Mariculture Increases with Fish Prices

 My course on ecosystem services leads to some interesting urls , for instance, integrated farming of livestock and fish.

https://www.fao.org/3/AC155E/AC155E04.htm

https://thefishsite.com/articles/shrimp-and-salmon-farmers-are-set-for-a-year-of-profits-and-plenty

https://www.worldwildlife.org/industries/farmed-shrimp

a comparison of India and Equador's farmed shrimp resource use

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/aff2.23

https://www.globalseafood.org/advocate/ecuador-sets-legal-framework-for-offshore-fish-farm-development/ legal framwork in Ecuador set for offshore fish farming

https://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?184801/Sustainability-standards-completed-for-tilapia-farming

Is the U.S. Losing the Race with Russia for Total Ecosystem Services Mapping?

 Why be primitive or last place in trying to map the ecosystem services of the state or nation one lives in? Alaska could probably have the entire state's ecosystem services mapped with some sort of federally financed, state operated program. Germany has done it...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318252191_Germany's_Ecosystem_Services_-_State_of_the_Indicator_Development_for_a_Nationwide_Assessment_and_Monitoring

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/mapping-ecosystem-services

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304571223_National_ecosystem_services_mapping_at_multiple_scales_-_The_German_exemplar

It is possible that the EU https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/mapping-europes-ecosystems-1 is ahead of Alaska too. As in the arms race, the ecosystem services race may have economic, political and financial consequences for the players. Alaska should not be a loser in the ecosystem services mapping race.

It doesn't appear to me that the U.S. government has got an ecosystem service map and survey with comprehensive data for Alaska done. The Russkies may have more data on their big board about Alaska ecosystem services than the Alaska State Government or even the U.S. Government. I wonder if the White House situation room has a Big Board with full display of the state of U.S. and Russian ecosystem services in real time providing updates whenever launches of defoliation or loss of biological species happen.

Maybe I should have invented a way to make potato chips at home from whole potatoes or soy beans and got a patent and manufactured the chip makers in China so I could live on Golden Pond. Instead I need to wonder about ecosystem services and water conservation and if wastewater could be reduced by using solar charged electrical toilets without water; maybe microwave toilets in major cities, instead of water-using ones. A properly designed microwave toilet ought to be fairly cheap. It would be interesting to see the design. I suppose even a poor manufacturer could make Beatles wigs with good hidden audio headfones and mp3 players for workers not allowed to listen to music at work. Maybe the wigs could have built in motion sensors so one would get a beep if their boss is sneaking up from behind. Perhaps Shanghai would be the place to make those. Even the Chinese could listen to my blog if the wig had a speech translator so they could find blogs talking about ecosystem services.

Ecosystem Serices and Post-Modernist Epistemology

 Plainly monetizing and commodifying ecosystem services with neo-liberal market criteria should be used as an advisory evaluation for government planners rather than as fungible things-for-themselves. In a way money itself- e.g. cryptocurrency, is commodified and relative with volatile values for what people are willing to pay in addition to its utility for avoiding taxation. Ecosystem services could be used for properties privately held I suppose, and bought or sold to governments or NGOs because they show the immediate worth to politicians and company economists of ecosystem services of a particular commodity within their general profit-loss paradigm concerning their present goals (politicians live in the present and act in the present rather than the future, while alternatively nature evolves within a continuum, unlike politicians as humans although party politics could be said to evolve, though quite unlike natural evolution).

Evaluations of environmental objects, or things as processes deemed to be objects may always underestimate object-values because they need necessarily be incomplete appraisals of object functions within the ecosphere. W.V.O. Quine’s ‘Word and Object’; a philosophical work of epistemology and naming, and Kripke’s ‘Naming and Necessity’ show some of the issues and structures concerning the developing of words and ideas in relation to objects, sometimes called perhaps inaccurately ‘external objects. It is interesting to me to find that environmental objects like wetlands are also subject to linguistic philosophy paradigms about naming. Quine’s ‘Ontological Relativity’ provides a formalism for the logical constructions of naming to a certain extent and is somewhat less of an epistemological treatise than ‘Word and Object’ or P.F. Strawson’s ‘’Individuals’. Quine notably demolished the philosophical foundations of empiricism in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ and demonstrated the subject nature of knowledge cannot be overcome too well. Yet I believe the entire idea of dead reckoning judgments of a pragmatic nature and working nature while remaining informed of the subjective and relativity of language and categorization of words and objects is an adequate replacement for naive realism. Relativity and uncertainty are transcendent ideas that allow space-time and matter to flow withing the Higgs Field’s entangled massless particles. Even so humanity still needs to keep its ecosphere working properly and ecosystem services including those of bats are a part of that. Bats evolved in caves comparable to the way human knowledge evolved in Plato’s cave. The prisoners chained to the cave floor saw things they didn’t understand and made explanations for them and over time they found the conditional truth at the surface. Then of course they could face new problems concerning environment and cosmology like those of contemporary humanity.

