 Recently I suggested that perhaps the best way to decide how you want to make a living was to simply ask Who Needs Your Gift Now? The implication of that question is that your Gift is something you both love (it’s your Passion) and are good at (it’s your Genius). For many that is easy — some people I know have known what their Gift is since they were old enough to talk. For others it has been elusive, either because they feel a mis-fit between their Passion and their Genius, or because, for whatever reason, they have yet to discover their Passion or their Genius. This article is for them (or perhaps I should say, for us). The chart above is a more elaborate version of the Venn diagram I have used in several recent articles. I use this chart when I review the important-but-non-urgent projects on my Getting Things Done list, to decide which of these projects to work on each day. I had originally planned to flag each of these important-but-non-urgent projects with a number from 1 through 7, depending on which area on the chart above it fell into — and then focus on the projects in area 3 first. But I discovered it isn’t as easy as that (it’s never that easy, is it?), because of the six questions that I’ve now added to the chart:
So how do I categorize these projects — career options really — when because of these ‘hitches’ they aren’t really area 3 projects? And what do I do about the projects that are area 1, 2, 4, or 5 projects — but might become, or be changed to, area 3 projects with time or dedicated effort? Let’s take the questions one at a time:
Let me be personal for a moment and tell you how this applies to the projects in my Getting Things Done list.
I’ve said before that if you can’t find work in area 3, you haven’t looked hard enough. That may be harsh, but I think it’s true: It takes courage and perseverance and a lot of self-knowledge to find (or create) that ‘perfect’ job, but it’s out there waiting. But if asking the question Who Needs My Gift Now? doesn’t get you there, is it really possible to ‘move’ a project from one of the other areas to area 3? My answer to this question, which will probably be controversial, is probably no. Things are the way they are for a reason, and if the potential customers of your pet project just aren’t persuaded, or aren’t ready, for what you have to offer, chances are all the brilliant sales pitches in the world won’t change that. Set your area 2 projects aside and wait for the market to catch up. If your work has you disengaged, and you’ve started to hate getting up in the morning, it’s time to give up on this area 5 work and find something you love. And if you love your work and it’s important, but your co-workers and customers have no confidence in you, chances are training and study and more experience won’t change that (unless you’re brand new in the job, in which case stick with it for awhile) — shelve the area 4 work and find something that’s a better fit for your capabilities. It’s the same way with relationships. If the love goes, or your partner ceases to appreciate what you have to give, or you just can’t seem to make it work, to the point you feel it’s more trouble than it’s worth, it’s really hard to get it back on track. Often the wisest thing to do is walk away and build a new relationship with someone else you love, who values your Gift and who you are just right for. Just like the perfect job, the perfect partner is almost certainly out there, waiting to be discovered, and a less-than-perfect relationship, like a less-than-perfect job, is incredibly difficult to improve by sheer will power and self-sacrifice. How do we get in these situations? Sometimes we just take the easy road, accept the first job offer that comes along, so we never know what we might be missing, and suddenly wake up to the realization that life is too short to work at something you hate, or can’t do well, or which just isn’t appreciated. And sometimes what seemed to be the perfect job turns out to be something less than perfect, or else something changes to make it less than perfect (the market moves on while you stay behind, or new skills are needed that you can’t seem to master, or it just become routine and all the joy goes out of it). It’s really hard to turn that around. It’s usually better, I would argue, to start from scratch and search for the project that, right now, falls in area 3. It could take a long time and a lot of work to find, but it will be worth it. We each have our Gift (our Passion and our Genius), and our Purpose — allthat is required is to discover what they are and where they meet. Now if only I could learn to take my own advice. |
January 31, 2006
Finding Where Your Passion, Your Genius and Your Purpose Meet
January 30, 2006
Advice to Innovators: Know What Urgent Problem You’re Uniquely Solving
