Discarded

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

All that manufactured stuff is eventually discarded and it's a lot of trash. As an example, "The average person in the United States throws away their body weight in rubbish every month." Some expect that the amount of solid waste generated globally will triple by the year 2100.

"A city resident generates twice as much waste as their rural counterpart of the same affluence." So one reason that global waste is rising fast is just the fact that more and more people live in cities all over the world. Think of China, where the government is aggressively moving millions upon millions of people from their rural homes to cities - and in some cases building those cities from scratch.

photo: wikipedia.com

But there are good reasons to expect that earth won't get buried in waste despite growing urbanization. 

Wealthier cities of the world deal with waste much more efficiently than poorer cities. It makes sense. In very simple terms, people use their material resources to meet their survival needs, and then at some point they can turn their energies to priorities lower on the list.

Just one more benefit - among so many - that accrues to a poorer nation when they start to create their own wealth beyond survival.

All our stuff

This post is for anyone who's ever wondered how much human-made stuff there is on the earth, and how it compares to the natural world.

To sum it up, there's more stuff - in both mass and in variety - manufactured by humans.

The stuff we've made amounts to "30 trillion metric tons . .  about 50 kilograms for every square meter of Earth’s surface."

And it all weighs much more than the combined weight of all humans: "Human-made things are 60,000 times as heavy as humans themselves."

photo: sciencenews.org

Half there

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

A description of social media addiction might be in order (because this is a behavior thing rather than linked to a substance like alcohol). From what addiction.com says, a person must have his or her social media hits to just feel normal.

The antidote would be to tame that cell phone (and thus facebook, pinterest, twitter, etc.) by driving it back into its cage (turn it off) when you need to give total attention, engagement or focus to the person you're with or the situation you need to handle.

Coke wants to give you some help when you're tempted to be only "half there" instead of "all there" with your friends or family. Actually, they offer a collar in this spoof ad:

All there

"Fully engaged," that's how author Liberty McArtor says she used to be with her close friends as a child. In contrast, she describes herself today as distracted by and even addicted to social media and technology.

Sitting still in the car at a stoplight for 30 seconds is a long time to be bored, so she must check her phone for notifications. Another example - finding herself "lost in Twitter with no memory of how I got there, even as I'm writing this article!"

photo: businessesgrow.com

Her addiction is not uncommon. But she has an uncommon point to make about boredom: kids should experience boredom sometimes without the instant rush of tweets and likes and texts. 

She says, "When you’re bored, you and your brain have to find something to do . . boredom [as a child] often preceded my most memorable adventures."

Her new resolution is to put down the phone and be "fully engaged engaged in the moment." I think of it as being not distracted by that entertaining phone, but rather all there in that moment.

(cont'd tomorrow)

EU weaker

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

We here in the U.S. have been less than happy with our economic growth of 12% since 2008, which is just an average of 1.5% per year (about 3% was normal for decades).

But Europe has even less economic growth. Since 2008 the economy of the European Union has grown overall only 4%, an average per year of 0.5%.

Because of that, unemployment in Europe is nearly 10% (about twice that of the U.S). And it's much worse for young people (image below).

"The currency can muddle through for some time to come," says a European economist. "But it cannot survive indefinitely unless ... fundamental problems are addressed."

photo: crossingthebaltic.com

EU disunity

The European Union is "falling apart" according to cnn. Those are strong words, maybe too strong to be accurate because the EU is definitely not closing its administration buildings any time soon. But there are multiple signs of disunity:

• Brexit, the great surprie when a majority of British voters told the UK government to get out of the EU
• Other countries which may also make that choice are France, The Netherlands, Austria, Finland, and Hungary
• Politicians in favor of leaving the EU seem to be growing stronger (Marine LePen in France for example)
• The euro, Europe's common currency, has weakened after financial crises in Greece, Portugal, and more

"Populist" is the term for politicians who appeal to widespread dissatisfaction among masses of voters who want change. After giving up the freedom to make many of their own laws and policies, these European voters want to get their sovereignty back from the European Union.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Happy anyway

Sam is happy. He knows how to keep being happy, he's figured out some important things, and he'd like all of us to learn how to do the same in spite of our challenges.

Sam is challenged by the normal things of life, but especially by a disease that afflicts only 350 kids in the world: progeria.

Here he is explaining "My philosophy for a happy life."

Hidden Figures

Nothing is "over the top" in the movie, "Hidden Figures." Nobody has special powers, including the three authentic women whose stories are brought to light. They are gifted in math ability, but they're not extraordinary warriors.

The women are diligent in their work at NASA in the segregated American South of the 1960's. They use their imaginations and press into their opportunities. In short, there's nobody who couldn't take inspiration from Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson.

Gifted hands

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

A movie was made of Dr. Ben Carson's inspiring story (2009) starring Cuba Gooding Jr. Get an outline of the movie's plot here unless you want to avoid spoilers.

His reputation in neurosurgery was global. German parents of conjoined twins took their desperate situation to him, the central drama of the film.

