A New Dawn

I got up to watch the sunrise this morning... and I haven't blogged in a really long time. While these two things do correlate, there is no causal relationship between them. The same thing caused them. The LSAT is on Tuesday.

I got up this early on a holiday (Indigenous People's Day aka Columbus Day) because I want to be in a routine when the test roles around. And, I haven't been blogging because I study every night.

Though I spend most of my free time studying, it doesn't stop me from encountering things I want to blog about. So, I'm going to post about something briefly that I want to cover more thoroughly later (post-LSAT): internalized cost.

Here's an example of the problems we cause when we don't internalize cost. Cheap toys from China are...well... inexpensive when we buy them in a store. But they're only inexpensive because other costs have been externalized. The laborers in China don't have to be paid as much (they have a lower quality of life) and there aren't as many environmental regulations in China (they're really screwing up the planet over there). These are costs in a very real sense. However, we don't have to pay them because they have been externalized. When we buy products from China, many costs (low quality of life for workers and environmental destruction) aren't built in to the price we pay in the store. China is different from the United States because we have things like minimum wage and environmental regulations so the cost of worker's quality of life and preservation of our environment are built into the price of an American made product.

Now, if we don't care about people in China and believe that low quality of life and environmental destruction in China won't hurt us (hopefully these premises aren't true), who cares about this particular example?

But this is only one example. Another example would be the Iraq War. We didn't pay for the war, we debt financed it and added the expenditures to the deficit.

The Iraq War is unique in the way we paid for it. Never before have we financed a war completely on debt. For every other war we have fought, we have instituted a special "war tax" to pay for it. One can speculate on why this war is different (all about acquiring oil or a massive give-a-way to the military industrial complex--probably both), but it is clear that we have externalized the costs of this war. Our children and grandchildren will have to deal with the debt, but it's not our problem. A more fiscally responsible approach would have been to internalize the cost of the war by instituting a war tax or a gas tax.

A war tax would have simply put us more in touch with the sacrifices of war. And a gas tax would have financially tied the war to it's purpose (in my opinion). We pay less for a gallon of gas at the pump because of the war, but actually that gallon costs much more than we have to pay at the pump. The costs are simply hidden in debt and future national security problems. Essentially, by not having those costs factor in the price of a gallon at the pump, we are circumventing the basic tenets of the market economy. Markets will only function correctly (and correct bad behavior) if all costs are paid by the consumer.

One could argue that the consumers will pay for all costs in this example. If costs aren't paid at the pump, they'll be paid later in the form of debt restructuring or terror attacks. This is true, but because consumers are not omniscient, believe we are capable of avoiding the consequences of our behavior, or simply can't comprehend costs that are significantly removed from the initial purchase, in practicality this undermines the market whether we ultimately pay or not. Companies know this, which is why they continually work to externalize costs.

I thought Ariana Huffington made a really coherent point on Fox News the other day.


Huckabee keeps trying to get her to say that government intervention is bad. She responds by acknowledging that the free market is the best economic system in a moral society. But because our society is not moral, the government must intervene on behalf of the powerless.

A responsible and moral company will work to internalize the costs of their products. In the absence of responsible and moral behavior, "we the people" must insist that companies cease to undermine the very foundation of our economic society.

The expert on this topic is Donella Meadows and her essay Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (it's a life-changing essay, go read it) is what first pointed me toward internalized costs. The essay essentially outlines the most important ways to affect change.

With all the shouting about how to incentivize this and incentivize that, what we need is a systemic fix to our economy. While implementation of system-wide internalization of costs will be difficult and complex, the idea itself is simple: actors in a system ought to bear the cost of their behavior. It is an elegant solution to a big problem.

Given the divisiveness of our political system, it is about time for us to reclaim our government, get down to business, and implement constructive public policy solutions like internalizing costs.

Freedom from Equality

Recently, someone pointed out to me that one of the underlying philosophical difference between the Left (Democrats since the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement) and the Right (Republicans since the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement) is equality vs. freedom.

Note: I'm going to ignore the fact that these parties hardly encompass (look: here and here) the ideas I want to express.

The idea is that the Right reveres freedom above all else (as they point out our founder fathers did) and the Left  highlights equality as most important (as became especially clear during the Civil Rights Movement). Case in point: following the Civil Rights Movement, restaurant owners in the South (and everywhere else) did not have the freedom to refuse service to people for arbitrary reasons (like the pigmentation of their skin).

