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| Sunlit Waves by William Trost Richards, 1903 |
In this post, I will continue to quote from ‘Paths of Fire: An
Anthropologist’s Inquiry into Western Technology’ (1996) by Robert
McCormick Adams. But, before I do that, I will mention some supplements
that I discovered and tested recently. I already made a post in which I
specified that omega-3 supplements are helpful for people that have ADHD
(attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). The benefits of consuming
omega-3 fatty acids for people with ADHD have been known for decades.
Therefore, this information isn’t really new or rare. I also made a post
in which I mentioned that ashwagandha (withania somnifera) supplements
can be beneficial for some people. Of course, I did this quite a long
time ago. Since then, I’ve discovered supplements that are just as good
or even better for me because I’ve been putting my unique AI (autistic
intelligence) to work on the problem of improving my diet so that I can
feel better, and feeling better is very important for me because
everyday life is very difficult and problematic for people like me
(people that have AuDHD) in this neurotypical society that we live in. I
won’t get into all of the information that I’ve acquired so far because
this would take up an entire post. But I will mention the most
important supplements that I have. I still consider omega-3 supplements
to be some of the best supplements in existence, but there is a more
effective dopamine amplifier for people with ADHD out there. It’s called
L-Tyrosine. There are dozens of dopamine amplifiers that one can
purchase, but the amino acid L-Tyrosine is the most effective one that
I’ve discovered so far. When it comes to something that can diminish the
problems of autism during the day, my best discovery so far is the
flavonoid Luteolin. Like many other supplements, Luteolin has more than
one benefit. It may help manage chronic inflammation-related conditions
such as pain, allergies, respiratory issues, and neuroinflammation. It
scavanges free radicals and reactive oxygen species, protecting cells
from oxidative stress. This contributes to potential benefits in
cardiovascular health, liver protection, and aging-related damage.
Luteolin crosses the blood-brain barrier, reducing brain inflammation,
apoptosis, and oxidative damage. It may protect against
ischemia/reperfusion injury, atherosclerosis, and heart failure by
improving contractility, reducing fibrosis, and blocking oxidative
stress. It has anti-cancer potential because it inhibits tumor
proliferation, induces apoptosis, and modulates pathways like PI3K/Akt
and STAT3 in various cancers. It has anti-allergic effects (e.g.,
reducing histamine-related inflammation), wound healing effects, and
antimicrobial/antiviral activity. Overall, Luteolin is the best
supplement that I currently have. It helps me to feel calm, energetic,
less depressed, and more willing to talk to neurotypicals and to deal
with their shenanigans. Before I began consuming Luteolin a little while
ago, I felt absolutely awful every day. Feeling awful every day is
typical for people like me. But now I actually kind of look forward to
the next day instead of dreading it. Another supplement that is
essential for me when it comes to feeling better during the day is
Palmitoylethanolamide (PEA). PEA helps with chronic and neuropathic pain
relief, neuroprotection and brain health, and anti-inflammatory and
immune modulation. It also contributes to improvements in irritable
bowel syndrome, endometriosis-related pelvic pain, migraines, sleep
disturbances linked to pain/stress, and even autism spectrum disorder
symptoms. The last essential supplement for me is called Glycine. This
amino acid is helpful when it comes to improved sleep quality. People
with ADHD have a number of problems when it comes to sleeping normally
(neurotypically). Glycine, when consumed before bed, reduces time to
fall asleep, enhances deep sleep, and decreases daytime fatigue and
sleepiness. It also provides anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects,
metabolic health support, mental health and neurological benefits,
cardiovascular protection, and collagen and skin/joint health. Moreover,
there’s some evidence that it reduces nighttime urinary frequency, that
it protects the liver, and that it has longevity benefits. The other
supplements that I’ve tried are mainly antioxidants such as Quercetin
and Sulforaphane. I won’t get into the many benefits of consuming
antioxidants in this post because they’re not as essential for my
everyday well-being as the supplements that I’ve mentioned. Therefore, I
will leave the information about antioxidants and the details of my
everyday consumption routine for a future post. I spent several hundred
dollars in the last few months on buying supplements that I didn’t know
about before and testing them. This activity, in which I have been
engaging on and off for more than a year, turned out to be well worth
it. Since there’s no help or medicine for people with autism, as there
are for people with other health conditions, supplements at least make
life less unbearable. Anyway, the following are quotes from the sixth
chapter, titled ‘The United States Succeeds to Industrial Leadership’.