I wonder if this interesting module of socio-historical analysis of ecosystem services is very useful in regard to the purpose of learning how to evaluate and set pricing paradigms for ecosystem services at the introductory level. Life offers only so much time to humans and while philosophical reflection is useful, some intellectual journeys can be superfluous to practical applications of knowledge.

The reference to Paul Erlich was interesting because he wrote 'The Population Bomb' in the 1970s- an early and sensational recognition of human overpopulation of the limited, finite world ecosystem. For those concerned with adapting human life on Earth to the available resources and conserving the remaining health of the ecosphere perhaps ecosystem services is a tool that can be used for bringing an appreciation of the value of the ecosphere to the masses and to political leaders analytically by showing clear and present costs and even dangers of harming or displacing/destroying environmental elements.

Ecosystem Services Practice Model 1

 Ecosystem services are a way to evaluate (find value) of natural ecosystem services like providing air to breathe, clean water, etc. In the course I am taking on line one of the exercises is to make a theoretical model where ecosystem service are being valued.

In theory different groups use different ecosystem services impacting one another. Although ecosystem services are naturally free and given by God as the ecosphere, people spend it as the natural capital that it is often depleting the resource. Sometimes selling natural, publicly owned capital to private economic interests for a fraction of what it is worth to the public in providing ecosystem services needs to be given monetary values for the public to really understand what is going on. 

That is, ecosystem services need to be monetized and commodified or quantified for scientific reason concerning human survival and for the public to learn how in some respects it is the modern equivalent of native Americans that sold Manhattan Island for 24 dollars and some few trinkets. My project example follows (we were limited to 300 words).

Conserving or Developing the Lower Stikine River Wilderness?

The lower Stikine River is a rich natural ecosystem. Its services providing habitat for king salmon, eagles, wolverine, minks, moose, brown bear, seals, sea lions and vast numbers of migratory wild birds, fresh water and forests absorbing Co2 per hectare is had to surpass in much of the northern latitudes, yet some hope to transform it into a rich agricultural zone with abundant mining upstream in order to provide local jobs as well as one-time logging operations.

Plan A- Development would clear-cut the forests, dike, berm and dry usable wetlands, form terraces on hillsides for produce, creating chicken ranches in place of economically useless wild birds and build structures for human living, business, tourism and trade where only Farm Island private property and a few remote cabins presently exist in addition to innumerable rat-like wild birds. Instead of a few trappers, tour guides, adventurers, smugglers and drug transporters exploiting the route to Telegraph Creek in Canada from Wrangell Alaska, thousands of workers and tourists would reside at least part of the year in the delta. Developers argue that local agriculture would reduce global warming by reducing the need to import farm products to S.E. Alaska on carbon emitting barge tugboats.

Plan B- Conservation, would restore the Stikine River from it’s dwindled salmon stocks; just 80,000 Chinook return to spawn each year and only 10,000 in the lower Stikine, and otherwise protect the river from clear-cuts, agriculture and mining pollution to keep the environment in as wild of a state as possible. Ecosystem services are valued at 145 trillion dollars globally each year. The Stikine comprises an especially productive portion of that, as coastal rivers and waters are  prime suppliers of nutrients to the oceans and plankton life-cycles. Wolves, eagles, wolverine, minks and other species are endangered in the ecosphere living locally. Even crab eat salmon carcasses when there are surplus, uncaught salmon that spawned and died to drift downstream. Fishing for wild salmon will be directly harmed with the destruction of Stikine River salmon habitat.

Police Reform Might be a Race Issue

 Police reform in the U.S.A. is a hot topic for Democrats and particularly blacks. Federal reforms tend to be universal fixes that break a lot of eggs to make minority omelets. My ideas on the topic are general and inexpert. Yet I will write them, or summarize them anyway.

White people are fairly satisfied with the state of police departments. Before racial integration mostly white communities worked very hard to eliminate police corruption. Internal affairs and F.B.I. investigations tended to square things away, and like military units with old lineages they tended toward stability. Integration changed that. J. Edgar Hoover being a homo may have been hot on undermining white police corruption and the strait world order in order to make a kinder, gentler society where one day he and his kids might be openly queer. History sometimes make silk purses out of sow's ears...it's all in the timing.

f course police departments in the old south served to arrest an enable convict labor of blacks. In the modern era racial integration made more white police interaction more like that of political peers with blacks yet the policing was arm's length and cautious because of the recent history of radical black activism, rioting and criminal behavior of undereducated people in slums. Blacks today are still the driving force in modern police reform primarily to benefit themselves understandably. For white people police are satisfactory, even so they would generally prefer quality poling of blacks in a way that black Americans are satisfied too. 

Hispanic Americans don't complain about policing too much. In Mexico and other Latin countries police departments are sometimes expected to have a high percentage of corruption and good cops are sometimes killed by drug cartels. The Mexican Marines and years ago the Federal police are regarded as honest and the remainder dubious. Maybe Hispanics don't expect American police to be more honest and are satisfied if they are not persecuted tor harassed. Maybe Hispanics have lower expectations of police based on cultural experience to the south- I just don't know. 

