Sorry, I’ve still got Watchmen on the brain.
Anywho, I’ve decided to play around a bit with the themes and set up of the page now that I’m back and still left with huge amounts of free unemployed time. Hopefully get a nice custom header image at some point, fix some font issues. Things’ll be a bit in flux for the next couple of days.
Coming soon: a review of Futurama: Into The Wild Green Yonder! Maybe! If I feel like it!
So, like most good red-blooded American 20-somethings, I’m a big fan of The Colbert Report; it’s one of the few things on television that I will actually make time to sit down and watch on a first run.
If you’re bothering to read a blog at all you’re probably already familiar with the show, like it or not, so I’ll get right to the point. Last night’s show featured “The Word” segment, in which the word was “Priceless”. The gist was that the EPA has lowered the value of a “statistical life” from an estimated $7.8 million to $6.9 million over the last five years, in an attempt to avoid placing regulations on American industry.
It breaks down like this: based on such measurements as payroll stats and opinion surveys, the EPA calculates how much consumers are willing to pay to protect against risks and what employers pay their hires to take on those risks during the job. More information can be found through this AP story.
With this data the EPA and Congress adopt regulation and law based on cost-benefit effectiveness. To use the AP’s example:
“Consider…a hypothetical regulation that costs $18 billion to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At $7.8 million per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at $6.9 million per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted.”
As the AP reports, the EPA says this shouldn’t be viewed as a “price tag on a life.” Maybe. At least not in the most literal sense. But what we are talking about here is how much we (theoretically) are willing to shell out to cover our own asses from various things that can harm us if imposed upon us (tainted food, dangerous work environments, release of pollutants, etc.)
My first question coming off reading all this was why is this even a fucking issue? Why are we having a circle-jerk about how much is too much to make living quality better for American citizens, and ostensibly global citizens – because the shit that we do here with our water, land and air (specifically air) affects a good portion of planetary climate and conditions. Why the need for this dehumanizing dicking around with “statistical lives”? What kind of patriarchal expendable-population bullshit is this?
After biting down on a piece of leather for a few minutes and going to my happy place, I tried to take a step back. Okay, so on the surface this whole cost of life deal may seem like a despicable application of utilitarianism. But the fact is, there’s only so much money in the coffers at any one point and we have to figure out where and how to apply it. Inconvenient act of life.
So let’s take another look at where this American life monetization comes from (and by the by, the EPA is not the only federal department that writes up figures like this; there are several. Hell, the Transportation Department’s is even lower.) The EPA says it’s based of consumer evaluation. “Consumers” initially might make you think of folk like you and me, the normal citizens who work the jobs and breathe the air and pay the taxes. But looking further, we get a better idea of what the title consumer is supposed to refer to here.
A lot of this data comes from collectivist business entities – corporations – who have to pay employees more for hazardous work and have to change the way they do business based off environmental regulation. Because corporations have almost all the same rights as legal persons, they are “consumers”: they consume and use energy, resources, products and labor. When a group like Exxon-Mobil or Phillip-Morris is asked what the value of keeping their employees healthy and looking after the welfare of their industrial sites – cutting into their bottom line – how do you think they’re going to answer?
Because these business entities have almost exactly the same rights as individuals, but with far more access and ability to wield raw and monetary resources, they have a huge sway on how these kinds of decisions go both in the executive and legislative branches of government. It’s here interesting to point out that the EPA and Congress have been in a long-standing game of hot potato over who’s responsibility it is to act on climate change and other environmental/health issues.
So these bougie motherfuckers are almost invariably going to sell short their human resources and physical sustainability for short-term profit, because hey, that shit’s expensive.
But if the EPA and Congress were to actually consult and listen the populace (especially Congress, seeing as in a democratic republic they are theoretically supposed to do what we will), I think the American life value would be a hell of a lot higher. It might mean a spending more on these regulatory legislations, but there’s a lot of places we could be dipping for that cash. How many billions is it going to cost for us to bail out Fanny Mae? When I talk to people out in the world, the biggest problem they seem to have with taxation in this country isn’t so much the amount they pay, but how little they see of it in their lives.