This example may be favorable to the Left's position, but it's the elephant in the room of American history, so I'd deem it fair.

This debate has raged now at least since the 1950s (much longer actually) over things like income taxes, welfare, capital gains taxes, education, unions, environmental policy, progressive vs. regressive tax structures, and mandatory health insurance. So, pretty much everything economic.

I'd like to side with neither completely. In fact, I'd like to say that we need both. We need both as much freedom as we can get our hands on and a completely level playing field (everyone starts out completely equal and lives their lives from there).

Let me make several observations. We could opt for equality without freedom (benevolent dictator anyone?), but we could not opt for freedom without equality. Here's why:

The legal right to do something does not equate to the freedom to do that thing. Freedom is bigger than legal permissibility. It is the aligning of not just legal, but also financial, emotional, psychological, and mental abilities (etc., etc., and etc.). Take the "ability" of African Americans to vote after the 15th Amendment. The legal ability didn't mean much after southern bigots took over the electoral process after Reconstruction. It took until 1965 and the Voting Rights Act for much change to happen and even then it was gradual. These, of course, were both laws dealing with legal ability, but don't miss my point: there were other factors (besides legal) at play that determined the "freedom" to vote.

Many (or most) of the non-legal barriers to freedom (I hope I don't need to enumerate exactly what these are) would be solved by increased equality. So really, we can't have "freedom" in the true sense of the word if we don't have equality.

We must acknowledge that for our society to achieve personal freedom, we must achieve personal equality. Espousing a policy of "freedom" does not give us freedom from worrying about equality. Rather, Freedom is derived from equality.

The Rat Race

I'm studying for the LSAT.

As you can tell from this photo, everything in my apartment building is mirrored. This actually signifies nothing other than that I took this picture with Photo Booth. Which also signifies nothing except that I was too lazy to go get my camera. Which signifies that I'm getting soft (or that I'm not actually in my apartment, but in the upstairs lobby of my apartment building where there is wireless internet and therefore it would have actually been an ordeal to go get my camera--the important, but unstated, point here is that we don't have internet in our apartment). I digress.

I'm studying for the LSAT. So my day looks something like this:

6:30-awaken and begin Yoga routine (this last part has only happened once to date)
6:45ish-shower
7:00-cook breakfast/eat
7:50-flee the building and race for the nearest metro station
8:00ish-board metro
8:17ish-arrive downtown metro and walk to National Geographic headquarters
8:26-arrive NGS HQ and commence working
17:00-cease working
17:11-board downtown metro
17:36ish-arrive at apartment
17:45-cook dinner and eat
18:45-commence LSAT study
23:00-cease LSAT study
23:30-crawl into bed sobbing

This schedule is a rough outline and doesn't encompass every little deviation, but it's fairly accurate.

The LSAT defines my life right now (well that and also work). I find this interesting since the LSAT could also define my future. I got good grades in college, and I've got fairly good "softs" (things law schools look at that are not your GPA or your LSAT score), so my admission to a good law school comes down to the LSAT. A good score = a good school (and if the score is good enough it get me lots of $cholarship money as well). A good school = a good job. A good job =... well you get the picture.

But enough moaning and groaning. What amazes me is that anyone would want to live this sort of life permanently. I'm only dealing with the LSAT until mid-October, and then I'm never uttering the word again (well it's not really a word...). Furthermore, I am determined to categorically reject the notion that a nine-to-five (or eight thirty-to-five) is necessary for survival.

Here's my plan:

Live simply (read: primitively--e.g. Amish) and therefore need hardly any money and therefore need to devote hardly any time to doing someone else's bidding. Nuff said.

I was thinking the other day about what I could do, that I would enjoy and be passionate about, that someone would be foolish enough to pay me to do. I didn't come up with a long list.

Part of the problem is that getting paid for something takes all the fun out of it (at least for me). So the solution is to minimize the amount of time I spend making money (a few hours doing some small-town lawyering here and there), while also minimizing my need for money.

Luckily, living simply is good for the planet AND my soul. Also luckily, I don't have a penchant for Dolce and Gabbana (read: luxury consumer goods), or none of this would work.

Kick the habit, reject the wheel, live simply.

Your car wears out on purpose

Toward the end of the 1920s new car sales were slowing. In fact, used car sales exceeded new car sales. Cars were made so well (and their styles didn't change much), so people just kept their cars that were still working fine. Cars never really wore out, but instead stayed in "circulation" being passing from diver to driver.