So how to reform police for black Americans and Hispanics too even if they don't expect much of the Federal government except to let more Hispanics enter the U.S.A. That is the federal question. Without a good answer it would be dangerous to willy nilly throw some experimental fixes on the nation and see if they work. If too many crimes occur after the new era of policing it is likely a harsh counter-reaction would follow if history is much of a guide.

Religious Oppression at Social Media by Atheist-Woke Crowd

 This is something of a placeholder for more on the topic later. The subject was occasioned by my online encounter with a wikipedia article on the relation between science and religion. The article is heavily biased toward the atheist point of view and editing of the article showing errors are deleted overnight by the woke crowd that rises after dusk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_religion_and_science

One of the claims made is that there was no concept of religion prior to two or three centuries ago. The truth is that people knew about comparative religions millennia ago. One example is the choice of Assyrian conquerors of Judah in the late 8th and early seventh centuries B.C.E. to destroy the temple at Jerusalem and enslave the leaders and priests. religion probably arises from the word liege meaning Lord that is from old English, Old French and Old German. In the Pentateuch God is named 'Lord' numerous times (e.g. in Deutronomy, 2nd Kings and Jeremiah). The koine Greek kyrios means 'Lord'. A religion was the practice of loyalty to God, the Lord in recurring worship. Reality as a word has a similar morpheme 're' and all probably is referent to everything. The use is similar to that of re before liege or lige. The word Lord appears more than 6000 times in the Old and New Testaments.

People have had a concept of religion for millennia. Comparative religions or comparing religions occurred early in history as evidenced by religious wars and heresies. People were aware of the differences between one religion or allegiance and another. That is one of the reasons why political Lords sometimes suppressed allegiances to foreign or unknown dieties- even specious ones; because they were aware that foreign religions were a potential danger to their own authority.

It wasn't simply that some like Nero believed themselves to be God or that various rulers made themselves head of the state religion; some religions were recognized and tolerated as in Athens and Rome for a time. The Apostle Paul tried to explain the nature of the One True God to people in Athens at the agora mentioning and comparing the others. People were persecuted to having different religious beliefs probably before the historical era in the Iron Age.  Nothing is mentioned of the topic in the wiki article; my contribution was deleted and scientist reading the thing are left to believe that religion was born yesterday.       

I mentioned my own book 'Christianity, Evolution and Digital Universes' and that was too deleted. How convenient that nothing of modern expository writing on the problem of Wittgenstein/Kripke/WVO Quines paradigm of the indeterminacy of translation and how that can effect interpretation of scriptural paradigms is permitted to be read. The atheists would like people to learn their own version of things omitting inconvenient  counter-factual truths.

Reform Capitalism and Political Economy Toward Sustainable Ecosystem Services

 Capitalism needs to be reformed with the global ecosphere becoming an element. Ecosystem services that find a value for environmental services have the problem of being too local and lacking in cognizance of the networked or essential unity of all system and the greater cost of deleting parts of it. Numerous studies including some mentioned in the marine environment have shown that species recovery and productivity of surrounding regions to a highly protected area rise too and may fall with its loss of protection. What is the value of life on Earth in which mankind arises and is sustained? Can it be sold off or traded within the values of the values of unreformed capital market economics? Are the goals of market economics and the values given to ecosystem elements commensurate with the ideal of conserving and recovering ecospheric health or for supporting the most efficient profit and trade relationships for all regardless the state of the environment. Is it a necessary that protecting the ecosystem is of more economic value than exploiting and degrading it within supply and demand political economies.

I think the reform of capitalism would include taxation and regulation as well as in some cases ecosystem service evaluation. Taxation would make it costlier to harm the environment than to conserve it. Real estate developers for instance, would pay fewer taxes on building homes that have no net loss of biota than builders that clear off biota and have a net loss of biota. Taxing properties than harm the environment or displace it would result in higher taxes than green properties, and that could stimulate a new era of sod roofs if not advanced design flora covered hollow artificial 'mountains' for people to live within.

Regulations should be made to stimulate inventors and business start ups to create enterprises that are not harmful to the environment and have the least entropic effects on the ecosphere. Maybe the IQ. level of business execs need be higher with better education. Capitalism given tax incentives that are consistent surely may find some entrepreneurs that can satisfy social ecosphere conservation and restoration efforts and benefit so many people on Earth. Even creating new ecosphere on the Moon, Mars and elsewhere off-world should receive substantial tax discounts. Capital of course need be taxed sufficiently to prevent the concentration of wealth to the degree that plutocrats arise to make a toy and puppet show of democracy as well as to support a basic social income so people can afford not to be employed in dirty business yet be able to survive until clean jobs employ them. For some time changing the quantity and proportion of dirty jobs to clean jobs will create some social displacement effects. The smarter and more honest politicians become (it must be a joke yet I hope that is possible) the less displacing the changes could be.

Is knowledge Comparable to a Redwood Tree Rooted in a Local Ecosystem or a Seagull Travellng the World?

 The question" Is local knowledge determined by nature" is as clear as mud; what is local knowledge, what is nature and so forth. One might as well ask the Cartesian question and reply cogito ergo sum and decide that experience is an existential affair. Knowledge is knowledge and people know what they know so far as they can be certain of the veracity of their own knowledge. If they travel some distance more than they can walk they have knowledge about that distant region.