HUD Secretary

Before the next Secretary of Housing and Urban Development can be confirmed, the American Senate held a hearing to interview this man, Ben Carson. He told his story:

"[H]is mother used to work cleaning beautiful homes. One day she asked him if he would rather live in those nice houses or the house in which he and his brother lived in Detroit. She told him that only he could decide the type of home he would eventually live in by how much he studied in school and the choices he made for his life.

"Thus motivated, Carson said he went from last in his class to first, and people who used to call him “dummy” started asking him for help with their schoolwork."

Dr. Carson (he became a brain surgeon) spent his childhood being poor in Detroit. Sharing similar experiences with people he will try to help in his new position - it can only be a good thing.

World families

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Gapminder's "Dollar Street" is their photo survey of families at different levels of wealth from various countries. Click on a family to see their home, the place they eat dinner, their stove, their bathroom door, their bed, etc.

The poorest may pay about 80% of their income for food - low in nutrition and little variety. Many dream of owning some goats or a better home. A relatively wealthy family in Mexico still pays about 30% of their income for food, but they have refrigeration and can store meat.

Visit the homes of families all over the world. Pictures speak volumes. The European mother below lives in a 1-bedroom house with her grandmother and her seven children.

photo: gapminder.com

Dollar Street

Gapminder is the website of Swedish statistician Hans Rosling which puts global statistics in beautiful moving charts with bubbles.

They have a new attraction called "Dollar Street" where you can see photo essays of families in many nations - their home, their income, their toys, their meals, and much more.

My post last Friday had a video of the American surgeon Jason Fader who lives in Burundi and serves rural areas. So take a look here at the way rural families live in Burundi - where Dr. Fader has chosen to live.

Foundation

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Mark Gerson had already been motivated to help African HIV patients, so when his old college friend Jon Fielder arrived in Africa as a medical missionary, Mark was ready to support him. “[I]f Jon said my philanthropic dollars would have an effect, I could absolutely trust him.”

“It is obvious to me that the work these medical missionaries do is completely extraordinary,” says Gerson.

Now Gerson and Fielder have partnered to start African Mission Healthcare Foundation (AMHF) to fund other medical missions. Recipient of the first $500,000 grant is Dr. Jon Fader. The only surgeon serving rural Burundi, he trains doctors, nurses, and other surgeons:

Givers

Among the wealthy living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, there's Mark and Erika Gerson. Erika is a rabbi, Mark is a businessman. They have the money to give generously, but their $4 million didn't end up at art museums. They put it into Christian hospitals in Africa.

photo: world.wng.org

Mark roomed in college with Jon Fielder, and respected his "moral seriousness." After college he taught for a year at a Catholic high school and developed an affection for Christianity.

His friend, Fielder, has spent his life as a Christian medical missionary.The Gersons became top donors at Fielder's HIV clinic. Last September Gerson and Fielder spent time with some of the HIV patients whose lives they have saved through their partnership.

“I learned the Torah, the Old Testament, commands us to love the stranger more than 36 times,” said Gerson, the fastest-talking New Yorker you’ll meet. "and who is more of a stranger than people suffering from TB or AIDS or any number of disabilities in a rural African village?”

Non-fragile

"Gapminder" specializes in world-wide demographic statistics. You already know that global poverty is way, way down compared to the end of the last century. Here is some more insight from them about what will be necessary to bring down poverty in the future:

"Over the last 200 years, Extreme Poverty went from being "the global default" to becoming a "global exception". In the future, the last billion to get out of extreme poverty will mainly be living in Fragile States. The fight to end global poverty will therefor be a fight for peace and stability.
Presented here: http://buff.ly/2hDu5po"

Non-fragile economies empower people to create (material) growth because there's predictable lawful protection of property and contracts with at least some level of free markets.

Boom begins

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

It was 1995, central Texas, and a young petroleum engineer got the news that he would probably lose his job.

His company was struggling to make enough money to stay in business. The market price of fuel was high but the company's costs were also high, and they thought they would have to close.

Engineer Nick Steinsberger was desperate to find a way to cut costs. So he experimented with a substance which accounted for nearly half the cost of this well: the white gel they used for blasting. He literally watered it down. Surprisingly, the technique never got less effective.

"And then Nick had this radical idea. Cut out the gel entirely and just pump water into the rock plus a little bleach to kill the bacteria and a little soap to help the water flow down the pipes. . .

"The well fracked with water was almost twice as productive as the gel-fracked well - twice as productive and half as expensive. The technique was tried on oil wells. And the same thing happened. [The fracking BOOM started.] Twenty years later, the U.S. is the biggest oil and natural gas producer on the planet."

This minor-seeming innovation created wealth that supports millions of Americans today.

Fracker job

(cont'd from last Friday's post)

This post is taken from an interview with the CEO of an oil & gas company operating in the Permian Basin. Here he tells about one type of those many jobs in America created by innovative hydraulic fracturing technology:

photo: wellsaidcabot.com

How does CrownQuest [your business] work?Our geologists determine where is a good place to drill. We lease the right to drill to access the minerals. Then we raise money to drill a well, and we manage production. We subcontract out all the construction stuff. We will typically have 70 different companies involved in drilling a well.

