Abundance....................

 Resources (as opposed to raw materials) are created and produced by human ingenuity. And so because human creativity is open-ended, the notion that there is a fixed amount of resources on earth, or even in any region of earth, is economically mistaken.

-Don Boudreaux

their special skill....................

 Looking back over the centuries, or even if looking only at the present, we can clearly observe that many men have made their living, often a very good living, from their special skill in applying weapons of violence, and that these activities have had a very large part in determining what uses were made of scarce resources.

-Frederic C. Lane

From a defense of incidental plagiarism....

     We, as human beings, are landed with memories which have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections—but also great flexibility and creativity.  Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength:  if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information.  Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and thing and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences.  It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind.  Memory arises not only from experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

-Oliver Sacks,  The River Of Consciousness, from the chapter The Fallibility of Memory

God knows, this is true......................

“You can’t have a bunch of wussy sand that falls apart when you squeeze it,” Robertson says.

-Althouse has the rest of the story - here.

Improve...................................

Agricultural efficiencies.......................

.........................................or, government is just another name of the way we distort markets together.  An interesting take of water and deserts and cotton - here.

I bet you didn't know................................

..................................................there is a sand shortage.

In praise of.............................................

........................fossil fuels.    Bet you didn't see that coming.

"Notice, too, the ways in which fossil fuels have contributed to preserving the planet. As the American author and fossil-fuels advocate Alex Epstein points out in a bravely unfashionable book, “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” the use of coal halted and then reversed the deforestation of Europe and North America. The turn to oil halted the slaughter of the world’s whales and seals for their blubber. Fertilizer manufactured with gas halved the amount of land needed to produce a given amount of food, thus feeding a growing population while sparing land for wild nature."

-full post from my favorite optimist is here.

Can I get an Amen.....................................?

 It’s easy to be pessimistic when one doesn’t understand economics or that the innovative nature of the human mind is the ultimate resource. The incentives and price system inherent in the market process ensure that innovation will continue to improve our world. But Simon wrote that two things were certain: first, “humanity's condition will improve in just about every material way”; second, “humans will continue to sit around complaining about everything getting worse.''

-As excerpted from #5 on this list of Six Reasons We Don't Know How Good We Have It.

One of the reasons us History majors tend to be optimistic is that the historical default condition for most of humanity is to be cold (my Eurocentric background is showing), wet, hungry, and poor.  It is pretty clear that economic systems matter, and the cold, wet, hungry, and poor thing is just an option these days.

thanks craig

A resource............................................

“I never viewed money as being ‘my money.’ I always saw it as ‘the money’.  It’s a resource. If it pools up around me then it needs to be flushed back out into the system.” 
-Louis CK, as excerpted from here

On limits..........................................

History's littered with tales of once-rare resources made plentiful by innovation.  The reason is pretty straightforward:  scarcity if often contextual.  Imagine a giant orange tree packed with fruit.  If I pluck all the oranges from the lower branches, I am effectively out of accessible fruit.  From my limited perspective, oranges are now scarce.  But once someone invents a piece of technology called a ladder, I've suddenly got new reach.  Problem solved.  Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism.  It can make the once scarce the now abundant.
-Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler,  Abundance:  The Future Is Better Than You Think

For a more recent application of "technology is a resource-liberating mechanism," think about horizontal drilling and the liberation of shale oil.  One take on the subject is here.

Those pesky humans are at it again.......

From Via Meadia comes this interesting nugget:

"Water scarcity has long been a favorite topic for the Chicken Littles of the world. But doomsayers who predict a coming global shortage of freshwater fail to account for one of the strongest forces on our planet today: human ingenuity."

Full post on Israeli water desalination is here.

Why Malthusians will always be wrong...........

They never have caught on to just how ingenious and resourceful us humanoids can be:

original blog post is here

Libraries.................

“Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs.” 
-Zig Ziglar

"A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life."
-Henry Ward Beecher 

“Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.” 
-Walter Cronkite

"The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history."
-Carl T. Rowan 

"Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital."
-Thomas Jefferson

“To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul.” 
-Cicero

“When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began.” 
-Rita Mae Brown

"Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest."
-Lady Bird Johnson 

"Everything you need for your better future and success has already been written.  And guess what?  It's all available.  All you have to do is go to the library."
-Jim Rohn

"these Libraries have improved the general Conversation of Americans, made the common Tradesman and Farmers as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other Countries, and perhaps have contributed in some Degree to the Stand so generally made throughout the Colonies in Defence of their Privileges."
-Benjamin Franklin

This IS interesting.................................

