The Story of Electronics

It started with The Story of Stuff. Annie Leonard presents her thoughts on the sad story of the production process in a concise, yet cheerful manner. Her upbeat attitude to solve these critical issues make her educational videos nearly fun to watch. Annie Leonard made the Story of Stuff a great story. Over the last four years she has added to it, and made a number of sequels: The Story of Cosmetics, The Story of Bottled Water, etc. And now: The Story of Electronics, 7 minutes worth watching. Here is her site: The Story of Stuff, and here is her YouTube channel. Perfect for us as adults, perfect also to teach teenagers the role of corporations and the outsourcing of cost to other nations. Well done Annie.

Economy

This phrase taken from Tim Jackson's talk "An Economic Reality Check" at TED (time 7:00) sums it up pretty well. No additional comment needs to be added: The world we live in is an economy in which we the people are "being persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need, to create impressions that don't last, on people we don't care about."

Cash

I like Cash. No, not the green bills, I am talking about Johnny Cash. I admire his songs and lyrics. However, listening to his songs we too often get reminded that things aren't changing. The 1960s and 2010. It is all the same. One of the biggest problems - especially for the poor people and the poor nations - remains debt.

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go;
I owe my soul to the company store.

This song under the title "Sixteen Tons" was first recorded in 1946 and later in 1987 by Johnny Cash. How far have we come? It is deja vu all over again. Debt is dictating our lives and enchaining us as individuals as well as at the national level. Today we owe our souls to the bank (or the World Bank and IMF in the case of nations).

And environmental pollution is also not something new. He sung about it in "Don't go near the water" in 1974. Here is a video version that will correlate words from 1974 with photos from 2010. Another one of my favorites is "The Man in Black". Listen to it if you have time.

Hemp

Hemp is a truly versatile material. It is well known that it was used for making quality ropes. It can be used for clothing. It is an excellent insulating material. Recently I found this video on hemp as a construction material: Hemp bricks are stronger and lighter than concrete. Hempcrete is sound absorbent , moisture absorbent, and has thermal mass. The list of uses goes on and on: paper, car bio-fuel, plastic-like panels, shampoos, soaps and food. No surprise that hemp is sometimes called the plant of 30,000 uses because it combines the utility of the soybean, the cotton plant and the Douglas Fir tree into one single plant. Now that is an impressive plant.

ParEcon

ParEcon is short for Participatory Economy. ParEcon is a social economic model trying to achieve: equity, solidarity, diversity, and self-management. Equity is defined here as "a condition in which each person gets what they deserve for what they have done, and no one gets more (or less) than that". A key site publishing information on ParEcon is at Z Communications, a company adhering to the parecon principles.

A good starting point might be reading the Capitalism vs. ParEcon comparison sections. The full book "ParEcon - Life after Capitalism" published in 2003 gives additional details.

For those who prefer videos of textual info, have a look at this short intro video clip.

The ParEcon model is certainly strong on equalities, justice and democracy. The resulting economy will be stronger in terms of sustainability and social interaction. It has the ingredients for more happiness and promises to reduced materialism. Its criticism is primarily in the area of efficiency. Capitalism as we have it today has certainly failed as it has failed to serve 80% of the population. We need a new model and studying ParEcon is worth the effort of a few hours of reading.

Competition

Competition is such a crucial concept in our daily lives. Free market economists see competition as a key element to their economic model. Socially, the results of capitalistic competition have been disastrous. There is positive and negative competition or at least one can agree while competition could be seen as something neutral as a concept, there are positive and negative effects of competition.

While competition is a crucial factor in economy and society, the amount of books written on this topic is relatively small. A simple search revealed that most articles deal with the concept of competition in sports and tend to give instructions to coaches on how to introduce, manage and train competition in their sports team. A typical article is this, published by Damon Burton and Thomas Raedeke in Sport Psychology for Coaches. Here is a simple and limited article on competition at the workplace.

In Webster competition is defined as

• 1.a: the effort of two or more parties acting independently to secure the business of a third party by offering the most favorable terms
• 1.b: active demand by two or more organisms or kinds of organisms for some environmental resource in short supply
• 2: a contest between rivals

This definition is all "negative", it is about one-against-the-other, a zero-sum-game attitude, a fight for scarce resources, and rivalry. Why can't we define competition as something positive? How about a definition like this?

