Let's call it "Generative A.I.eee!"

Am I right?  Too much too fast while not yet ready for primetime?

Remember the first time you were outraged by spam?  This, in the pantheon of gifts of technology misused by excessively profit-minded types, could dwarf its irritating effect. But they've got a hot technology they're trying to find a use for, and are hitting us with every conceivable uselessness, hoping to find the next fad.

Great ideas, thanks so much.  Now could you please move your Artificialism out of my way, just make it an option like everything else?

This is like the ridiculous Metaverse — taking a play-acting walk through the insides of a cartoon — being brought to you, instead of you needing to enter it.  Oh, so they thought we'd all love living in a pretend world, where you'd have a hard time telling what is real?

Then how about all those sugar-coated polystyrene illustrations? I am already really sick of seeing all these mindless garbage "A.I.eee!" graphics. Just imho; but really now. Or at the very least, if you do, please Label it as such, out or respect to all the human artists who develop and labor long and lovingly over their craft.

Artists should label their own stuff, too; something like, "THIS IS REAL — I DID THIS, my with genuine biological hands, eyes, brain and heart." (Only shorter.)

Fix Earth First - Remember, "The World Solved the Ozone Problem"

A very good and timely point:

"Fix Earth's climate crisis instead of dreaming of other planets, urges Nobel prize-winning astronomer"

'Earthrise' - Earth from the Moon, Apollo 8 mission, 1968

By Olivia Campbell - The Independent

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/2019-nobel-prize-physics-chemistry-climate-change-global-warming-a9237346.html

___
And that's got to be Now!

But while it certainly can seem impossible, another article I saw this morning provides a basis for hope. In an editorial yesterday, the New York Times made the point,

"The World Solved the Ozone Problem. It Can Solve Climate Change"
"The same tools that fixed the ozone hole — science, innovation and international action — can address it."

By The Editorial Board
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/07/opinion/sunday/ozone-climate-change.html
___
One of the most hopeful examples of the kinds of solutions we'll need may be efforts in process all over the world to extract all the carbon back out of the air.  As we now fully understand, that's what has trapped all the extra heat from the sun here, melting the glaciers and raising sea levels.

That could make all the difference, and clearly would if it worked well enough. Of course, that's over time, if not in time to avoid a lot more of the kinds of impacts and resulting troubles we're seeing.

But having let it slide so badly, it seems like the current population of Earth has an obligation to at least do everything possible to get things significantly moving back in the right direction.

''Are You Eating Plastic?"

> Europe is proposing a ban on single-use plastic items such as cutlery, straws and cotton buds in a bid to clean up the oceans. - CNN

It is SO about time for this — we now know that tossed plastic gets washed into the world's oceans and starts breaking into tiny bits which fish eat and retain, and that we used to feel confident eating fish. So this is very, very late, but the proposal is a solid advance towards a practical overall solution, and in a prompt few-year timeframe. 

A good start, but here's a humble Suggestion: ban the manufacture of all single-use plastic products.  And no plastic product can be made without an end-to-end plan for re-everything: recapture or recycle.

Its vendors will naturally need to work the cost of all that into the product, and voila, it's not so cheap to produce anymore, which is one of the main causes behind our ever-growing problems with the damn stuff.
_________

> The European Commission wants to ban 10 items that make up 70% of all litter in EU waters and on beaches. The list also includes plastic plates and drink stirrers.

> The legislation is not just about banning plastic products. It also wants to make plastic producers bear the cost of waste management and cleanup efforts, and it proposes that EU states must collect 90% of single-use plastic bottles by 2025 through new recycling programs.

> On a global basis, only 14% of plastic is collected for recycling. The reuse rate is terrible compared to other materials -- 58% of paper and up to 90% of iron and steel gets recycled.  Research shows there will be more plastic than fish by weight in the world's oceans by 2050, which has spurred policy makers, individuals and companies into action.

> The Rethink Plastic Alliance -- an association of environmental organizations -- called the proposals "a leap forward in tackling plastic pollution,"

 …but said that since the proposals do not set targets for EU countries for reduction, it "could result in countries claiming they are taking the necessary steps as long as any reduction is achieved," however small.

"Europe plans ban on plastic cutlery, straws and more"
by Alanna Petroff, May 28, 2018

money.cnn.com/2018/05/28/news/europe-plastic-ban-proposal/index.html

_________

More good ideas to solve the scourge of plastic are going into practice, like this one:

> Starbucks also announced in March it was launching a $10 million grant challenge to solicit designs for a cup that's easier to recycle.

money.cnn.com/2018/03/21/news/companies/starbucks-cups/index.html

From this blog (2014) — "What Can We Do With All This Old Plastic?"
 rosswriting.blogspot.com/2014/09/another-try-at-how-can-we-use-all-this.html

  (Photo by Bill McN. Ross)

(How About) A Greenhouse Walking Track Community Center

A Concept Statement.

