I have been pondering what it means to be a “successful” business person (or a successful person in general).  At first I thought it might mean running a “profitable” business.  That seems to make some sort of sense, after all what could be more successful than making money?  However, that is a rather nebulous criteria because it doesn’t include the idea of how profitable a business needs to be to be successful, nor does it include anything about how the “costs” of that profitability.  Our current social-economic model assumes that profit only includes the costs to the business; it doesn’t include the costs that are “paid” by others (such as society, the environment, or our future).  Just following “profit” as the criteria for success doesn’t seem to have a stopping point, or provide criteria for how much is enough.  Picking a target such as a “50%” profit as the criteria seems reasonable, but that approach results in some odd outcomes.  If I start with $1,000 and accumulate a 50% profit every year, in 40 years I would have over seven billion dollars.  Perhaps that would be a sign of being “successful” – but is this an appropriate goal?  I think we all know there is more to being successful than just making a profit.

I generally reject the idea that rich people got that way by being “greedy” – that is much too simple, and isn’t the way that most people’ mind works. People that make more money than others are not necessarily being greedy, they got that was as the results of making smart decisions, hard work, and luck.  I believe that most people (even very rich ones) are attempting to be “good” people, at least in the eyes of those that are personally close to them.  Not all of them are “good” of course, there are indeed psychotic and anti-social people that get into places of power – but even then it is seldom greed that is driving them, it is a desire for power – or perhaps fear.  If “success” means making money, and making money isn’t all about greed – I wonder what the relationship might be.  Perhaps that connection just results from there being a lack of an alternative criterion.    

I think billionaires are much like the rest of us.  They want to be successful.  They justify their wealth by convincing themselves that they are doing great things for humanity.  They have convinced themselves that by hiring tens of thousands of people they are providing much needed livelihoods and jobs – which is true.  However, in many cases they are actually providing poverty because of the low wages they offer.  They also spend a lot of money on silly, and stupid, things – but a point can be made that even buying expensive, frivolous things (yachts, mansions, private jets or flights into space) provide even more jobs, many of which are quite high paying. Oddly, these kinds of extravaganzas often turn into good investments and therefore don’t “cost” anything.  They are just different investment opportunities.  Many wealthy people turn to philanthropy in an attempt at “balancing” the obvious unbalance in their wealth – but because of the tax regulations even that effort often becomes yet another type of investment generating even more “profit.”

Success based on accumulating money seems rather hollow and not very “fulfilling” with regard to personal needs. I am wondering if perhaps a better vision for “success” is something along the lines of being “honorable”.    Realizing that there are many meanings for the term “honorable”, I Googled it and found this description: “The word honorable has to do with people and actions that are honest, fair, and worthy of respect. An honorable person is someone who believes in truth and doing the right thing — and tries to live up to those high principles.” This seems close to what I am thinking about.  What if this is how we judge “success”? What if a successful person is someone that achieves a life based upon these principles, instead of success based upon gaining wealth and power?  Would that make a difference?

While a definition of “a success person” as someone who does “the right thing” seems better than being someone that makes a lot of money, I am not sure how to use it as a useful criterion.   I wonder if there is a way for an individual to take actions that “help the world,” or does it take a community of everyone to accomplish that.  For example, when selecting something to eat for dinner, can I actually make meaningful decisions about helping the world – or do I have to depend upon others to do the right thing to support my decision?  If I buy some shrimp for dinner, does that somehow make me complicit with supporting the Thai fisherman that “captures” destitute Burmese to work in insanely cruel conditions for little, or no, pay?  If I purchase a shiny new all electric automobile, do I somehow also become responsibly for the environmental destruction caused by mining the metals for those batteries?  I think not, it is all too big, too far from my control, and too deeply embedded into the system of exploitation supporting our entire economic system. 

The most an individual can do it hope that the store selling the shrimp does their best at being “honorable” in their choices.  The best that they can do it hope that their suppliers are being “honorable”, and so on down the line until you come to shrimp farms and the fisherman in Thailand, or Vietnam, or India or Indonesia – we are all hoping that they are also being “honorable” – unfortunately, it appears that the attribute of being “honorable” isn’t necessarily prevalent everywhere along the chain.  What drives every step is someone trying to be “successful” in the sense of making a living, making a profit, expanding the business – being “successful”.  For anyone to do the “honorable” thing, everyone involved has to do it too.