“Hog production is perhaps the most notable example, with the number of
hogs slaughtered in Chicago alone increasing from 270,000 per year at
the beginning of the war to a level of 900,000 at the end. Federal civil
spending in the decade after the war (now including veterans benefits
and interests payments on the debt) was approximately twice as high in
real terms as it had been in the 1851-1860 decade. Increase of this
magnitude carry a significance of their own. We should not lose sight of
the transformative effects of the sheer scale of the Union war effort.
During the period of the war itself, federal expenditures rose ten to
fifteenfold in real terms. The army’s Quartermaster Department, growing
from a skeleton force at the outset and independent of expenditures by
other departments on ordnance and troop relations, was by the end of the
war “consuming at least one-half the output of all northern industry”
and spending at an annual level of nearly a half-billion dollars. While
the initial weakening in the ranks of states’ rights advocates must be
associated with the secession and the congressional acts and
constitutional amendments that followed, the irreversibility of the
trend away from those views must also owe something to increasing
familiarity with, and consequently acceptance of, this previously
undreamt-of scale of federal expenditures. Achieving such increases was
more than a matter of simply ratcheting up the scale of existing
practices. Intimately associated with them were technological advances
associated with railroads and the telegraph, for example. These were
absolutely indispensable in facilitating military planning, maintaining
command-and-control, and executing logistical movements, throughout an
enormous theater of war that was being conducted at new levels of
complexity. The experience thus gained would be readily translatable
into the increasingly national scale of corporate activities at war’s
end. The supplying of army ordnance was technologically conservative but
in other respects well managed. Difficulties with fusing impeded what
might otherwise have been significant changes in the design and
effectiveness of artillery, and repeating rifles, already known earlier
and also of great potential importance, were introduced into service
only belatedly and on a very limited scale. Relatively new technologies –
steam power, screw propellors, armor plating and iron ships – impacted
much more heavily on naval warfare. In Dupree’s judgment, the Navy’s
record in supporting these new technologies with research and qualified
management was an excellent one: “in no important way did they further
the naval revolution, but to keep pace with it was a major
accomplishment.” Again, it may well be that the power of a successful
example of quick and resourceful innovation at a hitherto unanticipated
scale was the key lesson that was later passed on to peacetime
industrial enterprises. Across a wide range of industries, developments
comparable to those in steel and fossil fuels were occurring in
approximately the same period of time. Growing, mass markets, partly as a
result of steeply reduced transportation costs, were for the first time
making substantial economies of scale an attainable goal. They required
in particular, however, massive investments and readiness to accept
long time horizons. In addition, they called for entrepreneurial vision
to be extended in a number of new directions: toward backward and
forward integration, as we have noted; toward improved selection and
training of managerial personnel; toward stability of full-production
levels as a key cost-saving measure; toward greater and more continuous
emphasis on product improvement; toward improved labor relations; and,
not least, toward unprecedented attention to marketing considerations.
Price reduction, on the other hand, for the most part was not a dominant
goal. Instead, the industrial giants “competed for market share and
profits through functional and strategic effectiveness. They did so
functionally by improving their product, their processes of production,
their marketing, their purchasing, and their labor relations, and
strategically by moving into growing markets and out of declining ones
more quickly and effectively, than did their competitors. The enormous
size of the internal American market clearly presented special
challenges and opportunities. This is nowhere more evident than in the
chemical industry. Still of very minor proportions at the end of the
Civil War, it was largely limited to explosives and fertilizer
manufacture. Growing rapidly to meet the demand, it was comparable in
size to German industry, the dominant force in international trade,
already by the time of World War I. In recognition of the size and rapid
growth of the U.S. market, especially in petroleum products, U.S.
