Sorry you missed the big meeting where all of this was decided. Your gold plated invitation and all-expense-paid ultra-luxury hotel reservation must have been lost in the mail.

Relatively few major decisions about economies are made by governments. Most economic decisions in the capitalist sphere are made by investors (the stock markets), corporate boards, private capital, investment banks, very rich individuals, and the like. The Federal Reserve (in the US) makes big decisions, but the Fed is only a quasi-government organization. It's mostly a creature of the banking industry with a mandate to maintain liquidity and keep inflation around 2% and the official unemployment rate as low as possible.

So, millions of large investors vote semi-second by semi-second on all sorts of economic questions. One question they have voted on is whether to invest in geothermal power. Again and again, big money has shied away from that -- and other -- unfamiliar or risky kinds of projects. In most places, nuclear power has gotten a cold shoulder from investors as a result of 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.

Investors are a nervous lot -- bent on buying low, selling high, and maximizing profits. Nervous and a bit fickle. They live their lives with at least one eye on the market's ticker tape. They are mostly risk averse.

"Hey, everyone. Invest in International Magmatron! We'll drill into mostly quiet volcanos in the Pacific Northwest and power up Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia. It's your can't-lose opportunity to get in on the ground floor of this futuristic thermorama."

Investors read the prospectus and got clammy hands, hyperventilated, and required medical attention.

In the meantime, there is the big multi-trillion dollar petrochemical industry that is in place, predictable, and cranking out billions of dollars in profits. Well, sure... it's wrecking the planet, but it IS very profitable, and everybody likes profits. The planet might die in a century but our Dynamo Energy Fund could go broke in 15 minutes, if we're not careful. We just hate going broke!

S0, Karl, that's how decisions about magma energy, and many other worthwhile projects are made. It's not nice, I hate it, but that is, unfortunately, the way the system works.

They don't seem that devoted — karl stone

No, they don't. Not in Washington, nor in most capitols.

It isn't that they are so much opposed to geo-thermal as they are opposed to risking their economies, as currently operated. This is not a mistaken danger. A sudden switch away from fossil fuels to any other system could not be done overnight, and the transition is more likely to be wrenching and wrecking rather than smooth and pleasant--whether the destination is geothermal, hydrogen, photovoltaic, wind, or hydro.

Yes, global warming is going to be maximally wrenching and wrecking, so much so that we (collectively, everybody) are well advised to take the risks involved in dramatic change, now.

Oh, oh: we're off script.

A very insightful assessment.

I identify with WW quip which you find heinous. There comes a time when one just has to accept that one isn't entirely consistent, and there's not much to be done about it--hence, "Very well then I contradict myself".

Whitman probably felt "full" -- not full of himself, but full of life, of people. Multitudes.

I haven't studied Whitman as much as I should have; was he full of highly inconsistent ideas?

Whitman was, as far as I know, a working class 19th century gay man. He did not have much education but he must have been paying attention while he was there; he attended public school in Brooklyn, NY until around 1828 +/-, and began working for a printer at the age of 12. He worked as a printer, a rural school teacher, a journalist, an editor, a clerk, a nurse in the Civil War, and a poet. "Poet" was probably not his day job. He also drove street cars (pulled by horses). So he mercifully didn't attend college, major in philosophy, and develop a streamlined personality and thought system.

He is considered one of Americas most important poets of the time, along with Emily Dickinson. High raise which he did not receive in his lifetime. His forms and subject matter 'unnerved' many people; he wrote about the body, and the manly love of comrade --which he celebrated and promoted, among other things,

You might want to read When Lilacs Last in the Door Yard Bloom'd, a poem he wrote in response to Lincoln's assassination.

Two things we expect from you:
Bitterness
Crankiness

When you get all "Look at me, I'm all reasonable and stuff," it confuses us. — Clarky

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman

There hasn't been much connection between what is called "the left" and what is called "the working class" for some time. Especially in the US, 'class' terminology has been out of fashion for decades. We are all "middle class" now. What was once the "marxist left" has literally died out.