Are these two possible meanings of success mutually exclusive?  Is there a way to be successful as a business person while being careful to treat people fairly?  Is it possible to make use of the natural resources in a way that is sustainable and healthy for the environment and all of the critters sharing it with us?  Is it possible to use resources in a way that does not plunder and “steal” them from others that need to share the resources of the “commons”?

If this is not possible, then we have a bit of a problem – there may be no solution to our current over-exploitation in support of our current striving for over-abundance.  What if the price of shrimp reflected the true cost of obtaining them?  What if the fishermen actually got paid enough to support themselves and their families?  What if the fishing is only done in ways that aren’t destructive to the oceans? What if the people that profit from the price “mark-up” at each stage do so only in relation to what they need, not just what they can get?  What would happen to the price of shrimp in that situation?  Would shrimp once again become very expensive, and therefore rare?  Is that a bad thing?  Just because someone finds a way to build, or expand, a lucrative market opportunity doesn’t mean that they should. Do we really need five times as many shrimp now as we did forty years ago, even if  they did find a way to supply them at 1/10 the price and still make massive profits?  Who is paying for those profits?  It seems like we all are, but in ways that we can feel or even know about. 

I think perhaps our only choice is to find a way to change what it means to be successful.  The meaning of “success” is just an opinion that we have, it has no “reality” – it is merely a dream that is shared by humanity, one that could be changed.  A shift in point of view, a shift in opinion, perhaps a shift in what it means to be “honorable” is all that is necessary.  Greta Thunberg pointed directly to this issue when she told the members of the UN that they should be ashamed of themselves.  To be ashamed of yourself means that you are doing things that you know are wrong, and that are not “honorable”.  She obviously has a strong opinion about what it means to “do the right thing.”

While reading the October issue of Scientific American I came upon an interesting quote from the author of the book, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh. Ghosh used what happened when the Dutch East India Company occupied the nutmeg plantations on the Banda Islands in Indonesia as an illustration of, “the unre-strainable excess that lies hidden at the heart of the vision of the world-as-resource – an excess that leads ultimately not just to genocide but to an even greater violence, an impulse that can only be called ‘omni-cide’, the desire to destroy everything.”

My reaction to this observation was along the lines of “Holly Cow!!! He nailed it.” All of the excesses that seem to be plaguing the world are rooted in this idea that we can, and should, take as much of everything as we can; rather than a vision that of the world-as-home. If the world is “home” then there is no benefit to taking from it, no benefit in destroying it, no benefit in grabbing as much as possible as soon as possible – because it is all right here right now.

The issues all seem to ultimately (and often directly) lead to many (or most) of the problems in the world hinge on the vision that it is necessary and important to take as much out of the “commons” (the shared resources of the world) as possible, otherwise someone else might get it and I will lose out.

The reason that this hit me so hard is that first off it seems obviously true. Just look in any direction and there it is, we call the drive to take as much as possible “greed” but in reality it is much closer to the vision that the world-as-resource to be taken and used. But… this is just a vision. Visions are just thoughts, dreams, made-up mental models – they have no actual substance, no mass, and require no actual energy (no ergs are required) to sustain or change. You don’t have to fire up a bunch of big generators to change a view or a point of view, it can just happen – no resources required. Perhaps this is the direction that people such as Greta Thunberg are pointing to. She, and others like her, are pointing the a new world where we don’t find a need to only take – they are pointing to a world where we can share, manage and protect. Why not? This seems reasonable to me. The sun and earth provide more than we (people, animals, plants, everybody) needs if we just back off trying to grab as much as we can – as if we could somehow gather it all up and take it to another planet (or with us when we die). We can’t, it is here and that is great.

