Tom Toles

***

Up in arms

If I had an upholstered armchair, I would settle back in it to do some armchair speculating today. Like every day, but today I would hold a thoughtful pipe in my hand. A bubble pipe, because I don't use tobacco products. Tobacco is at last acknowledged to be exceedingly bad for you after a decades-long argument that was pretty much an exact duplicate of the climate argument we are having now as a way of proving that we are slow learners.

Anyway, as the bubbles float above my head, like good cartoon thought bubbles do, here's another reason why I think the new class of the hyper-wealthy is dangerous to you and me. In case you missed it, rich people are not only not like you and me, but they are not like rich people of thirty years ago. They are way WAY richer now. Rich people's incomes have pulled so far away from the common rabble that I think a certain change in psychology is nearly inevitable, human psychology being what we know and love/hate.

So here is this new class of people for whom the standard expectation of wealth and income has become so extreme, that the need to do what it takes to maintain it all has to invite some severe temptation to do things that Mom would not be proud of. Or maybe she would, depending on the mom. And on a necessarily dangerous scale. This seems to be what led to the Great Recession we have been enjoying so thoroughly of late. Conservatives are fond of explaining aberrant behavior in terms of incentives. I don't see what has changed much in the incentive structure here. Do you? --Tom Toles

***

Waste not, want not. Not

Small-car sales are picking up in response to higher gas prices! There's a surprise. But people don't WANT small cars, we were told, until they do. Depends on what you really want.

But people only want small cars when gas is expensive! And it wasn't expensive before! Of course, we could have raised gasoline taxes and reduced the deficit. Reducing the deficit is the thing that everybody says they want more than anything else in the whole wide world. Except cars that waste gasoline. They want cars that waste gasoline just a little bit more than reducing the deficit that they say will bankrupt the nation into Third World status and ruin the lives of their very children and grandchildren. That's a worthy concern, too, to be sure, except when compared to a car that wastes gasoline.

Oh, and not wasting gas would also help curb climate destruction. Whoa, there, pal! Not so fast! You going to put THAT up against a car that wastes gasoline?? Where are your VALUES, dude? --Tom Toles

***

Outsmarting ourselves

Suppose you came to work one day and somebody else was sitting at your computer! This is a ridiculous, outmoded fear. Because what you should really be concerned about is that NOBODY will be sitting at your computer because your chair is gone and your computer is running itself.

This is one of those perennial type of apocalypse jobs stories that seem like they must be true and simultaneously seem like they won't be true, because they rarely are. Still, it's hard to spot the obvious flaw in the logic. Kids in school don't seem to be getting any smarter, but computers sure are. What's that formula, again? Computing power doubles every two years and doesn't leave crumbs at its desk? It's not that computers are going to outclass us someday; they already have, but we haven't realized it yet because of our slower processing capacity.

So, yes, one day machines will do our work for us, but we never figured out that little paycheck wrinkle. Slow processing capacity, again. -- Tom Toles

***

***

Spit take

Hello commenters. Seems as though a certain ecosystem is developing in the comments section here. I have misgivings, sure, because I have this peculiar aversion to getting sprayed in the face by spittle from lunatic climate-change deniers. But things seem to have calmed down enough that I can peek in the clubhouse window and say hi.

While there are clearly visitors who do not think before they write, or after, or ever, I think a good percentage of the comments are by people who know their inclinations, but are interested to test those and see what others have to say. Just like me! This is the real value of free speech in a democracy. Not merely to get to say what you already think, but to listen to others, sometimes in a gale of saliva and all. I brought a towel.

And, deniers: The climate evidence isn't perfect, but the overwhelming preponderance is on my side, and it PREDICTED your increasingly erratic behavior. --Tom Toles

***

***

Friday rant: Far and away edition

“Throw away” is a fascinating expression. I love that word “away.” Where is “away”? It’s over there. Somewhere. Away. Not here. The gentle arc of the apple core gliding into the shrubbery. And that is what throwing away used to consist of. The term could be a soft-focus expression of benign vagueness because that’s what the activity was. Seriously, it’s hard to think of anything from the pre-industrial era being thrown anywhere that could have had much of an impact on anything. Okay, catapulting a plague-infested cow carcass over a castle wall would be an exception to that.

But the more things change, the more they change. When industrialization cranked up, things changed a lot. A company that was producing a lot of poison, rather than dealing with the cost of the toxins it produced, decided it was more profitable to put them in the river. Your river. The river your drinking water came from. Or into the air. Your air that you breathe. See how that saved them some money? They put THEIR costs on YOU. “Away” now meant “you.”

We spent a lot of time in the second half of the 20th century trying to fix that situation, but we never quite established in the public consciousness the idea that these dangerous “externalities” are just fundamentally costs generated by producers that those producers are responsible for, but which they are trying to pass off on the public whenever they can get away with it. We will try to resist the temptation of likening that to certain media outlets that are designed to generate their profits from toxic vitriol.

***

***

Under covers

Reporters like to think of themselves...let me correct that...reporters like OTHERS to think that they are working tirelessly through the night to dig out the hidden facts that the American people need to know to govern themselves through the instruments and institutions of their democracy. And some of them actually do.

On the other hand, many of them actually don't. For those of you who crave some confirmation of your darker fears and thoughts about American journalism, particularly the Washington variant, please read Dana Milbank's recent column. And look forward to Mark Leibovich's book. Sad to say, this doesn't fit neatly into either the narrative of the Liberal Media or the Right Wing Noise Machine. It fits into the tired old categories of Mutual Backscratching and Careerism. The Two Fevers here in the fever swamp. The swamp itself is largely special interest money and power politics.

This could be a great book. Reporters never tire of embarrassing others, often with excellent reason, but it will be interesting to listen to them trying to explain away revelations that ought to be professionally embarrassing to them. They won't actually BE embarrassed. People in D.C. don't get embarrassed. --Tom Toles

***

***

Help me out, here

So explain to me again what the point of all those SUVs was. Why drive all that weight around to get to the same place any vehicle would have got you to? Why burn all that fuel that is gone forever now to go the same speed? Now, while you stare at the scary numbers on the gas pump, do you turn and see that you are pumping all that gas into a giant piece of stupid? Why did we send all that money out of the country at a time when our negative balance of trade was kicking the blocks out from under our economy?

And why did we decide to take such pleasure in hating our own American cities? Why did we treat with such hostility the compact, efficient use of space and transportation resources? Why the crazed need to sprawl out all over the landscape building ourselves a permanent commuting nightmare? One to get stuck in, in a truck disguised as a car?

Why in the face of mounting evidence that all this pointless WASTING of fuel was highly likely to wreck the climate, did we then decide to go out and buy even BIGGER vehicles? Are people capable of thinking about more than one competing interest at a time? Is immediate pleasure the ONLY consideration America is now capable of mustering? The same people who claim this sudden screaming concern over GOVERNMENT irresponsibility seem blithely indifferent to all of this. Somebody explain. --Tom Toles

***