 2015 I bought it on clearance partly with money I was given by VocRehab for < $5/shirt. I bought 12.
Thank you 🙏
"Now the idea was: you made him pay for fishing lessons, offering student loans if necessary, and failed to mention that you had already depleted the pool. In a late capitalist society with dwindling opportunities for cash-poor workers and few checks on entrepreneurial conduct, what could be better to sell than false hope? This was a smart business."
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/17/get-rich-quick-silicon-valley-startup-billionaire-techie
"Here we document predatory cannibalism on larger conspecifics in Drosophila melanogaster larvae and address its evolutionary significance. We found that under crowded laboratory conditions younger larvae regularly attack and consume ‘wandering-stage’ conspecifics, forming aggregations mediated by chemical cues from the attacked victim."
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2744
"Figuratively speaking, different gene expression means that that in the genetic material of the three ant species, certain buttons are pressed at different levels of intensity – yet, ultimately, this leads to the same result in all species: a successful raid. The team was surprised..."
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-unique-gene-patterns-underlying-ant.html
re LB: slavery wasn't so much abolished as it was outsourced...
"But corn—with all the fertilizers and pesticides it takes to produce—is an exceptional burden on waterways. Unlike pasture, which keeps ground covered in grass year-round and the soil intact, corn requires plowing and added nutrients to pump up yields. [...] Through the winter snow and spring rains, fields are kept bare—meaning that the exposed soil can wash away."
https://thefern.org/2017/06/troubled-waters/