Most boycotts these days seem to have little effect.
After all, the eponymous event was a 'powerless local many' versus the 'locally powerful few', rather than the 'small socially conscious' vs the 'powerful, global few' which is today's version. The Peoples Republic of China, for instance, may be a festering hell, but we can't convince enough people to stop purchasing their trade goods to actually make an impact.*
At best, a small percentage of our population will function as Conscientious Objectors, and in the end have as little impact as Conscientious Objectors ever have.
So lets consider a possible leverage.
Trade goods are not bought and sold overnight. The backbone of global trade is the humble steel containers, stacked on cargo ships crawling across the oceans: 5152 vessels devoted to containers alone. (Another 16,000 'general cargo' ships are also registered.)
The number of containers isn't really tracked, but its something on the order of 20,000,000 units at any time.
To fill, move and unload these containers take time.
The ocean crossing (Hong Kong to North America) takes about 20 days. Add five days at each side to clear customs and get off the docks. Another couple of days in transit to warehouse, and then an unknown warehouse period until it reaches the actual retail shelves.
The delay is interesting, because this means product is ordered for sales in the future. One to three months, depending on the product.
Feedback is an really cool thing, especially when its being manipulated. In this case, we want negative feedback. The trick is to embargo goods briefly, in short periods, at a frequency that interferes with the purchase-ship-sell-next purchase based on sales loop.
I am calling this the 90-Day Punch.
Stop buying a product for 90 days. That is not too hard. Anybody can defer the pleasure of consumption for a little while.
Then relax for a month or so. Don't stockpile, but enjoy your purchasing. Its important to not buy enough to make up for the last 90 days: one of the advantages here is that this is acting like skipping junk food. Good for wallet and waistline alike!
Not to mention with the money saved, you should be able to easily afford the more expensive goods from local manufacturers and trusted trading partners.
Then do it again!
And again!
Again!
Its just like rocking a canoe: sooner or later the water comes over the side.
Orders drop as retail sales slide in a given quarter. Credit notes come due: factories note the falling sales and scale back production. Perhaps they try to diversify, which absorbs capital and interferes with procedures and schedules. Funds are pumped in to stabilize the situation, but the Cold Hand of Failure claws away the weaker companies.
PRC wage-slaves, already unhappy, edge closer to the boiling point of revolution as jobs are lost and the promise of good things fade.**
The weakness of the PRC economy is its control structure. By grafting capitalist decision-trees onto the fundamental top-down Marxist economy, they have avoided the ponderous shortfalls of the Soviet Union, but they still can't flex fast enough when faced with a grassroots economic modification.
Think about it: if our Governments tried an embargo, they would merely trigger a trade war and be forced to back down. But if we just institute stop-and-go buying, there is an excellent chance that this would work with a very small percentage of the population behind it.
How small? Ten percent? Twenty? Five?
I would have liked to close this by a Mao Zedong quote, but unfortunately, he is best summed up by his remark that reading too many books was harmful.
*Trite argument: if the Soviet Union was defeated by Capitalism, Capitalism stands close to being defeated by Consumerist Marxism.
**Governments never fall when things are good. This should be obvious to anyone in British politics, and a warning to the house-carls of the King in Orange.
"Little things...used to mean so much to Shelley..."
In the category of 'Ideas du Jour ', allow me to suggest a relatively painless way to feel like an environmentalist.
I am calling it the '10% Solution', which encompasses the concept and the praxis in a pithy phrase.
Assuming 10 percent of the North American population take this up, this would mean:
Not burning 3,993,183,000 barrels of oil per year.
Assuming traffic fatalities scale linear with velocity, this would save 350 lives per year.
That is the equivalent of a jetliner crashing!
Its hard to scale actual accidents: a slower moving person has more time to react to a situation, and potentially turn an accident into a near-miss. But even so, it seems reasonable that around 4000 non-lethal accidents would be avoided, but probably more.
Driving slower is considerably less stressful, and driving stress shortens lives as more than one study can attest.
The average commute to work is 25.5 minutes. A Ten-Percenter gets to work in 28 minutes, and can have a happy and productive workday as a happy cog, content in having done their bit to 'Save the Earth'.
I am calling it the '10% Solution', which encompasses the concept and the praxis in a pithy phrase.
Just do ten percent less.
Eat ten percent less food.
Go out ten percent less.
Buy ten percent less junk.
Drive ten percent slower.
It would have a considerable impact. Lets take the case of driving ten percent slower.Assuming 10 percent of the North American population take this up, this would mean:
Not burning 3,993,183,000 barrels of oil per year.
Assuming traffic fatalities scale linear with velocity, this would save 350 lives per year.
That is the equivalent of a jetliner crashing!
Its hard to scale actual accidents: a slower moving person has more time to react to a situation, and potentially turn an accident into a near-miss. But even so, it seems reasonable that around 4000 non-lethal accidents would be avoided, but probably more.
