One More for the Pile

December 3, 2020 at 2:45 pm

Today marks the offi­cial announce­ment that the com­pa­ny I cur­rent­ly work for is per­ma­nent­ly clos­ing. I did­n’t say ‘at’ because I’ve been work­ing remote from home since March anyway.

We made it fur­ther than most dur­ing this pan­dem­ic, but it’s still anoth­er name to add to the list. One more small busi­ness closed. Five fam­i­lies find­ing new paths. Thousands of cus­tomers pick­ing a new brand to buy. That last line should be read with a hint of sar­casm and a dose of crit­i­cism with a cap­i­tal­ist C.

I’ve still got a few pay­checks to col­lect before I join the other 20 mil­lion unem­ployed Americans or find some other way to make my liveli­hood. I cer­tain­ly feel for­tu­nate to have made it this far. I know oth­ers have been deal­ing with upheaval for most of 2020. The changes I’ve had to make in my life are hard to even clas­si­fy as incon­ve­niences. I’ve been lucky and privileged.

There’s still more stir­ring around, but I haven’t nailed down all the words. This might be all I have today. A sim­ple mark­er for where the trail changes direc­tion. A somber, grim, fore­bod­ing mark­er for the occa­sion — but hey, at least I cre­at­ed some­thing today!

The Unsustainable Internet

December 1, 2020 at 2:00 pm

I’ve been try­ing to rec­on­cile the envi­ron­men­tal impact of work­ing on the com­put­er and Internet. Hosting this site means I should be accept­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty of the elec­tric­i­ty required to store, trans­mit, and work on it. Correct?

I’m not the only one com­ing to grips with this real­iza­tion. Mozilla recent­ly released a green­house gas base­line. They esti­mate that peo­ple using their brows­er in 2019 amounts to 785,474 met­ric tons of car­bon diox­ide equiv­a­lent (mtCO2e). That’s equal to the year­ly ener­gy use for 90,639 homes in the United States.

Pie chart of Mozilla's Emissions Distribution, 2% Business Operations versus 98% of Product Use
Mozilla’s Direct Business Operations vs. Product Impact

Apple has also made a bold promise to be total­ly car­bon neu­tral by 2030. That includes “the ener­gy used to power our cus­tomers’ devices.” They would not be count­ing the ener­gy my iMac is using right now since it is nine years old. The fine print states, “Apple assumes a three- or four-year peri­od for power use by first own­ers based on the prod­uct type. Product use sce­nar­ios are based on his­tor­i­cal cus­tomer use data for sim­i­lar products.”

Apple 2020 Environmental Progress Report, Historical and projected future emission bar chart

Closer to my orig­i­nal thought, Eric Bailey came along and asked, “So you wanna cre­ate an eco-friendly web­site.” His take includ­ed some good per­for­mance improve­ments for min­i­miz­ing impact but still came to the same con­clu­sion I’m run­ning into. Outside of delet­ing your web­site and not par­tic­i­pat­ing in ener­gy use, you’re going to need car­bon cred­its and offsets.

Luckily, there are some resources to help with this process.

  • The Website Carbon Calculator can show you a sober­ing esti­mate of your impact.
  • The Green Web Foundation can help find eco-friendly hosting.
  • There are tons of car­bon off­set com­pa­nies pop­ping up now. I haven’t done enough research to link any. That seems like the next step I need to take to jus­ti­fy this site stay­ing online.
Website Carbon Calculator, 1000 monthly pageviews equals one tree per year

Livelihood

November 30, 2020 at 3:45 pm

Livelihood: a means of securing the necessities of life

“Memaw” Ivey, as she has been affec­tion­ate­ly — or deri­sive­ly? — referred to, tweet­ed the other day. Maybe it’s the empha­sis of this being a reit­er­a­tion. Maybe it’s the con­cise­ness. Something about it sounds more like an ulti­ma­tum than a life les­son, pre­scrip­tive rather than descrip­tive. Something about ‘can­not’ is so defin­i­tive in the statement.

“You can­not have a life with­out a livelihood.”

Why do I get the feel­ing that’s the polite Southern way of say­ing, “If you don’t have a job, you don’t deserve to live.”

It’s true that if you don’t get water, food, and shel­ter — at the bare min­i­mum — then your life will end. There is a fun­da­men­tal aspect to the state­ment that is under­stand­able. It’s also false.

There are plen­ty of peo­ple right­ful­ly exempt from such an expec­ta­tion. Different lev­els of phys­i­cal and men­tal abil­i­ty might pre­vent some­one from being able to take care of them self. We cer­tain­ly don’t expect chil­dren to go it alone and secure their own neces­si­ties. On the other end of the age brack­et, we believe the elder­ly have a right to life with­out con­tin­u­ing to work. So it is pos­si­ble to have a life with­out a livelihood.

