 Swans photo by Kevin Cameron “You’re very quiet these days, Dave.” Three times I’ve heard this recently, from three different friends. It got me thinking about Flemming Funch’s recent comment:
As I pondered this, I wondered at first whether the silence of those of us who’ve made peace with our own radical, grim worldviews was a bit selfish, or lazy: If we know something important the rest of the world should know, and act upon, isn’t it our duty to stand up and shout it from the rooftops?
But then I thought how difficult it is to explain, within the attention span of the average listener, how one arrived at these conclusions. It’s taken me years, and a ton of reading and thinking that the average person has neither the time nor inclination for, to come to my current assessment about how the world works, what the real problems are, and what we should be doing. I’m delighted at the number of people, readers of my work and composers of their own, who seem to be on the same wavelength that I am on, but they’ve reached that point by their own arduous and tortuous journey, and we wouldn’t be nodding at each other’s ideas and comments based on a few articles, no matter how well written or reasoned. We are, all of us who concede that our civilization’s time is probably running out and the best approach now is local, community-based, model-creating actions, not a new political, economic or social movement or revolution, too far ahead to be able to explain to others, easily or simply, how we have arrived at the philosophical space we currently occupy. And we are, as well, too far ahead to go back, or to wait for the rest of the world to catch up.
So we shut up and, in the company of those not yet ready for what we believe and what we have to say, we say nothing. We have given up arguing with the deniers, the apologists, the technophiles and rhapsodists who still think our manifest destiny is to be ’saved’, by our own ingenuity or some higher power. I talk to my children, now in their thirties, about the fact that their suburban lifestyle is utterly unsustainable and headed for a wall, and that our economy is so stretched out and fragile that it’s inevitably going to come flying apart. But while they are attentive and respectful, their hope that I’m dead wrong far outweighs their fear that I’m right. I love them dearly, but they are not yet ready to listen. And my granddaughters, who will bear the brunt of our generations’ irresponsibility, are too busy acquiring the competencies they will need to be distracted by the awful truth of the world they will soon inherit. They know me, already, by reputation, and they will come to me with their questions, when they’re ready.
So in the meantime, I’m very quiet these days. I’ve become the person I said those ‘too far ahead’ must become: accepting, responsible (without laying guilt or blame), joyful (alive in the moment) and purposeful (towards a full, natural life). And quiet, reflective, thoughtful, attentive, even patient.
As a result, I don’t engage in enough oral conversations on matters that are important, because those to whom I could talk about these things are either (a) not ready or (b) already know. Daniel Quinn’s advice rings truer all the time:
So while I’ve become a better listener, my conversational skills (never my strong suit) are not getting much exercise, and without practice they’re not going to improve. Perhaps I should practice talking about things that aren’t important, but my heart’s not in it.
Or perhaps I should practice conveying some small, important, easier messages. Jim Kunstler is a master at this, and he’s developed a knack for hammering on some very basic, vital lessons, repeatedly and eloquently, in ways that are memorable. Recently, Sharon Astyk (thanks to Michael Yarmolinsky for the link) picked up on this Kunstler riff:
This idea is an explosive, innocuous, dangerous little meme that somehow worms its way into your worldview, even if you’re not ready for its implications. Read the rest of Sharon’s article to hear her thinking out loud about these implications (such as the need to pursue a lifestyle of radical simplicity), and then read the offended response from some of her readers who are clearly unnerved by these implications.
So I’ve decided to build a collection of explosive, innocuous, dangerous little memes and, whenever I can, drop them gently into conversations about ‘unimportant’ things. Beyond that, I’ll continue to be mostly quiet, and see what happens. Contributions to this deliciously subversive experiment are welcome.
Category: Activism: What You Can Do Personally
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May 31, 2007
Dangerous Little Memes
May 30, 2007
How to Make a Living
 Several readers have asked me for a five-minute summary of the iterative, lifelong process of learning what we’re meant to do for a living, and making that living through Natural Enterprise. I thought this was a reasonable request, so I’ve illustrated it above. Here’s the five-minute walk-through:
The four steps above are inward-focused, about self-direction. Next you turn your attention outward, to filling a need:
This process is not easy, but it can be great fun, it’s always rewarding, and it’s never impossible. It’s a continuous, creative process of learning, discovery, paying attention, practice and innovation. Those of us who do one job our whole lives follow this process, in a simplified way, intuitively, and there is no rocket science here. Creating a Natural Enterprise is, well, natural. Watch what creatures in the wild do to make a living, to care for and provide for themselves and their communities, and it’s identical to this process. We’ve just (most of us) forgotten it. We are problem-solvers by nature, and all this is hard-wired in us. Justwaiting to come out. Category: Creating Natural Enterprises
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May 29, 2007
Communication Tools: Make Them Simple and Ubiquitous or They Won’t Be Used
As part of my current work contract, and in some of my blog posts, I’ve grappled with the ineffective and inappropriate use of the various communication tools that are available in the workplace. I’ve developed a variety of ‘tool choosers’ — decision trees and charts that identify the criteria for use of different tools. And I’ve written articles on when not to use e-mail.
