As is often the case with the large, complex issues facing humanity, most of our effort is (dare I say it?) wasted on trying to fix the wrong things. Like changing our lightbulbs. Even changing our cars is, most of the time, the wrong thing. Why?

Making a thing, almost ANY thing, takes an enormous amount of energy input. These days, most of that energy input is petroleum, generating huge amounts of waste carbon. So regardless of how much BETTER the end product is, it needs to fulfill two criteria to justify the switch:

1. It needs to last forever (or some reasonable facsimile).
2. It needs to use so much less carbon, that it offsets the output of buying something NEW in the first place.

Our problem, as a culture, is less an OIL addiction, as it is an addiction to CONSUMING. Endlessly.

Let’s take the principles of the “Tucker” automobile, and apply them to all consumer goods. Do away with “designed obsolescence“, and try building things to LAST, for a change.

My favorite example of this? A Stanley #2 plane.

(‘But wait!’ you cry. ‘What about the Rabbits?’)

Ah yes. The Rabbits.

Even in “Peak Everything”, when the author discusses how America may need to shift back to a nation with 20-40% of our workforce involved directly in agriculture (in a move called re-ruralization), which mimics much of what Cuba did after the trade embargo was put into place – there’s still too much emphasis on simple vegetables and grain. As a passionate carnivore, I have to ask – Where’s the beef?!?

What’s wrong with cows, anyway? A lot, as it turns out.

1. They produce tons of methane, a greenhouse gas that’s hundreds of times worse than simple carbon dioxide.
2. They’re horribly inefficient at converting feed or pasture to meat.
3. They’re grazed at great distances from where they’re processed, and then transported great distances AGAIN to where they’re consumed.

4. They require relatively high-quality rangeland, and human-edible feed – which contributes directly to the worldwide shortage of arable land.

What’s better? Locally-grown, locally-processed rabbits. Why?

1. Rabbits are incredibly efficient at converting vegetable scraps, and simple non-human-edible vegetation (dandelions, for instance) into meat.
2. Their meat is lean, perhaps cutting down on the obesity endemic.
3. They’re fast and simple to process, with very little toxic byproduct from slaughtering.
4. They breed like, well, like rabbits.
5. They’re simple to breed on a highly-localized scale, reducing transport and attendant fuel costs, pollution, etc.

So here’s my pitch, Mr. Cuban – strike some direct-to-restaurant business deals with major fast-food chains (I’m thinking Wendy’s or McD-scale) for the “Bunny Burger”. Work with these guys on some compelling branding to take the stigma away from breaking fast on the bunny scramble, and put together massively distributed production of bunnies (and their attendant feed). Compost and sell the manure. Feed them kitchen scraps from the same restaurants that are buying your bunny burgers.

Hire the homeless as Neo-shepherds, to keep stray dogs and eagles away from your flock. And where do you put them? How bout the parking garages that will be abandoned as our global economy (and our ability to make ridiculous monthly payments) hits the toilet?

Rabbits. FTW.

As a self-taught engineer, I tend to notice the glaringly-obvious – perhaps more than many of my well-educated peers. And there’s one obvious lesson in this – if solid state electronics are getting HOT, they’re wasting using a fair amount of power.

In a nuclear reactor somewhere out there, an atom died for the pixels on my screen. Another few drops of precious oil, or a few tons more gasified coal, were spilt for those extra minutes of Microsoft Word (or perhaps “Grand Theft Auto 4″).

Moore’s Law has shown us how the steady change of computing SPEED (doubling), and COST (halving), has reliably powered our advancing Information Age. Yet nothing in Moore’s Law has halted the seemingly inexorable increase in ENERGY requirements, of these most devious of machines.

This is not a problem that we’ve address head on – in our subsidized energy economy, there has been no real motivation to do so. In fact, as our dependency on computing infrastructure has deepened, we’ve made it WORSE. Here’s how it works:

“Hey Jim, did you realize that these hard drives fail as they get older? And really reliable hard drives are WAY more expensive.”

“Wow! That SUCKS! Why don’t we just put TWO hard drives in every computer, and copy all the data to BOTH of them?”

No joke. We’ve also done the same thing with (redundant) power supplies, and since all these extra disks and transformers are putting out more HEAT – we’ve had to install more AIR CONDITIONING, too. Oh, and in the REALLY high-end data centers, we’ve got at least one (sometimes two or more) Diesel Generators running at all times – just in CASE the power goes out.

