Capitalists and Cheapskates on Craigslist

In these days of economic turmoil, in which large employers are abandoning any sort of commitment to the well-being of their employees, it is not surprising that many people are considering self-employment. Self-employment is attractive for a couple of reasons. First, a savvy entrepreneur can become independent of fickle, unreliable employers. A successful small businessman or businesswoman can therefore earn a living while being free from the fear of “downsizing.” Second, self-employment is “controllable,” at least on paper. That is, there need not be some external agent such as as boss forcing the self-employed person to work like a dog for sixty or seventy hours a week, while barely earning a living wage. In principle, the self-employed person should be able to set his or her own hours in order to live a manageable life.

The ability to form and use networks is a key for the self-employed. Not very long ago, such networks were built out of relationships – between service providers and satisfied customers, between service providers and trusted suppliers, between friendly fellow practitioners. Such networks were, in a sense, “owned” by all the users thereof. Now, such networks have largely become electronic. Everyone advertises and talks to each other on line these days.

It is instructive to trace the migration of relationship-building from the physical world to the cyber-world. There are several good examples of this from recent history. One such example is Craigslist, which started out simply as one means out of many by which a collection of friends with similar interests networked with each other. (See Craigslist from Wikipedia.) Craig Newmark's e-mailed list of things of interest to him expanded beyond his circle of friends as friends talked with other friends, and soon his list was a big, popular thing with the potential to make a lot of money for its owner.

For things that have no monetary value, or for the sort of “garage sale” things that people sell or trade, Craigslist still has value in connecting ordinary people with ordinary people. But while in its earlier days, Craigslist was a good way for small-scale entrepreneurs to connect with each other, it no longer seems very useful to the self-employed.

The problem is the capture of Craigslist and other on-line venues originally created for ordinary people to connect with each other. Nowadays, most of the people who advertise for jobs or offer services on Craigslist seem to be large corporations, or are start-ups backed by lots of venture capital from heavyweight “investors” looking to corner the market for some service. Thus many of the things that could at one time be done by ordinary people in order to get by without a regular job have now become commodities meted out to the public via growth capitalists. Those who are trying to escape from being turned into commodities are discovering that even self-employment is now being commodified.

There are many signs of this commodification. Are you smart? Did your education give you a solid background in mathematics? Now that your office job has dried up, you may be thinking, “Hey, I could tutor high school kids in math!” But beware of trying to drum up business via Craigslist. Tutor Doctor, Complete College Prep, and a host of other big, multi-state services will eat you for lunch if you try to set up as an independent tutor. Of course, you could always surrender and go to work for one of these outfits. They typically charge around $45 an hour for tutoring – but they will pay you around $20.

Let's say that tutoring isn't your thing, but you have a strong back, work hard and like cleaning houses. I know people who put themselves through college by cleaning houses, and they worked as independent small businesspersons. They couldn't do it today – not with people like The Cleaning Authority, who have massive advertising budgets and massive budgets for placating the legal system. Do you like kids? Want to be a nanny? Beware, because there are venture capitalists trying to capture the nanny market as well. In fact, at least one firm which has advertised on Craigslist offers to meet all your domestic needs – housecleaning, tutoring and nanny services – all from one provider. How convenient.

The commodification of things which used to fall under the category of self-employment has led to other harmful outcomes. Those who do domestic work or tutoring for these firms must increasingly submit to onerous and invasive background checks and must provide extensive references, often for jobs that don't pay more than $12 an hour. (A lot can be said about the burgeoning “background check” industry, by the way. More on that in another post.) This has emboldened private parties looking for services to ask for the most outrageous things while offering the most outrageously cheapskate compensation. Just this past week I read an ad posted by someone in Lake Oswego (a rapidly evaporating enclave of people who once thought they were rich) asking for a tutor to provide after school instruction and supervision to a couple of kids. The prospective tutor was to provide an extensive list of references for this most important job – in exchange for $5 an hour plus gas money!

The commodification of self-employment has emboldened some people who are as yet untouched by our ongoing economic collapse to try to use their fellow men and women as slave labor. These people are wanna-be capitalists who think they can get something for nothing from their fellows just because times are hard. So they post ads on Craigslist for “nannies” and “tutors” who must provide multiple references and submit to a background check and fingerprinting in exchange for chump change, or for nothing more than “free room and board.”

