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career paths in the hinterland
Tuesday, September 15 2009
As I had yesterday, today I spent the afternoon in a prison working on a list of computer issues. But this time the prison was Woodbourne in Sullivan County, I carpooled with Jed from Emanuel's in Stone Ridge, and the food I ate before leaving was leftover Chinese.
On the long drive to Woodbourne, Jed asked at one point why I wasn't driving a car fueled with biodiesel. So I explained that biodiesel had become just another fungible diesel product and offered no real advantages over fossil-fuel-derived diesel. There had been a time when biodiesel was cheap (even free), back when hippies would dumpster dive McDonalds grease traps and filter it on their own. But then companies sprung up to commercialize the process and now it was nothing special. Not surprisingly, it hadn't replaced regular diesel. We live in a wasteful society, but even if we eliminated all that waste and recycled everything, we'd still be dependent on unsustainable supplies of virgin materials. Until we do recycle everything, though, there will always be niches for resourceful people to take advantage of society's wastefulness.
I told Jed of a fanciful idea I'd had of a theoretical energy supply that hasn't been tapped. Someone could design a large Roomba-style robot that marched around randomly in the forest slurping up dead leaves, powering itself by somehow burning those leaves. And with some fraction of the leaves, the robot could perform whatever chemistry is needed to convert the reduced carbon in the cellulose into the sort of carbon chains found in fossil fuels, gradually filling a ten gallon container with fuel. Whenever you'd need fuel you'd go out into the woods to find your robot and drain it into a gas can, and the robot would continue on its way, treating the forest as open range for the grazing of dead leaves. This would be terrible for the environment, of course, because dead leaves are important to forest ecosystems (and plenty of insects and spiders would get slurped up and killed). But it would be carbon-neutral and tap an otherwise completely-unexploited resource. Eventually, though, there would come a day when everyone would have one of these robots and the forest would be crawling with them. At some point the leaf-litter resource would be over-exploited, and hardly any would remain on the forest floor for the robots to slurp. There would also be the problem of robot rustling, with people stealing them outright or just stealing their fuel.
While we were going about our business in the dreary semi-subterranean computer lab, we could hear the constant commotion of prisoners out in the yard (which is just outside the windows of the lab). A large group were seated at some tables either playing chess or cards and talking loudly among themselves. It was a beautiful sunny day, and this was how these men were spending it. As I pointed out to Jed, locking up prisoners and throwing away the key is just another luxury of our absurdly profligate society, right along with spending half the world's military budget and having an absurdly expensive yet ineffective health care system. These inefficiencies act as a drag on our economy, and nations that don't have them will eventually eat our lunch.
The waste of human potential isn't limited to the prisoners; it's also a feature of the lives of those who guard them. Assignments for these guards usually place them in chairs for hours at a time with absolutely nothing to do. Jed says that they are permitted to read, but you almost never see them with a book or even a magazine. Yet becoming a corrections officer is often an aspiration for the non-corrections-officers working in the prison. There's a woman working in the school who is a civilian and whose job it is to do the day-to-day tasks necessary to keep the educational facilities working. She unlocks doors, collects passwords from students, and approves printouts. But today she was excitedly talking to a guard about her next step on the career ladder. She was studying, she said, to become a corrections officer. If things worked out for her, she'd be making a lot more money and have to file a lot less paperwork. What she didn't say was that she'd be spending her days sitting around like a spayed housecat, though always watching the clock and anxious that some small oversight on her part might cause a problem that would cause her to get fired. It says something for this miserable part of the world that what she was describing was something she actually hoped for. But if it weren't for the prisons, this part of New York would be almost as jobless and empty as Chernobyl.
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