A CHRISTMAS POEM, TO MY WIFE

Grok Headline matches for A CHRISTMAS POEM, TO MY WIFE

A BLOGGER'S
CHRISTMAS WISH LIST

A BLOGGER'S
CHRISTMAS WISH LIST 12/19/2004 02:54 PM
lights

11.	A simple way to simultaneously send new blog articles, as they are posted, to any number of user-maintained, editable e-mail lists (from which people could easily unsubscribe, of course).
10.	An automatically maintained Table of Contents with one-sentence abstracts for each of your blog posts, editable by you and sortable by your readers by title, date, and category/sub-category.
9.	A simple, meaningful measure of total readership, that weighs blog hits, visits, average duration of stay, RSS subscriptions, inbound blogs, e-mail subscriptions, and visits to copies of your posts on aggregators.
8.	An ability to create standing-order 'profiles' for all blogs, as you now can for newsfeeds, so that you can receive a single daily e-mail or web page that aggregates everything posted that day, anywhere in the blogosphere, on a specific topic or containing specific keywords or phrases.
7.	A gigabyte or two of free storage on the hosted blog server, so you can keep a copy of your entire My Documents folder on the server, link to anything in it from your blog without having to FTP a copy, and be able to access your entire 'e-filing cabinet' from any computer anywhere anytime.
6.	An easy migration path from the asynchronous, polished anonymity of the blog to the real-time, one-to-one, face-to-face or voice-to-voice, halting interactive iterative intimacy of other media, media that move you from talk to action.
5.	Inclusion of our posts, if we want them to be, in Google News.
4.	More first-person accounts, first-hand news, live photos and reports, and investigative reporting in the blogosphere.
3.	A blogging tool so simple even our parents can maintain one.
2.	No more fear of your blog or your computer crashing and irretrievably losing everything you've written on your blog.
1.	The end of the terms 'weblog', 'blog' and 'blogger', and to be simply called An Online Journalist.

THINK
GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL: PETER SINGER'S
ONE
WORLD

THINK
GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL: PETER SINGER'S
ONE
WORLD 04/23/2004 09:24 AM

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I'm opposed to unregulated 'free' trade, very worried about the extraterritoriality of the WTO, NAFTA, Davos and other corporatist captives, strongly opposed to domestic corporations 'offshoring' jobs, using influence with the Bush regime and other right-wing governments to circumvent social and environmental laws and responsibilities, and a great believer in taking the pledge to buy local, and in community self-sufficiency.

At the same time, I'm a strong supporter of the UN and other multi-lateral NGOs, and I believe that we each have a responsibility for the well-being of all the people and creatures of this world. Some readers have said this view is inconsistent, and I wasn't quite sure how to respond to such charges. Fortunately, Peter Singer, in his recent book on global ethics, One World: The Ethics of Globalization, has come to my rescue. Singer sees no inconsistency between strong local autonomy, community, and self-sufficient economies on the one hand, and global responsibility on the other. The book is based on the Dwight Terry lectures at Yale in 2000, but has been updated to incorporate reflection on the events of 9/11 and the appalling Bush social, environmental and economic record.

I'll have more to say next week about Bush's fraudulent and despicable Earth Day media blitz, and the major media's shameless lack of critical evaluation of the utter nonsense that his propaganda machine has been churning out this week on the environment -- newspeak of Orwellian proportions. The first part of Singer's book deals with environmental responsibility, and his prescription for increasing it -- immediate ratification of Kyoto by the US and other holdout countries, and introduction of an emissions trading mechanism to make the realization of Kyoto feasible (subject to the need for some oversight on the disposition of the proceeds of such trading when it involves autocratic governments).

The second part of the book deals with the global economy, and Singer adroitly tears apart the Economist's (and other neocons') naive assertion that economic globalization somehow benefits both rich and poor countries. He then goes on to prescribe a substantial reform of the WTO and the GATT, which could actually lead to more equitable distribution of wealth and more efficient production of economic goods, while safeguarding human rights, labour and the environment. Unfortunately, the multi-national corporations and corporatists who hold sway in the WTO would never tolerate Singer's prescription, since it would entirely divert the benefits of economic globalization from their pockets to those of the world's poor.

The third part of the book deals with international law, and Singer lashes out at Bush for his unconscionable refusal to ratify the International Court of Justice, and for the UN's continued hesitancy to accept a duty (not a right) to intervene in situations of genocide and other humanitarian crises, even within a single nation. Singer is sanguine about the limitations and dangers of 'global government', but supports strengthening the UN to enable it to act as a 'protector of last resort', and including in its mandate the responsibility to supervise elections in all member nations.

The fourth and final part goes back to ethical principles and proposes that countries must, in this world where national boundaries no longer have any logistic meaning, set aside national interest and embrace, once and for all, global interest, impartially. That does not mean cultural homogenization, but imposes a responsibility for the reduction of inequality, both of economic resources and personal rights and freedoms.

Always the pragmatist, Singer concludes by worrying out loud about how the responsibility for a global ethic could be managed:

It is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that would make the bureaucracy of the EU look lean and efficient. At worst, it would become a global tyranny, unchecked and unchallengeable. These thoughts have to be taken seriously. How to prevent global bodies becoming either dangerous tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies, and instead make them effective and responsive to the people whose lives they affect? It is a challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration.

I'd like to believe that this was possible, because if it isn't, we're in serious trouble. We cannot expect national governments to set aside parochial interests, especially when this entails accepting a responsibility that would, for the richer nations, inevitably lead to a drastic redistribution of wealth to poorer nations and hence a sudden and sharp reduction in, at least, economic living standards (if not necessarily well-being). But as John Ralston Saul has so eloquently argued, larger organizations and institutions, whether public or private, are almost always, and inherently, less efficient, less agile, more resistant to change, more hierarchic, and less transparent than smaller organizations. So the challenge is to achieve the best of both worlds, having organizations of global scope and authority and responsibility, but broken up into sufficiently small, autonomous and dynamic units that they are sensitive, resilient, responsible and responsive to the people and communities they serve. We can only hope that "the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration", wherever they are, are up to the task.

GOOD,
NON-COMMERCIAL HEALTH INFORMATION

GOOD,
NON-COMMERCIAL HEALTH INFORMATION 09/11/2004 10:51 AM

The Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University has a site with useful information about 'micronutrients': vitamins, minerals, other nutrients (like Omega-3 Fatty Acids and Co-enzyme Q10), phytochemicals (trace chemicals in various plants), and the foods that contain all these nutrients. For each nutrient, you can learn its impact on the body, diseases it can help prevent or treat, where you can get it, and interactions with other nutrients, foods and drugs. The entire database can also be sorted by disease instead of by nutrient. Pauling was known, of course, for his controversial claim that large doses of vitamins can prevent the common cold and other diseases.

The site is very thorough, quite technical (but still comprehensible), and makes fascinating reading.

Thanks to tudogs.com for the link.

Speaking of health information, Health Central (the Dr. Dean Edell site) hosts the full (from what I can ascertain) contents of one of my favourite books, The People's Pharmacy. Learn how to make safe, effective treatments from natural, common ingredients that work better than most over-the-counter remedies. Find out which alternative remedies work, which are placebos and which are downright dangerous.

MAKING
POLITICS POLITICALLY CORRECT

MAKING
POLITICS POLITICALLY CORRECT 08/23/2004 02:34 PM

We went out for a delicious dinner last night at a wonderful, and completely packed, restaurant in downtown Toronto (it's called Mildred Pierce, for those who live in the area), and spent some of the time unobtrusively eavesdropping on the conversations at nearby tables. The discussions, much like the one at our own table, vacillated between the very personal (who's dating who, personal anecdotes) and the impersonal (entertainment, sports, weather). But not a single word was uttered about politics: Nothing about Canadian politics (collapse of the right), Ontario politics (health care and education strikes threatened), Toronto politics ('new deal' for cities in peril), US politics (Bush/Kerry), or international politics (Iraq etc.) Not a word. This was a Sunday night so there were no obvious business reasons for steering away from the subject. It just never came up. And it occurred to me that at our annual neighbourhood BBQ on Saturday night no one talked about politics either. Is politics just too boring in Canada or has it become tacitly PI to talk about them, because of the political polarization that seems to be happening everywhere? Is the left-right gulf getting too wide to even try to broach in 'decent conversation'?

I appreciate that there is less urgency about politics here in Canada than there is in the US, at least. The election here is over. And I'm told that at least 40% of Americans know personally at least one person on active duty in the Mideast, and that, I would expect, would probably make it a more likely topic of conversation. But some of my American readers tell me that talking about politics in face-to-face conversations is just too uncomfortable for them these days as well -- too likely to lead to arguments. So outside of political rallies and other meetings of like minds they don't talk about it much either.

What does this mean? First, it means the end of true political debate -- I don't mean those phony, scripted events where politicians roll out their rehearsed one-liners, I'm talking about articulate exchange of political views and information between real people. If you don't talk with others about politics, how do you form your viewpoints and where do you get your information? From attack ads? I don't think so -- maybe I'm naive but I don't think they work; most people know when they're being manipulated, and won't fall for it. From radio talk shows or editorials or blogs? Most of them are only for people who have already formed an unwavering political opinion on everything, and are merely looking for reassurance and justification for their belief. From television news and the print media? There isn't enough information content in the sound bites and newswire rehashes in most of them to allow an informed decision or point of view on anything.