• the effort of two or more independent parties to achieve a desired common result by comparing and contrasting independent ideas

I was criticized once for criticizing competition and labeling it as cut-throat, stab-in-the-back and winner-takes-it-all. Competition could be a positive force, but for most part in our economy it has a negative social impact. Discussing the topic I started wondering why we don't have two words, one for positive competition and one for negative competition. In the English language at least its definition seems to be describing a rather fierce force in a zero-sum game. Maybe other languages distinguish between competition leading to negative effects and competition leading to positive effects.

I am not against competition, we need competing ideas and we need freedom of choice between these ideas. The same for products, let the best product win. What we need is an open and fair competition that reflects human values and is based on respect for the others (the competing teams). A competition based on sharing which has the benefit of all in mind. Forced monopolies are usually not a good thing. One of the most urgent areas were we need to abolish a monopoly and need to introduce competition is at the heart of the monetary system. Let's legalize creation of money and give the FED some competition. 

That reminds me of code competitions and challenges to solve particular problems that are based on an open and positive competition. For example a mathematical problem is publicly posted to all competing teams together with a means of scoring a result. Different teams now start coding different solutions. Whenever a solution is available it is published online and rated on a public scoreboard. All teams can see all current algorithms and their score. All teams can and are encouraged to take existing solutions (source code) and improve on them, combine them with their own algorithms, and re-post these improved solutions. [Our economy would call that stealing ideas.] This iterative game stops when a defined time has passed or a defined goal regarding score has been reached. Astonishing creativity and results have come forward through such competitions. Some universities and companies nurture such challenges. Some events are called code-a-thon or similar where people from different companies come together usually for a day or two to cooperate and compete in a positive fashion to derive a common solution.

In a TED talk an education specialist explained that in a test the best results have been achieved by dividing a class in multiple groups, having them all in the same room, requiring that all share their current results at all time, encourage adopting ("stealing") others' ideas, and allowing team members to switch teams voluntarily whenever they wanted.

On Wikipedia the definition of competition is also in terms of a zero-sum game, as rivalry and it states that competition arises whenever two or more parties strive for a goal which cannot be shared. The page acknowledges the positive and negative competition. It labels the one as cooperative competition and the other as destructive competition. Co-operative competition is based upon promoting mutual survival and strives for a "everyone wins" solution through peaceful exchange and without violating other people. This is clearly the type of competition we must foster.

On a side note: The Wikipedia page makes also a reference to the term coopetition. At first glance it sounded like an attractive term for positive competition. At a second look though, it is not the right term as defined by some people. Webster does not recognize the term. Wikipedia defines coopetition as a dual-faced attitude of cooperating with the competitor (enemy) where victory seems impossible while at the same time continuing with destructive competition against the same competitor in other areas. So, the cooperation only stems from the realization that competition is futile and at the same time destructive competition continues. There is no voluntary cooperation in this at all. It is more or less forced cooperation as a last resort to survival. And still the mind set has not been changed as destructive cooperation is still followed as the principle way of doing business wherever possible. Furthermore, at a linguistic level US First claims a trade mark on the term. According to this definition and the legal claim on the term, coopetition is not what we need, and for lack of having found a better term, I will still need to refer to terms such as "positive competition" and "cooperative competition".

Happiness

Nic Marks talks about happiness at the planet level, the national level and the personal level in his talk "The Happy Planet Index". The HPI (Happy Planet Index) rates all countries on their happiness, or better said on their sustainable happiness, i.e. simply put happiness in relation to the resource consumption. Which is the happiest country? Costa Rica. Why? They did away with the military all together, 99% of the electricity comes from reusable resources, they invested in social and health programs, they enjoy a 78-year life expectancy (higher than US), they have one of the highest literacy rate in the world, they were the first country committed to be carbon neutral by 2020. And they did all this while using only 25% of the resources used by Western countries. Time to get rid of the GDP as measure and replace it with the HPI. Here is the official site of the Happy Planet Index.

On a more personal level, have a look at 5 Ways to Well Being.

An inspiring talk!

Oil and Corexit

Susan Shaw has dedicated a great part of her life to the damages caused by oil disasters such as the Exxon Valdez and the BP crime in the Mexican Gulf. She is an expert on marine toxins and her brief talk "The oil spill's toxic trade-off" is an excellent summary of the dangers of Corexit and the political and big-business attitude in which it is used.