I am beginning to read the book, “Smoke Screen” Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and our Climate by Chad Hanson. While this book is about wildfires and “saving the world”, I came upon a couple of sentences that I would like to quote here because they might have a much more universal applicability. Here they are:

“Now for the good news: you are being deceived. If everything you were told almost daily about forests, wildfires, and climate were true, there would be little hope. The truth, however, is that hope lies just beyond the falsehoods.” The paragraph continues with, “There is still time to avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis if we act with urgency and purpose to rapidly transition beyond carbon fuel consumption, dramatically increase forest protection, and simultaneously enact adaptation measures to help the most vulnerable communities. For this three-tier path forward to work, we much be willing to question long-held myths and assumptions that are acting as impediments to meaningful progress.”

I found this to be interesting because perhaps it contains a kind of universal truth about what keeps us (whoever you define as “us”) from finding effective solutions to the myriad of problems that keep frustrating us in our goals to “make the world a better place.” Perhaps we hide the solutions from ourselves because we are so locked into our myths and assumptions that we can’t see another way.

We finally got an opportunity to return to our cabin in the Sierras. It is located on the peninsula of Lake Almanor, right in the center of the huge Dixie fire in Northern California. The fire is approaching a million acres and is now 75% contained, but is finally out along the major roads in that area. The air quality impact from smoke at our cabin has decreased to a tolerable “moderate” air quality index instead of more than double the beginning of the “hazardous” range. The hazardous range is 300 and above. According to a neighbor, it was above 800 for a couple of weeks at our cabin. We decided to go check it out because the power was back on, the air was tolerable, and they were allowing people back into the evacuated zones. When we got there it was a little different than that because they had once again turned off the power, and on Monday the air was awful (unhealthy) once again. Our cabin is located in the center of a doughnut hole surrounded by vast burned up forests, none of that is visible at our cabin. You wouldn’t know there had been a fire except for the 1/2 inch or so of ash covering everything and many 2 inch chunks of burned bark scattered around the yard. The road to Chester went through miles of burned forest, with vast areas of black ground and black poles that used to be green trees.

One of the truly amazing things that we found (besides all of the burned trees) was scale of the “emergency” logging under way. I have lived in logging country most of my life, but have never seen anything approaching the scale of these activities. Everywhere you look there are hug piles of logged trees, ready to be picked up and taken to the mills. We passed dozens of logging operations, with many tractors, yarders, trucks, loggers, etc. They are clearcutting everything back a few hundred feet from the roads, and apparently vast areas of burnt forest beyond the view from the roads, but judging from the new logging roads and number of log trucks on the roads, they are really busy everywhere. It is an amazing sight. It is my understanding that the rush to cut everything down as soon as possible is that while the trees are only burned less than 1/2 inch deep into the bark, they are now dead and will dry out quickly- becoming useless for making lumber. They need to be milled quickly if they are to be “salvaged” – hence the feeling of emergency in these operations.

It happened that a really interesting program was on NPR while we were driving up to the cabin. (Ref: North State Public Radio out of Chico, September 10, Blue Dot #229, After the Fire featuring Chad Hanson PhD, Ecologist working for the John Muir Project). Dr. Hanson was explaining that there is a better way to approach fire safety while creating sustainable ecosystems than the current approach being implemented by the government (both California and the Feds).

His first point is that large, and very large, fires are a natural part of the ecosystems in California. The forests have not only regularly burned for a few million years, but the ecosystems have evolved to not only tolerate the fires, but to depend upon the fires for their existence. Big fires are not a disaster, they are the very things that have made California the beautiful and diverse environment that it is. Hundreds of acres of black poles sticking out of the ground might be rather unappealing immediately after a fire, they are the beginnings of new, healthy ecosystems. Basically, these fires should be considered to be good news because they are ensuring the future health of the forests, not a disaster. While there is a temporary problem with the “esthetics” of a burned area, we should not base our forest management practices upon what looks nice – we should base it upon science and sustainable practices for the entire ecosystem (not just ongoing logging practices).