It seems to me that, on almost any political issue, 50% or more of the population is completely disengaged -- even if they care, they don't think anything they do or say or feel will have any impact, so they can't be bothered to voice, or sometimes even form, any strong opinion on it. And the rest are in two, polarized camps, each believing that the other is irrational or immoral or misinformed, hopelessly so, so that meaningful discussion with the 'other side' or with the disengaged majority is impossible or fruitless. So except for the one-way palaver from the political flaks and political advertisers and partisans and oversimplifying mainstream media, there is no political information flow. And there is no discourse, no exchange of ideas or views, no balanced presentation of opposing views, no true political conversation. Because what purpose would it serve?

I see an astonishing paradox in modern society -- in an era with unprecedented access to information, most people are ignorant of even the basic facts on most political issues, from the connection between 9/11 and Saddam, to the causes and implications of global warming, to the political situation in Sudan and Venezuela and Chechnya< /a> (not to mention parts of the world less in the news), to the numerous ecological and humanitarian crises that everyone from the Union of Concerned Scientists to Amnesty International is shouting about. Why are so many so ignorant? I think because they choose to be uninformed. Why? Perhaps either because they they can't relate to the issue, or because they don't think there's any point in getting stressed about issues they feel they can do nothing personally about. So you end up in a vicious cycle: The less people know about a subject, the less inclined it is to come up in conversation, so the media conclude there is no interest in it, so they don't cover it, so people know even less. And if they do know about it but feel helpless or disinclined to do anything about it, they don't share their knowledge with others, and eventually with enough indifference the situation gets worse and the solutions become more intractable so people feel even more helpless and disinclined to try to do anything. Political disengagement is infectious, and it's reached epidemic proportions, especially among the young.

All of this supports Richard Manning's argument in Against the Grain that politics was and is designed to protect and entrench the status quo. As a result, nothing pleases those with power and money and influence more than massive political indifference and disengagement -- what Gene McCarthy in the 1960s during the fight against the Vietnam War called 'acedia' -- a Greek word meaning spiritual torpor, lack of care, apathy and inactivity in the practice of virtue. Unlike the 1960's, the numbers of politically disengaged is inversely proportional to the age bracket -- it is the young who I love so much and have such great hopes for who are least engaged in the political process, who infect each other with their indifference to global issues. But I don't think it's that they don't care. Most of the young people I know are overwhelmed and intimidated by how much those of us who are politically active know about global issues. My teenage granddaughter has read my blog, but says she "doesn't understand it". The young focus their energies and their passion instead on issues in their own networks, local things, things that they can do something about.

We need to show them the way to do more. We, who have been in the streets, need to reach out to the young and not-so-young who have given up on the political process (often before they began), and stop drowning them in facts and laying guilt trips on them and filling them up with bad news and instead:

Ask them what's important to them (open-ended questions with no preconception of the answers) and listen to their answers,
Tell them stories about how the political process has brought about important and positive change,
Teach them how the system works, in the context of how it could work to deal with the issues they said were important to them, and
Encourage them, starting with something small, to make the system work for them.

If we do that, if we can re-engage even a fifth of the people who never vote, who never read about politics or world affairs, who have lived their entire lives in political passivity, we will have started a revolution. Not only will they infect other disengaged peers with the zen of political activism, they will shake the diehard leftists and diehard right-wingers as well, because all of a sudden these new political activists will be up for grabs by whichever group that makes the most articulate, balanced and credible arguments, not by the blowhards who preach to the choir. And these new political activists will, on many issues, hold the political balance of power.

The real 'swing voters' are the ones who have never voted before and don't expect to vote in future. Rhetoric won't bring them to the polls. If we can 'activate' them, then conversations about politics will no longer be politically incorrect, and political activism will spread like a virus. As those who fought against the Vietnam War can tell you, political activism is as infectious as political apathy. The defenders of the status quo will be shaking in their boots.

And then the revolution we all need, the revolution to save the world, can begin.

Cartoon by the incomparable Robert Mankoff (from the New Yorker, of course)

AUSSIE
BREAKTHROUGH ON SOLAR ENERGY?

AUSSIE
BREAKTHROUGH ON SOLAR ENERGY? 08/27/2004 02:02 PM

Last year I waded through Jeremy Rifkin's The Hydrogen Economy and wrote a blog post that explained what's promising about hydrogen as a fuel, and its two major drawbacks. I used two charts, reproduced here, to explain how it works and what's holding it back.

The chart above shows the energy economy we have today. Red boxes are non-renewable, polluting and environmentally damaging energy sources and green ones are clean and renewable. Whether we use hydrocarbon fuels or electricity to light, heat and cool our homes, it's likely that non-renewable, damaging sources are producing it. Our cars likewise burn fossil fuels, and although hybrid cars are certainly an improvement, they still depend on fossil fuels to create ('reform') the hydrogen that the fuel cells convert into electricity.

The chart below shows the energy economy in twenty years, if we can solve the two major dilemmas of the hydrogen economy.
FState hydrogen

Under this scenario, hydrocarbons are replaced by solar, wind and other renewable, non-polluting, non-damaging energy sources. The central hydro utility is replaced by a local energy co-op, which produces energy for your community from its own solar collectors, wind turbines etc. The compressed hydrogen used to power next-generation pure hydrogen vehicles is produced from some of this electricity, and distributed through local service stations. The excess electricity produced by these cars can be used to provide light, heat and cooling to the home or sold back to the local energy co-op. The cars themselves will have no engine, no pedals, clutch or gearshift, make no noise and produce no harmful exhaust. The entire process will require no burning, no pollution, and no grid at the mercy of multinationals and sheikhs.

What are the two catches? First, the current cost of electricity produced from non-renewable sources is very expensive, and the process is cumbersome and not yet terribly efficient. Even more problematic is the $100 billion cost of building the infrastructure to generate, distribute and store the electricity and hydrogen, obsolescing a comparable amount of existing energy infrastructure, and probably causing some consternation to and resistance from the owners of that infrastructure.

titanium cell

Yesterday the University of New South Wales predicted that by 2010 a new generation of photovoltaic 'harvesters' based on titanium dioxide ceramics will both collect solar energy and use that energy to produce compressed hydrogen from water. A 10m square array, such as that depicted at right, mounted on just half the households in a sun-rich country like Australia, could produce the entire country's energy.

This would allow an even more distributed, decentralized model than that depicted above: With each household able to produce its own energy, the local energy co-op might be nothing more than a virtual market, and the need for local service stations selling or even producing compressed hydrogen would be obviated. We'd all change from consuming to producing energy.

The university has even higher hopes for the titanium dioxide technology behind this advance: They believe it will allow innovations in other areas such as "water purification, anti-viral and bacteriacidal coatings on hospital clothing and surfaces, self-cleaning glasses, and anti-pollution surfaces on buildings and roads".

Anyone know anything about titanium? I know it's a metal, but is it plentiful and easy and clean to extract? Is it recyclable? Durable? Toxic in landfill sites? I sense a bit of grandstanding and breast-beating by UNSW here. Is there another catch they're not telling us about?

WHAT'S WRONG
WITH FIRST-GENERATION SOCIAL
SOFTWARE

WHAT'S WRONG
WITH FIRST-GENERATION SOCIAL
SOFTWARE 02/10/2004 02:48 AM

I've written recently about the future state of business, a world incorporating powerful, versatile social networking tools. And I've played with most of the first-generation social software and read volumes about how it will, or won't, work in business and ultimately affect our daily lives.

The concept is wonderful, and the technology is fun, but the tools developed so far suffer from three fatal flaws:

They're built with a pre-designed, set content architecture, and centrally-stored content, instead of harvesting content that individual users already have stored, in different ways of their own choosing, on their own machines.
They're being populated just-in-case, with all kinds of content that people with lots of time on their hands see fit to contribute, and no content from the very busy or technologically illiterate, rather than just-in-time, with content being accumulated only if and when there's a demand and need for it.
They're badly over-engineered, ranging in complexity from challenging to intimidating, so they take a lot of time, energy and intelligence to understand and use properly, and hence drive most potential users away.

In this month's Darwin Magazine, social networking guru Stowe Boyd also laments the growing pains of many of the first-generation tools, and the absurdly high and premature expectations that people have of them. "My bet is that social networking services will resist standardization until they see the benefits of converging all sorts of private and public network information, and realize that no one company can create and manage all of it", he says. The heterogeneity of both content and context is producing specialized social tools that are excellent for certain focused purposes, but useless for others, and an aggregation of content -- filled-in forms, esoteric discussion threads and context-free 'knowledge objects' -- that is cumbersome and largely unreusable.

In an earlier post I stressed the importance of allowing each individual to maintain and organize their own content and their own networks their own way. At that time I said: "When you force people to adapt their mental models to a standard model (inevitably a complex one to accommodate a variety of specifications), a standard model that is dictated by the technology and its designers, you will get no usage, or at best reluctant, inefficient usage."

