Author: libmark73

It’s about time for my family to purchase a new car. With our daughter being a senior in high school and our son a freshman, we are firmly beyond the sport team carpooling years. We currently have two cars, a 2010 Toyota Corolla and a 2013 Toyota Sienna minivan. The minivan must go.

The Corolla has, or will have within the next week, 100,000 miles and the van is pushing 60,000 miles. The Corolla, having now gone five times around the fattest part of our globe, still has a good long life ahead of it, Gawd willing. I’ve long thought that internal combustion engine cars are a piece of shit technology and I’ve ached for the day when I could buy something that could move me around in a manner that is less damaging to the world. A worthy wish.

For roughly $50,000 I could order up, tonight, an all-wheel drive Tesla. And yes, for less than $40,000 I could get a model without the all-wheel drive but, for the time being and until climate change kicks in in earnest, I live in a location that tends to get significant amounts of snow in the winter and all-wheel drive is a necessary luxury for myself and my family. Considering that I could sell the Sienna for something close to $20,000, I’d be looking at a car payment smaller than what I had when I purchased the Sienna brand new six years ago. The Sienna (our all-wheel drive vehicle at the moment) gets crappy gas milage so again, the Sienna must go. Side note: I know it’s silly to buy a brand new car but there were extenuating circumstances at the time with the van. Financial planners of the world, please forgive my sins. Also, I’ve searched for used Teslas and they are rare birds. So I think we’d have to go new.

So here we are. I need a new car. There’s a reasonable alternative out there that does less damage to the world. The cost isn’t prohibitive. It’s a poorly timed cost, yes, but not prohibitive. So why am I feeling this hesitation to make the leap into the electric vehicle world?

Paul Kingsnorth is the answer.

Kingsnorth, in Confessions, has penned a set of essays that is equal parts saddening, maddening, and liberating. Kingsnorth is a year older than I am and nearly as handsome as I am, but while I was spending my early adult years logging and cutting down trees in NE Washington, Kingsnorth devoted that time, and more, to the front lines of the environmental movement. Greenpeace. EarthAction. Editor of The Ecologist. Real, heavy, hard-hitting work. And after a couple decades in the trenches, here’s his conclusion: if the Earth is going to be saved (or at least a rough approximation of Earth as humans have known it since we started toddling around), it will need to be saved from those who say it can be saved.

[Insert awkward pause here]

Kingsnorth devoted a good chunk of his life to the protection of wild places. There really is no place left on the globe that hasn’t felt some impact from humans but still, he worked hard to protect those spaces that hadn’t already been paved over, tilled under, cut down, developed, mined, dammed, sprayed, logged, irrigated, what have you. Kingsnorth’s efforts, and the efforts of legions of other lovely humans have produced some wins. Some areas have been preserved. Some habitat for something other than humans has been set aside. And yet, Kingsnorth has watched the environmental movement shift from one of “protection” to one of “sustainable development.”

And that kills him.

Sustainable development, for all its promise, really comes down to this: we need to sacrifice the wild in order to keep humans alive. If you’re driving on I-84 through the Columbia River gorge, and if you’re of a certain age or older, you’ll realize what used to be untouched (aka non-arable) lands on the bluffs soaring above the river are now blanketed with wind-powered electricity generation.

That is sustainable development.

On one hand, I think it’s awesome. There’s a massive source of energy that is now being tapped that doesn’t have a carbon cost associated with it. And when I say there’s no carbon cost, I mean there’s no cost once we get beyond the manufacturing of the turbines, mining the materials needed to make them, shipping them around the globe, constructing them, etc.

But on the other hand… we’ve now taken thousands of acres of previously undeveloped land and plunked down hundreds of wind turbines. To save the world. To save the environment. And this is the environmental movement today. As my son would say, Eef.

So here I am, looking a buying an electric car. Is it a better choice than a gas powered car? Yes, I firmly believe that it is. On an individual scale, at least. But what happens if my entire state, or even county, or even city, decided to switch over to electric cars en masse? We’d need to start producing a whole lot more electricity, that’s what. And where will that power come from? I certainly hope it won’t be coal or natural gas, but if it’s a renewable it’s going to have to occupy a sizable chunk of the Earth. Can we say that we’re saving the Earth if we’re covering it with solar panels in the name of saving it? Kingsnorth would argue we can’t.

This is probably the most important book I’ve read in a very, very long time. Five stars. Go track down a copy here: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/999308029

We live in an age of specialization. In a specialized world, the dominant narrative is that we need to find our area of focus early and stick with it. Think Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers book about putting in 10,000 hours of practice to achieve proficiency. What Epstein reveals is that the “specialize early” approach only works to a certain degree in some fields and to lesser degrees in others.