 Over the years I have advised many entrepreneurs, worked with a lot of consultants, and coached executives. All three groups repeatedly make the same mistake: They try to introduce ’solutions’ that are really interesting, quite feasible, and well within their area of competency, but which fail to uniquely solve an urgent problem (in the eyes of whoever is paying for it). It is easy to get entranced by what’s possible, especially when new technology is making things possible now that were impossible even a decade ago. I know of many entrepreneurs who have invested everything they have to develop an offering that is fascinating, but which has no market — because customers spend almost all their money on products and services that they think meet urgent needs. The late-night infomercials are full of such intriguing but unneeded offerings, as are the catalogues of high-tech gizmos that you often find in the seat pocket in front of you on airplanes. There’s a reason these gizmos are “not sold in stores” — because once you see them, you realize you don’t really need them, so you pass them over and go back to shopping for the needs that caused you to drive to the store in the first place. I’ve written before about the difference between needs, wants, and nice-to-have’s. We usually spend our disposable income on them in that order — needs first, then wants, then nice-to-haves. If the wants (and sometimes even the nice-to-haves) are cheap enough, however (like almost everything in the infomercials, gizmo catalogues and ‘dollar’ stores) we may buy them before we buy a more expensive need — that’s especially true, alas, for the poor, who otherwise would probably never buy wants or nice-to-haves at all. The purpose of advertising (especially in infomercials and gizmo catalogues) is to move a nice-to-have in the customer’s mind up to a want or even a need, and that advertising has been finely honed to do that. Generally, after the fact, we regret such purchases (both because they generally aren’t as good as advertised, and because they precluded us from buying something we needed). Unless you’re willing to resort to such advertising hype, and burn a lot of bridges behind you, you need to focus on offering products and services that meet real needs. And if you’re wise, you’ll focus on urgent needs before important ones, because to most of us, there is always tomorrow to look after that important need, while the urgent need must be addressed today. No logic there, just human nature. The discipline of knowledge management, for example, can provide many resources that are important and nice-to-have, but the solutions that traditional KM have produced are, for the most part, neither urgent nor strongly needed: The principal method by which people share information is the same as it was before KM came along – face-to-face conversations and telephone calls. The late Peter Drucker told us, decades ago, what the urgent need for KM really was: Improving the productivity of front-line “knowledge-workers” — those of us who make a living because of what we know better than anyone else. That urgent need remains largely unmet, which is why, in my opinion, KM is still alive ten years later despite its disappointing results, and also why there is such recent interest in Personal Knowledge Management, which could more effectively address that urgent, unmet need. A lot of consultants (including me) make their living helping their customers become more innovative. ‘Being an innovative company’ is another nice-to-have, or perhaps want, usually mentioned in the corporate mission statement (which means it is important) but rarely connected to significant current-year programs (which means it is not urgent). The main customers of innovation consultants are businesses that are obviously in trouble (though, alas, that sense of urgency often comes too late) and businesses whose executives have the prescience to realize that they will be in trouble soon unless they become more innovative now (and such prescience is rare, and takes a great deal of courage). There is a propensity of inventors, and corporate R&D departments, to devise new products and services that are incremental to those that have already proved themselves in the market. Most of what the corporate world calls innovations are in fact sequels, ‘new and improved’ variations (’upgrades’), knock-offs, redesigns, new flavours, imitations and spinoffs of existing successful products. They rarely provide significant value above and beyond the original, but they are usually cheap and low-risk to make, so they are often profitable. Much of the struggling, customer-defying entertainment ‘industry’ is based on watching for breakaway successes (usually produced by more entrepreneurial companies) and copying them, and then producing formulaic sequels of them. Apple Computer prides itself on being ’second movers’ in its markets — they watch for truly innovative products made by companies that lack the resources to really penetrate the market, and, before viral marketing can take off, Apple refines, redesigns and improves on the low-cost, utilitarian, garage-built original, and gets the entire Apple buzz machine working to scoop the market from the brave entrepreneur. In much of this troubled world, being cool has become a need, and in the attention-deficit economy, simple, elegant functionality is a need. No one meets these two needs better than Apple. Aspiring innovators have much to learn from their example. A common mistake of entrepreneurs researching the market for an innovative idea is to show so much enthusiasm for the product while talking to prospective customers that the customers say they want or need it when they really don’t. A related mistake is to anticipate the market for an idea before it arrives — to produce something before the market is ready for it. If you know there will be a need, but aren’t big enough to create the need today through buzz marketing, the best approach is to watch the market closely and wait until it catches up, before launching your product. Executives are often rewarded — by shareholders and directors — for avoiding risk, and hence for not needing to be innovative. One executive recently told me “Show me a company that claims it has to be innovative to survive, and I’ll show you a company in trouble”. What is urgent to CEOs today is minimizing risk and continuously slashing