Making Money Real

Writing: noun — the process of putting one’s best ideas into words that mean something entirely different.

It isn’t all that common for an Engineer to write a book. An operations manual? Sure. We don’t write that many actual books.

I am an engineer, with degrees in Psychology, Mechanical Engineering, and Computer Science, and an attitude problem with mainstream economists. I’ve programmed Real-Time, Embedded, Multi-Threaded instrument control systems at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Now retired and living in Wellington, NZ, I’ve been politically Green for the past 30 years because NASA has no illusions about climate. Described as “tenacious” by my (few) admirers and “mule-headed-stubborn” by my mirror. I am the first Mahinist.

This Engineer is pretty old now.

I was born in NYC in the early 1950s; short for my age to start with, and pushed up a grade as a punishment/reward for being smart. That was back when they measured IQ and thought it meant everything. Now, we don’t, but it doesn’t really mean nothing; it just means a certain KIND of smart, and it is still important for certain things we all try to do.

Since it was the USA, there were some choices to be made. I went to the University of Rochester on an NROTC scholarship and avoided being drafted to go to Vietnam. I thought I’d be an Aeronautical Engineer, but I didn’t know why. I started with the science & engineering courses there, and it was there that I encountered my first Economist. I graduated with a degree in Psychology, a minor in Philosophy, and a profound understanding that I would not stay in the Navy. It was one of the smallest NROTC graduating classes ever, and my 5 years in the US Navy as an Ensign, then a JG (mainly in the engineering spaces), were not as good for the US Navy or myself as either of us wished.

I then went on to get a degree in Mechanical Engineering at SUNY, Stony Brook. I was finding direction, and it finally took shape when I got my Master’s in Computer Science at the New York Institute of Technology.

At the peak of my engineering career, I was designing and writing pthread-c Parallel, Embedded, Real-Time code to control instruments at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. People who write that sort of code are uncommon, and I had been told I was weird all my life. At JPL, I was with “people like me,” I loved the Lab, and I’d found my niche.

In the late 1990s, I found a lovely Russian wife, married, and had a daughter, and then in 2002, I felt a warning. I’d had this happen before, and they were never something I could ignore. It was a gestalt perception of threat that precipitated an immediate need to escape. By 2003, I had sold the house, quit the job, and moved to New Zealand. My Son was born here in New Zealand. I haven’t moved much since.

It was in Pasadena, while working at the Lab that I was forced to think about that first discussion with an economist because I was exposed to the warming of the planet through the science and wondering at the inaction and lies being told about climate. I believe that this is part of what made me up stakes, but there was more to that gestalt warning to “get out of Dodge” than just climate.

I’ve worked, while not working to support my family, on this concept. It wasn’t until I was close to retirement that it became a book, and it took me years to learn how to write it acceptably (if, indeed, I ever really did).

I expect to finish my life here in Porirua, and I expect human civilization to ignore me as it ignores (or kills) every other person who challenges the owning class.