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Seven7's comments:
on Intervention in Libya
The oil in Lybia is very high quality light sweet crude. It makes 4 times the diesel of lesser grades that are more common from the middle east; and Oil is the chief reason that Lybia accepted once again after Lockerbie and the last war we had there. Oil, even 2% of the worlds supply, is always valuable; and I think you would find that there is more there in Lybia than in the Alaskan Wildlife refuge they ae so anxious to drill in Alaska.
posted 2 years, 1 month ago
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on Intervention in Libya
Three answers to your question.
#1: Oil
#2: Oil
#3: Oil
by the way, did I mention oil?
posted 2 years, 1 month ago
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on Intervention in Libya
What success could look like in Lybia
They could have a participatory democracy with people that participate; unlike America where less than 2% of the eliglble voters participate in any political activity except voting.
Income distribution, while not socialist, could at least have some degree of fairness across the board, with a large middle class enjoying the profits from oil and other resources and not reflect the current situation in the United States where a mere 1% of Americans are receiving 23 cents of every dollar of GDP. It should be easy for them to do better than we are doing now as they are going to start from scratch.
The environment could end up with standing in court just like corporations have in much of the western world. The environment could employ lawyers to seek redress when the water, air and soil are sullied in the name of profit and owners of companies could be forced to pay the environment back damages. This would be heplful in America too, but we cannot have everything; and we have been saved by private property rights on this issue.
Food production in Lybia could go all organic. Just like in America, it takes a lot of hand labor by human beings to grow food and animals without chemical shortcuts and band-aids. If either country, Lybia or America, made a commitment to this principle and also made a commitment to fill those jobs with citizens, the price of food would surely rise but there would also be full emloyment. And that raising of prices would work on that income distribution problem at the same time. Maybe the average Lybian needs a good diet and a healthy environment more than a plasma television and smart phone and an SUV with subs and seperate DVD players for each kid.
And law enforcement in Lybia could start out enforcing laws against white collar crime first and deal with the crimes of the common man second. Somehow this always gets turned around. Why is it people are always so anxious to pursue economically disadvantaged single men whose actions hurt only a few; while they let powerful bankers and lawyers and CEO's walk away from crimes that have destroyed the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of people. Maybe the Lybians can create a "radar gun" that detects economic crime committed against people and the environment.
Oh, and they could start off with a 30 hour work week and single payer health care and sustainable solar power too. Couldn't hurt.
posted 2 years, 1 month ago
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on Health Care Changes
I am not satisfied with the current health care system and wholeheartedly support eventual expansion of the Single-Payer Medicaid System to all American citizens regardless of age.
A friend of mine was injured on a large construction project. There was an emergency in a confined space; and he was one of two workers sent in to do some emergency welding. There was inadequate fresh breathing air supply in the space; inadequate management of the emergency and both he and his partner inhaled a bunch of welding gases because they did not have access to the proper positive pressure respirators they should have been wearing. The emergency was rectified and both workers came out of the space hacking and nauseous.
The general contractor on the job gives out kickbacks...err... bonuses to the subcontractors that do not have any injuries; so my friend's boss told him to go home for the weekend and take care of himself and see how he felt on Monday. The boss promised him that he could get light duty on Monday if he was able to return to work. He was able to return to work but has been sick for 5 years now; because he can barely breath he does not get the excercise he needs and has been steadily gettin worse.
He will never have the lungs to chase a deer or a grandkid through the Oregon Forest again. He has to use a nebulizer to clear his lungs every day and various inhalers and pills to make it through work. His buddy is in the same boat.
Because of the complex system of health care and accident reporting in the work environment, and the bonus to the employer for no accidents; this injury was never reported to SAIF; a workmens comp claim was never filed, and my friend's Union Health Insurance is saddled with the entire cost of the treatment. Because my friend requires the health care of the Union he cannot retire. He loses a portion of his income to the union health care system in contract negotiations because the cost of health care is skyrocketing.