The "politically correct", neomarxists, and all of the various identity groups from which one hears so much are neither a class nor a political movement. Saying so isn't a criticism. They are social movements, and may or may to be very important. Whatever, they don't fit into "class" categories.

You are misreading Karl. Where Karl Stone lives (UK) "class" is still valid terminology, and people have more awareness of their class status. His views have nothing in common with Tucker and Fox.

Whether he actually 'really' did it or not, I don't pretend to know for absolute sure and I don't think any of us do. I don't have a dog in the fight and I don't think either of them is completely innocent. They both sound horrible to me. — Baden

The vigor of your attack strongly suggests that you do, indeed, have a dog in the fight.

A judge in one country voted one way, a jury in another country voted the opposite way.

political parasites like karl stone — Baden

You are speaking immoderately in your moderator's role. Bad practice.

when an admin said some mean words to him. — Baden

Which you did. If you want to play on one of the teams, then you can't be an umpire.

The difference between 1960's civil rights - and political correctness is summed by considering MLK's dream that his children will be judged by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin... and paragraphs following — karl stone

@Baden, Karl's explication of political correctness, PoMo, and allied neo-marxism, strikes me as an insightful and succinct summary. You may not agree with his conclusions, but he has demonstrated clear thinking.

We might blame the internet, social media, on-line advertising, cable television channels, and so on for some of what you see going on, How so?

The social turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s was covered by the mainstream press and 3 television networks (in the US). The number of local or national observers, interpreters, and commenters was quite small. At the time, the 5:30 pm CBS News with Walter Cronkite (in the US) announced 'reality'. Outside of narrow official channels, there was direct experience. One could go to San Francisco and try out the Summer of Love, or one could demonstrate against the War in Vietnam. There were very small alternative publications which distributed endorsements of far-out lifestyles and politics.

Gay liberation started in the 1960s and gradually developed in large cities. There was no national coordination, no how-to manuals. People traveled, picked up ideas, and brought them back home. This is largely the way the world had worked for a long time.

Once the Internet, personal computers, distribution networks, good browsers, search engines, etc. were in place -- let's say around 2005, advertising money -- the lifeblood of the press and networks -- began to migrate to online venues. As it did so, the capacity of "old mainstream media" to continue as before began to be hobbled.

Social media platforms (on computers and smart phones) gave new voices to anyone with a cause or an opinion. Observation, interpretation, and commentary became increasingly decentralized, fragmented, and de-professionalized. All sorts of political opinion, from the thoughtful margins to the outright crackpot, had a chance to speak to the public.

Media isn't the only factor, but it certainly plays a role in politically correct identity politics.

While we can't put the genie of ubiquitous access back in the bottle, we can take stock of how it has shaped / and warped current politics.

I am increasingly out of touch with pop culture, and I know nothing about Heard or Depp. I did read about the verdict. A plague on both their houses.

I suspect that a substantial portion of the celebrity 'abuse' cases (or cases involving very well known people, even if they aren't celebrities per se) are bogus. That is, no actual harm occurred, but some action can later be presented as abuse to a credulous movement (#metoo).

Being a woman is not sufficient reason to extend automatic belief.

PoMo didn't invent relativism, of course, but to whatever extent relativism is a feature of PoMo, I find it useful. Different groups of people hold different moral systems, and to negotiate working arrangements, one must practice flexible diplomacy. Never mind settling disputes between Hindus and Moslems. One own siblings can present chasms of difference.

One need not abandon the standards that reliably guide one's own behavior to negotiate with others whose standards are quite different. Still, under the friction of interacting with both congenial and uncongenial people, one's own certainties may be weakened. For instance, uncongenial Christians and uncongenial religious people in general had a part to play in my distancing myself from religion. The less stake I have in theism, the easier it is to deal with theists.

Then too, I think everyone is a relativist whenever it is convenient. We may be against war, for instance, until our favorite ox is gored. Ukraine's ox excused arm sales that were not enthused about when the destination was Syria and other places.