I often lived in a forest more than 30 years and know it fairly well, yet I travel too and know the desert etc. I flew over Iceland a couple of times and looked at it from 30,000 feet. It seemed like a nice place with a lot of clouds around. Yet people in cities or even a few miles away have a completely different experience of life, and nature, because they live indoors in a heated and cooled thermostatically determined world. One should not underestimate the power of artificial heating and cooling, running water, baths and electricity on the way people think and how they tend to lack common sense about 'nature' and its relationship to mankind. People can be content with parks instead of the wild and its health and destroy it without thought since they don't live in it carefully.

One might wonder if knowledge is comparable to a Redwood tree rooted in a local forest or like that of a seagull flying hundreds or thousands of miles. Bar-tailed godwits fly 7500 miles each year between Alaska and New Zealand. One shouldn't overlook special relativity in considering the meaning of locality and knowledge. The philosopher C.D. Broad actually wrote a book a long time ago titled 'The Mind and Its Place in Nature'. People have wondered about knowledge and mind quite a long time.

The planetary ecosphere is a continuum with humanity existing within the ecospheric bubble they clumsily try to break like bulls in a China shop economically speaking in regard to methods and practices. 'Primitive' people live existentially too and have serialized praxis concerning behavior. The difference between primitives and advanced societies are in externalities and manufactures. Each has an ensemble or tool kit that is more complex actually in nature than in the simplified artificial world of stick frame homes, steel girder structure or whatever produces indoor comfort and security for dwellings. People naturally separate themselves from nature in order to make life less painful for-themselves. Apes may groom other apes and pick off fleas and bugs of various kinds as part of nature; humans like to do a little better than that even going so far as to be unhappy when contracting various illnesses that cause pain and death;therefore humans manufactured or evolved surgical and pharmacopoeia remedies over time, so far as they could. Even primitives happily become moderns where they can afford to.

Knowledge is a result of the grace of God, reasoning and occurs within nature. Nature includes Universal thermodynamics and the intake of energy and mass to sustain personal healthy mass and thought. Thermodynamics is the correction to original sin perpetrated by beings beyond the four dimensions of space-time. Willful disobedience to God is the inherited problem for the human race. Only though the saving grace of Jesus Christ can a soul be saved and liberated from eternal separation from God. Letting nature be healthful would require intelligent humanity and it is corrupted by original sin and systems that reinforce worldly, corrupt values, hedonism and consumerism. It is worth trying to change. Yet in my opinion it is possible that putting a price on nature and natural services will not solve or fix the primary environmental question of sustaining its existence in a healthy way. Human values Adam Smith's capitalism wouldn't generate an invisible hand that would guide the market of ecosystem services to the best possible condition as if the market was intelligent and benevolent. Even the atmosphere would be considered an externality to most people and air would have no value perhaps in some ecosystem service systems. Who needs to breathe is more than an existential question in my opinion.

Alligators Could Save the Lives of Cattle and Frump Atmospheric Gas CO2

 Because cattle are so harmful to global warming reduction areas and require large amounts of grassland to feed (or even grains) phasing them out and keeping just a few for pets and free ranging in the wild in some locations could be a natural evolution. What could replace them on the American menu? You may have guessed; alligators.

Farming alligators to large size might be used to help recover wetlands lost to development. Hundreds of thousands of very well fed, large gators might be raised in restored and artificial wetlands and commercially exploited, transformed into alligator-burger patties. Alligators fart underwater usually and may be less damaging to air quality. Millions of frumps may be safer and greener than farting in the air.

If Crocodiles replaced alligators for food then saltwater could be used to raise them in vast artificial ponds. Saltwater could be pumped and siphoned in pipelines, evaporated and collected under condensation roofs to make fresh water for the American Southwest deserts. Maybe gators and crocs would let a million points of light bloom, or not while fresh water for drinking was made in New Mexico from Pacific Ocean saltwater.

Some Americans might be relieved that harmless cattle no longer were decattleized as units of meat on the hoof raised and sold as abstract entities for profit and barbecue. Prime alligator rib and barbecued alligator could be more appealing to diners than Herefords sliced and broiled and Guernseys converted when milked dry into dog food pellets.

Ask Mexico to Join the United States to Secure Southern Border

 The Democrat Party has created and maintained a perennial border crisis allowing more than a half million foreigners to illegally cross in to the U.S.A. every month. For years and even decades that party has sabotaged U.S. internal security and swollen the ranks of illegal workers that have several adverse effects on the American economy. About a quarter of a million illegal entrants are captured and released monthly while about 300,000 get away without making any kind of contact with federal officers at all. Some of those could be Russian, North Korean or Chinese specialists bringing in suitcase nuclear bombs to bury in desert regions for later possible use by sleeper agents demolishing U.S. cities. There should be some sort of interim solution to the problem of the creeping conquest of America by illegals.

