A Networked World

There's a reason that "Everything in your house is getting cheaper to buy"

The prices of durable goods have been falling pretty steadily since peaking in 1997, and now they are as cheap as they were in 1988, after adjusting for the constant improvements manufacturers have been making to their products.

What’s striking is how pervasive the price declines are. It’s not just a few items that are pulling down the average; prices are falling for almost every sort of durable good that consumers buy.

via www.marketwatch.com

There are 2 reasons that prices fall.

In times where efficiency or productivity or new processes or newly discovered, easily accessible resources are having their major effect, the prices of the products or services they provide will fall because the absolute cost of making them is being actually reduced, but this study accounts for those improvements. There are no new processes or massive new resources being discovered and put into service, especially not across the board.

And the lastest survey of American productivity show that it is falling, not rising.

There is another reason that prices fall and that is when the incomes of the customers fall. And in real terms, American incomes, except for the 1%, are about the same as they were in the 1980's. So prices have to fall to match them.

The reason they have not fallen earlier is that the difference has been made up with debt. But consumers have finally reached the point where they can no longer fool themselves into taking on more debt, or they are just plain maxed out, even by the corrupt standards of the banking system.

The second case has another facet; it is the indicator of a deflationary economy.

As wages fall, prices have to chase them down, but because each seller is still trying to maximise their profit, then their income, then finally their survival. Because they try to brake their fall, the prices always remain higher than the customer can actually afford so they inch down some more, preceded by the wages that companies pay their workers who are then supposed to be able to keep buying the products they make.

This is a deflationary spiral and the next phase is the failure of the companies that make this stuff. People like The Automatic Earth, Steve Keen, Chris Martenson etc have been predicting this for over a decade and the process is playing out pretty much according to their models. But those who are terrified of deflation, and that should be all of us, WILL NOT talk about it honestly.

If we refuse to talk about it, we can't even attempt to deal with it. So will will have to face it alone. NOT a good scene.

Not an Arab Spring - More Like a Winter

I've been a fan of Gail Tverberg's stuff since I first came across it on the late Oil Drum. Gail is not an oil expert, she's an actuary, she specialises in statistics and data and demographics and she sees stuff that most of us miss.

Like this little ball of dynamite from Syria

Syria’s oil production is dropping. The drop between 1996 and 2010 reflects primarily the effect of depletion. The especially steep drop in the last two years reflects the disruption of civil war and international sanctions, in addition to the effect of depletion.

When oil exports drop, the government finds itself suddenly less able to pay for programs that people have been expecting, such as food subsidies and new irrigation programs to support agriculture. If revenue from oil exports is sufficient, desalination of sea water is even a possibility. In Syria, wheat prices doubled between 2010 and 2011, for a combination of reasons, including drought and a cutback in subsidies. When basic commodities become too high priced, citizens tend to become very unhappy with the status quo. Civil war is not unlikely. Thus, oil depletion is likely a significant contributor to the current unrest.

via ourfiniteworld.com

In 30 years, Syria's population nearly trebled but its ability to provide for that population has been shrinking for exactly half of that time. That makes reral sense as a driver of unrest and civil war. 

Further down the piece she applies the same analysis to Egypt and Yemen and Saudi Arabia. In February 2004 I posted a piece (Now apparently missing from the blog) called "Did we just go over the hump" about why I thought we had reach global peak oil as Saudi Arabia gave all the political signs of no longer being able to pump the stuff at will. 

I've had no reason since then to change my opinion and endless yapping about fracking being a game changer etc is just that; you don't spend billions squeezing out every last drop if you could spend millions to get buckets-full.

Oh, and Norway is about to get a right wing government in part because they have been able to blame the current one for "wasting the oil opportunity", just as the UK did in the 80's.

In every case, countries that find significant oil piss away the opportunity, they talk and act as if this finite resource is unlimited and time after time, within a single lifetime, it proves not to be the case. But apparently we have zero ability to learn from the mistakes of others, we have to do it all over again for ourselves.

And then we refuse to acept the reality so we elect fantasists, our own current shower of "not quite-free market" true believers, now in Australia, and Norway and so on. We elect "conservatives" because, having changed everything about the way we live, we suddenly don't want to change away from the good times and we are suckered into believing that they can, somehow, magically as it happens, be prolonged forever.

They can't. We are living through the early phase of how that "can't" turns into "didn't". And if you aren't, right now, taking substantive action to wrap up, you will be naked in the cold; probably praying for more global warming.

