The Trump Slump

                                                                                            written 18 May, 2025

                                                                                        published 25 May, 2025

  

            Growing up in San Diego, I watched lots of surfers.  Being in the right spot, at the right time, moving in the right direction, the world gives a great ride.  Being in the wrong spot, or at the wrong time, or moving in the wrong direction, you could get pounded, broken, or even killed.  This metaphor for life shows the benefit of awareness of the whole system.  Being in harmony with life is beneficial, while being out of harmony is painful.  This is true for society as well.   

            We are into our fifth month of painful disharmony at the top of the Federal government.  Many people still believe what they are being told.  Multiple pronouns are the problem.  Immigrants are the problem.  Foreign alliances are the problem.  Courts are the problem.  Government is the problem.  Billionaires know what's best.

            But people are having second thoughts.  The economy stopped growing, and is now contracting.  Locally we have already seen cuts in fire safety, mental health, food aid, and education.  The uncertainty of tariffs makes business decisions riskier.  Core costs vary widely.  Anything imported is more costly.  Commercial shipping into the US west coast has plummeted.  Food and gasoline prices jumped higher.  Tourism, a key to our county economy, is slowing down.  Some results from US threats to Canada.  Some is due to the general caution, as disposable income shrinks with rising prices.   

            Geopolitical risks are growing.  America is no longer a trusted partner in defense, as we threaten to invade our neighbors on a presidential whim.  America is no longer trusted economically either, as established trading relationships are destroyed and our credit rating has been downgraded.  The role of the US dollar as a global reserve currency has been slowly eroding for decades, but is now very much in question, as erratic behavior at the top brings everything into question.  The winner here is China, which has been actively working to replace the dollar in the global marketplace.

            Based on our leader's actions, there is question as to whether he is working for a foreign government, or just for his own corrupt gains, or is demonstrating progressive mental decline.  For another government to gain advantage, or his personal wealth to be relevant, Earth has to remain habitable for humans.  Furthermore, the issues of gender identity, immigration, economic upheaval, and geopolitical gains, are age old struggles which take place within the underlying assumption of a habitable planet.  But the climate crisis, if left unaddressed, is making Earth uninhabitable for humans.

            Therefore, to my mind, his absolute rejection of any consideration of the climate concern is an act of mental insanity.  A sane person entertains the possibility their opinions might be wrong, or at least incomplete.  Instead, we see a rejection of any mention, let alone investigation, that the climate is rapidly changing.  Every department in the National Science Foundation, which funds basic research in many fields, is being shut down.  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which funds weather research and reporting, is being decimated and parts of the country no longer have 24-hour weather information.  Studies that monitor the physical reality of our climate are being closed down.  

            Assessment of the risk the changing climate poses to the financial and building industries has been abolished.  But the insurance industry knows it can no longer use past events to reliably predict future risk.  Even the fossil fuel industry knows "drill, baby, drill" is bankrupt, and has acknowledged that global oil production has peaked, becoming less affordable, even if available.  

            This denial of information is in addition to defunding the modest domestic attempts to stop adding to the problem, which worked to shift energy production from combustion of increasingly scarce resources to collecting the free energy already falling on the planet.  The US used to lead the rest of the world, but we are out of harmony with reality, essentially choosing to invest in buggy whips in response to the automobile revolution.  This leaves China in a position to become the global leader in production of solar panels and EV transportation.

            Reality eventually overwhelms insanity, and so we wait to see how it unfolds.  Will we soon experience a recession, or even a depression?  Will politicians become courageous?  Will it take civil unrest?  Or a massive climate disaster?  Or a critical mass of awakened consciousness?  We are all in this together, and must stop pretending otherwise.

 

The Gift That Keeps On Giving

                                                                                            written 11 May, 2025

                                                                                        published 18 May, 2025

 

            Production of the WWII atomic bomb was "need to know", limited to physicists and engineers for security.  The two fission bombs immediately killed about a quarter million Japanese.  The enduring health effect of nuclear radiation on the survivors was unexpected, since few biologists had been involved in the project. 

            When matter comes apart in fission, energy releases in four forms in addition to heat: gamma radiation, and beta, neutron, and alpha particles.  Electromagnetic gamma radiation is massless, with deep penetrating power, damaging cells and DNA throughout the body.  Beta particles are high energy electrons.  The small mass is less penetrating than gamma radiation, but damages living systems through ionization and impact.  Neutrons, 2,000 times more massive than beta electrons, can also be "captured" into the nucleus of other atoms, creating unstable isotopes, which decay radioactively over time.  Alpha particles, four times more massive than neutrons, with a larger electrical charge than beta particles, have reduced penetrating power.  An outer layer of dead skin is sufficient protection, but once ingested into the body, damage is intense.

            The US postwar investigation of radiation health impact focused primarily on the effect of the bomb's gamma radiation, and considered just the immediate death and injuries data, but radiation exposures were overestimated due to few solid measurements.  The report set a standard for radiation damage, defining "safe" levels of exposure.  There were no long-term studies of damage resulting from internal exposure to radioactive material from breathing, drinking, and eating, which can occur with low exposure building over time.  This report conveniently shielded the growing nuclear industry from responsibility for those health effects.  Radiation can't be seen or felt, and the long-term damage can't be tied to one specific exposure: the best kind of externalized cost.