companies naturally focused on the special problems of introducing
large-volume, continuous production and finding ways to take advantage
of the potential economies of scale they offered. As L. H. Baekeland,
the discoverer of bakelite, said of the transition he had to make from
laboratory flasks to industrial-scale production of this synthetic resin
not long after the turn of the century, “an entirely new industry had
to be created for this purpose – the industry of chemical machinery and
chemical equipment.” With heavy capital investment for new plant in
prospect, fairly elementary laboratory problems of mixing, heating, and
contaminant control became much more difficult to handle with precision
and assurance of quality. This largely explains the distinctive
existence in the United States of chemical engineering as a
university-based discipline. Still, it needs to be recognized that
profitability, not absolute market dominance, remained the major
consideration. Chandler quotes a revealing letter advocating the
policies that the E. I. du Pont de Nemours Powder Company would
presently follow. It urged that the company not buy out all competition
but only 60 percent or so, since by making unit costs for 60 percent
cheaper they would be assured of stable sales in times of economic
downturn at the expense of others: “In other words, you could count upon
always running full if you make cheaply and control only 60%, whereas,
if you own it all, when slack times came you could only run a curtailed
product.” Thus “in the United States the structure of the new industries
had become, with rare exceptions, oligopolistic, not monopolistic. This
was partly because of the size of the marketplace and partly because of
the antitrust legislation that reflected the commitment of Americans to
competition as well as their suspicion of concentrated power. American
railroads deserve to be considered as a final, and in many ways most
significant, example of industrial and corporate growth. Alfred Chandler
had demonstrated that “the great railway systems were by the 1890s the
largest business enterprises not only in the United States but also in
the world.” Thus they were unique in the size of their capital
requirements, and hence in the role that financiers played in their
management. Ultimately even more important, because they were widely
emulated, were organizational advances in which the railroads “were the
first because they had to be,” developing “a large internal
organizational structure with carefully defined lines of responsibility,
authority, and communication between the central office, departmental
headquarters, and field units.” Railroad managers became the first such
grouping to define themselves, and to be generally recognized, as career
members of a new profession. Railroads had quickly become the central,
all-weather component of a national transportation and communication
infrastructure. Around them, depending on their right-of-way and
facilities, grew up further, closely allied elements of that
infrastructure: telegraph and telephone lines and the corporate giants
controlling them; a national postal system; and, with frequently
monumental urban railroad stations as key transfer points, the new and
rapidly growing urban traction systems. Added to this mix by the end of
the century was railroad ownership of the major domestic steamship
lines. The total length of the networks of track that were placed in
railroad service over successive periods of time can serve as a
convenient index of aggregate railroad growth. Extensions of track
naturally accompanied growth in areas calling for railroad services as
incoming population claimed new lands for settlement. But no less
importantly, the increasing density of the networks reflected the
essential role that railroads had begun to fill in the movement and
marketing of growing agricultural surpluses, internationally as well as
in the cities of the eastern seaboard. The major epoch of railroad
expansion came to an end at about the time of World War I. Albert
Fishlow has shown that productivity improved on American railroads at a
faster rate during the latter half of the nineteenth century than in any
other industrial sector. He adduces many factors that were involved:
economies of scale and specialization as trackage lengthened and firs
consolidated; industrywide standardization; technological improvements
(heavier rails and locomotives and larger rolling stock); and the
growing experience of the railroad work force and management. By 1910
real freight rates had fallen more than 80 percent and passenger charges
50 percent from their 1849 levels. The multiplicity of factors
accounting for the marked growth in railroad productivity parallels that
in the steel and petroleum industries and is, in fact, a general
characteristic of the period. As Robert Fogel has succeeded in
demonstrating for American railroads (vis a vis canals in particular),
"no single innovation was vital for economic growth during the
nineteenth century." For the American economy more generally, he has
reached the conclusion that "there was a multiplicity of solutions along
a wide front of production problems." This implies that growth was a
relatively balanced process, not dependent on breakthroughs brought
about by "overwhelming, singular innovations" narrowly affecting only
one or a few "leading sectors." How universally this applies is a
separate question. I have concluded earlier that there was indeed a
handful of key innovations and leading sectors of growth at the heart of
the Industrial Revolution in England, and will presently argue that our
current phase of growth is heavily dependent on a few technological
innovations like semiconductors and the computer industry they led to."
