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Sunday, August 17, 2003 |
We watched the '60 Minutes' report tonight on the risks to commerical airliners from the plethora of shoulder-fired ground-to-air missles throughout the world. [Summary: we're cruisin' for a bruisin'; Senator Charles Schumer wants to spend $10b to outfit the US commercial airlines with counter-measures; the process, if you can call it that, is moving very slowly.
It's almost as if they want occassional catastrophes, Jane mused, as an excuse for continuing to clamp down on civil liberties..
Could be, but there are simpler reasons. All you have to do is look at the way large institutions so often fail to act in their own interests -- due to inertia, distraction, turf issues, procedural obstacles, ego and so many more reasons. We've seen many clients walk away from large and certain financial returns -- for example from eco-efficiency initiatives -- due to one sort or another of an organizational inability to make the decision. The technical issues are simple, compared to the orneriness of minds ands organization.
This is where the art of change unfolds: finding the way for the right thing to happen anyway. Fortunately, it can be done.
(And lest we forget, this is not just a problem for corporations an dgovernments; we've all seen these same difficulties in families, relationships, and our own individual beings, too.)
8:41:16 PM 
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[Rocky Mountain Institute]: Eastern Power Outage Unfortunate but Entirely Predictable; Event Offers Wake-Up Call for U.S. Energy Policymakers
Calling the massive August 14 power outages in the Northeastern United States "a wake-up call to decision makers," officials at the twenty-year-old Rocky Mountain Institute said Americans should look to distributed, diverse, and resilient clean technologies to power their industries, homes, and communities. America's existing system--based on a hundred years' worth of heavily centralized generation and distribution policies--can trigger a cascading series of errors that leaves us vulnerable and should be corrected.
In fact RMI predicted this in their Brittle Power report to the Pentagon in...1982!
8:20:24 PM
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[Greg Palast]: And that's why, if you're in the Northeast, you're reading this by
candlelight tonight. Here's what happened. After LILCO was hammered by
the law, after government regulators slammed Niagara Mohawk and dozens
of other book-cooking, document-doctoring utility companies all over
America with fines and penalties totaling in the tens of billions of
dollars, the industry leaders got together to swear never to break the
regulations again. Their plan was not to follow the rules, but to
ELIMINATE the rules. They called it "deregulation."
I can't vouche for Palast's credentials, but what I read here has the ring of truth. I was involved in lobbying the California Legislature during the deregulation debates in the mid-90s, trying to steer the inevitable approval to consider the needs of small and mid sized businesses, and to preserve what we could of California's energy efficieny and renewables programs.
But the deregulation juggernaut was not to be stopped, and had the solid support of the now bankrupt and near-bankrupt utility companies and then [Republican] governor, Pete Wilson. Gray Davis inherited Wilson's deregulation, and while he didn't handle the crisis well enough, he certainly wasn't the one who caused it. Palast suggests who did.
Worth reading. (And I be interested in hearing from anyone who can vouch for or debunk his assertions.)
7:47:01 PM
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...to trick Radio Userland into working.
11:37:14 AM
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Terrific concert -- no surprise there -- and the worst sound system I've ever heard at a major concert. This muddled the sound on more than half the songs, made many solos inaudible, and Bruce's one explicit political statement -- aside from a generous dedication of one song to the San Francisco Food Bank -- completely unintelligible.
From his web site, this is apparently what he said:
People come to my shows with many different kinds of political beliefs; I like that, we welcome all. There have been a lot of questions raised recently about the forthrightness of our government. This playing with the truth has been a part of both the Republican and Democratic administrations in the past and it is always wrong, never more so than when real lives are at stake. The question of whether we were mislead into the war in Iraq isn't a liberal or conservative or Republican or Democratic question, it's an American one. Protecting the democracy that we ask our sons and daughters to die for is our responsibility and our trust. Demanding accountability from our leaders is our job as citizens. It's the American way. So may the truth will out.
Reviews: Two words: 'PIT ENVY!'
10:34:21 AM
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[I, Cringley]: If a U.S. employer said out loud, "Gosh, we have a lot of 50-something engineers who are going to kill us with their retirement benefits so we'd better get rid of a few thousand," they would be violating a long list of labor and civil rights laws. But if they say, "Our cost of doing business in the U.S. is too high, so we'll be moving a few thousand jobs to India," that's just fine -- even though it means exactly the same thing.
But aside from branding 'offshoring' as covert age discrimination, Cringely sees it as bad business:
IBM and a number of other companies will send jobs to India. Profits will rise, but no head counts will drop. Head count will rise, in fact, because the heads are so much cheaper. Productivity for these offshoring companies will not rise. It will fall.... Power and efficiency are in conflict here....
A larger question here, aside from the direct impact on companies that Cringely flags, is the relationship between micro and macro considerations here. The quest for ever lower labor costs may make competitive sense for individual companies (at least those that view labor as an expense rather than an investment), but what happens as it cuts the purchasing power of the US workforce? What happens as China evolves from a low cost labor haven into a serious technical competitor than can give US (and European) companies a run for their money?
The signs are already showing. Tech companies that moved manufacturing to China to cut labor costs 85% are now finding, to their surprise, quality of engineers, plants and infrasturcture comparable to any in the world.]
10:23:27 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Gil Friend.
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