I am not sure what I am with Matt on ’cause, honestly and not insultingly, I can’t understand what you are talking about. Maybe it’s that I quickly read these blogs during my lunch break or before I leave work, but my attention starts to die way up at the top of your comments. Sorry…try consolidating your discussion.

Dan, I agree that economic impact of shipping containers (importing) is grossly overrated. Probably account for a couple hundred longshoremen jobs and some rail jobs but, relative to other industrial users like manufacturing, is very low-density employment. Outbound port capacity, on the other hand, is a major need for washington’s ag businesses and manufacturers.

Connecting the two thoughts, inbound traffic accounts for about 2/3 of the traffic at Ports of Seattle and Tacoma, so a dramatic drop off in imports caused by some combination of a weaker dollar and canal expansion is highly probable in the future. At that point, Seattle could probably make due with just Terminal 5 and Terminal 30 and let Terminal 46 redevelop into other uses. I’m personally very defensive when it comes to protecting industrials lands, but that piece of property is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to create a brand new, close in neighborhood from the ground up (well, maybe two of a kind depending on ho one views Yesler Terrace).

You seem well equipped to join in the fray!
So yeah. Awesome. Points well taken. (Mine, pruned into truncated form, to mar my intent).

Sure, “erase some of my data” (LOL! As timely as today’s headlines!) so you can look at your ‘concluded formatting and restatement of those muted and changed statements’ — and then it surely will make the sense, or in this case the ‘nonsense’, you want it to make. (I have it on authority that this is the premise behind becoming and being the High Priests who manage “the value-added, quality controlled and homogenised data” in any data set or sample set… SWEET!)

Bend my intention. Warp and twist whatever I ‘might’ be asking, to feel ’strong’ and ‘right’. SCIENCE RULES! SILENCE DEBATE ITSELF!

That should help make your case better. At least to each other. But three can play at that game: “Hey Dean, tell Colleen and Keith to text me if Matt feels bolstered by Wes chiming in all smug and chummy with more snarky, conversation-silencing gambits, none of which are germane — still! — to any of the questions posed by the original post and its pre-homogenized and value-added logical thrust…”

You agree with each other, sure. That, at the very least, is ‘obvious’. Maybe everyone agrees with you in here but me, irrespective of a method or of actual madness. Hawks, handsaws, Denmark, Copenhagen, etc etc etc. “Discuss”.

You feel good, and smart, proportional to thinking I’m ‘not even saying anything’, even though I keep getting more bombastic and shrill, hemorrhaging this prose, to pose an inevitable question, which isn’t actually even ‘my own question’, but lies there, fallow perhaps, latent in the entire problem posed by any task of attempting novel and corrective ’sustainability efforts’… just as any new fruit of any invariant Knowledge Tree inevitably results in more trouble and hassle and work to-be-done; in any static Paradise, real or imaginal. Or certainly in any paradigm that needs ‘changing’. (You guys want to ‘change the paradigm’, don’t you?)

Look around you in your offices, homes, families, bands, clubs, bowling leagues, platoons, malls, cities, meetings, cafes, second third fourth and even fifth places, for this corrosive ’social value’ of ‘duh, we all know already what we all know!’… with it’s ‘value added premise grid’. As it refuses to engage the missing part, the Excluded Middle, the actual hassle. As it silences more and more inquiry, strips itself nude at airports, allows satellites and laser eyes to come into our homes, police and fine us by robot proxy from Broadway and John…

Can you spend the same calories making fun of me it would take to sincerely answer the questions? Can you ‘try’?

And yet, isn’t this the assignment you guys pose to ‘everyone else’: ‘change!, hope!, “take a sad song”, and existing fucked up carbon purgatories, and “make it better”! Get austere! Do what you should! Want what you SHOULD want! Go green!’ Is it just me, or is that not the New New Deal you guys are in here ‘concerned about promoting’?

Wes, you are with Matt. And that’s all that matters, surely. Even Shell and BP are telling me to ‘Go Green’. Because Shell and BP are secretly supporting the ‘deniers’ in the meantime, to keep us all slaves to peteroleum… wait, what?

Crickets.