Along came the assembly line and the increased ability of building cars in a more uniform way. To make a long story short, automakers (most-notably Ford and GM) decided they would design their vehicles to "wear-out." This idea is called "planned obsolescence" or "designed deterioration."

Planned obsolescence takes two forms. The first is that products physically wear out and break down. In this way, companies can "force" consumers to buy new products (because the old model broke) so that we keep giving them our money.

Re-visiting the movie Objectified, one of the designers talked about a leather briefcase he had inherited from his father that improved with use. And while he was reminiscing, he gave us a glimpse into the fact that this is rare:

Sometimes I get that task, which is, 'design something that gets better with use.' Right, there's very few things if you think about it, they mostly degrade, but, um, some things like this briefcase gets [sic] better with use. 

It's sad that the idea of creating a product that gets better with use is novel. It's pretty clear that companies design products that purposely degrade.

I first encountered this concept in my sophomore U.S. History class at the Framingham State College. We talked for quite some time about how Henry Ford stopped designing cars well and began to design cars that would quit working in a decade or two.

But Planned Obsolescence has another, more overt form (if you've been reading the links you've probably already picked up on it). See, car companies introduce a "new" car every year (do you have a 2010 Prius or the 2011 model?). They don't do this because they've made some technological break-through (in fact substantive changes come far less often), rather, they do it because they've found consumers are more likely to buy a new car if a "new" model comes out.

Think about computers. I do basically the same thing on this computer that I did on my computer five years ago. But, because new operating systems come along and require better computers, most of us find ourselves upgrading to the newer "better" models.

This is a system designed to keep us buying "new" products even though we often don't need whatever is being called "new."

Another interviewee from Objectified had this to say:

If I had a billion dollars to fund a marketing campaign, I would launch a campaign on behalf of things you already own: 'Why not enjoy them today?'

Though companies benefit financially from planned obsolescence, our planet does not. All of the things we junk, have to go somewhere (usually landfills) and we just keep on creating more.

I'd like us to be more materialistic. Not in wild acquisition of consumer goods, but rather in cherishing the things we own and preserving them so that we get a lifetime of use out of the things we buy. Let us shift away from acquisition and towards preservation.

People who design sinks never wash their hands

Yesterday, I watched this movie about design. The movie observed the ways things are designed to interact with us. In actuality, it was a celebration of consumer materialism and the cleverness of designers who are continuously designing things for us to buy.

My first emotion while watching the movie was anger (though not about what you might suspect). Specifically, I was angry about the way most bathroom sinks in public spaces (and everywhere in England) are designed. During my childhood, I became obsessed with hand-washing (no doubt a symptom of our bacillophobic society). This obsession led me to observe that in order to get my hands absolutely clean in a public restroom, I had to be very careful. Many sinks are designed in such a way that if I want to get water on my hands (kind of the point), I have to touch the back of the sink bowl. The problem is that the spout does not reach far enough into the sink bowl to be easily accessible.

I took this picture today at the local McDonald's (don't worry, I wasn't eating there--I just walked in, took this picture, and left):

Am I missing something, or is this design totally absurd (comical maybe, like some really funny practical joke)? While I can't think of a reason someone would design a sink this way (unless they never washed their hands--hmmm, this reminds me of a guy I knew who worked in the aerospace industry, but refused to ride on airplanes... though... that's actually scary), I can think a few reasons why it shouldn't be designed this way--namely, I don't want to have to smear my hands on the sink bowl just to get water on them.

After a few minutes of fuming about sinks, I realized that there are much bigger issues at stake here.

One interviewee said:

Designers spend most of their time designing products and services for the 10% of the world's population that already own too much when 90% don't have even basic products and services just to lead a subsistent life.

The significance of that statement needs no interpretation--we're addicted to stuff beyond any logical need.

I liked where she was going, but when she started talking about sustainability, I was disappointed. She said that since designing in a sustainable way is such a "mammoth task,... it's no wonder designers and manufactures are finding it so difficult." The only reason that designing in a sustainable way is a "mammoth task" is because companies would rather expand profit margins than save the planet. One might point out that making money has to be the ultimate goal of a corporate entity because without profit a company cannot exist. But, I propose that any company that destroys our world as a byproduct of it's business should not exist.