Self-employment is a valuable and viable means of coping with hard times. But I think that those who want to make a successful go at it will need to re-learn the art of building networks of relationship outside of the Internet. Networks of personal relationships cannot be easily co-opted by capitalists and cheapskates.

A Survey Of Solar Thermal Power Systems - An Interview

A few weeks ago I promised you an interview. Today I'm pleased to be able to deliver on that promise. I present to you an interview with Dr. Luther Clements, a member of the faculty of the Renewable Energy Engineering Program at the Oregon Institute of Technology. Dr. Clements teaches a course in solar thermal power systems, and my interest in this subject was aroused several months ago by an article I read in No Tech Magazine titled, “The Bright Future of Solar-Powered Factories,” written by Kris de Decker.

The premise of that article was that most of the interest in solar energy was biased heavily toward the generation of electricity, and that the huge potential for direct use of solar heating in manufacturing processes was being overlooked in the United States. The article included a number of references which described the high level of interest in direct use of solar thermal energy in Europe and other parts of the world, along with descriptions of some unexplored avenues for direct use of solar heat in metallurgy.

During my interview, Dr. Clements and I discussed the article and the possibilities which it described, as well as possible reasons for lack of interest in direct use of solar heating for American industries. He touched on the need for sound engineering and design standards for manufacturers of solar thermal systems. Lastly, we discussed the future of engineering in an energy-constrained world characterized by economic contraction. You can listen to the interview directly on this blog, or you can download the audio by clicking here.

Dreaming That We're Poor

This past week, the New York Times ran a front page piece titled, “Bleak Portrait of Poverty is Off the Mark, Experts Say.” It was basically a packaging of “expert” criticisms of a U.S. Census Bureau study titled, “Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010.” The study stated that, among other things, the number of Americans living officially below the poverty line grew by 9.7 million between 2006 and 2010. (That figure is found in Table B-1, on page 62 of the report.) The report states that the number of Americans living in poverty has grown to 46.2 million, over four consecutive years of increasing poverty, and that the official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent. There are also now 49.9 million Americans without health insurance coverage.

The experts quoted by the Times (as well as the writers and editors at the Times) object to such a stark depiction of American poverty, saying that it does not take into account the availability of safety net programs for the poor as well as earned income tax credits. According to these talking heads, such things would cause “as much as half of the reported rise in poverty since 2006” to “disappear.” These talking heads grudgingly acknowledge a rise in the numbers of “near poor” people (what does that mean?!), who make too little to live comfortably and make too much to qualify for aid or tax breaks or reduced-cost medical care.

I find such talk to be very far from reality. It seems to me that the nation has become poorer. Social safety nets have been and are being gutted in every state in the Union while the rich continue to concentrate wealth. Access to social safety net programs is dwindling for most Americans. It's easy for so-called experts and their media mouthpieces to redefine “poverty” by fudging numbers. They have no idea what it is to experience life on $18,000 a year. But maybe I'm asleep, dreaming that most of us are poorer. If I just pinched myself hard enough, I'd wake up to find that most of us are rich.

Then again, maybe pinching myself wouldn't work. Maybe those of us who are tired of pinching ourselves should tell our stories to each other, lest the experts convince us that we're all crazy or dreaming. What if we bloggers mounted a campaign to contradict the Times and its talking heads by citing the Census Bureau study and posting our own stories of the poverty we're seeing?

By the way, if you want a copy of that Census Bureau study, you'd better download it fast. According to the Times, on Monday the 7^th of this month, the Census Bureau will publish a “long-promised alternate measure meant to do a better job of fudging the numbers counting the resources the needy have and the bills they have to pay.”

Renewables for Rich People - A Geothermal Hole

(This week, I'd like to give a big welcome to LindaM. She writes the blog hello it's me.)

As part of my present job, I am getting to mingle with people who have relatively deep backgrounds in the various facets of what is commonly called “renewable energy” in the United States nowadays. I am always eager to have my horizons expanded and my thinking challenged, so from time to time I talk with some of these people about their work.

A couple of Fridays ago I got to have coffee (for me it was actually herbal tea) with a geothermal engineer who holds advanced degrees. I was curious about geothermal energy, and was wondering as well about whether pursuing a post-baccalaureate education would actually be worth my time and effort. I learned a number of interesting things about geothermal energy.