Spengler welcomes China to the party.....................

English-language media completely ignored a noteworthy statement that led Der Spiegel’s German-language website October 12, a call for China to “take on responsibility as a world power” in the Middle East. Penned by Bernhard Zand, the German news organization’s Beijing correspondent, it is terse and to the point: now that China imports more oil from the Middle East than any other country in the world, it must answer for the region’s security. “America’s interest in the Middle East diminishes day by day” as it heads towards energy self-sufficiency, wrote Zand, adding:

China’s interest in a peaceful Middle East is enormous, by contrast. Beijing is not only the biggest customer of precisely those oil powers who presently are fanning the flames of conflict in Syria; as a VIP customer, Beijing has growing political influence, which it should use openly. The word of the Chinese foreign minister has just as much weight in Tehran and Riyadh as that of his American counterpart.

Really good news on the helium front.......

You may not have been aware of the looming crisis, so news that it has been averted may not qualify as news.  Still, for those of you who believe in the law of unintended consequences, and for those of you who fancy helium balloons, it's an interesting story.  Update is here.

thanks tyler

How big is big.......................?

The always interesting Via Meadia blog, the home of one of my favorite bloggers, Walter Russell Mead,  has a post up about China and water and big, big problems.  In said post can be found this excerpt:

"The Gobi desert is expanding by an area almost the size of Rhode Island every year."

Hmmm..............I don't know if that is a big deal or not.  As usually happens at times like this, the Oracle Google was consulted.   Here are a few tidbits:

The Gobi, at 500,000 + square miles, is the largest desert in Asia, but only the fifth largest on the planet.  Can you guess the largest?  If your first reaction was  "Sahara",  we both got it wrong.    Apparently sand is not a requirement for a desert.   The largest desert in the world is the Antarctic (at 5,339,573 square miles) and the second largest is the Arctic.  Next comes the Sahara, followed by the Arabian desert.    The tenth largest is the Great Basin, which covers most of Nevada and a goodly bit of Utah.

As it turns out, Rhode Island, the smallest state, only has 1,045 square miles of area.  Doesn't seem like that big a deal to add 1,045 to 500,000 every year.  Not much of a growth rate percentage wise.  Unless,  of course, you live there.  We live in Licking County, which has 688 square miles of area.   If some desert came and ate our county in a shade less than two years,  I would think that was a pretty big deal.

Economic Development 101.........

An economy that was based on (among other things) cheap energy gets a huge shot in the arm:

"Each shale well requires up to 100 tons of high-quality steel pipe; fleets of specially adapted trucks and trailers; a small hangar of earthmoving, drilling and other equipment; specialty chemicals, sands and ceramics; and some very high-end seismic and other underground imaging gear. Many of these products are now U.S. specialties."

and:

"Energy production is a good job producer, offering classic blue-collar jobs at high pay to people without college degrees. Oil and gas rig workers can pull down $100,000 annual incomes before they’re thirty. "

and:

"The current official estimate - that by 2020 or so the U.S. will surpass Saudi Arabia in oil output, and Russia in gas - remains on track, and the country will be a major global energy producer far beyond that, which will do wonders for the U.S. trade deficit."

Next assignment for the bright and creative people who brought us the horizontal drilling-fracking revolution: solve the problem of how to re-cycle the chemicalized water used to frack the wells (and, while you are at it, figure out how  to frack using less water).

via

It's a tad cold out, maybe we'll splurge and turn up the heat a bit tonight................

via

Tyranny..................................

Why do I get that uh-oh feeling every time I notice that the mileage number on the little oil change sticker thing on my windshield has been exceeded by the number on my odometer?   I know that my car's motor oil does not need changed every 3,000 miles, even though the sticker says it does.  The friendly Ford Motors owner's manual says to change every 7,500 miles is plenty often enough.  Yet, exceed that magical 3,000 mile number on the sticker and the internal pressure starts to mount.  Turns out I'm not alone.  The psychology behind this pressure to change oil is sort of impressive.  Even though it is a waste of money and stresses our beloved Gaia, we continue to be tyrannized by the little stickers.  Full story is here.

thanks Craig