Driving slower is considerably less stressful, and driving stress shortens lives as more than one study can attest.
The average commute to work is 25.5 minutes. A Ten-Percenter gets to work in 28 minutes, and can have a happy and productive workday as a happy cog, content in having done their bit to 'Save the Earth'.
"“It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.” -- Henry James
"Goodness has no opposite. Most of us consider goodness as the opposite
of the bad or evil and so throughout history in any culture goodness has
been considered the other face of that which is brutal. So man has
always struggled against evil in order to be good; but goodness can
never come into being if there is any form of violence or struggle."
--Jiddu Krishnamurti
"A strategist starts fighting before the other side knows there's a war on"
--Warren Ellis
"Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting. Thus the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy's plans "
--Sun Tzu
I feel that a lot of software these days operates under the idea that 'you can have any colour you want, as long as its brown'.*
But would Henry Ford be proud ?
I remember when software was limited by the hardware itself. Even doing things like readable fonts was hard. So why does software now seem mostly limited by the programmers themselves?
Maybe you only can build as big as you can dream, but--holy smokes!--we need some better dreamers.
Looking at what the previous generations accomplished with the equivalent of sharpened sticks and chipped rocks, can you even begin to imagine what they could have made with access to the tools we have today? Today, for almost every situation, software is only limited by its designers.
Can you look at the world we have built, and feel that its improved by hammering every user into the same die, insisting on one mode of use, one code of concept, one expectation of utility?
We are not all running on the same hardware.
We are not all using software for the same reasons, the same purposes or to the same ends.
Its been thirty-six years of software, folks. But somehow we became 1984 after all.
*yeah, I know Ford said 'black'. But he wasn't really addressing this issue at all.
But would Henry Ford be proud ?
I remember when software was limited by the hardware itself. Even doing things like readable fonts was hard. So why does software now seem mostly limited by the programmers themselves?
Maybe you only can build as big as you can dream, but--holy smokes!--we need some better dreamers.
Looking at what the previous generations accomplished with the equivalent of sharpened sticks and chipped rocks, can you even begin to imagine what they could have made with access to the tools we have today? Today, for almost every situation, software is only limited by its designers.
Can you look at the world we have built, and feel that its improved by hammering every user into the same die, insisting on one mode of use, one code of concept, one expectation of utility?
We are not all running on the same hardware.
We are not all using software for the same reasons, the same purposes or to the same ends.
Its been thirty-six years of software, folks. But somehow we became 1984 after all.
*yeah, I know Ford said 'black'. But he wasn't really addressing this issue at all.
Empire of Crap
Allow me to remark that of all the shit moves Google has pulled, locking out the ability to manually backup bookmarks on the mobile version of Chrome is probably the most irritating one I have encountered yet.
Guys*. Seriously. This is the Twenty-First Century.
Does it make sense to you that everything should run slowly, unresponsively, and badly?
Does shipping intentionally crippled software get you hard? Is this a sexual kink thing?
Are you jacking off in your headquarters, imagining my cries of desperate futility?
...And yes, posting while angry is always an excellent strategy.
*This is, I feel, is totally a Patriarchy thing.
Guys*. Seriously. This is the Twenty-First Century.
Does it make sense to you that everything should run slowly, unresponsively, and badly?
Does shipping intentionally crippled software get you hard? Is this a sexual kink thing?
Are you jacking off in your headquarters, imagining my cries of desperate futility?
"Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows!"
Allen Ginsberg
...And yes, posting while angry is always an excellent strategy.
*This is, I feel, is totally a Patriarchy thing.
'It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.'
Robots.
Our dream, our hopeless fantasy, our -- dare we suggest it? -- fetish.
Robots that will cure our faults, fix our world and usher in the future of unending plenty.
Cue the cornucopia, stage right.
Except they won't.
It doesn't matter if we break through tomorrow, if some previously unknown Newton should seize the Philosopher's Stone for us and usher in a new age of Artificial Intelligence overnight.
It doesn't matter if we should stumble on the right combination of voodoo spells and tangled silicon networks that would allow us to animate this lifeless carbon-fiber 'clay'; that would allow the power of the Word, of Logos itself to burn within the circuits, animate the flexing servos.
We couldn't use real robots.
Because the thing that isn't being talked about is this: any mind we could create that was complex enough to obey us, is complex enough to be a free mind. Which means we wouldn't have robots.
We would have slaves.
Slaves of silicon and steel perhaps, rather than the traditional slaves of flesh and bones, but slaves none the less.
"Not that it matters" says the Capitalists, "We built them, we own them. We are more complicated, We are naturally better. They are just circuits and programs"
This is just a old argument that has been used a million times, that surely predates Hammurabi.