But the problems with profit margins don't stop at cutting corners to make a buck. Products often serve the purpose of merely being bought. One interviewee said this:

Often the way that a product comes into being isn't because a bunch of expert designers sat down and said 'what are the 10 most important problems that we could solve?' There is a company that's writing a check and what the company wants is new SKUs they want more stuff and they want more people to buy it and that's the name of the game.

I don't know why companies don't have designers sit down and solve our problems, but if they did, maybe they wouldn't have to spend all that money on advertising (read: brainwashing) to convince us we  should buy products that don't really solve any of our problems.

Some of the designers that were interviewed showed signs of "being too immersed in their field" (read: insanity). One particular designer (who I will remember for the distinct care he took while forming his sentences) seemed to value good design quite highly:

People need to, like, demand that [a designed product] performs for them and that is special in their lives, these objects that they buy. You can't make your GPS thing work in your car? There should be like a riot because they're so poorly designed. 

He's saying that if a product is not designed well, we should riot (sinks anyone?). But you know what? I think we ought to riot about the fact that 20,000 children die of hunger each day (that's the low estimate), rather than that my GPS could have been more logically designed. But that's just me.

Metallak Island

Just got back from Metallak Island, Maine.

It was great to get away from screens and news and all the noise we are bombarded with constantly.

Further, it was a revolutionary week in that we were all so connected to the material. While there was a cabin on the island, it was free of electricity and the only water came from a hand-pump. Obviously camping is a pretty standard way of getting in touch with nature, but the Metallak experience went beyond the typical sitting around the fire and listening to birds.

Alban invited me to Metallak. The trip is a yearly tradition of his immediate and extended family as well as other close families. The people who participate in the Metallak tradition are the most innovative people I have encountered.

One evening, we needed a cheese grater (I should note here that when it comes to food, Metallak is not roughing it. Though the cooking methods are primitive, the food is unrivaled.) So, Cousin John took a tin can... and made a cheese grater.

That sort of attitude is pretty contagious. For instance, there were numerous woodworking projects during the week (that I will not reveal now for reasons that will become apparent around Christmas) that took hours of our time, but rewarded us with visceral connection to the things we made.

In fact, if Metallak didn't show me anything else (and it did), it showed me that we are fully capable of making common consumer goods that are just as good or better than the mass produced stuff. I'm not saying we should all make the switch to tin-can cheese graters, but we ought to consider connecting to the things we use by making them ourselves. I'm talking about making our own furniture, sewing our own throw pillows or clothes, building our own houses, whatever.

The master woodworker on the island, "Uncle Tim," told me about the canoe paddles he had made and noted that he would be more ahead financially if he had paid someone else to build them and had spent the time at the office instead (he's a physician). "But," he said, "I enjoy working with my hands in the workshop. I get enough headwork at the office and it's good to balance those out."

I might have trouble making complex electronic goods like the MacBook Pro I'm typing on right now (all the more reason to distance ourselves from them), but I'd like to point out that this is not an "all or nothing" proposition. I choose to stare at this glowing rectangle and write this blog for a variety of reasons even though I'd rather live a life completely free of electronics, the internet, and all the things that go along with them.

However, I also recognize that this is the "digital age" and if I want to be a part of the conversation about how this world is going to progress, I have to go where the conversation is taking place (though John the Baptist might disagree).

Plus, another challenge is that most people don't have the time to chop a tree into a dining-room table. If you're working 80 hours a week you probably aren't in the mood for rushing home to the workshop (at least I wouldn't be). Downshifting is an appropriate thing to mention at this juncture (let's please re-evaluate our priorities), but the point I want to make is that any little bit helps. Building a home might be beyond the capabilities of most, but is making a rag-rug, or a quilt, or a bookcase, or a bird-house? Once someone experiences making things with their own two hands instead of using those hands to push a shopping cart through Walmart, they'll be hooked--I know I am.

I think two mantras would go well here:

First, every little bit helps.

And second,

You must be the change you want to see in the world. --Mahatma Gandhi  

Why the Department of Defense spends money like a sieve

It turns out that, until very recently, we weren't insulating any of our buildings in Iraq or Afganistan (but were still air-conditioning them). Uh, it doesn't take an HVAC specialist to realize that's going to waste a lot of money. There's got to be other ways to save money that are no-brainers.

Here's Robin Young's Here and Now on WBUR with an interview of a soldier who did something about it and is now saving us billions (literally).