A fundamental principle in economics is that there are more wants than there are resources available to fill those wants. While there may be enough for everybody to have a little, there’s not enough for everyone to have as much as they want (read:I WANT IT ALL!!!). Doesn’t matter what “IT” is, there’s simply not enough currently available to go (all the way) around. So you need to get more.

First choice is go look for some more. (Well, for some groups, the FIRST option is to take some from other groups that already have some, but let’s set the military option aside for the moment and try a “friendlier” approach at the start.) Depending on what the resource is, it’s likely that you can find it SOMEWHERE just lying around. (Natural gas as an example is harder to come up with examples of, but even so there are occational times in certain locations where it is present at the surface without specialized equipment being required to get at it. Collecting and using this “natural” natural gas, on the other hand, might be problematic, but the principle holds). So, all you have to do is wander around long enough and far enough, find it, and take it back home.

Unless, of course, the source is located on the property of someone else who also want it…which goes back to the (for the moment ignored) military concept that possession is 99% of ownership. Negotiation might persuade the current possessor that their total utility (economic concept that provides a non-specific way to identify how to value different items in a meaningful way, so you really can compare apples to kumquats) would be enhanced if they “sell” you some of theirs. If the owner fully buys into the scarcity principle, they simply don’t have enough to let you have any, and you are forced to look elsewhere.

Look long enough and far enough, and you might find that there is no more just lying around for your acquisition and so you need to look outside the box for more.

So, what do you do if the resource you would like/want/need/lust after is underground? Well, historically, there’s a couple of ways to go about getting it.

You could dig a hole down until you find/reach it and take it back up the same hole. Some products (like dirt) are fairly effective in obtaining by this method. As the material is extracted, however, obtaining the next batch is further down, requiring extending the hole downward. Eventually you reach a point where you are working as hard (or harder) at simply making the hole as obtaining the material itself, and you have created a mine.

Dealing with all of the associated dangers and challenges of working underground (dark, lack of ventilation, water {too much or not enough}, finding reliable canary breeders, marauding dwarves, dragon caves…) makes mining a challenging process. And you also need to provide a creative way to deal with the other materials you encounter while obtaining the desired resource (say, the useless gold/silver/copper/coal/diamonds you run across in the middle of your dirt mine). Depending on the relative richness of a particular location, the actual amount of “junk” materials can be several orders of magnitude greater than the desired materials. Removing several tons of rock to obtain a few kilograms of the good stuff not only means you have to move several tons of rocks in the first place (tiring to exhausting, depending on your level of stamina) but you need to find a place to put it (annoying at first, totally exasperating later on as the further you go, the further you have to move this stuff, too).

An alternate method of extracting buried goods is to make the hole wider rather than deeper…a pit mine rather than a shaft mine. So, you start with a (relatively) shallow hole in the ground and as you find/collect the good stuff (and move the “not-so-good” stuff out of the way) you make the hole wider rather than deeper. Gravel and granite are commonly obtained this way. (Technically, I suspect “dirt” mines would also fall into this category as it’s usually a resource that is readily found in more shallow locations, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually visited a working dirt mine, so it’s just a guess.)

As the scale of the operation increases, you eventually end up with a strip mine, where you elongate a side and put the tailings at the ends. This is especially effective when the good stuff grows in rows (veins) and you can extract more in one (relative) direction than randomly wandering around hoping to get lucky. These kind of mines work basically by taking a mountain and moving it over to the left a few feet/yards/miles. (And it’s the same principle even when the mountain is hidden by being buried up to it’s peak in all directions with dirt…you can be standing on top of a mountain and be totally unaware, simply because you think the ground is level as far as you can see.)

So far, we looked at the process of getting access to the resource we wanted. It (eventually) required moving a lot of stuff we don’t want to get to what we do. A principal problem with this method of goods acquisition is what to do with the unwanted stuff. In the “best of all worlds” situation, you simply move it to another place you own and it’s only your “problem” (so to speak). However, it’s not likely you will be able to contain the residue the longer you work and the greater the scale of your operation. Eventually there will be collateral damage from your waste piles (a friend of mine lived a couple of miles from a municipal land fill [garbage dump]; he observed a change in his local climate as the heat coming off the pile would cause weather fronts to split over the site and the resulting amount of rainfall that fell on his property dropped over time) and a subsequent protest that you curb your activities (pitchforks and torches optional).

Much of the debate regarding remediation of current and former extraction sites involve what needs to be done, and more to the point, who should pay for it (NOT ME, is the claim of all parties involved). That there is ongoing damage seems clear, but the way of restoration is anything but.

Even more difficult to deal with is when the mining operation takes place in an urban environment.