If anything is permissible — Banno

If anything is permissible, then God is dead? per Jack Karamazov's brother, Ivan.

Optimistic perhaps, but I see no magical thinking in these proposals — karl stone

The 'magic' isn't in the basic technology. There's no 'magic' in the physics and chemistry of using hydrogen instead of hydrocarbons. The 'magic' lies in the human part of the equation, in supposing that the truly massive investment in fossil fuels can or will be switched to an equally massive investment in hydrogen or geothermal (magma) in a relatively short period of time. Oil companies have sunk petawads of money in drilling holes in the ocean to suck up toxic sludge; it takes a lot of magic to suppose that the whole fossil fuel industry and its millions of investors and billions of consumers can or will switch to anything else in the near future.

My reading of the global warming situation is that time will run out before we can make sufficient adaptation (like using hydrogen, reducing population, sequestering CO2, etc.). "Time running out" means that the heat gains will begin to unravel the economic fabric of the world's economies. Without robust economies, we're pretty much dead in the water.

Major industrial or technological changes take time to implement, usually 40 years, +/-. In the 75 years since it's arrival, nuclear fission has has not been fully implemented. The infrastructure for ever higher volume data transmission through the Internet is still being implemented, never mind fully developed. Computers, in all their various and sundry forms are still being developed and integrated, and that's around 75 years.

If it takes 50-60 years to implement hydrogen, along with geothermal, we are out to 2070-80, by which time the chickens of global warming will be home and roosting. There is absolutely no guarantee that we will convert to hydrogen. Supposing that we will have done so is where the magic comes in.

Demographers have said the 2100 population will be around 11 billion. Gaining 3 billion people, coping (or not coping) with at least a 2ºC global temperature rise, and the consequent increasing competition for food, water, and livable environment looks to me more like an end game than anything else.

Look, I hope we get our collective acts together to solve our various big problems. It just doesn't seem like we are going to be successful or quick enough.

"Magical thinking" is from Kunstler's book, "Too Much Magic". Kunstler and Smil both warn us away from solutions which require 'magic' of some sort to work. Replacing petroleum with hydrogen is an example. Hydrogen is a far, far less dense energy source than oil, and it takes energy to get it. If transported, it has to be liquified and kept under cold pressure until it is fairly close to the end user, This can be done, BUT it can not be done without using considerable energy apart from the energy in the hydrogen gas.

Capturing tidal energy is possible, but claiming that it will be a significant source of energy requires a bit of hocus locus, because (as far as I know) tidal energy research is in an early stage. Announcing that in 40 years, everyone will use public transit sounds like a good idea, but it is just more magic if one can not explain how that happy event is going to be brought about.

Fusion is another piece of magical thinking, The magic isn't in the fusion; the magic is in the prediction that it will work, will work well, and will be on line within a few years.

The most magical piece of thinking is that without coal and oil, we will go on our merry way, living as we have been living--plastics and all--just using different sources of energy.

In his "world made by hand" novels, Kunstler illustrates what life would be like after an abrupt break with our energy past. Life goes on, but it is far more difficult. Whether the break is abrupt or more gradual, we should stop thinking about doing things like magically replacing 1 billion gas powered cars with 1 billion electrical cars. (There are about 1 bn cars on the world's roads now,).

I nunc intellegite.

Quomodo stultus pertinax sapiens efficitur?

oops, too obscure.

But surely you've heard of "glittering generalities"? "A glittering generality or glowing generality is an emotionally appealing phrase so closely associated with highly valued concepts and beliefs that it carries conviction without supporting information or reason."

between dying like a dog and living like a king. — Agent Smith

That's a scriptural generality: "Anyone who is among the living has hope —even a live dog is better off than a dead lion!" Ecclesiastes 9:4

Are "glittering generalities" a) better than b) worse than c) about the same as sweeping generalities?

Sola dosis facit venenum. — Agent Smith

Congratulations. You are the first person to post this Latin phrase.