I didn’t expect enormous success in using these levers for change in information behaviours. Things are the way they are for a reason. In studying the use (and non-use, and mis-use) of various tools, I’ve come to the realization that some pretty simple rules govern whether, and how, communication tools are used:
These four rules are captured in the charts above, the top one for most of the baby boomer generation (most of the people I’m working with) and the bottom one for generation millennium (and for more tech-savvy older people). Each chart shows the communication tools most appropriate for 1-to-1 versus group communication, and for synchronous versus asynchronous communication. Tools that are relatively simple to use are shown with a green circle on the left side; tools that are relatively ubiquitous are shown with a green circle on the right side. Tools that are both simple and ubiquitous (the ones most people prefer to use) are in bold.
I’ve recently come to realize that virtually all business communications are conducted with these simple ubiquitous tools, and that, no matter how well marketed, or how extensive the available training, tools that are either complicated or not available to everyone on the businessperson’s ‘mailing list’ just won’t be used.
When part of your job is to sell people on using complicated and/or exclusive (restricted access, pilot) tools in the workplace, this is a dismaying realization. So what I’m now focusing on, to bring about information behaviour change, is this approach:
I’d always expected that the younger and more tech-savvy people in any organization would be able to show (not tell) the older and more tech-wary people how to use new tools easily and effectively. But in thirty years in business, I’ve almost never seen this happen. Generation Millennium will use IM, blogs, and personal web pages (internal or on public sites like LinkedIn, MySpace and FaceBook) whether they’re officially sanctioned or not, but they won’t be evangelists for these tools.
We therefore need to look at each group in the organization as a separate cohort with different levels of comfort with (and possibly different degrees of access to) various tools. That means the larger and more risk-averse the organization, the slower the likely adoption curve of new communication tools will be, because (a) giving everyone access to a new tool is a more expensive proposition in larger organizations, and (b) there are more likely to be laggards, especially in the senior ranks, who will refuse to use a tool because they still perceive it as too complicated, and they will hold everyone else back. There’s a lesson here for those designing and experimenting with new social networking tools, too:
It doesn’t matter if it’s better designed or has more functionality, or even if it’s clearly ’best of breed’ – it won’t be used. Each new tool, to be introduced successfully, must meet all three of these stringent tests. Come to think of it, this lesson probably applies to all new innovations, not just communication tools. I’m going to call it Pollard’s Law of Innovation.
In my current assignment, this means I have my work cut out for me. I have to:
This goes part-way, perhaps, to explaining why it’s so hard finding success stories of social networking tools in organizations — it’s just too hard for them to meet the stringent criteria. It took the ’simple’ fax fifty years from its invention to achieve ubiquity, only to be obsolesced by e-mail a decade later. And dare I suggest that, in so many of today’s hollowed-out organizations, for all the lip service paid to them, networking and communication just aren’t apriority? Category: Communications Technologies
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May 28, 2007
A Note to Writers: Choose Your Voice and Your Media Carefully
 Photos: From richardpreston.net : Top: Author Richard Preston in the forest canopy 310 feet up a redwood called Poseidon. Bottom: Botanist Marie Antoine 310 feet up in a redwood called Adventure. Richard Preston’s new book contains some important lessons for writers. Preston is an accomplished storyteller, and his biological exposÈs The Hot Zone and The Demon in the Freezer are riveting. His latest book The Wild Trees is the story of the young men and women who have, recently and without much support or acclaim, discovered a phenomenally rich ecosystem within and atop the world’s tallest trees — the Coast redwood, Douglas fir, and mountain ash — by climbing them. It’s an interesting story, since these pioneers had to invent much of the technique and many of the tools they use to climb these 350-foot giants, and the idea that the canopy of these trees is so strong and intertwined that you can play in it like a huge jungle gym (see top photo, of Preston, above, taken from his website).