Dr. Hanson described what happens to the ecosystem following a fire in very compelling, and hopeful, terms. First come the beetles, then come the woodpeckers to eat the beetles, then come other birds to live in the holes made by the woodpeckers, then the raptors (hawks and eagles) eating the birds and squirrels, etc. Then the plants that depend upon fire for procreation and health reseed, etc. Basically, the forest quickly starts to regrow, revitalize and become healthy. It is the process that has happened for thousands and thousands of years, and will happen again if we let it be. However, if we cut down the dead trees clear-cut and plant new trees, then there are no beetles, no birds, no squirrels, no regeneration of vegetation, etc. He considers what we are currently doing to be a very expensive subsidized logging practice. The loggers get paid to “clear” the land, get permits to plant trees where they couldn’t before, are allowed to clear cut where that practices has been outlawed – all in the name of “salvaging” dead trees (as if they had no value other than wood for lumber). The practice destroys the forest ecology in the name of more logging.

Dr. Hanson suggests letting the fires burn, letting the burned forests rejuvenate according to “nature’s way”, and use the saved money to make existing human things fire safe and to protect those things when necessary. He also suggests avoiding building more houses in dangerous, fire prone areas. He offered a lot of interesting, logical, but new to me ways to easily and affordably reduce fire risks to homes and structures.

I found it quite interesting to have just listened to his presentation and then be driving through those areas an hour or so later. What struck me most was the LACK of devastation in the burned out areas. It was not even close to being completely burned – the fire appeared to jump around. Some places burned the ground clear and burned all the limbs off of the trees. In other places it just burned the ground cover and brush, other areas were untouched. Obviously there is a lot remaining that can quickly colonize the burned areas. In the burned areas, it was clear that the ground had been greatly fertilized by the thick layer of ash. When looking through my new “eco-friendly” eyes I saw that the burned areas looked “right” and the logged areas to be the actual areas of devastation. Perhaps clearing next to the roads to maintain access during fires makes sense. Perhaps it makes some sense to remove the dead trees to minimize road hazards due to falling trees and the like. Other than that, it was clear that it was really just a glut of subsidized logging.

I ordered Dr. Hanson’s book, Smoke Screen, to see what else he has to say about improved forest management practices and fire “proofing” homes in fire hazardous areas (since I live in a fire dangerous location and have a summer cabin in another). I don’t know where I will land with these thoughts after reading his book and doing further research, but my instinct is that he is correct – we are continuing to destroy our forests in the name of “smokey the bear” and subsidized logging.

I spent most of last week as part of a review committee in preparation for the annual joint status director’s review. I find these to be extremely interesting meetings because they talk about the detailed status for the construction of the Rubin Observatory and it’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) telescope. My role is this team is to evaluate the status report from the point of view of safety, which in my case means “System Safety”. I have always been a tiny bit of an astronomy “geek” (maybe really a wannabee geek – on the outside looking in). Being on this team met a lot of my lifetime goals of somehow being involved in BIG science, particularly big astronomy science.

I have been working on this project as a safety consultant for the past five years – but there are always some new things that I didn’t know about, or perhaps didn’t fully appreciate. This year’s review was no exception.

The LSST is a very large (about 27 feet in diameter), with a HUGE 3200 megapixel camera. It is designed to perform a ten-year full sky survey of the southern sky (because it is located in Chile where that is what you can see). Once operational in 2023 (or thereabouts), it will take 15-second “snapshots” of the sky, moving between shots to eventually get the entire visible sky each night. Each snapshot is about the size of 40 full moons. While this seems to be a pretty large piece of the sky, the camera is so large with such a high resolution that it will find LOTS of things to look at. At last week’s meeting they mentioned that it is expected that the telescope will identify and catalog 30 billion (yes, with a B) galaxies, something like 17 billion stars, and 7 or 8 billion other things (such as comets, asteroids, and who knows what else). The changes in position and other things such as color will be recorded and monitored.

One of the primary purposes of this new type of telescope is to gather information that might help understand dark matter. Of course, with that much information it will undoubtedly be critical in a LOT of other astrophysics explorations. One of the really cool things about this telescope project is that the data will be made freely available to anyone that might be interested – including you, me, and k-12 STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) programs.

