Junkyard Planet: A Book Report

Junkyard Planet by Adam Minter. Had I read this book when I was sixteen, I have no doubt I would be in the junk business. There is an excitement to the junk trade that I found compelling. No doubt this is the same excitement people on the Antiques Roadshow experience when they find out the piece of the junk in their attic is worth a significant amount of money.

Take, for example, this story about how Leonard Fritz made his fortune and founded one of the largest recycling facilities in the country:

"Back when Leonard Fritz was first starting out, steel mills had dumps where trash and the residues of steelmaking were thrown away. This latter category was represented by sand, bricks, and bits of steel that fell away during the manufacturing process. Of these steel bits, the most plentiful were the thin flakes that form on the surface of hot steel as it cools. "Mill flakes" as those flakes were called, was pretty much useless in 1938....Elsewhere in Detroit, Armco Steel, a major supplier to the automobile industry, was testing a new type of steel furnace. But Armco was dealing with an expensive problem: preparing ore for the furnace cost roughly $100 per ton. So the designer of the new furnace, a metallurgist who happened to be daughter of the mill's president, did some calculations and figured out that if you added a substance with the chemical makeup of mill scale, the preparation process would speed up and the cost would drop by $99 per ton, to $1. But where on earth could Armco get enough mill scale to feed its furnace. For reasons lost to history, the job of sourcing that mill scale landed in the hands of the metallurgist's young husband, who was visiting the Kelsey-Hayes wheel forging plant near Detroit on July 2, 1938. As it happened, Leonard Fritz was busy screening a three-hundred-ton pile of mill scale in the parking lot of the Kelsey-Hayes forging plant that day, working at an agreed-upon rate of $1.25 per ton... 'Ah, how much of that mill scale do you have there young man?' 'I figure there's about three hundred tons.' 'That won't be enough.' 'Well, how much do you need?' 'What I'm looking for is three thousand tons.' Leonard Fritz was only fifteen, but he already knew a few things, one of which was this: there was a dump in Detroit where mills had been dumping scale for years....'I think I can scrape it up. How much would you pay for it?' The metallurgist's young husband hesitated for a moment. 'Probably thirty-two dollars per ton.' Leonard Fritz understandably lost it. 'WHAT?' he exclaimed...'Well, thirty-six.' 'I'll do her.'...a few months later, shortly after his sixteenth birthday, Armco Steel presented Leonard Fritz with a check for $186,000. It was still 1938."

Point being, the "how" and the "where" can send a ragpicker, or anyone really, into the ranks of those with considerable fortunes. The book has a lot of stories like that, and mainly now involving poor Chinese farmers who take America's (the Saudi Arabia of garbage) scrap, and turn into raw materials for the insatiable appetite of the world.

When I was growing up in Northwest Indiana, it was easy money in the steel mills. It was also some of the foulest air you could hope to breathe. That foul air was from the coking process, where they bake the volatiles of out of coal and turn into coke, and the volatiles, in turn, coke gas, are burned to produce a shitty brown haze. That haze - and jobs at the mills - is mostly gone now. Globalization was bad for the employment conditions of the area, but good for the air. Keep in mind, steelmaking didn't go away, it just got more efficient - and when you consider that a ton of scrap converted back into steel in electric furnace equals a ton and a half of iron ore, a ton of coal, and a half ton of limestone, that isn't so bad.

The scrap industry, as this book points out, is one of the greenest industries around. It may be true that a lot of horrible work-place and environmental practices occur in the developed world, where much of the scrap is recycled and purified, but these places have trouble enough just to produce clean food and water. The last thing on many people's minds over there are work conditions. (And besides, as standards of living improve, so does a demand for quality of life and environmental standards).

The majority of the book takes place in China, the majority of the action revolves around metals, and the majority of the capitalist hero characters are Chinese. Not that there are not good things happening here in America, but honestly we are all pampered poodles, not willing to do the dirty work anymore, even when we can profit from it. We have to remember that, if there was no boom in China, most of our crap would end up in landfills here, or burned, or illegally dumped.

Many of our broken things are sent to China, where they are repaired or repurposed, and sent on to the developed world. Part of this reuse is the resourcefulness of people in the developed world, part of this is our own wastefulness, and the distressing tendency of manufacturers to discourage repairs in favor of buying new products (and that can change, but it requires the consumer to demand it).

