Category: Me Myself&I

Derek is so right! Here’s his reasoning:

If I buy a book in one format, it doesn’t seem fair to pay full price to get it in another format. That would be paying twice for the same content.

Let’s separate these two things:

1. Contents: the words in a book
2. Delivery: the ways to get the words into your brain: paper, audio, PDF, HTML, etc.

What we really want is to buy the contents, not delivery.

With so many different devices now, it seems fair that if you buy the contents of a book, it should include all formats of delivery. EPUB, MP3, Kindle, M4B, PDF, HTML, or whatever new formats may come in the future.

Today you want to read silently by the fire. Tomorrow you want to listen while you drive. In ten years, you want to read it again on your new device. This should all be included when you buy a book.

That gave me an idea: what if device manufacturers were doing the same? Say you buy a phone but instead of getting a new one in 18 months through your carrier, you just get lifetime support. That is, the manufacturer does everything it can to make the device last. Changing parts one by one if/when they wear out, for a small fee.

Imagine how much savings we would be doing. Imagine phones that last at least five years. Imagine the staggering amount of rare minerals, toxic sludge, sweat and blood that we would save from spilling all over this planet.

We NEED to consume less. Smarter. Let’s go.

August 28 2021, 4:52pm ~ still going.

This is one of the best skateboarding video ever. It came out last year but I only watched it early this summer.

I watched it a few times. Times 10.

It’s so perfectly iconic. The music, the editing, the camaraderie, the tricks, the styles.

I could go on.

The skateboard company behind that vid is valley-based Illegal Civ, which has been very active on YouTube.

Y’all have to sponsor Noe Solis. His part like all of them, is so dope.

And there again, I watched it again. Davonte, you’re the man brother. Thank you, thank you.

When I clicked on a button and Google said “we’ll attempt to..” I knew I would get that Overstock email until I die.

If I have a tombstone, I’m pretty sure Overstock will find a way to get their freaking sale engraved on it.

Unrelated but it looks like autocorrect is getting worse, how is that possible after 15 iterations of an OS? I don’t know. Let’s breathe.

The Chicago Sky won their first WNBA title last weekend. Candace Parker is from Chicago and had just landed on the team roster last season after a few years with the Los Angeles Sparks.

It’s a great story. The WNBA playoffs this year were amazing. Shout out to miss Copper who was so relentless the entire series.

Yup, the WNBA was fully vaccinated by the end of May while the NBA still isn’t yet.  Almost 60,000 people died from COVID-19 last month in America (only 8,000 died in June).

Something something women get stuff done.

And ACT on it. (part 1, part 2)

Key points:

– The green energy transition is not really happening.

– In practice, the life expectancy of a wind turbine may be less than 15 years. Solar panels may last a few years longer but with declining efficiency, so both turbines and panels have to be replaced regularly at great financial, energy and environmental cost.

Neoliberal economics is ecologically blind. Even Nobel laureate economists argue that we must maintain allegiance to growth and the illusion of “rescue-by-technology” so the next generation has the wealth and techno-mechanics to mitigate the consequences of climate change. Consistent with this illusory reasoning, many national and corporate leaders interpret the threat of climate chaos as an investment opportunity.

It’s awful. But! We can change that. Here’s the plan in 11 steps (emphasis is mine):

1. Formal recognition of the end of material growth and the need to reduce the human ecological footprint;

2. Acknowledgement that, as long as we remain in overshoot — exploiting essential ecosystems faster than they can regenerate — sustainable production/consumption means less production/consumption;

3. Recognition of the theoretical and practical difficulties/impossibility of an all-green quantitatively equivalent energy transition;

4. Assistance to communities, families and individuals to facilitate the adoption of sustainable lifestyles (even North Americans lived happily on half the energy per capita in the 1960s that we use today);

5. Identification and implementation of strategies (e.g., taxes, fines) to encourage/force individuals and corporations to eliminate unnecessary fossil fuel use and reduce energy waste (half or more of energy “consumed” is wasted through inefficiencies and carelessness);

6. Programs to retrain the workforce for constructive employment in the new survival economy;

7. Policies to restructure the global and national economies to remain within the remaining “allowable” carbon budget while developing/improving sustainable energy alternatives;

8. Processes to allocate the remaining carbon budget (through rationing, quotas, etc.) fairly to essential uses only, such as food production, space/water heating, inter-urban transportation;

9. Plans to reduce the need for interregional transportation and increase regional resilience by re-localizing essential economic activity (de-globalization);

10. Recognition that equitable sustainability requires fiscal mechanisms for income/wealth redistribution;

11. A global population strategy to enable a smooth descent to the two to three billion that could live comfortably indefinitely within the biophysical means of nature.

If we don’t do exactly that,

It is a key number in economics.

For small businesses (still the vast majority of businesses around the world), the average profit margin is under 10%. Restaurants are most likely around 3%. What that means is that for every $100 spent by a business, they make $3 in (return) profit. And that’s when things are good. Gas stations hover around 2% profit margin. Shit is rough.

An app store, like the info about Google Play showed us recently, has a profit margin of over 60%. Yup, from every $100 spent, Google makes 60 bucks.