Preston tries to create a sense of urgency for learning about and preserving the thousand-year-old redwoods (which are 96% gone thanks to logging) but this is a much harder task than the sense of danger and urgency he taps so successfully in his earlier books about virulent, infectious, largely unknown diseases. He also tries to create intimate portraits of the pioneers, including Marie Antoine (lower photo above). These characters are brilliant, courageous, dedicated and quirky, but (with due respect) they aren’t heroic enough to build a biographical story around.
I’m an impatient reader, and I was just about to abandon the book when Preston, about two thirds the way through, started a new and personal thread. It seems the unassuming Mr Preston has become, himself, at about (I would guess) twice the age of his story’s lead protagonists, one of the pioneers in this quest, one of the few to have scaled the tallest of the giants, both in California and Australia. What’s more, he has infected his teenage kids, his wife and even his parents with his passion. Now there’s a story. What would inspire a successful author to so step outside his comfort zone that he would take up a new, complex and dangerous hobby, relatively late in life, and pursue it to the limit? And what is so compelling about climbing trees that just about everyone exposed to the opportunity to do so gets hooked on the hobby, to the point Preston has to conceal the whereabouts of some of the trees, and information about some of the more advanced techniques and inventions, for fear recreational climbers will overwhelm the last remaining stands of ‘wild trees’ and bring about their demise before this newly-discovered ecosystem can even be mapped?
The answers to these questions are the story screaming to come out of Preston’s book, and, either out of humility or perhaps because such speculation is outside his area of interest, Preston leaves them unanswered. As I closed the book I thought immediately of biologist and ultra-marathon runner Bernd Heinrich’s semi-autobiographical Why We Run. Heinrich’s work is immensely educational and interesting precisely because he tells his story in the first person; you can relate to the emotions he feels as he discovers kinship with other creatures, and he is more than willing to generalize from his own passion for marathons to speculate on our universal penchant for movement and speed.
Preston, ever so briefly, describes his children’s fascination with climbing. He tells stories about their astonishment and delight at discovering that some of the creatures who live in trees (e.g. saw-whet owls and flying squirrels) are so unaccustomed to human contact that they are unperturbed by human presence in their tree-canopy homes, coming right up to Preston and his family and even climbing over them. What I would have loved to read is whether and how they overcame an instinctive fear of heights, and whether his children have any plans to do something with this unique new skill, in their own words. I want to hear Preston’s own story — what led him to go to such extraordinary and seemingly-courageous lengths, beyond the need to do research for his book. I want to learn the basics of climbing, step by step, enough to decide if it’s something I want to do. The real story here is one of personal discovery, challenge and transformation, and what it tells us about ourselves.*
The other major lesson for writers (and publishers) is the fact that this is largely a visual story. The book has some useful black-and-white maps and sketches, but what Preston is describing is unimaginable, even with the help of an excellent story-teller, without rich visual images. And in the 21st century, there is no excuse for not providing them. Preston’s site has some excellent photos that not only add immediate clarity and drama to his story, but also introduce us personally to the climbing pioneers he profiles in a way that no rich biographical information can do. Marie Antoine and Michael Taylor, particularly, look nothing at all like how I pictured them when I read the book.
The publishers could have put the colour photo spread inside the book. But they could have done something even bolder and richer: National Geographic is making a TV special based on Preston’s book. The book could be cued to images and video clips from the special, so that the reader pauses at prescribed points and goes online for the next clip. The resulting multimedia experience would have been amazingly rich. The merging of online and print media could, just like Preston and his brave climbers, have pioneered something rare, extraordinary and important.
It’s not too late. If Preston were to work with National Geographic to do this, and add in some video clips of his family talking about their passion for climbing and how it emerged, and some video clips teaching us how to climb safely (just small trees will do), and then sync this with a second edition of his book, I’d go out an buy another copy just for the URLs of the clips positioned appropriately throughout the book. And then this book could be as revolutionary and eye-opening as The Demon in the Freezer.
Anyone currently writing, or thinking of writing, a book should imagine the possibilities of enriching it with video clips, interviews and other multimedia content. It is no longer awkward to have both a book and the Internet at your fingertips at the same time. There are things that a hard-copy book just cannot do, and things that only a hard-copy book can do. It’s now possible to have your cake and eat it too.
