Cav's Place

I guess this is a milestone. Not just because the number is divisible by five, but also because I keep saying that, excepting some truly miraculous developments regarding all important aspects of my quality of life that’d still be in effect after that age, I’m really not keen on living past 50, so this may be the halfway point of my life. And I sure have little to show for this half, don’t I? I’m not talking about other kinds of achievements because, unless it’d be something that’d truly change the world, I don’t care about them so it’s quite normal that I don’t have any, but I will focus on close relationships because that’s what matters to me on a personal level, what can make me happy if it works well or destroy me if it doesn’t.

I had no such things as friends or people that I could really talk to about everything in my early years. There might have been a few I got along with somewhat out of those that were forced upon me in various ways, but nothing more than that. The first person I really got close to came after I got Internet access, though right now it shames me to admit that I can’t really remember if I met her in 1998 or 1999. Probably 1998 though. That was Kristi, and we ended up playing at something that might be considered an on-line relationship if you try hard enough. But we were never really that close and she vanished soon enough.
Then things did seem to get a bit better, after meeting Sarah in the summer of 1999. That did feel relatively close and it was a decent attempt at an on-line relationship, though I doubt that either of us saw it as something “real”. Though the idea of a relationship was just phased out after some time, we did keep in touch and stay relatively close until I cut contact with everyone after Andra left. We managed to occasionally get in touch after that too, but the situation she ended up being in didn’t allow for this to happen with any frequency and therefore there was no closeness left. In the end, she died to me.
Then “real life” decided to give me a jolt, so I met Rose and fell madly in love with her. That proved to be nothing but pain, since she never gave me any chance and didn’t even want to be friends. It helped that I had Mandy to talk to on-line, we talked about everything despite the fact that it didn’t feel like a truly close friendship, but this didn’t change the fact that I suffered after Rose for three whole years, until I was eventually able to bury my feelings for her under those I had for Andra, some six months after the start of our relationship.
But there were a couple of people that I did feel close to in “real life” as well, starting with Elena G., who was the only high school classmate I actually felt close to while I still went to school and I did cling on to her for a while. Or at least I meant to, but it didn’t quite work. I obviously will never be able to truly know what she thought about everything, but I did see her as the first potential close friend I ever had. I still do see her like that, actually. But we lost contact once I stopped going to school and never seem to be able to keep in touch for long, despite the fact that we did bump into each other on-line a few more times since then. We just talk for a little while, things seem to be going well, and then she vanishes.
The only person I could ever call my best friend, however, was Elena P., at least if any of that was true. I still have serious suspicions about what happened back then, so it’s possible that it was all a lie and I never had a best friend at all. Still, if it was real, those two months when we kept seeing each other were by far the best thing that had happened to me until then, and they still are one of the only two truly good things that ever happened to me, though admittedly by far the lesser one. But then she grew distant, kept being too busy to see me anymore and then stopped answering when I called as well. Maybe it was because it would have been quite impossible to stay just friends, maybe it was because of her boyfriend’s jealousy, maybe it was because it had been just a lie before, I doubt I’ll ever know, but I still wish and hope that I’ll somehow meet her again someday, at least to get some explanations.
Then, of course, was Andra. That relationship and my feelings for her came out of nowhere, but the three years we spent together were a happy time for me. That was the only period when I was actually happy, despite the fact that there obviously were problems as well, especially during the first year, before we moved in together. Words can’t convey what she and our relationship meant and still mean to me, so I won’t even try. But then she met someone else, decided to leave and it was over, leaving me dead in every way but the purely physical. And that’s how I’ve been ever since, all through these four long years, and this is how I’ll stay unless somehow, someday, I’ll get another chance…
At the time Andra left, I found myself trying to cling on to Jen, seeing as she was the closest thing to a friend that I had. But that didn’t work, her personality wouldn’t allow anyone to get as close to her as I wanted to, not by a long shot, so things didn’t go so well. We talked a lot for some time, but eventually she drifted away too, and for the past two and a half years I just find myself struggling to keep in touch. If you can even call it keeping in touch, seeing as she basically hasn’t told me anything personal in all this time. She does host this blog, though, in case anyone cares, so I need to take this opportunity and say a big thank you.
As for now, there are two “new” people that I consider to be important. One is Andreea, who seems to be pretty much what Mandy was back then, and the other is Alina. Alina is the first person I’ve ever actually tried to earn as a friend, and I’ve been doing that for over a year now, but I don’t seem to be getting far. She’s also only the second person I actually liked, defining that as having more positive than negative thoughts about her when trying to honestly analyze her personality, and may well actually be the first one in case everything that happened with Elena P. was a lie. (No, I didn’t like Andra quite like that. I thought she was far better than the tremendous majority of people, but even during the best times there were still quite a lot of things that bothered me if I sat to think about them. Love and like are two different things.) I can only hope I’ll manage to keep in touch with Andreea and eventually manage to actually get close to Alina. There are too many failures already…

