Peter Zelchenko's List: Technology

• The paradox is, narrowly speaking, that total savings may fall even when individual savings attempt to rise, and, broadly speaking, that increase in savings may be harmful to an economy

• marginal utility of water is low. In other words, each additional unit of water that becomes available can be applied to less urgent uses as more urgent uses for water are satisfied.
• less urgent uses as more urgent uses for water are satisfied

• Health problems emerged immediately. Thomas Midgely and Carroll Hochwalt, Kettering’s chief assistants on the anti-knock project, suffered symptoms of lead poisoning in early 1923. By June 1924, two men at the Dayton blending plant were dead and 60 had suffered serious health effects.
• Kettering could hardly have been unaware of TEL’s risks, when his own people were dropping like flies around him.
• The Surgeon General convened a parley in May 1925 to hash out the question. On one side were the industrial hygiene people, an impressive group that included Yandell Henderson of Yale University, who stated that “leaded gasoline will be in nearly universal use and large numbers of cars will have been sold ... before the public and the government awaken to the situation.” He argued the precautionary principle: that it was up to industry to prove that coating American roads and cities with lead powder was not the bad idea that it sounded like. On the other side were Kettering and his supporters, contending that, in the words of one Standard Oil executive, “Leaded gasoline is a gift of God ... Because some animals die and some do not die in some experiments, shall we give this thing up? It must not be fears, but facts that we are guided by.”
• He claimed to believe that lead occurred naturally in the human body, and at “low levels” was not toxic. He even asserted that lead was an essential micromineral – i.e., lead was good for you! It was a Big Lie strategy, which was not unpopular with the employers and corporate funders of the interest-conflicted Kehoe.

  • cf. Michele Smith and her boss International's "Clean Diseel" campaign
• One possible reason why the Public Health Service failed to conduct any more studies is that the Service was under the jurisdiction of the Dept. of the Treasury. The Secretary of the Treasury at that time was Andrew Mellon, whose family controlled Gulf Oil. And Gulf Oil was one of the three major oil companies recently given lucrative distribution rights to leaded gasoline by Ethyl Corporation.
• “I was taught that a scientist is a man who works at his subject for the sake of the subject alone, and that a man who works on a scientific project with the idea of selling it has no right to be associated with science,” he said in 1927. “I have since learned that a bank account in the black is the popular applause of a scientific accomplishment.”

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• It is relevant to note that this perspective is often correctly closely connected with many contemporary theories, perhaps most notably the developmental theories of Vygotsky and Bruner.^[5]
• as parents negotiate rules for their children to follow, those rules confront the children as externally produced "givens" that they cannot change. It is in this sense that it can be said that reality is socially constructed.
• It links to Heidegger and Edmund Husserl through the teaching of Alfred Schutz. Schutz was Berger's PhD adviser.
• During the 1970s and 1980s, social constructionist theory underwent a transformation as constructionist sociologists engaged with the work of Michel Foucault and others as a narrative turn in the social sciences was worked out in practice

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• Soil erosion on farms dropped sharply in the 1970s with the introduction of "no-till" seed planting, an innovation that also reduced dependence on diesel fuel because fields no longer had to be plowed every spring. Farmers then began conserving water by moving to drip irrigation
• by leveling their fields with lasers to minimize wasteful runoff. In the 1990s, GPS equipment was added to tractors, autosteering the machines in straighter paths and telling farmers exactly where they were in the field to within one square meter, allowing precise adjustments in chemical use.
• Infrared sensors were brought in to detect the greenness of the crop, telling a farmer exactly how much more (or less) nitrogen might be needed as the growing season went forward. To reduce wasteful nitrogen use, equipment was developed that can insert fertilizers into the ground at exactly the depth needed and in perfect rows, only where it will be taken up by the plant
• When agricultural modernization went out of fashion among elites in the developed world beginning in the 1980s, development assistance to farming in poor countries collapsed.
• U.S. response was to withdraw development assistance and simply ship more food aid to Africa.
• The World Bank has documented average rates of return on investments in agricultural research in Africa of 35 percent a year, accompanied by significant reductions in poverty. Some research investments in African agriculture have brought rates of return estimated at 68 percent. Blind to these realities, the United States cut its assistance to agricultural research in Africa 77 percent between 1980 and 2006.

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• Mass deforestation probably isn't what organic advocates intend.

• it is a means for sourcing true forms and ideas that exist before the figures we perceive.

  • What? Before it becomes a clouded phenomenon, to deconstruct/understand what it is?

• '...a three-word logical proposition: "Technology determines history"' (Raymond Williams)
• (Murphie and Potts)
• "Subversive Rationalization: Technology, Power and Democracy with Technology," Andrew Feenberg

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