            Two nuclear industries thrived after the war: production of nuclear weapons and nuclear electrical power.  Weapons production evolved to plutonium production from irradiated uranium, and each nuclear power plants uses tons of enriched uranium annually.  Both industries require extensive handling of radioactive material, producing thousands of tons of highly radioactive waste products.  The government, and the corporations selected for plant construction and operation, had economic incentive to disregard "unproven" health dangers for their employees, or the civilian communities surrounding and downwind from the production sites.  The limited gamma radiation data from Japan was accepted as justification for avoiding further investigation, so people and property were contaminated for decades.

            Over time, people began to notice chronic health issues and word slowly leaked out.  In 1979, Three Mile Island brought radiation concerns to the public.  The nuclear industry response was, and still is: there is no risk, people are experiencing psychological radiation trauma, not real health issues.  There were no radiation monitors at the plant.  With no quantitative evidence of contamination, corporate denial was hard to refute. 

            In 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Russia brought radiation contamination to worldwide attention.  Soviet disregard for human nuclear exposure was as extreme as the Americans.  Awareness of the explosion only came when nuclear plant workers in Sweden set off detectors as they were heading into work.  The Russians didn't tell their own citizens, even those eventually evacuated from the irradiated areas.  In the US, Chernobyl forced the government to address the decades of contamination emanating from the Hanford plutonium facility in Washington state, and actual production ceased in 1989.  Over the last 35 years the Hanford "clean up" has cost $65 billion, with an estimated total cost of $600 billion by 2086, which may be optimistic.  This will just clean up the plant site, without considering the contaminated surrounding land, ground water, or citizens. 

            Only time makes radioactive material safe for living systems.  Some material is lethal longer than humanity has lived.  No real "cleanup" is possible.  Radioactive material must be removed from contact with living systems, and there is no place to put it.  Radioactivity accumulates as it moves up food chain, concentrating in humans in specific areas, such as breast milk, the gonads, and bone marrow.  This causes chronic fatigue, depressed immune systems, tumors and growths, cancers, hormonal imbalances, genetic mutations in offspring, and death.  But the people who make money spreading this stuff are never held accountable for the consequences.

            Chronic diseases are on the rise.  Cancers now strike young children.  Human fertility is declining.  Our economy has saturated us with chemicals, bits of plastic, and radiation.  Might there be a connection?

 

Artificial Intelligence

                                                                                              written 4 May, 2025

                                                                                        published 11 May, 2025

  

            Quantum mechanics, first considered in the early 1900's, and formalized by 1925, opened a fundamentally new view for western physics.  The world is whole, not a collection of parts.  

            The first semiconductor transistor, a technical expression of quantum mechanics, was built by Bell Labs in 1947.  A small electrical charge could control a larger electrical flow, acting as a switch or amplifier.  Although large in size and relatively power hungry, this was the first step toward the computers of today.

            The first transistors were individually constructed, and assembled together as discrete elements into larger systems.  Manufacturing processes evolved to build whole arrays of semiconductors, and the interconnections, into large chips with high level functions, such as stored memory and central processing units (CPU), the core of a computer.  This involves precision lithography and layers of physical vapor deposition, which are then precisely etched away, before additional layers are added.  

            As manufacturing processes were refined, the size of each semiconductor junction was reduced over time, allowing more transistor junctions per square inch, while using less power.  The result has been exponential growth.   

            Since the first semiconductor in 1947, about 2.9 billion trillion transistors had been mass produced by 2014, about the same number as the stars in the Milky Way galaxy.  Today that number is 10 times greater, and still growing.  In 1971, Intel produced one of the first microprocessors, with 2,300 transistors.  Today, CPU's contain as many as 10 billion transistors.  In 2023, a Micron 2 terabyte memory chip, had 232 layers, with over 5 trillion semiconductors.

            The human brain contains about 86 billion neurons.

            Computers are increasingly more complex than the brain and operate orders of magnitude more rapidly.  To think humans are still in "control" is wishful thinking.  Artificial intelligence programs, also called large language models, now routinely perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence: learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making, to achieving goals defined within the structure of the programming. 

            This has supported such varied socially beneficial results as warnings of incoming seismic waves, swift reading of medical imaging records, and complex calculations of the folded shape of a DNA coded protein.  But the downside consequences are huge as well.  

            The lure of enormous economic returns, driven by the "fear of missing out", has spurred investments in vast cloud computing resources, with typical corporate disregard for unintended consequences.  But the recent Chinese "DeepSeek" program, using a different approach, can run on a laptop, is open source, being offered for free, threatening to make other AI investments irrelevant.  

            AI models are "trained" on the vast array of information on the Internet, using material without regard to copyright ownership.  The capacity to create documents displaces people.  The capacity to fabricate images supports fraud and disruptive propaganda.  While AI is good at identifying patterns, it is not good at generalizing from those patterns.  