(You have to admit, a bumper sticker on a car in front of another car that read ‘HONK IF YOU ARE WAY AHEAD OF ME’ would be ‘funny’ if you saw it on the Onion or on a Hulu clip of a ‘Mr.Show’ show, or in some Pixar cartoon, instead of in some rant by a pesky Outlier who seems to be sour in some tabu way, contrary and chafing and shrill, to your ‘way of thinking’…)

Crickets.

Any other takers? Anyone who actually cares enough about the postures we make of ‘caring’ who ergo wants to get underneath our shiny facile Seattleish gloss of transcendence and INSPI[RED] goodness and who therefore (even if only on the Internet, and ‘in words’) wants to look at this Global Machinery’s ACTUAL conceptual and caloric engine with me?

As David Byrne would say (and remember, he ‘gets it’; see earlier posts about ‘bike racks’): “STILL WAITING…”

COMPUTER CRICKETS.

“On foot lol; we’re these other obvious us that sucks. We with scientific questions, not actual meaning, might be other. How big should the biggest tv screen be? More grants please!
Lol level, I am asking questions. Honk if you are way ahead of me! Are ‘I see green people!’?”

I added some punctuation for translation purposes.

Which is really cool because I AM ASKING QUESTIONS.

(You New Guys ‘don’t do quagmires’, either, I guess. Nice!)

Here, isomorphically, holographically, my deeper concerns are evidenced even in the rarefied and twee ‘free speech zone’ of a blog ‘conversation comment space’. My questions are still unanswered.

(Bumper sticker idea: “HONK IF YOU’RE WAY AHEAD OF ME!”)

We may consider such tactics (and they are everywhere being employed, in every sense of the word, and we well know this) to be examples, I think, of another, parallel dilemma: The Sullen Politics of the Youngest Child. This discursive or conceptual process (which is a strategy of scorn, eye-rolling, evasion, sneering, and a host of other hip fun remote detached unscientific opinionated stuff, but is not actually discourse per se), this deferment of engagement under false cover of presumed bulletproofness (because We All Know What We All Know, If We ARE a Homogenous Enough Us, With Numbers), upon more methodical study or reflection, may even eventually be visible as a phenomenon to Matt.

My claim is that it’s a pandemic doublethink raging loudly in ‘our’ own coterie. And forms a primary ‘pollutant’ that is far, far more potentially algebraically dangerous than mere ‘barges full of TV screens’. So there.

“I SEE GREEN PEOPLE!”

Here, let me switch to the ‘rhetorical’ strategy of directly addressing a subjectivity instead of appealing to an invisible ‘group’, (which — as a style of communication — nonetheless ultimately obviously formally works quite against the cool collectivism that is being promoted on this thread and others as ‘the Grail of Our Brave New Eco-Urbanism — participation and commitment on the part of all of ‘us’, not just ’some’ — by instead snarkily appealing to ‘other parts of the whole that aren’t the Sour Note Nail That’s Trying to Stick Out’ in this transparent attempt to banish any messy paradoxes or difficulties — or me in sum — and to ‘get back on with it’):

“Thanks Matt! Keep on Engineering!”

Crickets.

So.

So. Let me see if I am getting this. What makes the friday ‘black’ is ‘global trade of items some of us think are luxury items (because we don’t want them ourselves)’… at rates that ’seem consumerist’ to ‘us’ because we consume at a ‘different rate’… while we go on, still consuming at rates that are not to be mentioned or ever otherwise ‘compared’ to theirs, or even to ‘a theoretical potential amount of consumerism’ that ‘is’ or ‘would be’ necessarily sketched in as, ‘the appropriate level’ of ‘actual consumerism’. Or even, ‘AN appropriate level’. Science!

Surely there must be a way to school me in what should come next (hey, you know I want to Save The World, too) besides forcing me to need your guys to decide for me (on my behalf, and on behalf of All Those Weary Hands That Manufacture This Junk All Across the Remaining Slabs of Non-Western and Incompletely-as-Globalized-or-as-Globalizing-as-We-Are World; thus, for ‘us all’, of course) how much is ‘actually enough’? This is not a rhetorical question. Sadly.

