Speaking out of the herd

Coffee Cups and Global Warming Theory

2012-02-12T04:34:00.000-08:00

As evolutionary theory goes, there are gradual evolutions (weaker dying out) and sudden, cataclysmic events (quite rapid change in environment which would cause a spike in extinctions).

Examples of the latter are a comet or asteroid hitting the earth and wiping out the Jurassic critters.

Climate change researchers note that while it may seem like the earth has always been changing temperatures, and vacillation between ice ages and tropical ferns on Antarctica, that the current climate change is not during a period of tens of thousands of years. A change over a couple of centuries is quite a spike, or bump, in terms of species evolution.

Imagine if all the species of the world were 100 humans, sitting in a Greyhound bus, holding piping hot cups of coffee. One of the hundred might just spill their cup of coffee at any time... it would be normal.

Now, imagine that the bus hits a literal bump in the road. Some of the species get their coffee cups spilled which wouldn't normally have been outperformed. If it's one big bump, it's bad, though it has happened before.

But what if human civilization is just a bumpy damn road?

It's not like belching carbon is the first thing we've done, or even the worst thing we are doing right now.

Cutting down tropical rain forests to get beef, sending recycled content mercury for alleuvial gold mining in the Amazon and Congo basins, mining coral reef islands for rare earth metals, using rhino horn as (stupid) aphrodisiac... we've done a lot of things over the past few hundred years. And our population is growing, so even if one person's personal consumption or impact is lessened, the planet is going through a very bumpy ride.

It's like humanity is a big, lazy comet. Rather than wreaking havoc in an instant, we are growing louder and badder over a couple of centuries.

How then to put climate, global warming, change, in perspective? Is that really the one place to concentrate? Or is it one of many bumps?

God Has a Use For Me

2011-12-10T04:07:00.001-08:00

The single biggest challenge I can think of for a writer is to convey inspiration, to convey a feeling which comes from a greater perspective, as if outside your body. Rather above your body.

Each one of us is in God's Inventory. We can discuss what God is, we can agree to something simple and amorphous like a "higher power". We may be agnostic about human's ability to correctly perceive something immense and Objective through our individual lenses of subjectivity, through our personal filters. Nature and evolution have given us many filters to digest and synthesize the environment.

What I believe Soul is would be kind of like describing music, separate from the brittle cold wood of the fiddle, the silent alloy of the horn. When all the intruments work together and make a tune, that tune has a single identity. Some tunes are simple, some attempt to be identical. Some are jazz. Some split the eardrum.

I am seeing our brains, our habits, our livers, our lungs, our eyes and our nerves as "filters". All of these filters emerged and evolved to adapt to situations and environments which were either constant or statistically likely.

A filter is a wonderful thing. It regulates. It allows something to pass through it. But it also stops things from passing through it. Whether fed passively like open eyes filtering light spectra, or actively like the heart-pump jetting hot red plasma at the liver, whether the lower intestine or the mouth, every process we carry out can be compared to a clam on the seabed.

Rebirth or awakening or enlightenment... baptism. The moments of being "born again". To me they were like I got a brand new filter, or had my filter cleaned of sludge. Dirty thoughts and distractions keeping me from functioning clearly in my environment.

As you grow in childhood and adolescence, your filters change, and you become self aware.

Self-awareness. That is what makes it difficult for a writer to convey inspiration, to convey the feeling of enlightenment. The sensation and awareness of cleaning and rebirth are information to be processed through the filter of the human mind. It's like changing a filter in a car that is still in use. It's like heart surgery.

God has a use for me, I realized this morning. I have an obligation to maintain myself. Whether I am a broom handle God has set aside in case he needs an extra, or whether I'm a forklift, or a truck or a baler, I have some use. Probably in society.

My usefulness is not my consumption. Many days we may find ourselves kind of uselessly consuming, or pumping the same water already filtered through the same grundgy filter. Day after day, we can lose ours sense of purpose and awareness becomes a curse of boredom. It is sad to see consumption itself becoming like a "purpose" for people. We consume in order to create jobs for other people to productively make what we consume? This is a nightmare, a cancer on the earth, and it is our biggest challenge.

My purpose on this earth? That is going to be as hard as describing a painting to a blind man, or describing harmony to a deaf child. Every day, I need to thank God, as revealed to me in whatever tired blind-man-touches-elephant way, that I have this inner composition, like an artist creating song, sparking or pitching or gurgling out the back of my filters. What I photosynthesize into Value is not really understood much more than the way a leaf turns light into sugars... the ultimate type of filter..

I believe in photosynthesis, even if I cannot explain it. And I believe that I have a purpose on earth. That purpose is not to consume, like a fake leaf. It is not to hoard, like an umpteenth unhealthy fat cell. But unlike Ghandi, I have put friction into bad gears with force and conviction that I'm unlikely to win friends by putting on a big white diaper and eating simply.

What I will try to do is compose. I will try to record my sense that God has a use for me. I will try to find a way to harmonize that revelation with other Gods and other Churches and other prayers and revelations. Uniting them is no more a purpose for me than turning every musician in the Orchestra into a flute player. We make better music using drums and xylophones and oboes and cellos.

I see skeptics asking the preacher, like the heretics out to stump Jesus or the hypocrites twisting the words of the peaceful Muhammed... how do you know? And if you know, and you are a human, how do you know that I do not know, that MY interpretation of God is not equally right to yours? How can you claim that my campaign to destroy the woodwinds is not also directed by God? If I take away the musical instruments from every musician in the orchestra pit, and make them hold, bare-handed, balls of cold wet spaghetti, how do you know that mine is not the greater Art?

How do I know that music sounds better than 20 people holding wet spaghetti in their hands? It's a matter of taste, perhaps. Perhaps to someone, a choral of injured screaming infants is music. We humans have evolved not to like the sound of screaming babies so much. We deal with their screams differently, whether as native americans taking them out in the woods to cry-it-out, or by suckling and cuddling. But we respond to filter their expressions of unpleasant sounds, or at least if we do so, we are recognized by the crowd as a bringer of justice. Imagine a better hero than someone who magically touches and soothes a screaming pit of babies. Imagine the popularity.

That is the image of a Savior, and I am not a savior nor do I promote waxen images of the Savior. I believe that Organized religions and churches have, in some way, become a broken filter, a filter which provides centuries old dogmas and lectures as "revelations". I believe that there is a karma for 'graven images', that an image of Jesus, Buddha, or other Prophet can become "graven" in word, graven in simplicity, handed out like crackers. For many, the perfect Sunday sermon would be a bit like a Meth high, you go in, get inspired, feel saved and reborn, and go out and consume until the following Sunday.

The graven images are found everywhere in song, in sound, in dogma, in words. God needs editors. As more and more people land on the planet, looking for purpose, we'd be mistaken to let organized church machine complexes print out instructions like Chinese Cookie fortunes. But within the elevated, highest and most aware group, how do we find the antidote? How do we find a new Savior or inspirer?

I think my purpose is like a member of the choir. I remember in sixth grade, singing so badly and off key, that the other boys sang louder to cover me up, and when I forgot the night of the performance (stayed home watching "Horton Hears a Who" special on analog TV), I was told that the chorus suffered in performance from light-singing-boys. Who knows. God may have made me off key in order to embolden others to sing more loudly. People who are reporters, people who collect and synthesize repair, people who create positive fair trade between other peoples of the world, creating peace on earth through the miracle of vested interests in commerce.