If I were start all over again, to design the second generation of social software, it would be transparent to the user, wouldn't require any submissions, wouldn't keep any content in any central location, and would be so simple to use that even people without computers would use it.

architecture

That may sound like a tall order, but it really isn't. It would be like building a house. Let's start with content, the foundation of the house. Rather than getting people to submit stuff, we need to help people to organize the personal information they already have, and then harvest it automatically. When I talk to people in the front lines of just about every business, from proprietorships to large companies, they confess their filing cabinets, the document folders on their hard drives, rolodexes and other personal collections of information are chaotic and impossible to find things in. They also say no one ever taught them how to organize these personal repositories so that content could be found easily. Everyone just assumed that the skill to do this comes naturally. So first order of business is personal content management. No rules, no standards. Just some simple tools that allow people to organize all the information and documents they have into some order so it can be readily found again when needed. Let a whole bunch of PCM tools loose on the market, and let them evolve as people learn what they need and what they don't and what organization makes sense to them as individuals. Weblogs would be a good source of ideas for the design of PCM tools, since essentially that's what blogs are.

The next floor of the house is the metadata. Software developers would work with the users of individuals' content other than the individual him/herself to ascertain how they might want to use the individual's newly-ordered content, and develop tools to harvest the relevant metadata to do that. This second layer of tools essentially reorganizes the individual's content, transparently, in ways that make it more useful to the individual's networks -- actual and potential friends, associates, customers, suppliers etc. These tools would spider the content and essentially 'fill in the forms' that those in each of the individual's networks might need to access the individual's information in the format they want it in. The PCM tools would allow people to specify which content could be seen and accessed by others with the appropriate 'permissions', and the metadata tools would repect these permissions. These metadata tools would be invisible to the individual user, and would work automatically in the background as the individual added, deleted, and changed the content using the PCM tools.

Still with me? Now comes the pièce de résistance. The third level of the house is the networking and connectivity tools, the ones that, analogous to the telephone switch, actually enable the identification of relationships, the making of connections, the transfer of information, and ultimately even collaboration and other more dynamic interactive applications of connectivity -- transactions. These applications harvest and mine the metadata, and have no content of their own. They operate on a just-in-time basis. These tools might include an Expertise Finder, a Connector, a Super Address Book, a Network Builder, a Publisher, and a Subscriber.

So for example, if I'm researching solar power for my new house, or looking for people to work with me on a Meeting of Minds business assignment, I could use the Expertise Finder tool to identify who I could and should talk to, what information each of those experts has in their personal content that is permissioned for me to look at, multiple contact information for each of those experts, and the cost, if any, of contacting the expert and/or accessing their personal content. A Connector tool would then enable one-click connection to the selected expert(s) regardless of medium selected -- telephony, instant or asynchronous messaging, Simple Virtual Presence, etc. The Connector tool, just like a telephone switch, would connect people within an organization, or between organizations, or between an individual and someone in an organization -- it wouldn't matter. So if I work for a bank and I need to find an expert in financial derivatives, it would work exactly as my personal solar power search did. I could then choose between 'found experts' within the bank and those outside. If I want to contact my father in Winnipeg, or the group I play poker with on Friday nights, I would use the Super Address Book instead of the Expertise Finder before using the Connector tool, but the process would be analogous and as simple and intuitive as looking in a rolodex or phone book. And if I wanted to build a new network of people interested in discussing New Collaborative Enterprises, or whether Kerry should pick Kucinich as a running mate, I might use the Network Builder tool, which would function exactly like the Expertise Finder except it would identify people with particular interests rather than particular expertise. Finally, I could use the Publisher tool to 'push' selected content out instead of waiting for people to come and get it, and a Subscriber tool, based on RSS, that puts out a 'standing order' to pull in and aggregate others' content that meets my specified criteria.

Just-in-time. Dead simple. Built on information I maintain, control and organize my way. Personal versus business information, internal or external, doesn't matter. A utility. An appliance.

You could even build additional commercial and transaction tools on top of this. Buy a 'smart' fridge/freezer that takes inventory of what you have, 'permission' it to feed your PCM tool, and your grocery supplier can automatically compute, fill and deliver your order with no intervention by you at all.

There are some important lessons to learn from the success and failure of previous technologies. A combination of simplicity-of-use, personalizability and adaptability has made tools like paper, books, pencils, paints, diaries, typewriters, newspapers, timepieces, telephones, radio & TV, personal calculators, CDs and DVDs ubiquitous and hugely popular. In contrast, the lack of these attributes in tools like the PC, musical instruments, the VCR, the fax machine, almost all software, PDAs and videoconferencing, has severely limited the market for these tools, and caused millions to curse their complexity.

I don't blame first-generation social software designers for making the three mistakes that already have detractors raising their eyebrows. We need to do lots of experiments to see what will work and what won't. There's no harm designing and playing with skylights and new types of shingles even before the foundation is ready to be poured. And as Stowe said, social software "will become the cornerstone of a revolution in IT", not to mention a revolution in how we connect, network, and organize and share information -- activities that comprise much of the fabric of our lives. We just need to remember: Simple, Personal, Decentralized, Just-in-time.

THE STOCK
MARKET AS PONZI SCHEME

THE STOCK
MARKET AS PONZI SCHEME 05/07/2004 01:32 PM

(Warning: some financial math ahead.)

s&p 500

A Ponzi scheme, named after its early 20th century inventor Carlo Ponzi, is a form of pyramid scheme. Basically it involves selling a nearly worthless security to a small group of investors, with the promise of great returns if they promote the security to more investors, and so on, ideally, forever. Like any pyramid scheme or chain letter, of course, it eventually collapses when it runs out of suckers. The first ones in get rich, and the last ones in (much greater in number) get shafted.

As we all know, the stock market is focused on the short term, and fluctuates wildly in response to a single quarter's earnings, external economic events, even rumour. If you look at it holistically and long-term, however, it has all the markings of a century-long Ponzi scheme, the most lucrative, and potentially most devastating, in history.

Let's take a look at the US S&P 500 as a surrogate for the entire stock market, the entire market for equity securities of listed public corporations. The index goes back to 1917, but was revamped in the 1940s and recalibrated so that the index for the average of 1941-43 was 10. It slowly rose to 100 over the next 50 years, and then to 1000 over the next 12 years.

This broad index earned, in 2003, about $55 per average share of the component securities, using GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles). So at its current level of about 1100, it has a P/E (price-to-earnings) ratio of about 20. That means investors are willing to pay $1100 now for a share that will theoretically 'pay back' $55 next year, and hopefully successively more in future years, to justify the 'present value' of $1100. To think of ir another way, it's like a bank charging you $55 this year, $65, say, next year, and so on for at least 50 years, as 'interest' on a loan of $1100. The 5% interest in the first year isn't very attractive for such a risky 'loan', but since future 'interest' will be dependent on (hopefully rising) earnings, there is the prospect of a very lucrative return eventually.

So the S&P 500, like all equities, is said to 'discount expected future cash flows'. A general rule of thumb says that the P/E ratio approximates the annual expected growth in earnings, so that means the investor in the market is expecting earnings to grow by close to 20% each year, essentially forever. How is that possible? Well, it isn't. Earnings grow because (a) prices increase, (b) costs decrease, and/or (c) volume increases. In a 'free' market economy, prices are determined (theoretically, now) by competition -- new competitors will enter the market, and/or existing competitors will adjust their prices, to the point that their return on invested capital is just high enough to justify the investment risk. That level, in a low-inflation economy where the alternative 'risk-free' investment in GICs and bonds is only 2%, is roughly a modest 7%, with the extra 5% compensating the investor for the risk implicit in equities. And, in the long run, volume can't increase -- there's only so much market for anything, and once it's saturated, earnings should therefore level off at a flat rate.

Let's suppose we've more or less reached that state now. Let's also set aside the fact that the $55 earned last year by the average share is likely considerably inflated -- there are undoubtedly some more undetected Enron-type exaggerations out there in some of these 500 companies, and GAAP allows capitalization of stock options and other near-fraudulent practices that significantly overstate 'true' earnings. Is the $55 a fair return on investment in these companies? To answer that question we need to calculate what the investment is. According to the S&P, this $55 represents a 17% return on investment. In other words, the net assets or 'book' value of the average share is $55/17% or about $325. We already indicated that a reasonable return, given the risk, was 7%, which on $325 would be about $22 per share.

Why are stocks earnings $55 per share when in a 'free' market they should only be earning $22? To answer this we need to look at the three components that make up ROI (or more correctly, return on equity -- ROE). These three components are: Margin (profit/sales), Turnover (sales/assets), and Leverage (assets/equity). Leverage can be inflated by excessive borrowing, which companies can get away with in times of low interest, but which boomerang when interest rates spike. Leverage can also be inflated by stock buy-backs, where the company essentially uses excess cash flow to buy back its own stock and hence increase the value per share of the remaining stock -- but this is a form of cannibalization, and leads to the same imbalance between debt and equity. Neither is sustainable. Turnover can be increased by lowering inventories, factoring and off-balance-sheet financing, but ultimately tops out -- you need to have a certain amount of money tied up one way or another in assets to be able to run an effective business. So you're left with Margin, which ultimately is the only explanation for the enormous ROE of $55/share, when in a free competitive market someone should be willing to accept $22/share.

The truth is that the market, and big corporations, are far from efficient. Many industries are heavily subsidized by governments to the tune of billions of dollars in kickbacks -- er, I mean, support payments -- per year. Big corporations also work as oligopolies to prevent smaller companies from entering their markets and charging more reasonable prices for their products. We, the consumers, are in fact paying $55 for goods and services that could be sold for $22 and would still provide the corporations with a very reasonable return. If and when government subsidies end, oligopolies are broken up, and the market for goods and services truly becomes free and open, the S&P 500 should then generate $22/share each year, a 7% ROE, still an attractive return in a low-inflation economy.

