Pedestrian SUVs

I can honestly say I do not care for umbrella’s. In the pedestrian world, people with umbrella’s are the SUVs. Umbrellas are oversized and impractical. They do the job of a hood. There is no value added by having an umbrella. Your pants still get wet. You keep your jacket dry, which is intended to get wet and keep your shirt dry, so there’s no real point there.

In some ways, however, umbrellas are even worse than SUVs. SUVs are constrained to a single lane on the road. Even if they fill it pretty tightly, they cannot spill over. A single umbrella can cover an entire sidewalk, slowing or blocking the traffic of people moving behind them. Stepping off the sidewalk easily results in water in the shoes, soaking the socks, leading to a general state of misery for the rest of the day. I really don’t like wet socks. I keep a pair of dry socks at work as an emergency in case a puddle incident happens. Not everyone can do this, and so must suffer soaked sock syndrome when forced to bypass an umbrella walker while in a hurry to get to work.

Umbrellas are dangerous. Shorter people hold them at a level that is just right to smack a taller person in eye. I’ve had more than one umbrella spoke glance off my glasses.

Umbrellas can lead to dumb behavior. I’ve seen a woman stand and get completely soaked because her umbrella got blown inside out, rather than walk the remaining 15 yards to cover with her umbrella. I cannot count the number of times someone comes to a door, stops, takes the time to collapse and shake the rain off their umbrella, all the while blocking the door while people try to get in or out.

So please, if possible, leave the umbrella at home if you can. If you’re walking with a little one whose hood cannot stay up, or in a stroller with no cover, use them by all means. I will not begrudge you. But if you’re strolling down the path side by side with a friend, talking about what so and so said at lunch yesterday while a pack of 8 people wait behind you for an opportunity to get past, please leave the umbrella at home.

I do not care for umbrellas.

CAD Blues

Badum! Badum!
The model won't regenerate!
Badum! Badum!
The sketches are bad!
Badum! Badum!
Promotion requests are screwy!
Badum! Badum!
No approvers to be had!
Badum! Badum!
I'm up working late!
Badum! Badum!
And my left eye is dead!
Badum! Badum!
What the hell is iritis?
Badum! Badum!
CAD says this part's gotta be made out of lead!?!?!

I've got the CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD Blues!!

Is Globalization good for the environment?

We recycle a fair amount. Often enough, that we wish the recycling was picked up every week and the trash pickup was only once every two weeks, the reverse of what it is now.

That being said, if I decided to stop recycling, the impact on a global scale would be pretty small. Yes, every little bit helps, but for global change that means you’re relying on a lot of people to go out of their way when there is little incentive beyond the basic “I feel good because I’m doing my part”

How much money is spent on awareness campaigns to encourage people to do something just because it’s the right thing to do?

Consider two models:

One is a vast array of 10,000 small, self sufficient farms. Everyone operates in a largely self sufficient way, occasionally bartering with their neighbors, but nothing more beyond that. For each farm you have basic overhead (the farmers) as well as infrastructure: Barns, fences, and hand tools. Historically, a system like this has allowed people to subsist, but not necessarily prosper. If a season goes well, you eat well that year. If a season goes badly, you starve to death. Morever, let’s say that out of 20 lbs you harvest, you lose 1 lb to damage, spilling, general human error.  That’s 5% waste, but to the individual it’s only 1 lb. Multiply it by 10,000 farms and you’ve got 10,000 lbs of waste. But, the cost of saving that last 1 lb becomes prohibitively expensive for an individual farmer.

Model #2: One farm that occupies the same area as the previous 10,000. There are fewer barns, farm houses and fences, meaning that more land is available for farming because of reduced overhead. Suddenly, a single farmer is faced with the prospect of 10,000 lbs of wasted food, you can bet they’re ready and willing to invest the capital to reduce that, because it means more food for profit, because by this time they’re making far more than they need, and are selling off the excess. While I acknowledge that greed is a vice, it’s one that can be leveraged to do good, no?

Obviously, one giant farm that produces all of the food for the world is a bad idea, because monopolies are a bad idea. Free markets dictate that people will choose the price, and competition is necessary for people to have a choice to dictate that price. But does that mean that an inherently more viable market economy is intrinsically more wasteful? Is the best system an oligarchy of farms under the watchful eye of publicly funded watchdog group ensuring that the farms collaborate on efficiency, but compete on price? Is that even fair to the markets? If everyone is on equal footing, then they are dependent on geography and weather to produce competitive yields, and those will never be the same. If we then impose restrictions on sale prices, or subsidize those that had a bad year, we’ve just taken away the market incentive to be competitive.

I’ve always perceived globalization as a homogenization of larger corporations leveraging global resources to optimize efficiencies (which tend to reduce waste and emissions) as a means of maximizing their profits. This has the benefit of also being better for the environment. But does that mean that what is good for the environment is bad for the economy? If so, then who wins?

I guess I support the current method. Let free markets reign while attempting to increase awareness and leverage available knowledge and tools to increase individual’s efficiency and environmental responsibility.

At the very least, I will keep recycling.

The war on paper, part 4

I think it’s fair to warn I’ll be talking about this for a while. Given that there’s little about work I’m permitted to speak about, and for fear of becoming one of those parents who speak incessantly about their child as though he’s the first person to ever go through any of that (though those posts will emerge, to be sure), I’m going to stick with this topic for a bit. At least until I’ve managed to win the war, or achieve a cease fire.

For comparison sake: Here is the filing cabinet:

And here is what scans the paper:

There’s obviously more to it than that. What do you do with the paper when you’re done with it? What do you do with the things that you can’t scan? What about data loss?

I have answers to most of those questions, but not all. As they become more relevant I will update. But for now, I’ve still only gotten as far as the 2006 finances.

So, I will simply link to a video of Alex crawling with his freakingly adorable hat on.