Illegal workers as a vast left-wing class undermine the fundamental principles of equality. Plainly there should be no illegal underclass of citizens in the U.S.A. that creates a bifurcated economic divide between those on the legal clock and those not as is the case in California. Some way the U.S.A. and its values are permanently corrupted by the presence of a vast illegal underclass of physical workers not collecting fat paychecks at a desk. The remedy is to seal the southern border to illegal entrants as President Trump tried to do while being sabotaged in the effort by Democrats. After a couple of years of sealing the borders against illegal entry aliens that have worked in the U.S.A. for two years or more should be offered legal residence after being screened against international criminal and terrorists registers.

The alternative would be to ask Mexico to consider becoming part of the U.S.A. so the United States of America would include Mexico and its states as they are with one government and citizenship for all. Mexico has a smaller southern border that the U.S. government might be able to afford to defend although Democrats probably would find a way to make it grossly insecure too.

Public Goods in the Market and Scarcity

 I don’t believe that capital is a concept created by the Judaeo-Christian culture. Capital I.m.o. is a fundamental quantification of anything and giving it a value as a thing-in-itself. Value in turn is a function of scarcity. Abundant water in rainfall for example is less valued than rare water in a desert to users. A primitive tribe might regard itself as part of nature and not be wrong about that, and if it had abundant resources no particular value system might arise to a level at all resembling anything structured, yet if any disturbance to the force of nature occurs that makes living a challenge, the response of a tribe would be a function of the increase in value of the resource disturbed or reduced in quantity. Scarcity is the cause for the origin of capital even if it is manufactured as a novel product that becomes desired-with implicit scarcity before mass production.

Why can’t public goods be traded in the market? In the United States some public goods are owned by the government (i.e. land, water, oil, minerals etc.) and can easily be given a price and sold in the market. Maybe in some nations they cannot be traded.

If ecosystem service are worth more than 150 trillion dollars annually and setting aside ecosystems because the value particular ecosystems have are annually worth more than 100 times what it costs to buy them in dollars, and the loss of income to particular users of ecosystems not conserved is about 1/100th what the loss would be to public users of the ecosystems if they aren’t conserved, why can’t either major U.S. political party move to set aside and restore more ecosystems at a progressive pace of perhaps a trillion worth of acquisitions each year (maybe through taxes on the rich and a decrease in the military budget)?

Ecohomo Economics vs Ecopluralism

   What is presently named biodiversity to portray an abundance of species flora and fauna is being reduced toward the disaster of ecohomo monism over time. If the sole existing life form on Earth is mankind that species may be doomed. Classical economics exploits the wealth of ecopluralism and prioritizes to the exclusion of everything else ecohomo lines. Ecohomo psychology has even reached out to try to kill off the idea that God exists.

An ecosystem service approach if using a standard axiology would lock in that value system socially, and economic valuation metrics are hard to change. Society does chase after money- the root cause for slavery and wars, and so adapting ES to a free market is necessary yet challenging. Ecopluralism rather than an Ecohomo monist reduction to just mankind on Earth is the right way to proceed.

An ecohomo economic world order is evolving or devolving the ecosphere obviously. Maybe experimenting theoretically with constructing lunar ecohabitats of as large a scale with selections of Earth species that could adapt would help humanity learn of the value of keeping a verdant ecopluralism on Earth.

There is no mistake that ecohomo economics is driven by greed and the attraction of money. Slavery in the United States would never have occurred without the profit motive. It was the economic value of slave labor rather than sadistic sociopathy and racism that motivated the growth of the slave business. Wars occur for economic reasons and have for millennia even when security appears to be the primary cause.

Ecopluralism has been shown in the newish field of Ecosystem services to be of real economic value. In other words the value of a rich and vibrant ecosphere with ecopluralism entailing millions of species. Today the estimated number of species is close to nine million though just more than one million have been cataloged. That number is large yet is in steady decline with numerous important species already extinct and/or critically endangered.

Because ecopluralism is like a cloth that adapts to various challenges, eliminating various species threads from it can lead to its disintegration and the disaster of a necrotic ecohomo environment. An economy subsists through interacting and harvesting ecosystem services and a portion of various species rather than eliminating any. With ecoreductionist methods ecological economics are adversely impacted, for example, if all of the fish were harvested there would be no fish to catch, or in the abstract, if species 1, 3 and 5 were needed to support the life of species 9 that is harvested economically, then species 1, 3 and 5 need be protected too in order to allow species 9 to live to be harvested. If species 1, 3 and 5 depend on several other species and flora to exist, eliminating those species with displacement of harvest to extinction will ultimately result in the loss of the species that support the life of species 9.

Ecosystem services are part of the toolkit needed to keep ecopluralism alive and healthy. Humans benefit and are alive because of ecopluralism and the grace of God.

