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.

It’s now 11pm on Wednesday night. Tomorrow morning, at 10am, I will be presenting my Project Plan to execute $6M worth of custom software development over the next 36 months.

That Project Plan doesn’t really exist yet.

It’s been a busy week. LAST night, at 11pm (roughly), I filed a Notice Of Intent, to bid on a DIFFERENT multi-million dollar, multi-year contract. Oh, yesterday was also my oldest daughter’s 6-year-old birthday.

There’s a point, in here, somewhere. We’ll wind our way towards it.

Technically, these days I’m an “Information Worker”. What I think that means, is that I get paid for thinking about things. At least, that’s how I choose to interpret it. My clients probably prefer to think I get paid for the OUTPUT of my thinking – but I’m all too keenly aware of how directly the quality of my output, is related to the quality of my thinking.

I drink a lot of coffee most days. It brings a certain crisp, painful clarity to my thoughts – great for coding, decent for hacking up a schedule, horrible for writing proposals.

Some days I drink beer, partly to fuzz those crisp, certain edges – partly to counteract the effects of the coffee. When I write strategy or policy, I usually combine the two. It produces documents with a certain bizarre, compelling lucidity – and leaves me useless afterwards.

Information workers, such as we are, can be noted for their ability to force their thoughts to follow a linear progression – to march through the gates of logic, as it were. This is, after all, what software is about – making rigidly explicit the implicit desires of the user.

And yet athletes often talk about being “In the Zone” – where every motion seems effortless, and the outcome so certain as to be written in time. Is there a place for such sentiments in the realm of informatica?

I like to think so.

And this belief is what leads me to my daily routine:

1. I never start (or finish) at the same time.
2. I rarely work in the same place. Anywhere with coffee and Wifi is a candidate – on writing days, the WiFi is optional.
3. My roles, while sweeping, are ill-defined – and I prefer it that way. When I’m in the mood to write, I write. When I’m in the mood to code, I code. If the phone calls, I dial it.

Such freedom comes at a price, however – the day I fail to meet a deadline, is the day my freedom ends. (NASA, after all, can only overlook my eccentricities while I’m impeccable). So occasionally, I push. But I don’t push the doing – I push the feeling. If I need to write, I’ll push at feeling a writing mood. If I need to code, I’ll push at feeling the thrill of execution and interpretation.

What about you? Do you believe in multitasking? Do you drink the Kool-Aid, that the A.D.D. we suffered with as children, was actually the early manifestations of a better, more intuitive and transcendent way of thinking?

Or really, are we truly the over-indulged, lazy and self-centered Generation-Me that “Suits” would have us think?

1. Numbers

Regardless of the language they use, or even the character set they use for writing it, most countries on the planet now use the “decimal positional notation” for all numbers and mathematics. This public, open standard for notation has allowed the development of relatively friction-free international commerce, and was the successful basis for…

2. Weights and Measures

What if, every time you bought a gallon of milk, a five-cent license fee was paid to the owner of the patent – on the Gallon?

Aside from underpinning all advances in commerce, engineering, scientific research, cartography, medical sciences, etc… just look at a few of the many examples of what goes wrong when we don’t follow established and open standards of weight and measure.

3. The Telephone System (SS7)

Ubiquitous enough that most people don’t realize there’s a standard at work here, the details of the Signaling System Number Seven protocol are the magic glue that makes global and local telephony possible. It’s worth noting that individual countries are able to implement and revise this base standard in significant ways, and that they’ve done so without abandoning the SS7 system. (This would be a great example of an extensible standard).

When was the last time you plugged a telephone into a wall jack – anywhere in the world – and couldn’t get it to work?

Other non-technical, non-software standards:

1. Shoe Sizes
2. The Dewey Decimal System
3. ISBN
4. Bullet Calibres
5. Screw sizes and screw heads, bolt, nut and nail sizes – (although not ALL screw heads)
6. Dimensional lumber
7. K-12 Grades
8. Zip Codes

The most obvious technology standards are, of course, electrical power – of the 110V or 240V, 50 or 60Hz variety. Can you imagine what limits on the innovation of electrical equipment we would have suffered under if GE collected a license fee every time you used a wall jack?

