We Can't Stay Here

13:34 Saturday, 9 November 2019
Words: 1369

Being retired, having a lot of free time and feeling a sense of responsibility (albeit belated), I go to a lot of meetings in this part of Florida. I go to Citizens Flood Advisory Committee meetings, flood mitigation meetings, the Public Private Regional Resilience meetings. I went to a clean fuels initiative meeting last week, I went to a cultural heritage at risk due to sea level rise meeting a few weeks ago. I go to the Ponte Vedra Coalition meetings, I meet with my County Commissioner, I went to the most recent Citizens Climate Lobby meeting last weekend.

I think you get the idea.

Last night, I went to an event sponsored by 1000 Friends of Florida, kind of a conservation/sustainable development advocacy group. The topic was what St Johns County might look like in 2070. It took place at the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve (GTMNERR), which is a fabulous facility. I happen to live on the western side of the Tolomato River in an area formerly known as Cabbage Swamp. (Explains the mosquitos.) Turnout was pretty good, it wasn't sold out, but there were probably fifty or so people in attendance. The meeting started at 6:00PM, so it was accessible to younger, working people and parents with children, but I think the audience was mostly folks my age or more.

It started out with a little sticker exercise, where you had twelve stickers, four of each of three colors, and there were large sheets of paper with issues named at the top. Things like "Public Safety," "Schools," "Social Services," "Growth Management," "Traffic," "Water/Sewer," and so on. You were to place green stickers on the four topics you felt were good in the county, blue stickers on the four topics you felt were important, and red stickers on the topics you felt were problems or challenges in the county. (Here's a pro-tip: Write down or take a picture with your phone of the topics you put stickers on. Some of them were close calls, and when it came time to discuss them, I wasn't sure if I'd placed a sticker on a particular topic or not!)

Then followed an intro from the Matanzas Riverkeeper about how the program would run, and an introduction of the people we would be hearing from.

The opening pitch was from a representative from 1000 Friends of Florida with a presentation on a study of Florida growth they conducted, and what it suggested about the future of St Johns County. It was a slide show of mostly bad news, as one might expect. Water shortages, probably two thirds of the county developed into residential property, population approaching 600K (591K, was the actual number I think). And then he went into some ideas about how the county could begin to anticipate this now, and actions it could take to promote the most sustainable outcome.

I thought it was a good pitch, but the most significant weakness was that it only considered existing demographic trends and ignored sea level rise, which will have a profound impact on Florida in the next 50 years. They are working on an updated study that includes the effects of sea level rise. But, with that caveat, it didn't significantly affect the goals of the program, which was to look at how we do development now, versus how we might think about it differently.

The next part of the program was a group discussion. Brian Nelson, former CNN anchor(!), lives in the area and often facilitates these types of events. He led an examination of the topics and how many stickers were present, and what colors predominated. Unsurprisingly, the Schools, Public Safety and Social Services (libraries, boat ramps, parks, etc) received the greatest numbers of green dots. The implication being that those desirable features were the drivers of the red dot challenges, Growth Management, Water/Sewer (and flooding) and, I think, conservation. So then we went on to the discussion.

There was a mic set up in the middle of the room and at first people seemed reluctant to stand up to talk about why they put a red dot on a topic. When the Water/Sewer (and flooding) topic came up, I did recall that I'd placed a red sticker on it, and so I got up to speak about the county's Citizens Flood Advisory Committee.

Well, wouldn't you know it, as I'm approaching mic Nelson asks me, "What about all these houses on the beach? Should we be incentivizing them to leave?" or words to that effect. Well, that wasn't what I was planning to talk about, but I sure could talk about houses built too close to the ocean.

I can't recall exactly what I said, but I think I opened with, "We can't stay here." And I went on to say that the built environment at the beach was going to have to be deconstructed in order to create a natural environment to help protect upland properties as sea level continued to rise. I said it was an enormous challenge and required planning now, because whatever plan is developed will be litigated for decades before it can be implemented, and the sea is not going to wait. And there was an enormous disincentive to face this unwelcome reality because these are the most valuable properties in the county, and provide the greatest amount of property tax revenue. Nelson asked who should pay, and I said it would take a federal and state effort to help get people to leave their homes, and that homeowners would likely have to take a haircut.

At some point, shortly after I started, I suddenly realized that there were probably at least a few of those homeowners in the audience, and that this would be a decidedly unwelcome line of discussion. When we moved on and I sat down, a gentleman in front of me began speaking about how little sea level has risen in the last 100 years and so on. Nelson pushed back that it's accelerating and expected to keep accelerating. It looked as though we were about to get derailed, but then we moved on to another topic before we got bogged down in a debate about the reality of sea level rise.

