Time To Bother May 18, 2009
Posted by naughtwirthreeding in Family Life, Future, Life, Money & Investing, News & Events, The Economy.comments closed
There is a destructive and costly mind-set that has run rampant in America’s consumer culture, and I think it’s high time we began the process of setting things right. As consumers it has become part of our everyday lives, so we don’t think twice about it. It’s always been that way, we rationalize, so why bother?
It’s time to bother.
Why don’t they build a light bulb that lasts forever? So that they can continue to sell you the light bulbs that burn out. This is one of the more obvious (and inexpensive) examples of a de facto collusive consumer marketplace that worships at the church of the endless revenue stream. Why fix a problem for good, when we can make billions of dollars per year fixing it temporarily? Why find a cure, when we can be rolling in dough by just treating the symptoms? Light bulbs are small potatoes, but the next example should put the severity of the problem into more acute perspective.
There is a disease that is the #1 cause of asthma attacks, the number one cause of sinus infections, ear infections, and upper respiratory infections, and is often a contributing cause to influenza. Indirectly, this disease is responsible for thousands of deaths per year. It is the leading cause of days missed from work or school. The economy loses over $50 billion in wages, productivity, and expenditures on treatment every single year. Every human being on planet earth is affected by this disease dozens, even hundreds of times during their life. And yet no researchers are looking for a cure, and there is no foundation raising money to fund a cure.
The disease is the common cold. And yet, with this massive impact on our everyday lives, with the billions of dollars lost, not to mention the toll on human life, the pharmaceutical companies are trying to get us to believe that the best they can do is NyQuil?
The truth is, the common cold is the biggest cash cow the major drug companies have. They never release details about the precise source of their revenues, however sales of cold remedies are estimated to be between $5 billion and $30 billion annually. We get the sniffles, head to the store for some Kleenex and Sudafed, plunk down $15. Now multiply that by every family in the industrialized world: about 500 million of us, two or three times per year. Starting to see what this really costs?
Should we expect a cure for the common cold anytime soon? Not a prayer. The big drug companies have entered into licensing arrangements with nearly every major research facility in the world, including the U.S. National Institutes of Health, every major university, and even the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. If anyone dares to try for a cure, the money from the drug companies disappears. So nobody’s trying, because they’re rather fond of the millions of dollars that the drug companies pass their way every year. If anybody they haven’t already co-opted manages to get close, you can bet those drug companies will show up with a nice fat check and a suggestion that they quietly stop work on the project.
So instead of getting a cure for the common cold, we get railroaded by a coalition of drug companies that has the entire research sector and the government agencies that regulate it in its pocket. Thus, we make the pharmaceutical companies rich, one pack of Benadryl at a time.
This mind-set has now permeated every industry that serves our consumer culture. Plastic isn’t only cheaper and lighter weight, it breaks easier — meaning that you have to constantly replace the radio, the cordless phone, the door handle on the rear passenger’s side, the knobs on the stove, the silverware basket in the dishwasher, the battery mount in the flashlight, the trim around the base of the TV, and on, and on, and on. Making those parts out of metal would mean they last several generations, but where’s the profit in that?
Clothes, shoes, luggage, carpet, paint, tools, electronics, home appliances, office equipment, you can’t name me a consumer product whose industry hasn’t fallen victim to this plague. The church of the endless revenue stream is a cult, and every stockholder on Wall Street has been drinking the Kool Aid. Planned obsolescence will make us all rich: all of us, except the people who have to keep paying for this crap over, and over, and over, and over…
It’s time to hold industry accountable to a new standard, and reward companies that produce cures instead of merely treating symptoms. It’s time to turn our money towards the companies that solve problems instead of merely profiting from them. Whoever puts out the ever-lasting light bulb won’t be in business too long, but they will solve a problem that costs Americans millions of dollars each year. It’s time we put a premium on that kind of innovation, and send the companies that have been fleecing us for so long into bankruptcy. It’s a well-deserved end for any firm who has bilked us of so much for so long.
The New Paradigm April 2, 2009
Posted by naughtwirthreeding in Future, Humor, Life, News & Events, The Economy.comments closed
In case you’ve been in a cave for, say, the last two years, you’ll notice that there has been a serious sea change in America lately. We are collectively realizing that turning the reins over to corporate interests and the government they bought was a huge mistake, and has resulted in the turnoil that we are currently experiencing. America is looking for a new direction, and has a new government to help that change come into focus.