Mass as a Secondary Quality Embedded in the Higgs Field with Relativistic Characteristics

I had a dream or something like that this morning that brought me to consider relativity in the Higgs field as if I was going to explain it to a class of non-mathematicians like myself. I looked at Google search about the field equations for general relativity and got a couple of useful, succinct paragraphs…

“The Einstein Field Equations are ten equations, contained in the tensor equation shown above, which describe gravity as a result of spacetime being curved by mass and energy., which specifies the spacetime geometry.”

and

“Einstein made two heuristic and physically insightful steps. The first was to obtain the field equations in vacuum in a rather geometric fashion. The second step was obtaining the field equations in the presence of matter from the field equations in vacuum.“

Mass is an emergent characteristic of energy slowed down passing into the Higgs field. Relativity; the special and general theories, explain the relationship of space-time relationships of mass-energy particles have traveling in the Higgs field. Mass attracts other mass at the speed of light- the speed limit of any mass in motion, and of course loses times as it acquires speed for space and time are one unified field in the Higgs field.

Probably space is really an empty dimension and the Higgs field fills it and gives it the qualities of being a unified space-time for mass embedded within it. Quantum particles travel at the speed of light, or nearly, and are massless. In the Higgs field some massless particles pick up the characteristics of mass as they are slowed and their energy is converted or transformed into mass that seems to be an inert phase of energy; an appearance of being mass and solid.

Quantum particles and the characteristics of quantum particles with small amounts of mass; quantum orbital spacing and distance, charges etc are functions of theoretical units of mass in the relativistic apparent aspects of the Higgs field acting on mass. Quantum uncertainty is necessary for quantum particles because mass is an apparent rather than an actual phenomenon at all times subject to the characteristics of being mass in a Higgs Field. Because there isn’t actually mass; just some kind of grand appearance of massless, highly energetic field particles entangled at the quantum level, and because space-time is unified though space itself hasn’t real dimensions either-simply apparent dimensions defined by the Higgs fields governance for some reason unknown to me (as is the grand reality of energy in massless particles that download or flux into the Higgs field space-time) it is reasonable that quantum entanglement can exchange information faster-than-light because the information may be more real and equivalent to the level of the Higgs Field’s ‘altitude’ than mass.

There is a point made in physics, if I recall correctly, that quanta may have mass in one dimension yet not in another. Spin of quanta may alternate from massless to mass in various dimensions, and there are four dimensions of space-time. On a mathematical line there is no spacing between points- it is a continuum. Quanta on the line may have mass on that line yet non in dimensions intersecting it. I suppose quanta in the Higgs entangle dimension characteristics in their positions of being.

I would like to think of the relationship of the Higgs field in the context of Neo-Platonism. In Plotinus the expositor of Plato several centuries later- about six-hundred years in the second century C.E., Plotinus in 54 tracts named The Enneads wrote of the realm of forms operated by the Intelligence/Spirit who downloads copies into a Universe where they seem real objects. Quantum information would be in the realm of forms and the quanta themselves in the world of real objects. Relativity; special and general, govern the relationships of energy quanta embedded in the Higgs Field of real objects.

I would like to think of the relationship of the Higgs field in the context of Neo-Platonism. In Plotinus the expositor of Plato several centuries later- about six-hundred years in the second century C.E., Plotinus in 54 tracts named The Enneads wrote of the realm of forms operated by the Spirit who downloaded copies into a Universe where they seemed real objects. Quantum information would be in the realm of forms and the quanta themselves in the world of real objects. Relativity; special and general, govern the relationships of energy quanta embedded in the Higgs Field of real objects.

Pres Biden Pushes 30 M1 Tanks in Ukraine Front of Nascent 3rd World War

 One might wonder about the battlefield changes of the Ukraine war brought on by President Biden’s continuing willingness to send weapons and cash to Ukraine. Sending tanks, HIMARS and Patriot Missiles to influence the course of the war is a fairly aggressive posture. Ukraine has already used HIMARS to attack inside Russia. Tanks are a traditional tool for ground invasions, yet thirty won’t be enough to make an attack inside Russia. So why send them?

Russia may still have as many as 10,000 tanks in reserve although some may be rusted out. It has 200 of its T-90s in Ukraine and has lost 27. I believe the U.S has 600 M1A2 tanks in Europe; quite a build up since it had zero in 2018. Transferring some of those should be simple enough.

Russian leadership hasn’t figured out how to use tanks well in an era with drones for attack and surveillance. The U.S. gave Ukraine more than 17,000 anti-tanks weapons and Ukrainians used them well. Russia has Kornet anti-tank weapons and the practical RPG-29 and 30 that are able to take penetrate the reactive armor of M1s. Israel recently made a defense tool against anti-missile systems and it isn’t known if they will sell those to the U.S. or provide them to Ukraine. Perhaps the U.S. will encounter a significant loss of the tanks it gives to Ukraine when they are deployed in the field.

The slow build up of the Ukraine war into a fully western supported total war against the Russian front concentrated in a particular area does seem a bit dangerous inasmuch as it could make a hard choice ahead when the U.S. expect Russia to run out of ammunition in early 2023. Would Russia use battlefield tactical nukes to supplant its ebbing conventional ammunition?

I suppose N.A.T.O. and Russia consider the Ukraine was as the first round of a general western war against Russia that is presently limited to Ukraine. In that case the continuing U.S. build up of weapons in N.A.T.O. countries is designed to serve for that war should it occur. The more weapons Russia uses in the battle for East Ukraine the less it would have for the north and south fronts of round two of the war in its expanded form. The U.S. may have 600 tanks in Europe to deploying tanks to the Ukraine front even operated by Ukrainian soldiers for the time being is a reasonable way to prepare for round two’s advance into Russia and onward to Moscow should round two happen and nukes not.