This morning, I had a kind of epiphany that God has a use for me. But it wasn't like an awareness of being special. I felt like a forklift that needed be scrapped yet. I did not feel the need to be immortal, or a sense that I will always have a use no matter how long I live. It was a sense of infinite proportion, a sense of 50,000 feet, or 50,000 years of evolution. I experienced a strange harmony of knowing my place as a piece of dust, able to see the desert. And at the same time, like a discarded cell phone that's grabbed and used to place a saving TXT, in and unlikely miraculous deux-ex-machina "out of a jam" rescue by the hero of some Hollywood movie, I saw that I may still be of some use.

As I grow older and become less useful, I would like to die. The alternative to death would be living forever. It's not that "hell is others", but in the evolution of things, I hope that I don't leave a legacy that humans squeezed desperately at every last rag in fear. I hope that the calm I felt this morning, that I might somehow find a way to convey it to others.

It was a moment of filtering Self. It was a moment of seeing perspective as a way to filter the accumulated patterns, addictions, thoughts, habits, narcissism, and conflicts of interest in this particular human body. It was a moment of seeing myself no more nor less important than any other piece of a puzzle, but feeling extreme gratitude at having the potential to SEE that puzzle as a greater image.

If a bunch of enlightened people learn to play in harmony, I think it is possible we will create a Wiki-Religion. We will learn to play together, as violins and trumpets, and learn to incorporate the songs of birds and the swoosh of cuttlefish, to maintain all the instruments in the rain forest we haven't even ever listened to or seen yet.

My role, I thought, is to protect rain forests and create patterns of sustainable consumption for mankinds machines of explore-derive-smelt-manufacture-use-consume-waste. But I have other roles... as a father, as a balancer of books, and just perhaps, as someone who cares how he is used by God, of my subjective place on God's chessboard. I want to learn to listen and find the way that pianos and drums can sound good together, even if only when separated by commercials. I want to find a way to use words to help someone see our quest for a net impact as a hunger or demand for good purpose, and to document how an Ozarks boy can pick up the Tao and pick up Lester Brown's State of the World and pray to both Jesus AND Krishna, can meditate and yell in some kind of appropriate balance, and through those purposes, filter or insulate or shock-absorb the incredible force of humans on the planet's diversity. I want to preserve TYPES of life more than I want to preserve one life. I want to preserve not "this here fiddle", but the violin as an instrument. If I can find a way to mold myself just right before I return, as we all do, to the clay, I might just bring inspiration and science together into a kind of symphony or form of art. Unlikely that mine will be listened to, especially if directed by the pumps of ego and self-righteousness, and contaminated by self promotion and packaged in dogmas. But there have been too many centuries of graven image ideas and ideals by almost all traditional religions. If you care, and you moderate your consumption, and you listen to the chorus, and keep an ear open for change, difference, diversity, as inspiration...

This is a life worth something. I should take care of my health, and take care of my family. Today at least. And when my time comes, like a soldier, I'll consume not what I've earned, but what is appropriate for the value I can bring in future dividends. I don't need to live forever, I need to live appropriately, and I need to stay as long as I have a purpose and sense of that purpose, and that my impacts - positive on science, negative on carbon, whatever - are accepted as Gods charity.

Thank you. It's hard to write down exactly what the moment of inspiration was. All I could ever really do writing journals was a jam session inspired by that moment, like a musician's "high". I lost about all those journals, and almost never shared them with anyone. Writing a blog is a recognition of mortality and letting loose of etiquette. If my inspiration has had a positive effect on my own life, I can perhaps find a way to share without preaching, to lay it out like a product design for a life well led, or led in a very interesting, strange, unique and positive direction. Take this and be done with it, for what it's worth, as it's intended to capture a moment of completed puzzle, a feeling of what I am worth, what my purpose might be, as part of Gods inventory in this room of the universe, as one of an exploding population of humans who are hitting Earth slowly like a big lazy comet, capturing purpose and beauty, even if it turns out to be in a supernova of erasure, plasma, and death of photosynthesis. I don't think that's what God wants, and I suspect taking the time during my life to listen when God is saying something gave me some insights into the obvious. Those moments of direction are most like... love. I don't know if God is Love, or love is a god, but the moments of crystalline direction, humility and thanks feel a lot like mutual love. You feel like you are running again on a clean filter after you have just almost forgotten what it feels like. Reminded of great love, and re-experiencing it... it's what it felt like this morning. But it also felt like being completely alone on the silence of a mountaintop in the wilderness, and it felt like being 50,000 years away from the present. I am pretty damn sure other people have experienced this moment, and those, like the prophets or the priests or the apostles who took time to convey it to others, in song or in scripture, help me to recognize a good thing when I feel it.

2011-03-04T19:27:00.001-08:00

Organic revolution in Libya...

It cannot be organic if the Gaddafi leadership is using arms and mercenaries.

2011-02-13T10:44:00.000-08:00

I guess I shouldn't be posting things I haven't translated. But I just hope it's not "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss". I hope we won't get fooled again.

One of my posts from several years ago was an "open letter" to an unknown Iraqi, putting on record my aspiration and open mindedness that the overthrow in Iraq would lead to commerce and people power. Now, the hard work is yet to be done following the overthrow of Mubarak. But what gives me hope is that the way the Iranian revolution occurred, with speeches distributed by cassette tape, was open to a whole different type of collusion and perversion than a revolution distributed by twitter and facebook and cell phone texts.

2010-09-05T06:49:00.000-07:00

Addendum to the Ethical "E-Waste", Fair Trade Recycling blog:

... By the way, one secret with writing blogs that are too long for most people to read is that you can talk to the small group, the kind who read user comments and have long attention spans. I want to confide that I know I've made both real and apparent mistakes sticking my finger in the eyes of Jim Puckett, Don Mayer, and other important investors and important collatoral decision makers.   What my experience at Mass DEP was is that to maximize effective change, you have to do all the homework, make sure your case is waterproof and airtight, work obsessively to make the best product as if you were not so much an environmentalist as a rocket scientist.

When you have all the legal, logical, environmental lifecycle and other tools assembled, you will find ossified opinions which are difficult to turn into consensus for your approach. At this point, you can hope for the attention of a benevolent power above you. Or like a career suicide bomber, you have to take hits with reprecussions on your family finances, your career, your stamina, and prestige.   Those approaches are contrary.   So you recruit someone who does have the charisma to meet with the power that be, and you take the suicide approach, drawing fire to get your recruit the attention they need when the pieces begin to fall.

Before a career suicide mission, you must check yourself free of spiritual materialism, of ego-driven reactions to doing the same thing, of pride and of profit motive. When you are sure it's really the best thing to do, you have to go directly head to head against the bureaucrat or feedback-loop environmnental group, conflict of interested business model steward, etc., and make inflammation. You just hope that for every people who attribute it to your stubbornness, ego, or inability to "work with people", there are a few antibodies who understand the method to your madness, and can see you created a path and that it was courage, not stupidity, which planned your steps.

If you attract enough good people, you will then have to have a plan in place to take the fall and go away and leave the successful model you've opened to people who have not blistered and calloused their social network. This is how I took the Massachusetts DEP budget from $1M per year and 6 staff to $9M per year and 20 staff in a four year period.    I made enemies, I made survivor-like allegiances (e.g. with former Senator Bulger's UMass or Stan Rosenberg's ways and means department), and if they tried to take the project afterwards in a way that defied the rocket-science blueprint, you had to make an enemy and keep the money.