So far that change has taken the shape of some serious money being spent, and some even more serious spending being proposed, to tackle the problems of corporate rescue, job creation, economic recovery and banking stability. Beyond that, we are looking at changes to corporate (especially financial sector) regulation, health care reform, environmental and energy policy advancement, and foreign policy repairs including the cessation of hostilities on two fronts overseas.
But today I want to take a look at the next step, the frontier that will soon be visible as America empowers a new group of prime movers to change the landscape. As corporate magnates were labeled “fat cats” following their back-alley financial indiscretions, the trust the public had in them was thrust into reverse, and their influence disappeared nearly overnight. The U.S. has a new wave of thinkers, teachers, philanthropists and social entrepreneurs that will craft the agenda for the next generation, and depending on how successful they are, perhaps the next century. Today I will present the crux of that agenda to you, as a preview of what is about to take center stage.
For a long time, the kooks on the left have been hosting rallies and holding marches and chaining themselves to spotted owls under the banner of the following underlying concepts: corporations are evil, governments are just corporate shills, women and poor people are getting the shaft, health care sucks, the environment is decaying, and if you don’t stop eating cows you are all going to face God’s wrath… except we don’t believe there is a God, so never mind — you’re just really, really mean!
Those ideas are still alive and well in the lunatic fringe, but they have morphed into concepts that are now championed by some people with genuine practical ideas about fixing some of these problems. Young ideologues and motivated B-school grads have gravitated to a mirco-preneurial model aimed at coupling small up-front investment with highly-repeatable results to achieve long-term gains. Which problems are being solved and in what way is too lengthy to go into here, and the degree to which they are being implemented ranges from, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” all the way out to functional and successful projects in wide-scale field trials, and even successful business models.
Instead, I have identified a series of concepts that comprise the new paradigm. All of these projects encompass at least one, and in many cases all, of the concepts below. It represents a significant and world-changing transformation from the current capital- and corporate-centric framework our socio-economic structure is built upon.
Humanitarian Focus: advancing human interests in the areas of education, health care, hunger, housing, equality, human rights, employment, and circumventing corporate “non-solution” solutions
Gap Identification: finding those areas where neither the market nor governments have gone or will go, and step in to fill a humanitarian need
Empowerment: providing the tools, expertise, and seed funding to facilitate community-based self-sufficiency, and sometimes small-scale profit
Sustainable Local-Source: using the natural resources available in a given region in unique ways, either as the means of actually solving a problem, or as a crop to provide capital to fund a solution — sometimes converting corporate waste into profit for the corporation and funding for the project
Open-Source: the free and open exchange and leveraging of ideas for the purpose of alleviating dependence on expensive and proprietary corporate options
Collaboration: partnerships between not-for-profits, sometimes involving NGO’s, government agencies and even for-profit companies, with the expressed goal of achieving mutual self-interest and expanding the pie — instead of increasing the size of the piece any individual receives
Shortened Free-Market Leash: identifying and impeding corporate practices that ignore overall costs, either by legislative action, legal hindrance, direct supply- or demand-side intervention, and even collaboration or formal partnership
Hair Of The Dog: using corporate tricks to outwit corporations, and employing market-based solutions in conjunction with corporate collaborators to leverage social impact while increasing business profits
Non-Financial Rewards System: more than just barter, but also identification of non-monetary rewards that motivate both providers and recipients, and supplanting the materialist incentives — often with better success than is achieved with money
The hyper-capitalist mercenaries that are slaves to the old way of doing things will dismiss this as folly, saying the only true motivator is greed and self-interest, and predicting the new paradigm’s imminent demise. But they’re fooling themselves, and it’s easy to see why. Each of the new-paradigm projects I have caught a glimpse of has been unique and ultimately driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, but has also provided a literal template for copycat projects in other geographical regions, as well as a conceptual template for similar projects using different tools in another vertical market or social space. In other words, new-paradigm projects are well-managed, reciprocally adaptive, present low barriers to entry, and are easily replicated with non-expert protagonists in most corners of the globe. As a result they are spreading both vertically and laterally at a pace that makes traditional start-ups look like lemonade stands.