(Greenhouse on the Biltmore Estate - Dale S. Rogers)

Imagine — not just "picture," since scent is central to this— a lush, leafy greenhouse under a large, arching glass ceiling, filled with beautiful, breathing plants, most of which are also food.  It's warm, with an invigorating light moisture in the air.

Then, winding its way through this living space, a walking track, a footpath under the bowers, interspersed with fountains and benches.  There's a space in one corner, say about 25 x 25 ft., where near sundown the shelves of plants usually growing there can be swung into wheeled stacks and moved to open it up for meetings, small performances, etc.

The small café, its tables tucked in under the leaves, is always open starting later in the day, once all the work on the plants is through.  The music is selected for the tastes of the plants, the food for the people's.

You began coming here (remember, we're still imagining,) because you heard the walking path was very pleasant, and maybe to look at the various foods grown there and for sale.  But definitely hearing that interesting and generally healthier types of people were getting together there was an influence.

Once you'd been in there a couple times, you noticed how much you looked forward to that first in-breath of oxygen-rich air when you walked in the double door, and your step always became just a bit livelier.

Eventually you became a member, because you fell in love with all of it.  Membership in the co-op means that you get the best price and first crack at every new crop, with a year-round food share of whatever best grows in each season and cycle, and preferential choices for walking times and meeting space use.

You even looked forward to the open member meetings because you liked a lot of the people, and came to feel a common cause with them.
___

Now, realistically, we all know that good and even helpful ideas can and do run aground as easily as bad ones.  So any idea worth its salt has to stand up to a few good rounds of How's It Work, What-If and Then-What?

The key idea is that the combination of a strong, (literally) healthy Membership program, and the café (which could expand into a restaurant if the demand is there), could ease the enterprise out of the brutal stream of making it work exclusively as a retail operation on what's grown for sale.

Okay, sounds ducky; but "What If" it doesn't work?

If it didn't fly as this multipurpose dreamhouse, it could still be easily turned into simply a commercial greenhouse — unless the winter fitness or restaurant crowds are what draw the main support, who knows? — and I'll just need to find somewhere else to walk in the winter, even year-round.

Postscript
It would so cool if someone would do this; I'd consider moving there and becoming your first member, how's that?

(April 20, 2018)

"A Working Simple System"

This post represents an interesting confluence of past and present. In a recent short series I wrote for LinkedIn on "Economizing on High Quality Documentation Projects," I ended the third with a reference to John Gall's famed concept about the crucial role of what he called "a working simple system."  It turns out this concept has become so famous over time that it's now known as "Gall's Law."

Well, that started the wheels turning, because one of the first half-dozen posts I wrote in 2006 was about just that.  Why rewrite what I've long been saying about Mr. Gall's stellar thinking, when I already have *and* had decided to start republishing my own favorites from the blog, as topsoil for what will come next.

That's what made this one our nominee for our blog's humble "Hall of Frame," we'll call it.  So:

---

Here's an idea so profound, so fundamental, that I can't tell you how many times I've quoted it; even before the time I had it on my first site ( in "the Serious Part," now enshrined here, along with everything else in the Internet Archive). A lot of system designers of all kinds would do well to contemplate this principle.

It's from a book by John Gall, famously named "Systemantics, The Underground Text of Systems Lore." (With the typical feverishness of Web publishing, I'm going to slap this up here now, then do some searching later to see if I can find anything about it online, or in print, or at least a bread crumb trail. Originally found this in print, in the old Whole Earth Review when I believe Kevin Kelly was editing it, before he went on to Wired.)

Some essential statements:

"Complex systems exhibit unexpected behavior. 

"The system always kicks back - systems get in the way - or, in slightly more elegant language: Systems tend to oppose their own functions.

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

"The parallel proposition also appears to be true: a complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system."

General Systemantics Press, Pub. Date 2nd Ed.: November 1990

---

(Shortly afterwards:)
...Sure enough, there are ample references to Mr. Gall's book all over the Web.

"General Systemantics Press was established in the 1970s to publish Dr. John Gall's book, 'Systemantics™ - How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail.'
This was the First Edition of what is now 'The Systems Bible™,' 

which they proclaim includes,

"three new chapters, new AXIOMS, THEOREMS AND RULES OF THUMB, and many new Horrible Examples..."

Of course there are a number of entries about it in the Wikipedia;
the main page for Systemantics contains these additional, comforting Laws:

"The Functional Indeterminacy Theorem (F.I.T.):
In complex systems, malfunction and even total non-function may not be detectable for long periods, if ever.
"Systems develop goals of their own the instant they come into being."

---

– from this blog, Rosswriting: "A Working Simple System"
  (originally posted  July, 2006, at 10:36 PM)  

Does Amazon Own Google Now?

On a laid back Sunday morning, when I'm most likely to feel the room to indulge curiousities that float by when you're buttering the toast, I was looking up how little you could get the third season of 30 Rock for on DVD at this point.