Of course, Twitter’s char­ac­ter lim­i­ta­tions pre­vent nuance. Governor Ivey would never say peo­ple who can’t pro­vide for them­selves for­feit their life. That does­n’t sound as nice as, “You can­not have a life with­out a livelihood.”

1867 Days

November 24, 2020 at 3:20 pm

267 weeks. 61 months. 5 years. Those num­bers all rep­re­sent the same thing. How long it’s been since I last post­ed on this here blog thingy. That sure is a long time and begs the ques­tion — why now? That prob­a­bly has to do with a string of things I’ve read recently.

  • “Don’t like to write, but like hav­ing writ­ten. Hate the effort of dri­ving pen from line to line” Frank Norris via kottke.org
  • “Purpose is an essen­tial ele­ment of you.“
    Chadwick Boseman via brenebrown.com
  • “One lit­tle blog post is noth­ing on its own, but pub­lish a thou­sand blog posts over a decade, and it turns into your life’s work.” Austin Kleon
  • “There will always be too much to do – and this real­i­sa­tion is lib­er­at­ing.” Oliver Burkeman
  • “I decid­ed I need­ed to start writ­ing things down.” kottke.org first post

Going fur­ther, the words that keep ring­ing in my ear — and I hope to exor­cise through this lit­tle dia­tribe come from the fol­low­ing quote pub­lished fifty years ago.

“We must do away with the absolute­ly spe­cious notion that every­body has to earn a liv­ing. It is a fact today that one in ten thou­sand of us can make a tech­no­log­i­cal break­through capa­ble of sup­port­ing all the rest. The youth of today are absolute­ly right in rec­og­niz­ing this non­sense of earn­ing a liv­ing. We keep invent­ing jobs because of this false idea that every­body has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, accord­ing to Malthusian-Darwinian the­o­ry, he must jus­ti­fy his right to exist. So we have inspec­tors of inspec­tors and peo­ple mak­ing instru­ments for inspec­tors to inspect inspec­tors. The true busi­ness of peo­ple should be to go back to school and think about what­ev­er it was they were think­ing about before some­body came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

Richard Buckminster Fuller
“The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In” by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30

A human being had that thought in 1970. Here it is the year 2020 and so many still think a per­son is only worth their pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. That value is only mea­sured in what you can cre­ate or do for oth­ers. That your efforts must be quan­ti­fied through cur­ren­cy or com­fort or con­ve­nience. That life is a zero-sum game. That progress requires growth and pos­i­tive year-over-year bal­ance sheets.

Why can’t progress sim­ply be zero? You replace all the things you extract in order to live. You erase your impacts so they don’t con­tin­u­al­ly build up as debt to future gen­er­a­tions. Hell, you quit exter­nal­iz­ing costs and trans­fer­ring them to liv­ing, breath­ing peo­ple cur­rent­ly on the other side of the plan­et or even right down the road. Accept that more isn’t always the answer because some­times it’s the problem.

Consider this a warn­ing that more word vomit sim­i­lar to the above might come spew­ing out. Or it might not. I’m still swirling in the do less/do more conun­drum of jus­ti­fy­ing my exis­tence by doing things vs. sim­ply being.

They Call It Flat Design

June 9, 2013 at 8:52 pm

I would be a hor­ri­ble blog­ger if I did­n’t write about the two-ton ele­phant in the design room right now — flat design. It is the trend, buzz­word, motto, theme, and cliché of 2013. Thousands of words have already been writ­ten about the rise and pro­lif­er­a­tion of flat design, and I’m here to con­tribute a few more. Continue read­ing →

Hey Kids, This Is Advertising!

December 21, 2010 at 4:23 am

Coupon with Large Headline - "Hey Kids This Is Advertising"I think this is total­ly blog wor­thy and an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion starter. I took the kids to Burger King for lunch on Saturday. (It was a bribe for good behav­ior while gro­cery shop­ping and also a chance to get them sug­ared up for rak­ing leaves in the yard.) Of course they get a toy in their kids meal. Along with the toy, there was a lit­tle piece of paper show­ing how to put every­thing togeth­er and then push the but­ton to make the toy go shoot­ing across the floor.

And then, there was this. In big, bold, block let­ters — Hey Kids This Is Advertising! Now that I’m reflect­ing on it, I’m not quite sure what to think. At the time, I smirked. I almost LOL’ed but some­thing stopped me. I think it was the inde­ci­sion on whether this was a good or bad thing.

On one Whopper-filled hand I thought, “It’s a good thing that they are iden­ti­fy­ing and in some way sep­a­rat­ing the adver­tis­ing push from the help­ful fun part.” On the other hand, occu­pied by a 48 ounce “small” cup of sug­ary Dr. Pepper, I find the tone of the state­ment to be, “Hey Kids, this is adver­tis­ing and does­n’t it look cool!”

Because real­ly, the whole thing is adver­tis­ing. The bag, the toy, the coupon, the entire con­cept of kid’s meal is adver­tis­ing. So what’s the point of putting that state­ment on there? That’s the ques­tion I put to you.