The program went on successfully I think. I learned some interesting things, and there were some topics that could have been better explained or developed.

At the end of the program, Jane West, a local attorney and a new staff member of 1000 Friends of Florida summarized some specific actions the county and citizens of the county could take to address development. I wish I'd recorded it, because she seemed to go out of her way to respond to my contention that beach homeowners would have to take a haircut (i.e. would not receive what is notionally "fair market value") when they ultimately leave their homes. And I got the impression she was making the point that because they provide so much in property tax revenue, they're deserving of full value if they're ever asked to leave.

Well, I would dispute that, since these folks' risk in building on the beach is being subsidized by taxpayers in the form of the National Flood Insurance Program, and we are about to undertake tens of millions of dollars of "beach renourishment" so they can remain in their homes for some number of years, until it becomes patently obvious that we are simply shoveling taxpayer dollars into the sea, in an ultimately futile effort to forestall the inevitable.

I think beach homeowners should be prepared to expect a significant haircut, because the lifestyle they're enjoying today is paid for to a significant extent by taxpayers. And while these are notionally "public" beaches, there is little in the way of public access to those beaches and less in the way of public parking.

But, there will be more meetings. I will rise, however uncomfortably, to speak the truth and hope that it will make some kind of difference. This isn't exactly how I planned to spend my retirement, but here we are. We can't stay here, and we can't stay silent.

Random Walk

09:49 Tuesday, 9 November 2021
Current Wx: Temp: 63.37°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 7mph
Words: 447

I guess my goal of posting something every day in November is completely out the window now! Oh well, non-attachment to results and all that.

I confess that Friday I got sucked into Twitter, unfortunately. Current events resembling something like a car crash, it has that effect on a person. Can't look away.

But I did do a lot of digging around about "knowledge graphs," "backlinks," "bi-directional linking," and some of the other terms of art in the present "tools for thought" flowering. It became somewhat overwhelming at one point, and I definitely felt like I was kind of lost in the weeds. Probably should have been building a graph around it.

Some of it, I think I get. Some of it just feels like people want to build their own Wikipedia in an app.

In terms of learning a new subject, becoming familiar with the concepts, the vernacular, the model behavior, I can see where constructing "nodes" and "links" into a "graph" might help facilitate understanding in a new domain. Then you get into the whole, "the map is not the territory" thing, (the finger is not the moon). I guess the idea is that as one continues to add to that graph, eventually it will help facilitate some new insight, surface some heretofore unseen connection or model behavior. I suppose that's possible. I don't think it's a substitute for thinking, and I happen to believe most of our thinking occurs below the level of our consciousness so I'm not sure that constructing graphs is the most useful activity for facilitating that. Taking a walk might be.

Sure makes for pretty pictures though. And we shouldn't discount the value of pictures in aiding thought. Every engineering student knows that.

The zettelkasten thing is somewhat different, I think. It seems many people believe it serves the same role as building the graph, helping to facilitate new insight. Again, I'm not persuaded. I do believe it can be productive in terms of organizing a great deal of information over a wide range of subjects over a long period of time, in a way that promotes better understanding, not to say "mastery" of a wide variety of subjects over time.

What we seem to have evidence of, at least with a zettelkasten, is that it can facilitate writing; and insofar as writing is thinking, then the zettelkasten does seem more like a "tool for thought" than simply constructing a graph with atomistic nodes and characterized links.

But, I could be wrong.

It's a very hot topic with a lot of passionate people working in the space, so expect friction and the possibility of more heat than light.

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Disconnect

10:27 Tuesday, 9 November 2021
Current Wx: Temp: 63.12°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 4mph
Words: 357

This will be, hopefully, a brief post. Perhaps incoherent and maybe not ready for publication, but here we go.

I've been trying to wrap my brain around what seems to be happening in America, the collapse of democracy, the rise of an extremist right and why it's happening. I don't have the answer, but I have a few thoughts.

David Brooks has a piece in the December issue of The Atlantic called The Terrifying Future of the American Right. I don't know what was more terrifying, the rhetoric he was reporting, or his rather blasé take on it. That's not to say I think he's wrong about any of it, I just think he undersells the threat he's reporting.

