Category Archives: Globalization

guns or butter?

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This clever site offers some insight into the cost of the Iraq War in dollar terms.   Human costs are of course ultimately more important than money, but most people simply refuse to recognize that when you are talking about things like war and hunger the *human costs* often boil down to dollar costs.

You can save  LOT of people in the developing world by allocating a relatively small number of dollars, especially if they are spent on famine or health items. More about that later as politically and emotionally motivated spending is a fascinating examination of human irrationality.

The human death toll in Iraq (or even the total global WAR death TOLL) simply pales in comparison to the global hunger OR health tolls.   It's a factor of many thousands of preventable hunger deaths for every ONE (arguably NON-preventable) Iraq war death. 

Unlike most fiscal conservatives I simply stagger from the failures of the neocons when it comes to intelligent budgeting and ROI.    McCain, very much to his credit, was talking about this years ago and is talking about it now.  

People Always Love It Only

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I've found a new table tennis rubber sheet I really like with one of those funny, malapropesque Chinese names.    It's the "PALIO" CJ 8000 tension model.    PALIO means "People always love it only".  The numbers and other stuff might make some sense – I don't know.

But I do love my PALIO sheets and have ordered more.  At about 10.00 per sheet they are a third the cost of comparable German or Japanese rubber and so far feel about the same as the German equivalent.

I've GOT to get to China – both to see the changes, internet buzz, and to play some great table tennis with my Palio! 

Web 2.0 as the “generous” internet

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Over at O'Reilly's blog there is an excellent discussion about the nature of biz in a Web 2.0 world (why does the term Web 2.0 BOTHER so many people?  Get over it!)

Doc Searls seems to suggest that old style biz is selfish where new style is generous, sharing resources in a virtually unrestricted way.   One poster suggests, I think wrongly, that generosity comes after affluence.   Based on my experiences I'm often surprised that when I share ideas openly and honestly I build trust with people and that trust leads to opportunity *for everybody in the equation*.   Sure there is a *chance* that somebody will nab your idea, implement it better than you can, and do great thing.   But that is:

1) OK because ideas, even great ideas, are not a key component of change.  The key is a fully implemented great idea and is a much taller order. 

2) unlikely, because they are probably working on a new angle or different idea or implementation anyway.  At MashupCamp I was pleased and surprised how few people were even interested in doing some of the things I thought would make "great mashups" in the travel space.  Why?  Because they were busy with THEIR vision of the next big thing.  Cool, and the best part is that the collective intelligence in such a group, or in the internt community at large, leads to a sort of *collective* expanion of horizons and creation *even better* stuff than without the open exchanges.    I'd note that MSN's traditional failure to understand and harness this power may be their biggest impediment to moving ahead successfully in the new Web world.

What one should seek in the new "generous" internet are relationships and mechanisms (e.g. blogs, websites, wikis, wifi, free computers, etc, etc) that foster bigger and better ideas which in turn will foster bigger and better improvements to the global web, still a very immature system.

Laziness and self interest as the means of production?

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One of the most common and legitimate criticisms of both  public and private sector enterprises is that they are run in ways that serve narrow, often selfish interests rather than the broad public good.  

In the private sector this takes the form of profitability, sometimes attained at the expense of "doing the right thing".  In the public sector one often finds that spending can be very inefficient due to lack of incentives – sometimes more a function of political pressure and interest group influences than common sense and the public good.

In many cases one could argue that in business the short term return on investment is too important where in Government it's not important enough.

Whoops – I got off the point.  I was wondering about how a model of production would look if you characterized activity primarily in terms of how people *avoid* work and feather their own nests at other's expense.  How businesses use regulation to thwart competition and create unneeded goods and services.

Just a thought 

Pure Water for All

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This water purification system sure looks promising and Kudos to Rotary for working to promote it.  Using simple, low cost methods it can purify water using only ceramics and gravity.   A higher tech but also inspiring approach is  this machine promoted and invented by Dean Kamen of Sedgeway  and other invention fame.
Clean water is among earth’s greatest challenges to humanity since disease is often spread via unsafe water supplies in the developing and undeveloped world.
Hey FOX news – some might even want to hear about these innovations in between the latest celebrity gossip or missing upper middle class party people.

$100 Laptops Rock. Bill’s wrong. But the Gates Foundation still rules.

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I was sorry to see Bill Gates bashing MIT’s $100 Laptop project

Gates’ credentials as an advocate for the developing world are unsurpassed, but I’d guess he’s reacting more to the fact this is a Google sponsored project than legitimate concerns about it’s viability.