On Google, after a lead ad,

• the first three (3) pure search returns were Amazon pages,
• then one from Wikipedia,
• then we get three more in succession from Amazon.
• That's followed by one from Bestbuy,
• one IMDB,

then an ad by Amazon and one by Target. Even better, the third result of the leadoff 3-in-a-row for Amazon is for Season 4, when my search for "30 rock season 3 dvd" pretty much couldn't be simpler or more specific. What's the logic there?  (Maybe "rationale" would be the better word.)

Overall, of nine (9) pure search results, six (6) were from Amazon.  Dear Google, how smart does that look?

I realize of course that your Shopping tab will give me what I want.  But most people, and it's been this way since the earliest days of Web search (based on having worked at the original AltaVista Search in the late 90's), just go a search engine, type a one-word search and pick something from the first page. Google's default search page should be much smarter than this; and, inevitably, it makes me wonder what other subjects they're screwing up in similar ways.

On the identical search within the hour, Yahoo did much better, although with two each for Amazon and Ebay, it's still plainly skewed towards the Big Boys. That's anti-competitive, a principle that is not only common sense, but deeply entwined in the law. (Sure sounds a lot like whistling in the wind in this era, doesn't it.)

So, am I complaining about a flaw in their search algorithm ("Such mistakes have always been traced back to human error, Dave,") or Amazon's dominance?

Both.  First, we not be many, but there people like me who clearly choose not going to Amazon except in a pinch, and for all the reasons.

Like, Shop Local for everything possible, because Small Is Beautiful and human-scale, and you have a voice in it.  Unlike the alternative, where Too Big is a Failure of society, and Amazon in particular sounds pretty brutal to their workers, both white- and blue-collared?
That last part may not be such a problem in the near future, though, because here's a tip: if you're a robot, go see them about a job.

Bigger Is Better – for the Bigger.  Not necessarily for anyone any smaller.
___

Yahoo - pure search results, not incl. ads - one each of:

• Amazon
• EBay
• Wikipedia
• dvdempire.com
• Bestbuy
• Overstock.com
• EBay (2nd)
• Amazon (2nd)
• dvdizzy.com
• barnesandnoble

___
"Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace
- The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push
white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions."

New York Times, by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, Aug. 15, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html

UNDO-ing Plastic: At The Source

As I've been documenting just one small corner of our problems with plastic pollution — the fact of the vast patches of plastic garbage in the world's oceans — it's equally important to keep the focus on solutions.

They do exist (Bucky Fuller said so), and while we don't expect any particular new deconstruction of technology to restore the planet back to Eden overnight, it's almost always a much better use of our time and attention to be part of a solution.  That's even if its effect is no more than a nudge in the right direction (which, let's be realistic, may be the best we can expect at this point).

But it is still worth doing – any part of the right direction feels better than just moving further into the wrong ones.

Trying to address the source of the problem is usually a good way to go.  So here is just such an effort:

The "Think Beyond Plastic Business Accelerator," in Menlo Park, California, (of course,) calls itself the world’s first such incubator to focus on eliminating plastic pollution.  The company helps startups to develop affordable, sustainable alternatives to plastic, meeting the specific needs of large companies.

"Plastic may be toxic, and it lasts forever, but it’s also extremely convenient.  ...If you want companies to stop using plastic, you need to offer viable alternatives—and provide assistance to the startups coming up with them."

"A NewBusiness Accelerator Takes on Plastic Pollution"
By Caroline Winter, Businessweek, July 14, 2014

In here:
The OceanS' Floating Garbage PatcheS – Yes, it's worse than you thought

Fun Facts' About The Great Pacific Garbage Patch & Co.

The OceanS' Floating Garbage PatcheS – Yes, it's worse than you thought

Recently, the conclusion has come to me that the mere fact of the five gigantic "floating garbage patches" in the world's oceans means we'd better start figuring out how to capture waste plastic in the wild, and to reuse or break it down to its original elements, among other things.

North Pacific Gyre World Map (by Fangz)

(That's right: it's not just the one in the northern Pacific, the first one spotted in 1997, said to be twice the size of Texas.)

I mean, really – shouldn't the world collectively feel the shame of this, and the responsibility?

(Okay, I know the world I've mostly chosen to live in is a Frank Capra movie, but,)
How come as soon as the news first hit the big media, had its 15 minutes — now probably down to around 3-5, hm? —an immediate worldwide action movement didn't spring up to do something about it?

Could it be that maybe all the plastic they say has leached itself into our systems has influenced us to be more sympathetic to plastic!? (Okay, I'm kidding... I sure hope I'm kidding.)

But for the moment, rather than dive any further into another depressing round of grim facts about all our plastic-coated problems, two basic questions:

What can be done about it?
What can we do?

Maybe we could start with an insight of R. Buckminster Fuller's, who had the right idea when he wrote, decades ago,

“Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.”

(Pollution seen simply as unharvested resources – this idea would work as an brilliant example of Genius, or vision, something really grand like that.)