It was brutal, and it was not sustainable as a career. I eventually would have had to get a promotion in the bureaucracy to another department, or leave state government.   But what you do is maintain your integrity and transparency and honesty, and then with your momentum, you recruit intelligent people who either understand or are capable of eventually understanding how the pieces you've won fit together into an iron man costume that can accomplish great good. Then you go away and leave behind:

1) broken ossified walls
2) good smart people with the right agenda

And some people understand what you did and give you some credit, some think you are an asshole. I did the exact same routine, by the way, unperfected, at Carleton College as a food service employee (leaving 5 great upperclass food service student manager recruits.. though Jane BeeGee Tornatore also helped recruit there and I don't get all that credit), and at Carleton Student Government (CSA) where I recruited Peter Ubels and Sarge Woods etc. into faculty-student-administration committees. I rubbed a lot of fur the wrong way in both cases. Then, at Peace Corps, I got hired to be Peace Corps staff trainer for cross culture and when the opportunity to move the training program from Mbalmayo came up, I used all I had to get it moved to Ngaoundere, where I got jobs for my dearest friends Yadji and Ateh Suzanne and others from my home town of Ngaoundal.

Some believe that another more talented social person could have accomplished the same thing in the same amount of time with better social and consensus-building skills.   That may well be, but I've usually seen it accomplished the easy way with lots of money... If I had Shakira's budget, maybe I could hire Bill Clinton to be my secretary of best e-waste policy.

But I got little of that, I had to build my own small business and, during a recession, keep that business alive while using it to support my way to conferences and meetings. So I have to set ten year goals and meet the goals even if it requires career hari-kari, making myself not hireable within the conservative crowd.

I'm not afraid of that, it's part of the plan. Part of what happens is that other people fall out of the influencial crowd over time, either of their own choice or by miscalculations in their own careers, or by simple retirement, or by moving on to their own promotions in other departments and fields. For the truths I believe in and will fight for, I will have to recruit young like minded people from places like Net Impact, and make sure they are connected to the people I've met in Africa, Asia and Latin America, to build sustainable and common sense policy for another ten year period. Then I can sit back and use my creative juices to set the next lofty goal... maybe trying something in software again, or some other alternative to bushmeat and mining. I would really like to bring Edward Abbey "Monkeywrench Gang" methods to pygmies, for example. But that isn't thought out yet, I'd have to have another rocket science blueprint to make me confident against unintended consequences. And hopefully I'll get help defining the goals next time from another generation of proteges.

Robert Duchesnay of Canada was someone I knew for just a few weeks but who I wrote to after the international work camp in Murren, Switzerland. He advised me back then that my plans to make a difference and change the world would be ineffective, because whatever courage I supplied would be met by someone equally courageous trying to undo it - his examples were Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. He said his path was to "create", love art, create create create! His letters were a fountain of enthusiasm for artistic paths to enlightenment.   One of his best quotes was "Babies are babies, Art is art".   I didn't really take his advice, but I have found more than enough ways to create paths in ossified societies.   Maybe my creative work is more "Rushmore" than "Rodan". But plumes of cyanide from copper mines in Bornea are visible from space, and they are poisoning coral reefs which Jacques Cousteau showed me as a kid. I cannnot create anything as beautiful as a coral reef. And so I must, with every cell of my body, create a society and a lifestyle which preserves the planet long enough for the next generation of inspired protectors.   With Net Impact, I found there are other people who did what was unheard of when I did it - hippies earning and MBA, because you can accomplish good from the inside.

This blog is hopefully about honing my direction so that the CRT device, which is finite in time, can become a step by step for other agents of conscience to courageously improve not just 'ewaste' or 'recycling', but to find connections to the best and brightest people in the developing world, which I learned are statistically significant among geeks. Geeks aren't cheaters. And cheating is what is holding Africans and South Americans down.

2009-12-28T20:19:00.000-08:00

Cameras were handed out to Morgan (13), Gabrielle (13), Kristin (11), Jake (9), and Alex (6) (Laurie 8 is helping us judge). They could take as many photos as they wanted but were only allowed to choose 5 for the contest. The editor (moi) threw in a few more good ones from their photo sets and then mixed them up for the slide show below.

Vote, comment, label and enjoy

2009-08-04T04:11:00.001-07:00

Seu Jorge is my favorite artist of the last year or two.

What a trip!

2009-07-31T05:46:00.000-07:00

I saw Cranberries in Concert in Boston at the Orpheum the year my wife took the job in Middlebury but I hung back at the apartment in Eastie for the year. MAN!

I think I love this group so much in part because I was not using and LP. I think that's what killed Paul McCartney and Wings as much as the absence of Lennon... The Beatles albums I could listen to all the way through without running to pick up the LP needle. I am not sure all of Dolores songs would survive without the skip feature of CDs and youtube.

Kind of like me. I would suck as a writer if I had to handwrite everything. To get your thoughts down in an accessible way, you had to be king or pope or a close friend who could command a hundred quill-scroll monks to get your point across.

2009-07-27T04:58:00.000-07:00

They need to invent
a timeout button for Facebook.
Haiku is time sink.

- Robin Ingenthron

2009-07-22T20:12:00.000-07:00

What we know today as channel surfing will not exist in the not-distant future. The Tv will be able to "learn" from our past "skipping" or "surfing" and will not bother to display individtual programs we have always skipped past in the past. It will be able to recognize ads and remember the actual program you are skipping (the programming channels will insist they are not penalized as you skip past at a time that happens to be an "ad").

If you truly dwell upon relativity, as I suspect others than Einstein have done, it is easy to see the superficial resemblance between "atoms" and their revolving "neutrons, electrons, protons" and suns, moons and galaxies. Orbiting is "in". Perhaps with antimatter, orbiting is "out".

If you dwell upon exponential equations while dwelling on relativity, you can imagine that this universe is an atom in another universe which is an atom in another universe. If you chant this for two hours and thirty minutes, imagining successive exponential universes, you will reach nirvana.

God I imagine has to keep track of every atom in every universe in every exponentiality. While resembling a "singleton" like us, he is "omniscient" of every atom-nee-universe in every exponentiality.

I imagined this today as God channel surfing through exponential universes. I imagine there might be entire universes (made up of atoms which are universes which are made up of other atoms/universes) in which the most interesting thing in the entire universe is the color "blue", and other universes that make ours look "rural". To perceive these as an individual, God needed a universal remote, and the ability to channel surf infinitely quickly.

This infinite quickness is what Einstein calculated was impossible with E=MC2 But if God can do miracles, God can channel surf infinitely fast. For that matter, he'd have freeze-frame and rewind and could see all time on all channels at once.

By being able to perceive everything at once with no time constraints but forwarding and rewinding, God's perception would be equal to the entire timespan of all the entire nested exponential universes.

A = A, God is the Omnipotent universal.

So if there is no God, there is no A, and we do not exist. We do (I postulate). But "a caring god"... hmmm... But "caring", that's a trip. It would be like I have to "care" about every single channel I was flipping past, and I'd have to freeze-frame and backwards and forwards learn that channel programming in its future and past entirety. Man, that would be exhausting. An infinitely interested God would have to spend an infinite amount of time in the "blue" universe, reading every blank page of every book written by the blue boring planet people. The terrain of the moon would be thrilling.

Each browser window would have an infinite number of websites open, each with browsers with an infinite number of websites...