#NetHui and Digital Literacy

At last week's excellent NetHui, run by Internet NZ, I was asked to plug in 5 minutes worth on Digital Literacy. As usual, I tried to give it a bit of a spin. (starts at 41.12 and runs 6 minutes - the cut [poor sync] is Download Nethui_digital-literacy)

Here's the full version that probably takes a bit more than 5 minutes.

As one of the other presenters suggested, Digital Literacy means different things to different people and I want to pick up on some points raised by Mike Dickison and maybe be push them out a little, perhaps just shove them off the cliff.

For me digital literacy includes knowing when to take one of these and stick it in your mouth.

The reason for this is simple; in Miami Beach on Memorial Day this year, a bunch of out-of-control cops pumped over 100 shots into a private car in a public place, killing an unarmed black man inside (now there's a surprise) and wounded some bystanders.

A young man called Narces Benoit saw what was happening and whipped out his cellphone to record the scene. One of the cops noticed what he was doing, broke off his shooting gallery duties and came charging at Benoit, waving his gun and screaming at him to get out of his car and hand over the cellphone, which he did.

The cop them smashed the cellphone under his boot and arrested Benoit. Nevertheless, within a few hours, the video of the event was going viral on Youtube because, when he saw the cop rushing at him, Benoit had the presence of mind to take out of the phone his digital media storage card and put it in his mouth.

The difference between Benoit and the cop is what I call Digital Literacy.

A few months ago in the Australian Navy, a female recruit was having a sexual relationship with another recruit. The guy in question thought it would be terribly cool to capture the "action" with his webcam and broadcast it to his mates. She was not happy and complained to her commander about the breach of trust and privacy. He essentially told her not to be a spoilsport and swept the matter under the rug.

The young woman became even less happy and shared her experience on facebook. Within days her commander and his boss and his boss and HIS boss were all publicly on the mat, caps in hand, staring at their shoes and explaining HOW they were going to solve the problem of their appalling leadership.

The difference between the young woman and the Australian Navy is what I call Digital Literacy.

About the same time, footballer Ryan Giggs was having an affair with model Imogen Thomas and when it was discovered he sought the help of the UK Supreme Court which obligingly issued a "super injunction" forbidding the publication of the facts.

Within hours, over 70,000 Twitter users had turned the super injunction into a legal fiction.

The difference between the Supreme Court and Ryan Giggs fan base is what I call Digital Literacy.

And all over the Middle east and North Africa this year, people have risen up, trying to throw off a generation of oppression, corruption and violence against them. Now we have had revolutions for a long time, but in the past they have needed a core of intellectual, philosophical and operational leadership, surrounded by a cadre of activists willing to take the message into the community.

Those roles are now being taken over by the whole community using social media tools. It is that takeover and the loss of the privileged position of leadership that I call Digital Literacy.

In Christchurch's major earthquakes, at risk of their lives and while their buildings and their city crumbled around them people grabbed their cellphones and videoed the event as a way to record their own experience to share with others and possibly to provide evidence of what happened to them if they didn't make it out.

That too I call Digital Literacy.

Literacy of any kind is not just being able to read and write the words, it is understanding the meaning, the significance and the context of the communication, then knowing how to manipulate them.

The best example I can think of is the advent of film to entertainment. The first films were little more than stage plays with a camera placed in front of them to record the action. But it wasn't long before we saw the appearance of film literacy, using the unique language of the cinema to tell the story in its own way. The language includes backgorund music, closeups, tracking and pan shots, framing and the million other ways to use a camera that are not available to stage plays.

So we cannot expect that Digital Literacy will look in any but the most superficial ways, like hard copy literacy. In fact, by my definition Digital Literacy is happening all around us, all the time, with increasing frequency.

For 20 years we have talked about the ICT Revolution, blithely ignoring the fact that all revolutions break stuff, and the thing they break first and most irreparably, is the status quo, to expect the revolutionaries to restore the powers of the old guard is nonsense.

Digital Literacy does not consist in being able to write a CV in a word processor nor manage our accounts with a spreadsheet, they are far too often, a way for the old guard to try and force the revolution into a mould with which they feel comfortable.

Our problem is that digital illiteracy is rife in Government, business, education, health, justice and the NFP sectior, very often among those who are pushing hardest for solutions.

The real digital literacy challenge that we have is to shift the old guard into actual digital literacy so that our organisations, which have real, and vital, work to do, can engage with, communicate with, work with an increasingly digitally literate community; so that they can swim in that literacy instead of drowning in it as they are doing right now.

