Tao Designs Weblog

I returned from Taiwan with the conviction of setting up my own website, as a sandbox/resumé kind of thing. The web site is to have two initial features: a sample multi-tier application and a blog about how I am doing it, problems along the way, etc.

These requirements already yielded problems to blog about. The application platform is to be asp.net; the blog is to be in WordPress. WordPress uses PHP and MySql, which are not always installed on the same host with .net framework. Asp.net prefers to use c# and MS Sql®. My web host doesn’t provide ms sql, so I configured MS Access® providers.

Since we’ve already established that environmentalists are “kooks” (see earlier post, Oct, 2005), we may as well discuss something really kooky, like the meaning of life.

‘Meaning of Life’ sounds really ominous. The topic is not for casual conversation. It is usually removed to mountaintops for other kooks to ponder. But the meaning of life is quite close: for it is we who give it meaning. 

Whether you regard a tree as lumber; habitat; or a source of inspiration or shade; whether beautiful or ugly, the tree is just what it is. A tree, mountain, or planet has no meaning in itself; the observer makes it meaningful. A tree is no less meaningful for a lumberjack, backpacker, bird or beetle, but the meanings are different

For humans, at least, how we view trees and the world depends a lot on how we view our self, and how we think of God. It is obvious (to me) that I am the center of the universe, and all the heavens revolve around me. Unfortunately, I’ve talked with enough people to know that opinion is not widespread. Yet, people have been holding a similar view of themselves since the earliest human record. It was no stretch, then, when peoples’ religions gave them dominion over all things.

In modern times, scriptural authority is sometimes used to deify private property, and a market economy free of government regulation.. It’s a divine right, some say, to dump chicken poop in rivers, carbon in the air, or wager on dog or cockfights. Never mind that the same authority tells them: “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity; for the land is mine, and you are but aliens who have become my tenants.” (Leviticus 25:23) Think how pissed the owner must be when he sees what his tenants are up to.

Alternatively, if everything depends on everything, and even the moon pulls back on the earth, my view may tend toward “interdependence.” There is a great opening of mind in this approach, because it cannot fathom the interconnections, the proverbial ripple effect. We can only monitor feedback that is closest to us.

Many of us have a view somewhere between these two. The rapid flux of scientific investigation, of astrophysics and quantum strings, is projected against a heavy backdrop of religious beliefs. Even the physicist, when she leaves the lab, intuits that the sun rises and sets over her, while knowing intellectually she’s twirling around it at roughly 67,000 mph. 

The intuitive experience of that is reserved for kooks on mountaintops.

The President’s FY 2007 budget includes the sale of 304,370 acres in 35 states, including 3,572 acres in Oklahoma, now held by the US Forest Service. The sale is intended as a source of funding for the Secure Rural Schools Act. The Forest Service downplays the sale, stressing it is less than two-tenths of one percent of Forest Service land. And, taken out of context, it’s probably no big deal. But let’s put it in context.

In a period we now call the Dark Ages, Europe stagnated. Innovation was suppressed, philosophy and literature banned, and achievements in the rest of the world, ignored. The average European counted with his fingers. The contemporary Hindu-Arabic number system had something the European couldn’t dream of – something for nothing – a zero.

Zero is handy for a lot of math, and also for double-entry accounting. “Double-entry” uses a set of accounts which, taken as equation, add up to zero. Without the “credit” side of the accounting equation, you might know how much money was in your pockets – but you wouldn’t have
a clue where it came from. That was the case in those Dark Times. Princes loved money, and they borrowed a lot. Lacking adequate accounting methods, it was squandered. Merchant banks foreclosed on their manorial estates, speeding the decline of feudalism, and the beginning of capitalism.

Americans love money, too, and we also borrow a lot of it. We have sophisticated methods for accounting debts, and equally sophisticated methods for hiding them. One such sophisticated method is the “tax cut.”

Americans love tax cuts, while government spending continues to grow. It has grown an average of 5% in each of the last 5 years – the highest rate of growth since the Great Society, Vietnam War and race to the moon during the Johnson Administration. But this time around, taxes were cut. Result - the federal debt has grown by half in the current Administration – to $8.37 Trillion.

Staggering as that may be, the number is mere cash accounting – it does not include unfunded commitments like pension guarantees, new Medicare drug benefits, environmental cleanups and flood insurance. Liabilities like these have doubled in the last five years to $46 Trillion.

There’s a lot of talk about the Social Security trust fund in the next half-century. In a couple of CBO scenarios, the fund will run a deficit of 1.3% of GDP in 2042, down from its current surplus. If the Bush tax cuts are made permanent, the combined budget would yield a deficit of 10.7% of GDP the same year.

And where do the tax cuts go? Supply-siders recall the Laffler Curve, depicting higher federal revenue from lower tax rates. The napkin drawing ignores the business cycle, as demonstrated lately; and, it assumes tax cuts produce higher domestic income, despite the fed policy of keeping wages flat. What if the tax dividend is absorbed in a housing bubble or pushes up gas prices instead? Or, what if it is sent to Asia, adding fuel to the trade-deficit.

Another form of debt, last year’s trade-deficit broke all records - $805 Billion. To make up for the tax cuts, the fed has to borrow dollars back, selling long-term debt to finance the current year. Dollars from all over the world flow back in to buy our debt, as well as capital. Americans don’t contribute. Not much. In 2005, for the first time since the Great Depression, American households had a negative savings rate. We’re getting older, and spending like there’s no tomorrow. But tomorrow, the debt comes due.  Tomorrow, we may be selling the farm, not just the forest.

Environmentalists are often considered kooks. That is because we have a different operating system. We’re like Macs in a PC world. We operate under different rules. The dominant rule nowadays is self-interest. Environment, by definition, is everything that is not self. So environmentalists are other-interested. This makes us seem like kooks.

As kooks, we are at a disadvantage. We’re apologetic when addressing a political forum, where we have to compete against the self-interested. Politicians, too, are increasingly selfinterested – they want more power and money, which only the rich and
powerful can provide. And the rich and pow rful will provide, as long it is in their self-interest. Kooks, on the other hand, don’t have a lot to offer. As environmentalists, we have to hide our other-interest behind a façade of self-interest: “I’m here as a taxpayer,” we say, instead of, “I’m here for the Sierra Club.” For Macs to communicate with PCs, we have
to emulate their protocol. In a self-interested operating system, private resources are appreciated; public resources are not.

Self-interest has been growing for the past two hundred years, and really took off over the last quarter century. It’s the primary motivation in a capitalist economy, which assumes free agents, under the sway of competitive self-interest, act rationally and efficiently. No need for government regulations. No need for taxes. Social problems are a symptom of
moral corruption, for which we can build more prisons. Or, better yet, we can impose morality, and get everyone singing from the same hymnbook, so to speak. That’s coo - except for the part about “free agents.”

Alternatively, we should recognize that “self” is an abstraction. The Universe doesn’t know of any independent self to be interested about. The Universe is universally interdependent. For example, your greatest self-interest, perhaps, is your body. Your body is the debris from galaxies thousands of light years away, arranged as the result of a process billions of years long, sustained by breathing, frequent eating, drinking, and regulating temperature through epidermal pores. Forms
we see, food we eat, thoughts that popcorn in our mind, we are in continuous dance in relation with others. Our interest is other interest, and other interest is our own. Where do we draw the line?