The Pines Resort

Alarm clock is ringing. Its time. Another day another deal.

I raise from my bed and put on a pair of shorts and walk to the kitchen. Six eggs, four for me and two for Fred, from the refrigerator is put down in boiling water and the coffee machine murmurs like its happy to start the day but not yet ready to go full speed. I'm not either, yet.

After eggs, cereals and a cup of coffee i change to my training shorts and take my paddle and walk to the boats. The sun is up and its another beautiful day at The Pines. Florida offers another day  of paradise but also a lot of pain and suffering. Training is tough, but when the going gets tough, the tough get going. We are not here to be comfortable, we are here to improve, to master our sport to perfection. 

Its an olympic year and you can tell, the atmosphere is tense. There is not as much small talk as it use to be other years I been here. I put my boat in the water and do some strokes to get away from the docks. Fred is a little behind as usual. I say hi to a couple of Canadians thats already done with their morning training, I just got on my shift. I increase the speed a little more. My heart rate goes up but is still under 100 beats per minute. It's still warm up and there is no reason to rush. Both body and mind has to be ready when the sessions starts. 

After two right turns me and Fred have reached the part of the river were we are going to throw down, and maybe throw up. A dolphins blows out some air just a couple of meters away. We start our watches and we are off.

Salt water and sweat are getting mixed on our warm working bodies. It's another beautiful day in Florida. Another day of pain and suffering. A new day to master our sport to perfection. A good day to learn to be a winner. A fine day to be alive.

A world at change

In five years the global politic picture will be different, it takes no Einstein to figure that out. But what will happen with one of the biggest global players today, the United States?

Since their economy is going south there is a big possibility that they will lose some of their political muscles. But with their big and high tech military organisation they will stay in the game for a little longer then five years.

The problem with being a super power with bad economy will eventually catch them. They can't afford to go to war all the time just to be a big player. The more enemies they got the harder it will be for them to trade internationally and also protect themselves from attacks.

This is going to be tough for the americans. Their country is not built with quality at mind and when the economy put on the breaks for real, the difference will be easy to see. The US will look like an eastern europe country from the beginning of the century.

In 50 years I think the world will be less dependent on oil. Why? Because we have to.

The world can't produce oil in the same speed as we do now so the prices will go up and with that the interest to find something cheaper will follow.

So what will the new thing be? Its hard to say, there are a few possibillitys and with higher prices on oil more money will be spent to research. I think we are going to see to diffrent things. One is to build more electric driven cars and produce more electric from different sources like water, wind and solar power. Its not likely that only those will cover the new need and to cover the loss of electric production from oil.

Nuclear power is highly unlikely to leave the energy market, its to cheap, and it produces big quantities of power. I bealive in an increase in nuclear power. Im not putting any personal values in that, I think it has pros and cons, but the truth is that we are dependent on it. The only way to decrease nuclear power is to decrease consummation. 

Will we see that happen? I hardly think so. 

“How to make love like a porn star” by Neil Strauss told by Jenna Jameson.

The book is about the young Jenna Masoli and her upbringing. As a reader you get to follow through many of her personal crisis who sets her path through life and don’t only make her a broken person but also an extremely strong one.

I think the bottom line in the book is how important your family is. The introvert Jenna Masoli who grew up without a mother misses a lot of values that are typical teached by female role models. Even though her father loves her and would do everything to protect her he is not around a lot which makes her awkward when trying to be social. But once she starts to work as a stripper she learns that she has the gift of seducing men and being the social center of a group. Since she is not really good at anything else and that she heard stories about her mother who was a show girl in Las Vegas she makes the decision to pursuit a career as a naked model and later a porn star. This transforms her to be the biggest porn star in history. Jenna Jameson is born.

A so called “chosen truth” about people in the porn business is that they are damaged from bad experiences in their life. I’m bound to agree. I think there are very rare that “normal” people with a good childhood and economic stability make the choice to get naked and have sex on camera.  When saying that I know I make a generalization but from my point of view there are always other options to explore your exhibitionistic needs which does not include making moving picture of you having sex available on the internet forever. Some people in porn defend themselves with that they love to have sex and why should they not take the opportunity to make money on it? I would like to see a prostitute making the same argument and hear how many who buys into it.

Off course there is a difference. As a porn actor you can chose what people you will work with and what sexual boundaries you won’t cross. But since the business sets the prices it is hard to make a living without agree to do almost all kind of scenes. In reality there are only the biggest stars that enjoy the benefit to do only the scenes they want to.

A fact mentioned in the book is that a lot of the girls have a really bad start in the business since they haven’t learned to distinguish serious production companies from the unserious ones. This result that a lot of the girls doing porn have been treated really badly so their self-esteem is set really low from the start.

But in the end of the day your business is your business and I won’t judge anyone. Still I would never recommend anyone joining the business.

Since I have read both logistics and energy and environmental engineering this was not news to me. The consumer society is consuming us as well but from a consumers point of view that is hard to see. When you buy your stuff you always go for the cheap one produced far away where workers work their ass of for almost nothing in return. Also you don’t see the amount of raw materials use or the energy wasted. Energy waste is one of mine personal favorite subject which I’m planning to fight in my later days as a worker in the energy business. At so many point in the chain of production energy is going to waste although it didn’t have to! But when a corporate boss is making decisions he won’t do changes in the production unless the investment will break even in less than four to five years. Since most new technology is expensive before a broader mass is using it, it will never help the society until the society helps the technology. The weird thing in all this is that the one who will benefit the most from this is the society itself but since there is just one man on the top of the hill who making the decisions for you that aint gonna happen dude!

So what to do?

I say it is extremely hard for a person who is not educated in this to separate good products from bad, it’s even hard for those of us who studies for years at a university!

In environment engineering we talk about allocation. Who will take responsibility for the waste, the dirt air and the slaves working at the very beginning and actually in the end of the supply chain (just look at Lidel in Sweden and Wall mart in the US as example of bad labor conditions). I say you are! The one consuming is the one responsible. You should pay for all the costs, all the environmental impact and all unhealth that is created during all parts of making your stuff! But for customers to be able to take that responsibility some one will have to make it clear what product is good and what product is bad. And who is going to do that? My answer is simple, one of the most powerful actors in today’s society, media. Media have to educate us on what is going on and who makes the decisions when you buy a product or flick the switch on your electronics.

Sadly most media is not up for the tasks, partly because it is controlled by people who don’t won’t them to educate since they will lose money on it. There for its back to us the consumers. Make better choices when you turn on the TV or buying a newspaper. Because as long as you watch low quality TV shows they will keep on producing them for us. The thing is we all have to pitch in. I for one have stopped reading Aftonbladet and Expressen which I consider as unserious and lying.

So now it is up to you my friend. The truth that media controls us is just partly true, if you stop watching they will not control you anymore. So be pickier on what news channel you watch and which newspaper you buy and you will reclaim your intellectual freedom. Let’s not just make it a cleaner world, let’s make it a smarter one!

Corporate survelience the cancer that destroys our beautiful world.

I respect that a bussiness owner wants his employees to work at work time and leave their facebooking and other surfing to their time off. And for me there is nothing wrong with spying on wich websites your personel are watching on the companys computer. But what you do on your time off is your bussiness and yur bussiness only.

When people tracking your wherabouts you dont feel like a free man anymore. I think that the freedome is one of the moast beautiful things in our society and no CEO in the world shuld be able to mess with that. No lost bussiness relation and no loss are to big to take compared to the loss of freedome. At least that is my point off view, but hey, I'm only a normal guy with no money to protect so what does I really know? A lot if you ask me!