An End-to-End Range of Solutions

Beyond that, of course, the full product lifecycle has to be dealt with. The main point first will be to reduce demand and production to the level where it can all be recaptured and somehow processed.  Reducing demand will require learning how to produce good alternatives to the functions people like to use plastic for.

=0=

The Buckminster Fuller Institute  http://bfi.org 

The Guardian's environmental news index on plastic bags:  (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/plasticbags) 

The "Great Pacific garbage patch" on Wikipedia  

Here: posts tagged "appropriate technology"

(All the old posts restored, cleared of any unsuspecting copyright issues)

As noted in a post here some months back, I had promptly taken down all 150+ pieces that I'd put up over the years when I heard that a certain online image bank was sending hefty bills with threatening letters to bloggers who'd used one of their copyrighted images.

It didn't matter if you'd linked and attributed that photo (which I've always practiced), or immediately took it down.  You owed 'em, and they said they'd sue if you didn't pay.

Given what a wild and woolly frontier the Web was in the early years, with everyone reusing everything and proud of it, this certainly did seem like a dirty trick.

So I then started going through every post, following the links to everything that I'd put there, and zapped anything that I couldn't confirm had a Creative Commons license or was otherwise public domain.  This did get dreary, naturally, so it's taken awhile; it wasn't exactly a high priority, y'know?

But today, working on a new one, I finally got around to finishing going through the rest of the earlier posts, from way back in 2006.  So, for what it's worth, it's all there again, minus a couple of pix.


A quick search of "blogs images copyright threats" reveals quite an amount of cases; this one, among others, was detailed and instructive:
“If Getty Images sent you a demand letter, there is definitely potential for a lawsuit.” –  (Onehourprofessor.com)

New Leaves on the Tree Again

It's Spring, (even if kind of an on-again, off-again one this year,) so what better way to restart the discussion here in the Things Green Dept. than by Going Back To The Roots.

Yes, we're talking about Trees, in this case stimulated by an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times, "Why Trees Matter."

"We have underestimated the importance of trees," author Jim Robbins writes. "They are not merely pleasant sources of shade but a potentially major answer to some of our most pressing environmental problems. We take them for granted, but they are a near miracle."

Among the many well-cited benefits he names are,

•  "In a campaign called Forests Are Lovers of the Sea, fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned. 

• "In Japan, researchers have long studied what they call 'forest bathing.' A walk in the woods, they say, reduces the level of stress chemicals in the body and increases natural killer cells in the immune system… 

• "In Africa, millions of acres of parched land have been reclaimed through strategic tree growth."

"…an old proverb seems apt. When is the best time to plant a tree? The answer: 'Twenty years ago.' The second-best time? 'Today.' "

From "Why Trees Matter," by Jim Robbins, author of the upcoming book, “The Man Who Planted Trees.” NY Times, published April 11, 2012

Ah, the endless subject of trees, the lengthy lists of all their virtues and gifts to us. From just one page of the Arbor Day Foundation's site, for example, we can learn that trees:

• help fight climate change, 
• are the “low tech” solution to energy problems, 
• reduce your carbon footprint,
• tame stormwater, 
• conserve soil and water, 
• regulate the temperature of your neighborhood, 
• provide food for wildlife. 

Why, they even "add value to your home," especially when planted to require less energy to heat or cool it.

That's all just on the coolly rational, cost/benefit analysis side, too. Trees, standing in for the entire plant world, offer a perfect symbiosis with oxygen-breathing, carbon-dioxide-exhaling humans. "Through the natural process of photosynthesis," Arborday.org reminds us, "trees absorb CO2 and other pollutant particulates, then store the carbon and emit pure oxygen."

Then, in the most direct terms, how much does the shade of a tree mean to you on a hot summer day, with the sun at full blast? How about the sound and the visual of a grand old tree in the wind, being moved and heard from a thousand different spots; and the incomparably soothing effect that can produce in your nervous system?  How is it that all that motion can massage us, tip to toe, from inside to out, somehow washing away a tide of tension and concerns?

Like the man said, we don't appreciate trees nearly enough.

Not that there aren't people who do, and are working on it: for example, the United Nations sponsored an International Year of Forests in 2011, "a global celebration to highlight people's action for sustainable forest management," and "highlight our relationship with forests and humankind’s role in ensuring their well-being and development."

"The four shared Global Objectives provide a framework for international efforts toward sustainable forest management."

This United Nations Forum on Forests awarded their first-ever Forest Heroes Awards, celebrating the "countless individuals around the world who are dedicating their lives to nurturing forests in quiet and heroic ways. By honouring everyday people, we would like to show that it is possible for everyone to make a positive change for forests!"

(Snapshot by BR, 2012)

"Green" Lights in Europe, Asia, But Not U.S. (Except...)

The new Peekaboo version of The New York Times ran an excellent overview of the state of "green" business in the U.S. vs. the rest of the world, which pretty much explains what we're seeing today.