Now here’s an interesting question – why has it taken so many years for “Hi-Def” television to become ubiquitous? The underlying standard (broadcast or cable television) wasn’t extensible and, in fact, (similar to the Y2K bug) had been designed with very short-sighted considerations.

In a level playing field, (such as the emergent technology market of Internet servers, databases, scripting languages, frameworks, etc) open source software is a sure contender. However, when dealing with vendor lock-in (which is ALWAYS based on closed and/or proprietary standards) it doesn’t have a hope. This is a simple (perhaps simplistic) explanation for the failure of Linux to make the gains in desktop market share that everyone has expected.

In the long run, adoption of the right open standards becomes the trojan horse within proprietary software. It levels the playing field – let the best app win.

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.)

The Progressive Economics Forum – Chief Economist / Blogger, Andrew Jackson. Marc Lee. So far just talking simple technology of setting up blogs – DreamHost, picking a theme, getting a domain name. Nothing specific about motivating activism yet.

Extent of “ripple effect” is limited to Technorati, and promotion to”Progressive Bloggers“.

700-1000 page views per day avg.

Intersections with Mainstream media – “A number of times when I’ve made a post, have led to mainstream media contacting for an interview. It just happened, not promoted. No mediaroom section on the blog.”

If you want media coverage of your blog, put that all in the mediaroom. Make it easier to capture.

Watch the Comments on the posts (via RSS, etc.), sometimes the first comment can derail the whole thread.

The DMCA is being used to shutdown dissenting voices in the US. Hosting companies will generally shut down the blog first, ask questions later.

TAKEAWAY: Use a Canadian web host to avoid the DMCA, or try:

• koumbit.org
• http://theorem.ca/

What about using Reddit/Digg for collecting Canadian political content? Try using the Canadian Reddit section.

There are dozens of aphorisms around this theme:

• Might makes right
• The ends justify the means
• The meek shall inherit the Earth

And, of course, my personal favorite: The Golden Rule.

Now, there are a couple of problems with the Golden Rule – firstly, it’s often misquoted, which gives it an ugly twist. Before we dive into where things go wrong, here’s the version I prefer:

Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.

There are two tricky bits here – first, it’s as you would have them do, not what. If you’re a sado-masochist, that doesn’t make it alright to beat your neighbors – unless that’s how they like it. Treat people with the same set of values and principles as you would like to enjoy – not necessarily the same actions.

The second bit is would – this is not guidance to do to others what has been done to you. (An eye for an eye, etc.) Get over that – this is a “turn the other cheek” moment.

With all that in mind, is it still possible to want people to do what you want, and sleep at night?

We’ll get back to that question in a bit. But first, let’s look at what “Doing what you want” really means.

• Marketing – I want you to buy this product.
• Conversion – I want you to believe in these things.
• Teaching – I want you to absorb these facts.
• Guiding – I want you to embrace and abide by these values.
• Manipulating – I want you to think you want to do, what I want you to do.

In the amazing soup of language that is English, we seem to have dozens of words that describe essentially the same thing – colored only by the relative rightness of what we want to motivate. Even with something as simple as marketing, the question of whether we’re identified a need, or manufactured a demand, may be impossible to answer.

Let’s pretend, just for the moment, that we’re all grown-ups. (It’s the lie that advertisers have used to assuage their conscience since the invention of advertising). Knowing that persuasion is, at the end of the day, simply a tool, I will leave my trust in the hope that you’ll use it for good, and not evil. (However we’re defining those things these days.)

Five Methods of Persuasion:

1. Let them decide on their own (and make sure they pick what you wanted them to). This is often known as the “long con”, although really there’s nothing very “confidence” about it. My favorite way to play this one is to argue passionately AGAINST the desired action, with a set of arguments that I know can be defeated. As they are, one by one, I gradually capitulate – taking the audience with me. Alternatively, this works well with divide and conquer / false choices, where you provide several seemingly different options -all of which suit your purpose. (In sales, this is typically described as “two yes’s”, or “six, or a half dozen?”) American Politics, anyone?