Dark Side of Housing Bubble

This is one of the most touching videos about the negative after-effects of the housing bubble: Foreclosure, a short 8-min news report by KCET bringing it all to a (sad) personal level.

Individualism vs. Collectivism

Why is it that "me", "I" and "individualism" are so ingrained in US culture? How does that compare to Asian cultures that are deeply rooted in "us", "together", "community" and "collectivism"? The TED talk entitled "The Art of Choosing" by Sheena Iyengar shows some intriguing scientific results related to this topic. Is this an explanation why cooperation is difficult in the US and most things in the US are based on hyper-competition?

Find Oil, Get Poor

For some time I wondered why rich countries that find oil get richer, but poor countries that find oil get poorer. There is not a single example of an African nation that found oil and by doing so improved economic conditions for its people. In all cases, in the African continent, income and wealth from oil ended up in the pockets of the multinational exploring companies (MobilExxon and the like), arms dealers and manufacturers, and a handful of corrupt politicians, but never in the pocket of the people. Often the issue is also meddled with by intrusions from the IMF and the World Bank. The involvement of these two organizations in these poor countries having discovered oil does not improve these nations' fate of getting poorer. It is not limited to oil, other resources will do as well, and it is not limited to poor nations in Africa, poor nations in other continents are likely to follow the same path. There are some exceptions, most notably Bolivia and Venezuela.

Today I started reading up on this known issue and I learned that there is even a term for this behavior. It is called "the Curse of Oil" or the oil curse for short. The general term is Resource Curse. The 16-page report by Samuel R. Schubert published in the scientific journal Oil and Gas Business in 2006 entitled "Revisiting The Oil Curse: Are Oil Rich Nations Really Doomed To Autocracy And Inequality?" describes the situation and the facts in an excellent fashion. Read it, it is fascinating.

When Western politicians, organizations, corporations (Bush, Obama, Blair, IMF, World Bank, etc.) say and dictate that poor countries must do what is right for the people, they really mean the western corporations. And they (with help from their credits) have the power to modify policies to see through that the benefits of oil finds in poor countries flow back into the rich nations. An article entitled "When Two Poor Countries Reclaimed Oilfields, Why Did Just One Spark Uproar?" in the Guardian written by George Monbiot also talks about this topic.

Also relevant and compelling is the TED video entitled "Four Ways To Help The Bottom Billion" that suggests that the rich nations should help install good governance in poor countries to avoid the resource curse.

We Feed the World 2

I re-watched the "We Feed the World" video. This 96-minute documentary produced by Austrian Erwin Wagenhofer in 2005 shows the relations between small farmers and fishers and big agro-industry and the effects the global food trade has on individuals, at a personal level. Even the second viewing was interesting. It is the little details that will get stuck in your mind: Austrian farmers today have to work 6 times the size of land to produce the same living standard as their farming parents. ... Every day the largest city of Austria Vienna throws away the amount of bread from overproduction that the second largest city of Austria Granz consumes. ... In the largest vegetable and fruit market in Dakar, Africa, one can find subsidized Spanish vegetables. Subsidized vegetables from European agro-business sell for one third less than local products causing the irreversive death of African farms. ... European governments pay large amounts of subsidies to European farmers to produce wheat and corn. Europe then burns subsidized wheat and corn to fire electric power plant, i.e. wheat and corn are used to produce electricity. Europe then imports soy for feeding its animals, mostly from Brasil. The world's biggest soy exporter is Brasil. Despite being the world's largest soy exporter and one of the world's largest food producing nation people starve in Brasil. ... The global web of interconnections becomes clear. What we eat and how we produce food not only affects us but many people around the world.