The reality of the matter is, in order to survive a for-profit start-up needs one of two things: a huge pool of cash, or a steady income stream. If those are never achieved, the project folds no matter how good the idea may be. Most of the new-paradigm projects I have looked at get off the ground and effect change with little more than an iPhone’s worth of funding. Additionally, since the retail impact is human instead of monetary, the non-financial rewards system employed by most of these projects is usually brimming over — enough to keep key players engaged and motivated even when the pool of resources is bone dry. This means that good ideas survive, and many of them thrive, even in the most desperate and bleak of circumstances. Face it: this is coming, and once it reaches a tipping point it is going to take over.
What does this mean? Many things. Will we all still have jobs? Sure. Will the economy change? Not overnight, but yes, and in two or three generations we will hardly recognize it. Will corporate America adapt to this change? They always have in the past, and there’s no reason to think they won’t this time either. We’ll just see a lot more good things come to pass, and we’ll have the opportunity to help out with, and even profit from, a transformation that will humble us all and create a world we can be proud of.
The good news is, regardless of our political disposition, there is some aspect of these new-paradigm projects that will affect everyone in a positive way. There is something for each and every one of us to get excited about just around the corner. Keep your eyes open, think about what you would like to do to fix what’s broken, and it just might be you whose dreams change the world.
The Devil We Stand To Inherit February 7, 2009
Posted by naughtwirthreeding in Future, Humor, Life, News & Events, Politics.comments closed
It’s sad to watch, really. With the brains that this group of people claim to have, you would think they could come up with a better plan. But no, the in-fighting has come to a public end, and now the schemers and back-stabbers will go to work behind the scenes, and their collective fate is sealed.
The Republican Party will self-destruct before the next Presidential election in 2012.
This past week the Republican National Committee held elections for a new Chairman. The crushing defeats in the last two elections put the GOP on the defensive and facing a crossroads in its evolution, and that was reflected in the nine candidates vying for the Chairmanship. Do they take the party more populist? Focus on fiscal concerns and tone down the Rove-ian hate rhetoric? Or go the other direction, hammer harder on abortion/gay marriage/prayer in school issues and target upper-middle-class suburbia? Appeal to young techno-riche? Go web-enabled? Fire up the grass roots? Countless ideas were forwarded as the field narrowed to two.
And in the end, the party decided against the old guy from South Carolina who belonged to a whites-only country club, and instead took an unprecedented step in electing its first African-American Chairman in history.
Jaws dropped across the length and breadth of the political spectrum: Conservatives because the party they had put their faith and trust in had just put one of “those people” in charge; and the rest of the country because they couldn’t believe that the GOP actually thought anybody would fall for such a blatantly pandering and wholly transparent copy-cat maneuver.
But the icing was spread neatly atop the cake on Friday, when newly-elected RNC Chairman Michael Steele said, in his first public statement since assuming the Chairmanship, “The Republican Party is just fine as it is.”
Perfect. Prophetic, flawless in its irony, and a clear and concise statement of the genuinely myopic idiocy that is the collective Republican brain trust.
Now, call the Republican members of the House and Senate whatever you want, but one thing they are not is stupid. They saw these happenings unfolding last week and realized that the proverbial writing was on the gilded marble wall. It was time to loot the store and slip out the back before the manager got back from his cigarette break.
In 2010 there are six vulnerable seats in the U.S. Senate, and all of them are currently held by Republicans. All the Democrats need to do is pick up two, and the game truly is all over but for the crying. 61 seats means no more filibusters, and all the GOP will be able to do is whine on the Sunday morning talk shows, deflecting blame and defending their decades-outdated positions that landed them in that position.
So starting now, the GOP members of the House and Senate have two years to try to grab anything and everything they can get their greedy little hands on. The strategy is simple: put enough pork in the hands of a big-dollar campaign donor, then hope for a job offer from them when they get ousted in the mid-terms. You’re seeing it already, as the “All tax cuts, all the time” chorus has begun in earnest over the stimulus package. There’s a method to their madness, and it has nothing to do with helping the country: they’re just looking out for their own tired, lazy white asses.
But fret not: any damage they do can and will be undone. They may drag the country down with them for a while, but we’ll eventually pull ourselves back up and set things right again. A new era has begun, and thankfully we can all look forward to calmer and more reasonable days ahead.
But this raises a new question. A new entity will rise from the smoldering ashes that the GOP leaves behind. Is the devil we know going to be better than the devil we stand to inherit?