As Mr. Minter points out, recycling is really not an indefinite process. The quality of product inevitably declines, and so recycling is really outsourcing of trash to somewhere else. What Americans can do, is to follow the other two points on the recycling can: reduce and reuse. Problem is our way of life discourages wearing of hair shirts and the practice of austerity. And so we continue to consume and dispose...

Still, it is better than not using the stuff again and again. When you consider how much energy and effort has been used to extract and purify so many things from the earth, it seems rather a waste to dump them all back in again.

   

Glen O. Reeser, RIP

My friend Glen passed away yesterday. Here is his obituary. I'm not ashamed to say I got teary-eyed reading it. This is the second friend I've lost to cancer, and it's never gets easy.

In May of 2013, he announced he had Stage Four lung cancer, and tumors in his head. After consideration and debate with his family (his sister had gone through a nightmarish treatment of cancer and died miserably), he opted for treatment. That was a good thing, as he gained an extra year and a half from it, and after treatment when he was feeling OK, he had good year. He went on trips with his wife to places they wanted to go, he got visits from his many friends and family, and visits from his "kids", international students he had hosted over the years.

I actually didn't know Glen all that well. Glen was always was a little restrained. Always had a little formality in his relationships with me (well, so I perceived). It may be because he was a little Scandinavian? (I'm reminded of the joke about the Norwegian husband who loved his wife so much he almost told her).  My grandfather was the same way. There was always, despite some informal events, always a distance in there. Not surprisingly, like my grandfather, I found out after the fact that he was extremely charitable and altruistic and helped out a lot people without their knowing. That's a very high bar for me to work at.

I transported Glen to and from chemo and radiation treatments when my schedule allowed. I also drove him to and from the bar on Thursday nights this spring and summer. (Harper College ceramics night class had a long tradition of after-class drinks and pizza on Thursday night).

I think as a thank you, he built a hot wire device for cutting shapes out of plastic foam. I've never used it, and didn't have the heart to tell him. I guess I'll have to use it. It's really slick.

Glen's Hot Wire Foam Cutter

Glen was a heavy smoker. Since I smoked for thirty-five years, I kind of have that sword of Damocles hanging over my head. Ah, but, probably no. Not in my family history, and they were all heavy smokers.

I recall a time last year when I helped Glen move some e-waste out of his basement for recycling. He was heavily into the chemo stage and had lost all his hair and weight and strength, and so I had to haul all this stuff on my own, which was fine with me. He told me he needed a break and went outdoors. When I hauled up a load to my car, I found him smoking a cigarette, and he looked a little guilty.

"Are you going to give me shit?" he asked.

I replied "You already got lung cancer. What more can happen?"

He was miserable enough as it was. Why try to quit?

I really didn't expect him to make it through last summer.

At the school, I only had to give him grief in a professional capacity once, as lab tech. He was making ceramic drums, and was using goat skin for the drum heads. The goat skins were stored in his locker and were really starting to stink up the place. And so I said to him "Dude! You got to do something about those rank goat skins!" He laughed and got them out.

Glen had a work shop in his basement that included a nice metal lathe. One time he brought in a remarkable little brass device, which he placed on a hot coffee mug, and it oscillated in a very charming way.

"Oh!" I said, "A Sterling Engine!"

He nodded and said nothing, but later I found out from the ceramics professor that he had said "Leave it to Kurman to be the only one to know it was a Sterling engine!"

I puffed up with pride, delighted to be absently complimented by such a smart guy.

And he was a smart guy. And a good guy.

I heard a cop story once about a man who's son was murdered, and he wanted to pray over the body. the cops told him not to do it, because his son's mangled body would be his last memory of him. That's not true. We choose the memory we wish.

So, the memory I have is from two weeks ago, when I went to visit Glen at his house. Glen , my former student aide Scotty, Glen's wife Martha, and Glen's sister Mary Jo all sat on the porch. It was a pleasant warm sunny afterrnoon. We had beers. We had laughs. We had good conversation. Even though he needed a walker, Glen was active, aware, engaged, funny.

Everyone enjoyed themselves, and that afternoon is where Glen will reside for me.