This is, simply put, insane profit margin. Absolutely batshit insane.

You would think that yeah sure, software IS a high profit margin business. True. But over 60% profit margin and they never gave a bigger share to their developers, ever? And then they want to give a bigger share to one developer called Netflix, who doesn’t need a cut because they’re a thriving business? It’s wild. NDAs and “soft” monopolies are enabling all kinds of abuse and supercharging greed.

By the way Apple has a profit margin of 68% on their latest phones, so it’s not like Big Tech is only profiting like crazy on software. To reach a margin that high on a physical, expensive device is another level of ruthlessness: imagine hundreds of suppliers getting squeezed, dealing with single digit profit margins at best, hearing that their client boast how they’re printing money while avoiding paying taxes. Infuriating.

This is why there’s capitalism (mom and pop restaurant trying to satisfy customers and simply be) and there’s capitalism (absolute abuse of power from overly wealthy company to extract staggering, not-shared profit while doing the least possible).

Rare high rises make them a lot more special, just sayin’

I wrote about Broadacre City before. I just saw a great comment about it and its place in our future:

In my opinion, reviewing the Broadacre City as social reform for everyone actually has a lot to offer… Surely, Urbanists insist that density solves all carbon-emissions concerns, but as we’re learning, the world is shifting to more of a "work from home" model, for one thing.. More concerning, at least to me, is the overwhelming research and evidence that modern urban lifestyles are producing unhealthy and stressed out people.
Just to discuss health, it’s now abundantly clear that human beings were evolved to be on their feet, moving around, in the sun, in the fresh air, eating foods that come right out of the ground… Surely, Wright saw naturalism as an aesthetic value and a philosophical one (in the realm of Whitman). But his concept, as it pertains to healthy lifestyles, offers a remarkable amount of equity in primary human well-being.
We talk about future communities that offer fresh, local produce and animal proteins, grown conscientiously by small farmers. We talk about places to walk and run and ride bicycles where the air is clean and there is minimal danger. We talk about schools that have healthy air circulation* and places for children to run around in grassy fields. We talk about obesity and how lack of these things produce it. We talk about mental health problems, and how lack of these things produce it. Etc.

A 100 percent.

Urbanists don’t have common sense. Life demonstrates constantly that people have different ways of living and you want to cram them closer and closer to deal with it? Sounds like you’re not listening.

Relationships are terrible these days because people are stressed out by this super intense life, it’s so obvious for people who experienced something else at some point. High urban density (outside extremely homogenous population) is a disaster. They say it’s more efficient in terms of carbon-emission, I’d say it’s making people ultra dependent and more sheepish than ever, which is a good thing for many, many companies. It’s good for business, I get it.

It’s bad for our communities and societies though. And this is where FLW’s city concept is far from being naïve or idealist.

I grew up in the countryside, and then in the suburbs. I lived for ten years in a top 10 denser cities in the world. Now in the infinite suburban Los Angeles, I enjoy everything that I enjoyed previously: quiet field of grass if I want to. Busy skatepark if I want to. Fancy restaurant if I want to. Huge movie theater, a bicycle ride, a car ride, I can do it all and I wish that to everyone. It’s the best. Suburbia is queen.

Now give me a small, FLWish house with radiant heating floors and I’m golden, making bloopidy bloops in my workshop.

I mean,

If billions of dollars are spent on AR/VR for decades to show how no one is using it in 2021,

If a company with a failed AR set can still raise $500M in 2021,

If companies can hide billions of dollars in taxes all the time,

If hundreds of people playing games on camera are millionaires,

If the state of California hit by a pandemic, somehow ends up with a surplus of *checks notes* 24 to 75 billion dollars,

If people can pay millions of dollars for a .jpg file “certificate”,

If people can “invest” in crypto and get scammed in the millions of dollars range,

If Los Angeles still allocates $1.76B a year to police when crime is at its lowest in over 20 years,

If Panama and Pandora leaks demonstrate that most world leaders (often demanding austerity from us, citizens) are hiding staggering amounts of wealth all around the world,

What is money, and why are we acting like it’s part of the periodic table? It’s totally made up, foh.

I was talking about how innovation doesn’t drive anything anymore because we pretty much have everything already, capitalism’s end of the road, etc. Well, another example of that (HN comment):

My last company tried really hard to pitch AR/VR projects. Using headsets, phones even the Bose sunglasses. It was a huge struggle to find anything compelling to do with AR even when it worked. We ended up selling a few nifty marketing experiences and artsy installations but they were like 30 second experiences and not useful for anything. The tech "works", it’s just not very compelling.

Think about phone AR which works very smoothly and Apple/Google have been investing in hardware upgrades to enhance AR experiences yet it’s been 5 years since Pokemon Go and no one has figured out another interesting thing to do with it.

It’s not that we can’t innovate, it’s just that that innovation goes nowhere because human beings are completely satisfied, in so many ways. VR/AR don’t bring anything that we don’t already have. Decades, billions of dollars and we’re still facing laptops most of the day because those not only are enough, they’re just perfect for what we do.

Then we leave them on a desk, close them and go do human things around, in the sun maybe.