MY problem is that I   have no idea how the hell we are going to do that.

Digital Literacy does not consist in being able to write a CV in a word processor nor manage our accounts with a spreadsheet, they are far too oftten, a way for the old guard to try and force the revolution into a mould with which they feel comfortable.

The damage done by Wikileaks

I'm sure that it comes as absolutely no surprise to any diplomat nor their employing government, that their counterparts from other nations routinely lie to them about pretty much everything. Nor should it come as a shock that some of their counterparts think of them as idiots or worse.

A diplomat is someone who lies professionally for his country and any diplomat not fully aware of that is a liability and should be fired forthwith.

So it is unlikely that the Wikileaks data dump provides anything more than confirmation of normal suspicions and, being diplomats, these people will have no trouble whatever continuing both to deal with, and lie to, each other with unruffled feathers for many years to come, their personal flutterings soothed by regular application of canapes and booze.

On the other hand, what the leaks can very much damage is the credibility and safety of governments at the hands of their employers, viz, us.

While most of us have a default position that our masters, elected and otherwise, treat us and our aspirations and needs with dismissal when it is not outright contempt, it is another thing altogether to discover how regularly and egregiously they betray our interests in the pursuit of their rarefied and esoteric goals in the Great Game.

Wikileaks has the mission of fleshing out and adding fine detail to those betrayals and in doing so they undermine the pretenses and obfuscations and credibility, the authority of nation states in relation to their own people.

THAT is why the bastards are screaming in moral panic; that is why they are plotting the destruction of the torchlight shone straight into their corrupted hearts.

That is why we all have a duty to support Wikileaks, because it has the potential, at last, and in fact, to keep the bastards honest.

Update:  What is the betting that, if sweden is able to have Julian Assange extradited, the rape case will be dropped but he will be held because there is an application from the US for his extradition to their jurisdiction? I'm going with about 80%.

Plus, after spending so many uyears in a very happy association with sweden and its reputation for openness, I'm bloody horrified by their role in this.

Reality checks and data points

This piece from CIO.com is a nice reality check and the general principles apply to everyone, not just IT people. Retire? How About Never?

Overall, the recession has had far more of an economic impact on late-middle-aged adults. In an April Pew Research Center study of 2,969 adults aged 50 to 64, nearly 75% said the nation's economic problems are making it difficult to afford retirement.
Click here to find out more!

Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed in that age bracket said their 401(k) accounts or individual stocks have been clobbered, with two in 10 claiming that their investments have lost 40% of their value and another four in 10 saying nearly 20% to 40% of their retirement funds have been erased.

I have never believed that I would be able to retire, not just because I could not save enough to do so, but because I have known half my life that when the moment came to kick back I would be doing it with millions of other boomers whose removal from the "productive" economy would shrink that economy and make it too small to support us.

I've also been pretty much convinced that rule number one of investing is "never give your money to someone else to play with on your behalf, never, ever, no, I really mean it, never"

So I have paid off my mortgage and I'm building an urban homestead where we are aiming to be able to live, not just survive, on about $200 a week in current dollars.

While most of the rest of my peers have spent their lives trying to get rich enough to retire, I've spent mine learning to live poor.

My wife is a teacher on a 4 year contract and she has 2 years to go. Here's how I rate that contract.

• Chances of it being renewed on similar terms - 20%
• Chances of being significantly cut on renewal - 40%
• Chances of not being renewed 20%
• Chances of being bought out before the end 20%
• Chances of surviving any of those otucomes, pretty good.
  

Now eher are some more data points.

1. 56 year old family member on contract for a company that provides training to large insurance and financial companies. Unpaid for several months, yesterday asked me for a loan to get through Christmas
2. 58 year old CFO for several medium sized north American companies. Laid off in march, 10 months on global search for new job. Nothing
3. 58 year old former exec and successful business man. Lost his company 3 years ago, still no job and about to run out of money

Just people close enough to hear about their actual problems and 2 of those in the last 4 days. Interestingly, all three are still in denial about their real situation, still looking for the silver lining that tells them all is going to come back to what they fondly believe is normal.

Economic recovery? Not close.

This thing hasn't even cleared its throat yet and as the CIO peives goes on to say, "there is no place to hide in this economy"

Mega

Lomania

The sooner this guy self destructs, the better for us all. Tamaki's 700 'sons' swear oath of loyalty

The leader of Destiny Church, Brian Tamaki, who not long ago anointed himself bishop of the church he founded, has now proclaimed himself the church's "spiritual father" and designated the male members of the church as "spiritual sons".