World Economy and Global Trade

One line in the 2002 PBS documentary "Commanding Heights - The Battle for the World Economy - Part 3" subtitled "The New Rules of the Game" (19m49s) stuck out: Global Trade consists of a) $8 trillion in trade in goods and services and b) $288 trillion in trade in currencies. That told me something. Global trade and globalization is much more about moving big money around in split seconds and about multi-national financial speculation than it is about actual trading of goods and services. We should keep this in mind when we hear proposals from the WTO. And since currency trading is a zero-sum game, wherever there is a winner there is a loser. We can assume with near certainty that the big winners in the currency trade are the big financial institutions, while the losers are the millions of average income or poor people that hold a little bit of savings or just have enough cash for the day's food purchase. Global trade has been presented for decades in a false light and above all it is measured by false parameters. It is measured by trade volumes. Just like GDP is not an appropriate measure of the health, progress or wellbeing of a nation, trade volume is not an appropriate measure for economic, social or national health, progress or wellbeing. Countries that have seen explosions of trade volume have seen neither an explosion of national health services, nor of national or social progress. Trade in Mexico has grown 700% in 6 years after the enactment of the NAFTA and yet workers are as poor as before. Global trade should be measured by the benefit for the people: Do people have access to more goods at a reasonable price? How did prices of goods and services develop that were dominating the local eceonomy before the new trade agreement? How did the workers income develop? How did workers rights develop? How about environmental impact of the new trade and production? Is it increasing or decreasing national or global divides? These and similar factors combined would form a better multi-facetted indicator to tell us if increased trade was positive on the whole. Just because we grow soy now in Brasil and ship it to the US and Europe instead of growing it locally does not make the trade a positive thing. In contrary, we increase transport, CO2 emissions and place the burden of mono-culture dependency on Brasil while destroying the rainforest for ever greater soy fields. Is it a good thing that 90% of product X are now produced in country Y and then shipped around the world? Is this positive trade? You may replace placeholder X with product like palm oil, T-shirts, sneakers, television sets and place holder Y with countries like China, Indonesia, or Mexico. The goal of trade should be to enrich people financially, socially and culturally and not to add additional power to a few already powerful banks and corporations. We need high-quality trade, not high-volume trade.

On the official PBS site one can find everything, all videos and all transcripts. A subset is on YouTube.

IMF and Indonesia

There are many examples of the wrong-doings of epic scale of the IMF and the World Bank. Here is the example of the rape of the nation of Indonesia by the IMF. The 53-min video documentary was produced by John Pilger for British television in 2001 and entitled "The new Rulers of the World". After highlighting Indonesia as a case study of the IMF processes at a detailed level, the documentary concludes in the last minutes that the newest ruler of the world is the WTO (World Trade Organization) and that the WTO has been created by a few as an unelected embryonic world government above all nations and responsible only to the world's richest corporations. The last sentences is "Why not abolish the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and replace them with genuine trade institudions that are democratically acountable? ... Why should we accept this? Why should our children have to face these visions and dangers? None of them is god-given, all of them can be changed."

Overdose

The documentary Overdose shows us the future. My favorite sentence is: "The US government has handed out stimulus packages to the tune of ten thousand billion dollars ($ 10,000,000,000,000). That's more than the total cost of the US government for World War I, World War II, the Koren War, the Vietnam War, the invasion of Iraq, the New Deal, the Marshal Plan, and the moon landing". (37:17 or if you are watching the equivalent 3-part series it is Part 3, 6:00-6:22). Wow. Now, that is a good visualization of the amount spent on the bail outs and stimulus packages. My second favorite sentence follows right afterwards: "G.W. Bush has recked up more national debt than all presidents combined before him, from George Washington to Bill Clinton. And Obama is close to create more national debt than all presidents before him, including G.W. Bush."

Watch the Swedish 46-min documentary from 2010 entitled "Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis".

Food Secrets

"Food - The Ultimate Secret Exposed" is a 15-minute video by Alex Jones. In his typical style this video is exaggerated and dramatized. Nonetheless, filtering out some of the theatrical allegations, there is an essence of truth in this video. It is a rapid run through the dangers in today's processed food: Aspartame, GM corn, GM soy, GM cotton seed oil, growth hormone meats and milk, fluoride in water and toothpaste, dimethylpolysiloxane (a type of silicon) in TV dinners, GM salmon, MSG, mercury tainted fertilizers, viral meat spraying, ... For those who do not have time to spend on viewing 1-hour documentaries with more facts on each item of this list, this might be an appropriate summary warning us of the many items to watch out for in the food shopping aisle. Think before you shop.

