A Networked World

Delete Delete Delete

Jerry gets it exactly right: Intranets are not information dumps. Especially this bit

The vast majority of intranets would be far more productive and collaborative if they deleted at least 90 percent of the content they currently have.

Ahem. Or to put it another way, not just conversation can start in the middle.

Starting in the middle

I'm a huge fan of the Rise of the Stupid Network so maybe you can image what a great time I've had being able to hang out and chew the fat with this guy to myself for 24 hours on his way from Wellington to Tokyo. Even my dogs get him.

In the midst of all the yakking we came up with the idea that with blogs and facebook and whatever social networking tools, any (and one day every) conversation can start in the middle, just as you do with people you have known all your life.

And later this month I'm meeting up with Euan Semple (and hopefully Johnnie Moore) in London. Carbon debt to one side for a moment, what a cool life I have been led to by this Internet thing. I've met Euan once and never met Johnnie face to face, but I'll give you good odds that both those conversations also start in the middle.

I wonder where it goes from here. (See the next post)

Serious Static

Hat tip to David I for the link to these pics: Fotos Tormenta eléctrica en erupción del volcán Chaitén.

Astonishing.

I glad I'm an ocean away although if this thing goes with a big enough quake I could wind up swimming in my living room because there is nothing between us and Chile but water.

Social Innovation Camp

Tip to Johnnie Mooe for the link to: Social Innovation Camp » Lights, camera, action: Social Innovation Camp on film.

If you missed Social Innovation Camp the other weekend, never fear: The People Speak came along to record all the highs and the lows, the triumph and the tears, to bring you Social Innovation Camp, The Film.

I like this model for lots of things, there's been some events where people make a film in two days and back in my Access radio days we had kids come into the station for a couple of days to make a radio programme.

There is something about the scale that invites intensity and achievement; somoen in the video suggests that maybe we should work like fury for 2 days a week and spend the rest of the week goofing off. It may not be a silly idea, maybe that's how we are configured. Like a python that gets a feed and then spends a week digesting it.

Clap harder!!!

OK, its election year both here and in the US and both countries are taking a major wedgie from increased costs of formerly cheap resources like oil and food. And on both sides of the pacific some pollies have come to the same conclusion; magic works: PM: Govt would veto regional fuel taxes.

The Government is likely to veto any move by councils to implement regional fuel taxes in the near future as consumers reel from rising food and petrol prices, Prime Minister Helen Clark indicated today.

Her statement follows Energy Minister David Parker yesterday confirming the Government is considering delaying parts of its emissions trading scheme (ETS) so consumers are not hit with even greater petrol price rises.

It has been estimated the scheme would add 6c-to-8c to the price of a litre of petrol from January next year.

Other legislation before Parliament would allow regional councils to impose a 5-10c a litre regional fuel tax.

Auckland Regional Council is under pressure to generate money for transport projects, but under the legislation it and other councils must get Cabinet sign-off to proceed with a tax.

Helen Clark today said that would not be happening in the near future.

"I can assure you that any suggestion of the Auckland region slapping 5c on the petrol next year is absolutely ridiculous. It's not going to happen," she said on TVNZ's Breakfast programme.

Meanwhile Hillary Clinton is proposing a "summer holiday" from US excise taxes on fuel that will save individuals almost nothing, cost thousands of jobs (well the money pays for road and bridge maintenance and if it ain't coming in what do you think they will use for pay?) and allow the gas companies to stick up (deliberate choice of words) the price of petrol and reap the windfall.

Here's the news; the price of petrol will exceed $2 a litre in NZ and $4 a gallon in the US, it will go to maybe $200 in the foreseeable future and NOTHING anyone can do will change that. Nothing.

So laying in some pre-emptive taxes will change only the timing of the pain and will at least give us some choices, delaying them will achieve exactly the opposite, same pain at least but with no money in the kitty to alleviate it. Great leadership there.