This past weekend, an artist was detained and arrested while working on a mural in Detroit. The city commissioned him to make the mural and the police believed he was involved in vandalism. It came to my attention as a 30-second blurb on a local news broadcast (I live about 130 km WNW). Further research online brought up multiple other sources of information giving more details of what happened. Each source provided data, but each also gave spin on what was presented and how to “understand” what happened. The original news broadcast seemed to be saying the artist arrest was for the art. The article from a Detroit based media source said the arrest was not for the art, but rather for how the artist reacted to the authorities during their encounter.

When I grew up (last millennium), vandalism was bad. So was police harassment.

My greatest sense of sadness is not that this event occurred, or made the news. It is that there’s been an undermining of trust and respect for so long in our society that such an event seems inevitable rather than outrageous. We’ve been strip mining our society for so long, the detritus mountain avalanche that will wipe out our very existence seems a foregone conclusion. Except for the west coast.

Perhaps the “big one” will get them first.

Phred

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So, it’s been a while since I have been here (actually, a LONG while upon reflection) and a short back-story might be in order. I decided maybe 6 months ago to become more adept at drawing, thanks to my gaming friend Bill “WhiskeyKetchup” (not his real name…er, the Bill part is, but the WK part is his gaming nom de plume) and the skill he demonstrated in his hobby. He created one of those “adult” colouring books for his wife and I had serious doubts upon first examination…it was WAAAYYYY too good to have been made by hand. Looking at other works he did allowed me to change my opinion and see he was truly skilled at putting marks on paper in appropriate places.
I’ve wanted to do this (sort of…kinda…) for a long time without really giving it serious thought or effort. Until now, that is. I asked him if we could do a weekly challenge, draw the same thing and compare the results to provide incentive to improve (as well as actually DO the work). He agreed, and this is week 6 of the challenge.
Today, while doing laundry, I spent my typical session (45 minutes by the “focus@will” timer I use for background music) originally doing a warm-up exercise of drawing the same thing 20 times, building incremental improvements with each iteration. I did not get the second one done…

I was drawing the coffee mug that was sitting beside my drawing pad, the coffee cooling and decreasing in quantity over time. It was about a third of the way into the second drawing that the problem focused enough to result in a [small, but reasonably valuable pile of head-hair ripped from about temple high on both sides of my head] need to determine what was going on. It’s not like I’m making something up out of the depths of my soul, memory, or imagination…the blasted cup was sitting 14 inches from my right hand. So, why could I not draw the silly thing?

It also should be pointed out that one of my principle goals in this (longish-term endeavor) is to overcome the tendency to draw icons and to put what I actually see on the paper. I “know” what a coffee mug looks like, and could “draw” one in a moment, but in this time and place, the problem wasn’t with the mug, but the handle. In iconography drawing, the cup/mug always has the handle coming out of the side of the thing. On the table, it was rotated about 30 degrees toward me (clockwise as viewed from the top) and so I could see part of the outer face and part of the inner face (the handle was not a tube, but more of a rounded brick shape, roughly rectangular in cross section with the corners rounded off). It was driving me nuts, as it was also a highly glazed surface, so reflections were noticeable on both the mug and the handle, and it was also partially in the shade (where the light coming through the sky-light struck mostly the far edge but some hit the handle as well), so I was having no easy time with any of it.

Instead of being a warm-up exercise, it became an obsession of it’s own, devouring the full time the last load of clothes took in the dryer…and then some. Half a page of badly drawn cup handles later and I achieved only the first goal: finishing the coffee in the mug (drunken, not drawn). Even while driving home after folding clothes, my mind kept returning to the problem of drawing a twisting ribbon in 3-space on a 2-D page.

I “know” what I have to do…so why is it so hard to actually DO it?

I suspect that the problem lies within the scope of the explanation I heard many years ago, that the key difference artists have over mere mortals is the way they SEE the objects they draw. To the extent I can “train” myself to look at my subject in the same way an artist looks (that is, to see it the same way) it will be “easier” to make the needed marks on the paper with the stick in hand. To stop seeing a coffee mug handle and rather seeing a smooth curve bending over, then down and back a little…until it meets up with another curve which also bends in an interesting way and changes value as it moves over a little to the right, ending with a sweeping curve upwards… and so on.
Despite how “easy” this is, it is proving to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done…and re-done…and re-re-done…and erased and done over…and over…and…

And so, I’m home, several hours later, and still trying to recover from my brutal assault. At the very least, I have a badly bruised dignity and damaged self-worth. Yet, I suspect it is not going to be productive to file a police report on the mugging I took this morning…

Phred.

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