2. Subvert their existing behaviors or motivations. It took a full generation to culture the sense of civic responsibility combined with guilt, that made curbside recycling programs successful. Most marketing efforts (and certainly anything more we expect to do to combat global warming) don’t have the luxury of that sort of timeline. So we need to work with the motivations that we’ve already got – greed, fear (of being out of the loop, of being unloved, or of death), lust (hey, sex sells), etc. For the more astute among you, you’ll realize this is why BountyUp is completely modeled around simple financial transactions – people already understand spending, earning, and winning money.

3. Man on the inside. Let’s face it – nobody pays attention to advertising anymore, except for entertainment value. And especially not advertising for charities. Instead, we simply ask our professional advisors (or more likely, our friends) what they think we should do. As an example – suppose I want to sell a new PDA, and I specifically want to target dentists in town. Do I: a.) Cold call the Dentists? b.) Cold call the secretaries of the Dentists? c.) Find out who manages their IT, and take them to lunch?

4. Dare them. This is really a psychological bait-and-switch – the discussion is no longer about the desired action, it’s about not losing face. (This really only works if the dare is public – and if it involves their sweetheart, so much the better.) While this only works for people in certain circumstances, it’s amazingly effective with corporations – the larger, the better. Why do you think Walmart is installing solar panels?

5. Just Ask. By “ask”, I’m presuming a huge amount about your relationship to the “them” we’re talking about – that you have open and meaningful dialog, with an established level of implicit trust, and some sense of domain expertise. But hey – if putting all that together means that, when you want something to happen, all you have to do is ASK for it – maybe that’s the simplest approach?

The sad fact is, we’re hardwired to deal with emergencies. We’re biologically programmed to run from tigers. But when it comes to slow-moving, inexorably advancing walls of ice (like heart disease, greenhouse gases or even obesity), we’re basically useless.

Why? Because they don’t have a face.

It’s true. Even wars need to be personified. As individuals, and as a mob, we treat threats with a face (terrorism, muggings) as way more serious than those without (car accidents, poverty, environmental issues) – regardless of the real numbers. As an example, cited from the book I mention above, the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11th killed around 3,000 people. Another 24,000 people died that day from starvation – and every day before, or since. But starvation has no face.

Recruitment has done well with a face, too. Remember good ‘ol “Uncle Sam needs YOU”? Possibly the most successful propaganda campaign EVER run by any government anywhere, and it was simple personification of military recruitment, as a stern but friendly family member.

So we need a face for Carbon – and no, I’m not suggesting we single out any particular political, special-interest-group or petroleum multinational for this visage; something more along the lines of Uncle Sam. But an evil, twisted, half-relative with social problems – the crazy, knife-wielding brother of Aunt Betty. He needs to be committed – for his own safety, as well as ours.

Maybe we could borrow some terror from 50 years of Hollywood, and name him Carbon Krueger.

If we give him a face, then people can compare him with other threats (dictators, both at home and abroad), and decide how to prioritize.

So here’s my stab – tag photos CarbonKrueger if you think they’re a good candidate. Tag bookmarks CarbonKrueger if you think they help personalize and personify the impacts of Carbon. Use #CarbonKrueger on twitter for your discussions. I’m going to add a Google News Alert, and watch how this works. (I’ve never done the blog-meme thing before, but let’s give it a try.)

The good folk of Jefferson County, Iowa let us know how they won the primary for their county. This should be the “National Ron Paul Grassroots Playbook” – and best of all, it’s featuring one of my very best friends (and co-founder of BountyUp), Samara Burnes. Mind you, I spent 3 years living in Jefferson County, Iowa, and I can tell you it’s not really like anywhere else on the planet.It may be one of those places where honesty and principles still go over in politics.

read more | digg story

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

The recordings were not provided to a federal court hearing the case of the terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui or to the Sept. 11 commission, which had made formal requests to the C.I.A. for transcripts and any other documentary evidence taken from interrogations of agency prisoners. C.I.A. lawyers told federal prosecutors in 2003 and 2005, who relayed the information to a federal court in the Moussaoui case, that the C.I.A. did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge in the case.

I have only two questions:

1. What is the difference between “Severe Interrogation Techniques”, and Torture?
2. If the CIA doesn’t report to Congress, who do they report to?

C.I.A. Destroyed Tapes of Interrogations – New York Times

Blogged with Flock