And to propose a delay in climate change legislation because the cost of polluting is getting too high has a fine level of cynicism. It seems our kids and grandkids will have to bite the bullet because we are too weak, cowardly, stupid and venal to do it for them. SUCH parental love.

So clap harder everyone and if you really really close your eyes tight and believe with all your might, reality will be suspended for just a little longer.

I can't HEAR YUOOOOOO!!!!!!

Update: the latest nuttiness is that the government wants to force oil companies to announce in advance any price increases.
So here's what will happen.

1. Oil companies annoucne increase
2. People rush to fill up
3. Some petrol stations run out
4. People can't get fuel at any price and either run out in transit or can't start their journeys and all of them get PO'd. Some of them get violent
5. Petrol thefts and siphoning from cars goes up
6. More PO'd people
7. Exactly the same amount of fuel is bought at the current price and the price goes up anyway but since a significant percentage of people have not been able to manage their fuel use they have to fill up empty tanks instead of topping up as normal and there is another shortage at some stations.

Yep, brilliant, that will work a treat.

Update 2.

Oil now tapping on the $120/bbl mark, I think I'll run a sweep on when it gets to $200. Maybe it will have to be a tontine.

Enemies of the Establishment

The other day I talked about Barack Obama making enemies in the establishment and what happens to them. case for the prosecution: DC sex-scandal madam found dead.

The "DC Madam," whose arrest for running a high-end prostitution ring sent sex-scandal tremors through the US capital, hanged herself in a shed at her mother's house, police said.

Deborah Jeane Palfrey was found by her mother hanging by a nylon rope from the ceiling of the shed at her mother's mobile home in Tarpon Springs, Florida, local police said.

"Handwritten notes were found on scene that describes the victim's intention to take her life, said police captain Jeffrey Young.

"Foul play does not appear to be involved."

Palfrey, 52, was convicted last month of federal racketeering charges for running the prostitution ring for the rich, famous and powerful, including members of Congress and other Washington power-brokers.

Bet your boots foul play does not APPEAR to be involved. I would also give you good odds that she had the message that going into a US prison would NOT be a pleasant experience; and that she would not be coming out to enjoy the fruits of her notoriety. She was given a choice.

Bill Moyers does it better

Almost exactly a year ago I had a little splurge on simplicity: The KISS of Death.

At every level and on every scale we live in a world where the benefits comes from staggering levels of complexity, where understanding takes years and is then only approximate at best, where significant and thoroughgoing change is now inevitable as we confront the massive problems of Peak Oil, climate change and economic disconnection.

We live and will die in this world, yet our decision making systems revolve around whether or not the entire value of the discussion can be distilled into a 30 second statement because we don't actually want to pay the price of living in complex societies, we want our personal worlds to remain simple.

That, friends, is a vote for suicide.

But Bill Moyers does it so much better when dealing with the Obama/Wright trivia panic in the US.

Its interesting in its own right, but stick with it for the punchline.

Choosing Failure

In Collapse, Jared Diamond talks a lot about how whole societies makes choices that guarantee their failure, but those choices are hard to see when the society itself has vanished. Nevertheless, we can be sure that each choice will have been relatively small and made for reasons that seemed "reasonable" at the time. Like this: Grain transport fears undermine farmers' crop boost.

Sorghum, a summer cereal grown for stockfeed and destined mostly for the domestic market, is grown in northern NSW and southern Queensland.

A record 2.5 million tonnes, according to the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, will be stored in silos on farms and at railway sidings until it is delivered.

With forecasts for a bumper wheat crop later this year, grain storage, handling and transport facilities will be in big demand.

Therein looms a big logistical problem. The freight company Pacific National announced late last year that it would no longer be transporting export grain by rail when its five-year contract with the State Government expired in March.

Despite the warning, there has been little indication as to how half the state's grain production which is hauled by rail will be handled. Farmers are fearful of another layer of freight costs if the rail grain network is reduced, or worse, closed.