W.I.P.P. and the Texas Shredder

Forgot to mention the other day, I had a desire to visit the Home of the Texas Shredder, which is in Canutillo TX, just north of El Paso. There was no effing way I was even going to bring it up with my honey that we go there, though I (because I do love to go on tours of industrial manufactories if I can get in on them) desperately wanted to see one of my favorite pieces of technology.

Ah, no. Not this Texas Shredder.

THIS Texas Shredder.

I also wanted to visit W.I.P.P. but doubt I could, and so had to satisfied with driving by the place after we went to Carlsbad Caverns. (W.I.P.P. was directly on the drive back to Amarillo).

Now, why would I want to visit a weapons-grade-but-"mixed down" plutonium depository? Surely the twelve-year-old-boy in you can answer that. You will also perhaps remember that W.I.P.P. was in the news earlier this year?

Actually, these items are all within a theme rather unsuccessfully explored some time ago, in two essays: Deep Logistics; The 100,000 Year Project. I'm not sure that exploration was needed or warranted, as the question about future deep time orientation = deep morality involves something that, as my honey sagely put it to me, is something that requires more than wisdom, a something deeper than wisdom that lies stratigraphically just beneath it, and is certainly connected to biology.

Quite simply, a good start is stewardship: resource management and materials reincarnation.

I point to the Texas Shredder as an example of a solution (recall that once upon a time, scrap cars in the US were a HUGE environmental problem, and probably, without fanfare, the last remnants of that problem were hauled out of the woods in, say 2008 or so, and turned into little tiny recyclable pieces of steel in places like Thailand, China, Kenya...), but also perhaps the very earliest manifestations of the maws of Sneetch Machines.

Surprisingly, and perhaps a result of living a harsh and frugal life, places in the Southwest point in the direction we need to go. Perhaps Texas (and Texas, please, you haven't been a frontier state for a hundred years, so cut the shit already) can start by switching from carbon exploitation to carbon management, and from there to the other elements and compounds.

So, there's that. And then W.I.P.P.? The Union of Concerned Scientists considers the project the best of  nothing but worst alternatives. I'm not sure I agree.

I view the disposal downblending and sequestration of 34 metric tons of plutonium as something that we may regret in a unique way. After all, 34 metric tons of plutonium is extremely useful in the right environment - the outer Solar System. Problem is, the time when that utility is recognized to be useful in thermoelectric generators could be far in the future or never.

But I would prefer, if we are going to think about anything that we, anything that we use, that we think about in the long term rather short-sighted.

I read an excerpt, and as a result, now plan on reading a book called "About a Mountain", by John D'agata.

Surprisingly, it is in the juvenile section of my local library. That's probably a good sign.

I Heart Texas

What's with the Vaseline, you might ask? Coincident.

Haven't written about things happening to me in a while, so here goes... been kinda busy, what with summer session, trying to work through the conveyor belt of my to-do list, going on vacation, and negotiating the terms of my surrender with a rare and lovely bird named Maia from Amarillo, TX.

The vacation part involved going with her down to a wedding in Marfa, TX, which is in the Big Bend portion down by Chihuahua. The drive involved a first leg haul from Amarillo to Ft. Davis, where we camped under the stars. And what stars! I haven't seen the Milky Way since Idaho 1975, and it never fails to impress. We were scheduled to attend a viewing party at the Ft. McDonald observatory Friday night, but we got off to late start, arriving around midnight, and so missed it. Maia and I went up to the observatory the next day. Hiking up to the domes, I mentioned I was strangely short of breath, and Maia pointed out we were a mile above sea level, which mitigated my alarm some...

Here is my obligatory geek shot of the trip and a more normal shot below with the 107 inch telescope dome in the background...

Not my cowboy hat....

"I am here!"

Aferwards, we stopped in Ft. Davis for lunch, where I had one of the better chocolate malts with extra malt I've ever had. Our server was having trouble with our order, and consulted with one of the regular waitresses. I asked what his deal was, was informed he was a foreign exchange student from Poland. He actually turned out to be from Ukraine. I mentioned I spoke Russian once upon a time, and he insisted I try. Surprisingly, I remembered conservational phrases and we actually had a back and forth. I could tell he was tickled with the exchange and left him a big tip. Maia observed our conservation, and said "Oh honey, you absolutely made his day!", but, you know, with that charming twang that I could get so used to.