costs to sustain the double-digit annual profit growth that shareholders have come to demand to support today’s high P/E ratios. Their new revenues come from greater global market penetration, incremental ’sequel’ product offerings, planned obsolescence and buying up competitors — not from risky, innovative new products. Probably the hardest part of the needed-urgent-unique equation is making your product or service truly unique. Every company claims its products, processes and services are unique, but that uniqueness is rarely recognized in the marketplace. The most notable way many large companies use to try to be unique is through design. It’s not very courageous, but it is a very sensible strategy. Design is really the only way American car companies, for example, really differentiate themselves, while the Japanese car-makers have differentiated themselves from American car-makers (though not from each other) through better quality. In that industry, it’s pretty clear which differentiation strategy customers prefer. There are many ways a company can differentiate itself — and stand out as unique. It generally entails either doing something different, or differently, from competitors. Better design is one way. Adding needed functionality but avoiding complicating, unneeded functionality (like 90% of the ‘nice-to-haves’ in most cell phones) is another. Differentiating on price is a third way, provided you have a cost advantage that will allow you to win a ‘price war’. Differentiating on product or service quality or speedy service is a fourth. And with all of today’s bewildering new technologies, making your product or service easier to use or easier to buy is another alternative. I’ve described other differentiation strategies in previous articles. The decision chart at the top of this page can tell you whether it’s time to charge ahead with your innovative idea, or whether instead you should wait — for the market to realize it needs your idea, for that need to become urgent and not just important, and/or for your own differentiation strategy to evolve to the point the market sees youroffering as truly unique. |
January 29, 2006
A Proposed Collaboration: The Wearable Home
 I have written several times about the idea of a ‘wearable home’ — a self-contained environment that would allow the ‘wearer/resident’ to live comfortably ‘outdoors’ anywhere on Earth. The standard human solution to the problem of inhospitable climate is an extravagant invention called the ’single family home’, which contains as many as a dozen different single-purpose unconfigurable ‘rooms’, must be abandoned in favour of another model when the occupant’s lifestyle changes, and consumes huge amounts of fossil fuels to keep the entire structure at a comfortable temperature, even when the occupant is away from it. There are several more economical solutions in widespread use. The most enduring of these is the deer-and-harehide suit of the aboriginal peoples of the Arctic, which allows the hunter-gatherer tribes to travel long distances comfortably, and requires the construction of only a simple, inexpensive and temporary dwelling for the few activities that cannot be carried out comfortably out-of-doors. These natural suits are, for the Ihalmiut, the perfect house. In areas more hospitable to us naked humans (the tropics), the few gatherer-hunter peoples that have not been exterminated by Agricultural Man build only temporary structures and abandon them as their communities migrate across their hunting and gathering range. They lead the most leisurely lives of any humans on the planet, spending most of their lives ‘outside’ and hoarding nothing. We have all seen the wearable homes devised of necessity by the (mostly) urban homeless. Despite the lack of cultural knowledge of how to construct such portable housing, some of the examples I have seen are quite ingenious. One man I spoke to said it had taken him years to perfect the layers he uses to protect himself from cold, wind, rain and heat, yet allowed the heat from the subway grates he slept on to penetrate on cold winter nights. In that spirit, a number of designers and artists have created wearable homes suitable for homeless or transient life, or for life after the collapse of civilization. Some of these have been serious efforts, others ironic. The photo above shows a wearable home designed by Mary Mattingly, who has even provided some specifications for it. It seems to me that, whatever you think the future will bring, with all the recent research on ‘smart textiles‘ we now have the technology to design and create a wearable home. And the possibilities if we can do so — doing away with the need for the single-family dwelling and all its accoutrements (lights, furnaces, air-conditioners, furniture, and the need to ‘commute’) would almost entirely solve the problems of the End of Oil and Global Warming — seem too good to pass up. So I’d like to propose a collaboration: Let’s create, together, the Wearable Home. The three steps in doing so are:
Here’s a very incomplete start to the specification:
What am I missing? And would our culture accept this innovation? We have recently invented a set of technologies that have essentially eliminated the need for offices, yet we remain anchored to an obsolete mindset that says everyone has to have their own personal office or cubicle. We are still building new office space, of which 90% is space designed for principal occupancy by one person, at a record pace. Are we just culturally unable to abandon the idea that, even though we can carry our entire ‘office’ under our arm and ‘open’ it anywhere, we still need a personal office ’space’? And if so, does this suggest that even if the personal wearable home became a reality, we would still insist on wearing it in a redundant ‘family home’? And even though technologypromises/threatens the end of privacy, will we still want walls and doors so that government, business, and community snoops can’t always see what we’re doing? |