The U.S. Marines are getting rid of their M1 tanks, or already did, as they seem a bit obsolete on a modern battlefield. Their best use may be to act as mobile artillery for a ground invasion and as dug on, concealed and mobile field pieces in a static war like Ukraine. Probable self-driving platforms to move howitzers around, or rockets to locations quickly would be a faster and cheaper way to get artillery and rockets to the right places quickly. The Ukraine war is an expensive distraction and should be and could have been settled peacefully with just some concessions from the U.S. toward Russia’s claims of a right of recovery of land rightly owned by Russia.

Lakers Positioned to Win a Few Games

 The Lakers are in a good position to win a few games more without damaging their 2023 first round N.B.A. draft position. The Pelicans have the right to swap first round pick with the lakers because of the Anthony Davis trade, and the Pelicans are ranked fourth in the Western Division and the Laker's twelth presently, so winning a few more games won't hurt them at all since the Pelicans will want the swap.

Getting the Wizard's forward Rui Hachimura for three future second round picks was a fair deal since the guy is just in his fourth season and plays reasonably well. It seems as if the Lakers always have too many guards and not enough forwards so Hachimura helps solve the problem although his is no Rick Barry.

Austin Reeves may be the Lakers future point guard at 6'5" with good shooting skills leaving room for the Lakers to find some sort of high end shooting guard someday who can drop in 30 points a game. West and Goodrich, Wilt and Elgin Baylor were good Lakers teams well balanced like the Kareem teams. Lebron James may be an off the bench Laker as long as Tom Brady started at QB, and Anthony Davis signed a long term contract in 2022 so he will be an occassional starter when not injured the other half of the year at forward-center, so the Lakers still could use that Larry Bird forward, Shaquille O'Neal center and unselfish Kobe shooting guard to return to lasting number one ranking. Short of that paradigm the Lakers can solve one of three problems at about 60% success for each of its future draft years with a first round pick. With some long-term players already on the roster its not a bad position to be in- provided they don't slip into their old habit of trading away great young players to get a grass is greener old guy they believe will immediately make them great again.

Perhaps the Lakers have two of four positions of their future team set presently (Reeves and Hachimura). The Lakers need to fill in their future team around young players rather than James and Davis who are better regarded as icing on the cake that win championships. Thus the Lakers need three more pieces of the future team and have three years to get them. Thomas Bryant might be an adequate long-term interim center until the big guy arrives- I am not expert on centers. Dennis Schröder could be the interim shooting guard on the cheap with good point production until the dead-eye three point shooter graduates, and the new tall power forward star is the primary deficit- a Michael Jordan, Larry Bird kind of guy that draws the defense to a lop-sided asymetric position on the court.

Why UKNEA Didin't Get Any Action

  UKNEA was Britain's national environmental assessment. It was made and not given a screenplay and used as a five year plan or whatever the House of Lords and Commons might have made if they were particularly inspired one day by Vladimir Illyich Lenin. Not being a Brit, its challenging for me to say why the nation that invented the industrial revolution doesn't go whole hog for neo-socialism- after all Britain also invented homosexual marriage for the planet, and much of the ecosystem services officialdom seems to be caught up in promoting divisive social agenda as riders with ecosystem services. Incidentally democracy and political pluralism include free speech and different opinions- that isn't corruption at all. If Brits are more concerned with riots, the Ukraine war and football when not buying up foreign markets should poor and downtrodden Brits be expected to act like King Canute and order the ecosphere magically repaired straitaway?

If the ecosystem services approach hopes to evolve to be a rational use of ecosphere movement and/or its conservation I would think that defining meta-structure parameters concerning the needs that the ecosphere must meet for humanity should be made, found, discovered or whatever. Since people can and have used about every material thing they can get their hands on for economic purposes, an ecosystem services approach that is continuously ad hoc and reactive to contemporary demands to use the environment and seeking to serve as a dumbed-down Solomon apportioning half of the baby to various claimants will be presented with contemporary values and axiological criteria evolving regularly. As Parmenides and Heraclitus could discuss if a river ever or never changes, ecosystem services could consider comparative values of commodities locally and neolocally on a vary unstable scale with subjective values. Setting values for things humans demand yet don't need probably occurs within traditional paradigms of supply and demand. For sustaining a healthy planetary ecosphere the entire planet need be considered instead of billions of arguments and demands over portions of the ecosphere.

If the quantity of food needed to sustain ten billion people is F, and the area required to produce F is F divided by area A at a certain rate of production, then ecosystem servicing of F need be hypothesized and located in the minimally disturbing area A of Earth. When the area is determined then the economic policies and methods to produce F within A can be considered. Other non-food use of an ecosystem inclusive of all empirical material should be determined and quantified too. With the quantification surveyed, and necessary locations with Resources R plotted in the least disturbing locations the combined areas of F and R could be added up and set aside for humanity to develop in the most efficient way possible.