European and Asian governments had good game plans and put them in play effectively, while, until the last few years, the oil-bound U.S. stood alone bravely claiming that the science on climate change wasn't in yet. As a result, other countries have raced ahead in developing and implementing sustainable technologies on a wide scale.

"Many European countries — along with China, Japan and South Korea — have pushed commercial development of carbon-reducing technologies with a robust policy mix of direct government investment, tax breaks, loans, regulation," and emissions either capped or taxed, author Elisabeth Rosenthal writes. "Incentives have fostered rapid entrepreneurial growth in new industries like solar and wind power, as well as in traditional fields like home building and food processing, with a focus on energy efficiency."

Tighter energy-efficiency standards in Europe, Japan and China have incented companies there to dive into design and development with more gusto than their American counterparts — with the notable exception of California, whose standards are equivalent to Europe's.

The story contrasts insulation jobs on a single, four-story home each in the U.S. and Britain: $5,000 vs. $1,000, with the English tapping that 40-to-60% subsidy from their government, thus being able to recoup their full investment in 12-18 months in fuel saved. (Poor people and seniors got theirs done for free.)

"U.S. Is Falling Behind in the Business of ‘Green’" – NY Times, June 8, 2011, by Elisabeth Rosenthal

"California's Energy Efficiency Standards for
Residential and Nonresidential Buildings"

Followup: "Dr. King" quote mostly accurate

(…depending on which network you saw it on.)

Just happened to see followups this past week about two different, almost-true stories, one of which I had passed along the longer, more-accurate version of to my purposefully-small corner of Facebook.

That would be the quote attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr. ("Rev. King," let's remember), which was being passed around when the U.S. government finally found, and killed, the mass murderer. Turns out someone noticed it was almost a King quote, garbled by addition, and one thorough individual took the time to track the messages back to the source; so here's how it happened.

The Christian Science Monitor reported, "Megan McArdle, a blogger at the Atlantic, tracked the original quote down to Jessica Dovey," a young lady recently graduated from Penn State but living in Kobe (the original one), Japan. She'd posted in Facebook, writing,

I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. "Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that." MLK Jr

Note, as someone down the line didn't, that she properly put quote marks at the beginning of the actual words of Dr. King. But as the message was passed along, those crucial open-quote marks were lost, and it became No-Longer-Really-A-Quote of MLK.. Then, as the wave spread to Twitter (ah-ha!), the rest was dropped and only Jessica's sentence remained, at which point it attained the state of true Fakeness.

So it was just due to this petty detail, a seemingly harmless omission, that the meaning was changed; only subtly, but enough that its credibility was compromised. But worse, this made it ripe pickings for Twitter, the Short Attention Span Medium (SASM), to phase it impatiently into a total "fake accompli."

Not the author's fault; first of all, her own statement still seems to me to be entirely faithful to the thought and intention of the great man she quotes in turn. And technically, she got it right — although it would have been an even better version of Right if she'd started the quote with its own paragraph.

So, right on, Jessica; and good work, Megan.

More to the story: Facebook to blame, too?

But, ah-ha! Here, once again, we detect the haughty hand of Fazebook's user interface design authority, which has turned its back on 25 years in the evolution of GUI design standards. They've decided that a Return or Enter is now the Send or Post command, not a line feed/"carriage return" as in pretty much every other piece of major or minor software out there.

And of course this fairly-significant change seemed to be turned on without any prior warning, much less inquiry into how their non-mobile access users felt about this new "feature" (since it seems geared to handhelds).

Therefore, Ms. Dovey may not have known that she's able to write posts with more than one paragraph — the trick is a couple "Shift-Return's." Only recently, finally, is it noted on-screen, while the function was always there (one UI tradition they have kept, so far). Maybe people were complaining.

So, that's another fine mess you've gotten us into, Mr. Zuckerberg. (And you can quote me on that.)

"How Osama bin Laden's death sparked a fake Martin Luther King quote"
– Christian Science Monitor

"Anatomy of a Fake Quotation"
by Megan McArdle, The Atlantic, May 3 2011

(The next day.. )

Only later does it occur to me that there's a genuinely wonderful thing to appreciate here, which should also be acknowledged. That's the fact that a near- and very-faithful-to-the-original quote with this perspective, this nature, struck such a chord in so many people, all over the country and globe. Nice to know that such a sensibility is that alive in this world, don't you think?

Reboot

The traditionalist part of my brain will not allow me to let seven months sans postings go by unacknowledged. Search-engine-wise, of course, it doesn't matter, because people reach you by tags, not chronological lists.

But in the narrative sense, in the words of Chico Marx, "Nah, atsa no good, too." I'd moved my blogging attention primarily to logging events in the movement to make the Hudson Valley a Green Tech center, and what seems to have happened, at least at this point, can be summed up in a word: China.

In a few more words, Vince Cozzolino of The Solar Energy Consortium in Kingston talked about a specific solar manufacturer's setback, but he could have been speaking for the sector.