I love the $100 Laptop Project not so much because it will bring tech to the poor, especially children (though it will do that), but because it will help to rapidly and aggressively break down what I see as the key barrier to development which is the lack of communication and exchange between “them” and “us”.

A dictator’s tyranny or a famine in Nigeria will take on a whole new relevance when THEIR kids are all playing video games and instant messaging with OUR kids.

Bill, you got this one wrong, dawg. But the Gates Foundation remains the world’s most heroic development effort.

Crash beats Brokeback, author’s rant rings hollow, kids still go hungry

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Not a fan of the predictable unrealism of the Best Picture Oscar winner “Crash”, I certainly agree with most of what Annie Proulx says about Crash and its admirers. She wrote the story on which Brokeback Mountain is based and I think she’s suggesting that police racism directed against rich hollywood folks is low on the social priority list of all but the out of touch.

But somehow Proulx’s rant rings hollow as well, failing to note the obvious.  The success of Brokeback also owes much to that same crowd who are so very out of touch with mainstream sensibilities, let alone global sensibilities.

The world is struggling with an overwhelming number of social challenges now. Neither Crash nor Brokeback addressed any of them, as Hollywood only very rarely does. More than 99.9% of the world’s population would place the challenges faced by the sexually conflicted, let along sexually conflicted american cowboys, somewhat lower on their priority list than Annie does.

So, why can’t hollywood produce more REAL films about REAL people facing REAL global challenges? Sometimes they do it but it’s rare. Beyond Borders very nobly tried to tackle hunger and development issues but could not rise above critics and perhaps Angelina Jolie’s screen persona which overshadowed the story. The Killing Fields and Hotel Rwanda brilliantly brought unspeakable tragedies to the big screen. But these films are the total exceptions in a sea of gratuitous sex, violence, and unrealistic stereotypes.

Why can’t all that cleverness, marketing hype, and technology be used in a concerted effort to address the key global challenges of our time – the lack of basic food, water, shelter, health care, and infrastructure in the developing world?

For every Brokeback cowboy there are millions of hungry kids – when are you going to write their story, Annie Proulx?

Time gets Web 2.0

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Time Magazine notes:

From politics to movie-making, from NASA to NASCAR, exciting new changes are occurring — and so is the very process of innovation. For one thing, corporations and universities no longer dominate the world of new ideas. Instead, we’re living in an age of individual innovation spurred on by the Internet as well as a form of group project best represented by resources like Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that is edited by the masses instead of an elite cadre of professional editors.

I like it.  I’m big on the implications of the explosive growth of global online communities, the programmable web and all the other cool things that happen when the notion of social and corporate networking is extended to an increasingly robust global information network (aka “the internet”).

How the money will flow in this brave new networked world extravaganza is less clear than how the information and innovation will flow.   Wall street still views and invests as if heavily capitalized, large corporations will dominate the landscape for some time, though they are again warming up to the idea that little companies can make a big difference.  Myspace.com’s 580 million valuation and Skype’s even higher number give even the humblest small biz programming people cause to work a bit harder to find “the next big thing”.

Self Help or Self Ish?

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I’m sure there is some virtuous stuff amidst the current swirl of motivationally spoken self-helping new ageified banter, but I can’t [self] help but think “hey, this is mostly just a license for people to feel comfortable about doing whatever they darn well please”.

At least with much of the bible thumping old time religion there is an undercurrent of helpfulness and broad social responsibility. Also the new and improved and globilized business models are paying more than lip service to the idea that business responsibility goes far beyond profits for shareholders. This includes the big beneficiaries of big biz. One needs look no farther than the Gates Foundation or Google.org or the Omidyar (Ebay founder) efforts with Microloans to see how powerful this new business ethic has become in solving real world problems.

Many new age folks would suggest that there is some form of collective consciousness and that participating at that level does much good for the world. I’m very skeptical. Tell that to the kid in Africa with AIDs or Malaria or no clean water. They’ll (correctly) choose water purification to soul purification, and we should all get that set of priorities straight.

Concern as a function of distance

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Fascinating and very relevant to “problem solving” is how we prioritize our charitable acts.    Seems theat he closer you get to your own location – geographically or psychologically – the more likely you are to “chip in”.    Thus an American is more comfortable giving to the local school than to one in another state and to schools in the USA more than in India.

This is probably logical from a “survival” and evolutionary perspective, especially when you are helping a family member and therefore increasing the  chances of reciprocal behavior and passing along of your own genetics to future generation.

However I think I prefer the approach where you look at the return on investment.  For example I could give 1000 to a local university and help a student for … a month.   Or I could give that thousand to an India school and help 5+ students for a whole year (I guesstimate).