Einstein's Amygdala Part 3: The Predatory Business of Labelling Competitors as Predators

To reiterate the below-the-fold conclusion of Part 2:

Today, in most of the world, the highest risks to our health are affluence-related.

Over-eating. Driving cars too fast. Ingesting newly developed drugs. New inventions like handguns. But as compared to the highest risk of death a mere fractional 200 years ago, the biggest risk today is having lived twice as long as the average human 1% of evolution ago. The entire list of these affluence-related risks and outside risks today is a lower risk than faced by 30 year olds, centuries (seconds in evolution relativity) ago.

Einstein's theory of relativity places the fully formed amygdala in a perspective setting, similar to the relative speeds of sounds from trains, speed of light, all the great Einstein thought experiments explaining relativity. 

The press and social media constantly portray business and trade as if it takes place between predatory cats and baby rabbits. And it is natural for humans to give equal weight to every new fear.

Photo by me 2021. Lots of people photograph this cat in San Juan. Some of my

own photos over the years have been flagged by Google as unattributed, fodder for

another blog someday

Einstein's Amygdala Part Two: Creating Popular Regulations

So all of the wild baby rabbits lasted 5 days, seemingly content to feed on pieces of bread soaked in milk and eggs.  Then they got sluggish. Then they suddenly seemed wide awake and active, and we kids were elated. This is what some animals do just before they die. We buried the baby cottontail rabbits in the woods. My mom, raised on a farm, said it was par for the course.

So from a child's perspective, our amygdalas had been yanked around, rewarded and punished, over 5 days falling in love with wild baby rabbits that your mom says probably won't survive the initial cat bite.

Deceased. late, extinguished, Monty Python "no more" baby rabbits is a headline we don't like, so it's easy to write a story... to imagine a reporter covers our dead bunnies, and the press demands a solution.

So what lessons would we expect innocent, naive, emotional children to learn? If they were in charge of regulating cats and rabbits, what rules might the children create which an experienced, educated, creative, thoughtful, highly intelligent person would not? Even though the Einstein does have an amygdala, we imagine that the higher power of intelligence would design a better rule - or not try to design one - rather than let emotional bunny-centric kids rule the roost.

Or what if the Rabbits were Super Intelligent, and could Propose Their Own Rules?

Bugs Bunny Square Dance from Loony Toons "Hillbilly Hare" (set in my home state of Arkansas)

Einstein's Amygdala Part One: The Baby Rabbit Rescue

January 2022, first blog of the new year. And I can tell this is going to be a multi-parter.

One day in Fayetteville, Arkansas, when I was a teenager in the 1970s, my adored and adorable white mutt persian cat - Samantha - came to the door with a baby cottontail rabbit. As I recall, she was clutching the baby rabbit by the scruff of its neck, as Samantha did with countless litters of her own kittens over the years. But I knew she was a hunter, she'd likely eat the baby bunny, and I reacted quickly to save it.

Samantha gave up the baby rabbit to me with what seemed a minor fuss as compared to times I'd tried to get back a prized bird or mouse. I rushed to show the baby rabbit to my little brother and sister, who cooed and said how cute it was, and I started to tell them about a wild cottontail my great aunt and my mom and I raised successfully when I was 3 years old, and the memories of...

... Wham. Samantha was back, with a second baby cottontail rabbit. We were so occupied with the first, stupidly in hindsight. Bunnies are born in litters of five or six. The eyes were not quite open, so this was a nest of bunnies, and Samantha hadn't fought to keep the first, either because she was on a fire-fighter rescue mission to save all the other bunnies, or she knew there was plenty of lamb hasenpfeffer where that came from.

So I gave the first and second baby rabbits to my siblings, and followed Samantha this time, out into the side yard of our brown split level home on the corner, down the hill toward the small park across the street. Samantha went on with her mission, and this time I was tracking her. She entered some leafy ivy covered portion of the yard, and quickly emerged with Peter Rabbit #3. I grabbed both the cat (now growling) and kitten still in her mouth and carried them both back to the front door, where our mom was now preparing a box for the involuntary kitten-bunnies. We got the third baby rabbit out of Samantha's mouth, and then shut the cat in the lower floor of the house to keep her from returning, whether as Terminator 1 or Terminator 2 - this fluffy white Schwartzenegger was in the penalty box.