I could go on and on.

by Robin Freeland Ingenthron, 2009-07-02
copyrighted

2009-07-21T02:46:00.000-07:00

For the record... I still want my body composted when I die. Like the Lee Hayes song.

I wanted to start a Green Funerals business in 1998, and actually announced (tongue in cheek) that it was the business I was leaving DEP to pursue.

I read in NYTimes (Home Burials...) today that DIY funerals are today what home births were 30 years ago... trendy and novel and saving a lot of money.

I guess there are questions about what it will do to property values. I would suggest we all bury ours friends, family and colleagues along strategic preservation routes, using "heeby jeebies" to block construction and development (to use a technical term).

We need to get compost in there somehow. Or to commercialize the scavenger beetles they use to make medical skeletons. Those would make a great movie.

2009-03-29T03:17:00.000-07:00

"homophily"

"— the tendency of individuals to associate only with like-minded
people of similar age and ethnicity. "

I was writing in my journal in high school about this, though I didn't know the word for it. I was reminded of the word today, reading an article in the NYTimes about the growth of Facebook.

In high school I prided myself (my chief flaw) on being comfortable in several social groups. I belonged to debate team (the future lawyers), science seminar, went hiking and canoeing, and smoked pot (but avoided all other drugs) with the freaks or drop-outs. When friends dropped out of any of those groups - like, became "born again" Christian for example - I tried to make them comfortable and would even let them try to convert me. And for the most part I could genuinely like them. I never really felt an urge to have one group interlace with another, except through me. It was like my secret that I could swim in multiple ponds.

I think I was hugely influenced in this regard by my mom, Janeth Ingenthron, who was studing World Literature under Dr. Kemple at the University of Arkansas. She would throw Lao Tsu, or Plato, or Bhagavad Gita on my bed. I would smoke pot, feel guilty about smoking pot, and read these books to assuage my paranoia. The books turned me on completely.

My mother also encouraged me to travel. I had already lobbied and taken a trip to California in 9th grade to visit old friends, especially Craig Scharton, in Fresno, California. I hung out with the protest hippies at the anti-nuke power club at the University, I worked for African American boss Lonnie Williams alongside Clayton (who went on from janitor to management at U of A, power to you man). I saved up my money and went to Europe to work at IBG workcamp in Murren, Switzerland, with 20 something people between 17 and 29 from twelve or thirteen different countries.

When I returned from the trips, or reading a great book, I was able to satisfy myself that I didn't need to do drugs (though I made a date to take LSD when I turned 25). But the common thread in my life has been finding truth through exploration of diversity and change.

As Einstein showed, introducing the theory of Relativity through very simple mind experiments about relationships and relativity in space and time, you can discover truth if you look at something from more angles and points in time. You can use simple statistics, no more complex than baseball stats, to gain probabilities and truths from more angles of perception. It's like Kaplan test taking, but for life. I think it's what Warren Buffett probably does when he looks at companies to invest in, though I'm way out on a speculative limb now.

A variety of foods, a variety of religion, a variety of movies (international tournee of animation was my favorite) and a variety of music. A variety of jobs, a variety of friends. While I could not have imagined the world wide web, it has been a fantastic tool for reading and pictures and film and other information. Now I can trade and do business in China, Indonesia, India, Egypt, Cameroon, Tanzania, Nepal, Peru, Mexico... and last year ran my house as an international bed and breakfast for recyclers from all those countries, all of whom I connected to via internet.

What disturbs me is that some people use the web to connect to more and more people and information which is the same as they already believe.

The internet is great for journalism, except that if I wanted I could do nothing but read articles about Jesus, or about a popular TV show, I could spend hours exposing myself to one subject. That is the potential problem with e-waste or e-scrap recycling, it's pretty narrow. But what I like is that recycling is connected to raw material consumption, which I associate with loss of rainforest and species diversity, and extinction. And turning electronics into a window that could get people like my students from Peace Corps (CES Ngoundal Cameroon) connected to reputable USA companies with surplus goods that the kids to resell, becoming well to do, and get even more friends like doctors onto the internet... I see it as kind of a very special place.

There is not yet a single website or blog or location to meet contrarian, relativity-garglers like myself. My Lord, it would be a pompous site if there was one. Ultimately, life is short, and experience is a commodity. The book "cutting through spiritual materialism" by Chungpa helped reveal that whatever pride you take in your spiritual growth ultimately turns faith into a commodity, and becomes an embarrassing jewel on your moccasins.

Time is so very short, even my family and children and grandparents are like watching a movie that will end, and all our names will roll in the credits, and there is no Academy Awards afterwards. If there was, perhaps we'd be most remembered if we pulled a "Patton" (George C. Scott refusing to show up for his Best Actor award) rather than a Cuba Gooding Jr. Whether my one moments of appraised value come from other people, from God, from Atman, from my children, or my own vanity, the are to me a snapshot of a bullet.

My life will be shorter than that of a bullet on a battlefield.

I am getting to see the hail of bullets, the billions of bullets, whizzing by one another. Some shot in ignorance, some flying in pride, some misfire in the barrel. What I would really like to accomplish - which is to preserve Earth's diversity of species and flora and fauna - may never materialize through my chosen career in recycling. It may take Monkeywrench Gang tactics, though I would suspect those would be about as effective as Al Qaeda, which inflicts mosquito bites on the ass of an irritable elephant. The more extremely you take your cause, the more extremely you ultimately take yourself. Homophily of people who take themselves too seriously leads to ... I don't know. Churches?

Environmentalists, I believe that interbreeding with businesses and getting an MBA has made me a stronger bullet in the war on environmentalism, but it has also benefitted me personally, and perhaps that puts a question mark on my daily decisions and choices. But I am trying to innoculate myself with truth, and seek participation, and try to deal with each binary decision day-to-day with Truth (light) and Faith (gravity).

And I'm trying to watch a lot of history channel, since I don't have William Freeland around to summarize his 20 years of book reading, during the Indian service, with his great grandson.

2009-01-31T03:10:00.000-08:00

Song

Liberals get their money from luck
get their money from luck
get their money from luck

Liberals get their money from luck
get their money from luck
get their money from luck

Conservatives get their gain from pain
get their gain from pain
get their gain from pain

Conservatives get their gain from pain
get their gain from pain
get their gain from pain

Libby got her money from love
got her money from love
get their money from luck

Libby got her money from love
got her money from love
get their money from luck

Keddy got his dough real slow
got his dough real slow
figured out where to go

The inspiration to this tune was a reference to Hollywood liberals.

If you become wealthy by having a company like mine, along the way you have to make some tough firing decisions and go through sad breakups in order to make the team stronger. If you keep every person you ever hire, you are extremely unlikely to succeed.

Psyching yourself to do this and grow the company requires a conservatism.

If you become a millionaire, on the other hand, by being incredibly talented (or incredibly lucky) like a Hollywood star, you probably don't go through as much of the "try to salvage the employee relationship" and subsequent "fire them and step over the bodies, and the next person you hire may have never otherwise had his/her shot".

I would guess that experience with hiring and firing people correlates to conservativism.

2009-01-08T16:22:00.000-08:00

SlowBama Opposes HDTV Transition....

This is the transition passed in 1996, which gave a 10-year grace period where broadcasters hogged BOTH digital and analog broadcasts, rather than transition them to broadband internet use. The internet by the way is the competition of these broadcasters.

It's been extended to 13 years already, and now Obama says there was not enough time for the transition, it needs to be extended.