He explained they were "hit by a combination of the bad economy, reduced demand for solar cells because of lower subsidies in parts of Europe, and competition from countries such as China, where solar manufacturing is heavily subsidized by the government."

(From the story by Christian Livermore in the Times Herald-Record/Recordonline, 12/22/10.)

At the same time, I've gotten busy with successive new documentation projects, two of them back in the field of professional video, one for large-scale live events and the other for broadcast studios.

As a guy who was trained to really take the time to choose the right word and proofread carefully, I can't just dash off some breathless verbiage and hit Send. It takes time. Even here in the 21st century, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right — right?

Now add the increasing if still stingy amount of time on Facebook, because naturally I've discovered a couple dozen old buddies that I wind up riffing with on subjects both serious and JPF (Just Plain Fun*), and all that's how the blog went "on hold." You've got to have a sense of when you're getting spread too thin; and that's coming from a skinny guy, where it becomes especially important.

But I knew the tide would come back in, and there it is. It just took the right time and an exciting enough reason — in this case, Ray Allen's night — to take keyboard in hand again.

(* - "Just Plain Fun" - no, I'd never seen that acronym before, either.)

A CLEAR-Headed Idea for Reducing Emissions

Two U.S. Senators have proposed what looks like a brilliant framework for not only reducing carbon air pollution, but putting some money directly into our pockets, and doing it with what sounds like a refreshingly simple system.

(Are you kidding me? Can I be forgiven for fearing, in these nutty times, that it's too good to be true? Well, I just read this morning that the White House and Senate allies decided this week, "to press ahead with a scaled-back energy bill," and they didn't mention this one, so it might turn out to be. Nevertheless:)

In December, Senators Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) introduced the Carbon Limits and Energy for America's Renewal (CLEAR) Act. They wrote,

"Our concept is simple: Instead of cap-and-trade, our approach is 'cap-and-dividend,' with the dividends going where they belong: into the pockets of hardworking Americans."

"The legislation would set up a mechanism for selling "carbon shares" to the few thousand fossil fuel producers and importers through monthly auctions. Seventy-five percent of the auction revenue would be returned to every citizen and legal resident of the United States through equally divided rebate checks -- averaging $1,100 for a family of four each year. The remaining 25 percent would finance clean-energy research and development…" and more.

This would be done "without disrupting the economy, using a gradually declining 'cap.' The concept is to gradually accelerate emission reductions," aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 20% by 2020, and 83% by 2050.

Quotes from "A cap-and-dividend way to a cleaner nation and more jobs," Cantwell and Collins' Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post, Friday, 6/18/10.

There are literally a host of good ideas contained in this one bill, beyond the obvious lure of a check from the guv'mint, for a change: transfer money directly from those who profit from polluting to those who suffer from it the most. Set a predictable price for carbon that everyone can plan on, one that's market-driven within set limits, and all with a minimum of government involvement since an independent trust would be set up to handle the auction. (A few nods to the Republican side of the aisle, there — bully! Let's get everybody on board.)

And how about these perks? "We create a level playing field instead of providing pollution credits to whichever entities have the best lobbyists," the Senators write. "The act cuts out Wall Street speculators and price manipulators. It minimizes destructive price volatility."

And, perhaps most radically of all, the actual bill is only 39 pages long! That means all those members of Congress will be able to actually have a concept of what's in there, for a change. (Candid Representatives have admitted there's no way you can know all the provisions in your common 2,000-page bill.) Between the few pages and the mechanism proposed, it also means that special interests wouldn't have anywhere in the system to hide big payouts to themselves.

The idea is that now that companies will have to pay for the carbon they allow into the atmosphere (that we're all breathing, and in effect swimming in together), they will be economically incented to reduce that output. At long last they'll find the will and the way to do what they'd put off for as long as possible, simply due to the cost. Polluting did not figure into their bottom line — aside from compliance costs during earlier eras when the EPA was actually on the job. Now it would.

By golly, they even made a cute little video for YouTube to explain it:

"How the CLEAR Act Works" (PDF, from cantwell.senate.gov/)

First saw it here:
"Double Dividend: Make Money by Saving Nature"
George Lakoff, Huffington Post

Photo from Wikipedia —
the controlled demolition of four giant coal smokestacks, known locally as the "four sisters," in a Toronto suburb (2006). The plant was labelled a heavy polluter by the Ontario government; and we who live downwind, to the east, thank you.

VIDEO: Tim-berrrr! (53 sec., no sound)

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Conservation Tips For The "Heat Wa-a-a-ve!"

Public Service Electric and Gas, New Jersey’s largest utility, and PJM Interconnection, the electric grid operator for 13 states and D.C., put out an urgent release yesterday, July 7th, asking everybody to conserve electricity, and since it's no cooler today I thought I'd pass along these highly-relevant tips they included.
(Unless you tend to live this way already, in which case Bully for you! And thanks.)