So that’s how I’d describe the important part of these 25 years, and I even left out a few betrayals… The rest usually consisted of various types of sorrow, so it doesn’t matter anyway. Relationships are what matters to me on a personal level, so I can only hope that my luck will change during the next few years. What I want, besides good health and having the basic necessities met, is to be with Andra once again and make our relationship work out really well. Having a true best friend is also very important, and this best friend could also double as a secondary partner if we’d agree to have such a relationship. And if one or two other close friends could be added to that as well, it’d truly be perfect.
I had three reasonably happy years and at most two good events during these 25 years. Dare I hope that they were by far the worst part of my life, not the best? Dare I hope that I’ll get my wishes during the next few years, while I’ll still be young and hopefully healthy enough to enjoy them for a fair amount of time? According to everything that’s happened so far, I most likely shouldn’t even dare to think that such things could happen, and I usually don’t, but I have probably been undead for too long to still truly wish to die. Hoping that those wishes will be fulfilled while there’s still time is the only way to keep on living, so I need to somehow create that hope and hold on to it… Maybe someday it’ll even stop being a lie.

Climate change is receiving a lot of attention lately. There is the Copenhagen Summit in December, October 24th seems to be the International Day of Climate Action and, of course, the topic of this Blog Action Day is also climate change. But these are just a few events, albeit taking place at very different levels, while I’m mainly talking about all the people, companies and organizations that keep mentioning this issue. Some do so because they truly care about it, yet in many cases it’s just greenwashing. It’s quite easy to say a few things about climate change and appear to care, so many do just that and little else. And yet, you see, climate change in itself is not the problem. It’s only an effect of the problem.
Yes, global warming causes many other issues. It means summers will be even hotter, it means wet areas will risk even worse floods and dry areas even worse droughts, it means sea levels will rise and potentially destroy coastal settlements, it means glaciers will shrink or even vanish and deprive those who rely on them of their water supply, it means species and entire ecosystems will need to migrate in order to survive, it means many of those species and ecosystems will not be able to move fast enough or simply won’t have anywhere left to go and therefore will go extinct. It means unrest, disease, starvation, dehydration, wars, destruction, death and, once the systems that managed to ensure Earth’s balance for billions of years will kick into motion, it means the start of a new ice age. But it has a cause as well, and that cause is our behavior, specifically all the things that harm the environment as a whole. Climate change is just one of the many harmful effects of the things we do to this planet and Earth is quite capable of eventually restoring the balance on its own if we’d only stop hurting it for once. Sure, Earth doesn’t measure time as we do so we’ll need to help it restore that balance if we want it to happen before it’d be too late for us and many of the other species we share this planet with, but first we need to stop harming. And we need to stop harming the environment as a whole, not only focus on the types of harm that appear to directly cause this or that specific negative effect!
If a patient is seriously ill and the doctor only treats the pain, the patient will end up just as dead. Of course you should also ease the symptoms when you can, but the priority must be finding their causes and eliminating them. And, once those causes are eliminated, you should find out how did the patient fall ill in the first place and try to prevent a relapse. Only then can you rest a bit easier and focus on accelerating the patient’s recovery. So this is what we should do when it comes to climate change too. The environment is the patient, our behavior is the disease and climate change is one of this disease’s many symptoms. The really tricky part is that we must also be the doctor…