I'm glad I could make his day!  One of the great things about being human is how so little effort can bring such great joy.

I've always liked the desert, and the high desert of the Trans-Pecos could not have been a better place to be. It's positively springlike with all the flowering plants and tan landscape and purple mountains in every direction. I want to go back and see all the things I didn't see there. Fortunately, rain came through, at one point pounding down like horses' hooves. Fortunately the luxury tent we stayed in at El Cosmico was waterproof.

Rain on tent canvas creaking like a sailing ship, but we were fine.

Then up to the Carlsbad Caverns, an experience which I would suggest was slightly hallucinatory. Those rock formations deep under the surface look nothing like the dry and simple stalagmites and stalactites we learned about in school. They were - to me - monstrous, fleshy, glistening with fat, scaly, gill covered and warty, living things. They were something out of Lovecraft. But the absolutely most bizarre part of the underground adventure was the snack bar. Here is the modern, fluorescent-lit cafeteria in a pitch black chamber, the cave walls barely lit. The bathrooms were equally weird, stainless steel, tile and porcelain surfaces in a cave tunnel. I couldn't help but think about the storied underground cities built for the nation's elite in preparation of the Apocalypse.

All in all, a truly, fantastic magical wonderful time!

Back to reality on this past Wednesday in time to close out the summer session. I was informed I should go visit Glen as his condition was worsening. (I've mentioned Glen in prior essay from a year ago. He had been diagnosed with Stage Four lung cancer and several tumors in his brain last May. He underwent chemo and radiation, which bought more than a year, but a month ago he told me he had had enough, and was going into hospice at home. I've tried to make it to the bar with him and the group  from the college when we go out Thursday nights. Normally, this tradition takes a hiatus over the summer, but, considering...

So I was informed his condition was worsening, the brain tumors taking their toll, and should visit him while he was still lucid. My former student aide, soon to be graduate student at Wichita State University in Kansas, Scotty, and I headed over last evening.

We found Glen on a good day, and he, his wife, and his sister had a very fun time. He was active, alert and engaged, and I can only hope this lasts for awhile.

At one point, we were talking about smart phones, and the topic switched to Scotty's thesis. He specualted he might continue the work of his undergrad advisor in sustainable and waste fuels for wood kiln firings. I said "I know what you need to work on, developing tumbleweeds for fuel. They are a nuisance that should be used for something like that".

Glen Reeser and I

Scotty came back with "Other people have smart phones. I have John". Which got a laugh considering how often people use their plastic pocket brains for memory, or use agents like Siri.

Glen quipped "John, call Katie!" (Scotty's girlfriend).

"KATIE!" I mock shouted.

It really was wonderful to see Glen sharp and in the groove for a change.

The Maw and the Spew of the Sneetch Machine

I'm guessing that, maybe twenty to fifty years from now, people will look at the current crop of 3D printers as rather quaint old macguffins that, oh, had their uses I suppose, but were superfluous to the greater vision of Processing. Let me get back to you on that.

3D printers, as they now are, can extrude more than one type of material, and thus already represent a level of sophistication way beyond the cute little x/y plotter with the extruded thermoplastic pooter. Were I to speculate, I would suggest that the end result will be some type of plasmonic surface or plenum that utilizes quantum teleportation to provide material information, building molecule by molecule, or atom by atom.  No doubt it will be hooked up to, not only the internet of things, but a disintegrator that will supply a matter bank that supplies the printer with pure elemental materials. As such it really will grow what it is that you want. And it will range from laptop size to industrial strength, and in a utopian world, possibly be on street corners, and like a version of Mr. Fusion, will be fed garbage and squirt out consumer items.

In any event, I propose that the two ends of the thing be called "the maw" and "the spew". And that the whole be called a Sneetch Machine (after the Star-On and Star-Off machines that Sylvester McMonkey McBean made available to the Sneetches in Dr. Seuss's The Sneetches and Other Stories).



Processing, capitalized, will be what we humans, or post-humans, will be all about.