Mainly I am writing this just to express my awe – not so much about the technology of the telescope (although that is awe inspiring), but that the vastness of the universe that is so large that they can find 30 billion GALAXIES!!! Holly molly – and that is just the part that they expect to be able to see, identify and study. This telescope will be able to see things that are 10,000 times dimmer than the dimmest that the Hubble Telescope can resolve. Amazing.

So where could all of this immense amount of matter and energy come from? How odd – I try to think about it and my mind just kind of flops around out of control, it just makes no sense in any way shape or form to me.

I just completed a “little” video project and am writing this as a sort of celebration of completion (I hope). For the past few years I have been presenting a six hour seminar at the System Safety Society’s (SSS) annual conference. The Executive officers decided that a service that we should be providing to our membership includes a series of tutorial/seminars covering some of the more important aspects of the profession. Since nobody was stepping up to this I agreed to do it one time as a kind of “placeholder” of the idea, with the understanding that the SSS would form a team to work on these seminars. I partnered up with a friend, Russ Mitchell, on this project. I developed and presented an introductory class on the technical aspects of the profession, Russ did the same for the management aspects.

Of course, during the intervening year nobody else offered to assist, so we got to do it again and the next conference. This was of concern to me because while I thought my presentation was “adequate” it was by no means representative of the best that we can do as an organization. I threw it together in a hurry because the decision to do this was close to the conference date. Unfortunately, the second version wasn’t much better. Basically it was the same presentation with a few changes to reflect things I had noticed the first time around. I was still presenting to new/novice individuals (after-all it is an introductory course), without the assistance or feedback from our seasoned members. Without critical feedback I essentially did this same as before.

Then it came time for the third year and not only didn’t I get any feedback or assistance, but this time was a “covid year” so it had to be done via zoom rather than as an in-person standup presentation. This new venue demanded several changes to the presentation, but the biggest change was that I recorded it as a zoom presentation. That was pretty good, but it was just slides with me talking in the background. Perhaps it was perfect – since I got no feedback it is hard to know.

This year it happened again, now it seems to have become “my” presentation! It was supposed to be the Society’s presentation, representing the desires and directions of the Society as a whole. Instead, it is now just whatever I want it to be. Not a good situation. However, I decided to attempt to “spiff it up” a bit and use an actual video camera instead of the zoom camera, and edit the presentation using a video editing suite in the hopes of making it run smoother – giving me the chance to stop, go back, reshoot etc. I put the camera far enough away so that I could stand or sit on a stool during my delivery. I shot myself against a green screen, and put the slides, photos and video clips in a box next to me in post production (I overlaid the various parts five layers deep – the background, the slides, the header icons, the footer icons, and myself.) I don’t know if it made it any better, but it was a more interesting project to me.

My first “studio” was intended to be the pottery studio I had just finished building for my wife. I has good lighting an appropriate blank wall to shot against. However, the AC hadn’t been installed yet and therefore the room got pretty warm in the Sacramento Valley summer. So hot that I was quickly drenched in sweat – totally unsuitable for presentation purposes. I therefore moved to a room in the house that has air conditioning. Much better, but I had to install so many lights that I still could only go for about 30 minutes before becoming visibly wet. That was alright, it limited my “on screen” time to something more tolerable. I ended up spending several days setting up the space to get the green screen correct, placing the camera, testing the audio, moving production lights around to get them right and that sort of thing.

As usual, the shooting of the raw material is the quick and easy part. It is the editing, blending, adjusting in the video program that burns up hours. I have done this a few times in the past for some little “travel logs” of places we have visited. I find that it takes about an hour of editing for each minute of finished product. I would take more to get it really “right” (and would usually take some reshooting of things that I didn’t get quite right but wished I had). Since I had six hours of material, at that rate it would take me 360 hours of editing – not in my preferred schedule. So I took the route of making a pretty rough video and only spent about 15 minutes per minute (about 80 hours). I came out “ok” – but not what I would have liked to do. I guess I could have saved a lot of time by just giving it “live” in zoom.