Let’s put this one issue aside for a moment and focus on the big picture. We act like a virus or a very stupid parasite. The first problem is that we have reached unsustainable numbers at least 50 years ago and our population kept growing more and more even after that point. The second problem is that we take and take and only give back toxins and waste. So we must first reduce our population to a sustainable level, preferably by severely limiting the right to breed to only a relatively small number of gifted individuals and offering the right to die in a dignified manner to all those who wish it. If we do so, we might still achieve this goal without killing anyone and while continuing to improve medical services and prolong the lifespan of those who wish long lives. Then we must change our behavior and turn ourselves into a symbiote inside this great organism called Earth. The current situation has been created by the idea that we need to increase production to improve our lives and that we need more people to increase production. But production requires resources, which we take from the planet and only replace with waste and toxins, so more people generate more consumption, more consumption requires more production, more production requires more resources, and those resources are taken from somewhere and not replaced, inevitably leading to the destruction of our environment. If we could learn to only take what the Earth can afford to give, reuse what now appears to be waste and replace everything we take with materials and substances that the planet will then be able to use properly, we would break free of this cycle and start the healing process.
Sure, it’s easy to take things out of context and claim that we can solve the problem of climate change just by lowering our carbon dioxide emissions, but that’s completely false. Plants absorb carbon from the atmosphere, so in order to reduce the existing concentration we need a healthy flora. Polluting, logging and clearing wild areas to make room for crops and cities destroys that flora. Monocultures make the situation even worse because they deplete the soil, making it harder and harder for plants to grow, which in turn prompts the use of more and more chemicals, which in turn tends to breed stronger pests, which end up causing even more damage to plants everywhere and therefore freeing even more carbon, since that’s what happens when dead plants rot. Depleted soils and stronger pests mean that all animals, including humans, need to exploit larger areas in order to obtain what they need, which creates conflicts and even more destruction. But such habitat destruction causes species to become threatened or even go extinct, species which would otherwise eat the pests or pollinate the plants, creating yet another cycle of destruction. On the other hand, oceans absorb carbon as well and store it for a very long time, but that makes them more acidic, which harms sea life, starting with corals and shellfish and then propagating through the food chain. And since oceans are the cradle of life, such harm will end up having serious consequences on all life on Earth. What’s more, carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas. Water vapor contributes greatly to the greenhouse effect. As the temperature increases, more water evaporates and less of it falls back as rain, which increases the atmospheric water vapor concentration, which increases the temperature even more, which only continues the cycle. And let’s not forget methane, which we rely on so much but also produce in significant quantities. Just think of cows… And this is just a very simple analysis, but I think it serves well enough to show how things are connected, how reducing carbon dioxide emissions is a necessary but far from sufficient step and how climate change is one, but far from the only, problem we’ll solve if we’ll take all the steps.
Yet we do need to alleviate the symptoms while we’re working on curing the disease itself, though that’s only because we have waited so long to start. But the methods that are most often suggested for this purpose are all wrong, because they keep trying to bend Nature to our will. Proper measures would include moving those who are threatened by rising sea levels, floods, drought, extreme weather or lack of resources to areas which are less risky. This would also apply for those who live in areas which need to be given back to the wild in order to help the ecosystem heal itself, as well as those who live in areas where specific programs will need to be enforced in order to restore the soil, biodiversity or other such things. Other measures include a lot of conservation work in order to preserve as much of the current biodiversity as possible and restore all those plants and animals to their rightful place once a suitable habitat will once again exist. Carbon sequestration could also be a solution, but only if it’s done right. If that carbon dioxide is simply dumped somewhere, it’s the equivalent of sweeping the dirt under the rug and will eventually come back to haunt us. If, however, we can find a way to use that carbon to create rocks and minerals, therefore simply hastening a natural process, it could be a pretty good solution. After all, using atmospheric carbon to create new rocks and minerals is how Earth has kept the concentration more or less constant, with a minimum that was slightly over 200 ppm and a maximum that was slightly under 300 ppm, for the past 25 million years, until we destroyed that balance during the last few decades, currently forcing our poor planet to deal with a concentration of 387 ppm.

Of course, it’s not the Earth we should worry about. Despite Venus’ frightening example, life on Earth in general will most likely survive global warming, pollution and all the destruction we can cause. Some 50 million years ago it was dealing with an atmospheric carbon concentration of over 1000 ppm and truly extreme temperatures, after all. However, the current ecosystem won’t be able to survive something like that, and we are also part of that ecosystem, no matter how much we try to deny it.
It’s been a long time since the last truly massive volcanic eruption, an even longer amount of time since the last major asteroid impact, and we still have roughly a billion years until the Sun’s luminosity will start to increase, so we’re the only ones to blame for the current situation and we therefore owe it to ourselves and to all the other species that we currently share this planet with to stop the destruction and then help the ecosystem heal itself as soon as possible, because without our help it will need thousands of years for that and many species, including our own, can’t afford to wait that long. Let’s stop focusing on this or that specific issue and, more importantly, let’s stop focusing on us and start doing what needs to be done for the world. Let’s change our behavior to cure the disease, let’s take precautions to ensure that such behavior will never arise again to prevent a relapse, let’s implement proper and effective measures to mitigate the effects of environmental degradation to alleviate the symptoms, and let’s fix the damage already done to accelerate recovery. Everything will get solved once we do. Until then, climate change is just a symptom…