First, the word “geothermal” has two common uses in the field of energy engineering. The first use, which more accurately reflects the classical definition, has to do with the energy, generated within the earth via radioactive decay, which is accessible via voids and discontinuities in the earth's crust that allow high-temperature matter to reach the earth's surface. Typically the high-temperature matter consists of steam, hot water, and high-temperature rock. The second use of the word has to do with the use of ground-source heat pumps to exchange heat between the earth (at shallow depths, typically less than 100') and a building which has spaces that must be conditioned (heated or cooled). (My geothermal engineer friend considers the reference of the word “geothermal” to ground-source heat exchange to be somewhat inaccurate.)

High-temperature geothermal energy resources are used for electricity generation and to supply heat for direct heating of spaces and for some industrial processes. My friend told me that in the United States, there is a strong bias toward using geothermal energy for electricity generation, and not nearly as much interest in using geothermal energy for direct heating applications, although there is a growing interest here in direct heat applications. I mentioned an article by Kris de Decker that I had recently read in Low Tech Magazine, in which Mr. de Decker stated that “Most of the talk about renewable energy is aimed at electricity production. However, most of the energy we need is heat...”

We discussed the bias toward electricity generation in the renewable industry in the U.S. and concluded that it must be due to the prejudices of the big economic players here who have sunk large amounts of capital in electric power plants and centralized schemes of electricity distribution. These players are only interested in a renewable source of energy to the extent that it can help them maintain and increase their profits via their current infrastructure and business model. Using a renewable resource for primary delivery of energy in a form other than electricity would undercut previous investments in electricity generation and distribution. (As an aside, my friend pointed out to me that non-electric uses of geothermal energy are very popular in Europe and elsewhere. China, for instance, has no geothermal electric plants, but has many applications of direct geothermal heating.)

We moved on to discuss how geothermal “resources” are discovered and exploited. I was interested in knowing whether the same methodology used for identifying potential oil and gas resources is used for identifying geothermal resources. My friend told me that historically geologists have used somewhat different methods for identifying geothermal resources, and that the oil and gas methodology is not altogether a good fit for identifying geothermal resources, due to the dynamic nature of heat flows within the earth's crust. A good (as in ethical, honest, accurate) geothermal geologist is therefore likely to include a much larger margin of error in his or her assessment of a potential geothermal resource than a petroleum geologist is in assessing a potential petroleum resource.

This puts a geothermal engineer in a bit of a bind, because the only true way to assess a potential geothermal resource is to drill a well, and wells require a lot of money up front. Therefore, venture capitalists and other lenders often demand that a geologist provide an unreasonable degree of certainty in identifying a resource prior to drilling. Of course, any geologist who identifies a resource with such certainty prior to drilling makes himself or herself professionally and financially liable if such an identification proves false. Typically, it is a petroleum industry service firm that drills a geothermal well, since such wells must be deep (at least 300 feet, and typically thousands of feet deep), and such firms normally collect hefty profits.

Although readily accessible geothermal resources in the U.S. are limited in availability, there are some good examples here of geothermal energy use. My friend told me of villages and towns in Alaska that are supplied with geothermal district heating. Also, there is the city of Klamath Falls in Oregon, which provides geothermal district heating to its populace, along with a geothermal heat and electricity plant at a state university campus in Klamath Falls.

One “take-away” point from our conversation is that geothermal energy is expensive due to high up-front capital and infrastructure costs. In a shrinking economy, this means a shrinking likelihood of expanding geothermal energy use. The American bias toward viewing renewable resources solely in terms of electricity generation is likely to have unpleasant consequences because of the age and increasing disrepair of our grid, along with the very high costs of an extensive grid overhaul and the rapidly appearing shortages of capital caused by our economic collapse.

What about ground-source heat exchange, then? We both agreed that it is a useful way to save energy. But here again, the up-front capital and infrastructure costs are high. Landlords and owners of large buildings would be far more likely to be able to afford the micro-tunneling needed to install a large heat exchanger in the ground next to a new building whose interior spaces were to be conditioned via ground-source heat pumps. Small landlords and homeowners would find the installation of ground source heat exchange to be quite “spendy,” to use an Oregonian term. Retrofitting an existing home – especially a home with a conventional joist floor – would be really spendy. (Think $30,000 or thereabouts.) This would be due to having to replace the floor with a concrete slab containing embedded heat exchanger pipes.