January 28, 2006
Links for the Week – Jan. 28/06
 As usual, here are, in my opinion, the most important news announcements of the past week Health Canada’s Public Health Agency has a great site with advice on preparing for epidemics and other emergencies. Thanks to fellow Future Creator Dave Davison for the link. Now you can add the aÁaÌ berry from Brasil to the list of highly nutritious and healthful natural plants like Stevia and hemp, that you’ll never be able to buy from the food and drug distribution oligopoly. This berry is an excellent antioxidant and high in fatty acids. Thanks to Treehugger and Dale Asberry for the link. New Technologies Swedish company Marratech has a highly-rated free videoconferencing system. A couple of users tell me it’s much better than competing products and has a simple, intuitive whiteboarding tool that enables virtual collaboration. Any other reviewers out tried this one? If you’re thinking of investing in wind energy, here’s a US government map showing places in the US where wind turbines make sense. The latest thing in technology convergence is software that combines fitness training with virtual reality video games. It promises an end to the boredom of repetitive exercises. Thanks to Innovation Weekly for the link. Politics & The Environment James Lovelock, author of the Gaia theory (that our planet operates as a single self-regulating organism) has revealed that his upcoming (next month) book, The Revenge of Gaia, claims it is already too late to halt the accelerating consequences of global warming, which he predicts will increase average global temperature by 6-8 degrees celsius by the end of this century and will have consequences that will create ‘hell on earth’. Forget about just slowing down CO2 emissions, he says, and start preparing for a planet that will become largely uninhabitable within our grandchildrens’ lives. Wow, a scientist even more pessimistic than I am. Watch for my review when the book comes out next month — I may surprise you. Thanks to Cyndy for the link. US ambassadors to Canada seem to be picked by Bush for their sheer offensiveness. The latest unqualified Bush lackey to be given the job, David Wilkins, exploited the transition of governments in Canada and the fact that incoming prime minister Harper has said he admired Bush and the neocon movement, to announce that the US does not recognize Canada’s sovereignty over the waters around Canada’s northern territories. Harper, to his credit, expressed the outrage of all Canadians over this remark, and Canadians everywhere are wondering what’s behind this announcement. Since everyone knows the drilling in the pristine Alaskan ANWR will destroy the area’s ecosystem and only produce a few months’ worth of oil, speculation is that the US will soon claim drilling rights in the entire arctic as first-come, first-served ’international waters’. Even Harper won’t put up with that. Does Bush really enjoycreating enemies of every country that used to be an ally? Drawing above is from local artist Kathy Hagerman. You can view and buy her work here. |
January 27, 2006
The Natural Enterprise: Feasibility Testing Your New Business Concept
 So you’ve started a new business, maybe even a Natural Enterprise. You’ve done your homework, and found a need with a solid business case that you think you and your partners can fill better than potential competitors. And you’ve been careful to avoid the landmines. The customers you tried out the idea on are enthusiastic, and maybe even are doing some viral marketing for you already. You’ve found a way to organically finance the business launch, so you keep total control over decisions and don’t need to get stressed about money. And most importantly, you’ve found the right partners to start the business with, rather than trying to go it alone, and your partners have skills that complement yours and cover all the bases, and they’re people you know you’ll love working with.
If so, there’s just one more step before you launch the business: The Feasibility Test. This article explains what that’s all about. The feasibility test will allow you to prove your business concept quickly and inexpensively, and will allow you to rapidly prototype your concept with ‘pathfinder’ customers (those who see more value than others in your concept, and are on the leading edge of thinking about their own industry), and, when you fail to get it perfect the first time, will enable you to ‘fail fast and cheaply’ and learn a lot quickly from your mistakes. There are no hard and fast rules for feasibility tests — they depend on the size and nature of the business. Generally however, they take you through three steps: viability testing (validation), piloting (prototyping and experimentation), and scaling (gearing up to full production of your product or services). In the course of these three steps, you will be attempting to answer ‘yes’ to all of the following questions:
I have met entrepreneurs who went through all of the above steps, and at the end of them had lost their enthusiasm for the idea, but still went ahead because they had invested so much time and energy that they didn’t want it to go for nothing. Life is too short for that. As I’ve said before, if the work you’re doing, or planning to do, is not at the intersection of What you love, What’s needed and What you’re good at, it’s time to quit. Even if it’s before you start. If you have done your research and you can answer ‘yes’ to all of the above questions, you’re miles ahead of most entrepreneurs, and you’ll have dramatically increased the probability that your enterprise will be low-stress, beholden to no one but you and your partners, financially successful, and a place wherepeople love to work. And damn, could we ever use some more of those. |
January 26, 2006
BLOG Why Republicans Want a Huge National Debt
 Warning: Long post with lots of financial terms. Before you bail and read something else, just remember that that’s what Bush is counting on — “don’t worry your pretty little head about all this economics stuff, we’ll take care of it”. I mentioned last week that Warren Buffett, one of the world’s richest people, had expressed great alarm about the US trade deficit, expected to grow this year by another trillion dollars or so, to $10T, but he was unconcerned about the size of the US budget deficit, expected to increase this year by between $400 billion (if you believe the optimistic budget) and $900 billion (if deficits continue at the levels they have for the last four months), bringing the national debt to about $9T. The reason he thinks this way is that, coming from a business background, he sees the federal accounts through a business lens, and assesses government finances as if government were just a giant corporation. In times of low interest rates, businesses are encouraged to borrow heavily, even if they don’t need the money, and to use the funds to establish new businesses, buy business assets, or acquire other companies. The principle behind this is called leverage, and it holds that as long as the cost of borrowing (the interest rate on additional loans) is significantly less than the rate of return on the equity (’ROE’) purchased with those loans (and ROEs of 15-25% are quite common among Fortune 500 companies), it makes sense to borrow at the low rate (especially since the interest is tax deductible) and invest it to yield the higher rate (especially since capital gains have been increasingly tax-sheltered under recent regimes). The only caveat is to avoid getting over-leveraged, to the point that the ratio of debt to equity (equity being the accumulated investments and earnings that have not been paid out in dividends) gets so high that a company becomes vulnerable to sudden spikes in interest rates or a fall-off of revenue, and cannot meet its interest payments or dividend obligations. Here’s an example to illustrate this. A typical corporate balance sheet and income statement for the past year might look like this (all amounts in billions of dollars):
This company has a healthy 40% return on equity (ROE = 0.8/2.0) and a healthy 13% return on assets (ROA = 0.8/6.0), a comfortable debt/equity ratio of 2:1 (4.0/2.0) and income before interest (10.0 – 8.8 = 1.2) of six times the interest expense of 0.2. Now suppose they decide they should leverage their company’s high returns by borrowing another $4B to acquire a competitor which they think would also, under their management, with massive layoffs on acquisition, attract a 13% ROA. Assuming they’re right, this is what the financial statements would look like a year later:
Thanks to leverage, profits are up 62%, the ROE is 48% (1.3/2.7), the ROA is 12% (1.3/10.7) and income before interest (13.0 – 11.0 = 2.0) is 5 times the interest expense of 0.4. The CEO who leveraged the debt and took over the other company looks like a genius. High fives, big management salary increases and share options all round. But suppose in the third year of this example interest rates suddenly spike to 10% instead of 5%, and that causes customers to be stingy, so revenues of the company drop by 30%. Unless salaries are cut back as soon as the fall-off becomes apparent (and this rarely happens) profit would completely disappear. ROE and ROA would be zero, and times-interest-earned would fall from 5 to less than 1. At this point, if they’re prudent, the company’s lenders would call some or all of their $8B loans. The company would then need to sell off or close half of their operations to reduce costs. If this is done at a loss (at less than book value) which is not uncommon in a forced sale situation, the company could end up insolvent, unable to pay its trade creditors, and forced into bankruptcy. The shareholders would be looking for blood. That’s the risk of leverage. Now let’s go back to the US government and look at their accounts, this time in trillions of dollars rather than billions:
The accumulated debt of $9T, despite being four times annual government revenues, is currently manageable for three reasons:
This is why Buffett isn’t worried about the national debt. However, if the trade deficit (which Buffett is worried about) isn’t reduced, confidence in the US dollar will continue to fall and, as is happening now, creditors (like China and Saudi Arabia) will not be able to sustain the foreign exchange losses (which could wipe out their profits). They will insist that the US buy in euros, or yuan, or some ‘basket’ of currencies with fundamentals stronger than the US dollar. That will produce a double-whammy:
If the US had to pay, say, 9% interest on its debt (spikes like that are not unprecedented) instead of 3%, that would add over $0.5 trillion in annual interest expense, nearly doubling the annual deficit. And since the interest rate spike and inflationary price increases will cut into corporate and individual earnings, it will also lower government revenues to the point they are only half of expenses, a rate of debt accumulation that, as in Argentina a few years ago, could make the US dollar virtually worthless and produce an economic collapse that will be felt around the world. There are two ways to prevent this. The first is to double tax rates, and you know no Republican regime will do that. The second is to sell off large amounts of public property to private interests at a greatly accelerated rate. This second alternative fits precisely with the Norquist/neocon “weaken government until you can drown it in a bathtub” agenda. They would then be doing exactly what corporations do — treat the entire country’s public property, the Commons, as an enterprise in liquidation, as economist Herman Daly has described. Until they’re sold off to private developers, they’re ‘worth’ nothing because they generate little or no cash revenues. So now you know why Bush is not only unworried but actually pleased with skyrocketing deficits. They give him the excuse to cut government services and programs (if you read the harsh rhetoric of his annual budget he makes no bones about the fact he sees only defense and ‘homeland security’ expenses as essential), and to sell off ‘priceless’ parks, national forests and other public lands inexpensively to Republican campaign donors. By this analogy, the ’shareholders’ of the US are its taxpayers. They should be outraged that their assets are being given away, and their ‘investments’ (taxes paid) so badly mismanaged. Imagine if Google or Microsoft were to do this: Their shareholders would not be happy to learn that to pay off their huge debts it would be necessary to sell off priceless corporate assets at fire-sale prices to friends of management. If this was tried in the private sector there would be a hastily-convened special general meeting of shareholders and directors, and the managers would be fired and possibly charged with negligence and imprisoned. But because no one knows what ‘y’ is (the real, rapidly-increasing value of all public holdings), we can’t audit Bush’s sell-offs to discover how cheaply these assets are being sold off — though the discounts will eventually have to be made up by the next generation’s taxpayers. And as a result we can’t tell either how much is left to “drown in the bathtub”. And that means we don’t know how necessary it is, and will be, to cancel or privatize all government social services and programs to reduce the need for even more fire-sale sell-offs of taxpayers’ property. So no wonder Buffett isn’t worried about the size of the debt. His companies stand to benefit both from the huge Bush tax cuts to the rich (though I give Buffett credit — he does pay his taxes and is scornful of the many corporations that don’t), and fire-sale divestiture of public assets to private corporations. Through his lens of government-as-corporation (rather than government as steward of public assets, standard-setter for social services and sustenance provider to those unable to help themselves), the private sector can always manage any ‘business’ better than government can. In the US, as a result, private enterprises are slowly taking over the provision of essential services (education, health, transportation etc.) and studies indicate they are more bureaucratic, more expensive and less efficient than the government agencies they replace (the bureaucracy and waste in the privatized US health care sector chews up half of every health care dollar it receives in administration costs). No matter that private companies, in taking on these essential-for-all services, are only really interested in serving ‘customers’ who have lots of money to pay for higher-margin, premium services. No matter that priceless public assets are being virtually gifted to private corporations who see value only in ‘developing’ them for the crassest purposes. No matter that trillions of dollars are being wasted on ‘defense’ and ’security’ boondoggles like Star Wars, ludicrous spying and other invasions of privacy and abrogations of human rights and the law, and imperialistic wars in the Mideast — all designed to fatten the wallets of private ‘defense contractors’ while making life for Americans much less safe. The plan is clearly to liquidate the people’s assets and leave nothing for the next, more liberal, government to borrow against, so that government will be unable to restart essential public service programs. It’s too bad that America’s starved and broken education system doesn’t teach economics programs that show this theft for what it really is. By the time most Americans wake up to what the neocons have done with their assets and tax dollars, and the bankrupt legacy the neocons are leaving for future generations, it will be too late. Americans will then have to do what so many countries have had to do when their public purses have been completely pillaged by corrupt political opportunists — nationalize the industries that are not serving the majority of citizens, and reappropriate the lands that were sold to private interests at a fraction of their real value. And the cycle of seizure and theft will start all over again. |
January 25, 2006
Never buy a Dell
Well, my Dell finally packed it in yesterday – the whole machine shorted out. I managed to salvage the hard drive and it appears I’m back in business, but I have a lot of work to do to fully restore my new (non-Dell) PC to a state where I can use it properly. So, no post today except to say — never buy a Dell.