An example: learning to play chess. Chess, as Epstein describes it, is a “kind world” type of problem to solve. Through repetition and practice, players can garner near-immediate feedback on their decisions and strategy, allowing them to re-evaluate and reflect. Most of life, however, isn’t a “kind world” problem. In Epstein’s vernacular, most of life falls into a “wicked” world scenario. Not “wicked” in an evil way, just one that is more complicated and often lacks the immediate feedback of hitting a golf ball and knowing to adjust a swing.

In a “wicked” world of situations, being a generalist and having a broad background of knowledge to draw upon is not a drawback or a liability, it’s an essential ingredient in being able to solve problems that are ill-defined in their scope.

I deleted my Facebook profile way back in 2018. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it, but I’d also be lying if I said I slept better at night as I participated in and contributed to the success of a deeply flawed company. McNamee gives me plenty of reasons to feel comfortable with my decision to bail from Facebook.

Here’s the deal: McNamee is a Silicon Valley institution in his own right, a pioneer alongside the wave of hippies who birthed the information technology industry. He was an early investor in Facebook and personal advisor to Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook, along with some other investing decisions, has made McNamee a very wealthy man. And one who is now tormented by what Facebook has become.

As Facebook grew rapidly, the company made a series of missteps when it came to protecting users’ privacy. As Zuckerberg would apologize and promise to do better, McNamee was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt through the first few cycle of that pattern. Until the 2016 elections. With verification of foreign interference in the U.S. election, McNamee went public with his doubts and concerns about the company and its leadership.

In short, McNamee’s concern is that Facebook’s business model (develop massive adoption rates, maximize users’ time spent on the platform and construct filter bubbles for users), flies in the face of what is needed for functional exchange of ideas and thought within democracies (or constitutional republics, if that is your preferred term). As it turns out, falsehoods and conspiracy theories, coupled with rage and incense, lead to far greater user interaction with the Facebook platform (and thus, higher ad revenues) than do logical, rational exchanges of ideas.

Facebook knows this. And yet they structure Facebook users’ personal feeds to enhance content that is incendiary in nature. How do I know that Facebook knows? Because McNamee wrote a letter to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg outlining Facebook’s culpability in sowing dissent and discord amongst the voting public. And yet Facebook continues to operate largely as they did prior to the 2016 elections.

McNamee offers several solutions to the mess we find ourself in, but the most promising would appear to be the application of antitrust laws. There is plenty of legal acreage to make the argument that Facebook (and Google and Amazon, but that’s another story) are monopolies and should be broken up. As things currently stand, Facebook is able to squash competitors, buy up attractive businesses that then protects Facebook’s core business, all while wreaking havoc on the entrepreneurial system. Quick case in point: Facebook purchased Oculus, a VR development company, for $3 billion dollars. Okay, fine. But what investor is then going to go out and back a small company in that space knowing that the only exit strategy is to be bought by Facebook? There is little to no chance that Facebook will allow a competitor to build a strong business in the VR space.

Overall, four stars out of five. Here’s the link to go find this title in your own local library: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1060183381

With no clear protagonist, this reads more like an interwoven, multi-generational collection of personal essays about the present-day urban Native American experience. The antagonist however — also never clearly defined — looms large in the story. Violence. Abuse. Genocide. Drugs. Alcohol. Cultures struggling to adapt and find some relevance and vitality. Poverty. Each of these overlapping forces also gets its own moment in the spotlight.

As one might guess, it’s a tough read. But a good story. 4 stars.

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1003830622

I have to say, the title is very descriptive. The perception of a business needing to grow exponentially in order to succeed is just that, a perception.

While I found the book to be slightly repetitive and it covered the same ground multiple times and kept repeating the same overarching points a couple times and restating what has already been said in previous chapters and… well, you get the point. This book could have been half the weight but still carried the same punch. Once I got past that issue, Jarvis is decent writer. But, like my views of Seth Godin, his writing is more geared to a blog style format than a full-length book.

There. I got my quibble out of the way.

The remainder of the book was insightful as it laid out the many ways a business fails by trying to grow to quickly: investing in and focusing on potential customers rather than investing in and focusing on current customers, being myopic when it comes to viewing growth as the only viable answer to business problems, giving up ownership of a company unnecessarily to VC/PE/angel investors, etc. In short, growth as a business strategy needs to be carefully examined before embarking on that particular path as it often becomes a solution looking for an ever-bigger solution. And at a certain point, that strategy can get crunchy.

Here’s the WorldCat link for the title: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1086338038 Go find it in a library near you.