The consequences of increased road transport are all too obvious, they claim. Trucks not only pose serious community safety concerns but there will be more damage to roads, and an increase in fuel consumption and resulting greenhouse gas emissions.

The state rail network has experienced serious shrinking in the past 25 years with the closure of 17 lines. The future of many other branch lines hangs in the balance as the State Government grapples with the costs of maintenance and upgrade required to keep them in grain-handling order.

See? Simple isn't it? Ideologically driven decisions that cannot now be reversed for fear of attack from the ideologues that pushed them and have profited handsomely from them. In addition, they would have to raise taxes to pay for the infrastructure; that too would be a reversal of the ideology.

Then throw in the cognitive problem that we are now developing for down-sizing and down-powering our economies. That is totally at odds with the whole "growth" mania that has driven us for hundreds of years.

They can't deal with warnings of dead certainties such as the end of a contract that will leave tonnes of grain rotting in silos, what chance is there that they will do anything at all about warnings of indeterminate but no less certain futures? None of this is new, we have done it time and time again and settled for extinction rather than survival; this is how it happens, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Actually more like a whine.

To the gardens.

The wrong time to avoid risk

The story about Peter Bernstein is mostly about economics and financial markets: One Guy Who Has Seen It All Doesn't Like What He Sees Now. And its worth reading on that level, but in the middle there is a single sentence that gives me the shivers.

When you think about how all of this will work out in the long run, we are going to have an extremely risk-averse economy for a long time.

Here's the problem.

1. The people making the decisions haven't a clue about risk; that, by definition almost, is how we got into this mess in the first place.
2. They are already terminally risk averse, to the extent that they tried to drive it out of their businesses and wound up with an equally terminal moral hazard.
3. In our rapidly changing environment (social, political, economic, meteorological and physical) change will be mandatory
4. Those who cannot or will not change will suffer, many of them will starve.
5. Any changes we make will have no guarantee of success, all innovation carries risk and the closer to the survival edge you are living, the greater the downside of failure - that's why poverty-stricken nations are also very conservative, they cling to what they know because a failed change can be literally fatal.

Now, the real question is whether we can learn from the Risk Preferences in Chimpanzees and Bonobos.

Because chimpanzees exploit riskier food sources in the wild, we predicted that they would exhibit greater tolerance for risk in choices about food. Results confirmed this prediction: chimpanzees significantly preferred the risky option, whereas bonobos preferred the fixed option. These results provide a relatively rare example of risk-prone behaviour in the context of gains and show how ecological pressures can sculpt economic decision making.

The big problem is that we are bonobos living in a world where food (and other resources) are no longer stable and dependable. So we have to start taking more and more risks at the very moment when we have spent a generation or more stamping out what we perceived as risk.

As our leaders' reactions to terrorism have shown in spades, we wouldn't know how to evaluate risk, even when  it bites us on the butt.

Houston, we have a problem

In the last 10 days the IMF, the World bank and the UN have all come out with warnings on the food crisis. They have pointed to food riots in haiti and egypt and other places as suggested that, apart from the starvation of untold people, the crisis thrweatens the whole international order.

But for most of us in the 'affluent west' the thought has been that it is Africa and parts of Asia that are suffering, as usual.

No, it ain't: Food Rationing Confronts Breadbasket of the World.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Many parts of America, long considered the breadbasket of the world, are now confronting a once unthinkable phenomenon: food rationing.

Major retailers in New York, in areas of New England, and on the West Coast are limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil as demand outstrips supply. There are also anecdotal reports that some consumers are hoarding grain stocks.

At a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday, shoppers grew frustrated and occasionally uttered expletives as they searched in vain for the large sacks of rice they usually buy.

"Where's the rice?" an engineer from Palo Alto, Calif., Yajun Liu, said. "You should be able to buy something like rice. This is ridiculous."

It is not ridiculous, it is serious. Very serious. And most of us are not even vaguely ready. And check out your Kübler-Ross, disbelief is the first stage, and anger is the second.