I have a pessimistic, fatalistic streak, I suppose. I am more confident of pessimistic predictions than optimistic ones. Maybe it's genetic. Some people seem to be born optimists. At 75 it's too late to rewire my brain, neural plasticity not withstanding, You, on the other hand, seem to be very optimistic, so go for it!

I'm not in the battery business, and I'm neither a physicist o chemist. My guess is that a lot of midnight oil is being burned on the problem. It just seems to be very difficult to corral electrons and stuff them into boxes. Then there are problems with heat, chemical stability of the storage media over the long run, not to mention cost $$$.

Still, if you compare a run of the mill D cell with the battery in your cell phone... there was some real progress. Maybe there is an undiscovered exotic molecule out there that will absorb and release electric energy really really well.

Eventually (in a few billions of trillion years) all this will be stopped due to heat entropy, but hey. — god must be atheist

We won't have to wait for a flat-out frosted cosmos to (paradoxical phrased) cook our goose. Long before the last erg of heat is given up, the sun will have expanded to envelop the earth within itself. The planet will survive as a cinder.

Long before the sun fries us, it is likely, under the best of circumstances, that we will have run our evolutionary course into the ground.

Long before we have run ourselves into oblivion, we may have spoiled the earth to a degree that we will have all died off.

Not to leave a disasteroid crashing into earth off the list.

Magma seems like a fine source of energy to me, at least where it is accessible. The Pacific Ocean is surrounded by a ring of volcanic activity related to continental subduction and ocean floor spreading, I'm not sure where it is, and is not, accessible. I suppose there are limits o how deep a access pipe can go.

So, drill baby drill.

(1800s - 1900s), — Agent Smith

In 1960 the world population was 3 billion. At that time, there was, already, some concern about CO2 among expert circles, and there was concern about population. Yes, we could have done more 60 years ago, assuming that the 3 billion free-agent humans were willing to forego what they thought was material progress, what they thought was the right thing to do.

We are not good at planning for long-term consequences. Young people tend not to think usefully about what it will be like when they are old, even though old age is only a few decades away. Once they are around 50, old age becomes a more cogent concern. People alive in 2022 can not usually think very usefully about 2050 or 2060, never mind 2100. It's too distant. 2030 is close enough to worry about,

Were we skilled at predicting and planning for events 50 to 100 years out, we would conduct our collective affairs differently. But we are not.

We certainly could slow down the rate at which we produce and consume, allowing nature to catch up on carbon renewal. Unfortunately, even if we did that, global warming would continue for a considerable period of time.

The idea of slowing down production and consumption sounds good, until we consider the severe consequences awaiting. Slamming the brakes on production/consumption will bring about a world-wide depression of great severity. The world's economy simply can not turn on a dime.

There are many ideas like yours which directly address the problem (say, let's all live like it was 1890). The problem is that radical shifts in production / consumption will cause the sort of horrendous catastrophe in the short term that global warming will produce in the slightly longer term,

What does this mean? I think it means we're screwed. It's like this: if you are in the way of an oncoming disaster -- flood, forest fire, category 6 hurricane, a dozen tornadoes, poisonous toads falling from the sky-- whatever, it's too late to do anything about it. You must either flee or perish, maybe perish even I you do flee.

Of course we should keep working diligently towards solutions, but keeping it in mind somewhere between our ears, that there is no magic solution where everything turns out just perfectly.

I like Vaclav Smil's book -- How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going 2022. For example, he shows how much energy it takes to manufacture a windmill and turbine, for instance, how much energy it will capture, and how long it will last (on average). It isn't that windmills are a bad idea, they just don't provide carbon free energy. Or a nice red greenhouse grown tomato has about 5 tablespoons of diesel fuel embedded in it, figuring all the inputs and distribution. Nothing wrong with hothouse tomatoes; they are just not carbon free.

Smils is a physicist, now retired from the University of Manitoba, and doesn't come down hard on either side of the global warming debate. Rather he shows what is physically possible, what is physically unlikely, and what can not work at all. He's an exceptionally clear writer, very accessible.

