Reviews for Polymer Surfaces from Physics to Technology

The average rating for Polymer Surfaces from Physics to Technology based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-05-31 00:00:00 London Chapman Engineering unequal exchange [Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com, Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com, Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' working conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites.] The fundamental idea of the book is that finite natural resources are the only source of value - not labour - and that it is these resources that industrial and then financial capitalism has been accumulating for two hundred years - not money - disposessing others. As a corollary to this, industrial production must be revealed as dissipation through the work of people and machines, which downgrades the creative potential of raw materials and energy sources blending the two into objects with a limited creative potential, but higher order. Which is quite exactly the opposite of how we tend to interpret reality. From these premises, the conclusion that the economy is a zero-sum game - which is unacceptable and depressing to most of us. Neoliberalism, in its double-truth approach to influence, has always acted in line with the zero-sum game assumption, and preached as if the infinite growth (here 'cornucopia') paradigm were true. The increasing aggressiveness with which developed countries seek to secure energy resources and raw materials wherever they are based, in the name of 'security' and other rethorical devices, is a testament to this comeback of Physiocracy, as all attempts to deny climate change (on the grounds that if we leave fossil fuels unburnt, we give up the only available source of value). What about machines then? In this finite, constrained world, machines - both materially and metaphorically as organizations and infrastructure - are the result and enablers of unequal exchange, which makes possible accumulation. Fascinating, mesmerizing, machines hide underneath the veneer of complex order the reality of the appropriation of resources. The weakest component of this theoretical framework is the use of thermodynamics, which is not fully explored as an actual law of physics or as a metaphor. Once it is agreed that value derives from natural resorces, the exergy/emergy treatment of the value transfer becomes superfluous. Exchange is not unequal because exergy rich resources are traded for exergy depleted goods, but because those goods are valued using a different value theory. We buy at staggering low prices (exergy depleted) goods from China, which have a value - based on the natural resource input they incorporate - several times higher. In sum, exchange is twice unequal because natural resources are undervalued when they are extracted and undervalued again when incorporated into products. The surplus is thus twice appropriated by the buyer. Dismantling the underpricing mechanism is the only way to allow development and redistribute wealth.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-06-04 00:00:00 Gary Scotts I'd give this book a 5 but it is a tough read. Deeply philosophical, politico-ecological, post-marxist, exergy-based critique of capitalism and its effect on the environment. Got that? Mixes political ecological theory, entropic theory (essergy/exergy/emergy type stuff), ecological theory and global development stuff. Fascinating, brialliant and hard work. The bottom line? Material, exhange (supply-demand) and labor theories of value support capitalism's rape of the earth and the natural support systems that make out lives good. The only way to escape this cycle is to value the amount of energy put into a product, and/or the amount of useable energy still available in the product. Yee-haw!