My conclusion at the end of our conversation was that exploiting geothermal energy or ground-source heat exchange is probably out of the reach of the vast majority of people in this country because of the high cost involved, and geothermal energy will therefore probably not be part of the toolkit of people looking to create resilient neighborhoods in this present time of energy and economic decline. Most of us will have to adopt low-tech strategies for getting our energy needs met. Geothermal energy has its place, but that place is limited.

And as far as me going back to school? I'll tell you all about that some other time...;)

P.S. Although I am an engineer, I am not a geologist. If any geologists read this, feel free to chip in your educated two cents...

No One For President, Or, Election-Proofing Your Life

(Before I start, I'd like to welcome Meg O'Halloran to my blog. Thanks for your readership! Also, a belated welcome to those who joined last year, including Neil and Naomi Montacre. If you live in the Portland metro area, feel free to check out their store some time.)

I've been thinking about my visit to the #Occupy Portland protests, especially in light of the mainstream media's continued lame coverage of the #Occupy movement in general. While the MSM have not been exactly enthusiastic or even diligent in their coverage of the protests, they have been very enthusiastic in providing coverage of the Republican presidential campaign. This is interesting in that it shows the rapidly widening rift between the MSM and the ordinary people of the United States.

One message that came through loud and clear in my interviews with the #Occupy Portland protesters is that increasingly, most Americans do not believe that either main political party serves the interests of the common people. Increasingly, people are coming to believe that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are actually interested in providing solutions or adaptive responses to the problems and predicaments facing ordinary Americans in this time of economic decline and contraction. An increasing number of Americans is waking up to the realization that the entire electoral and political process has been bought by the rich in order to serve the rich at the expense of all the rest of us. And more and more Americans are realizing that the story they are being fed by the mainstream media bears no resemblance to reality – especially the reality lived daily by ordinary people of small means.

Meanwhile, the New York Times is pushing stories about Texas Governor Rick Perry's proposed policies for America while Herman Cain chews up the airwaves with controversial and schizophrenic statements. (If ever there was a man suffering from a massive case of Stockholm syndrome, Herman Cain fits the bill. He's at least as bad as Clarence Thomas.) And AOL News recently ran a piece advising its readers which Republican presidential candidate would be best for their wallets. At least Sarah Palin has experienced a rare moment of decency and has decided not to run for president.

Increasingly, the Republicans remind me of a line from a Warren Zevon song, Werewolves of London: “You better stay away from him. He'll rip your lungs out, Jim...” And the Democrats? They are being paid by the werewolves to do nothing while the rest of us get eaten. In fact, I can see a few well-developed canine teeth in the mouths of many Democrat politicians. As for third parties in the United States, most of them also seem to be insane and more than a little bit feral.

Maybe we ordinary people should send an election year message of our own to whoever might be listening. I propose a campaign consisting of homemade bumper stickers (for those who drive) or bicycle helmet stickers (for those who pedal). Let the stickers read, NO ONE FOR PRESIDENT. I also propose that ordinary working-class people devise means for election-proofing their lives. This means finding strategies that will enable you to live in some measure of dignity without danger to your lungs or any other body parts, no matter which werewolf gets elected in 2012.

P.S. I will have a couple of more technical posts in the next few weeks, including (hopefully) an interview.

The Death Of The Central Valley

I will begin this post by amending my policy for comments on this blog. In the sidebar on the right, I originally wrote, “A Word On Comments: Comments are always welcome. I am flattered by those who read, and gratified by those who comment (even though we may disagree). I only ask that comments be 'family-friendly' – clean language, if you get my drift.”

That part of my comment policy still stands. However, I am now adding a new condition, namely, that anyone who wants to post a comment on this blog must do so via a valid OpenID. I will no longer be accepting anonymous comments. Why the change? Because of anonymous comments supportive of certain economic interests which were submitted for my posts, “The Chicken That Laid Leaden Eggs, And Other Horror Stories,” and “The 'Congress Created Dust Bowl'.”