NASA crashed a lunar satellite under controlled conditions in an attempt to determine whether the Moon holds water ice. Many seem quite excited about the possibility and one has to admit that proving that water exists on the Moon is exciting from a purely scientific point of view, but otherwise I don’t exactly see what all the fuss is about.

There are serious talks about colonizing the Moon, so the presence of water on it would seem to greatly help when it comes to that… Only it doesn’t. Not really. There are plenty of other problems that need to be solved before something like this could be possible, such as protecting the colonists from radiation and impacts, providing them with air to breathe, food to eat and medical services. One could argue that having water on the Moon would at least get rid of one of those problems and give scientists more time to focus on the rest, but that may not even be the case. I could be wrong but, since systems to completely recycle the used water would need to be installed anyway, I think it’d be easier to send a sufficient quantity of water to the Moon at the start of the mission than to figure out a way to make use of any water ice that could be found there, especially considering the regions where it’s likely to exist.
Another argument could be that these finds could be used to help predict what could exist elsewhere in the universe, but I don’t think the Moon is too relevant when it comes to that. For one, it’s a satellite, and a barren and probably a rather unusual one at that, considering the way it formed. That means that whatever happens on it is quite different from what could happen on a planet, especially on one that could support advanced life. Secondly, it orbits the Earth and therefore is placed exactly within the habitable area of the Sun, which means it won’t help in determining how could a star support life outside its habitable area, such as on certain promising satellites that orbit its gas giants. Under these circumstances, not even finding fossilized or dormant traces of microscopic life on the Moon would be a major discovery, though any such find would need to be taken into consideration very seriously because microscopic life could very easily mean incurable disease.

Proving the existence of significant quantities of water on Mars would be very interesting, as would be starting to explore what’s hidden beneath Venus’ eternal clouds or proving the existence and starting to explore the vast ocean presumed to exist under Europa’s frozen surface. Exploring Pluto and any other dwarf planets is also very important, seeing as we know so little about them. Finding any traces of life on Mars, Venus or Europa would be a momentous discovery, as would be figuring out a way to travel quickly through space, especially interstellar space. And, at least in my opinion, finding out more about the planets that orbit other stars and looking for an atmosphere, liquid water and life, especially intelligent life, on them is by far the most important thing when it comes to space exploration. Whether some water ice exists on the Moon or not pales in comparison to any of these…

My current computer problems reminded me of a few things I read some time ago. I’m actually quite surprised that I haven’t already written about this, but then again there are a lot of things I never get around to writing about, many of them being on my mind far more than this.
I’m talking about the fact that certain things are becoming too cheap for their own good. Consumers desire cheap goods in order to be able to afford as many as possible and manufacturers desire high profit margins. That means that, in order to be able to make some profit out of selling their products at prices that consumers are willing to pay, manufacturers need to reduce costs as much as possible. Some costs can be reduced without causing problems, and those certainly should be reduced, but most go past that level and the consequences are unpleasant for all involved. On top of the environmental and social problems caused by reducing costs past a certain level, the products in question also lose quality, and this is what this post is about.

