Monday, March 31, 2008

Craigslist; laptop batteries

I hooked up with one of my employers via Craigslist.com (worcester) and realized how useful it is.  Once we posted a size 24 wedding dress for free and it found a new home within the week. 

Today I'm listening the Personal Computer Show from March 26th.  That's one of my podcasts from WBAI.  They're conducting an interview with the CEO, Jim Buckmaster.  Craigslist has 24 employees and gets 10 billion page views per month!  He says that while they do make sure they run a financially solid business, their underlying purpose is to maximize the social good that they can do at the site, and to be as useful as they can be to as many people who want or need the service.

On another topic, there was a big fire in Korea at a factory (LG Chem) which produces many of the backup batteries for laptops.  Turns out there are some very tight supply lines for computers so when something like this happens it can really affect a lot of people.  

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Letter to the Editor

Look, my first ever letter to an editor.

To the Editor:

Waking up Easter morning to a taste of Swiss chocolate, I am reminded that our economy is still quite intact. The cocoa beans were grown in Africa, the sugar in South America. Making the bar of chocolate required complex machinery and expertise born of years of schooling. The end result: an Easter treat at a cost of what I earn in about 5 minutes.

Change is on the horizon. Oil and natural gas production is leveling off, and the costs of extracting what's left are rising steadily, plus the competition to use these materials is growing. Our local economy is going to evolve quite soon into quite a different beast.

We need to look around a little further than to question whether to buy a Prius or a car that runs on diesel. Used anything plastic today? Eaten anything not grown locally? Most of our food is entirely dependent on oil and related products -- not just to transport it or run the farm machinery, but to supply all the fertilizers and pesticides. Don't forget the toiletries, medicines, synthetic fibers, or the energy embodied in anything made of metal in your home.

We need to take the time to understand the ways cheap energy and petroleum-based materials are intertwined with the world we live in: the layout of the land, how we do our shopping, where we go for medical care, what the roads are made out of, how far away our loved ones live. The amount of cheap energy available to us equates to each of us having few hundred personal slaves doing extra chores. The resulting disposable income (aka extra energy) has enabled us to fund education, a big government, $500 billion international expeditions, and a fancy entertainment industry. The energy in a gallon of gas, at a whopping $4, is equal to about 120 hours of human labor.

Let's enjoy the chocolate, and everything else we take for granted, but at the same time let's begin to envisage a world radically different, and plan accordingly. It can all work out for the best, but only after many of us awake to what we have, what we could or will lose soon, and what the alternatives will be.

Rebecca Hyde
Woodstock


Wednesday, March 12, 2008

New York




Going to NY tomorrow.  I'm starting to get that not-quite-here feeling.  Oof.  Took some shots today of Meera playing with Michele in the field.  Meera can run really fast now.


that's the part 1 link and here's the part 2:


The later makes a surprisingly convincing case for the possibility of ramping up a full-scale societal effort to actually reduce atmospheric carbon levels below today's levels.  He's pretty sure that with levels as they are today the arctic ice cap will melt within a few years, followed quickly by all the Greenland ice, and much of the northern permafrost.  Altogether too many positive feedback loops which our species would be better off avoiding.