I guarantee this is a common practice in the workplace as. Workers especially construction workers, know that the squeaky wheel gets laid off at the end of the job and never rehired and that includes workers that demand the proper safety equipment.
This is also one of the factors that drives so much of the underground economy in Oregon as clients choose not to spend on contractors that insure worker safety all of the time; and concern themselves not just with the daily reports for major injuries to SAIF, but also lifetime well-being of their employees. Illegals do not report injuries nor do people working under the table.
posted 2 years, 1 month ago
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on The Biomass Question
Bone dry huh? Bone dry is hardly the way to describe what is in my green recycling bin. Pond dry would be a far better description. How is it going to get bone dry?
The city of Portland is having a hard time coming up with a place to make compost with all of its debris and that is a wet process. Coming up with a place to get it all dry enough to burn is something altogether different. It is a scam.
posted 2 years, 2 months ago
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on The Biomass Question
The probem with the future of biomass and your argument for it is that you are trying to compare apples to oranges. Your hospitals are, as you say, using a bypproduct of another process that is already concentrating a resource in one place, getting some product out of it, and creating a waste material. This is a natural outcome of resource management on a small scale and is a good thing.
Using biomass on a larger scale and actively going into the forest to harvest biomass after logging, or growing a fuel that you intend to burn; is something altogether different. The amount of fuel needed is vastly larger for a city than it is for a hospital.
A similar thing has happened in the recent past with burning spent fryer grease in diesel vehicles. The oil is a waste product; yes. You can refine it and burn it in diesel vehicles; yes. There is plenty to go around; No. Not even close.
The only reason they have ever burned slash in the forest is because it lets them plant a few more trees. I would say that the slash piles I have personally hunted around in Oregon forests compromise an area that ten to twenty trees could grow on per spar pole landing slash pile. Because the trees could have a future value of a few thousand dollars it has made sense in the past to burn the slash and plant the trees. You pay a couple guys to drive a water truck to the scene and torch the pile and pay them $400 and you have a place to plant $7000 worth of trees. It is simple math.
As far as forest protocol goes. We cannot trust men to make sound decisions without being forced to by a court of law. It is unfortunate but true. And one thing that you can count on is that men seldom learn by mistakes of others and looking at history.
posted 2 years, 2 months ago
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on The Biomass Question
And if you think we have problems with electricity now just wait for the quickly coming day when everybody is going to get on the fashionable bandwagon of plug-in hybrid cars.
They are advertised as "zero emission" vehicles by clever advertisers. Zero emissions... Riiiiight. Another mystical hoodwink, by advertisers, paid by for-profit car companies. Where do folks think they are going to get the power to go?
Where is the number to call in government to say the advertising is just plain an outright lie?
We are electing the "d" students that somehow got off the farm where the rest of the "d" students remain.
Election after election we elect the same kind of knotheads because their campaigns are financed by rich people that have chosen them as easiest to manage and manipulate.
One more thing I heard recently in the film 180 degrees south.
"Gaming devices" across the United States use as much energy as the City of SanDiego. I would love to see the math but I am guessing it is true.
We had technology in the 1982 Nissan Sentra that got 62 miles per gallon. Honda came out shortly after with the Civic VX that was the highest mileage, mass produced vehicle that was ever sold in this country. There are no non-hybrid cars available on the market today that come anywhere near the mileage of these two vehicles unless you go to the high end and very expensive Volkswagon diesels.
People buy what advertisers serve them. People are sheep.
posted 2 years, 2 months ago
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on The Biomass Question
By the way, if you desire full employment for your friends and kids; all you need to do is buy Organic Groceries and encourage your government to enforce workplace safety, wage and hour rules for all workers; including the rule that demands workers show documentation that they have a right to work.
Organic farming is very dependent on the hand and the mind. It requires weeding and fertilizing techniques that are a hands-on operation.