"[It is] reassuring to read an author so impervious to rhetorical fashion and so eager to champion uncertainty. . . Smil’s book is at its essence a plea for agnosticism, and, believe it or not, humility — the rarest earth metal of all. His most valuable declarations concern the impossibility of acting with perfect foresight. Living with uncertainty, after all, “remains the essence of the human condition.” Even under the most optimistic scenario, the future will not resemble the past. "—The New York Times"

We are up against time. Yes, we will transition to fossil free energy eventually, because we will have used it all up--if industrial civilization lasts long enough. As Vaclav Smils explains clearly, we will have to use a lot of fossil fuels to manufacture solar, wind, and nuclear power. Once we have it all in place, we will have to replace it ever so often, because stuff wears out.

new lead — Bird-Up

Never mind lead; what about lithium, indium, lanthanum, cerium, cobalt, neodymium, samarium, europium, terbium, and dysprosium? Rare earths are critical for 'green' energy and related applications. It isn't that rare earths are necessarily rare. It's just that they don't usually appear in concentrations that make them easy to obtain.

WELCOME to TPF.

Planning is the critical piece missing from the recycling process. Manufacturers must plan for the products entire lifespan. Don't make cars, refrigerators, or computers out of material that can not be recycled. Plan for their eventual retrieval and reprocessing. Don't make trillions of single use objects without establishing the means for their collection and reprocessing (water bottles, paper envelopes, or diapers). Individual efforts are part of the solution, but without industrial planning, we will get what we have got: a large percentage of readily recyclable materials being wasted / lost, and a lot of non-recyclable materials accumulating -- somewhere.

I'm not a chemist, but I understand that some plastics can be made from biomatter. But plastics come in a huge range of molecular structures with all sorts of extreme performance characteristics. Can you make Teflon out of ore oil?

I'm an old man, and I like plastic, just like everybody else does. Great stuff. But people lived full, meaningful, interesting lives before plastic. For instance, people used to keep food in their refrigerators in glass containers. Worked fine, until you dropped it. Very few people died as a result.

NO! We should definitely stop producing, consuming, and disposing of stuff the way we do. It's just that when you look around, there are megatons of stuff that are not going to get recycled.

All well and good about the sources of post modernism. What about too much magic expected of magma?

The US is no more violent, has no more mental illnesses, and has no more crime than other developed countries. And even excluding the US, the same pattern emerges; the more guns there are the more mass shootings there are. Which is fucking obvious. — Michael

Indeed.

The numbers of deaths caused by gun fire will very likely remain high because there is a surfeit of hand guns, rifles, and assault weapons. GUNS=DEATH.

As for the mental health of Americans, I would think that we are no crazier than people in other countries. At least, most of the people I have met in my life have seemed perfectly sane, even if they held insane political and religious views. I live in one of the states with the lowest rate of gun deaths (less than 10 per 100,000) and a liberal political culture (MN). Maybe if I lived in Mississippi I would think differently.

How much violence occurs in one's vicinity depends on where you live in the US. This map shows the distribution:



"Mass murder by gunfire" accounts for a slim fraction of gun deaths, 38 or 513 out of 19,384 murders carried out one-by-one in 2020, depending. ("Mass murder" is not clearly defined. It might be 20 at one go, or it might be 3, depending on the definition. Of course, it's crazy that we even have a statistic for mass murder, however vaguely defined.)

I like to cite the case of the Bath School massacre perpetrated by Andrew Kehoe on May 18, 1927, in Bath Township, Michigan, under the category "Nothing New Under the Sun." 38 elementary schoolchildren and 6 adults were killed, and at least 58 other people were injured after dynamite placed in the school was detonated. Kehoe, the 55-year-old school board treasurer, was angered by increased taxes and his defeat in the April 5, 1926, election for township clerk.

Prior to his timed explosives detonating at the Bath Consolidated School building, Kehoe had murdered his wife, Nellie Price Kehoe, and firebombed his farm. Arriving at the site of the school explosion, Kehoe died when he detonated explosives in his truck.