You have geologists and engineers, but you also have blue-collar lease managers who manage that activity out of their pickup trucks.How much money do you think they make?

$50,000?It’s $80,000—and I’m talking Basin-wide.

What do they need to do to get a job like that?Pass a drug test, have a driver’s license, show us they’re sharp. They need to look at data and understand how machinery works.

College diploma?Not necessarily.

High-school diploma?Not necessarily. We teach them to do engineering analysis, so we want them to be smart. School might show you’re smart, but school doesn’t make you smart.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Lots of jobs

Hydraulic fracturing, "fracking," has turned around the energy industry in America. This technology is used for both natural gas and oil, cutting the cost of fuel drastically in just a few years for American consumers.
But there's a lot more to the fracking story than just the cost of fuel. People with new jobs and more money are going to spend it. Here are the numbers that show beneficial effects all through our economy

• 4.6 million new jobs 2012 - 2014
• and $3.5 trillion in new wealth created 2012-2014

That's a whole lot of families with more resources to spend on education, food, homes, debt elimination, everything. It's been good news for American families.

(cont'd Monday)

Tesla 2017 #2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

To take their factory production of cars from 50k (2015) to a crazy 500k by 2018 (or 2020) is a challenge, but it hasn't slowed down another of Tesla's important features: their progress on the self-driving program.

Autopilot Full Self Driving will be available for all models by the end of this month. More cameras and more sensors capture much more data so there's a new processor:

"To make sense of all of this data, a new onboard computer with over 40 times the computing power of the previous generation runs the new Tesla-developed neural net for vision, sonar and radar processing software. Together, this system provides a view of the world that a driver alone cannot access, seeing in every direction simultaneously, and on wavelengths that go far beyond the human senses." (from teslamotors.com)



According to the website, your Tesla will sync with your calendar to know where you want to go when you get in the car (if you don't tell it otherwise). Then when you get there, just get out while the car parks itself.

"[I]rrestible to the status-conscious buyer," according to Automotive News.

Tesla 2017 #1

Tesla's goal by 2020 is to make 500,000 cars, an achievement matched in history only by Ford's Model-A. Their 2015 goal of 50,000 was achieved, but their goal of 80,000 in 2016 came in slightly short in the last quarter.

They have a huge production goal looming in another couple years, so 2017 is going to be a critical ramp-up. Consumer orders keep on rising.

Part of the new production ramp-up will be starting production of that new mass market car which was unveiled last year, the Model 3:

"Something approaching 400,000 people have already put down up to $1,000 dollars to reserve this car," said a Tesla VP last April. "This is great for Tesla Motors. It gives us the confidence to make the investments we need to make in order to build this car."

By the way - in case you're interested, CEO Elon Musk is listed as #21 in Forbes' list of most powerful people, #94 in billionaires (net worth $12 billion).

To brush up on Tesla Motors history during the past few years, check these posts under the Tesla label.

(cont'd tomorrow)

"Intense"

Note: re-post from July 2015

(cont'd)

Engineer Jeremy Hollman was already disappointed in his job at Boeing at the age of 23. When Elon Musk recruited him with his radical vision of change in the aerospace industry, he liked it: "I thought it was an opportunity I could not pass up."

Young and single, he was willing to "give up any semblance of having a life in favor of working at SpaceX non-stop." He worked with the top engineer to create a new rocket engine. Then he loaded it in onto a U-Haul trailer behind a Hummer and drove 4,000 lbs of gear from CA to Texas for intense trial and error testing.

A great job, but super consuming, with failure after failure. "I was really, really frustrated and just tired and mad." His glasses fell down a flame duct and he had no time to go to the optometrist. His safety glasses got scratched. He "vented about this in the factory one night." Musk was nearby and heard it all.

Two hours later, Musk's assistant appeared with a lasik eye surgery appointment. He paid for the surgery. Hollman says, "Elon can be very demanding, but he'll make sure the obstacles in your way are removed."

from Elon Musk: SpaceX, Tesla, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

"Start over"

(Re-post from July 2015)

We all know Elon Musk somehow managed to really change both the space and car industries, and this while still in his 30's. He has super focus, drive, vision, and built a network of super talent around his goals.

He recruits fantastic people and inspires them, and then he makes fantastic work demands – which are also part of the legend. "Ulcer-inducing deadlines” and 100-hour work weeks make for some bad stories, but I'm going to share some good stories from that biography I'm reading . . 

After working so hard, sacrificing personal time, the employees of SpaceX had big investment of effort in their rockets. They were going where many had failed before and they wanted to succeed. 

"The failed launch [third rocket test] left many SpaceX exmployees shattered. "It was like the worst [blank] day ever.You don't usually see grown-ups weeping, but there they were. We were tired and broken emotionally." 

"Musk addressed the workers right away, and encouraged them to get back to work. He said, "Look. We are going to do this. It's going to be okay. Don't freak out."

SpaceX employee Singh says, "It was like magic.Everyone chilled out immediately and started to focus on figuring out what just happened and how to fix it. It went from despair to hope and focus."