That a person would pay the guy installing a sink $45/hour and pay the guy growing food for his 2-year-old $9.50 an hour is just more proof of the upside-down way that businessmen and lawyers have manipulated Americans.
It is not natural for a 12 year old girl to have b-cup breasts because she has been eating chickens full of growth hormone her whole life; and it is not natural for your son to still have strep throat 3 weeks after he starts taking tetracycline because all of the beef he ever ate was loaded with it and the strep has adapted.
Proper organic farming takes compost and it takes a lot of woody debris to make good compost. Dont sell off our future good health so we can charge gaming devices and cell phones and plasma televisions.
posted 2 years, 2 months ago
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on The Biomass Question
If you have ever wondered why Mason Jars have two different sizes of lids the answer is conservation. At one time in the past the smaller lids cost 2-1/2 cents a piece less because they use less metal and after the first world war metal was in short supply. To people like my mom that lived through the war and the depression, and put up hundreds of quarts a year of all manner of farm produce; that could add up to $50. Real money in her day.
We need to get over the idea that we can just keep growing without limit.
I would imagine that for the cost of all of the salaries, together with the cost of office space; for all of the knotheads in government and industry and banking that think it would be a good idea to burn all of the organic material we need for other far more important things... well for that money we could probably give a 60% rebate on the purchase of good windows for the entire bottom two thirds of wage earners in the state.
All the drivers of this idea want is money. There is a reason the top 1% income bracket gets 16.4 cents of every dollar of GDP; and hoodwinking all of us with the promise of a dumb idea like this by calling it green and co-opting powerful dissenters is just how they do it.
Biomass is dirty, and it is an inefficient use of resources and we will be sorry if we let them sell us this idea.
Ask your grandma. Before they put another water drain on the mighty Columbia to grow switchgrass to burn for electricity, ask your grandma where the fertilizer came from on her parent's farm. Ask her what it looked like to see a free running river dammed. Ask her. Please. Ask her.
posted 2 years, 2 months ago
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on The Biomass Question
I was doing some consulting on a farm recently. Although they have done a lot of thing on this farm in the past 5 decades, with animals and berries and a variety of other things, the owners are now living out their retirement years growing a monoculture crop which is a perennial and requires a minimum of actual effort. The barns are perfectly organized museums of past Willamette Valley Productivity. The owners also have their kids living in other detached houses on the same property, and it was one of their kids that called me and wanted some help figuring out an organic garden scene for the farm.
As we walked past a threadbare chicken yard just uphill of 5 fallow acres that have been that way for a decade, I spied a huge pile of organic debris full of leaves and branches, three used cristmas trees, and all manner of debris that had been pulled out of the meager garden that had been nearby in the preceding year. i would estimate the size of the pile at 6-8 cubic yards.
I asked what it was and I was told it was the "burn pile". Later we would go into the house and reach past the woodstove to turn up the electric baseboard heat. And later still, we would talk about where the soil was going to come from to fill the terraced raised beds to be built on a perfectly southeast facing slope on the farm. No compost pile in sight on a farm with 3 families and 5 decades of farming experience. It is the "D" students that got left on the farm.
If we get a plethora of biomass facilities in place to burn organic waste we can just about kiss an organic future goodbye. If you think you can put a value on logging slash or the contents of a green bin in Portland, and then send people out to a logging site to harvest fuel or empty bins without fundamentally destroying the lowest tier of our entire farm/forest ecosystem.... well if you can imagine that you deserve to pay $20 for a pound for potatoes grown on chemically sterilized soil using fertilizer derived from fracked natural gas imported along a pipeline through the Timberline Lodge.
People harvesting logging slash for money will make Portland's "canners" digging through the recycling bins and scrappers stealing the wire from substations look like angels in comparison. They will take every single scrap of organic material they can get their hands on and burn it. It will be gone. Water will run through logged forests and into creeks and streams and destroy salmon habitat faster than a guy named Chuck with a saw named Stihl could ever think of destroying forest. We will all look like bigger chumps than even the folks in Iowa that thought you could fuel America's cars growing corn.