Remember the old canard about political affiliation, where if you go far enough right you go full circle and end up on the left? Well, that's not true, but I suspect it happens when it comes to increasing biological and civilizational complexity.  Given the quasi-fractal aspects of nature, it seems there is a self-similarity of scale.

And so, when you move up the technological ladder, with increasing leverage and sophistication of control over the surrounding environs, it gets to a point where an advanced civilization looks a lot like a slime-mold, or a multi-cellular organism, and all it is doing is converting available matter and energy into more suitable habitat and more life. Where all you are doing is taking one order of matter, and Processing it into something more to your liking. The original matrix of organization is destroyed in favor of its new matrix.

Of course, with creative destruction, that Maw beckons to the Spew. Just hook up the two ends of the Sneetch Machine, and let her rip!

It's Going To Be Africa For Quite A While, Stupid

Adam on the right.

I went to dinner with a friend of mine last night. My treat. I ate breakfast for dinner, with two dark beers. He ate meatloaf. His name is Adam Bacon, he is thirty-two years old, an Xray technician, six foot eight inches tall, and scheduled for back surgery today. It was an on-the-job accident moving a morbidly obese old decrepit off the gurney what did his back in. He has had difficulty with the healthcare company fulfilling their promises of adequate care. On the other hand, he has been under a number of strictures involving correct behaviors re: maintaining his injuries, and under surveillance to make sure he is not committing fraud.

Meanwhile, the parasitic scumbags who destroyed 40% of the world's economy got bonuses and wrist slaps again this year.

Go figure.

After dinner, with both of us bloated with potatoes and cheese and meat, it was decided we should walk. Since my car was parked back at the college, near the stadium track, we walked on the track. And in walking and conversing, and this mainly to help Adam dispel anxieties about the back surgery, I just kind of ranted and rambled about any and everything to get his mind off things.

We discussed a TV adaptation of Apocalypse Now, set in American suburbia, with the Kurtz family. After a bit, the well-manicured front lawn is littered with body parts and pieces of local pets. It's a comedy, a horror-filled comedy. And in the end, Jack, the neighborhood wants Kurtz dead, but that's who he took his orders from anyway.

I also mentioned how Rob Zombie really screwed the pooch. When he made House of 1,000 Corpses, he really fucked up.  What he should have done was by up the Beverly Hillbillies property, and adapted his Corpses screenplay to a murderous backwoods cannibal family that strikes it rich and moves to Beverly Hills. Sheri Moon Zombie would have made a fantastic psychotic Ellie Mae Clampett. Again, it's a comedy. A blood-soaked, gore-filled, all-American red white 'n blue cement pond comedy.

Sigh.

I talked of another movie I had seen, A Touch of Sin, based upon four real-life events "based upon random acts of violence". Of course, that's the description, but the context behind the movie explains there is nothing random at all. If there is one regime that shits it's bed in fear every night, it's the Central Committee of the Communist party of China. Here they are, trying to deal with the scourge of S. Invictus Anglo-American collapse capitalism they have unleashed upon themselves. True, they've got the police suppression machinery in place, but they are desperate, desperate I tell you, to get the consumerist pacification program thoroughly in place before the lid blows. Even if they have to wreck the countryside to do it.

I talked of a book I read about conditions in India, called Capitalism: A Ghost Story. If you thought income inequality was bad in America, look to India. In fact, if the trend continues, India is probably America's future.

I talked of why Revolution will never come to America.

We are all now just too dumb, fat, slow, sloppy and lazy. People are hobbled by debt. People are threatened with it. Police are slowly becoming better at suppressing the locals, with the equipment and tactics in place. People are sated and hypnotized and coddled with consumerist items, and shinies dangled of either gangsta or hipster cool lifestyles. Not just America. It's the Anglo-America Empire that is like that. (Or Orwell's Oceania, if prefer, and I do).

Ever wondered why the English never had their revolution, in a time when the rest of Europe was in turmoil? Ever wonder why Great Britain managed that? Look to the last paragraph. Carrots and sticks, but mostly sticks. The means of production (though ever so briefly disrupted) always were under the firm of control of capital. And when the unions threatened to take over? They got bought, suborned, bribed, and rewarded.

And if things got a little tense? Just ease up on the reigns a bit, Hoss. If you notice, more than half the energy production and products of Oceania is flushed down the sewer, wasted on nothing. How can we really be in an era of scarcity when we are throwing away more than half of everything, food, product, people, you name it.