Dig it. Different people from us (the Zombies Who We Aren’t, Careening With Gaia-Poisoning TV Greed Down at Coldwater Creek, because they are, wait, what? Okay! Jesus Freaks, and many of them ON FOOT LOL) need to act different than they do… because ‘they aren’t like us’, (since – hey – we all know WE’RE not zombies)… because it is a ‘false needs economy trend’ (I bet it’s THESE losers who took out those junk mortgages, too, right?) and besides, because all of this Crapstravanganza hurts other OTHER people — that aren’t like ‘us’, either (the Poor Oppressed, The East Timorese, the Future Generations, etc etc etc) — some OBVIOUS wasteful icky bad really actually obviously bad degree more hurtfully and greedily than ‘how we must be actually hurting them’, or ‘benefitting assymetrically from their labor’(“Fair Trade Coffee”… why, it says so, right here on the package!) — ‘us’ being the Good Us who is ‘not as bad’ as The Bad, ‘TV, Greedy Us’ who are, meanwhile, ‘Those Black Friday Zombies, in the first place…

It’s the Politics of the Middle Sibling.

Where is the science in this, again? How do you really see this being rigorized, beyond blogging about it with irritation? Don’t stop at TVs, take me with you on a thrill ride to Copenhagen itself. Let’s Roll!

Even if I submit, how do you see hundreds (thousands, millions) more people ’submitting’, when they are simply being asked to, or expected to; and yet why? “Because ‘we’ want them to”. ‘We’ being:’some of us, who ‘get it’, and have ‘The New Vision Thing’? ‘Them’ still being: the duped US THAT SUCKS.

“Actually”? Actually, is it? Hmmm. Okay. The people WE actually want to be? Remind me, again?

Crickets.

I am appealing to you science people and sustainability people WITH SCIENTIFIC QUESTIONS (full disclosure #2: I am NOT a Jesus Freak or a William F. Buckely Zombie): where is a line drawn? What happens when some freak (of whatever stripe) — who is (mercifully) NOT a Sarah Palin Soccer Pop — inquires what your ACTUAL threshold of ‘consumerism, itself’ is? (Or will it again depend on what ‘is’ is? Or worse: on what the MEANING of ‘is’ is?). Thorny. Thorny.

“It’s the Global Warming, stupid!” And of course: even if it isn’t, totally, for super-certain, well… gosh! Like all good, pious, sensible-shoe, already-invested apologists and believers: ‘we can’t be sure, Pascal’s Wager, wot? let’s be on the safe side, leave it to us, etc etc, cuz hey, it MIGHT BE…’

The mind boggles! The boon doggles.

What happens, say, when one of these OTHER maverick ‘mavericks’ (who isn’t ‘denying’ anything, is just wanting some Open Source Methodology Disclosure and Frame Control Participation) asks, ‘hey, what is the framework of this “sustainability”, itself? What is the metric, beyond spin control crisis management, besides The Newer Kids On The Developing Block, besides {B} being {Not-A}?’

HOW BIG SHOULD THE BIGGEST TV SCREEN BE?

Crickets.

{A} is not {B}. True, true. {B}, in a sense, is “a kind of” {‘Not-A’}. Or can be. Sure! There are lots of logical games to play with {A’s} and {B’s}. These processes can be modelled and tossed around, and heaps of specific things rhyme with them somewhat, or fit into these schematics. (“MORE GRANTS PLEEZE!”) Beyond a pendulum, beyond ‘Blue States are not Red’ (at an inverse proportion to how ‘Red States Are Not Blue’, et al), there should be a transparent rigor to these eco-synergies, if eco-synergies they be.

But who decides? “We do”. Okay, who are ‘we’ if some us us are still being identified explicitly as your ‘them’?

{C}? What I mean.

Crickets.

On the other hand, shippers seem to be developing some pretty efficient cargo ships, complete with kite sails http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0403/p13s01-sten.html

and the opening of artic shipping channels will create shorter shipping routes.

as a side note: the widening of the Panama Canal, to be complete in 2013, is going to cut Long Beach, Seattle, and other west coast ports out of a significant portion of eastbound containers…