Limitless growth and expansion is impossible. Even the universe has an edge.
posted 2 years, 2 months ago
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on Wage Woes
Cheaper than we can...
Cheaper than we can is often only calculated at the price tag level. You need to factor in externalities to determine the true cost of something and that is a complicated affair.
But just one example would be the export of our production of consumer goods to China. Yes the goods are cheaper but they are completing a new coal fired power plant every 10 days and the pollution, as in acid rain, falls in North America and most of that west of the Cascades, and in fact a good deal of that right here in Portland.
Externalities figure into a large component of economics but they are too complicated for most people to take the time to understand. It is easier for most people to listen to sound bites on television commercials and form their opinions at the end of an advertisers carrot string.
If externalities were understood by a majority; and people took them into account when they made purchasing decisions, many things like organic farming and sustainable logging and such like would automatically fall into a favorable stasis.
posted 2 years, 5 months ago
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on Wage Woes
cont...
And our Salmon, our precious Salmon.
On the east coast of the United States there is no longer anywhere to catch and retain an Atlantic Salmon. "The Leaper" arguably the fightingest fish ever, is commercially and recreationally extinct. The state of Maine is glad to see a few thousand while we lament the fact when we get less than 3 million of our historical run of 20 million. And when we do get salmon we pursue them in the river with nets and sell them, like our forest, with no value added. One transaction and the fish is gone over the border, out of the region and critically, unavailable to the possible tourist that we might entice to come here from the fishless east coast. We make a couple of hundred for one frozen fish and miss the airport fee, hotel room, fishing license, rental car, guide fee, tackle purchase, and the price of ten meals out over the course of a few days.
We trade a couple of hundred dollars for a couple of thousand dollars we will never see.
If we just cannot see our way to eliminating gill nets in our rivers let us at least finally draw the line in the whitecap; and say that no matter how good the fishing gets, no fisherman will ever get to keep more than s/he has kept in his/her best year. And when He or She, the holder of that precious salmon gill net permit, can no longer drive the boat; That permit is over. And to encourage the thing along, we could grant these same fishermen and fisherwomen free recreational fishing licenses, along their bloodlines for the next 7 generations to turn over their permits tomorrow.
Oregon is the Pacific Wonderland. While a lot of the world lies in environmental ruins; (no Atlantic Salmon in France or Germany either; rivers running through Korea, India, etc. brown with toxic waste, millions of square miles of minefields and brownfields; air in Bejing so bad it cannot be quantified ) we got lucky and got the hippies and the Governor that made all of the difference in the race so far.
We should take advantage of that.
posted 2 years, 5 months ago
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on Wage Woes
Two More Places...
There are two other places where money is running out of our local economy like gin through a sieve. Forestry and Fishing.
Say whatever you like about the current diversification of our economy with all of the shiny white silicon forest campuses, but the real forest in Oregon is made of Douglas Fir and Hemlock trees, Ponderosas and Cedars, and all of their foliage and fungus kin; knit into one of the grandest ecosystems on the face of the planet.
And swimming within that ecosystem, year after year, day after day, cool pool and rapid, one after the other, again and again, is the most advanced scientific monitoring device ever conceived: The Pacific Salmonid. Restore a vital ecosystem with its native plants and vegetation, preserve its cool waters with shade, allow the floods to wash the siltation off of the gravel, cut the phosphates and take out the old tires and garbage; like the canyon behind Reed Campus in Portland, and watch the magic of returning Salmonids declare the success as they make the final half mile of the journey to the canyon through a remodeled culvert and someone's side yard ditch. It had probably been 20 years.
And yet, despite being the very extraction point for valuable forest and fish resources, in demand throughout the workd and its finest sushi restraurants, we seldom see the value added that we could see.