He also thinks the space shuttle should be extended.

And he opposes reforming the General Mining Act of 1872.

It's like his popularity is a shiny new car and he's afraid to drive it.

Slooooowwww Bama?

Too early to brand him that, I hope he's just doing what he has to do. The Clintons did he gay military thing pretty quickly and I guess regretted it. But Carter said that's what you have to do, do it and get it behind you.

2008-12-25T06:06:00.000-08:00

Children are like kites. You can be really happy with where they are, and a bad kite may never have made it there. But the same kite can be in a tree tomorrow.

2008-12-24T09:08:00.000-08:00

Airport Security 202

Watched the 60 Minutes program about TSA effectiveness. What's below is synthesized from my own experiences (travelling by air between USA, Canada, Africa, Europe and Asia during the past few years) and listening to the TSA head, and the pony-tailed critic dude.

Here's the Reader Robin Digest version:

TSA Head: "We are at war. We discover a threat (e.g. shoes, liquids). If we don't reduce that threat, we will be responsible for result from lack of diligencence."

PonyTail: "There are a million things you could 'discover' to be a threat. If my ponytail could have an explosive, you could make me wear a hairnet. The cost of each new "rule" results in less safety than the cost of the protective measure."

RDR (me): I observe that when you make a rule about laptops or shoes or hair gel, that you suffer and enjoy a learning curve. Once people 'buy in' to taking off their shoes, and the security guards are trained to make it normal to take off shoes, you create a culture of security. I think that culture of security has value.

Part of that culture is applying the shoe rule to white children and elderly old church ladies is that it removes the "asshole" label from the security guard. I am applying this to YOU because I apply it to EVERYONE, therefore I cannot be accused of profiling YOU or being and ASS to YOU.

Historically this is good.

- GI's who shine their shoes are less likely to drop their ammo
- Kosher butchers who do x-y-z are less likely to leave snot on the meat.
- Players to attend spring training are less likely to have a fellow player blow off a first inning.

So that is the defense of TSA, and I can go along to a large extent. My expectations are that I will go through security.

But Ponytail is also right. TSA is reacting to attempts. The incremental cost of each reaction is $Y x XX million passengers x Z,000 days. Even if the learning curve and culture reduce the final cost of each rule, the rule is set in stone based on an attempt and has an absolute value post learning curve.

To illustrate, if I was Osama Bin Laden and wanted to have an even greater effect on the cost of the system in terms of bang for the buck, I would announce plans to blow up airplanes based on cell phones, smaller bottles, electric razors, etc., adding a few pennies of cost to the TSA for each new rule without any expense.

The ultimate free market outcome will be when they suicide bomb the long line at the pre-security part of the airport. The more rules, the longer the line, the longer the line, the more victims.

At that point the TSA will be revealed for what it is doing: protecting airplanes and other hardware, not people. People are everywhere.

And at that point, TSA will have a manageable diligence task: they should encourage affordable security and a culture of willingness to participate in security up until the "breakeven cost" where the security costs more than the airplanes. Because the people can be killed at either side of the security line, TSA is not responsible for people, only for culture and reasonable screening costs.

As a first step, I'd suggest that TSA offer "laptop holidays", where on one day per month they don't check laptops. The cost to Al Qaeda of sending in 30 teams with laptop bombs trying to catch the one day of laptop holiday is uneconomical.

Then they should cheat and figure out a "profiling" scheme which is not racial per se. They shouldn't even announce it, or perhaps not even do it but leave Al Qaeda to believe they are profiling, which they probably believe anyway. They keep up the anecdotes of searching grandmothers but do it statistically less often.

This is kind of the way the IRS works, they don't try to audit every return, they don't even audit enough returns, but they maintain a credible threat of auditing a return.

Al Qaeda is already trying to recruit Timothy McVeys to get past the profilers, hopefully that makes them more willing to take a chance on James Bonds infiltrating under the guise of Timothy McVey.

2008-12-16T04:00:00.000-08:00

Crystal clear.

I have gone from a happy childhood that I wanted to last forever to a happy parenthood that I want to last forever.

God bless Jesus, God bless Lao Tsu, God bless Copernicus, God bless Siddhartha... Thank you all, and Captain Kangaroo and Dr. Seuss too.

2008-12-11T06:48:00.000-08:00

A Massacre in Congo, Despite Nearby Support

NYTimes article showcases again the numbing violence in the Lake Kivu region of central Africa.

If my son or daughter were to say they wanted to go there, like I did in the Peace Corps in the 1980s, I would have to say "bring a handgun". And that makes me wonder if we should try that. Instead of sending blue helmets who are no threat to criminals, issue a handgun to every woman and elderly person in those provinces.

Today, if you are a young man in the area, and you had a choice to join a band of thugs or be a victim... or for that matter if you were the father of kids and wanted to protect them... wouldn't you consider being a thug? Or if you chose not to, wouldn't you like the option of owning a handgun?

2008-10-26T15:19:00.000-07:00

Is it crazy
to be concerned
that my great grandkids
who I don't know
could someday not
own the "stuff"
they buy?

Stewardship gives property to manufacturers
like leasing does
I like leasing.
At least
I like the choice to lease.

Socialism gives properties to "society"
the government
which I guess also owns
the manufacturers.
I'm not afraid
of the state owning roads.
I prefer the state own
some stuff like signs.

But I have an education
and a decent shot
of defending my property.
Most folks I know
don't know what it's like
to live in a state
where a cop with a gun
can own your wife.

2008-06-01T04:29:00.000-07:00

It's not really that no one listens. That's really a self centered and defeatist statement. What I experience is several conversations going on in different corners of the world, and not enough cross-pollination.

It's almost like I have recreated this role I had in high school, where I was smirky-proud that several of the high school's social census takers were confused whether I was a geek (Science Seminar, Debate Team) or a freak (doing drugs with future traffickers and dead people). I liked to feel equally comfortable at the cafeteria lunchtable of studious college bound kids (the island of misfit toys) or in the backseat of a car in a police chase. Or equally uncomfortable, whatever. And while I didn't hang out with the aggies or bandies, jocks or drama jocks, I seem to remember that I liked them and defended them whenever I was in a group that said something snide. The "Soshes" (Socialites) were not my favorites as a group because of the exclusivity and the disdain that they seemed to excrete.

That late-teen experience, I actually can say I broadened it to city hall, University of Arkansas anti-nuke-protest-hippies, and to Europe (making pretty firm friendships with Danes, Dutch, and fond memories with Morrocans, Turks, Brits, Germans, Swiss, etc.).

At a certain point, man without a country, jack of all cultures, a lot of suspicious multiple escape routes, probably kept me from being more than a fly on the wall in many of those prospective groups. The Blind Men and the Elephant, TBMatE, I've said that phrase so many times it is stale. In religion, too, I was a believing Christian and a Vedantist, reading Plato and Tao and Bhagavad Gita, finding more similarities than differences. Or perhaps I was attracted to the similarities, and emphasized them. What I was able to distinguish was the difference between difference in faith, and difference in barriers erected to social groups. In the same way I couldn't really have joined an Aggy party without suspicion ("he's after our hootches"), I found I couldn't paricipate as I would have liked in the born again crowd because they were convinced a whole lot of people were going to burn in hell for eternity. I could truly appreciate the parable of the mustard seed, but also wondered how Buddha could cast demons from sufferers to swine. The house divided question seemed to me to say that Jesus would consider the enemy of his enemy (selfishness, untruth, hypocrasy) to be His Friend.

