[7] Who Owns The Future?: Jaron Lanier - 200 pages - Review

Part 2

This will likely suffice as the whole "review" given that I don't see what I have to say about it changing by chugging through the next 150 pages.

(Thighs. When your blog needs more sex.)

This book, and the way it's laid out, is a long thought experiment with many disparate and perhaps incomplete ideas. It feels like if I blogged in short form, then pushed all the blogs together, then tried to make a claim about the future of people or culture.

You can tell that Lanier is well-read and well-traveled. He gives you an insight into the conversations he's had from Silicon Valley to different U.S. intelligence agencies. He's sat in on the conversations from MIT super scientists who made all sorts of predictions about what the future of the internet and big data would mean. Unfortunately, it seems exceedingly hard to coalesce all of these experiences into an argument for an augmented and representative economy.

The book centers around the idea of "siren servers." Essentially, big data gathering engines give insight to the people running them. This insight is  often sold to advertisers or used to exploit the market. There are a whole host of ideas, often cliched and predictable, that surround what people try to claim about the data collected. Lanier tries to advocate for us petty humans who get lost in the hype.

Much time is dedicated to discussing the implications of things being "free." What we've seen happen to the arts in music or tv, Lanier thinks will happen to education. We'll slowly erode "the middle class" because we'll lose appreciation for the humans required to input, manage, and interpret information. It will just be presented for free in exchange for transparency to our information. It promises to be thought provoking, but it's hard to grasp how strong the argument is with how it's structured.

Arguably, the book could be half the length or perhaps split between examples in one half and abstract informal theory in the other. I'm a little let down because it's a topic and world with ever-changing and challenging ideas to explore, but maybe so much so that even it's pioneers and insiders have a really hard time trying to talk about.

[6] Green Gone Wrong: Heather Rogers - Review

Though the book is  little old it constitutes an expansive piece of journalism. Much of what the general public takes for granted concerning the conversation around "organic,"carbon offsetting," or "such and such certified" is shown to be a corrupted puddle of politics, marketing, and part of a significantly larger picture that makes you feel good verses actually fixing anything.

There are any number of problems with oversight and regulatory committees. From faulty standards, under staffing, people appointed to head the departments who come from the industry that made them rich, it's a fairly common tale. Regulations get imposed which cripple small farms in taxes and equipment costs they don't require. Most are compelled to sellout. The farms that don't are often not profitable, despite what you may be paying at the local farmer's market.

Certain bastions of sustainability and potential of green engineering/building do exist. The lessons learned from these places is that much of it is a work in progress, even if they've existed for 20 or 30 years. (Un)fortunately, these places seem mostly likely to exist as a result of some disaster. Freiburg, Germany remembers the destruction from WWII and was emboldened after Chernobyl to categorically reject nuclear as a prominent source of power. This helped create a social and political culture that supported the investment in green initiatives. It's important to note, that it's not enough to simply live in smarter homes, by design, they make it so people are consuming less at the same time.

You'll get an insight into the world of SUVs as well.Certain gas guzzelers had the cards stacked in their favor in lax manufacturing standards, foreign competition being priced out of the market with shady tax laws, and incentives offered to businesses who used their SUVs for work purposes .All insured an unfair advantage at the expense of better technology. How refreshing it is to hear that GM was instrumental in dismantling public infrastructure for transportation, you know, to encourage more car buying. and upon them getting caught, a pawltry fine and then back to monopolizing business as usual.

It's not exactly new news, but the idea of carbon offsetting is more joke than not as well. The industry is unregulated, which means baseline measurements, from which to judge the amount carbon offset, are all over the place. This in line with the fact that a trip overseas could take your purchase of a tree over one hundred years to "equal out." The impoverished areas that these trees might go to end up getting mismanaged and underdeveloped., while many of the funds get diverted to other investments.

We treat 'green" like we treat most things. Haphazard effort that's talked about in much rosier terms than is ever accomplished. In the opinion of Obama's head of, I forget which agency related to environmental protection that's not the EPA, "it will take the weather 9/11" to galvanize people into wising up.When you read how messy it gets to even accomplish something small, I can't help but to think the same.

[5] Eichmann in Jerusalem: Hannah Arendt - Review

This is much less of a review than a reflection and meditation. After all, what am I really going to be able to contribute to an insanely detailed account of a trial of an upper-echelon Nazi?

Reading a book like this makes you hyper aware of the quickness we make caricatures of the entirety of WWII and the Holocaust. You'll get accounts from people at all levels of the chaos testifying and laying blame in every direction. You'll get a feel for the giant clusterfuck that constituted the organization and mitigation of orders. You'll start to get a sense of the amount of hands involved, Jew and non-Jew alike, that had an infinite list of reasons for their compliance or resistance.

There is no more appropriate word than "banal" when it comes to how the atrocities are contemplated, tried, and explained. Eichmann is almost too much, yet too little, for words. You will never need to look further than his own words, a hodgepodge of cliches and arbitrary appeals to circumstance and concern for his career, to understand the depths of delusion, complacency, and justification.

It's just, when the numbers get reported. I have 101 friends on Facebook. You here 2,000 here "deported" 25,000 there trying to "emigrate." Most on their way to a death camp. Their possessions signed over, their families split apart, stateless, and described in utterly inhuman terms while the perpetrators find ways to consider themselves righteous in letting a few slip through the cracks to safety. Arbitrary death metted out from most countries, combated only by a handful of nations and only by semi-arbitrary edicts and ideas themselves. Like, France, happy to deport the stateless native born German-Jews, but when asked to ship out their French-Jews, NOW they switch gears and start protecting and playing hardball. Complicated immigration policy much?