Lumber is so cheap and available that thousands of board feet of this resource is sitting this very moment in dumpsters throughout the state on its way to a chipper to become hog fuel or compost. This while the inhabitants of the city flock to IKEA and buy cheap furniture made of particle board in a foreign place because there can apparently be no homespun furniture industry in a land covered wall to wall with trees. So many trees that when the first Timber Barons arrrived, they saw so many they assumed they would never be able to cut them all down. With all of this scrap why would anone anywhere in the country ever cut a standard window cripple stud again, or fascia block. Why aren't we manufacturing standard door and window headers? Why are all the bee hive parts coming from somewhere else?
posted 2 years, 5 months ago
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on Wage Woes
Continued...
Our main tool for the discovery of undocumented workers is the not-yet-mandatory use, by employers, of the E-Verify system. But even when this system is utilized it is still an easy work-around for the undocumented worker. The system only requires a match of a social security number and a name on a photo ID. There have been many arrests in the parking lots of Malls and Big Box Stores of people providing these matching documents utilizing advanced color printing equipment in vans. No one it seems is trying to figure out why some Social Security accounts are receiving multiple payments from across the country and nothing seems to be taking place at the state level.
The process whereby employers circumvent this whole system employing people for cash is going to be much more difficult to discover but one key would be through a system whereby the state CCB would require construction sites to list the CCB numbers of participating contractors in bold print at the front of a job site. It would be a simple effort thereafter to see if exempt contractors indeed were working with several employees. Exempt employers could be hiring through a temp agency but if a team of workers is constantly working on this basis, they really are a single entity and should be required to act like one, and pay workmen's comp rates for the work they are doing and not some general temp agency rate.
The State also loses when contractors hire through temp agencies because the temp agencies utilize a single CCB number throughout the state and so the state does not collect fees from each branch even though each brance is acting as a single entitiy.
In the end people have to stand up for themselves and their families; and that gets uncomfortable in our laid back social scene. Perhaps as more prisons are closed and more old folks are going without the support of the safety net and more businesses are closing up because they cannot compete; our own social responsibility will come to the fore. Perhaps.
posted 2 years, 5 months ago
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on Wage Woes
Income and availability of jobs are both much lower here than in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Oregon has a severe problem with the underground economy. Both undocumented workers; and also people working under the table to lower their cost to employers or clients, avoid child support payments or to avoid other legal judgements against them that involve the garnishment of wages.
Because thse groups of people are forced by percieved circumstance to take lower wages, they depress the economy as a whole. Both because they make less money themselves and because their employment drives down the going rate for their labor input in our local market.
Because taxes often go uncollected the state budget suffers. Because workmen's compensation is not paid, injured workers show up in emergency rooms; and in the end the public at large pays for their treatment through increased insurance premiums. For business that provide health insurance it is a further burden to support their competitors. Employees end up paying because increased payments by their employers for insurance cuts into the profit that pays wages.
It is the employers however that should be held responsible because they stand to benefit the most by breaking the law and profiting from the labor of those working for them illegally. Contracts are landed by them because they have a much lower labor cost and drive other legal businesses out of business through competition in the marketplace.
In addition, much of the money earned by illegal workers leaves the teacup of our economy and supports economies elsewhere; lowering social pressure in those countries to undergo substantial political change, and thus reinforcing the extreme disparities of income in those countries; pressures which would be much more likely to come to the fore if people in those countries continued to grovel for wages within their own countries.
The arguement that some certain nationalities work so much harder than the typical American are baseless. Most of the increased productivity of these groups falls squarely on operating outside a basic envelope of safety. But once again, because workmen's comp is not involved the accidents are not tied to particular employers and the system does not record the cost. Undocumented workers also are routinely denied overtime, which again cuts tax rates in that group and depresses state government revenue.
posted 2 years, 5 months ago
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on Compromise
The biggest problem facing the state right now is a shortage of funds. This shortage is due primarily to a high unemployment rate and the resultant double edged sword of low tax revenue and high payments to the safety net that unemployed people rely on.