So we have a number of factors at work, conspiring to drive up stock prices in the unsustainable illusion that double-digit growth can and will continue forever, or at least until we're dead and it isn't our problem anymore. We have big corporations earning exorbitant returns, two and one half times a reasonable level given the risk, paid for by the taxpayer and consumer (the same people who then take what's left of their meagre paychecks and invest it, with insane trust in the brokers' unsustainable recommendations, in the stock market). And we have a P/E ratio that is already assuming that these wildly inflated, taxpayer subsidized, price-gouging levels of profit will continue to rise even further, at close to 20% per year, forever. Voilà, Ponzi scheme, par excellence.

Let's do the math. Take the $22 per share that big corporations should be earning per share in a properly regulated and open market. Acknowledge that the assumption that these earnings are going to grow in the future, when markets are saturated, consumers, corporations and governments are already buckling under grotesque and unprecedented debt loads and cannot afford to buy or pay more than they already are. Discount that annual stream of $22 of earnings for 50 years at a reasonable 7% discount rate. Know what you get for the fair value of the S&P 500 with these calculations? About 300. That is what, when you strip out the growth hype, the subsidies, the price-gouging, and the unsupportable P/E valuation, the S&P 500 should be trading at. Not 1100.

Eventually the Ponzi scheme will collapse. There may yet be time to con yet more foolish investors into believing that it will rise from 1100 to 1500 to 2000 or 5000 or higher, and if investors can be duped into believing that's what shares are worth, that's what they'll trade at. This scheme has been running for a century, and made many people millionnaires. But eventually we, or our children or grandchildren, will realize that the S&P 500 should be at 300, and since stocks always trade at what people think they're worth, that's where the S&P 500 will end up. The millions left holding the bag will lose most of their life savings, their pensions, everything.

(Oh, and if you change the assumptions about inflation and interest rates, the above valuation doesn't change. Future values and discount rates both go up proportionally, so the inflation-adjusted present value stays the same.)

Even the brokers can see the writing on the wall. They will now try to convince you that by wise investing you can 'outperform the market' by buying low and selling high, even if the market is ultimately doomed to do no better than go sideways. This is another great variant on a Ponzi scheme. It's the stuff that has hooked the new breed of gambling addicts called 'day traders'. For every investor whose holdings 'outperform the market' there will be, of course, at least one loser. But the magic of Ponzi is that it's always the other guy, the next guy, the not smart enough guy, who will get burned. You'd be better to play slot machines or buy lottery tickets -- at least the potential payout isn't overstated by 250%.

In addition to the perpetual-growth Ponzi scheme, and the 'outperform the market' con, brokers also make scads of money from IPOs -- initial public offerings. As James Surowiecki has elegantly pointed out, the IPO is a scam by which an aptly-named 'syndicate' of investment firms ('underwriters') buy a mass of shares from the company 'going public', at about half the price per share they know they can flog them to gullible investors, many of whom rely on these very brokers for investment advice. They then dump their shares on these investors, knowing that the price will promptly drop back close to the IPO price. The underwriting brokers get rich, and the unsuspecting customers get burned.

That's the reason Surowiecki and others, most recently Lawrence Fisher in yesterday's excellent analysis over at our mother ship Salon.com, have urged Google, potentially the most lucrative IPO of all time, to screw the brokers and either sell all the shares directly to the public by auction, or, even better, not to go public at all, and save the delirious investors the grief they will suffer when they find out Google has no direct line to God, and hence isn't worth a million dollars a share.

Eventually we, or our descendents, will learn (or have no choice but) to 'just say no' to dysfunctional stock markets and all the evils they breed. Until then, we'll continue to be addicted to short-term thinking, the illusion of perpetual growth, paying too much for everything we buy, subsidizing public companies with our taxpayer dollars, downsizing and outsourcing and offshoring as 'productivity enhancement', and putting up with the atrocious greed, corruption and devastation of insatiable global corporations that pull the strings of politicians like puppeteers, all in the name of 'maximizing shareholder value'. It's addictive gambling with a staggering cost, it's insane, and it's fraud.

THE TEN MOST
UNDER-REPORTED HUMANITARIAN EVENTS OF
2003

THE TEN MOST
UNDER-REPORTED HUMANITARIAN EVENTS OF
2003 02/10/2004 02:48 AM

Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) recently released its list of the ten most under-reported humanitarian events of 2003. The map above shows which countries these events occurred in. Although the MSF site is temporarily down, you can read the complete details of these stories here. The top 10 stories are:

Tens of thousands seek refuge in Chad from wars in Sudan and Central African Republic
Ongoing oppression of civilians, war and dislocation in Chechnya
Tenth year of civil war in Burundi lowers life expectancy to 40, causes massive dislocation
Three million displaced in Columbia, infrastructure destroyed, violence & disease rampant, 'drug war' ruins economy
Daily terror and disease in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo pushes 20-year death toll past three million
Annual death toll from malaria in sub-Saharan Africa reaches two million because $1 treatment is too expensive
Twelve years of violence, displacement, flooding and drought make Somalia the world's most destitute country
Millions of refugees fleeing starvation and terror in North Korea struggle in fear and deprivation in hostile China
'Free' trade agreements deprive millions of AIDS victims in Southern Africa and elsewhere of affordable treatment
War, displacement and lack of medical care produces massive malnutrition in Ivory Coast and Liberia

Why aren't the media covering these stories? None of them is physically close to the West. None of them involves countries with resources of strategic importance to the West. Almost all of them are ongoing, so there is nothing 'new' to report each day. None of the people in these countries has resorted to terrorist attacks against the West to bring attention to our indifference to their plight. And all of them are intractible problems, and therefore issues that those of us in the West would rather not know about.

OUR PERVERSE
PLEASURE IN OTHERS' MISFORTUNE

OUR PERVERSE
PLEASURE IN OTHERS' MISFORTUNE 12/29/2004 06:17 PM

Schadenfreude. It's a German word that literally means "joy from damage". It refers to the perverse pleasure we take in observing or hearing about the misfortunes of others. That pleasure seems to be enhanced by talking about it with others -- gossip would be empty without it, and when we hear about a disaster, like the horrendous catastrophe of this week's Asian earthquake and tsunami, we have an almost instinctive need to share the news with others.

If you don't think it's pleasure we feel in these situations, here are some more examples:

Our reaction when we hear that another couple's marriage has broken up, or suffered a sex scandal
Our reaction when someone we know (but don't love) loses their job, or their life savings
Our reaction when we hear of an unexpected death or tragedy outside our immediate circle of family or friends
The pleasure we get from comedy that recounts the protagonists' stupid, catastrophic or pathetic behaviours and their consequences
The satisfaction we get from hearing about criminals' dire, even cruel, punishments
Reality TV
The joy many felt at the bursting of the dot-com bubble
Our media-pandered fascination with celebrities' scandals
The pleasure we get from winning a game or sporting event, that we wouldn't get if there wasn't a 'loser'
The popularity of movies that dwell on, and exploit war, suffering, and horror

There's even a book, When Bad Things Happen to Other People, on the subject, written by John Portmann. Portmann believes Schadenfreude is harmless, a natural and healthy stress-buster. At the other extreme, the sublime ecstasy that psychopaths feel when their lies and bullying and manipulation cause misery to their victims is extremely harmful, and perrhaps addictive. How dangerous and unhealthy is this all-too-human proclivity? And why do we feel this way at all? Is it because others' misfortune, in a world of scarcity and competition, vindicates our own behaviours and decisions, increases our own stock and our self-perceived likelihood of success, or at least survival?

Writer Valerie Weaver-Zercher suggests< /a> what may be behind this is our dual need to see others as needy (which plays to the nurturer in us) and to see ourselves as not needy (which plays to our egos, and our feelings of learned helplessness). She calls this the "head-shaking syndrome". Some writers say it reflects a subliminal (or not-so-subliminal) desire for revenge against those we feel have wronged us or shown us up in some way.

I confess I'm like Calvin's Dad in the cartoon above: I don't get it, though I recognize it seems to drive an enormous amount of human behaviour and activity. I loathe reality TV and the plethora of programs and films that wallow in human misery and suffering. I love games, and play to win, but afterwards I feel badly for the 'losers', and it is the social and learning aspect, rather than the competitive aspect, that I enjoy: I would get as much, if not more, pleasure from a collaborative social activity that everybody 'won'. I find comedy that ridicules and humiliates people to be pathetic and exploitative, not funny at all. And although I have been predicting a growing cascade of social, economic and ecological catastrophes, I will get no pleasure from being proved correct. I change the station when news comes on about disasters, crimes, and the undoing of celebrities: If there's nothing I can do about these things, to me it seems merely morbid to dwell on them. Can someone please explain to me how these things are pleasurable, or even cathartic? What perverse joy can anyone get watching people eat worms, women screaming at the loss of a child, athletes and film stars humiliated, losers of card games groan, or stand-ups reveal grotesque embarrassments from their past? Taking joy from these things seems deranged to me, evidence of great mental distress and anguish, or at best a bizarre, reality-detached ennui.