But here's a paradox: today I am violating my own comment policy – just a little bit, and only this once. This past April, an anonymous commenter submitted two very hostile comments on the “Congress Created Dust Bowl” post. (I am just now getting around to addressing this person's comments. In April I was up to my neck in teaching and my office job.) Despite the hostility, I found the comments highly entertaining. (In another setting, they would have been downright funny, although the commenter was not trying to be humorous.) In many ways these comments are typical of the mindset of the “conservative,” jingoistic, materialist, supremacist, anti-intellectual element in modern-day America, even to the emotive name-calling, bad grammar and misspelling of simple words. The commenter also accuses me of allowing only comments with which I agree. Today, I have proven him wrong. If you want to read what he wrote, check out “The 'Congress Created Dust Bowl'” post. (And yes, Mr. Anonymous, whoever you are, I no longer live in California.)

Now I'd like to give a response to this person's comments, a response which will shed a rather different light on the challenges facing Central Valley agriculture. Hopefully this response will also shed further light on the fallacy of promoting unrestrained resource use of any kind in pursuit of economic growth. The truth is that in so many ways, our society has hit the wall.

My anonymous reader starts by saying, “The Central Valley produces 8% of the Nations (sic) ag on 1% of the total ag land in the country. Reservoirs made it possible to farm and feed you, yes feed you...When the state regulates your water use, and doesnt (sic) let you WATER YOUR CROPS its called, its a top down regulation. THUS CONGRESS CREATED...” He drives home his point by concluding, “IF THE STATE REGULATES YOUR WATER AND DOESNT (sic) LET YOU USE (sic) TO THE POINT THAT YOUR CROPS DIE AND YOU CANT (sic) FEED YOUR FAMILY! ITS CONGRESS CREATED!!!” (Emphasis in original.)

To provide some background to this man's rant, over the last few years the United States Federal government and certain California state agencies have imposed water use restrictions on Central Valley farmers in order to protect Central Valley groundwater supplies and to prevent ecological damage resulting from the over-exploitation of the Sacramento River. In response to these restrictions, a number of wealthy agribusinesses mounted a protest campaign whose most visible manifestation was the installation along Interstate 5 of hundreds of yellow signs with red letters reading “Congress Created Dust Bowl,” “Stop the Congress Created Dust Bowl,” and the names, Boxer, Costa and Pelosi (politicians who were being targeted by farmers for removal from office for helping to “create” the supposed “dust bowl”).

Here we have a very typical fight between a group of people who want to pursue economic growth at all costs, regardless of the collateral damage, and a group of people who acknowledge the very real limits to economic growth caused by limits on resources and the magnitude of the damage resulting from over-exploitation of those resources. Those who worship growth above all else demonize those who acknowledge limits and warn against trying to breach those limits. Those who see limits to growth in the Central Valley are branded as “Socialists!!!” and “LA liberals!!!” as my anonymous commenter called me.

But what if the pro-growth agribusinessmen got their way? I'd like to suggest that they would soon hit the wall anyway. In the Central Valley, that would mean the demise of large-scale agriculture, sooner rather than later – even if farmers were allowed to take as much water as they possibly could from available supplies. For intensive irrigated agriculture on a large scale carries the seeds of its own destruction.

The problem is the salting up of irrigated soils. This is a contributing factor to desertification – the result of farming too intensively, extracting resources too rapidly from the soils in a region, especially an arid or semiarid region, so that the land is not allowed time for natural processes to recharge and replenish it. (Desertification resulting from improper agriculture has caused a few ancient civilizations to fail, by the way.)

I will try to summarize the process by which soils become salted. Salts of various kinds are present in all soils, as well as in most naturally occurring bodies of water. However, salt accumulation in soils is usually the result of human activity. When water from lakes or rivers is used to irrigate lands used for agriculture, the salt in the irrigation water mingles with the salt in the naturally occurring groundwater. This is not a problem if the land has good drainage and if the amount of irrigation is relatively small. However, if the amount of irrigation is large or the land has poor drainage, there are a number of negative effects:

• Plants used as crops take up the irrigation water through transpiration, leaving dissolved salts behind in the soil.

• As large volumes of crops are grown in the same plot of irrigated land, the concentration of salt remaining in the soil increases.