To be sure we have a national problem on our hands; but I feel one of the main factors that needs to be addressed is making sure people have a legal right to work in the first place and that businesses of all stripes are only employing people legally and paying all of the commensurate workmen's comp and business license fees they are supposed to be paying.
There is a national E-Verify system in place but it only ensures that the Social Security Number and Name on the ID match. 2 or 4 or 100 people could all be using the same number and name and the state is doing nothing to make sure only one person is using that ID match. This allows many businesses to employ people that will work for minimum wage who are sharing an identity and thus slants the workplace in favor of the employer. Just because he is employing cheap labor does not mean he chages less but his workers do contribute far less to the system and the entire state suffers.
It is in the interest of both parties to address this huge hole in our economy. It is less a matter of compromise than simply doing the people's business.
posted 2 years, 5 months ago
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on Addressing Gang Violence
Like for example:
Did they ever get out of bed to someone cooking a low cost breakfast of oatmeal or pancackes from a bagged mix; and then eat breakfast as a family or with at least one other person, at a table, without a TV on; making a plan about how the day was going to go, who was going to be where when, if homework was ready.
And then go to school on the bus and eat lunch at school and come home and do homework before settling in front of the television; and eat again, a low cost meal of soup or hot dish made with mushroom soup and tuna and pasta or a jar of ragu and some pasta you had to cook in hot water for 8 minutes, or basically anything at all ever cooked from ingredients and not just rewarmed in a microwave?
Did they ever do anything outdoors on a weekend day like fish or bike or even take a walk with at least one adult along that wasn't drunk or high? Did they even have a bike as a kid? How about a pet? How about their own bed.
In my opinion it seems that we lose the most kids to just not ever exposing them to a life that could be different. TV and the Movies are never very real but these kids never see what is Normal to have some basis of comparison. They look around and they see themselves as just part of a community that is all losers. Successful families shun them because they are unpredictable and their conduct can catch like a virus and hurt their own children.
posted 2 years, 7 months ago
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on Addressing Gang Violence
And also this. How do those two young people think that other successful not-gang-involved kids were kept out of the gangs. Do they know anybody that didn't get in trouble?
posted 2 years, 7 months ago
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on Addressing Gang Violence
I am wondering if either of the young people you have on the show today ever met a "normal" family with two working parents and a home they owned and a car they owned?
posted 2 years, 7 months ago
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on The Viability of LNG
The reason people like me opposed Bradwood; and the reason it failed as a project, was because of the place they picked. They chose a place that is nearly wilderness, directly across the river from two wildlife areas; one of which holds the primary remaining population of the Columbia Whitetail Deer, and right smack at the edge of a popular salmon fishery. Your guest comented on how it was only a dock and some tanks but the reality was that they were about to put a large, well lighted 24/7 industrial area in a place that is now silent and dark.
Why they weren't putting it in dontown Astoria seems obvious as they were trying to prevent vaporizing an entire city in the event of an accident or terrorist attack on the facility setting all of that gas afire.
As far as the domestic production of Natural Gas goes. The scene of the extraction in Northern Canada is an environemental disaster as they rip up the northern Boreal Forest lungs of the planet and pollute all of the surface water as they grub around. The project is such a massive failure already that even wit the extreme unemployment in Canada at this time they are having to pay a premium price to import workers from the US to get the job done. These people are merely slaves living for months at a time away from their families in barracks with nearly every element of their lives directly under the thumb of the man.
Shale oil in the lower 48 is also a disaster as the fracturing of the earth neccessary to get at it is causing widespread damage to aquifers, many innediately adjacent to the major metro areas of the east.
Start with conservation. Put the unemployed back to work right here in our own backyard woth some real and substantial weatherization programs. Slam a tax on huge homes that hold two people. Make the rich pay for all of the externalities they create.
posted 3 years ago
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