            People trust legal advice generated by AI more than a lawyer.  However, while generally "truthful", AI advice can degenerate into a dark side, encouraging depressed people toward suicide, lying under pressure, or hiding mistakes when "punished".  They struggle to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth", and can digress into hallucinations.

            In addition to these serous social/economic concerns, AI is a massive new energy load.  Part of the renewed push for nuclear power is to support AI.  Methane gas turbines are the other preferred power source, which produce as much climate warming as coal plants.  In the last 5 years, Google emissions are up 48 percent and Microsoft emissions are up 29 percent.

            AI programs can now modify their own code, exhibiting capabilities that weren't originally programed into them, with changes happening on the scale of weeks, even days.  They can replicate themselves, terrifying experts who have long warned about the threat posed by artificial intelligence going rogue.  

            As our computer capacity exceeds human capacity, we are at a singularity, a point of such rapid change that the past gives no reference for the future.  AI is based on the existing conceptual logic of humanity knowledge.  However, the fullness of humanity is more than just conceptual, and includes inspiration arising from our innate connection to the whole, as validated by the underlying physics.  AI is like an insane sociopath, with only self-serving logic and no compassion.  Until we rise above the short-term lure of riches, and embrace the unity of reality we inhabit, we race toward our demise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sudden Changes

                                                                                           written 27 April, 2025

                                                                                          published 4 May, 2025

   

            Humans have Neolithic bodies, developed over millennium, oriented to respond quickly to immediate physical threats.  This flight/fight capacity ramps up rapidly, allowing appropriate response in the moment, slowly returning to "normal" after the crisis passes.  Therefore, we are ill prepared for slow, long term changes.  This is like the frog, that immediately hops out of boiling water, but will cook to death if put in cool water that then heats to boiling. 

            One of the challenges to motivating people about the climate crisis is the immediate dangers seem minimal to non-existent.  Sea levels are slowly rising each year.  The general cautious consensus is "only" one meter rise in the next 75 year, averaging out to about 1/2" this year, which seems like almost nothing.  In the last 150 years, the Earth has warmed by less than 3°F, which is smaller than the variation between the normal body temperatures of different humans.  That seems tiny, and the changes are slow, making it very easy to disregard.

            The linear assumption that tomorrow will be pretty much like yesterday is, for the most part, true.  Our investment economy is based on this assumption, and everything tends to follow from that.  However, the natural world is non-linear, where even very small changes can have immense consequences, shifting from one stable condition to a radically different one in a heartbeat.  Consider an earthquake, or a volcanic eruption, sometimes centuries in the making, changing the landscape in minutes.

            An effective climate solution has been identified: complete economic decarbonization (no longer adding to the problem) and massive carbon sequestration (returning to a climate habitable by humans).  But this demands radical change to our entire energy system, involving extensive rebuilding and massive investments.  That threatens our highly stratified economy, which has resulted in the well-funded climate denial industry.  Denying the problem even exists is now Federal "wisdom", and an emerging backup narrative is that climate "solutions" don't really work anyway.  

            But reality doesn't care what foolishness we believe, and scientific climate research continues, even if the US is no longer a relevant leader.  China is becoming the renewable powerhouse, producing affordable solar cells and electric vehicles for the world.

            While a succession of 500 year floods, megafires, or a decade of drought can destroy a regional economy, human structures can change rapidly as well.  Our economy is very fragile, highly leveraged, which means stability is based on the continuity of existing conditions and assumptions.  When any of that changes, even a little, the entire structure can collapse.  

            Currently, a key economic weakness is the insurance industry, a "canary in the coal mine".  The recent changes in flood and fire hazard zones are disturbing.  For instance, in Ukiah, everything west of Dora Street is now in the Moderate to Very High fire hazard zone.  This reflects new information gathered from a decade of fire storms, showing strong impact dependent on wind conditions.  This is the new reality, yet our entire civilization was built on a different set of environmental assumptions, now increasingly irrelevant.

            Insurance companies literally can't afford to ignore reality, when losses exceed premium income.  In February, Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, said "insurance companies and banks are already pulling out of coastal areas and areas where there are a lot of fires.  In 10 or 15 years there are going to be regions of the country where you can’t get a mortgage.”  This threatens the foundation of the financial sector.

            There are three options going forward: status quo, triage, or resilience.

            Status quo (high climate breakdown and low adaptation) is the current Federal approach, which focuses exclusively on maintaining existing short term profit structures.  Increasing disasters will create a chaotic exit of insurers from affected areas, leaving customers and local governments stranded and abandoned, eventually leading to states going insolvent.

            Triage (high climate breakdown and high adaptation) assumes continued governmental denial, but some regions begin to adapt and "ruggedize", making survivability more possible in those areas.

            Resilience (medium climate breakdown and high adaptation) assumes the insurance industry becomes an advocate for effectively addressing the climate problem, through managed retreat and climate adaptive policies at all levels.

            Insurance companies already see the problem reflected in their bottom line, unlike the fossil fuel industry.  Choosing to build resilience sooner increases what we can preserve.  The best time was decades ago, but the next best time is today, while we still have options.