I don’t pay for TV so I only get channels that come off-the-air. One of those is Fox. They have Saturday baseball so I watched the Giants game this weekend.

After the opening sequence the camera panned onto the field and the home plate area. A graphic came on the screen advertising a gambling outfit and giving some odds for today’s events. I don’t remember if it was Bet365, FanDuel, DraftKings, or something else, but it was MLB-approved. I remember when MLB had “official” bat-makers, glove manufacturers, and whatnot. Now they support casinos!

Hypocrisy is nothing new in pro sports, so an anti-betting entity like Major League Baseball supporting betting isn’t a shocker, really. MLB likes money streams and people like to make bets so they are getting their piece of the action.

People are going to gamble. So making it illegal won’t work. So, we regulate gambling. We make it inconvenient. You have to go somewhere to place a bet. It takes effort and time, not just money.

But now we have the mobile phone and the apps that do everything for you. Enter the betting app. Now you can gamble whenever and wherever you want. You don’t even have to be an adult. All you need is the app.

I can’t see gambling-at-my-fingertips as a social good. A net positive. I can only think of the negatives. It makes me think of when the cellphone came to classrooms. Once the dam was breached there was no going back and the change was irrevocable.

Bets are blood money. Recreational betting (think Super Bowl pool) has never needed an app or anyone’s help. Prop bets in bars have been around as long as bars and betting. People who want to throw money down on elections or ballgames can do it all by themselves. Mostly, that stuff is harmless. But gambling is like drug addiction. Some folks can’t do it. They go down the tubes and take their loved ones along for the ride. Gambling is bad and EVERYONE ALREADY KNOWS THIS.

But MLB thinks it’s okay. I think they are fools. At some point the gambling money will be bigger than the prize money and the outcomes will be more important than just fans’ bragging rights. And that won’t be okay.

The economic engine we call capitalism depends on several things. One, a continuous stream of affordable energy. Two, a continuous stream of new raw materials. Three, continuous consumption.

The logical outcome is a continuous stream of waste! And that is what we see, of course. All these “growing markets” and all that consumption means we have to throw away the old stuff. And throw it away we do!

It’s hard to get people to care about their trash. Fortunately there’s a book about it:

I’m not going to tell you this is the best book in the world or anything like that. But it is well-written, thoughtful, and has a sense of urgency. Mostly, it’s the topic. I think garbage is a pretty damn important topic. We all know we live in a throwaway society. Sure we have recycling and food and clothing charities, but mostly we throw stuff away. And mostly that stuff ends up in giant dumps in poor countries.

We export our waste. Even the waste we keep we take an “out of sight, out of mind” attitude and bury the stuff. There really should be no such thing as waste. All the stuff we throw away is just an under-utilized resource.

In the developing world, they use our waste. They pick out stuff that still has value. It’s ugly, dirty, dangerous work done by the world’s poorest people. We hear a lot about “American jobs, American industry, American workers” from the current regime. Here’s an industry we need—waste recovery. Instead of shoring up a nonsense racket like “crypto-currency” we should take a serious look at our recycling and waste management systems.

Oliver Franklin-Wallis’ book is a good place to start. The subtitle on the USA edition is the secret world of waste and the urgent search for a cleaner future and that unfortunately sounds like something a corporate green-washing committee would come up with!

I like the subtitle on the UK edition (pictured below): the dirty truth about what we throw away, where it goes, and why it matters. That’s much more direct. Regardless, read the book!

While there are a myriad of uses for both calcium metal and its various compounds, most people associate calcium with supplements.

Calcium is one of the most abundant substances in the crust of the earth and is well-known as an essential nutrient, especially for bone health.

The supplement industry knows this and they sell a hell of a lot of calcium. The 2024 global market was estimated to be just shy of six billion dollars and it is expected to grow by half in the next ten years.

The supplement business is a big one. Globally, vitamins and minerals and other such things generate about fifty billion dollars in annual revenue and that’s expected to double in ten years.

Most of these things are of dubious nutritional value and are even possibly harmful. The industry is mostly unregulated and the medical claims made by its salespeople are mostly nonsense. Nonetheless we love our supplements!

With that famous-named asshole now in charge of health for the entire country things are only going to get worse. There will be a lot more “alternative” medicine foisted upon us. Americans have a rich tradition of snake oil peddlers and we will be embracing more and more of that stuff as we drift further into medieval mumbo-jumbo.

There are plenty of things wrong with modern medicine. But that doesn’t mean you throw out good science and replace it with hippie bullshit. It’s just like recognizing the deep, systemic flaws with a capitalist economy. You don’t dump the whole shebang and go full commie, fer chrissakes. That’s NOT an alternative. You don’t go from a free market to a command-and-control economy because, like, uh, you couldn’t come up with anything else?

We have this tendency to see all problems as binary. You have a problem with modern medicine? OK, the smart move then is to get rid of the entire apparatus and replace it with sassafras tea, kombucha, and pilates. Good grief!

The problems that are worth solving never have simple solutions.

These days we have more knowledge about the body and nutrition than ever before. The problem is that we are buried in information. That’s not the same thing. Knowledge is hard-won. Information is easy. Anyone surfing the internet for nutritional advice will be quickly overwhelmed with masses of factoids, sales pitches, and contradictory materials. And increasingly, the same material reproduced at a dozen different sites! Actually learning—gaining knowledge—from all that shit is difficult at best.

Going back in history, the ancients knew they could heat limestone (calcium carbonate, CaCO₃) to make lime (calcium oxide, CaO), also known as burnt lime or quicklime. Lime was used for mortar. Lime is still the most important ingredient in modern cement. You can imagine the scale of global concrete use and that will tell you about the huge demand for calcium! Good thing it can be found in large quantities all over the earth.

It wasn’t until 1808 that Humphry Davy isolated calcium metal from quicklime via electrolysis. Calcium metal is used in alloys and steel-making. Calcium compounds like calcium sulfate (CaSO₄, aka gypsum), used to make sheetrock or drywall, and calcium chloride (CaCl₂), commonly used to de-ice roads, are ubiquitous.