So I got into this junk/recycling field, which is about a far from important from most people that I should be able to keep from getting a big head about it, but should be able to fight for truth in it without fearing 'stepping on the wrong toes'.

Toes are everywhere. World overpopulation can be measured by how many things you can believe, say, and offend someone with at a social function. "Not that there's anything wrong with that". "And that's OK!".

I was just in a state funded consensus focus group thingy funded by EPA. The guy gave us 4 choices to vote at the end of the meeting: Passionately for, Supportive of, Willing to Assist, and Passively support. I'm not kidding!!! Those were the votes, and he never pursued how many people didn't raise their hands, and then they can say there is consensus?

I digress.

What I meant to write about was that my goal in this life would be to write a tome, Recycling in Democracy in America. To do for resource conservation what Alexis de Tocqueville did for popular democracy. He was the fly on the wall in a lot of rooms during the USA Revolution, and made a lot of simple point that were profound.

The anti-mining people need to talk to the recycling people, for example. The digital divide people need to talk to the anti-export people. The product stewardship people need to talk to the secondary market people.

If we cannot bridge differences in torque of expression in a low-stakes economy like scrap, without offending, our hopes of achieving world peace while promoting justice, or achieving an end to poverty without rewarding productivity, or finding mutually agreeable lines to draw in uninhabitable sand piles in the mideast, are overextended.

2008-05-02T12:34:00.000-07:00

Watching Prince of Egypt, a few days after returning from Cairo.

So many problems with scripture. If I were God, would I punish entire groups of people with plagues? Heck, I would turn specific people into flowers. Why act with divine power through ordinary explicable means like burning bushes and plagues? Why not turn people into electric guitars?

If the non-God person turns his staff into two snakes, I would rethink my original snake trick I gave Moses. Like creating a 200 story building with elevators that would stand by the Pyramids to this day. Make my Moses snake eat their snake?? WEAK.

So why do I believe in God?

Ultimately, I am a better person when I believe in God than I am when I do not believe in God. I am a much better person If I genuinely believe in God than if I pretend to believe in God.

That's a definition I can call "being a person of faith" to the Evangelicals I may run into, and mean it. It's better than when I was 17 and argued with them that little Chinese children who listen to their parents go to hell by not listening instead to hairy strangers with English books.

But anyone who comments in a blog is open season for retort.

2008-03-14T21:53:00.000-07:00

I like everyone on TV except for Sean Hannity. I dislike him so much, I criticize Fox News in order to tarnish Sean Hannity.

2008-03-14T03:04:00.000-07:00

It's difficult to describe a 40 minute period when the imagination is really perking. For me it's usually in the early AM after a sober evening. Early to bed, early to rise, makes a mind itchy and curious and fascinated.

I think it is apart from fascination, or from a toke, or a peyote experience, though I'd have to dig through decades of dusty recollections to compare.

In 40 minutes, you can learn about the rainforest from a PBS Nature program, and imagine your life pursuing its protection. You can realize that what you are doing, recycling copper and tantalum from electronics, satisfies the appetite, at least for a few moments. The appetite for metals which chops away tunnels into the rainforest. Organizing recycling trucks and training staff to make recycling more affordable and accessible is doing more to help the rain forest. Knowing the rainforest is there is good, even if I don't see it, the way a Tibetan monk always sees the Himalayas.

Which reminds me of my decision not to become a buddhist monk, perhaps because the PBS show has concluded and BBC News is describing protests by Tibetan monks, perhaps leveraging China's Olympic Game Show. Back then, basically I decided that climbing the mountain to peek at God's glory would be a bit selfish use of my time, and that if I practiced Karma Yoga (I think... Good Works, anyway), and kept careful track of my consumption, that I could prolong the life of the planet and make more people able to get to the top of God's mountain. t's like clearing a hiking trail in a sustainable fashion.

What reminded me was that I am to this day comforted by the knowledge that Buddhist Monks are there doing the meditation. It seems valuable to me that they are there doing it. And that is kind of the way I see the spiders and anteaters and jaguars and harpy eagles and sloths and bullet ants and stingless bees and brazil nut trees in the Amazon... I like that they are there, and seeing them is like seeing a Buddhist monk in person... Cool. But if "seeing" them becomes a bumper sticker or tourist trinket (I saw the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, over 50 heads crowded around it), then you don't really understand the Buddhist monks you are seeing. Spiritual Materialism...

So I recycle and try to make sure it's 'sustainable', a net gain for the rain forest. And I think of the similarities between the Tibetan monks and the indiginous tribes of the Amazon, remnants of the ten million who died during the Spanish conquistador invation of South America. And how China can say that the West's history is so much worse than the CCP's treatment of the Tibetans. Spanish tortured 'indians' to ask where gold could be found, but justified it at home as spreading Christianity. China treads lightly in comparison, and brings the message of communist bliss.

A morning thought, what if the Tibetan Buddhists could be relocated to a rain forest? Instead of contemplating majestic unmoving Himalyan peaks, they could observe strangling fig trees and chicken-eating-spiders and ant colonies and monkeys. How would observing an ecosystem bring a different kind of enlightenment than observing mountain scenery? And we could all leave them alone there, which is what they are looking for really, and the encroachment of roads and Chinese culture and schools would be similar to the encroachment of mining and forestry companies on the rain forest. And it would be curious whether they found the indigenous tribes living deep in the same rain forest, spiritually. As the Indians put coming of age boys arms in leaf-made sleeves of stinging bullet ant butts, with the boys covering the emotions from horrid firey pain, the Tibetan monks could compare that experience with fasting and other personal challenges.

It makes no sense in a way, putting Tibetan monks into the rain forest (or perhaps they should go to Borneo), and more than putting antiques in a closet. The Kaypro 1983 'laptop' next to grandfather's wooden toy, because they are both old and worth saving, though they are completely different. We want those two things out of the way of our lives, in a safe place, and hope that both will appreciate in value as antiques.

What made the toy and the Kaypro obsolete is the internet, the bandwidth which makes it possible for me to learn instantly, at a more convenient pace and with more choice than waiting for the right show to be on PBS. With the internet on, I am simultaneously reading a story in the NYTimes about "The Internet Traffic Challenge: The Policy Dimension". I'd run across some C-SPAN congressional testimony last week, I think in a hotel room, about whether allowing cable internet companies to charge for bandwidth according to bits, according to 'bit credit' according to the individual's typical use of bandwidth, and a lot about bit torrents, which are like flash floods of bandwidth use.

One side promotes the free market, it's the companies which need to build the bandwidth who need financial incentives to remove the bottlenecks, to add infrastructure to deal with the flash floods of digital signals which grow more and more common as the internet lines begin to handle video that used to be transferred on analog airwaves.

The demand for precious hard rock metals to expand that infrastructure to make it possible for me to watch PBS uninterrupted will send more mining trucks into the rain forest, exposing gorillas to poachers on the same truck roads as the coltan/tantalum mining trucks.

So learning about resources consumes resources. Kind of like monks need to eat. I mean, who would blame a vegetarian monk when another greedy tourist is eating monkey brains with money paid to poachers who hunt gorillas for a living. If we feel guilty for eating, drinking, and going pee, then the alternatives are suicide or divine grace removing our sins, or chipping away at our sins with regular meditation.