These are some of PSEG's conservation tips:

• Turn off everything you’re not using; lights, TVs, computers, etc. Use dimmers, timers and motion detectors on indoor and outdoor lighting.
• Close blinds, shades and draperies facing the sun to keep the sun’s heat out and to help fans and air conditioners cool more efficiently. (Duh.)
• Close doors leading to uncooled parts of your home. With central air, close off vents to unused rooms.
• Delay heat-producing tasks such as washing and drying laundry or dishes until later in the day, and (or least) wait until a load is full.
• Don't use nonessential appliances, like an extra refrigerator in your garage. Consider setting air conditioners to 78 degrees, health permitting.

More "Energy Conservation Tips from PSEG"

"In the New York City area, Con Edison said its crews were working 24 hours a day to maintain service. Con Edison on July 6 broke its 2010 record for peak electricity use when the company delivered 12,963 megawatts at 5 p.m. A news release said usage would have been even higher if not for the efforts of Con Edison’s customers, who responded to the company’s request for conservation."
- Sunpluggers.com News, where I saw a piece on PSEG's release.

(Can't resist on a day like this:)
"Heat Wave" — (the music starts at 1:40 in)

Giant Shipper Finds "Slow Is Better," Cheaper

Now that oil is back in the news with a vengeance, exacting the price for our dependency on both the fuel and the money to be made from it, I kept thinking about this piece from earlier in the year about a revolutionary move of the leading container shipping company.

"Slow Trip Across Sea Aids Profit and Environment," Elisabeth Rosenthal, NY Times, 2/16/10.

The world-spanning Danish line Maersk, socked with $145 barrels of oil in 2008, cut their fuel consumption by almost one third with a daring manuever: cutting the top cruising speed of its ships by half.

"Reducing engine load dramatically decreases fuel consumption," a Maersk presentation explains, because, "fuel consumption and CO2 emissions increase exponentially with speed." Maersk was able to cut their fuel needs on major routes by as much as 30 percent, a major savings. But just by that, the company also managed an equal cut in their ships’ emissions of greenhouse gases.

On many routes, it doesn't even take any more time(!) — cut-off, transit and arrival schedules remain the same since technology now allows for a better distribution of speed, thus gaining back what had been wasted "hurry up and wait" time.

(Of course, when you think of it, this isn't really an entirely new principle to any of us, because we've all heard from way back that driving at 55 gives you the best fuel efficiency and gets you there just some minutes later. But that doesn't mean some of us aren't still looking for the chance to really open 'er up anyway.)

"Where the previous focus has been on 'What will it cost?' and 'Get it to me as fast as possible,' " Maersk’s director of environmental sustainability explains in the NYT story, there's now a third dimension: 'What’s the CO2 footprint?' " Maersk's pitch to shippers includes the offer that, " We will significantly reduce your carbon footprint," claiming that, "Super Slow Steaming alone easily reduces a customer’s whole annual supply chain by 13%."

"Slowing down from high speeds reduces emissions because it reduces drag and friction as ships plow through the water," says the NYT's story, and points out that the same holds true for airplanes, which could easily reduce their emissions by taking it slower, say by 10%.

This is an especially welcome innovation at a time when worldwide consumption is growing so fast; the container ship trade grew by eight times between 1985 and 2007, especially long-haul shipments of goods from Asia. Maersk says their fleet of 545 ships makes a port call every thirteen minutes. So their shift to Slo-Mo has an impact, even more so as a gauntlet thrown to their competition — not, God forbid, because it's the Right Thing To Do or anything, but because it'll save them money, too.

Hey, whatever it takes.

But here's another excellent and really intriguing example of how progress doesn't always come from charging ahead — maybe just as often, it can be achieved by dropping back a step.

• Maersk vessel photo page

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Happy Earth Day

How could any green-thinking individual not offer an increasingly gladdened salute to the day? It's hard not to consider where we could have been by now if the original Earth Day, 40 years ago, had been embraced more widely. But by golly, at least now the momentum has shifted, and even though every institution with an advertising budget is busily greenwashing itself — for example, the one that brags widely about their "ecoimagination" on one side, while continuing to oppose the cleanup of the Hudson River they publicly agreed to on the other — there are real and tremendous strides being made.

So let's toast the day with a glass of pure water, giving some grateful credit to all the pioneers of this awareness — like the people PBS is chronicling in "Earth Days," the story of "the dawn and development of the modern environmental movement through the extraordinary stories of the era’s pioneers.

And while we're at it, let's not forget to celebrate to whatever force or forces deserve the credit for the amazingly beautiful planet we're standing on.

On Giving Linky Credit Where Due

A side thought:
In today's other post, above, I encountered some internal resistance as I was picking links. Was it necessary to link to some automated index, which had vacuumed up these stories from their respective sources, or just to the original articles?

Why was such a commonplace even an issue? If you've ever discovered your own stuff lifted, as a whole — as distinguished from partial, Fair Use referencing — on some parasitic phantom site, you know where I'm coming from. Fie on those who profit (however slimly) off someone else's labor, while adding no real value of their own.