If they were presented with the choice of propping up failing banks and padding energy industry coffers, or better ensuring the health and safety of their siblings, parents, children, themselves…I can wager a guess as to how that’s going to swing.
Just a thought.
So I wrote a few sentences in the background fiction for my foreground fiction, and almost a whole page for that short story that’s been sitting in my .doc folder since last semester. w00t, as my chronological peers would say.
Now that I’m no longer burdened by a modern serfdom gig or school for a few weeks, I’m quickly getting my sea-legs back under me for the whole creative process. It feels good, as it always does, to sit down and just create, gettin’ that sense of doing what you were made to do.
Of course, being an emotional masochist, I cannot possibly let myself feel good about anything before tearing it to tiny crinkled shreds.
Reading Aasimov’s Complete Robot, flipping through my copy of The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower and catching up on a few reviews, I sit here asking myself just what the hell it is I think I’m doing.
I have no idea how it is or was for other artists, but I am constantly racked by feelings of self-doubt about my skills. It’s probably not fair for a journeyman to try and compare himself to masters of the craft since you’re always going to come up short there, but even the earliest stuff from Lovecraft or King shows a promise that I just don’t know if I have. I just don’t feel as possessed of the same penetrating eye or protean genius that my heroes seemed to be.
I comfort myself with the perhaps false comfort that few people probably set out to be geniuses, and few succeed. It’s something that’s there or isn’t, I suppose. I hope that I’m a great artist deep down inside, and somewhere in me I’ve got one of those genre defining, generation inspiring works of fiction kicking around in the ol’ noggin, but if not I don’t really care. Right now I’m writing about dragons and magic and a ranger in ruddy leather, because goddammit that’s what I feel and that’s what I want to do.
There’s a lot of “I” stuff in that last paragraph. Already this blog is turning into some self-absorbed bleeding heart affair. Ai-ya…
The thing is, the real reason I’m worried about all that crap is because I don’t want to disappoint the one audience that matters. That if I can’t bust out that save-the-world-through-my-art masterpiece I won’t be good enough in their eyes.
Ah, well. Someday it’ll come. Who knows, Weyard might even be it. Right now though, I think it’s best to just make sure those dragons and rangers come out the best they can. I think she’ll like that…
So I’ve finally set up my first blog. Or rather, my first blog that I intend to keep regularly and make public. Whatever.
Though I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, the impetus to finally get off my narrow ass and start was my new girlfriend. She’s actually been encouraging this for a few weeks, but being supremely lazy/ambivalent about these sorts of things I put it off, waiting for the right “milestone” to use as a starting point, or some other bullshit to get out of actually sitting down and writing something. Seeing as I just got fired yesterday from my wage-serf job at Cumberland Farms for snacking without rendering unto Caesar (for the record, Cumberland Farms is a gas station chain that’s a subsidiary of Exxon-Mobil. Somehow, I don’t feel too bad about it), I figure why the hell not now? Also, I’m bored.
This blog is going to be a pastiche at first, acting as personal journal, news analysis and reporting platform, fiction repository, media review site and whatever the hell else I feel like yoking this free internet workhorse for, at least until I can get enough headway to a) focus in on one thoroughly or b) get each one it’s own location. So bear with me, folks. In reality though, you’ll probably be reading this after having dredged it up from the bowels of the archives. If so, then hi! Thanks for being such a big fan! There’s probably better stuff in the front, though.
So, um…what’s going on?
Okay, tomorrow I’m having a big yard-sale (huh, I’d have thought that yardsale would be an actual word by now in American English. Anyway…) to both get rid of some of my now-useless crap (though, let’s be fair, alot of it was useless from the get-go. Why did I ever need Pogs?) and earn some extra scratch in preparation for moving in with my girlfriend. More on that another time. For now though, I will sign off and get back to sorting through my stacks of VHS tapes and affixing teeny-tiny price stickers to them.
…Holy crap, Power Rangers: The Movie? Maaan, I was lame!