I think there's a disconnect between what people experience and what they think affects them, and I think that's because we inhabit a media culture. Life isn't in our yards, in our neighborhoods, in our bowling leagues, PTA, youth sports, in "meat space" in other words, it's in our screens, and our screens are everywhere. Our screens have largely replaced all those physical interactions. Many still exist, of course. But we seek social interaction, and we are richly rewarded, by virtual interactions mediated by screens.

And our screens present a completely distorted picture of "reality." Distorted not so much because the depictions are necessarily untrue, though some are, and all are inaccurate to one degree or another, but simply because of scale, or perspective. Everything is magnified. We have no sense of proportion or perspective.

So, for many people, the story becomes what's in the screens, who controls what's in the screens, not the stories themselves.

And there are many people who understand this, and exploit it for their own selfish aims. I don't know how they think this is going to end for them. They've got a tiger by the tail, perhaps they should google how that story ends.

I don't wish to overlook the irony that you're reading these words in a screen.

Far from being the salvation of humanity, I think the internet will be its doom.

Stick that in your graph and link it.

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Ginkgo Fall

19:42 Wednesday, 9 November 2022

Current Wx: Temp: 64.76°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 81% Wind: 17.27mph
Words: 151

Arrived here in Washington DC yesterday evening around 1930. Trip was relatively benign, a lot more traffic on I-95 than we had anticipated. At least the weather cooperated, no rain.

It seems we arrived the night before all the Ginkgo trees decided to drop their leaves. It almost looked as though it was snowing out this morning as leaves kept falling and falling. The morning temperature being below freezing may have contributed to that impression.

I hadn't done a thorough job preparing the MacBook Pro for the trip. In any event, all is well now and it was a worthwhile exercise in using AppleScript and Automator.

Photo is a jpg straight out the Olympus XZ-1, which I took along with me on a little walk this morning, after the temps got up into the 40s.

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Sore

07:36 Saturday, 9 November 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 73.09°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 97% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 667

In my experience, muscle soreness is always worse the second day after the exertion. My experience holds.

Surprisingly, my biceps hurt more than anything else, as in, they're the only thing that hurts! And I thought they were the ones in best shape! Oy!

I'm still sore about the self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head the nation experienced on Tuesday too.

But I'm doing fairly well avoiding the news. Plenty of it shows up in the blogs I follow, and texts from people I know. Again, there's nothing I can do about it and so there's little reason to know about it. So call me a "know-nothing," I don't care. Knowing something doesn't seem to help.

I need to dig into Sequoia's settings to figure out how to turn off this new "window management" thing. I'm sliding windows around to do something I want, and they take on a life of their own, jumping here and there and expanding. It's infuriating. Fuck Apple! God damn it! Just fix broken shit! There's plenty of that!

Mitzi's beginning to enter the "concepts of a plan" phase. She's talking about not buying all new furniture again, so a storage unit is in our future while we figure out where we're actually going to land.

I'm letting her go at her own pace. Right now she's leaning toward finding another place up there and selling the one she already owns. I'm not in favor of that. I'd rather build on the two acres we've got. I like the location, the view and, so far, the neighbors don't scare me. But I might change my mind if she finds the right place. I'll have more of a say then because I'll have my stake in this place to work with. I think next summer is going to be a scouting and reconnaissance mission to establish the final objective.

Then the real planning will begin.

I hate moving. It's a pain in the ass. But it's less of a pain in the ass than losing all the furniture and dealing with the bureaucracy of "recovery."

Last night, during a small bout of insomnia, I kind of went over the risk assessment again. "Low-probability, high-impact." Significant cost to moving. May never have an extreme weather event that puts us in a "recovery" phase with thousands of other people.

That's the key thing. There are a lot of low-probability, high-impact events that can happen to us individually, anywhere. Those are the things we insure against, and if they happen we're dealing with our insurance company, some contractors and maybe the county.

In a (un)natural disaster, we may be among thousands of people impacted by the event. And while there may be more financial resources available, everything takes longer, is more bureaucratic. How do you vet your contractor? How do you guard against fraud? Do we live in New York and try to manage recovery remotely? How does that work? Where do we find temporary housing locally, with thousands of people looking for the same thing?

Then there's our age, our stage of life. Maybe nothing happens here for ten years. Then something does when we're in our late 70s. Or later. How are we prepared to cope with that situation at that stage of our lives? I'd have my kids relatively nearby to help, but they may be coping with the effects of the same event! How much assistance can they really be?

No, Florida is too vulnerable to large scale natural disasters. Every part of Florida is.