But how long, realistically, could we expect to keep our "free range" cat, who'd been free to live her life indoors or out for 15 years? Some moral blue district suburban PETA subscriber today would tell me to keep all cats indoors, and never remove their claws, accept the collateral damage to the wallpaper and furniture. And today no doubt the population of humans is doubled, and the standard of living of humans now supports far more cats and far larger home spaces. But this was Arkansas in the 1970s, and I came from a family of Ozark farm dwellers. Rabbits have as many litters as they do each year because they have evolved to be food. If not for the owls, bobcats, foxes, falcons, coyotes and wolves, rabbits would suffer a mass overpopulatoin, disease and starvation. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution left us with rabbits facing far fewer pumas and grey wolves, and if some farmers grandkids cats caught and ate a few, it was merciful violent mitigation of the dearth of carnivores humans had created over just the past few centuries. 

My 1978 Pentax K1000 pointed at my sister stirs amygdala counter-threat

2021 Pandemic Response - Seeking One True Size To Fit All

Here on a foggy mountaintop in Marshall, Arkansas (population 1300 and change), I'm preparing my family's bags to return to our disparate homes - Vermont, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Brooklyn and London. The kids are adults with careers and degree studies in Europe, my partner has a continued sabbatical in Spain. I should have more time to blog when I'm on my own again, though re-making this thing over and pruning back to the best branches seems daunting.

So let's try this. I can explain and represent the views of my conservative red-hat Trump was robbed family members to my more educated, more erudite liberal relatives. First, let me explain something to blog readers - the reddest of states has both.

Here is a conservative in my family who I wuld not want to become sick. He's 89. He loves oysters. He lives in the South of France, where vaccine hesitancy is highest. Today's blog will use CV-19 policy and opinion variance to illustrate how there is not "one correct answer". 

(Publishing prematureley as a place holder, last post of 2021 Coming back to edit, time to pack the car).

Recent E-Waste News Predicted by Good Point Ideas Blog

News headlines travel faster these days through my @WR3A Twitter account and LinkedIn. As compared to the blog, those social media venues compete better for shorter attention spans (including yours truly).

The beat goes on.

That said, it's worth it to link today's news to the paradigms long established in the blog.

For example, former E-Stewards Executive Director has retired rather fitfully, and gone on record that both the R2 and E-Stewards Certifications are flawed... flawed in a way that this blog described a decade ago as follows - They don't know what they are talking about and are making it up as they go along.

Akers told me he was somewhat censored by Resource Recycling editors who are trained to flinch by angry outbursts from Jim "A Place Called Away" Puckett. He filled some gems in by email, but the Op-Ed itself is damning enough.

In My Opinion: Does today’s industry need e-Stewards or R2?

I’ve looked at the IRS 990 filings for both Basel Action Network (BAN), the owner of the e-Stewards standard, and Sustainable Electronics Recycling International (SERI), the owner of R2. The most recent filings publicly available online for both organizations cover 2019.

BAN’s filing shows gross revenue of $838,358 with total expenses of $817,088 for a net gain of $21,270 (the year prior, BAN had a net loss of $77,785). The organization reported only $83,351 in grant revenue, meaning the bulk of the revenue is from e-Stewards. The executive director was paid $133,741. Spending on travel totaled $39,234 and spending for advertising was $7,514. Another $314,701 was spent on other salaries.

The SERI filing shows gross revenue at $1,746,118, salaries of $508,775 and a net revenue of $742,097. The executive director was paid $159,650. Certification fees brought in $1,689,774 in revenue.

Both filings raise some questions. For BAN: Is this program sustainable? What happens to my e-Stewards certification if BAN folds? BAN is mostly a one-man show. What happens if that individual retires or becomes ill? Is there a business-continuation plan to protect my investment in an e-Stewards certification? Was any money spent on advertising to help drive business to e-Stewards or just to recruit more companies into the certification pipeline?

For SERI, the main question is: Is any of its revenue spent to help drive business to R2 recyclers?...

The main question really is: How much of those membership fees are being spent to aid the certified recyclers in the marketplace?

From looking at the 990 filings, the answer is not much.

Pouty Puckett has yet to respond in public to Akers cards on the table, though SERI's Corey Dehmey tried to direct us away from the man behind the curtain, and back to the Wizard of Obfuscation with his response last week.