I kind of feel hopeless. When you stop and contemplate the amount of people, from all levels of society, all different mixtures of nationalities. The tacit approval, in the lack of a voice against, the different experiments that were carried out at the social level to test what people were capable of. Like, you know "we won" the war, but the lessons and struggle of what it means to be "human" are so profoundly important, you wonder if when that generation is entirely gone if the message will really set in about the scale and nature of what happened.

This is absolutely something you read for the details. The gist of the trail itself or Eichmann as a person might take a chapter or two. The "mess" of people involved, how they ranked, different country policies, pacing, personal stories, different purposes the trail tried to serve and reflections and interplay of the testimony as it pertained to personal philosophy and morality are all explored.The best kind of eye-opening about the worst capacities of the human habit and soul.

[4] Fight Global Warming Now: Bill Mckibben - Review

Talk about a quick read.

This is what you read if you're super motivated but don't know where to start when engaging your local community about climate change. It gives you practical, sometimes insanely obvious, advice on who to talk to and how. It describes the efforts of the "Step It Up" campaign in 2007 to get a U.S. carbon emissions cutback of 80% by 2050. It doesn't try to act like more than it is. You'll feel marginally connected to the efforts of some area or wonder if you can try something similar in your area. It doesn't shoot to be THE BOOK you go to figure out how you're going to structure your next rally.

In its specific goal of offering advice at the local level, it makes you want more. Do the rallies, speeches, and 50 mile walks translate into effective legislation? Learning how to goad the media into covering you might be great for telling someone you got on USA Today, but what is the tangible effect of feeling motivated and informing people with your catchy email titles? This is a guidebook for connecting with all the people around you who feel global warming is a problem, but it doesn't play too heavily into how much you can get organized and how little that can still speak to the overall problem.

The information comes in quick mini paragraphs and subsections verses drawn out paragraphs, so it's easy to look up information again or keep pocket mental notes. You do get the sense that you can create something, no matter how small, and that it can at least play the part of "spreading the message." There are so many links of the different collaborators that it's pointless to point them out here, but if you want to get lost in the array of different local efforts, the appendix lists them all.

If you show up to a rally one day and get to small talking with one of the organizers, they'll inevitably reference this book and talk about how every little bit counts. I no less wonder more about influencing the bigger picture and the actual gears that need to turn at the national and global level. To the extent that a thousand independent organizers spread awareness and help focus the conversation, it's great. It's efficacy and ties to changing the big picture remain tenuous.

[3] The Bet: Paul Sabin - 100 Pages - Blurb

"Population growth will end us all!"
"No it won't!"

This sums up a big portion of what this book is about. One group of scientists from a university over here created a model and method for saving the world that another set of scientists disagreed with, sometimes to the point of throwing drinks in each others' faces.

This is a detailed history book first and foremost. There are entire chapters you won't feel bad about skipping through because, well, it doesn't matter what neighborhood one of the combatants grew up in. It will be explained that such nominal details speak to why Julian Simon would take Chicago economists as a kind of surrogate family, but again, it doesn't really matter when you're trying to learn how these population growth arguments carried out.

The "interesting facts" are randomly sprinkled throughout the book. You can gain insight on how Nixon got the reputation of being environmentally friendly. You can see how oil embargos fed flames of fear that played into national best sellers' conclusions concerning over-taxing resources. You can see how there's always a group that will come in as the "finally learned skeptics" who tear apart previous conclusions with modern era ideology more than any genuinely calculable methodology.

If anything, it's a cautionary tale about style verses substance. Valuable points get lost in doomsday rhetoric, even if the rhetoric is more true than false or more true than the other side. The details are not the kind you want to take many notes about or tell people. It's not a "bad" book, but I'm finding it hard to continue reading it.

[2] Ecological Intelligence: Daniel Goleman - Wrap Up Review

First Part Here

Goleman continues with his reiteration of important points. Purchasing power matters. Many companies will easily dress up their products behind "green language" that have nothing to do with the life cycle of the product and the impact it has. If you don't think taking the extra second to use your app that identifies better companies is worth it, companies won't pretend you're going to affect their bottom line. Nike and Coke are just two examples he explores that had to respond to public backlash when their labor or resource processes were discovered.

I was clued into Body Burden which is a couple who tracked the different chemicals in their blood from the everyday food we eat. The couple does this because many things that are FDA approved or which appear on lists of approved ingredients can not show up as harmful upon a small or infrequent doses. Over time though, chemicals accumulate and mingle with other chemicals to create unforeseen health defects. This chemical footprint can be mapped and tracked.

Goleman made me aware of Skin Deep which has been on my radar given what I've read about our microbiom. Turns out all the little bacteria we carry around to digest our food and keep our skin healthy are important! Shampoos care about the scent and selling power. There's much to be read and researched given the interplay of this microbes, but I've at least learned that you should simply Never. Shower. Again.

There was at one point I thought Goleman was sounding way too optimistic about business ethics. That when problems saw the light of day, most would see the error of their ways and do what they could to make something right. He quickly corrects this optimism in his next chapter which is very refreshing. The book doesn't try to end on a terribly positive note. It knows how much work has to be done to enable and get the public involved.

Last, but not least, of cool things that exist is Earthster, a free, open-source, LCA-driven window into supply chains. Or, a place for businesses to come and figure out how to make their practices sustainable. You put in from ground to dump how your product gets used, this can help you identify a way to make it zero-impact or totally sustainable. It's a work in progress.

So, there's the gist, still worth the read if only for the details and it's fairly quick.