But I will admit to a strange desire to spread bad news about others (though only if I know the news to be true -- I don't traffic in rumour). I don't know what's behind this. Maybe it's my natural pessimism, an opportunity to say 'I told you so', to warn people: If John and Mary are breaking up, we should all be alarmed -- maybe all marriages are doomed, or maybe monogamy itself is unnatural, unsustainable, and Tom Robbins' warning of the staggering difficulty of 'making love last' needs to be heeded. If Frank lost his job, perhaps this shows that all business hierarchies are fragile, uncaring, poised to destroy the lives of those who rely on them and allow them to continue. If Bill took his own life, maybe he's the brave one, the harbinger of the future, the canary in the coal mineshaft. I love to learn, to attach meaning to things, and bad news seems to call out for explanation, for interpretation of meaning. Why would our amazing planet be designed to suddenly shudder, and drown millions of her creatures in a tidal wave of misery, and destroy the joyous lives of tens of millions of others? What possible reason could there be for such cruelty, such devastation? Someone, please, stop telling me how many died, and instead tell me why?

DAVE'S BLOG
CLEANUP PART ONE

DAVE'S BLOG
CLEANUP PART ONE 02/10/2004 02:48 AM

Well, thanks to readers much more tech-savvy than I am, I think I may be able to get Google to start picking up my posts again, and, by tightening up the code of my blogroll, also make the page load faster for those patient readers with dial-up access. So far I have moved the blogroll to the right hand column, so Google will not get bogged down in the blogroll code and give up before it gets to the actual posts. In the process I messed up the masthead, so I've adopted a simple one-piece masthead temporarily.

If this post works properly, I'll then make an additional change to my blogroll, stripping out the table HTML and replacing it with a simple list separated by line breaks. Next post will report on the results of that. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

RED
HERRING'S TOP TEN TECH TRENDS FOR
2005

RED
HERRING'S TOP TEN TECH TRENDS FOR
2005 12/26/2004 02:31 PM

Red Herring has published its list of the top ten technology trends to watch for 2005:

Moore's Law yields to innovation: The long history of processor speed doubling every 18 months without changing price looks to be coming to an end, not because it can't be sustained, but because other innovations, like dual cores, can accomplish the same ends without having to deal with the growing problem of overheating that fast processors must contend with.
VoIP makes distance irrelevant and increases the functionality of telephony: Although carrying sound over the Internet is most famous for killing phone companies that charge outrageous long-distance rates, and making all telephony flat-rate, it's also increasing the traditional PBX phone system's functionality, allowing people to dial others by clicking on their name instead of having to look up numbers, and providing 'presence awareness' (telling you before you 'dial' whether the person is available for your 'call').
Explosion of authentication and automatic identification systems: Increased need for security and the cost of maintaining password lists is driving this change, but authentication and identification systems, if they can walk the line between convenience and breech of privacy, could also simplify and streamline the process by which we get permissioned for almost everything, allowing us to access both physical and intellectual property without jumping through hoops.
Commercial gene therapy breakthroughs: RNA-interference therapies could soon be used to suppress messenger genes that cause diseases from AIDS to diabetes. But while the technical problems in making such therapies seem to be solved, the anti-innovation US patent laws remain a huge stumbling block, and patients may have to wait while greedy corporations sue each other to death or patent law reform enters the 21st century before the therapies can be brought to market.
Micro fuel cells' last change to prove themselves real: Small fuel cells that recharge or even power small portable electronic devices off-the-grid have been promised for years, but technical and performance problems have delayed their coming to market. Next year may see the first few commercial releases, though they will be unfriendly to the environment (another 'disposable', and in need of constant refilling), and initially very expensive (as much as a dollar per hour's worth of fuel).
Desktop search and desktop management heats up: Software vendors are finally realizing that the up-to-30% of people's work-time spent 'looking for information' is often spent looking on users' own hard drives, not on the Internet and Intranets. Google Desktop arrived with a splash this year, and many more desktop search tools are coming. But will vendors realize that search is just the tip of the Personal Content Management iceberg?
Medical equipment comes 'of age': Baby boomers are fueling the demand for new medical equipment that offers therapy for patients without the use of drugs (expensive, invasive, prone to side-effects, and slow-to-market) or hands-on treatment (even more expensive, and temporary). But while self-administered treatment is exploding, baby boomers are even more enthused with self-diagnosis, doing their own on-line research and using new diagnostic kits to avoid the doctor's office entirely.
Web services allow small companies to grow up fast: New web service companies are providing, in small, affordable packages, the capabilities that big corporations developed in-house or bought from hugely expensive systems integrators and ERP vendors.
Asia and Europe extend their wireless lead over North America: Where 3G technologies dominate in Asian and European markets, North Americans still use their phones for voice calls and go online using cables or phone lines. Only 28% of Americans own laptops or cell phones with wireless data capability, and only a little over half of them have used that capability. The digital divide grows, on many fronts.
PC/TV convergence and the battle for the living-room: The much-ballyhooed convergence of the PC and the TV, and promised ubiquity of 'smart' digital appliances everywhere hasn't really happened. Why? Because for most of us, it doesn't meet a need. Too many tech vendors are overly infatuated with their own technologies, and have no appreciation of the average consumer whose main consumer electronics purchases remain the traditional 'dumb' TV and telephone. 'Smart' devices will only succeed when the companies that make them smarten up and understand the mainstream customer and his/her needs and low tolerance for complexity.

I confess this list didn't exactly blow me away with the ingenuity of technology. What's missing from the list? I'm working on my own lists of Most Important Ideas of 2004 (in each of three areas: Blogs & Blogging, Business, and Politics & Economics), and I can use some help -- this year hasn't exactly been the promised banner year for innovation.

The innovation process at the top of this post is from Credit Suisse First Boston and is explained in more detail in my innovation paper.

CANADA HEADS
INTO POLITICAL CHAOS

CANADA HEADS
INTO POLITICAL CHAOS 06/13/2004 10:15 AM

Two weeks ago I reported on the upcoming June 28 Canadian election, and predicted that there would be a Liberal minority government, with the NDP holding the balance of power. Since then, groupthink has taken hold, and the anger that many Canadians feel about the incompetence of the federal Liberals to detect either wasteful spending or the 'sponsorship' fraud by some government workers, plus the anger of many Ontarians about the new Provincial Liberal government's reneging on promises to avoid tax increases, has led another 8% of Canadians to vow not to re-elect them. This 8% swing has been predominantly older men in Ontario, who seem unwilling to believe that the Conservatives are as right-wing as Liberal Prime Minister Martin has portrayed them, and younger people, whose support for the Green Party has significantly increased.

The province-by-province projections now stand as follows -- 155 of the 308 seats are needed for a majority:

	Liberal	Conservative	NDP	Green	Bloc Québecois
West - 95 seats	27 (28%)	55 (40%)	13 (22%)	0 (10%)
Ontario - 106	48 (35%)	51 (38%)	7 (21%)	0 (6%)
Québec - 75	15 (30%)	0 (10%)	0 (8%)	0 (2%)	60 (50%)
Atlantic - 32	17 (36%)	11 (32%)	4 (26%)	0 (6%)
Total - 308 seats	107 (32%)	117 (33%)	24 (18%)	0 (6%)	60 (11%)

Next week we'll hear the all-important leader debates, but they are likely to change nothing. The Conservatives are muzzling their own right-wing extremists, who are virulently anti-abortion, gay-hating, anti-gun control, anti-immigation, pro closer ties with the US, anti-Kyoto accord, and militaristic (Stephen Harper, the new Conservative leader and former head of a Western separatist party, wanted Canada in the Iraq war). The Conservative strategists are determined to portray Harper as a moderate, despite the fact that he is on record as having taken right-wing positions on many social, economic and environmental position. If this sounds a lot like Dubya, and the spin doctor white-washing of his extremism reminds you of 'compassionate conservatism' in 2000, it should, because the tactics are the same -- say anything to get elected, and then trot out the real agenda of the people who paid for the campaign.

But it's even more frightening than that. Small-c conservatives make up only 30% of Canadians, and the capital-c Conservatives are already above that point, with some of their voters coming from angry liberals. But if the figures above don't change, the Conservatives will get 38% of the seats with 33% of the vote. And the Bloc Québecois, the Québec separatist party that runs candidates only in that province, will get 19% of the seats with only 11% of the vote. Add them together and you get a distortion almost identical to what happened in the US in 2000, where Dubya 'won' with only 46% of the popular vote. If the Conservatives and Bloc combine their seats in a strange-bedfellows anti-federalist coalition, they'll have 57% of the seats with only 44% of the votes, while liberal-centrist parties will have only 43% of the seats, even though they will have received 56% of the votes. There is no other coalition that would have enough seats to form a government.

Problem is, this coalition won't hold for more than a few months. The Bloc is a left-wing, Francophone party, liberal on all social, economic and environmental issues. The Conservatives have diametrically-opposed views on every issue but one: their dislike of federalism. The cost of Bloc support would be to grant Québec limited sovereignty, kind of 'independence light'. The very idea of this is repugnant to core Western Conservatives. And the Bloc has already said that it would not support any Conservative government that tried to recriminalize abortion, and has made it clear that it would not tolerate abandoning Canada's support for the Kyoto Accord, or anti-gay laws, both of which are bedrock principles of the Western Conservatives. And Ontario Conservatives would quickly cross the floor to the Liberals to save their political skin if the Bush-style right-wing social agenda of the Western Conservatives was trotted out.