Some time ago, I read a post written by a corporate blogger where the author was trying to counter the general idea that products made in China are inherently of poor quality. The main argument was that the Chinese can produce anything that’s required of them and can do it while ensuring one of about ten different quality levels, so the company that chooses to manufacture some of its products in China chooses the desired quality level as well. Then he pointed out the obvious, namely that each quality level comes with a price, the lowest quality being the cheapest and the highest quality being the most expensive. Companies would obviously desire products of the highest quality, but they can’t afford them because they need to keep costs down, otherwise the products ending up being too expensive and consumers no longer buying them. Still, there can be companies that try to stick to certain standards and therefore demand higher quality even if their products are also made in China, so the question is what are the consumers who complain about the quality of those products looking for. If they look for cheap goods, they shouldn’t expect high quality, not even for products that are not made in China. If they look for quality goods, they should expect to find some that meet their criteria even among those made in China.
That’s a very valid point, but the fact remains that the average quality of the goods that hit the market tends to keep dropping. After all, we all know sayings like “they don’t make them like they used to” for a reason… In a way, such a drop in quality (and especially in reliability) can be seen as a strategy the manufacturers employ in order to ensure that people keep buying their goods, as they’ll need to keep replacing those that fail. However, it all changes as soon as you add warranty into the mix, because the manufacturers need to replace the products that fail without the consumers purchasing new ones, meaning that reliability problems create higher costs.
When you buy an item that fails and needs to be repaired or replaced during warranty, the manufacturer spends some money in order to solve your problem. Obviously, they need to earn those money back from somewhere. That can be accomplished by raising prices, which initially hurts consumers and then also ends up hurting the manufacturers when their sales start dropping, by lowering profit margins, which initially hurts the manufacturers but then can also end up hurting consumers when the manufacturers go bankrupt or stop developing new products, or by trying to lower costs even further, which usually ends up hurting everyone because the quality also drops and all the associated problems get even worse.
Either way, it means that people don’t get the products they purchase repaired or replaced for free, but that they pay for these operations in advance when they make their purchase. But, on top of paying for all of this in advance, consumers also lose time, productivity, information or various other things when the products they purchase fail. On the other hand, manufacturers see themselves more or less forced to keep lowering the quality and continue this vicious circle because, while they could perhaps manufacture more reliable products and sell them at similar prices if they wouldn’t need to cover the costs of the repairs and replacements, those costs aren’t going to go away for quite some time due to all the unreliable products that they have already sold. That means that an improvement in quality and reliability usually implies a significant increase in price for quite some time, which tends to drive consumers away from the products in question and toward those that just make this vicious circle even worse, more or less turning an increase in quality and reliability into suicide for the companies that attempt it and making even previously trustworthy brands become less and less so.

The faulty HDD made me remember this issue because it’s quite obvious when you think about computers. The percentage of components that need to be replaced during warranty, or even those that are dead or at least faulty on arrival, seems to keep increasing. I even remember reading several times in WXPNews and the former VistaNews (currently Win7News) that the author and her close friends and family have personally experienced situations where a certain component even had to be replaced three or four times before they received one that at least worked the first time, not to mention that the number of components that fail before the warranty expires seems to keep increasing.
Though I would hope that such situations where repeated replacements are required are still quite rare, I believe that just about everyone’s personal experiences can confirm that things are indeed getting worse and worse. Mine certainly do, at least… So I ask you this: Considering how much cheap products actually end up costing, how cheap is too cheap?

Yet another Seagate HDD decides to trouble me. The exact model is ST3500320NS, though on that page it says it has 16 Mb of cache and mine has 32 Mb, or at least that’s what it says. I really bought it thinking it’d be very reliable, seeing as it’s supposedly built specifically for reliability, but it would appear that I was very wrong. I checked two shops from here, one being the one I bought it from and the other being the one I bought most other components from lately, and there is a flood of negative comments about this specific model, the first one being posted just two weeks after I bought it. People seem to agree that it comes from a bad production lot, or at least it did at some point, and that it will fail no matter what.
The problem is that I had another Seagate HDD fail on me before, two if I add the one from Andra’s old computer, and I noticed some issues with yet another one. That makes it no longer appear to be a problem with a certain production lot or even a specific model, but with their products in general… Or is it just me? I’ll admit that they always recover enough to allow me to save what was on them elsewhere, or at least I could have saved everything if I only knew exactly what to do when Andra’s crashed and if I had enough room when the previous one I had crashed as well. But, while that is a detail of crucial importance, the fact that they keep crashing in the first place is a huge problem!

Meant to write much more about this, but it has already failed once and now it’s making strange noises, so I’d rather not risk it. Managed to get it to work again by disconnecting it, knocking on it a few times, connecting it again and then, well, praying a lot. Then I checked my backup and added pretty much everything I could get to without accessing the partitions where I believe the main problem is located, and now I wait. There’s nothing I won’t be able to get back rather quickly on those partitions anyway, but if it’ll keep working long enough and then also start again after I’ll need to turn off the computer in order to connect another HDD to it, I’ll really save everything since now I have more than enough room available. Once that’s done, I guess I’ll wait for it to be replaced, since I only bought it a year and a half ago.