A Bit Larger than Tweet-Sized Chunks of Apocalyptica

People lend me books to read all the time. It's hard to say no. I have a backlog of three loaners right now. I'll be reading these books probably for the next month, which means that I won't be getting to any of my own reading.

Why, I ask myself, Must people always lend me their books? And I think the answer is that most people don't read books anymore. So when someone finishes a book, he feels an immense amount of pride and joy, and he wants to share that with another person. The problem is that since hardly anyone reads books anymore, nor do many people from what I can tell pick up a newspaper and read actual newsprint -- now people look at their phones as they chew on the morning bagel, a truly dispiriting sight, like something out of Woody Allen's Sleeper -- I, because I read books and have decided to remain single and self-isolated so I can read as much as possible, become a book dump.

People would much rather read tweets.

Here are some little-bit-larger-than-tweet-sized chunks of apocalyptica gleaned from the news over the last week:

About 4 in 10 American adults – or nearly 40 percent – are obese, according to the latest federal government data published last week. Obesity (defined as a body mass index of 30 or more) significantly increases an individual's risk of developing heart disease, diabetes and various cancers, making the condition a major public health concern.

"About 4 in 10 American adults are obese — and it's only getting worse" 

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There's an 80,000-ton monster lurking in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California and it's still getting bigger.

Arguably more frightening than any shark, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a rapidly growing hot spot for ocean plastic, carrying 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in what is now the largest accumulation of ocean debris in the world, according to a new report Thursday in Scientific Reports.

The patch is now two times larger than the size of Texas, with bits of plastic and debris spread over more than 600,000 square miles of water, according to the three-year mapping effort from eight different organizations.

Meanwhile, the annual consumption of plastic is on the rise around the world and currently totals more than 320 million tons, according to the report. 

"The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, full of ocean plastic, keeps growing"

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Bacteria resistant to antibiotics turn up in turkey, pork chops and ground beef in the United States; in grocery store chickens in Britain; and at poultry farms in China. Antibiotic residues are found in groundwater, drinking water and streams, and in feedlot manure used as fertilizer.

Some 70 percent to 80 percent of American antibiotic sales go to livestock. In addition to the emergence of resistant disease strains, some microbiologists worry that the proliferation of antibiotics, despite their miraculous health benefits, is having a chaotic impact on microbes in the human gut.

"At Hamburger Central, Antibiotics for Cattle That Aren’t Sick"

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This is the key point made in Thomas Piketty's book, Capital in the 21st Century. Here, two things come into play: wealth from the past, and wealth from the future. The former takes the form of inheritance (hence all of the noise we hear about the evils of the "death tax"), and the latter in financial investments and speculations. Combine the power of the two, and you have, by Piketty's law, the tendency for the capital itself to grow much faster than the economy itself. This law is: r > g (the return on private capital is greater than growth of the economy).

When the rate of growth of capital as capital is terribly high—meaning, when cash as cash grows at double or even triple the rate of actual surplus value creation, or the creation of new capital/cash—then expect the size of the middle-income group to contract and the low-income one to expand. And this can happen even without a crisis (though it's certainly accelerated by such events). If not checked by regulations in banking and finance, the r > g law will assert greater and greater downward pressure on those just above or in or just below the middle-income group. Channeling G. W. F. Hegel's bad infinity, Piketty calls this the “endless inegalitarian spiral.” (As Marxist geographer David Harvey has explained in a number of lectures: Hegel's good infinity is like a cycle, or recycling, where a bad infinity is like spiral—as in, spiraling out of control.)

And indeed, the Pew Research Center analysis of government data shows that this is indeed the case. The US is in a bad infinity. Its "middle class lost ground in the vast majority of metropolitan areas from 2000 to 2014..."

"You Need to Make $148,000 to Be Rich in Seattle, and Soon Even That May Not Be Enough"