Concluded moving is the right thing to do. The sooner the better. Plus, this state is just awful, politically. Not just the ideology, or the cruelty. It's the incompetence. Again, gerrymandering guarantees you are going to get more extreme politicians, not necessarily more competent ones. Florida has been, and will be, made more vulnerable because of legislative stupidity. It's not going to cure itself.

Assessment affirmed.

Went back to sleep.

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Ah, Florida

11:02 Saturday, 9 November 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 76.53°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 9.22mph
Words: 81

The picture is starting to come into focus...

I shouldn't trash-talk this state so much. We'll need someone to buy our house. Hopefully we'll be out of here before it becomes so blindingly obvious that everyone flees the state.

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Insurance

11:28 Saturday, 9 November 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 78.75°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 88% Wind: 13.8mph
Words: 107

This is a long video, but if you live in Florida, or are considering moving to Florida, you should probably watch it. This is the hellscape of risk you are entering. And please recall that the Republican Party has been completely in control of Florida's government for more than a generation.

We really need to get out of here. Hope we do it in time.

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It's Not Easy Being Green

21:09 Saturday, 9 November 2024

Current Wx: Temp: 73.15°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 10.18mph
Words: 236

I'm not walking for pace yet, so I'm bringing along the OM-5 with the 14-150mm zoom mounted. Stepped outside the other morning and there were three of these guys on the wall. This one was the largest.

Mitzi had some exterior lighting mounted in the soffits and they attract bugs, making for a kind of buffet for tree frogs. So maybe it's a little easier, bein' green.

Shot a rose and a little blue heron this morning. Couldn't decide between the rose and the heron, so the frog was it.

And, huh...

Just noticed that I managed to lose the viewfinder eyecup on the OM-5. Bummer. I'm sure that little piece of plastic is going to cost $30 or more... Not the first time. Probably won't be the last. I'll order a new one when we get back in December.

Mitzi and I had dinner tonight with a couple I've known for more than 30 years.

We talked about my "risk assessment," and found that they agreed. They're looking at property in North Carolina, though Helene has altered their thinking regarding location, hydrology becoming a key element. North Carolina being "less red," also factors into their choice, along with an intolerance of northeast winters.

Anyway, life goes on.

And always remember...

No matter where you go, there you are.

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Knowing

07:37 Sunday, 9 November 2025

Current Wx: Temp: 37.09°F Pressure: 1012hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 1.05mph
Words: 679

We had an interesting discussion in the Tinderbox meetup yesterday. I'm afraid I spoke too much, but it's not a shy group so someone could have spoken up and made their views and opinions known.

The topic was "Atomic Notes," and it was about a process for note-taking. Our guest was the gentleman who wrote, The Complete Guide to Atomic Note-Taking, a topic I responded to back in October.

Clearly I'm something of a skeptic, but I think we had a worthwhile conversation yesterday. Of course, I've been doing some background processing, or "unconscious reflection," because I woke up wanting to return to the subject today.

It's still a big hairy problem, and it's difficult to know where to grab onto it first, because wherever you begin will shape where you end up.

He uses syllogisms as examples. Major premise, minor premise, conclusion. One of the examples was, if I recall correctly:\

The best dog is the most intelligent dog.

German Shepards are the most intelligent dogs.

German Shepards are the best dogs.

I challenged the major premise, as it is not a fact, it's an assertion, which may have been chosen, consciously or unconsciously, to lead to a desired conclusion. (He owns a German Shepard.)

He replied something to the effect that if you begin challenging parts of the major premise, then you end up in the problem of "infinite recursion," and you end up getting nowhere. At least, that's what I think I recall.

What occurred to me this morning (or during the night sometime), is that "infinite recursion" is perhaps another way of looking at "contingency." The "best" dog is contingent on an individual's idea what makes one dog "better" than another. (I suspect this is also another Western idea, categorizing and ranking things according to their "goodness.")

Good, better, best. Never let it rest, until your good is better and your better is best.

One of the lessons from Nagarjuna's The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way is that everything is contingent. Facts, ideas, beliefs, concepts, crackpot theories do not exist in isolation. They are not "atomic." They are contingent.

I commented at one point that his process seemed very Western, and I think that was some part of my mind nagging at me about contingency, and it just wasn't surfacing at that moment. I'm getting old.