At a special service during the church's annual conference in Auckland at the weekend, about 700 male members of the church swore a "covenant oath" of loyalty and obedience to Mr Tamaki and were given a "covenant ring" to wear on their right hands.

A church document describes the covenant as "a solemn oath of commitment that is binding, enduring and unbreakable. You are bound to covenant ... Covenant is an irrevocable, undissolvable oath of commitment".

There's another word for that kind of relationship; slavery. And if these 700 "sons" don't wake up to their "father's" serious ego problem, they will become his shock troops next.

There's a time to stop this dangerous crap, and it is now, before it gets out of hand. He has feet of clay like the rest of us, someone needs to dig them up pronto, although he is as cunning as a fox, he already has the antidote in their veins.

"You will hear all sorts of statements and opinions but you must be
prepared to ignore them and consistently hold him in the same high
regard no matter what you hear."

Somewhat surprisingly, the protocol says that Mr Tamaki is human and does make mistakes.

However, the sons must "be prepared to defend against any problems arising out of his mistakes.

A
loyal man is supposed to 'cushion' the effect of a mistake on Bishop
and to protect him. NEVER intentionally expose his weakness."

Now, we know that he knows that there is something under the covers. All that matters is what that something is.

Logos and meaning

There's a fierce amount of BS that gets spouted around the launch of a logo, especially where its a rebranding exercise. Millions have to be justified by some tiny graphic object and many pages are spent going into its deep psychology; how "it" represents some deep yearning we have for the company's products and services etc etc etc ad bleeding nauseam.

So, I thought I'd turn it inside out. Here's the logo.

What does it represent and whose logo is it?

If you know for a fact, ie you have stopped by the forum I found it on or the original, please hold off identifying it, I want to know whether it conveys anything by its essence.

My take is that logos mean whatever we vest in them over time, none of them have any inherent meaning so they can't express anything at all until they have been in use for a while.

This has meaning


But this

Doesn't.

Although once it did. It meant failed product and the name still does, but the logo, not so much

Or, never mind changing the shade of the lipstick, what have you done with the pig

Retaining value - what exactly does that mean?

James West has an interesting piece at Midas Letter - Gold Price Prediction

When anything, be it stock, bond, currency or commodity, reaches a new high, the impetus for selling into strength and taking profit off the table are enhanced dramatically. With gold’s new record high, there are plenty of holders of bullion who started acquiring it in the first years of the millennium who are now sitting on profit equivalent to 3 times the money.

The question is, however, sell gold in exchange for what?

Certainly trading gold for U.S. dollars is akin to forward selling gold at an incrementally lower price. Anyone smart enough to own gold since 2001 is unlikely to be so silly.

Renmibi might seem like a good trade. The only problem with that is you can’t easily spend renmibi at Home Depot or Safeway or Nordstrom.

No, there’s really no substitute for gold at this point in the global currency landscape. And so, the normally present impetus to sell and take profit has been castrated by the lack of anything else capable of retaining its value.

OK. I get that. But the question then becomes, what exactly does he mean by retaining value? If there is nothing that you would accept in exchange for it, how much "value" does it have?

I always look at the extreme case such as me having the last plate of food on earth and you having all the gold. How much of that gold would you give not to starve to death? How much gold would I accept to commit suicide?

Since the person who survives gets all the gold anyway, the only thing that has "value" is the food and even that is losing value the longer I remains uneaten.

I completely agree that exchanging gold for fiat money is a fools bargain, but once you have the gold you too can get fooled by seeing its exchange rate (as distinct from its value) constantly rising against all other possible "stores of value". Storage of any kind only has value if it is able to be released. from water in a dam to grain in a warehouse to savings in the bank, the storage part only works if the release part can take place. So how do you release the value stored in gold?

At some point you have to exchange it for something in the certain knowledge that you will never be able to get it back at that price, it will always go higher.

Well it will until all those left holding all the gold realise that it can't be eaten, worn, lived in, burned or used as medication, and if all anyone else wants is food, shelter, clothing, fuel or medication, how exactly do you sell your "assets" in exchange for something you actually need.

In complex societies the location of value is seriously camouflaged, and we can get carried away by the idea that, just because gold is durable and unchanging it has some kind of intrinsic value that can be locked away. I don't believe it.

Show me the mechanism.