Meditating is also a form of self-examination. Like Charlie in Flowers for Algernon, we can find ourselves with brilliant moments of enlightenment in examining ourselves, and seem both enlightened and self-absorbed. Like Siddhartha, who is happiest (peaceful is not the same as happy, some monk could sniff, but that's the way the book reads) when he gets a job as a truck driver (ferry boat operator, actually) at the end of his travels, we somehow continue to love Charlie, perhaps more, as he loses his grip on intelligence and returns to being a simpleton.

My method of meditation is learning. Learning yoga. I don't know if that's a form of yoga. I bet it is. I would know if I had decided to be a religion major at Carleton College, which was a serious consideration after I burned my bridges in the Philosophy department.

I learn with the internet, primarily. So if that is affected by traffic, we either mine more or we say, gee, so little of the bandwidth is consumed by learning compared to pornography downloads... maybe if everyone becomes more fundamentally religious, and the bandwidth is used only for spiritual purposes, that would be the way to preserve the planet. Recycling is just slowing down the speed of destruction. It also helps the poor by creating jobs, more jobs than would be created by mining and hunting, and more sustainable jobs by not exhausting the mining jobs by using up all the metal in a few generations. Recycling is like vegetarianism or herbivores in the ecosystem. You still need carnivores or the deer all die. Recycling needs mining and forestry like the forest needs carnivores.

Trying to control use of the internet can be done CCP (Chinese Communist Party) style or crackdown on Napster style (eliminating free downloads of intellectual property while extending the copyrights so that the image of Mickey Mouse or the ancient banjo ballad played by Roy Clark... hmmm. wait... why is that protected... anyway extending it so that the entertainers who are accustomed recently to being rich can maintain their lifestyles).

So anyway it is fun for me to run these creative currents and thoughts, to say to hell with compartimentalization for 90 minutes this morning. But if I did it all day, on welfare, it would be unworthy consumption. I would need to do it at a monestary, in a vow of poverty.

If I do it at the workplace, the case can be made that it is not hypomania, but hyper manic behavior, a form of insanity.

I think the definition of insanity in society is done by consensus. If I put stingy ants on my 13 year old son in Middlebury Vermont, I'd be arrested for sure and the consensus would be that I am insane. If I refuse to do the same thing to my son in the village in the Amazon, the consensus there would be much different.

Consensus is a wiki process. Being able to twist or bait or herd a consensus process is a talent that steers society. Plato spent a lot of energy and thought explaining that the rhetoric or reason or wisdom is a knife that can be used for good or ill.

Robert Duchesnay said that if you spend your life advocating good, that someone else will rise and advocate the opposite, that the only alternative was to create! art!

Siddhartha seemed to say that we are mortals and our lives are currents in a river, and that being attached to the outcomes is a form of insanity that the crowd suffers from, and that only the holy rare few are Christened with the enlightenment to understand the futility of struggle.

At midlife, I am happy that so many strands of my teenage meditation are still relevant and alive, and I am happy that I went into recycling and took a truck driving job like Siddhartha. But I still suffer the attachment to worldly outcomes. The option to grab a bag of nails and begin training pygmies in Cameroon to spike trees to slow forestry is still in the closet. Or the attic. My attachment to love, to my wife and children, is as captivating for me as it was for Hesse's Sidhartha. My consuming self curiosity is as strong as Charlie or Algernons.

There was a moment of self awareness, after all, at the hokey MBA student 'boot camp' BU held, bringing new MBAs into the woods to close eyes and fall backwards and challenge themselves. It was a unique crowd for me. I felt like a group of Wall Street investors had been sent to the Upper Buffalo Wilderness Area, and I was for a moment a big fish in a small pond when we strapped this little hook to a belt and did a silly rappelling move down a line from a tree, one by one. When my turn was up, and I was standing on the tree ready to sling down the line, I thought about it beforehand, I only got one shot at it. I decided I may as well try to impress, and did kind of a backflip on the way down which scared the person who would be filling out the insurance company reports if I struck my head on the tree in the process.

It impressed with oos and ahhs the MBA crowd, though a few seconds later it was no doubt eyerolls at the showoff and would do nothing to earn me a powerlunch. Most of that year was spent showing off and getting a reputation as a show off, in class and in life.

And the question I had before I did it and after was, well life is short, as short as this ten second slide down the line. At the end of it would I rather have showed off, or rather have gone down quietly like a dozen people ahead of me. I think both are sound options. The ones I would not want to be are the ones who showed fear and angst going down the silly line. Even though, for them, having done it was like sticking your arm into a sleeve of bullet ants, at least in some corner of their mind, in the context or consensus of their self.

Time is up, back to work.

2006-12-13T02:03:00.001-08:00

2006-12-13T01:44:00.000-08:00

First, let me stick my blog neck out and say I seem to be the only person in Vermont who is still remotely open minded about how Iraq will turn out.

Here's my thinking. The daily bombs are awful, and if it bleeds it leads the news. Photos and AP wire stories travel instantly across the globe, giving us instant feedback. I'm not callous or blind.

What I don't know is how anyone could have predicted the outcome of Japan if they were relying on information from embedded reporters in Iwo Jima.

The outcome in Iraq will be told 50 years from now. It may be horrible, I'm not saying I'm convinced it's going to turn out positive like Japan. But I'm saying you couldn't predict Japan based on kamakaze pilots and Iwo Jima suicide bombers, and I don't know how hopeful anyone could have been during reconstruction. Japan didn't have oil or any natural resources to rebuild with, and didn't treat women particularly well (the #1 indicator of GDP, I think, is women's rights).

What you can predict is public opinion of going to war or staying in a war. FDR had to repeatedly deny that he was going to aid England by sending supplies during the Nazi attacks across the Channel. 90% of Americans were against entry into WWII, and 70% even opposed sending supplies to England by boat.

When the population is unable to debate use of force, the decision to stay in a war or wage a war falls on a small number of people who are isolated, who have to tune out the din of the surrender monkeys. That's probably not a great mindset for making careful considerations of withdrawal. Maybe we should leave, or should not have entered Iraq. But if 95% of the people yelling to leave don't know what "Iwo Jima" is, it kind of enables the war machine to tune out the careful good advice commingled in the pack of reactionary withdraw cries.

Sometimes I wonder if Putin is onto something when Russia buries every headline of Chechnya and denies submarines are sunk. I would hate that, because I consider myself reasonable and well-informed. The other thing that would be bad about that is that it would strongly indicate that USA has no business being successful anywhere anyway.

A German guy told me a few months ago that if the USA had never arrived in Normandy and Italy, and had not entered the war, that the Germans would have worked it out and gotten rid of the Nazis on their own. Interesting. I tend to think Nazi German would have lasted at least as long as Stalinist USSR, and in fact USSR might still be around today if they weren't bordered by free Berlin.

Here's the problem... Taking out Germany (which did not attack USA) as long as you are going to take out Japan, because you are mobilized and have a license, was (let's say) a good thing in retrospect. Taking out Sadaam when you are already in Afganistan may have been sensible in a mideast reconstruction sense, and some of us were open minded to it without the WMA argument. The WMA argument (even the one that the price of oil was already predicted to skyrocket, and we were acting preeminently against future procurement of weapons of mass destruction by a Sadaam with 2006 oil revenue) was secondary to some of us. But we admit the WMA argument pushed the majority over the top, and without the BS claim we would have been outvoted.

That's why democracies are generally safer. It's the Catch 22 of the Iraq decision. You can't convince a democracy to install a democracy by force unless you convince the first democracy that they are under attack already.