Was Kehoe insane? He was certainly obsessed -- the dynamiting of the school required considerable planning preparation. Apparently losing this election was intolerable (See Trump, 2020).

Afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted was NEVER a function of the press or media. That honorable and thankless task belongs to gadflies***. The 'media' have always served the interests of their owners, whether they were crude money grubbers or refined money grubbers.

***a fly that bites livestock, especially a horsefly, warble fly, or botfly.
an annoying person, especially one who provokes others into action by criticism.
"always a gadfly, he attacked intellectual orthodoxies"

That said, the press and the media have also managed to be a useful source of information, ranging from low quality to high quality, despite themselves.

feck — ZzzoneiroCosm

Congratulations! You are the first person at TPF to use "feck" properly. (It has appeared several other times as a euphemism or local slang substitute for "fuck"). The usual manifestation of feck is in "feckless".

According to Google Ngram, "feckless" appears in print now more than ever before. That more human efforts are being branded as feckless than in previous decades and centuries strikes me as altogether meet, right, and salutary.

we need shit done and we need people to follow dictates of organizations to do the shit — schopenhauer1

A hymn to shit getting done by The Fugs Gospel Choir:

(gospel sound)
River of shit
River of shit
Flow on, flow on, river of shit
Right from my toes
On up to my nose
Flow on, flow on, river of shit

(transition to Rock)
I've been swimming In this river of shit
More than 20 years, and I'm getting tired of it
Don't like swimming, hope it'll soon run dry
Got to go on swimming, cause I don't want to die

(spoken with gospel sound in background):
Who dealt this mess, anyway?
Yea, it's an old card player's term
But sometimes you can use the old switcheroo and it can be applied to ...
Frontal politics
What I mean is ...
Who was it that set up a system
Supposedly democratic system
Where you end up always voting for the lesser of two evils?
I mean, Was George Washington the lesser of two evils?
Sometimes I wonder ...
You got some guy that says
"For God sake, we've got to stop having violence in this country."
While he's spending 16,000 dollars a second snuffing gooks

(gospel sound musical ending)
A wiiiiiiiiiiiiide, big brown river, yea, bringing health, wealth, and prosperity to every man, women, and child

Go here to hear it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svPDzNO6GQk

"What would communism look like" is an old debate. In any case, it will be up to the people to decide. Presumably, the people will not decide on a dictatorship a la Stalin, Mao, Castro, et al. I don't know what it will look like.

I still don't think you have an alienated worker if he thinks he's not — Hanover

People harbor all sorts of delusions. On the other hand, waking up every day thinking that one is the victim of systematic dispossession and extortion is generally not good for one's mental health. The exploited have to find ways to get through the day without going berserk.

Whether we live in the Soviet Union, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, or today's USA, one has to find a way to live in the world -- and people do. People manage to get through the day -- and actually enjoy life despite Marx.

I think Marx was correct that capitalism exploits workers: it alienates them from their work and from the goods and services they produce. At the same time, I must acknowledge that your observation about people who do not think they are alienated (in Marx's sense) reflects reality for many. Capitalists and workers have negotiated back and forth to reach a tolerable middle ground. Not for everybody, but for many.

schopenhauer1's antinatalist logic is valid. Life sucks, and having children perpetuates life's suckiness. I agree that life sucks, but not so much that no body should have more children. Similarly, I agree that many people do not seem to be alienated from their work, their product--whatever that is, be it nuts and bolts or legal services.

"Managing to get through one's day without going berserk" is not an endorsement of the existing system. Workers' vision becomes much clearer when they experience the harsh side of capitalism, the side where there is no negotiation towards a tolerable middle ground. It is also the case that capitalism works very hard to portray itself positively. The positive portrait is the one hanging in most Americans' living room.

Stirring words!

"Stirring" is here an adjective, not a verb. Good philosophers, of course, are never caught merely "stirring words".