The remainder of the planet should be made into a park with a natural ecosphere and people would live within artificial mountain ranges; hollow inside and vegetated outside. People would be free to live in space of course, at a faster pace if electro-magnetic linear accelerators were developed to replace chemical rockets for heavy lift as frequently as a machine gun fires bullets down a fifty mile tube to reach orbital escape velocity.

Without a macro approach humanity will defeat itself in detail like as not, as it wars upon itself and its environment through consumption. Each nation probably should develop a theoretical optimal approach of land and ecosphere resources for sustainability just to have such data for comparative purposes with the real world.

In Piketty's book Capital in the 21st Century a point was made that as private capital increases public capital tends to decrease. The total value of U.S. government debt is more than 30 trillion dollars presently; are all of the resources held by the public sector today even worth 31 trillion dollars? Problems like that tend to undermine public power to control the ecosphere as parks and land areas owned publicly are reduced.

Piketty also pointed out that Brits had vast public debt from the American Revolutionary war that weren't paid off until near the start of the First World War. Since Piketty also noted the well known fact that capital increases faster than wages and tends to socially concentrate- Britain had 1% of the subjects owning 99% of the wealth until taxes rose to finance the Great War to End all Wars it may be that the woke set are hand waving on the idea of gay government bureaucrats running the environmental services of a decadent world socially and ecospherically. Plutocracy may let the nominal democracy play with that to serve its politically controlling agenda.

In Farley and Daley's book Ecological Economics explanations of the way natural resources can be said to equate to natural capital was explained. I think it can be a danger though to forget he ideas of Edmond Wilson and his students about the interdependence and co-development of the biosphere- especially well exemplified on how some Arctic Islands evolved from bare rock to places with plants and animals living when the ice receded. The entire ecosphere is a complete living mechanism, perhaps biological fractalized in some respects of dittoing services at scales great and small, yet there are numerous irreplaceable parts.

If people have good comparative surveys of the way things are and what is actually required to sustain human life then people can look at that and make dead reckoning kinds of volunteer judgments and works to get some of that done. I don't believe there is a systems approach that could be politically enforced today in any nation without a dictatorship, and who wants that, ants?

Ecosphere and Ecosystem Services

 I started a new course on Ecosystem services that has a game in it to illustrate points about the costs of selecting or using land for producing food for humans with agriculture and ranching. Ecosystems provide free services to the human economy that may or may not be sustainable. They provide free grass for grazing and water for watering yet overuse can reduce the service.

Ecosystems sustain human life and biologically speaking all of the life on Earth is embeded within the ecosphere. As the ecosphere is destroyed, insulted, reduced in extent so is human security to exist in a viable ecosphere. The ecosystem trade off game in the course lesson one has the player select land squares to locate ranches and farms. The land selections have cost values for water, carbon sequestration and so forth rated from low to high and values for producing income from low to high. The combination of values alltogether determines the productivity of land selections.

I suppose one wants the lowest possible ecosystem costs and highest possible income. I wrote a comment on the game and how to improve it...

Agriculture in some areas with ranching seemed to reduce income or vice versa. Ecoservice regions with low value tended to have low income too, yet not always.

Maybe clarifying productivity and income would be useful; are they the same? Does maximizing productivity invariably equal maximizing income? In real economics doesn't over-production reduce price per unit sometimes?

Sometimes in the game the symbol for ranching or agriculture would disappear when working on the other and one would need to quit the ranching or agriculture and replace it after going into the other mode. The symbols should be immutable when working in the alternate mode (ranching vs agriculture).

The old game of battleship had players picking out squares they couldn't see rather randomly to try to locate and sink enemy ships. The trade off game round one reminded me of that. There didn't seem to be much information about how to get positive scores, and that is time consuming in regard to opportunity cost. Some information should be provided a priori in order to maximize the score through making informed decisions/choices of squares, acres etc to exploit for producing food.

Aesthetic values of wild areas should be valued too. Making ecosystem slums has very negative value too. It may be that ecosystem services is an area where sensibilities of good art and human survival coincide.

When assigning paradigms to evaluate the ecosystem for its value to the human economy on a sustainable basis (for it is too obvious that to use and destroy the ecosphere entirely might snuff out all human life on Earth) one must wonder how politically one would implment the value system and set its parameters. Would one intitialize the system by calculating the total food production requirements needed to sustain the human race and them find the least harmful acres of the planet to host production? Alternatively would it be possible to use a trial and error, piecemeal private sector, free enterprise approach to production and land use and gamble on the outcome?

https://www.coursera.org/learn/ecosystem-services/home/welcome

Depleting and overusing natural capital is like creating vast public debt that will likely never be repayed. Planetary Boundaries of natural capital illustration below. I should note that the oxfam source of the illustration also has many politically highly charged and divisive measures that are entirely part of the post-modern, Democrat Party moral relativism agenda such as homosexual marriage and the promotion of homosexuality politically. Those are completely irrelevant and external to the paradigm of producing enough food and manufactures for humanity while keeping the ecosphere and biodiveristy intact. Unfortunately the time lost to the divisive platform solidly retards the difficulty transition to a sustainable economy.