War on Drugs

The British newspaper The Guardian wrote a surprisingly candid and thoughtful article on drugs, its social and political implications and the war on drugs. This Guardian article is entitled "Our 'war on drugs' has been an abysmal failure". It is an excellent summary on the issue and a must-read. It reaches the conclusion that the current political legislation of declaring drugs illegal leads to tens of thousands of deaths annually, 1.5 million prisoners in the US alone, millions of impoverished people, social suffering, corruption of entire states, political instability, crime and criminals, 100s of billions of dollars of spending of tax money of fighting it, and the list goes on. Who benefits? Corporations who provide arms and services to fight wars in and outside the US, a few drug lords, people who are offered employment by agencies like the DEA and similar, politicians who gain rights and are given excuses to more control over society as well as support from corporations in the war-on-drugs sector. The war on drugs cannot be won and should not be carried out. Legalization is the path to reduce the negative effects of the drug business and surprisingly to drug consumption reduction as well, as shown by countries such as Netherlands, Switzerland and Portugal.

Independent of this article, a different author published a second - slightly related - article on the topic of drugs in the Guardian on the same day: Hillary Clinton: Mexican drugs war is Colombia-style insurgency. Here are two more articles from the Guardian reporting on the lost war on drugs and calling for an end of drug prohibition: Time to prohibit drugs prohibition and Prohibition's failed. Time for a new drugs policy.

And by the way, war on anything seems to be absurd and misplaced. We should be looking at the approach for tackling difficult issues from a different angle. War on Drugs, War on Terror, War on Hunger, all this indicates a one against another. Problems need a coming together not a fighting each other. A war - no matter on what - can never be a sustainable solution.

Global Dimming and Warming

This 48-minute documentary film produced in 2007 by the BBC for their Horizon series introduces the term "Global Dimming" to the general public and puts global dimming in context with global warming. While the documentary is too dramatic and too sensational for the taste of many people, it still might be a worth while film for the sake of understanding the causes and the trend of global dimming, i.e. the reduction of sunshine reaching our planet's surface due to visible air pollution.

There is a lot of data on both global dimming and global warming, and as with nearly all data, it can be interpreted in many different ways. I do not believe in the main predictions of the main stream scientists. They might be right, but they might also be wrong. Is there global warming? Maybe, probably, but maybe not. Is the global warming caused by mankind? Maybe, maybe not. Is global warming bad? Maybe, maybe not. In my opinion all this data is inconclusive because in today's world it is nearly impossible to know whom to trust.

I am even more opposed to the way greenhouse gas reduction is planned to be implemented. International auctions on CO2 emissions and similar forms scream of injustice, inefectiveness and seem to be another scheme to enrich a few CO2 emissions brokerage companies, paid for by all while not delivering on real, sustainable and just emissions reduction. In short such schemes will turn out to be expensive, ineffective and will be a hidden form of financial transfer from the masses to a few rich, similar to taxation. Emissions reduction will be misused to become a laudable and admirable front face for creating a new system inline with the current abusive banking system that will have a high maintenance cost, induce speculation, will eventually lead to an emissions market bubble, be full of negative side effects, and worse of all: it will not make people responsable for pollution and will not change the attitude of corporations on the topic of pollution. Regarding side effects: Without being able to remember the source, I read a stories that in Thailand large plots of jungle are being cleared to create monoculture palm plantations for palm oil production and that for such actions CO2 emissions bonuses are being handed out. If this story is true than it is clear that we have to expect a lot of unwanted negative side effects to the greenhouse gas emission policies.

Ignoring the data that can be interpreted either way and is only as trustworthy as the scientist who created it, it seems to me it is more appropriate to go back to common sense and basic, local thinking. In your own home, would you want to have a source of air pollution? Image for a second as a mind game, that your hot water boiler has some defect and black smoke would come out of it whenever you take a hot shower. Wouldn't you fix it? In the worst case wouldn't you replace it with a new model that does not pollute your own home with smelly smoke that stinks, makes your baby son cough and paints the walls black with time? It seems obvious. You would not put up with such a water boiler for long. You would replace or fix it. I would extrapolate from your home, to your home town, to your home planet. What is good for your home, along common sense, will also be good when applied on a global scale. Setting strict policies that force the reduction of visible pollution as well as green house gases at the source is a simpler, more transparent, more reliable solution to actually reduce emissions and to do it in a controlable and fair manner for the benefit of all and at the cost of the appropriate corresponding consumer groups.

Plastic

If you don't have time to watch "Plastic Planet" or "Addicted to Plastic" watch this different video on the same topic that is a good summary in just 7 minutes. It is entitled "World biggest garbage dump - plastic in the Ocean".

Overdose

"Overdose - The next financial crisis" is an 45-minute Australian-produced documentary explaining the upcoming financial crisis in layman's terms. It was released in August 2010.