In S. Invictus capitalism, Scarcity is an invention, to be bogeyman and coins in the seat cushions.

So, Americans are very, very unlikely, despite the teatard and Occupy tensions, to ever get all Mad Max, because that would mean no more Cheetos and soft drinks, and Hulu, and smart phones, and actually experiencing bodily discomfort and physical exertion, and people shooting back at you.

So, where to look? Because Revolution has left the station, and America is not on that train. Russia? China? India? Brazil? Phhfft!

Once again, friends, It's AFRICA stupid. That's where it is all going to go down. In retrospect, Black Empire was almost prophetic, but the problem was Schuyler relied on a ju-jitsu move using the Anglo-American version of capitalism, and that, we now know, that ain't gonna cut it. Not without the resources of the Solar System to subsidize it all.

Perhaps more like The Girl in The Road, but not. One thing I think Schuyler got right, it will involve religion, either an existing one, or a syncretic new one.

Normal Accidents : A Book Report

J.R. "Bob" Dobbs

Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow. Yale sociologist Charles Perrow prefered the term normal accident, in the sense that for complex systems with tightly coupled components, accidents are normal events. Indeed, he has suggested that some areas of technology and human enterprise are error inducing environments. This is rather similar to Edward Tenner's idea of Why Things Bite Back, the unintended consequences of human technology.

Perrow first coined the term "system accident" when this book was released in 1984. Since then, much of the examples and analysis in this book has been turned into a field of study known as Normal Accident Theory.

I'm going to suggest that, though even the public has come to realize that there is rarely a single cause to a catastrophe, the tendency is still there for the blame to descend to the operator's level, while the architects and designers get off scot free. Witness the financial collapse of 2008, as a prime example, and if that isn't a good argument for mandatory capital punishment for white collar crime, I don't what is.

As such, I realize that there are multiple sources for disasters, but still, when it comes down to it, I can't help but shake the feeling that most of them boil down to incompetent management. Incompetent fuckups who think they know what they are doing. When it comes to maritime accidents, one could blame the captains managers, but the error-inducing environment is created and maintained by the owners. These are the people who invariably cut corners to save a buck. And it is not just maritime accidents, it is every single area of human endeavor that involves technology only slightly more advanced than the five simple machines of the ancients.

Couple this incompetence with a willful ignorance to evidentiary facts, and you get a modeling system inside that bony carapace of a skull that almost invariably ignores dangers for a more rosy rainbow unicorn assessment of the situation (and who does a better job of that than clueless executives?):

"Why would a ship in a safe passing situation suddenly turn and be impaled by a cargo ship four times its length? For the same reasons the operators of the TMI plant cut back on high pressure injection and uncovered the core. Confronted with ambiguous signals, the safest reality was constructed".

So, this has been addressed in one form or another in the form of increasingly sophisticated risk assessment methods, but Perrow has suggested that some areas (especially, I would note, those that can be automated), might best be abandoned as human pursuits. Nuclear power and weapons being one of them.

I disagree, one thing I note is that if any area has had more incompetent monkey clusterfuck accidents with more devastating results, it is the area of nuclear weapons. And yet, if the systems for deploying and maintaining nuclear weapons are highly complex and tightly coupled are accidents waiting to happen, then wouldn't the past 70 years suggest the are not a Great Filter?

So, I would quintuple the quality control on bonehead executives, or at least, given their pay has increased some 350% over the past 30 years, subject them to 350 % more scrutiny than they suffered some 30 years ago. Public executives, not so much the problem, as they are already under public scrutiny. It's those private bastards that are going to wreck things for everyone. And so long as they insist on socializing the losses and privatizing the gains, they need to be kept ground under thumb, just to keep the hanky-panky to a minimum.

The other obvious choice is to loosen the coupling on the internal components so many of these systems. Tight coupling makes them more efficient, but it also makes them more brittle. Having a little inefficiency is not necessarily a bad thing. As such, the term "slack" comes to mind. Though this is considered an ineffable term within the Church of the SubGenius, I now suggest it be incorporated into every single human design element to the end of time.

Oh, right, and the accidents detailed in the book are highly amusing, and worth the read.