• As land with poor drainage is intensively irrigated, a second mechanism increases the concentration of salts in the soil, namely, evaporation of water from flooded ground, leaving dissolved salts behind. This causes the naturally occurring groundwater to become increasingly saline as well.

The result of these effects is the buildup of soil salt concentrations to a level that prevents plants from growing. Then the field becomes unusable for agriculture. In extreme cases, the field can become barren.

This process is happening to the California Central Valley. It is happening because of the expansion of intensive irrigated agriculture. Many recent studies have been published which document this process. A study published by the University of California, Davis, in 2009 predicts that “...if salinity increases at the current rate until 2030, the direct annual costs will range from $1 billion to $1.5 billion...The production of goods and services in California could be reduced from $5 billion to $8.7 billion a year...the increase in salinity by 2030 could cost the Central Valley economy 27,000 to 53,000 jobs...” In short, Central Valley intensive irrigated agriculture, done intensively in order to maximize profit growth, is on the verge of serious trouble – even if Central Valley farmers get all the water they can get their hands on. The more water they get, the sooner they will all be in intractable trouble.

The problem of soil salinization and desertification is by no means limited to the California Central Valley. It is a worldwide symptom of modern industrial agriculture. In many places, man-made climate change will only make the problem worse. Smart people should begin thinking of alternative ways of getting their food.

References:

1. “Excessive Irrigation Promotes Desertification,” Willem Van Cotthem, 23 June 2008.

2. “The Economic Impacts of Central Valley Salinity,” University of California Davis, 16 March 2009.

3. “More With Less: Agricultural Conservation and Efficiency in California,” Pacific Institute, 2008.

4. “Dryland Agriculture, Irrigation, And Salinity,” University of Florida.

5. “Sustainability of Irrigated Agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley, California,” University of California, Davis; Los Alamos National Laboratory; Hydrogeologic, Inc, 25 October 2005.

6. “Irrigation Salinity – Causes and Impacts,” Cynthia Podmore, Advisory Officer, Natural Resource Advisory Services, Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Australia, 2009.

7. “Salinity In The Landscape,” Geotimes, Pichu Rengasamy, March 2008.

Antibiotics Versus Natural Immunity - A Metaphor

I apologize for my lack of posting lately. Summer school ended five weeks ago and I spent most of the ensuing break catching up on things around my house. Not only did I not give much thought to blogging, but I also did not pay much attention to news from the larger world.

Thus I didn't hear about this week's big financial sell-off until Saturday, during a conversation with a friend. I guess several key global stock markets lost a significant portion of their notional value over the last several days. This friend brought up the subject as part of his discussion on the topic of collapse – a topic that I had first introduced to him over two years ago. This past Saturday, he related to me the strategies he considered to be important in preparing for collapse, including such things as stocking up on bicycles and bicycle parts, owning a gun and converting one's cash to gold.

I say “Amen” to the bicycles and bicycle parts. When we got to guns, I started to choke a little. He told me about how useful guns would be for self-defense and how ammunition was in short supply for a while after Obama was elected, and all I could think of in response was a mental picture of a nation of antisocial red necks each one of whom is convinced that all their neighbors are zombies. (I'm not knocking on my friend here, but rather the deluded doofuses who went out and bought all that ammo.)

I was also reminded of something Dimitry Orlov has said a few times over the last year or so, namely, that in much of the United States, social and cultural collapse have already happened. (If you want to know what that means, look up his “Five Stages of Collapse.”) Social collapse removes those volunteer associations and groups which provide mutual aid to people outside the immediate nuclear family unit. Cultural collapse goes further and reduces even members of the same family to people at war with each other.

Don't trust in a neighbor. Don't put confidence in a friend. With the woman lying in your embrace, be careful of the words of your mouth!

For the son dishonors the father, the daughter rises up against her mother, the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; a man's enemies are the men of his own house.

(Micah 7:5-6, World English Bible)

It's easy to see how, in such a scenario, people would be tempted to rely on guns and other instruments of mayhem as sources of security. But this to me is like people whose friendly intestinal bacteria and other flora have been wiped out because of living in our toxic industrial society, and who consequently get sick quite often, with the result that they rely on doctors and medicine as sources of security. Wouldn't it be better to rebuild natural immunity by re-establishing a healthy ecosystem in your body?

P.S. School break is almost over. I will try to post a bit more regularly. We'll see how it works.