"More for Less": Andrew McAfee's book explains how modernity can survive adjusting to climate change

Today, on CNN’s Global Public Square, Fareed Zakaria interviewed Andrew McAfee, author of “More for Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next”, 352 pages, from Scribner, publisher link. 

The author points out that we are producing much more wealth with fewer resources, and that our need for energy consumption has plateaued.

   

Zakaria had started the interview by noting that today’s young adult generation wonders if it will be called upon to demonstrate the “personal virtue of restraint”, and give up flying, driving alone, air conditioning, and hot showers, and especially meat.

Atlantic: "A Nation Coming Apart", collection of essays for the December 2019 issue; a second civil war?

The December 2019 issue of the Atlantic will be called “A Nation Coming Apart”.  I got a link for it   and apparently my paywall status let me see all of it.  It would be advisable to pick up the print – but typically that means getting to a Barnes and Noble or similar bookstore.  The email had a subtitle, “How to stop a (second) civil war”, or, as Tim Pool says, at least an insurgency.

There are three parts, each divided into several essays.

Yoni Applebaum writes about “How America Ends” and focuses somewhat on how non-whites will become a majority.  She also discusses the collapse of the GOP, and notes that authoritarianism or fascism or communism will come when center-right parties collapse and lose sight of their principles and behave like identarian tribes.  The right often comprises groups who have lost power and privilege to change, whereas the left comprises intersectional groups who are vengeful about the sins committed against them in the past.

  

Johnathan Haidt talks about the “Dark Psychology of Social Networks”.  Visitors are gripped by the latest clickbait scandals and lose sight of longer-term goals and principles, because of the speed of news. Many people are not mature enough to recognize “junk”, and better educated people are often unaware of the way “the masses” process things when overwhelmed or manipulated – through their tribes. Even David Pakman made a video in early 2019 admitting that many voters don’t understand anything and are swindled easily.

Here the writers suggest (1) stop evaluating the performance of individual content pieces with Likenomics (Instagram is already experimenting with this (2) reduce use of unverified accounts (or bots -- this means everything source should be idenitifed, at least like private registration of domain names; it's not quite the same as the Twitter verification check) (3) eliminate low-quality posts and comments.  

     

Tom Junod has a piece about Mister Rogers and personal localism. People are often disinterested in “neighbors” and more interested in the faraway worlds they have snatched for themselves.

  

Gay libertarian writer Johnathan Rauch discusses “too much democracy” and says that “direct primaries” and various other changes have led to primary seasons that attract extremists and ideologues and not people who can win and actually govern.

  

Danielle Allen describes “The Road to Serfdom” and James Mattis has a similar piece “The Enemy Within”.  An important idea is localism and the way people participate socially in solving problems.  

  

A lot of us (myself included) have become global and projected our rationality on media platforms on our own and ignore calls from local advocacy groups for help because they seem partisan and beneath us. It’s like the non-profits need more people marching and demonstrating and fewer bloggers filming them without joining in.

   

Adam Serwer cloases this out with “Against Reconciliation”, talk of another Reconstruction, to stop the idea that remaining in a historically privileged class is a birthright.

"The Science of Living Longer", supermarket book from Time

Take a look at a special edition of “Time”, “The Science of Living Longer”, in supermarkets until around the end of November.

The editors are Siobhan O’Connor and Jeffrey Kluger.

There are 16 photoessays or chapters, divided among three sections, “Mind”, “Body”, “Life”. There are 96 pages (a common length for this brand). 

   

In Chapter 1 (Alice Park), there is a chart on pp 16-18 showing how different parts of the human body age.

One surprising finding, collagen in the skin that gives smoothness and elasticity declines 1% a year. That means by age 30 it would have declined more than 12%.  Obviously from general observation, this seems to be quite variable.  Beto O’Rourke, at 47, looks young (being thin helps).  Too much sun probably accelerates it.  The replacement of muscle with fat accelerates after age 40 (which is about when most major league baseball careers end).  Brain concentration, for chess players for example, hits its summer solstice from ages 25-28.  But real decline may tend to start at around age 70 (without an actual disease like Alzheimer’s).  There are other oddities not often discussed openly, like the fact that many (especially white) men typically notice loss of hair from their legs by age 40. In the past, cigarette smoking may have made this problem much worse. This may be a little more common for men who go bald (on the pate) genetically, or when men are overweight.

On brain maturity, because the brain is still “pruning” and focusing on what it is good at, mental illness has become a risk in the age 18-25 group.

On p, 68-70, Dave Beal says that the Twin Cities, Minneapolis-St Paul MN, is one of the best cities for longevity (after a few blue zones in Italy and in California’s central valley). I lived there 1997-2003 and just revisited.