Towards the new normal

Whenever I'm with Steve barnett, he's usually drinking and I'm the designated driver. Mostly because he and my wife are members of a wine club and when they go on high-class pub crawls (or winery tours) and I of the cardboard palate drive the people mover. When he talks about business he reminds me a lot of Johnnie Moore and Rob Paterson; and me. Learn fast: things aren’t (ever) returning to “normal”.

National Bank (NZ) Chief Economist Cameron Bagrey... confessed he’s embarrassed that his profession’s consistently got it wrong: failed to predict the current recession and doesn’t have a clue how to fix.

He says only one thing’s for certain: we can’t go back to the way it was. Anyone who thinks that things will return to “normal” is stupid. The policy makers are determined it won’t; determined we figure out new ways to do, manage and teach business and the economy. Previous answers are wrong.

[...] I seriously doubt NZ Business Education can change from its prescriptive right-answer model any time soon, hobbled as it is by administrators and their anti-professional, centralised rules and controls, and know-no-better student and employer market.

I’m sceptical too that NZ business managers can abandon their manager-knows-best, right-answer approach any time soon: go deeper than recite the superficial lists of “secrets” peddled in popular business management literature.

Actually, if Steve thinks its only NZ managers, he's dreaming. The managerial class is global, its largely responsible for the problem and will cling to its paycheque till the collapsing businesses they parasitise crumble in their hands.

[...] Here’s the guts: (really) involve everyone; confess ignorance (starting at the top); spend time together generating a long term goal that everyone’s passionate about but not sure how to achieve; get very clear on the medium term strategy and short term goals that stand to take you towards the long term; openly generate and agree clear individual and collective accountabilities in achieving the change; openly measure progress to keep individuals and groups (at all levels) openly accountable for their contribution; continually review and revise in the light of individual and collective experience; take every opportunity to talk about the long term goal and the actual action and progress towards it.

I think he's optimistic here.

In the new normal, we have so little idea of what will work that the idea of goals and strategies may be a waste of time as well. As our energy and financial resources are decimated we will gain new appreciations of those resources that are left.

I think there might be some new parameters that will have more power in the future.

• We will demand much higher value returns for any of those irrecoverable resources that we expend, especially if we hand them to someone else.
  
• We will increasingly trade time for goods and services. Where we have invested a lot througout my lifetime in "saving time" we will now "spend" or invest, that time ratrher than use a resource like energy.
• Things will slow down in some areas such as travel and material flows
• Information shipping will speed up as we reduce even further the documentary exchanges and rely more on electronics (saving paper, energy etc)
• Discretionary spending will evaporate and the industries based on them will disappear. If we spend more time waiting, travelling or producing things we will have less liesure time and less money to spend in it.
• Energy and material flows at a personal, community and business level will become a critical part if every economic model and activity.
• The idea of waste will disappear, we will be much more conscious that we can't 'afford" it any more. The idea that we should pay for packaging, then pay to have it taken away and pay again in opportunity costs merely to have a wrapper will become laughable, if not criminal
• Product design, durability, ease of use and fitness for purpose will become absolute criteria for everything
• We will all need to try many, small actions that may or may not succeed. We will need to be deadly honest about the outcomes and rethink those that fail while iterating those that seem to succeed.
• We will need to acknowledge that, at a time of paradigm shift, nothing will be reliable for quite a long time; what worked yesterday may not work again tomorrow. That is why small, iterative actions will be the only safe ones, there will be no more going large.
  
• Your turn. What other geenral rules do you think might fit here and does this make any sense at all?

I'm planning some renovations to my house - we have been since we moved in 2 years ago - and the other night I was using Google Sketchup (a brilliant bit of software) to turn the 2D plan into a 3D model so we could try stuff out.

I put in a work bench for building things and a wet area for wine making and a pot still for recovering essential oils from the flowers and herbs and plenty of space for creating stuff and storing it and for tools and consumables like glues and screws and so forth.

And then I stood back and realised that I am making not just a workshop a small artisanal factory that would fit in the 19th century or earlier. I'm doing it because it is the logical outcome of thinking about local production andtrying to close the energy and material flow loops as tightly as possible.

When i build stuff, I use screws not nails so that everything can be dismantled and used again in something else. More rules.

• Low energy dismantle-ability
• Repurposing all manner of manufactures
  
• Building things that can be applied to new uses
• Shared spaces, shared tools, shared skills
  

What else?