*Interestingly, one of the major reviewers of the book takes the opposite perspective, arguing that Preston should have kept himself out of the book entirely. I can imagine the agonizing discussions Preston must have had with the publisher! The reader has no idea until two thirds through the book that Preston has become a world-class climber himself, a player in thedrama he has, until then, told exclusively in the third person.. Categories:Industry-Specific Innovations, and Language, Narrative & Story-Telling
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May 27, 2007
Sunday Open Thread – May 27, 2007
 Photo: My own, taken last night while sitting out on the patio. What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon: Vignettes: Did two this past week, and I have more to come. Improv: What are the ways we practice improvisation? Spontaneous conversations. Spontaneous flirtations. Spontaneous artistic expression. Unplanned brainstorming, collaboration, innovation, creation. Is there a danger that doing these things badly actually makes us worse at it instead of better? Natural Enterprise: Time to update some of my earlier articles on a better, more joyful, responsible and sustainable way to make a living. Blog-Hosted Conversations: Plan is for 30-minute conversations, once a week, on the subject of identifying and acquiring the essential skills and relationships we need to be models of a better way to live, and what those models might look like. The first few will be practice podcasts, and may not make it to the blog. What are the skills you’ve been trying to develop, the changes you’ve been trying to bringabout in yourself, the important conversations you’ve had recently? |
May 26, 2007
Saturday Links for the Week — May 26, 2007
 Ducklings — photo by my friend & colleague Karen’s twin sister What’s Important This Week: AprËs Nous Les Dragons: The experts on Extinction believe that, when we are gone from the planet, Earth will be dominated by insects and birds, two very resilient life forms. The latest story on consequences of The End of Oil (a story which was suddenly and inexplicably pulled after it was published, but is still in the archives) suggests that high gasoline prices are grounding aerial spray planes, leaving entire monoculture crops threatened by insects. We may have to find another way to get our daily dose of malathion poisoning. Oh, and this is the year of the 17 year locusts. Corporatists and Criminals Bilk the Elderly Together: Big corporations assemble phone lists of vulnerable, lonely and confused elderly people and then pitch them to ‘telemarketers’. ìOnly one kind of customer wants to buy lists of seniors interested in lotteries and sweepstakes: criminals,î said Sgt. Yves Leblanc of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. ìIf someone advertises a list by saying it contains gullible or elderly people, itís like putting out a sign saying ëThieves welcome here.í î Inoculating Yourself Against Disk and Computer Crashes: Slowly but surely I’ve been migrating the content of my machine to cyberspace, so I can do everything that I do on my ‘home’ computer, on any machine anywhere. Thanks to Google and others, we no longer need to retrieve and store e-mail on our machines, nor do we need to buy or maintain MS ‘productivity’ software anymore. I’ve moved ‘My Documents’ to Box.net. My music files and blog backup files are on my mp3 player and flash drive, and I’m migrating all my photos to Flickr or Picasaweb. My bookmarks are on spurl.net and my future podcasts will be on archive.org. Freedom! (Now I need a ‘Google Virtual Desktop’ to find my stuff wherever in cyberspace it is.) The Real Dangers of Pandemic Outbreaks: An excellent article by Sharon Astyk explains that the greatest threat from pandemic disease is not loss of life, it’s economic collapse, the excuse to institute martial law and further extinguish civil freedoms, and the backburnering of vital work to address Peak Oil, global warming and other threats. She goes on to talk about pandemic preparedness, with a prescription much like mine, except more optimistic that people will actually prepare. Thanks to whoever pointed me to this, and apologies for not noting who that was when I bookmarked/spurled it. If you live in the US and want to speak up on why pandemic preparation is important, Lugon and his Flu wiki colleagues tell us the government says it’s willing to listen. Big Pharma Pays Doctors to Test Psych Drugs on Child Patients: The young can complain, but they can’t vote or sue, and no one listens to them anyway. So they’re the perfect guinea pigs for testing expensive psychological drugs on, without regard for side effects, and it’s as easy and legal to bribe doctors to do it. No New China Poisoning Scandals This Week: But maybe that’s because corporatists like Murdoch have the order out to squelch all bad news stories about China. Another Silent Spring: Meanwhile, the cancer prevention network reports we’re still pretty good at letting domestic corporatists poison us. Excerpt: It is infinitely harder to identify causal links between the substances that body burden tests say are in our flesh, blood and bones, and their health effects. This complexity has protected the chemical industry for decades, and has served up a perfect excuse for many politicians to avoid taking tough, decisive, preventative action.