People live longer if they age in the area where they grew up.  People tend to return to earlier memories or contacts, even after a long adult life.

  

Long-term married (and never divorced) men tend to live longer than single or divorced men, and that is less true for women.  It may be true for gay male couples.  While never married men tend to fare worse, there are remarkable exceptions, such as individualists or artists or scientists very focused on their own work.

NYTimes booklet by a mom on recruiting teenagers by "racists" (October), rather firm in warning parents

 Joanna Schroeder has a rather strident booklet-article in the New York Times Oct. 12, 2019,  “Racists AreRecruiting.  Watch Your Sons.”  There is a tagline, “Parents need to understand how white supremacists prey on teen boys, so they can intervene.”

Caleb Cain would later relate on his recruitment and then deradicalization on the David Pakman show.  I think I've used his video ("Faraday Speaks") on YouTube before.  It did not seem that the views he had been exposed to were all necessarily extreme, at least in the beginning. But he added that teens generally aren't mature enough to see the flaws in how they are being manipulated (but neither do alo of adults). 

Schroeder pointed out one specific technique, calling boys “too sensitive” to specific remarks about people who are less competitive.

  

On the other hand, you can point out that other teens (more likely some PoC) can be recruited by similar techniques into conventional gangs, or sometimes the far Left.  It all depends on the circumstances in the home and surrounding community.

Teens who do accomplish things in school or family-connected or sometimes faith-based activity (scouting, sports, music, drama, science fairs, etc.) can build a sense of personal identity and resist “tribal” pressures to please their peers.  These things have to happen at least partly in the real world apart from the Internet.

The other thing is the ability to do abstract thinking (like that starts with math).  That happens much sooner for some teens than others.

  

That’s what you notice about the Parlkand teens, for example, how they could abstract from what happened and build a movement on their own.

Picture:  Tennessee Civil War park SW of Nashville, my trip, May 2014/  

Foreign Policy issue makes strong arguments for open borders

Bryan Caplan has a booklet-like article in Nov. 2019 Foreign Affairs, “Open Borders Are a Trillion-Dollar Idea”. Cato has already been tweeting it around.

  

Yup, most of the objections are political and cultural.  Immigrants commit less crime (as a totality), and add skills and willingness to work. They know how to run small businesses.  Their kids pick up English immediately.

  

  

Yet, Open Borders have come to be viewed as a placard of the radical Left.  You have to have countries, sovereignty.  Well, maybe you don’t forever, but you can’t make changes that quickly.  You can perhaps settle intentional communities within and make them autonomous.

  

Last night, at a post-Halloween party I happened to spot someone who had been at one of these abolish-ICE protests.  Yet he was perfectly intact, steady, seated in his own life.  Not everyone on the “Left” is as crazy as the neo-liberal YouTube channels (Tim Pool) claim. The truth is half way between Pool and Pakman.

  

Of course, there’s another side to it.  Maybe the poorest countries need to keep some of their talent so they can recover.

The meme "Smart Authors Don't Spend Their Own Money to Publish"

Author Incubator looks at the meme “Smart Authors Don’t Spend their Own Money to Publish”.

  

  

Economically the trick is to understand that, at least with new authors, traditional publishers succeed in with home runs with about one in ten books.  It’s like swinging for home runs against Garrett Cole?

  

When a traditional book fails, the author has often gotten an advance “of his own money” and the publisher eats the loss.  (Author’s Guild makes a lot about being able to get advances to make a living.)

  

I had always thought that most books published with advances are from established authors, or from people who have become celebrities in some specific niche. That might well include politicians.

  

If a book succeeds, a self-published book will usually make much more money for an author than a trade-published book.  (It’s less clear with POD, where royalty is intermediate.  Typically you might invest about $3000 for a book, and get about 20%.  Still, you could make a profit if you could sell 1000 books this way.  But it’s unlikely to happen until a new author is already “known” from a previous book or some other business, charitable, or political niche.

    

Her video has two “training slides” doing the math, and they are quite instructive.

Self-publishers need to be wary of scams that can steal their "rights"

Here is a quick video:  “Publishing Scams to Avoid”.  This video is intended for people who have self-published, either with their own print runs or with POD companies. 

Beware of the phone call that claims you have been “discovered” and of offers for services literary agents don’t do – and asking for money.

I get a lot of these calls. 

There are problems with people losing their “rights” too.  It’s a little hard to see how this can work if the author didn’t get any “consideration”.

  

On Youtube, the Author Incubator channel seems to have some anti-self-publishing videos, and I’ll look into what these say soon.