I suspect that Godel's incompleteness theorem is a manifestation of contingency. It's been a couple of decades since I read about Godel, and I think I've just gotten to that chapter in the book I'm reading. (Had to go look for it, because I couldn't recall the title. Yeesh. It's The Engines of Logic, by Martin Davis. I'm still in Hilbert, but I put the manual for Crush, Crumble and Chomp! on top of it on the nightstand and, "out of sight, out of mind.")

But this all points back to at least Leibniz and his calculus ratiocinator, a symbolic logic that could be exercised through algebraic means to lead to "true" conclusions, or "the truth." This is a very Western belief that reality may be reduced to "true" and "atomic" elements that may be known. Newton's determinism, give me the position at time zero and the acceleration and I can predict where a body will be at any moment in the future. Or in the past.

That seems powerful, and if there's one thing we're enamored with in the West, it is power. (And wealth, which are probably the same things, especially given the contingent nature of each.)

There's also the comfort of certainty. Certainty is a kind of "knowing," and "knowledge is power."

I think all this fascination with note-taking and "personal knowledge management," is a manifestation of the anxiety we feel in a world that feels increasing "out of control."

Anyway, it was a worthwhile distraction from the sadness that overtakes me when I think about the failure of our institutions.

Life is meaningless.

We bring meaning to life.

And when we fail to do so, then it is all just meaningless.

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Moral Cowardice

09:41 Sunday, 9 November 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 38.71°F Pressure: 1010hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 1.99mph
Words: 665

This is an interesting post that relates both to the failures of our institutions to defend the values they supposedly promote and uphold, and to the questions addressed by knowing.

The post refers to an "internal arbiter," which evaluates a moral choice by ranking the relationship the choice poses to various identities an individual inhabits. Later, the author worries that many Trumpist individuals lack an internal arbiter.

Korsgaard begins with a description of the individual. She says we adult humans are reflective creatures. We are able to examine our behavior and evaluate it against standards we choose.

"Reflection," is another term for introspection. And I would add that we evaluate our behavior against standards that we may not have chosen, but were rather instilled in us. Standards we have adopted unconsciously, or learned from examples, often the wrong examples.

Introspection is a difficult process, and it can lead to confusion, the problem of "infinite regression." I think that introspection is very uncomfortable for many people, and rather than work with the discomfort, they seek external stimulation, distraction, which our culture provides in excess.

Therapy can be a kind of guided or assisted introspection. The "what" questions can help an individual stay on track when wrestling with uncomfortable questions that relate to one's identity and one's "goodness." And boy does this country need therapy.

… [W]e require reasons for action, a conception of the right and the good. To act from such a conception is in turn to have a practical conception of your identity, a conception under which you value yourself and find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking. That conception is normative for you and in certain cases it can obligate you, for if you do not allow yourself to be governed by any conception of your identity then you will have no reason to act and to live. P. 122.

This was an important point, so much so that it's quoted from Korsgaard in the post. I would differ a bit in the assertion that "we require reasons for action." We don't. Much of our behavior is habituated. There may have been a reason once, but it may be forgotten and may not even be relevant to the "reason" for the requirement for action in the moment. Much of what you read on social media is habituated. Stimulus and response. Reactive, not reflective.

But the important point in the quotation is that "it can obligate you," if you embrace a concept of your identity that makes your life worth living and your actions worth undertaking. But we see, over and over again, people ignoring those obligations. Seemingly happy to embrace a lower conceptual identity that doesn't obligate them to act.

That is the conflict here between one's identity as a Christian, and one's identity as a Trumpist. Or the conflict between one's identity as a commissioned officer, or a formerly commissioned officer, and the consequences of speaking out against the leadership of the armed forces.

The "core values" of the United States Navy are honor, courage and commitment, and nowhere do we observe those core values animating the choices and actions of the officers and sailors on active duty, or the veterans who value their identity and their prior service in uniform.

"It's just a job." This nonsense about "core values," is just so much window dressing. Marketing. Bullshit.

We're just mercenaries. You give me a paycheck, I'll kill anybody you want as long as you're the "commander-in-chief."

Except for ADM Holsey, who made a choice for a reason. Whose choice has upheld the Navy's core values, even though it comes with consequences. I'd welcome more from ADM Holsey, in terms of speaking out. But actions can speak as well.

You can't claim to be a Christian, or claim to be an officer in the United States Navy if you aren't compelled to act when faced with a moral choice.

You're just a coward.

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Action

10:25 Sunday, 9 November 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 39.6°F Pressure: 1010hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 1.99mph
Words: 27

I'm giving some money to a local food bank here in Hector. But the opportunity to give some money to another worthwhile cause may be found here.

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