The hundreds of millions of dollars donated annually to cancer agencies are funnelled mainly into research for better treatments and “cures” for cancer; far less is targeted to preventing the disease in the first place, and only a negligible fraction to reducing our exposure to carcinogens in everyday products, in our food, water and air, and virtually everywhere. Just last week, researchers from five U.S. institutions named 216 chemicals that can induce breast cancers in animals. Of these, humans are highly exposed to 97 of them, including industrial solvents, pesticides, dyes, gasoline and diesel exhaust compounds, cosmetics ingredients, hormones, pharmaceuticals and radiation. Thanks to David Parkinson for the link. Thoughts for the Week: And then, take a look at what Flemming Funch and Tom Munnecke have to say about framing your conversations around the “Yes, and…” principle instead of “Yes, but…”. It’s all about accepting what you really cannot change, and instead adapting and/or letting yourself change. Excerpt: It almost never works to negate [argue with] what other people really believe in [no matter how persuasively]…[And] the more enlightened you yourself are, the less you are obsessed with making everybody else be like [and agree with] you. Ironically, as we could say you had allthe more reason to do so…
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May 25, 2007
Vignette #2 – Breathe
 Of all the contributions to my recent article on “great advice in 7 words or less“, my favourite was this one word from Siona: Breathe. I was thinking about this as I drove to work, and home again, one day last week. It was another smog alert day in Toronto, and breathing was nearly as hazardous to one’s health as the alternative. But I repeated it, my mantra for the day, as I practiced breathing, and paying attention. Letting come and letting go.
One of the ways I’ve learned to improve my attention skills, and also to reduce stress, is to imagine that I know the strangers I look at, and to imagine their story. I started doing this in restaurants. My imagination sometimes gets the better of me, but it’s a useful exercise. It forces you to focus, to pay attention to the details, to look for hints to the story behind the face, to connect the dots.
The country road that comprises the first half of my morning commute, and the last half of my return trip, takes me from the protected green belt where I live to the edge of the relentless suburban sprawl. As I enter the construction zone, with depressing subdivision rezoning billboards on every farmer’s field, the traffic bunches up and slows to a crawl behind a cement mixer and gravel truck. On the right side of the road stands an old man who has just collected the mail from his mailbox, on the opposite side of the street from his house. He waits, patiently at first, for some driver to stop and let him cross back. He wears work pants with suspenders, and a checked green flannel shirt over his gaunt, frail frame. He looks tired, worn out, hunched over with a cane in one hand.
And then suddenly he loses it. He starts waving his cane menacingly at the drivers that are passing by, ignoring him as if he were invisible, and the look on his face becomes one of pure rage. I imagine him as having once farmed the land now barren and crisscrossed with the tire tracks of construction vehicles. I imagine him having sold the land when, facing high property taxes and hopelessly low prices from buyers of his produce or grain, he received an offer from a big developer that he couldn’t refuse. They’d allowed him to continue to work the land, now their land, for a salary until the city had reached its edges and plans of subdivision had been approved.
And now, with no land to farm, he has become useless. Invisible. Nothing to do but wait for busy people with destinations to whiz by, and watch his land become another indistinguishable tract of crowded starter homes. In this imagined context, I understand his rage, and I stop for him. He doesn’t smile, or even acknowledge me. He just shuffles back across the road to his house.
Breathe, I tell myself.
When I reach the highway, the shiny electronic toll road built for those in a hurry, those with expense accounts, I stay in the third of the four lanes, the designated ’slow lane’ for vehicles traveling a mere 70 mph. Up ahead, in the fourth lane, is one of the trucks I always dread seeing, the silver-sided tractor-trailers full of small breathing holes, used to take animals to slaughter. I sigh. I want to turn away, to hope or pretend that it is empty. But I have to look, and of course it is not empty. Squashed up against the holes are the pink bodies of pigs, stacked three levels high. Breathe. Most of them are facing inward, it appears — the noise of the highway at rush hour is deafening and bewildering, and perhaps they prefer to look at each other. But near the front, I can make out, through the pattern of holes, one animal facing out towards me.
I want to close my eyes, imagining an imploring, terrified, desperate look on this animal, who, like over 90% of farmed animals, has probably lived his sad, monotonous life in the crowded stench of a feedlot. But as my car inches slowly by, the look I see on his face is instead more one of excitement. His expression says: “At last, something new, something important is going to happen.” His look is one of expectation, almost rapture. Pigs are intelligent animals, at least as smart as dogs and cats, and I picture the truck full of fattened pets, ceded by the local pound, and sigh. I am smiling and crying at the same time. Breathe.
As I pull even with the cab of the truck I look at the driver. A middle-aged South Asian man, he looks much sadder than his charges. He knows that his sentence is a long way from being over. This will not be his final, eventful journey. He wears a uniform, anonymous, obedient. He looks weary. I imagine him having come to this country, young and full of expectations, only to discover that his credentials are not recognized here, his skills not wanted. In a strange land, with others to support, in a culture he does not understand, with an accent that makes it hard for others to understand him, he has had to find a job, any job. He has done what he had to do, and this terrible work is it.