The good part is that I am done. An even better part is that my current opinion is that I won’t do it again next year – they can just replay this video. Of course, what is going to happen and we will have a live conference and I’ll end up giving it live again. But in the mean time we can use it for an on-line webinar. Who knows, maybe we can even charge for it and make a few bucks to support the desperately poor SSS. Almost all of our income comes from the annual conference, and the last two years of zoom conferences really depleted our resources. I am afraid that the Society will dissolve if we don’t find some better ways to get some income – soon. This webinar was my attempt at doing something along those lines. Hopefully it will work, but probably it won’t. Anyway, I finished the project in a rather amateurish way, but had fun and learned a lot along the way.

I have a bunch of relatives that refuse to get vaccinated. They have a lot of excuses for this, including “loss of personal freedom”, “it hasn’t been tested long enough”, “we don’t know what might come from it x-years from now,” “it is a liberal conspiracy,” “covid is not dangerous, it is just like the normal flu,” and more.

That brings up the question of whether or not it is “acceptable” for them to not get vaccinated. My opinion is that it is perfectly fine for them to take that approach. Perhaps it exposes them to what they consider an “acceptable risk” and they are willing to take that chance. My risk acceptance criteria is different than that, but we all use different metrics and criteria – so have at it. No vaccines, no masks, your choice. Sort of.

The “sort of” part is similar to having a desire to drive an automobile really, really fast – extremely dangerously fast. Is that alright? Certainly – as long as you do it where you don’t endanger others, especially others that don’t want to partake in your risk decisions. You can drive 250 mph as much as you want, but not down my street or on the freeways. As a society we place very few limitations upon the amount of danger an individual can engage in as long as it remains personal to them. That means the results of their risky behavior are local to them, not “shared” with others, with the environment, with the economy, with the medical system or anything else. If you want to take the chance of killing or maiming yourself, have at it as long as you aren’t endangering me, damaging our shared resources or costing me anything.

Not getting vaccinated, and not wearing a mask (etc) is the same situation as engaging in other forms of risky behavior. As long as you strictly quarantine for the duration, have at it. That means NO contact with others. No grocery stores, no restaurants, no schools, no parties, no doctors, no hospitals, no gatherings of any sort. Engaging in any of these sorts of activities exposes you, and thus others, to being infected and continuing the pandemic – in which case you are impacting our shared resources and it is no longer acceptable for you to make these choices for me or others. If you want to create a “pod” that include more people in strict quarantine with you, that would be great! Perfect in fact, much better than masking and vaccinations. However, should the quarantine be broken and someone in the pod gets infected – they shouldn’t be able to shared resources such as the use of medical or hospital facilities. They knew the risks, made their choices, and that is how it should end. If they survive, great. If not, so be it – that’s life. Easy as pie.

Of course the problem is that none of those that are not going to play by the rules involving vaccinations, masks, distancing, sanitation, etc will play by these rules either. They definitely want to have their cake and eat it too. So now it comes down to the question of how do we (society) enforce it. Do we do like automobiles and create a “covid patrol” sort of like the highway patrol? Monitoring, investigations, fines, arrests, jail time including convictions for manslaughter should someone die because of your risky behavior? This is obviously what should happen because people clearly won’t self monitor – which is why we have the highway patrol.

Without an enforcement agency it is up to individual morals, ethics, patriotism and love of community. We know where that lands – people are very happy to enforce those traits for others, but not so willing to self monitor and self control. Given the inability to enforce a strict quarantine (the only known viable option to vaccinations, masking, distancing and sanitation at this time), about all that we can do is say “shame on you” for endangering your friends, family, neighbors and the United States of America. The 800,000+ deaths belong squarely on your shoulders, and any additional deaths and sicknesses pile on them too. If you refuse to take the necessary protections, them YOU are responsible for what happens in the future. Sure, it might be that it would all continue in any case, we can never know the future – but we do know what will work for now and if you don’t control your actions we do know it won’t stop. Kind of like driving 200 mph down the freeway. Perhaps you can do it and nobody dies – perhaps not. If enough people do that surely many will die. We really do have to work together to get past this – and quarantining is a great solution, perhaps the best. So for all of you that don’t trust the vaccine, go for it – we can talk on zoom and might get together again in a few years (or however long it takes for this to pass). Otherwise, do the next best things – and you know what they are.