January 24, 2006
Canadian Election Results: What They Mean and What Comes Next
As the polls accurately predicted, Canada punished the Paul Martin Liberals for sloppy administration (allowing a small group of party stalwarts to steal taxpayers’ money for the party and to line their own pockets) and for the most astonishly inept election campaign in history (one might almost think their campaign managers and ad firms wanted them to lose), and half-heartedly elected the opposition Conservative Party with a minority win. Martin himself has resigned. Summary results:
If we had proportional representation like more enlightened countries, the Liberals would have 92 seats, the Conservatives 111, the NDP 52 and the Bloc 34. There would be 15 Greens in parliament. So what happened last night is that 6% of the population, one out of 16 Canadians, decided to punish the Liberals and voted Conservative instead. Not exactly a conservative mandate, 36%, when all four opposition parties are left-of-centre. I know quite a few of these moderate switch voters, and I know they are going to be surprised at what Harper does next. The Conservatives are thirty-one seats shy of a majority, so they will not be able to pass any legislation without support from either the Bloc or the outgoing Liberals. The Conservative strategy will be very similar to the one that the Liberals have most often used when they were in a minority government position: Press forward with legislation that they want, but which is moderate enough that voters won’t want another election to be fought over it, even if they don’t really like it, and dare the opposition to vote against it and force an election. The Conservatives clearly believe that the 6% increase in their support represents momentum that they can use to win a majority in the next election, which will allow them to introduce their more radical right-wing agenda: Curtailing of rights for women (e.g. right to choose), minorities (e.g. gay marriage), opting out of Kyoto, and embedding ‘property rights’ in the constitution (which will entail the unlimited right to pollute, abuse animals and maintain weapons on one’s own ‘property’). What they will do first on their ‘dare to force another election over this’ agenda will be tax cuts for the rich (a promise they certainly made to the Big Oil interests that bankrolled their hugely expensive election campaign). Harper was a great fan of Reagan and likes the discredited idea of ‘trickle-down’ economics – lavishing huge government gifts on the ultra-rich in the hope that maybe a bit of their excess wealth will trickle down to the little guy. They are also committed to much more defence (that’s how we spell it in Canada) spending and opting in to Bush’s loony, ineffective and absurdly expensive Star Wars program. And in another promised act of bribing taxpayers with their own money, he will cut the federal sales tax (GST) from 7% to 5%. This will be papered over with some ineffectual ‘get tough on crime’ bills and a new law to reduce the risk of corruption in government, which will create more work for auditors but otherwise accomplish nothing. All of this will cost a fortune, and, like Mulroney, the last Conservative prime minister, Harper will get Canada out of the black and into the red — watch for huge deficits during Harper’s administration. My guess is that these first acts will not bring down the government. The first stumbling bock will be the plan to cancel the Liberals’ extensive national child care program and replace it with a small tax credit program. The Liberals will be opposed to that, and Harper will have to bribe the separatist Bloc to get them to go along with it. Watch for a set of significant transfers of power and more money to the provinces as a sop to the Bloc in return for passage of this. Or Harper may agree not to take sides on a 2006 or 2007 referendum on Quebec sovereignty in return for Bloc support on the child care rollback (Harper actually received a small majority of non-Quebec seats in yesterday’s election). Harper used to be a Western separatist and, like the Bloc, sees a limited role for the federal government other than national defence. Then it will get interesting. With Paul Martin having resigned, the neocons have the chance to put one of their own at the head of the Liberals as well. Michael Ignatieff, an opportunist with dangerous right-wing views (he supports a ‘lite’ form of American imperialism as necessary to enable democracy in struggling nations, and approves of the use of torture to extract information and confessions from prisoners) has rushed back to Canada (he had been living in the US as a Harvard professor) and last night won a comfortable victory as a Liberal in a safe Toronto riding. He was parachuted into this nomination by the Liberal party establishment, to the outrage of the local Liberals, whose own candidate was forced out. He is now the odds-on favourite to succeed Martin as the next leader of the Liberal party. If (when) this happens, Harper will have the chance to introduce some of his more extreme right-wing agenda items. My prediction is that Ignatieff’s victory, and his subsequent support of some of Harper’s very un-liberal proposals, will cause mass defections to the NDP from Liberal ranks, and create just the crisis Harper needs to try for a majority in the next election, probably early next year. Just as the moderate Conservatives were swallowed up by Harper’s right-wing Reform Alliance party, the moderate Liberals could then be swallowed up by the more progressive NDP. If the referendum in 2006 or 2007 ends in Quebec separation (which I think is reasonably likely) we might then face an election in the ‘rest of Canada’ with two polar choices — Conservatives or the NDP. Ugh…this is all too ugly to think about. Mulroney and now Martin: What is it about Canadian politicians from big business backgrounds that they screw up entrenched 150-year-old political parties so badly they destroy them? Well, I have been working on a proposal to introduce tax shifting in the federal government, from employment and income taxes to taxes on production from non-renewable resources, pollution and waste. Now we have a prime minister determined to abrogate Canada’s support for the meagre Kyoto Protocol, maybe it’s time to work on my novel instead. What progressive Canadians can do:
