[FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Mon Apr 19 14:18:00 EDT 2021
>
>> Capitalists plan to make huge profits by recycling.
>> https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/ <https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/>
One of the other things I look at when I question the motives of a new
"corporate entity" is their chosen State of Incorporation. Nevada and
New Jersey are acutely implicated in their attempts to attract "shady"
businesses.
from Investopedia
<https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/nevada_corporation.asp> -
Another unique advantage of Nevada corporations is that company
officers and directors are well-protected
<https://www.natlawreview.com/article/nevada-supreme-court-gross-negligence-insufficient-director-breach-fiduciary-claims> against
lawsuits arising from lawful business pursuits.
If the principals behind Redwood Materials INC are all upstanding
long-time NV residents or there were something specifically obvious
about their geography that makes them an obvious location for such an
operation, then I can give that question a soft pass. To be fair the
principals listed on their website
<https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/about> do seem to have honest
credentials, albeit maybe weighted toward having come from places that
acutely helped to create the problems they are promising to solve...
>
> Redwood certainly has a slick website... I can't tell what they are
> actually *doing*... as websites (and brochures) go, they definitely
> claims some conceptual/business territory that might be valuable
> later, even if they don't have any significant tech or logistics to
> back them up. A good domain name, a few trademarks, some slick
> graphic design and aspirational stories can go a long way to generate
> something that can be parlayed into "wealth". With any luck, they
> are actually investing in the tech and logistics implied and required
> by their story. Or also possible, someone who is *doing the work*
> already joins forces with them and the "good story" and the "good
> work" converge.
>
> Are they planning to make huge profits recycling or
> pretending/aspiring to? And even if they are, what is this free
> energy/entropy they are dipping into? What did that represent?
>
> Maybe the big money invested in *creating all those waste streams* and
> *exporting the externalities into one commons or another* will use
> these good stories for GreenWashing their usurious behaviour?
>
> When I personally was confronted with the idea of recycling household
> packaging (~40 years ago) I was resistant and resentful. "how dare
> YOU tell ME how to dispose of my cans, bottles, boxes, etc.?", "it is
> my god-given right to burn off the organics in a barrel and dump the
> residuals in the arroyo, or maybe just bury them in my back yard, or
> maybe a community landfill, or even better, stick them out at the curb
> and have someone else do all that for me!" But as I gave over to the
> process of having separate bins and noticing what I was filling those
> bins with, I became more aware of what kind of load I was putting on
> the downstream systems. When it was made evident that most everything
> *except* aluminum cans were either costing a lot of money/energy to
> recycle and in fact in some cases were just being rediverted to
> landfills, I could have thrown out a cynical "see! it was never a
> good idea in the first place!" but instead I had to take a breath and
> notice how much embodied energy was implied in these buckets of
> bottles, cans, etc. and how much the "dream" of recycling was
> aspirational.
>
> The era when returning shipping containers to Asia filled with our
> "recyclables" is apparently over... either their standard of living
> raised enough that they could no longer "afford" to sort and process
> all of our "junk", or their standards for polluting their own
> air/water were raised enough that they could no longer "afford" to
> turn our junk into their pollution? When I lived in Berkeley
> (2005/6) there were days when air quality monitors on the west coast
> could detect particulates wafting all the way across the Pacific.
> Many were deeply offended at that, but a few of us recognized that a
> huge percentage of that smoke was being generated *on our behalf*
> either in energy-expensive manufacturing or in low-cost waste
> disposal, FOR US to have ubiquitous and inexpensive consumer
> products. And *I* was deeply offended by my own assumptions about
> all this. I think this is what Trumpsters refer to as "Progressives'
> Self Loathing"?
>
> My point, if I actually have one, is that our *analytic* efforts to
> reduce a huge system to a series of atomic bits we can easily
> apprehend and address, does not necessarily address the issues which
> are intrinsically *systemic*. I believe that within the
> transnational corporations (Leviathan-esque Superorganisms in
> themselves) that *they* consider the systemic properties of their
> supply chains and the environments they exist withing (raw materials,
> labor markets, consumers). It is only when they are asked to (openly)
> consider their impact on other systems *outside of their boundaries*
> that they want to reduce their arguments to trivialities that can be
> addressed/dismissed easily.
>
> grumble,
>
> - Steve
>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, 19 Apr 2021 at 17:49, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com
>> <mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Corporations are collective intelligences -- people -- but they
>> need someone to sell to. No point in owning all the air or
>> water unless you have millions of people desperate to pay for
>> it! But that said, horizons of five years are a long time for
>> most companies. CEOs incentivized to extract every bit out of
>> those short horizons to please their shareholders. And the
>> shareholders are too selfish to achieve something like Elysium or
>> even large private water desalination plants. Even if there is
>> a small evil population that kills off the rest, I don't see how
>> capitalism is going to lead to that.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com
>> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
>> Sent: Monday, April 19, 2021 8:11 AM
>> To: friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)
>>
>> I should have linked this:
>>
>> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-ted-chiang-transcript.html
>> <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-ted-chiang-transcript.html>
>>
>> "It’s capitalism that wants to reduce costs and reduce costs by
>> laying people off. It’s not that like all technology suddenly
>> becomes benign in this world. But it’s like, in a world where we
>> have really strong social safety nets, then you could maybe
>> actually evaluate sort of the pros and cons of technology as a
>> technology, as opposed to seeing it through how capitalism is
>> going to use it against us. How are giant corporations going to
>> use this to increase their profits at our expense?"
>>
>> On 4/19/21 8:01 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
>> > Ha! Sure. ... it still looks like SteveS called it with the Red
>> Queen's Race. Even if such tech solves more problems than it
>> creates, it'll still be distributed according to the power
>> structures in place (e.g. rich people) when the tech's ready to
>> scale.
>> >
>> > On 4/19/21 7:54 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> >> Again technology to the rescue... Nanotechnology for
>> desalinization.
>> >>
>> >> -----Original Message-----
>> >> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com
>> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
>> >> Sent: Monday, April 19, 2021 7:45 AM
>> >> To: friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
>> >> Subject: [FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)
>> >>
>> >> Copper? Natural gas? Pffft! Water's the interesting one.
>> >>
>> >>
>> https://theconversation.com/interstate-water-wars-are-heating-up-alon
>> <https://theconversation.com/interstate-water-wars-are-heating-up-alon>
>> >> g-with-the-climate-159092
>> >>
>> >> And another one:
>> >>
>> https://www.theolympian.com/news/business/article250595449.html
>> <https://www.theolympian.com/news/business/article250595449.html>
>> >>
>> >> On 4/15/21 7:59 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
>> >>> Another good example is water rights across states given
>> watersheds,
>> >>> flood irrigation, etc.
>> >>>
>> <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/arizona-water-one-p
>> <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/arizona-water-one-p>
>> >>> er
>> >>> centers>
>> >>>
>> >>> So, the question you're asking (how might "storage" in BTC be
>> less preferable to other assets?) isn't really answerable
>> *without* first discussing what that reservoir is *for*, what end
>> does it serve?
>> >
>>
>> --
>> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
>>
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