The role of the media in the final two weeks of the campaign will be interesting. Conservative media are likely to present Harper as the 'heir-apparent', the surprise winner and a fresh new face for Canada. Liberal media will be torn over whether to simply relate the campaign stories as they are spun out by the parties, or to go behind the scenes and surface what Harper has said, in writing, in past, on many issues he is now trying to paint himself as moderate on. The current Liberal campaign has attempted to do just that, but it has backfired, being portrayed as negative 'US-style' electioneering, sour grapes or desperation politics, so the liberal media could be subject to similar admonishments if they get proccupied with the 'secret agenda' of the Conservatives. But media being what they are, expect Harper, the new frontrunner, to face increasing heat over unanswered questions from his decidedly non-moderate past. Not to mention some of his decidedly wacko neophyte candidates.

So what do I think will happen? The Conservatives will win a small plurality, and have to either form a coalition with, or try to manage with the tacit support of, the Bloc Québecois. Paul Martin will resign right after the election, and the Liberals will choose a new leader not tainted by the recent scandals. The Conservatives will start to self-destruct right after the election, with hard-line right-wingers expelled or resigning, and moderates crossing the floor to the Liberals, especially after it selects a new leader. The new government will last 3-6 months, accomplish nothing, and fall when the Bloc Québecois withdraws its support. Then we'll have another election, and perhaps even a third, until the 70% of Canadians with moderate-to-liberal social and political views get a government they can live with.

Ontario and Québec have 60% of Canada's population, and no party has ever successfully governed the country without healthy support from both provinces. Stephen Harper is on record as opposing bilingualism, although he is now waffling on what his precise position on this is, which makes him unelectable in Québec. And his previously stated positions on many other issues will, if they become widely known, make him unelectable anywhere. It's going to be messy, and stay that way for quite awhile. And if the Martin Liberals hadn't been so politically stupid, it could all have been avoided.

Cartoon by Tom Cheney -- buy his stuff at Cartoon Bank.

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR 'WORK EFFECTIVENESS
IMPROVEMENT'

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR 'WORK EFFECTIVENESS
IMPROVEMENT' 06/14/2004 02:39 PM

Graham Westwood of ProCarta gave me a copy of Bill Jensen's Simplicity, a book that claims most business problems are a result of unnecessarily complex decision-making processes. I recently wrote that if Knowledge Management were relabeled Work Effectiveness Improvement, both the requirements of the job and the customers' expectations would be much clearer, and we might finally get the job done. Jensen's book offers a prescription for WEI.

Jensen's thesis is that poor decision-making is the root cause of business error and ineffectiveness, and his diagnosis of the four causes for it is shown at right. Most employees, he says, want to do good work, but are impeded by these four causes, which produce unnecessary complexity in each of our jobs. I concur with this diagnosis, though I'm not sure large organization have either the capacity or the will to fix these four problems.

At the individual and team level, Jensen suggests* five behaviour or learning changes that could alleviate these problems:

Better time management - We need to learn to prioritize and provide better context of why tasks are important, clarify and simplify goals, improve our personal work organization skills, provide better definition of expected outcomes and of 'success', develop and provide better, simpler tools and resources to get the job done, and eliminate unnecessary tasks and bureaucracy.
Improvisational project stewardship - We must learn to focus people's attention on what's really important, communicate priorities and success measures, and learn from failures. Today's organization is more like a jazz combo than an army, and needs a very different kind of team facilitation and 'leadership'.
Quality conversations - We must learn to communicate a vision that co-workers can understand in concrete terms, and can buy into, to selectively tell people precisely what to do (but only when it's needed, and when you know), and to communicate the measurements of success and the resources available to help.
Effective listening - We need to learn, in the mass of messages, to filter out what's irrelevant, unimportant, and unactionable, and to focus on messages that clarify expectations and identify unmet needs and critical problems that we can personally help solve. That entails knowing when to intervene, and when not to, and learning how to say 'no' gracefully.
Engaging people - We need to learn to use stories and other techniques to clarify what is important, what needs to be done, and the consequences of success and failure.

Both as an individual 'knowledge worker' and as a team/project member, then, we can be more effective if we learn, and practice, managing our own time and helping others manage theirs (by eliminating unnecessary tasks and simplifying others), more effectively; selectively intervene in work processes and project activities only when we can add real value or eliminate obstacles; communicate what's really important to bring clarity; listen to identify and resolve critical needs and problems; and filter out messages and information that burdens rather than alleviating work effectiveness.

These are useful suggestions for improving work effectiveness and hence decision-making in organizations, but none of them is new. Those that would take up WEI (or KM) as a career need to understand why these techniques have not worked in the past, before they attempt to implement them in their organizations. In many companies, both employees and managers raise their eyebrows at 'soft skills' courses like time management, effective communication and story-telling. We know how to do that, they will say, the problem is more systemic, more entrenched than merely teaching common-sense skills can hope to solve.

These critics are half-right. Many problems in business are structural, strategic, or systemic, and raising people's hopes by suggesting that these basic work management techniques are suddenly going to work bottom-up when they didn't work before, will merely create disappointment. Excessive size and hierarchy, poor managers, and inappropriate success measures (that reward executives more for cutting staff than for making staff more effective, for example) are at the heart of much work ineffectiveness, and need very different solutions.

But these critics are also half-wrong. Each of us today is increasingly in charge of our own careers, our own jobs, and hence our own work effectiveness. The five skills listed above are critical skills for every entrepreneur and every front-line worker, and we should each ensure we have these 'core competencies'. If the big, cumbersome organizations we work for do not allow these skills proper exercise, then the answer is either to leave them or reform them, not to revel in our ineffectiveness and just blame management (even when they are to blame).

The remainder of Jensen's book prescribes some higher-level organizational 'disciplines' that can enable improvements in work effectiveness:

Better understanding of what different stakeholders need, and why
Building trust, through openness, fairness, respect, attention, consistency, and clarity
Designing the content of databases for effective (re-)use
Designing project tools to focus on, and inform, the critical decisions and choices that must be made, and to surface potential landmines and potential innovations
Designing tools to make it easier to connect with the right people and find the right information
Making the objective of all infrastructure to make workers' jobs simpler

I am less excited about these latter ideas, because as desirable as they are, I just don't see them happening in most organizations. Enlightened businesses already have a culture that embraces these concepts, but the vast majority of unenlightened businesses simply lack the adaptability needed to embrace them, so I think they're just so much wishful thinking. Despite the claims of the zealots of acquisition, growth, integration, globalization and 'economies of scale', I am increasingly convinced that large organizations are inherently incapable of being efficient, responsible, agile, or places where effective work can occur. They need more radical surgery than Jensen's treatment.

Nevertheless, this book provides some of the much-needed definition for WEI, which I believe will be the next wave of organizational change, and will accomplish much of what reengineering and knowledge management failed to do. The #1 purpose of management must become empowering people to know and do what's important to achieve the organization's goals, and enabling them to stop doing the other stuff that, today, takes up most of their time.

* Jensen uses different words for these, and for many of the key ideas in this book. As much as I liked his messages, I found sometimes his choice of labels for his key concepts confusing.

SALON BLOG
DIRECTORY UPDATE - APR.10/04

SALON BLOG
DIRECTORY UPDATE - APR.10/04 04/10/2004 05:46 PM

I have just updated the full Dire ctory of Active Salon Blogs. You can download it in Excel format by clicking on the link at the top of the right sidebar just below my e-mail link. It contains current information on the owner and subject of each blog, plus current sortable data on hits/month and inbound blog counts. Please send me details of any missing and new Salon Blogs, and any errors in the Directory. I promise to post any updates I receive to the Directory spreadsheet regularly. Here are the summary statistics for the last month:

Total hits per month were about 1.05 million, up 10% from February (due almost entirely to a rebound in Filchyboy's hit count). Of that total, 760 thousand hits (72%) went to the top 11 (7%) of active blogs. Median hit count remains about 700 per month.
Inbound blogs totaled about 4150, up 10% from February, with the top 11 active blogs accounting for almost exactly half of them. Median number of inbound blogs remains at 7.
The approximate proportion of female Salon bloggers was 42%, the same percentage as in January and February.
No longer blogging, it appears, are the passionate Toby's Political Diary (#1282), Asia Business Intelligence (#1319), Everything That Sucks (Come Back, Amanda! #1691), Patriotically Incorrect (#2379),.Lean for Dean (#2429), Doublethink (#2521), Life in LA (We miss you, Claire! #2608), and 16 relatively new bloggers. David Harris is on hiatus.
Mambrino's Helmet is back as The Forge.
Of the roughly 240 new Salon Blog numbers assigned this past two months (#3412-3642 and #3743-3757), about 90 made at least one post, and the following 36 appear to be posting regularly. That leaves the number of active Salon Blogs at 174, up 14 from February. Welcome to all new Sloggers.