As is typical of the world’s larger problems, the smartest folks haven’t done better – they’ve just done WORSE… in a more complicated way. Let’s take a look at programmers.

Writing software has changed a lot since we started this business. We’ve drifted from the “low-level” languages, up through the “high-level” languages, to things now rightly called “frameworks” that are too abstracted to be considered a language at all.

But along the way (with all this gratuitous computing power sitting around), we’ve gotten UNBELIEVABLY lazy. Here’s an example – it is, by no means, the only one:

Ruby on Rails. A very popular framework, with some fairly typical problems.

Ruby is not, to start with, an efficient language. This means it doesn’t do a very good job of translating “high-level” code, into “low-level” machine code.

Rails, as a framework, is intended to be really easy to use. Which means it does a LOT of stuff for you – much of which you don’t actually need done, in any given case.

Rails uses a database access pattern called “Active Record”. It’s pretty cool, actually – it encapsulates about 10 layers of abstraction, into a few easy-to-use commands.

Unfortunately, that encapsulation ignores most performance impacts. Also unfortunately, the implementation of that pattern – is not thread-safe.

Here’s where the laziness kicks in – rather than fixing the ActiveRecord implementation, or making ruby more efficient in general, someone wrote Mongrel.

What’s Mongrel? An extra web-serving layer, it simply manages a bunch of ruby instances, and hands http requests back and forth. It’s a workaround for the thread-safety problems we were mentioning above.

In software development, it’s called a “Kludge”. In human society, it’s called a “Rat Race”. (We all drive SUVs, even when we object to them environmentally, because we need to be safe – safe in case someone ELSE driving an SUV crashes INTO us. Are you starting to appreciate the irony?)

“So what,” I can hear you saying, “Buying more hardware is cheaper than fixing a whole language, right?”

Yes, it is. And that’s the problem.

Because there are other, more insidious, global impacts of this wasteful computing philosophy. If you need a wickedly fast CPU and a few gigs of Ram to run a Ruby on Rails server, might as well turf out the old servers, right? Those old servers end up as e-waste in developing nations. (HEADLINE: “Lazy coding kills children in the third world”)…

Now, I’m not espousing a return to the good-ol-days of hand-coded assembler, or even web apps written in pure C. But I’ve managed 10,000 http requests per second on a single server (yes, including DB) – simply by taking the extra day or so to tune the database, install some byte-code cacheing – oh, and not running RoR.

Even if you don’t care about the 12 year old kids dying in Thailand while they bake your discarded motherboard over a camel-dung campfire – at least think about the abuse you’re putting your electrons through.

(Editor’s note: Many thousands of electrons were tortured in the writing of this blog post. And yes, this is deliberately provocative link-bait for my overly-zealous RoR-fanatic friends. Which doesn’t make it any less true.)

• Carbon output
• Non-renewables consumed
• Average distance food travels (aka carbon output in transport)
• Social impact (Average wage in USD of all workers in the supply chain of all goods and services consumed)

Obviously need a good baseline and some rough approximations.
Contests are regional in scope (e.g., Inconvenience Vancouver Island, Inconvenience Chicago, etc).
Teams can seek local or international corporate sponsors as appropriate to their plan (BC Hydro for a team looking mostly at electrical reduction, etc.)
Teams are responsible for documenting their score (photographic evidence of bicycle transport, power bills, etc.)

Make a reality TV show around it.
Host a massive awards ceremony with Celebrity MCs.
Kick it off with a rock concert, bring the teams up on stage in between acts.

If we can figure out a way to generate a handicap for each region (based on climate, available options, etc.) then we could play regional champions against each other.

THE NAME:

Obviously a not-subtle reference to the film, it also highlights that it is, at most, an “Inconvenience” to change your lifestyle to save the planet, and by extension, humanity.
It’s verbable.
It can be abbreviated to iCon, which also has interesting connotations as being a symbol of something bigger.
The domain name is parked and possibly for sale (or donation?)

STRATEGIES:

Plant sedge-grass for carbon-credit offset.
Rules should include not buying carbon credits, has to be direct action.
Direct action can include educational campaigns, with some percentage of the effects of the educational campaign scored against the team.
Note that final teams will probably all have NEGATIVE scores.

PS:

If someone runs with this before I get it together, more power to you. But you should still use bountyup.com for the prize

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