True, the worker might feel isolated, true. But workers may well have close companionship in their isolation. Marx's description is abstract; millions-- hell, billions of people are, by Marx's definition alienated and it doesn't feel good. The alienated worker is insecure (he can be abruptly laid off. His workplace can be closed, at great cause to himself and his community. Life may not be the same again, quite literally. A worker's identity as a this sort of worker in such and such a trade may be suddenly stripped away.

The conditions of work, particularly intrusive monitoring, control, pressure to perform at a high rate, is part of the experience.

Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the estrangement (German: Entfremdung) of people from aspects of their human nature (Gattungswesen, 'species-essence') as a consequence of living in a society of stratified social classes. The alienation from the self is a consequence of being a mechanistic part of a social class, the condition of which estranges a person from their humanity.[1]

The theoretical basis of alienation is that the worker invariably loses the ability

- to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions;
- to determine the character of said actions;
- to define relationships with other people; and
- to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour.

Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists.

per Wikipedia

Most organizations, whether government, corporation, or non-profit, operate under a very similar model of top-down authority and control, which practically guarantees that few employees will possess independence, executive agency, and minimal supervision. It may well be the case that large swathes of workers either prefer or readily adapt to top-down authority and control, and do not feel limited in their job experiences. I've met plenty of workers who were not bothered by the (often heavy) hand of management.

That isn't to say they are unalienated. It is to say they are not unhappy in their work--lucky them.

Alienation isn't primarily a "feeling". It's an objective circumstance. How unhappy employees may feel depends to a large extent on their expectations. I've worked in temp jobs where I had very few positive expectations, and wasn't oppressed by the meagre quality of work life. Landing in a job where one lacks competence to perform leads to many unhappy experiences, and may not be the fault of the employer. I've found myself in a couple of jobs where I was not competent to handle loathsome detailed paper processing systems and failed. Not the employer's fault -- more mine for lack of self knowledge.

What does unanlienated worker look like? — schopenhauer1

I don't know what percentage of workers are alienated or not alienated. I've been in both camps (more the former than the latter). Unalienated work (and this worker) experienced in a specific job:

a) considerable executive agency
b) minimal supervision
c) recognition and reward
d) independence to shape the work

I was not self-employed. The job was with an AIDS prevention non-profit. I was not highly paid, but received what I considered a good wage. The job was performing "street outreach" in situations where HIV could be transmitted sexually--bath houses, adult bookstores, parks, bars, and the like.

While "street outrace" had been carried out in other contexts, and AIDS outreach was being carried out in most large cities, every agency seems to have started from scratch. The task of the agencies was to find workers who were competent and willing to carry out the job. There were enough who were competent, but few who were willing. As a result, the hired workers were generally given carte blanche.

It was "mission driven" work; I had a very real stake in the gay male community, and its future. So I was very engaged and was quite willing to perform the under very unstandard hours and working conditions.

I felt very fulfilled.

Another job which involved fulfillment and the the four characteristics listed above was teaching a smoking cessation class for a hospital. This was a part time job involving a month long class (16 hours) for small groups of smokers who had not managed to quit smoking on their own (which most people do manage).

I felt less of a "mission" in this job, but I enjoyed delivering the instructional and group-processing content.

In contrast to these two fulfilling experiences, I had another job in AIDS prevention which was a nightmare -- not because of the clients, but because of the agency.

The features of this job were:

a) minimal executive agency
b) intrusive supervision
c) minimal recognition
d) hostility

Almost all of the negative aspects of this job could be laid to the peculiar psychopathology of the management (and consequently, the staff). Tight control with minimal direction, poor communication, and internal competition characterized the workplace. It was an unwindable game, one leaving most of the staff dissatisfied with their individual situations.

So imagine you live in a state where sexual abuse of children is tolerated, say it's Montana. There's no law against it. Would you say that in Montana, sexual abuse is a matter of choice? — frank

Well, Frank -- if a behavior is tolerated, and there are no laws defining what a behavior is, then it is a matter of personal interpretation as to whether one can permissibly do x, y, or z. You've raised a non-issue, seems to me.