Schnauzer Logic #3435
Connecting the Dots 3437
Vanitas Personae 3446
Cassandra Predicts 3456
Two Fawn's American Indian Movement Pages 3467
Mindboggling Adventure Tales 3488
Bartholomew's Notes on Religion 3494
Saunter & Repose 3517
Avon Calling 3522
Bill Penrose's Radio Weblog 3530
The Cassandra Frost Collection 3531
Lumberg Boinked Her 3552
Screwing the Pooch 3557
Poli Sigh 3566
The Outer Edge 3573
Matriarch 3577
Oh My Stars 3580
The Poche 3591
Bob Rich's Weblog 3592
Douglas Moran's Radio Weblog 3597
XXX Rated Realist 3602
Rich Whiteley's Radio Weblog 3605
Manhattan Waiter 3612
The Grace Pages 3622
Lucy 3627
Vietnam Moving Wall in Worland WY 3628
Ashent TwentyThree's Radio Weblog 3632
What's in Scott's Head 3635
Monkey Labs 3637
Carnival Knowledge 3641
Infidelia 3744
1.21 Giggawats 3746
Docta Puella 3751
Enough 3752
Steve Simard's Radio Weblog 3753
Heart Attack Diaries 3757

If I've missed your Salon Blog, or if you know of any active (posted within the last month) active Salon Blogs not in the directory, please let me know. There's just one day left to find the missing Easter eggs (see post below), and a few of them are hidden in the above newbie blogs.

DARFUR: A
COCKTAIL OF SUFFERING AND
GENOCIDE

DARFUR: A
COCKTAIL OF SUFFERING AND
GENOCIDE 08/27/2004 02:02 PM

Sudan has a great deal in common with Afghanistan. Both countries are horrendously overpopulated relative to their carrying capacity, and have exploding populations -- Sudan's population of 40 million people is doubling every 25 years and that rate is not slowing, raising the spectre of its population topping a half billion by the end of the century. Both Sudan and Afghanistan are also desperately poor, with only 7% of Sudan's land and 12% of Afghanistan's capable of supporting agriculture. What's worse, over-farming, over-grazing and global warming are producing chronic drought, which in turn causes massive famine and desertification. Encroaching desert has already halved arable land in Afghanistan since 1975, and the same phenomenon is happening in Sudan. Both countries have long legacies of brutal and repressive dictatorships, foreign occupation, savage and interminable civil war, lawlessness, genocide and, in the case of Sudan, slavery. And both countries provided safe harbour for Osama bin Laden.

What is happening now in the Western Sudanese provinces of Darfur is merely a continuation of a centuries-long legacy of misery, poverty, conflict and violence. In this week's New Yorker Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power reports from Darfur, with first-person interviews with government and rebel leaders and the victims caught eternally in the middle. Some of the information she reveals in telling the agonizing story of this impoverished and hopeless nation:

The military dictatorship that governs Sudan is desperate to end US sanctions so that its newly-found oil, which came onstream only five years ago, can start generating revenue for the bankrupt nation, so much so that it agreed to end its long and savage civil war against the rebels in Southern Sudan (where the oil is), and exempt Sudanese Christians from Sharia law.
That Southern war has cost two million lives, and the Bush Administration was active in brokering the peace for three reasons: (a) many of the casualties were Christians, which led to pressure from American evangelical churches, a bastion of Bush support, for US action, (b) the US would have access to an additional source of much-needed oil and (c) peace would have allowed Bush, in an election year, to portray himself as a peacemaker as well as a 'war president'.
Plans to announce the peace were undone when the Western Darfur provinces, suffering from horrendous drought, rapid desertification, increasing tension between Arabs and non-Arabs for scarce land, and long government neglect, began to clamour for independence (Darfur was an independent Sultanate until Britain annexed it into its Sudanese colony); the government, tapped out militarily and not wanting to jeopardize the possible end of sanctions, responded by outsourcing military retaliation against Darfur's six million people to local Arab sheiks, warlords and tribal leaders, who they financed and armed heavily and supported with aerial bombing raids in key areas occupied by the pro-independence Sudanese Liberation Army.
These local Arab leaders used this power and military might to launch a genocidal attack on all non-Arabs in Darfur, deputizing murderous gangs of Arab bandits called janjaweed, whose intimidation tactics include burning whole villages, gang-raping women, decapitation, burning children alive, mass public executions, ransoming community leaders, burying victims of atrocities and precious wells in sand, and kidnapping women and children. The bandits steal everything of value in the destroyed villages as compensation for their 'enforcement' of government authority. As a consequence over a million Darfur residents have fled their villages to massive refugee centres elsewhere in the provinces, where there is at least safety in numbers (50,000-75,000 per camp), and in neighbouring Chad.
USAID estimates that the death toll from genocide, starvation and disease will, even with humanitarian and peacemaking intervention now, exceed 300 thousand and could, without intervention, top one million by the end of this year. The UN has already established a food program that has reached 900 thousand of the 1.5 million affected in Darfur, but the threat to the safety of both Darfur natives and humanitarian workers is severe.
There are all kinds of reasons for Western reticence to get involved: Darfur is an all-Muslim area, so the genocide is ethnic, not religious, and it is resource-poor, unlike the oil-rich South. European leaders, not wanting to give Bush a smokescreen for his foreign policy blunders and rebukes of its allies, have been perversely reticent to support US humanitarian efforts in Darfur. Arab sheiks and tribal leaders in Darfur and elsewhere in Sudan have announced they will consider any intervention by the West in their 'internal dispute' as an unwanted foreign invasion, which they will liken to the US invasion of Iraq, and will use it to recruit zealous young Arabs to kill all foreigners, including humanitarian workers and peacemakers, producing a fiasco similar to the one that occurred in Somalia. One recruiting brochure says "We call upon you to head immediately to Darfur and dig the ground deep for the mass graves of the crusader army". Darfur's refugees say that bringing peacekeepers from the African Union won't work either, because "African troops are too susceptible to bribes". And the Sudanese government is probably both unwilling and unable to rein in the local sheiks and warlords and the rogue janjaweed gangs. And the only non-Sudanese body with authority to bring thm to justice for genocide is the International Criminal Court, which the US government has repudiated.

What can be done? Samantha argues that, despite the danger, we have a global responsibility to bring in peacemakers and protect the people of Darfur (and, if the detente with the Southern provinces falls through, which appears likely, the people of the South as well). But, just as in Rwanda ten years ago, how can that be done over the violent opposition of the ruling government of the country? You can only make peace where there is a desire from both sides to achieve a workable peace. Without that, peace efforts will constantly be sabotaged by the side uninterested in peace, which will produce retribution and escalate into full civil war.

What about invading Sudan? Its government is much more popular, at least in the North, than the government of Afghanistan, and the end result of an invasion would inevitably be the same as what we see in Afghanistan: Tyranny replaced by anarchy, the retrenchment of the power of local warlords, massive resentment by the locals of the invading force's inability to bring order or build infrastructure to allow even the promise of a normal life. Intractible civil war and strife. And quagmire for the invaders.

Should we arm the non-Arab people of Darfur so they can defend themselves? After all, the weapons used in the genocide against them came from the West and from Russia, so can two wrongs make a right? And we can't disarm the janjaweed -- in Sudan, as in Afghanistan, there are so many weapons that disarmament is an impossible objective. This was, of course, how we dealt with the earlier problem in Afghanistan -- providing arms to the Taliban and other extremists to allow them to defend themselves from the invading Russians. We all know how successful that was.

Should we relocate a million or two million people to Chad, and pay Chad to take them in, and protect their borders? This was how we dealt with the persecuted Jews after World War II, helping them build a new homeland in Israel. That, too, has been a political nightmare. Why would the people of Chad, itself overpopulated and struggling, be willing to give up part of their homeland to accommodate a huge exodus of destitute foreign refugees?

The sad reality is that there is no answer. The problem is that there are too many people and not enough land, water, or resources to support them. Throughout human history, the maximum sustainable population has been 160 people per arable square mile (1 person per 4 arable acres), which would mean that Sudan should have no more than 11 million people, a quarter of its current population. By the end of the century it could have fifty times this maximum sustainable population, and if desertification isn't halted, it will be even worse. If we think democracy, 'free' trade, education and technology are somehow going to prevent this situation from being catastrophic, we're wildly deluding ourselves.

What's happening in Sudan, now, is foreshadowing what will happen worldwide by the end of this century if we don't address massive overpopulation, unsustainable resource consumption, and all the consequences that these two excesses produce: famine, war, destitution, lawlessness, epidemic disease, terrorism, tyranny, oppression, suffering, genocide, and ecological collapse. Sudan is a country out of control, and while we must of course provide humanitarian aid to its needy masses, and do everything we can to persuade its government to allow us to help it broker a lasting peace, this is only a stop-gap. We must convince the government and the people of Sudan that it must reduce its population and start stewarding its resources in a sustainable and responsible way. Otherwise the next war, the next genocide, the next famine, the next epidemic, the next oppressive government, will be incomparably, unimaginably worse. They say you can't get blood from a stone, but there seems to be no limit to how much blood can be wrenched from an ocean of sand.

Photograph of a Darfur refugee camp from this remarkable online portfolio by Bruno Stevens at New Yorker online.

ISRAEL VS.
PALESTINE: THE INTRACTABLE, ENDLESS
WAR

ISRAEL VS.
PALESTINE: THE INTRACTABLE, ENDLESS
WAR 05/27/2004 04:36 AM

Things are usually the way they are for a reason. But there are few situations in the world that appear, from a distance, as unreasonable as the war between Israel and Palestine, a war that has been going on, in essence, without let-up for more than half a century. At one point the efforts to reach a peace settlement got so close to success that the negotiators on each side received Nobel Peace prizes for their efforts. But the dream didn't last, and for reasons we couldn't fathom, the cycle of bloodshed, escalation and retaliation cranked up again and is now at firestorm levels, threatening to push the entire Mideast into even more cataclysmic violence.