As I've been (slow-)blogging these last few years, I've given a lot of thought to linking, trying to achieve the right balance of interconnectivity with relevance to the piece. Every widely-travelled surfer has seen articles where the author, excuse me, the "content producer" has gone hog wild with links, producing madly distracting sentences with four or five separate words underlined and flight-ready, often just to a word's Wikipedia entry. Gee, thanks, but I can look it up myself if I'm puzzled; kinda gotten the hang of that now.

It never takes long for "link fatigue" to set in with these baubly pages; the writer is expecting you do so much work, not just reading but evaluating every third word to ask if you should follow the pointers to another, another, yet another page.

Then there are the opposite extreme, people who are, let's be blunt, too lazy and "self-preoccupied" (the mildest form of that dis I can come up with,) to make the little extra effort to be sure their borrowings are at least minimally attributed. C'mon, people, it's fun — and you know that if someone were quoting you...

(In this case, I did wind up choosing to link to that index, because it's BusinessWeek's, an established publication where one assumes some editorial effort was involved, and further inspection showed that one of the stories was their own, disguised as a related brand.)

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35 posts tagged "giving credit where due"

More Americans Now "Elevating Experiences Over Things"

There's always the instinct to start a new year off deliberately, to take that opportunity to examine the state of the deeper values in your life. (Please bear with us, we're just humoring the staff writer here, let him out to run around the yard a little bit. You know, for the holidays. - Ed.)

So, the theme of this article grabbed my attention, with the additional hook of the setting, Miami, where I lived for many years.

"Quietly but noticeably over the past year, Americans have rejiggered their lives to elevate experiences over things. Because of the Great Recession, a recent New York Times/CBS News poll has found, nearly half of Americans said they were spending less time buying nonessentials, and more than half are spending less money in stores and online.

"But Americans are not just getting by with less. They are also doing more. Some are working longer hours, but a larger proportion... are spending additional time with family and friends, gardening, cooking, reading, watching television and ...other hobbies."

"In Recession, Americans Doing More, Buying Less"
By Damien Cave, NY Times, January 2, 2010

Now, the everyday businessperson might well jump on this as a disastrous idea, almost unpatriotic given the limping state of the economy. The very thought of people buying less, much less saying anything to encourage them, sends shivers down their balance sheets.

But why? When people are active, they buy services, and tools and accessories to do things with. If your focus is on how to profit from this population, open an amazing park of some sort and charge them admission. Sell them backpacks, camping gear, cameras...

What we're trying to steer away from here is stuff, defined as the kind of things you buy because it's fun to buy things, the kind which when you discover them in your closet a short time later, you ask yourself why you ever bought — and can't remember.

George Carlin's "Stuff"

I believe you really can't talk about the issue of Stuff without acknowledging George Carlin's classic take on it. Here's a five minute performance of that bit, unusually non-obscene due to its venue, the nationally televised Comic Relief benefit in 1986. ❤

Now the sequel, "Cash For Caulkers"

An idea that accomplishes several things at once is usually a really good one. The Prez just proposed such a concept this week, which had already been dubbed "Cash For Caulkers." The clunky name, of course, is a follow-up to "cash for clunkers," which either was or wasn't a highly successful program depending on who you read, but certainly succeeded as an instant cliché.

The new program, the idea for which came from both Bill Clinton and John Doerr, the famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist, would reimburse homeowners for weatherization projects: ka-ching. It would therefore put builders and contractors, affected by the recent lack of a housing market, back to work: ka-ching!

And the more homes you make energy efficient, the less fuel is burned to heat them, and the climate gets a little breather. (Imagine this one as a ka-ching heard from a distance; so's the first one, probably.) Save money, help the climate by reducing energy use, create some useful work for under-employed people. Not bad.

"The housing bust has idled contractors and construction workers, who could be put to work insulating homes and caulking air leaks. Many households, meanwhile, would save substantial money — not to mention help the climate — by weatherizing their homes."
A Stimulus That Could Save Money, by David Leonhardt, NY Times

Details to follow from Washington, and we all know the devil's in there (the details, he meant), but on paper it looks like a good place to invest a couple of bil — okay, 23 billion. Some of those details to be considered: in the Times blogpost on the story, a commenter named Henry Challe wrote that homeowners should hire a pro to "conduct a Blower Door Test... to quantify a home's leakage. During the test, the auditor should then use a thermal imaging camera to locate these leaks."

The prospective program also more than fulfills our pressing need to put some of our finest clichés back to work: I've already read that it's a win-win no-brainer picking the low-hanging fruit, etc., and the masters of the obvious have only gotten started on this one. We confidently predict that they will leave no cliché unturned. (Ka-ching!)

Cash for Caulkers could seal $12,000 a home
By Steve Hargreaves, CNNMoney.com

“Cash for Caulkers” Could Deliver $23B for Home Energy Efficiency
- Reuters

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