Breathe.
Returning home the same afternoon, I watch a Korean woman walking her young daughter home from school. The neighbourhood I’m driving through is a strange mix of Korean and Persian people, with most of the store signs in one of these two languages. My knowledge of Korean culture, other than the Hollywood version portrayed on the Gilmore Girls, is negligible. There are few clues in the faces of the woman and the girl, both of whom move quickly down the street, the girl’s hand tightly gripped in her mother’s, both with faces lowered.
But in the woman’s face I see signs of great resolve and pride that remind me of my own mother’s grim determination to make a life here for her family after her young immigration. I imagine the Korean woman’s momentous struggles: to do what she must, coming from a patriarchal culture where women were obedient and stayed at home, to a multicultural ‘consumer’ society where women are encouraged to be independent and two-income families are an economic necessity. Her dress, and her daughter’s, are practical, modest and non-descript, almost like cloaks of invisibility designed for security in a world where dangers must seem incessant and inexplicable. Like that of so many immigrants, the culture they seem to represent is frozen in time, a culture that is disappearing back in their homeland while it is being clung to so fiercely by refugees in this rootless new world.
And while the daughter’s face is dutiful and obedient it is also restless and resentful: At some point, like a bone or muscle stretched too far in one direction, she is going to crack, to rebel, perhaps violently or self-destructively. Her expression says that if Michelle Wie can turn heads with her attire and thumb her nose at convention while burning up the LPGA at age 15, why can’t every girl find a new way, a different way, free from the suffocating culture that seems a drab anachronism in a world of breathtaking possibility.
Breathe.
That thought, of cultures lost and found within larger dissonant cultures, stays with me until I am once again out of the city, where grey has given way to green and industrial smells to natural ones. And then, as I pull into a left-turn lane, I am shaken by the sight of two dead animals, fresh roadkill. They are the corpses of two raccoons, an adult and, beside and just behind it, a baby. The adult’s body is angled, curled towards the baby’s. The story I imagine of their demise is one I cannot bear, and I have to pull over to the side of the road, beneath the trees, and weep.
Breathe. Deep, long, gasping.
There is no difference between a deep breath and a sigh. Breathe. Focus. Pay attention. Practice. There is so much work to do, and we must be ready, capable. Just breathe, until we know what to do next.
Category: Short Stories
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May 24, 2007
What a Dying Person Wants
 A recent Medscape health bulletin contains a remarkable personal story by sociologist Margaret Nelson called Listening to Anna, about the difficulties that family members, those given ‘durable power of attorney’, and executors of ‘living wills’ face trying to decide what is ‘best’ for a suffering, terminal, and/or incapacitated patient. Most of you don’t know it (or don’t want to believe it) but at some point in your life there’s a high probability you will have to make such a decision. It will present you with several serious quandaries:
If that weren’t bad enough, the ideologically-crazed Bush Administration has waded in, with its outrageous, Taking Care: Ethical Caregiving in Our Aging Society ‘recommendations’, including this especially egregious one:
In other words, as demonstrated in the Schiavo debacle, if doctors and loved ones do not do everything possible to keep a patient alive, at any cost, the state licensing authorities and the government may choose to investigate, censure, intervene, override, and impose its values on your personal decisions.