Once again, wherever you look, voters seem doomed to repeat past mistakes, and the parties and media seem determined to keep them uninformed. And you wonder why I am so often pessimistic about our future. |
January 23, 2006
What the Nose Knows
 Here, in its entirety, for posterity or for sticking up on your fridge, is a lovely little, unsigned editorial from Saturday’s NYT: How well do you know your dog? The answer is, not nearly as well as your dog knows you. Given the right incentives, humans can certainly be perceptive enough. But most dog lovers discover, sooner or later, that dogs have an alertness to the behavioral signs of their owners that humans rarely equal. And that’s nothing. Scientists have recently discovered that dogs can distinguish, with almost unerring accuracy, between breath samples from people with lung cancer and from people without. The dogs have to be trained to do it, of course. But the fact that they can do it at all is remarkable. There aren’t enough biscuits in the world to teach a human to smell at such an extraordinary level of subtlety. This news will give pause to almost anyone who lives with a dog. Just what a dog “knows” is hard to say, because the human idea of “knowing” is so closely related to the ability to express what you know. Even trained cancer-sniffing dogs express their knowledge – their distinction between samples – only by sitting or not sitting. But this is what always happens. We tend to forget the extraordinary powers of the animals we live with simply because we live with them. We tend to humanize them, which means, if nothing else, that we tend to reduce them – in terms of their sensory powers – to our muddling level. We can barely take in the fact that when a dog comes up and sniffs us, it is really giving us a nasal M.R.I. Not that this will change the dynamic of our relations with man’s best friend. For a while – remembering the cancer-sniffing dogs – some of us will wonder when we see our pets cock their heads, “What are you looking at?” But time will pass, and humans will be humans, and we will forget, at our end of the leash, that the beast we are walking with may already know things about us that we will discover only too late. |
Why Oil Prices Are Jumping Again
 Since the 1970s, the price of oil has been set, not by OPEC, but by buyers and sellers through two independent exchanges in New York and London. The US has been able to substantially control this price through most of the intervening period because (1) all three exchanges quote the price and transact only in $USD, so the US does not need to worry about the free-fall of its currency interfering with their ability to buy, (2) oil companies and oil nations friendly to the US have been overstating their reserves in an effort to counter the growing evidence that global production is about to peak, and (3) the OPEC countries have substantial leeway in adjusting production levels to ‘moderate’ prices. Recently, OPEC producers friendly with the US have been producing well beyond sustainable capacity, using forced water injection and other methods in their wells to increase oil flow per day beyond sustainable levels in an effort to keep the market price from rising too quickly. When you control the currency of the transaction, the information flow on production and reserves, and the rate of production, you pretty much control the price, at least in the short run. And when your economy is utterly dependent on foreign oil, you are really motivated to control that price. Why would OPEC be complicit in this? Many of the non-democratic members, notably Saudi Arabia, need arms, intelligence, and political support to fend off insurrection from their people. There have also been times (even quite recently, believe it or not) when OPEC members have needed support from customers to keep demand high so that the price does not fall significantly — their economy depends heavily on demand for oil. The US provides huge military and political support to the Saudis and others, and most US administrations have encouraged waste and discouraged conservation. Like the US-China co-dependency for manufactured goods, the US-Saudi co-dependency for oil ensures an artificially low price to US corporations and consumers in return for political support and sustained high demand for producers. Deals with the devil (or perhaps between devils). Neither of these massive market distortions is sustainable, of course. And there is a rash of new information suggesting that, for oil at least, the end of this devil’s bargain is near:
Here’s an interesting article on this whole subject published recently in the dubious Moonie-owned right wing paper chain. The Moonies, thanks to their purchase of UPI, now have a seat in the inner circle of Bush media contacts — a seat on Air Force One. Are the Moonies warning us, or Bush, of the possible consequences of invading, or not invading Iran? And here’s a recent, sobering overview of the vulnerability of the entire oil market, written by a former British oil industry executive. Anyone want to give me odds on $100/barrel oil at some point before the end of this year? *Thanks to Dale Asberry for most of the links above, and for connecting the dots. Chart is from peakoil.net. Part of the thin white band on this chart will be the only benefit the US will receive for the destruction of the ANWR and the massive damage to Alaska’s fragile ecosystem. |