Nobody is in charge - this is a good thing

Johnnie Moore comes across some great stuff and this is one of the best. Leadership in a self-organising world

Harrison Owen created, or maybe he just channelled, the Open Space process many years ago. He says he did so in two martinis and 20 minutes - pretty productive for a process that's been used hundreds of thousands of times around the world.

Here's Harrison talking about the paradox of leadership in a self-organising world. It's fabulous stuff. He serves his metaphorical liquor 100% proof and with great charm. I certainly feel challenged to up my game in future when talking about this stuff.

Harrison Owen - Talk I - Leadership in a Self-Organizing World from Harold Shinsato on Vimeo.

As usual there are a couple of points I want to argue with.

• Owen, and possibly Johnnie and others still want to talk about leadership and, if they are right about self organising systems and I'm sure they are, then it is not fruitful.

It begs the questions of how we get to decide where we want to lead, how we decide whose leadership to accept, including our own. and leaves unspoken the issue that we almost always abandon those leaders because they fail us. Leadership embodies exactly the kind of idea that Johnnie and Harrison argue so strongly against, that of being able to stand outside the system and, to some degree, direct it enough, or disrupt it enough, to instigate changes in a desired direction.

Leadership is change directed, management is homeostatic, but both entail an ability to stand outside, and you can't.

Which raises for me the much more interesting question of how real change occurs, how actual decisions are made and how they so often offer such great potential that is equally often fail and produce outcomes that can be significantly worse than the problem they were supposed to solve.

I've spent 2 years working around my property with an overall objective of it being as productive and as sustainable as possible. I am building and implementing stuff now that I had no concept of when I first started, I am using spaces that have been transformed utterly from what we inherited and there is much more to come. But I had, and have, no plan.

Along the way I've developed what I recently started calling "listening to the garden", literally standing still inside the space, looking around it without making decisions or judgements, noticing (ht Johnnie) new stuff and blurring other stuff into the overall picture and then carrying on with whatever I was doing. At some point an idea will start to germinate about what needs doing next given the current state of the place and our desire to reach those objectives. A bit later I'll start moving some stuff or building something which I will often stop building for days or weeks until the next bit of it becomes clearer.

I like the process and I'm pleased with the results but here's the thing, everything I build, the raised beds, the trellises, the garden workbench, the toolshed platform, every single thing, is screwed together because I completely expect that some of them will need dismantling and rebuilding or removing and replacing altogether at some future state of the process and I want to be able to reuse the parts.

I have no idea whether what I am doing is in fact right and as long as I am prepared to take apart something that doesn't, or ceases to work, I think I'm OK.

But I have no idea how I make those decisions or where they will lead. Now, what would you call that process? Because I want to see a lot more of it.

• The other quibble is with this metaphor We're all surfers in a self-organising world. Some of us prefer the beach, and some of us think we're in charge of the wave. The challenge is to be in the flow of the wave.

Surfers have an exhilarating ride to be sure, but they can only ever end up back where they started, and the wave leaves them on the sand or dumps them on the rocks but it only ever takes them back to the place they left their towel and their car.

I much prefer the metaphor of sailing. A sailor can go to any place they like, what they can't do is get there by any route they choose, they have to work with the prevailing conditions of sea and wind and their boat. Sometimes they need to tack across the wind for hours to achieve even some small headway towards their goal, and at other times they need to abandon the goal for a while and just ride out the storm.

The process requires determination, skill, patience, wisdom and persistence, but most of all it demands a direct and honest engagement with the reality you can perceive right now and a willingness to accept that the reality has changed on you, either because you have learned to see it better or because it has in fact changed.

Sailors need to listen to the sea as I listen to my garden and deal honestly with the facts of their situation, not those facts that they would like very much to be the case. Those who can't do that, or refuse to, are called strong or determined or leaders and, when they are also lucky they get away with it and are hailed as heroes. But that is just survivorship bias, most of those who act that way drown quite quickly and are erased from the story.

Nevertheless, watch the Owen piece, its a gem.

The read Johnnie's other piece. as usual, he has got there before me.

Behaviour change, revisited

Meanwhile, we're so busy dreaming up desirable futures for each other, that we don't notice all the subtle changes that are going on around us anyway. And while we craft our master strategies, we don't even think about the little experiments we could make to nudge the system and see what happens.

You know, stuff we could do right now, or at least in the next day or so.

I'm starting to notice that the more discussions revolve around the importance of strategy, purpose and other such abstractions, the more likely I am to start daydreaming about what to have for tea or going for a nice walk somewhere.

I love it, nudge the system, see what happens, nudge it again. Its about the best we can do.