Whether or not you live under such a regime, if you want to spare yourselves and your loved ones the agony and cost of uselessly and painfully prolonging the terminal period in your life, you need to ensure you and your loved ones have the kind of clauses Anna had in her living will:
Most boiler-plate living wills/health powers of attorney do not have such specific clauses in them — they refer only to the right and responsibility to make “personal care decisions” in the case of a patient’s incapacity to do so. And then, once you and your loved ones have these clauses in place, and a wallet card to indicate to medical authorities you have a living will, you all need to be ready to do battle with family members and/or doctors and/or government meddlers with their own personal ideological agenda who will try to overrule the clear wishes stated in these clauses. This will come at a time when you and your loved ones will be especially vulnerable to doubts and coercion – sleepless, exhausted, stressful times when this unneeded and unhelpful outside pressure will only make matters much worse. I keep saying it is not in our nature to plan ahead, to prepare for unforeseen eventualities. But after reading Anna’s story, I’m damned well going to make sure that these clauses are in my living will, and that I sit down with each of my loved ones and make it absolutely clear in everyone’s mind that, if and when the time comes, I am counting on them to have the courage and integrity to pull the plug. You’re my witnesses. D–N–R. “Don’t leave ‘em nothin’ to work on.” Category: Being Human |
May 23, 2007
Yet More Fun With Numbers: $7/Gallon Gasoline
 Chart by Stuart at Random Useless Info. For the previous 30 years, 1950-1979, price was steady at about $0.30 – 0.40/gallon before spiking near the end of the 1970s. In the last five years, the price of gasoline in North America has roughly doubled. This has created some problems for the poor, but for most people it has not caused hardship, and has not significantly affected buying or consumption behaviour. In fact, the inflation-adjusted price in 1998 and 2002 were the lowest since the 1940s. OK, you say, but aren’t gasoline prices a component of inflation? That’s true, but it’s not a major component, and besides, the real inflation rate for the average citizen is way higher than the distorted data the government spins each month. On that basis, gasoline has never been cheaper, inflation-adjusted. Our problem, as environmentalists have said for years, is not that gasoline prices are too high; it’s that they are too low. Crude oil prices have consistently averaged $20/bbl since 1950, ignoring two major spikes to $60/bbl, the first in 1979-80 and the second since 2003. In real (after-inflation) terms, crude oil prices have consistently fallen since 1950, and have never been lower. No wonder Big Oil is reaping record profits, gouging the consumer a little more each year to keep its shareholders happy with double-digit annual profit growth. So it’s not surprising that, except for the Wal-Martization of the North American economy (offshoring North American jobs and importing cheap Chinese crap to replace the goods once made domestically) to offset the higher costs of energy, $3.50/gallon gasoline has not affected any corporate or individual behaviour. But suppose it were to double again, to $7/gallon, over the next few years. $20/bbl oil translates to $0.40/gallon gasoline. $40/bbl oil in the 1970s translated to $1.25/gallon gasoline. Now $60/bbl oil is translating to $3.50/gallon gasoline. Do a regression line through these relative rates and we can project the following:
Would we be able to absorb these increases as easily as the increase from 2002’s $1.75/gallon to today’s $3.50/gallon? This article (thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link) argues that $6/gallon gasoline is just what we need. At first blush, it would seem to be a good idea. But what would its effect be, not just on consumer spending at the pump, but on the entire economy? Well, for a start, industry won’t be able to finance further energy cost increases on the backs of North American (and Chinese) labour. China is running into a wall of skill shortages, massive suffering of its huge underclass, an insatiable demand and skyrocketing cost of all kinds of scarce resources, and environmental devastation on a scale unprecedented in human history. Except for some services, savings from offshoring to cheap nations will be more than offset by the staggering cost of moving raw materials and finished goods back and forth around the globe. So an increase in oil and gasoline costs will mean an increase in producer costs and hence in consumer costs. No more Wal-Martization room remains. And a jump in consumer costs means a jump in inflation and hence in interest rates. Now, let’s look at what we buy that’s made from oil. In this post, I listed the top 10 uses of oil (many are surprised to learn that the cost and energy content of oil used in agriculture exceeds the wholesale price and energy content of the food it produces, thanks to $150B in annual subsidies to Big Agriculture in North America alone). In this post, I listed the average expense budget of a North American household. Putting them together, here’s how the average costs of living in North America break down, per $100 in household income: Expenses heavily dependent on oil: $52
Expenses dependent on interest rates: Housing $24 Other expenses: $28
Total expenses per $100 of household income: $104. Altogether, North Americans now spend $104 for every $100 they earn. Now what will happen if, say, oil prices rise to $90/bbl and gasoline prices consequently double to $7/gallon? Let’s assume, conservatively, that a doubling of gasoline prices means just a 50% increase in the $52 of expenses heavily dependent on oil. That would increase average household expenses by 26%. With no room for further cost cutting, producers would pass on their cost increases fully to consumers — after all, their shareholders expect them to continue their double digit annual profit increases — the stability of the stock market depends on it. Obviously, individuals cannot afford to spend $130 ($104 + $26) for every $100 they earn. The overspending in recent years has been made possible only by a sea of irresponsibly-granted consumer credit secured by overheated house prices. It can’t continue when house prices are falling, and when essential living expenses jump 26%, demand for houses, and house prices, will plummet, meaning credit will be reined in, further reducing consumers’ ability to pay these increased costs. If