Ok, what to do now?

Dumb Idea:

We have GPS tracking devices that are installed on animals for tracking.

USA and Iraq could put these devices on an animals, such as a large number of pooches or monkeys, or pigs, something not common in Iraq, to track them by satellite if one is reported stolen or missing.

If a bus or recruitment pickup or other work-solicitation vehicle shows up, they need to have one of the animals with them. People are warned not to get on buses without doggies or monkeys.

Maybe the same thing could be accomplished with a certain type of car or minivan which is rare in Iraq, GPS or lojack on any "red" vehicle, RFID tags would tell if the van is legitimate. But it would be more expensive than dog collars, I'm guessing.

2003-07-31T05:10:00.000-07:00

This is a new "eWaste Recycler Blog" page just to help everyone understand how the export and recycling transactions work.

As of 7AM this morning I have already received 10 offers to buy used or surplus equipment or software (see part numbers below). These are all offers to pay, and include buyers across the globe - Denmark, UK, Asia, USA, Brazil.... By midnight I will typically have received 200 requests for parts and equipment. I have a backload from vacations etc. of about 2,000 offers I haven't even had a chance to read.

The point here is that there is a very legitimate repair market, and it is stronger (and I would argue, better) overseas. In South America, for example, becoming a "TV repairman" is considered something like becoming an engineer. In the USA you don't see many valedictorians going into the field.

Anyway, if I suddenly get quiet about who is exporting and to where, it is in part because I know that some of these people trading are fine people trying to repair stuff. But there is an increasing crackdown by multinational OEMs, which manufacture in developing countries. And admittedly, there is a black market - notice all the offers for software for example. They would rather see 100 legitimate repair shops close than see one repackaging used parts, or swapping used parts for new parts at one of their warehouses. The line between the "white" market -- legitimate reuse and repair, and the "black" market -- stolen goods, repackaged used equipment sold as new, and violation of EULA (end user license agreements -- see "OEM version" software solicitation below), is blurred, and referred to as the "gray market".

As multinational OEMs consider which country to invest in, they consider more than labor rates and political stability. A crackdown on the gray market is part of the package offered to foreign governments. Agencies for those governments, desperate for the OEM investment, begin to crack down on the refurbishers. Shortly before I visited China, for example, agents in Ninhai arrested approximately 100 printer/PC/toner cartridge/one-use-camera repairers, and jailed them without trial. This winds up shifting the parts recovery to the countryside.

So these countries still need parts, and in the environmental lifecycle analysis, we should feel good about supplying them. It is easier to sell the parts below hidden in a pile of scrap.

There are 2 bad outcomes -- toxics along for the ride usually refers to a contamination (mixing in a little bit of bad with a legitimate load, of copper scrap for example). In the example above, it is "goodies along for the ride". There is an incentive for the overseas repair people to get the parts they need by buying a whole load of scrap with the parts hidden underneath, avoiding high tariffs and hostile conversations with government agents.

Some USA companies are participating in this, it benefits both parties. I can get money and get rid of my scrap at the same time. But at the same time, the NEED the copper, aluminum, zinc, coltan, etc. to MAKE their new equipment. How can they ensure they can get the raw material without letting it support the gray market?

The solution: Set up "shredding" recycling operations, and companies (like printer manufacturers, who gave away printers in the 1990's hoping to sell $40 ink cartridges -- they FREAK over the used cartridge refurbishing in China). even voluntary participate in manufacturer take-back. These companies want to legitimize shredding as the best recycling method.

The other solution: Mining. The more they have to pay for copper, the greater the incentive for copper mining. Sadly, this is SUCH a high polluting industry that you could never open a mine near a populated area. Where are the new investments? Among native populations... Borneo, for example, is a hot mining area.

We need to recycle to keep mining at bay. But we need to promote reuse. The secondary market is typically 7 TIMES LARGER than the "new" product market, because 7 people out of 8 car buyers on this planet will NEVER be able to afford a new car.

So what I promote is honest bill of lading -- state exactly what is on each containerload, naming the parts on the list below, along with the copper scrap and grade of scrap. But if I sell through a broker, I don't know for sure what the bill of lading is translated into.

The honest bill of lading approach I use is very difficult. Some overseas buyers won't touch it because they are afraid of the OEM enforcement against the "gray market", and I lose customers to companies which label the load as scrap.

Enough for now. The list of parts requested at 7 am this morning is below...

ICL Dumb Terminal P420 -CE
DELL Latitude CPT (V) UK Keyboard P/N 0w023
Looking for 2 x FCE2-6412-NE or FCE2-6412-E
20 x 2.5 inch Laptop drives-20GB please
MICROSOFT OEM SOFTWARE - WINDOWS/OFFICE/SERVER/WORKSTATION
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2003-07-17T18:26:00.000-07:00

[ Thu Jul 17, 06:24:33 PM | Robin Ingenthron | edit ]
I am a buffalo in a Microsoft herd. But it is a fast-running herd of elites, with a digital divide behind us.

This is the new age "planned obsolescence" described by Vance Packard. Im real-time.

Unlike the automobile, which is now available/accessible by 90% of Americans, the web superhighway is still hovering under 50%. Sell your 10 year old car, and you made an 17-year-old's dream. Sell your 10-year-old computer, and you sucked in a sucker.

It's like if a 10 year old car went at 25 miles an hour and a new car drove at 90 miles an hour.... what would happen? Would kids still learn to drive? If not, how would the american economy and demographic be changed?

A speed limit regulated detroit because people were in physical danger. No such speed limit exists on the web. Bandwidth, processor speed go to the highest bidder.

But this microsoft obsolescence thing... who said that your kids couldn't learn to drive because the used cars only go 1/2 the speed of the new cars?

Subtext? Baby boomers with stock in new PC manufacturing enjoy the planned obsolescence drive. If kids can't learn to drive on Dad's 486, they have to support stock in dad's Gateway-ibm-hp-dell portfolio.

Will a 2040 history student be able to scan my blog? I will eventually publish. Blogger is like limbo between griper and author.

Robin

2003-07-17T18:24:00.000-07:00

I am a buffalo in a Microsoft herd. Directions I've always gone, things I always did that worked, no longer work (drag and click text-box for example).

This is the new age "planned obsolescence" described by Vance Packard. Im real-time.

Except, look behind us. I'm following, grazing. But unlike the automobile, which is now available/accessible by 90% of Americans, the web superhighway is still hovering under 50%. It's called the digital divide. Sell your 10 year old car, and you made an 17-year-old's dream. Sell your 10-year-old computer, and you sucked in a sucker.

How long before the other drivers demand they need to browse, too? It's like if a 10 year old car went at 25 miles an hour and a new car drove at 90 miles an hour.... what would happen? Would kids still learn to drive? If not, how would the american economy and demographic be changed?

A speed limit regulated detroit because people were in physical danger. No such speed limit exists on the web. Bandwidth, processor speed go to the highest bidder.

But this microsoft obsolescence thing... who said that your kids couldn't learn to drive because the used cars only go 1/2 the speed of the new cars?

Subtext? Baby boomers with stock in new PC manufacturing enjoy the planned obsolescence drive. If kids can't learn to drive on Dad's 486, they have to support stock in dad's Gateway-ibm-hp-dell portfolio.

Will a 2040 history student be able to scan my blog? I will eventually publish. Blogger is like limbo between griper and author.

Robin