Brian,
But thought matters… if the things of the world that matter to us are not machines, why would thinking of resources like a machine be of help? I think it would be better to put our pension for machine-like thinking in it’s place, drop what makes machine thinking demand total control, rather than drop our […]
for http://www.oneclimate.net
I’ve been studying the puzzles of natural systems, how they all have their own individually divergent behaviors, and individual reactions to their environments. Then I noticed that that aspect of nature entirely conflicts with the idea of ‘determinism’, that everything (except human free will) is controlled by its surroundings.
Last year I read a paper […]
Michel,
WNYC’s “Tell Me More” 9/22/08
I don’t think you, or anyone else, is getting a good picture of what happened, why, or what effect it will have. I’m not a mystic with secret answers, but a systems scientist who has been studying this kind of collapse in natural systems for 30 years. It’s an odd sort […]
I think ‘magical thinking’ is apt for what brought down our financial system, but it’s a view from hindsight, not foresight, and altogether too imprecise. I wrote my first comprehensive paper on growth induced collapse 30 years to the day before the Fed called this one to a halt.
The problem now as seen from foresight […]
Alex,
Actually, it would seem to increase energy use to save energy. The reason is what you might call the “bottleneck principle”. If you remove bottlenecks it increases the flow. The high value we put on some efficiencies is that they are bottlenecks that unleash the use of other resources when made less of a constraint. […]
Responding to an Archinect discussion:
http://archinect.com/features/article.php?id=79713_0_23_0_M
Hi there! I haven’t read the whole thread, but gather the question is whether we can grow our way our of the impacts of growth, using crafty wind power investments to do it. I’ve been spending this week trying to find out why none of the media are aware of the vigorous […]
A Small Mistake
I think maybe we should believe our eyes rather than make excuses for some old rules that aren’t working.
Maybe what happened, in the beginning, was that God sent the scribe a text message, saying, “…and I give you all this and a wonderful mind with which you can make models to bee the […]
Allison,
Hi, to no one’s surprise someone unsubscribed me from the
list again. The site does not seem to be accepting applications for membership at present either. Hope this is responsive.
_____
You say: “! And please not just a theory.”
– The practical tools for measuring total direct project impacts has been the main thing I’ve raised here. The […]
Chuck,
Right, Growth to failure, but is it the kind of thing that just recreates itself after every failure, because we don’t understand the problem yet? That’s how it seems to me, as no one seems to be pointing out that the basic multiplier of economics has that exact property.
Phil Henshaw??
> Hi Phil,
> I think the […]
Anselmo,
I agree with you 99% philosophically, but note that there is a basic difference between the kind of environmental intervention we’ve gotten into from the kind that we started with. It’s a change in scale.
Our method of intervention in nature includes an automatic multiplier of scale. It may possibly be that there have always been […]