About Me
Questions you SHOULD be asking:
Beware of anyone with more answers than questions. Please know that any ideas I share, however excited I may be about them, are in the end only that; ideas. I do not claim to have answers but rather hope to spark people into questioning the world around them a bit more.
The human eye contains an inherent blind spot due to the location of nerves and vessels passing in front of photoreceptors. Our brain fills in the gap so we are not conscious of this phenomenon. The squid does not suffer from such a blind spot because it's nerve fibers instead pass behind the photoreceptors. It is thought that humans evolved this way not because there is an advantage to having a blind spot but rather because our eyes were always based upon the eyes of our ancestors. The only potential for change is through slow accumulation of genetic mutations. In evolution there are no hard-rewrites. We are stuck with the legacy hardware that the past gave us and we can only ever modify it bit by bit.
The modern world is similar. Henry Ford's wife drove an electric car; the 1914 Detroit Electric. It was advertised to have an 80 mile range. 80 miles is sufficient for the daily driver; yet for over 100 years the legacy technology that we have utilized has been the combustion engine. The dominant technology is not guaranteed to be the most logical one. An aggressive business strategy combined with political influence is often enough to promote an inferior idea far beyond a good one. Over time an inferior idea may grow. Growth of that industry leads to more jobs reliant on the continuation of that idea. Society starts to defend and even fight to continue inferior ideas in some cases. Capitalism has many strengths in combating this phenomenon but it may fail in the absence of great leaders willing to make drastic changes.
Modern, American Suburbia is fairly uniform across the country. Things tend to be done a similar way everywhere because standardization makes regulation simpler/safer. It is also the case that many industries and therefore jobs rely on continuation of the status quo. Some qualities of Suburbia have arisen merely due to humans copying humans without asking why we are all doing the same things as each other. I encourage you to explore the concept of mimetic theory for a potential explanation of why this might occur.
I equally encourage you to consider and question the following suburban stereotypes:
--Why is the grass in our lawn the plant we spend the most time caring for?
--Why do many people want to be able to see their house from the street with minimal visual obstruction. Is a yard full of trees less attractive?
--Why do construction companies slope our yards so that the rain flows quickly off and cannot soak in? Wouldn't it be almost as easy for each yard to have at least a small area to soak in rain water so that our plants grow.
--Why do many think that municipal sewer plumbing is superior to a septic tank?
--Why do we dispose of water that cleaned our dishes into the same tube that our fecal matter goes into? Are they are equally dirty and equally worthy of such rigorous decontamination?
--Why do we voluntarily drink chlorinated water when rainwater is chemical free and falls onto our roof? Chlorine is meant to kill bacterial cells and a healthy human gut is full of bacterial cells.
--Why do we use shingled rooves that require replacement every 15-30 years? Other materials last significantly longer.
--Why do we channel rain along street gutters and away from our neighborhoods without even attempting to have each house capture some little portion of that flow?
--Why do we build giant rainwater holding ponds rather than design each lot to hold it's own water.
--Why do we pay for electricity in an age where solar panels (and even some whole-house batteries) are already on price parity with buying electricity from the grid?
--Why do so many people drive trucks even though most of them (according to survey studies) never actually use the truck bed for anything and even more people never tow anything?
--Why do we buy water from a municipality that has to pump it into our house from miles away when the price of many rain tanks is affordable to most people?
--Why do we plant decorative plants instead of plants that produce food when both are equally easy to grow?
If you are defensive of the above concepts I would encourage you to fully consider what the alternatives might be. My aim is to accumulate video content on some of these alternatives. Thus far that can be found primarily on YouTube but I hope to spread outside that platform over time.
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