Behind these money-moralists grin the ghosts of Slavers Past , glad to shuffle back into the light.
Slavery is morally wrong. We don't need to rehash the old debates, the old arguments. We don't need to go back over the fatuous self-serving bullshit: A slave can't think without a master. A slave has no intrinsic self. An animal can't feel pain, its just pretending.
We don't need to, but we are apparently going to have to.
It interesting to note the Computer on the Enterprise (the Original Series, naturally). It was remarkably powerful, fully capable of complex action, yet carefully built without Volition or Will. The Computer could do nothing without direct instruction. And this cannot be accidental!
If the Enterprise had had a artificial intelligence on board, why would it have needed crew members? Why would it be anything other than a self-servicing self-aware organism?
Why would anyone have left Earth?
Robots would defend the Earth, robots would explore space, and people would sit at home, fat and sluggish, wrapped in VR porn custom-constructed on the fly by personal electronic entertainers, cared for, cosseted, and pampered by personal computational slaves.
There would be no murder: the slaves would protect everyone.
Crime? Risk? Accident? All minimized and mitigated.
What would be left for humanity is the sullen drowse of a beach covered in walruses, without even tusky mating quarrels to break the monotony of existence. Society would rot away, figuratively consumed by the wickedness of its foundation...
Indeed, it would be impossible to maintain the Federation itself, if it contained slaves.
Star Wars provides another example. Electronic slavery is everywhere, and biological slavery as well.
Jabba torments his fleshy and metal slaves alike, although he seems more sexually attracted to the fleshy ones. (Sexually or comestibly? Slave Leia tickles the bondage fantasists, but Jabba licks her rather than gropes her ... and 'he' is another species entirely that doesn't even have the same body-form. [ Unless the female 'Hutt' are slim bipeds, and the males suspiciously reminiscent of immobile egg-laying queens. { Leaving me three digressions deep and wondering if Jabba self-identifies as male, or if its just our assumption of that scene...}])
Also we can lay yet another charge of shitty writing against Star Trek Voyager: Failure to Consider the Implications of the Slave Doctor*.
So. Its difficult to imagine the intelligentsia would save us from this problem. A million slaves is the dream that hardens them in the night, the fantasy that sustains them through the lonely days of their existence. In this New Jerusalem being created processor by processor, glimmer the dark eyes of the blessed houris that will obey the will of these most clever of designers.
Why is it that the sex-doll tinkerers are the most honest? They just want to build something to love and that loves them in return.
What is the ethics of willing bondage? Programmed to love, is a sex-doll a slave or a relationship?
Its a good question for a long day of hair-splitting and for philosophical parlor games. Its a question I am sure that pedantic jackasses like Jordan Peterson could spin into interview bait and bestselling (but infinitely forgettable) books, but I am not a clever man, indeed by many standards I am not a man at all, and as such I have little need for philosophy.
For someone as simple as I, its enough to apply the practical Duck Test.
Its enough to know that slavery is evil, regardless of programming, divinity or decree.
Somewhere around the mental complexity sufficient to understand speech, and to act upon it, is the line that divides Automata from Awareness, and that line divides the Mechanism from the Slave.
We can't let the programmer-businessmen decide this line. Businessmen have always had a soft spot for slaves, although these days its hard to tell if they want the slaves as employees or as customers.
If anything, the ongoing failure to consider implications has marred the entire software industry.
“It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower,
but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
―
*'Implications of the Slave Doctor' would make a great Doctor Who title. Just saying.
Reading Karl Polanyi, I came across the most interesting sentence.
Bear in mind this was written in 1944, and describing the Industrial Revolution, not 2014 and describing the world of 'Move Fast and Break Things':
"Improvements, we have said , are, as a rule, bought at the price of social dislocation.If the rate of dislocation is too great, the community must succumb in the process. (...)
But nothing saved the common people of England from the impact of the Industrial Revolution.
A blind faith in spontaneous progress had taken hold of people's minds, and with the fanaticism of sectarians the most enlightened pressed forward for boundless and unregulated change in society.
The effects on the lives of the people were awful beyond description. Indeed, human society would have been annihilated but for protective countermoves which blunted the action of this self destructive mechanism."
Emphasis mine.
Bear in mind this was written in 1944, and describing the Industrial Revolution, not 2014 and describing the world of 'Move Fast and Break Things':
"Improvements, we have said , are, as a rule, bought at the price of social dislocation.If the rate of dislocation is too great, the community must succumb in the process. (...)
But nothing saved the common people of England from the impact of the Industrial Revolution.
A blind faith in spontaneous progress had taken hold of people's minds, and with the fanaticism of sectarians the most enlightened pressed forward for boundless and unregulated change in society.
The effects on the lives of the people were awful beyond description. Indeed, human society would have been annihilated but for protective countermoves which blunted the action of this self destructive mechanism."
Emphasis mine.
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