you’ve been following the news, this has already begun, and a bunch of the more reckless lenders are teetering on the edge of collapse as bad debts soar. Wage demands will soar as workers insist on earning enough to provide for their families. We saw this in the 1970s, as costs of living jumped sharply. What happened next? Inflation, fueled by rising costs and wages. And then, a spike in interest rates, which more than doubled in two years in the late 1970s, to the 15% range. If inflation jumps to double digits (to reflect the 26% increase in costs), interest rates will go higher than that, since investors need to earn more than inflation just to break even. Anyone remember what 15% interest rates did to the housing market in the early 1980s? Inflation and interest rate jumps will further erode house prices and will double the cost of mortgages as they come up for renewal (and immediately for variable-rate mortgages). So now the $24 housing cost per $100 of household income becomes $48. I think you get the idea. Consumers will have no choice but to buy much less. Corporate profits will plummet. The stock market will do likewise. Foreclosures, already jumping by leaps and bounds, will soar. Fortunes made in real estate and the stock market will vanish, along with the entire net worth of most North Americans. And the interest rate on the US government’s staggering debt, and more staggering trade deficit, will become crushing. The bottom line is that, while $3.50/gallon gasoline was a cakewalk (just a catch-up after decades of after-inflation price decreases), $7/gallon gasoline will be nightmarish. Not because we can’t afford to pay $140 to fill our gas tank, but because we can’t afford to pay twice as much for the oil we eat, the oil we wear, the oil that drives our entire economy. And our economy is stretched so tight, and is so over-extended and over-leveraged, we have no room to manoeuver. This is the incredible bind we’ve gotten ourselves into: Coping with global warming and the End of Oil (before the nightmare outlined in The Long Emergency befalls us) demands a large increase is the price of energy to dampen our appetite for it. But that large increase could easily plunge the world into another Great Depression. There is no way out of this mess. This is what happens when you crank economic systems to their fragile limit and find yourself with no resilience, no room to maneuver. A responsible response would be to own up to our recklessness, launch a major austerity and conservation program (including limiting corporate mark-ups and ROIs to levels commensurate with risk), and invest mightily in public transportation and renewable energy. The Bush & Harper doctrine is instead to publicly deny global warming and Peak Oil, privately acknowledge we’re fucked, and shove the whole massive problem into the laps of future generations. So the real problem is not that gasoline prices are too high, or that they are too low, it’s that we think the price of gasoline is thereal problem, and that changing that price will solve it. Category: Understanding Economics
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May 22, 2007
Making Short Unconferences Work
Last year I wrote an article about ‘unconferencing‘, including a suggested approach that involved having discussion leaders instead of speakers, whose job is
This has worked for me when the audience is small, engaged, reasonably informed, and know (and trust) each other. But what do we do when the audience is there to learn about something they know little about (or just because it’s a chance to get away from the office)? Or when the audience is too large and diverse to converse meaningfully with each other without being sidetracked with a lot of context-setting information? The pat answer is to ‘break up into small groups’, using some organizing principle to do so like Open Space (where people stand and propose discussion topics, are assigned a place and time-slot, and then attendees sign up for the ones that appeal to them, and ‘vote with their feet’ if a session fails to live up to its promise). This tends to mix the informed with the uninformed, and get people focused on subjects they at least think they care about. In a short unconference, however, doing this would use up most of the available time just hearing the topics and deciding which sessions to attend. David Gurteen has written about the idea of ‘conversation meetings’, where there is a pre-set ‘menu’ of topics around a common theme, and people pre-select the topics that interest them, which are posted on a large board (real or virtual). Then participants can select others interested in the same topics to ‘pair up’ with for conversations in break-out areas, over meals or on outdoor walks. Presumably the pairs could be pre-selected by the unconference organizer, and groups of perhaps three or four might also be accommodated, to avoid conversations of uninformed pairs with no ‘content provider’. David also writes about network badges, where you write something about yourself, your objectives or your interests on your name tag, to allow others at a conference to identify areas of affinity with you and cut through the small talk. I remember reading about an electronic version of these, where you identify your conference interests in advance and, when you come close to another participant, the areas of common interest are displayed on both badges (can’t find this online anymore — did the company that made them go under?) If common interests could be captured in advance of a ‘conversation meeting’, the ‘pairing’ process might be automated, and made more effective. Suppose you had a group of, say, 100 people willing to sign up for a half-day ‘unconference’ session. How would you organize it? Would you get people to ‘profile’ their interests (and depth of knowledge) in advance? Since there wouldn’t be time for Open Space topic-setting, would you use a virtual board and matching algorithm (see fictional illustration above) to schedule the conversations and do the pairing of participants, or would the participants prefer to (or insist on) choosing their own conversation partners, even if that takes time? Since these conversations are relatively intimate, compared to the safe anonymity of a large conference, would participants balk at them? Could they be relied upon to show up for one-on-one conversations with ’strangers’? How could we make this work? And perhaps most important, if we could make it work F2F, could we then use desktop video and make it work virtually? Category: Collaboration
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