The reason we couldn't fathom this, is because we've never lived there, never walked a mile in their shoes. In The New Yorker this week, Jeffrey Goldberg provides us with an excellent proxy for such an experience, as he crisscrosses the area, from Israel's "ideologues of aggressive settlement" to Palestinian mothers teaching their children the honour of death in the holy war against the Jews, describing what he sees and what he hears from those in power, and from those who have nothing. It is a gut-wrenching, depressing journey. You'll need to buy the May 31 edition to read it, and I would recommend it highly. Alternatively, you can listen to Goldberg summarize his findings, along with a slide show of photos by Gilles Peress, here. One of those photos, of a Palestinian woman peering through a temporary gap in the new Israeli Separation Wall, is reproduced above.

Goldberg makes no secret of his personal view of all this:

The leaders of the Jewish national-religious camp do not adhere to observable reality, They exist in the glorious Jewish past and in the messianic future but not in the reality of today, in which Jewish soldiers give their lives to protect settlements; in which Palestinians live and die at checkpoints; in which Israel is becoming a pariah among the nations; and in which Israel may one day cease to exist as a democratic Jewish state.

[Michael Tarazi, legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team says] "Settlements are the vanguard of binationalism" -- a single state that would soon have an Arab majority. "I don't care if they build more. The longer they stay out there, the more Israel will appear to the world to be essentially an apartheid state."... "We have to look at the way the South Africans did it. The world is increasingly intolerant of the Zionist idea. We have to capture the imagination of the world. We have to make this an argument about apartheid."

The view of the moderate majority on both sides is that the best of a sorry lot of options is to have Israel dismantle the settlements and withdraw from the pathetic Gaza Strip and the volatile West Bank, to the so-called Green Line, the UN-brokered treaty line after the last "official" war. But that majority view is very fragile, and violently opposed by a significant minority on both sides. The settlements in the occupied territories are the flash-point, where hugely outnumbered Jews, many of them vehemently anti-Arab, provocative, and uncompromising, are surrounded by largely militant Palestinians ready to lay down their lives to reclaim "their homeland", and protected by an Israeli army that has ceased being protectors and become an army of occupation, many of whom are all too willing to demonstrate violently which side they support, as Goldberg reports.

There are no good guys and bad guys in this war, and every confrontation, of which there are thousands, at every checkpoint, every attack by Arab militants (many of them children), every razing of Palestinian homes to make way for more Iraqi settlements, every suicide bombing, radicalizes both sides and renders the position of the moderate majority untenable. The extremists on both sides, outnumbered though they may be, are firmly in control of the political agenda, and their every provocative act strengthens their position rather than ostracizing them. The "ideologues of aggressive settlement" on the Israeli side, and especially in the settlements, largely believe that all of the occupied territories are theirs by divine right, and that it is the will of God that all Arabs be expelled from their holy land in its entirety -- that, as their website says, "There is no Palestine". And the militants and zealots on the Palestinian side, among the poorest and most destitute people on the face of the Earth, and with one of the highest birth rates, state categorically that they would not stop fighting if Israel withdrew from Gaza and the West Bank, but would merely be encouraged to continue the war until all Jews were extinguished from their holy land. The rabidly intolerant have the will and the ready means to scuttle every attempt at compromise, to embarrass moderates, to incite violence and then say "I told you so."

There is nothing particularly unique in this, of course. Many of the tribal wars in Africa, the ethnic wars in the Balkan states, and the insane religious war in Northern Ireland, exhibit the same shameful, and shameless, pattern of violence and intransigence. The next, inevitable attack by Islamic fundamentalists on US soil will surely produce the same knee-jerk result in the US, and launch another war to treat the symptoms and exacerbate the disease.

Ariel Sharon, less moderate than most but less extreme than the extremists, has taken an impossible 'middle' course sure to satisfy no one: Withdraw from Gaza, kind of (there are a host of conditions that render the withdrawal largely a joke to Palestinians), and bulldoze Palestinian homes to build a mammoth wall, not along the Green Line but deep inside the West Bank to "protect" the Jewish settlements, which are everywhere, not just in the border areas. The partisan, bipartisan support he has received in the US shows how little America's leaders understand the realities of the area's politics.

As I've said before, the only answer, and it will take decades, perhaps centuries to achieve, is to deal with the underlying humanitarian issues, to give Palestinians a reason to value peace, "something to lose", and help them build infrastructure and educational institutions, and a future to believe in. Poverty, ignorance and inequality, not religious and ethnic hatred, are the real enemies of peace. It doesn't matter whether the area is partitioned into two states, fairly or unfairly, or made into a single apartheid state. Things are the way they are for a reason, and in Israel-Palestine the reason is entrenched, and there is no short-term answer. No matter who represents the two sides, there will be decades of violence, war, and bloodshed to come, and it is inexcusable and ignorant of those of us who don't live there to take sides for cynical political gain. Let us instead -- as we should be doing in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the other areas we have recklessly meddled in, in the absurd and arrogant belief that we understand the problems and have all the answers -- let us instead invest in infrastructure, in education, in building a better world even as the zealous minorities try to tear it apart. The founders of the religions we all claim to believe in would surely understand, and nod in assent.

SALON BLOG
DIRECTORY UPDATE - FEB.10/04

SALON BLOG
DIRECTORY UPDATE - FEB.10/04 02/10/2004 01:32 PM

Total hits for the month were about 950 thousand, down 12% from last month (the decrease was due entirely to a drop in hits for two blogs). Of that total, 700 thousand hits (72%) went to the top 11 (7%) active blogs. Median hit count remains about 700 per month, or about 20 hits per day.
Inbound blogs totaled about 3700, up 16% from last month, with the top 11 active blogs accounting for almost exactly half of them. Median number of inbound blogs remains at 7.
The approximate proportion of female Salon bloggers was 42%, the same percentage as a month ago.
No longer blogging, it appears, are Subdude Citizen, who I'll really miss, Scott Summers' Taiwan Weblog, the Return of the King Countdown blog, Paul & Chris' Paris Travel Commentary, the very stimulating Mambrino's Helmet, and four relative newcomers, Quakergreen, Struggle for Progress, Graphite Furnace and Gabriela's Radio Weblog.
Storyteller Hugh Elliott's Standing Room Only is back, as is Short 'n Oblique.
Of the roughly 85 new Salon Blog numbers assigned this past month (#3326-3411), about 30 made at least

A CHRISTMAS POEM, TO MY WIFE

A CHRISTMAS POEM, TO MY WIFE

This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)

A CHRISTMAS POEM, TO MY WIFE

A BLOGGER'S CHRISTMAS WISH LIST

THINK GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL: PETER SINGER'S ONE WORLD

GOOD, NON-COMMERCIAL HEALTH INFORMATION

MAKING POLITICS POLITICALLY CORRECT

AUSSIE BREAKTHROUGH ON SOLAR ENERGY?

WHAT'S WRONG WITH FIRST-GENERATION SOCIAL SOFTWARE

THE STOCK MARKET AS PONZI SCHEME

THE TEN MOST UNDER-REPORTED HUMANITARIAN EVENTS OF 2003

OUR PERVERSE PLEASURE IN OTHERS' MISFORTUNE

DAVE'S BLOG CLEANUP PART ONE

RED HERRING'S TOP TEN TECH TRENDS FOR 2005

CANADA HEADS INTO POLITICAL CHAOS

A PRESCRIPTION FOR 'WORK EFFECTIVENESS IMPROVEMENT'

SALON BLOG DIRECTORY UPDATE - APR.10/04

DARFUR: A COCKTAIL OF SUFFERING AND GENOCIDE

ISRAEL VS. PALESTINE: THE INTRACTABLE, ENDLESS WAR

SALON BLOG DIRECTORY UPDATE - FEB.10/04

A CHRISTMAS
POEM, TO MY WIFE

A BLOGGER'S
CHRISTMAS WISH LIST

THINK
GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL: PETER SINGER'S
ONE
WORLD

GOOD,
NON-COMMERCIAL HEALTH INFORMATION

MAKING
POLITICS POLITICALLY CORRECT

AUSSIE
BREAKTHROUGH ON SOLAR ENERGY?

WHAT'S WRONG
WITH FIRST-GENERATION SOCIAL
SOFTWARE

THE STOCK
MARKET AS PONZI SCHEME

THE TEN MOST
UNDER-REPORTED HUMANITARIAN EVENTS OF
2003

OUR PERVERSE
PLEASURE IN OTHERS' MISFORTUNE

DAVE'S BLOG
CLEANUP PART ONE

RED
HERRING'S TOP TEN TECH TRENDS FOR
2005

CANADA HEADS
INTO POLITICAL CHAOS

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR 'WORK EFFECTIVENESS
IMPROVEMENT'

SALON BLOG
DIRECTORY UPDATE - APR.10/04

DARFUR: A
COCKTAIL OF SUFFERING AND
GENOCIDE

ISRAEL VS.
PALESTINE: THE INTRACTABLE, ENDLESS
WAR

SALON BLOG
DIRECTORY UPDATE - FEB.10/04