Scales

With my new found mistrust for big business, and my ever present thirst for a new computer project to work on, I have been working on a new idea.

I am concerned that it may be too ambitious, but it also feels like something that should exist. Whenever I feel that way, normally I mull it over so long, that I watch someone else launch it and get famous.. but at least I am satisfied that I thought of it first :)

The idea was born from the website I reported awhile back that gives out free research information on personal care products like toothpaste and deodorant. It tells you every questionable ingredient and what it might do to you. Unfortunately, the website doesn't make it super easy to get to the information, and doesn't provide any easy way to save a personal list of products to refer back to later.

Also, my reading lately has touched on many other areas where the products we buy may be causing various types of strife in the world (environmental, working conditions, etc).

I thought, wouldn't it be so useful if people could set their own preferences for what types of variables were of relative importance to them (e.g. price, safety, environmental impact), and then could rate all of the products in a given category based on their own values. Wow. That could have such an impact.

One thing I have come to believe is that big companies are only beholden to one boss - their customers. It is mainly customers and their demands that cause business to change their behavior. Government regulation and the outcries of activists seem to have had little impact due to the greater impact of political lobbying and giant marketing budgets.

As it is now, customers in a super market have only price and brand awareness to compare products on the shelf. What if they had 5 other ratings marked on the shelves? What if those ratings were automatically averaged out to fit the values of the customer?

I think that both the information and the technology exist to make this possible, and it's only the will to build it and the will to use it that remain to be seen.

Modest

It seems like many of the books I have been reading lately have dedicated substantial discussion to the global trend of corporations gaining power and influence in politics and culture. As someone who has always paid attention to business, I really thought I was more in tune with how it fits into our society. I have often found myself defending business interests in conversations with those whose politics lays to the left of my own. Now, I increasingly see corporations, especially large public corporations, as a societal disease. Now, I see that the rights corporations have gained for themselves, and the imbalance of resources they posess, give them the power to shape law and public opinion according to their own profit motives. I don't entirely fault the people who run them and work in them since they are more or less interchangable parts within the larger machine. It is the non-human paper entity itself that has a hunger for profit, and a momentum difficult to slow down as things stand in the world today. Kind of like the way a computer virus spreads itself; it's not personal, it's just programming.

My own views toward my place in the business world have shifted little by little over time. At first, I was somewhat ambitious. In my work, I took business needs to heart and gave everything I could muster to The Company. I was on call 24x7. I didn't take vacation. I let business problems become my problems. Then Shelly, a good friend, and professional mentor, took his own life in response to business problems he had, himself, taken to heart too closely. After that, I was able to see business and work for what it is - something much less important than the people who work in it.

This month, I was offered a promotion - an opportunity to take on more responsibility, have more control, travel frequently around the US, and probably make substantially more money. It was the natural path for someone doing well in a big company. Not only that, it's the path we are programmed to go after. How could you ever turn down the opportunity to "grow" professionally?

Well I turned it down. I didn't want to travel for work. I like it here at home. I didn't want more responsibility. I have enough. Who doesn't want more money? But I really have enough of that too. All I was able to see ahead was a degraded quality of life. And, as pessimistic as that sounds, I felt I made the right choice. And I was so pleased this week when I came across this passage by Paul Hawken in the The Ecology of Commerce.

"I suspect many people who get involved with business have a modest self that resists being adrenalized and overworked by incessant growth. In most cases, we see this subdued side of ourselves as something to overcome, a limit, a reluctant and unassuming persona that needs motivation tapes and seminars to mold it into the obsessive, success-driven, capable person the late-night cable programs assure us is hiding within."

I'm happy to be moving toward my modest self rather than away from him.

Prices

I have always been somewhat risk averse. I'm not totally sure where it came from. I generally don't enjoy gambling, I have never bunjee jumped, and I always park legally (no tickets). This tendency is exaggerated when it comes to any kind of financial investing. I suppose I figure that, for all of the hours I spend in a dreary cubicle earning the almighty dollar, I would hate to have any of it spent for naught.

Investing in real estate in the Bay Area has been especially traumatic for me. The dollar amounts of any and every property here are staggering (to me anyway). I understand that I live in a fantasy destination where many people dream of having a home. This is bound to make property scarce and pricey. However, I also have a decent understanding about human nature, interest rates, and such, and sometimes have a hard time balancing my skeptical nature with the real world. I don't want to worry myself out of good investments.

Then I came upon this study today which fans the flames of all my investment worries. According to this study, real estate is overvalued in the Bay Area by somewhere in the neighborhood of 40%. I can't say that I am surprised by this. But I also wonder, for all the cheery, bullish articles, why am I more likely to trust this one?

Electric

My friend Sean sent this cute story in an email. I'd like to find out more about the author, Richard Brautigan.

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Rural Electrification Project
by Richard Brautigan

I was trying to describe you to someone a few days ago. You don't look like any girl I've ever seen before.

I couldn't say "Well she looks just like Jane Fonda, except that she's got red hair, and her mouth is different and of course, she's not a movie star..."

I couldn't say that because you dont look like Jane Fonda at all.

I finally ended up describing you as a movie I saw when I was a child in Tacoma Washington. I guess I saw it in 1941 or 42, somewhere in there. I think I was seven, or eight, or six.

It was a movie about rural electrification, a perfect 1930's New Deal morality kind of movie to show kids. The movie was about farmers living in the country without electricity. They had to use lanterns to see by at night, for sewing and reading, and they didn't have any appliances like toasters or washing machines, and they couldn't listen to the radio. They built a dam with big electric generators and they put poles across the countryside and strung wire over fields and pastures.

There was an incredible heroic dimension that came from the simple putting up of poles for the wires to travel along. They looked ancient and modern at the same time.

Then the movie showed electricity like a young Greek god, coming to the farmer to take away forever the dark ways of his life. Suddenly, religiously, with the throwing of a switch, the farmer had electric lights to see by when he milked his cows in the early black winter mornings. The farmer's family got to listen to the radio and have a toaster and lots of bright lights to sew dresses and read the newspaper by.

It was really a fantastic movie and excited me like listening to the Star Spangled Banner, or seeing photographs of President Roosevelt, or hearing him on the radio "... the President of the United States... "

I wanted electricity to go everywhere in the world. I wanted all the farmers in the world to be able to listen to President Roosevelt on the radio....

And that's how you look to me.