To be clear, I understand that it is a wonderful feeling to find a home if you haven’t known one before.  In 1997 during my first visit to Burning Man, I felt like Gonzo in Muppets from Space when he (spoiler alert!) first meets his extended family.  His unique appearance had made him feel utterly alone, until a spaceship full of Gonzo-looking aliens landed on earth and explained that he was one of them.  The realization that he was not a freak outcast but part of a vibrant community is the same that many first experience at Burning Man.  I first experienced this sense of inclusion there, and it has undoubtedly transformed my life for the better.  It is a deeply powerful experience that continues to be extremely important for a great many people.  But why does it need to be rooted in a wasteland in Nevada?  Why not bring that feeling to your real home?

My challenge is this to everybody who considers Burning Man their home: How can you bring what you love about Burning Man into the other 51 weeks of your year? What is so immutable about your regular life that you can only feel comfortable 2% of the time?  Is that dusty dusty place really so special that you cannot bring its culture home in a sustainable way?  From personal experience, I think not.  It might take years, but you really can take the things you love about Burning Man back to your regular life. Let’s go through some of the features of BRC that many people find wonderful and discuss how to recreate them in the real world.

At Burning Man, I get to spending lots of time with my friends

One of the simplest pleasures of That Thing In The Desert is that you get to spend an entire week hanging out with your friends.  Vacations are great, right?  Well here’s an idea: go on a camping trip with your friends closer to home.  Or how about arranging a weekly gathering to play board games or cook dinner together?  Creating sustainable community activities is completely possible at home.

Or convince your friends to go somewhere new for a vacation.  Sure, BRC is a wonderfully amazingly different place (at least the first several times you go), but so is much of Africa or Asia.  It’s not like a trip to BRC is cheap either — on average people spend over $2,000 for the whole thing (ref: BRC Census).  Compare that to a plane ticket across the globe.

If you really like being around your friends all the time, how about actually moving into a house with them?  That’s what I did.  It’s called co-housing, and it’s awesome.  Every morning when I get up and every evening for dinner I see my good friends milling about living their lives, and we enrich each other.  I highly recommend it.  If that’s too intense for you, figure out how you and your closest can live within walking distance of each other.  It takes years for neighborhoods to coalesce, but when it works it’s wonderful.

At Burning Man, I’m surrounded by cool art

If this is an excuse for why you can’t feel at home in your regular home life, the irony is thick.  First tabulate how much time and money your camp expended on your last vacation in the desert.  Break that down into the part that was spent on personal comforts (i.e. making BRC more like home) and the part that was spent creating cool art for others to experience.  Now try harnessing all that creative brainpower which went into your project, and divert it towards doing something awesome for your local community.  A few quick ideas: a mural or sculpture in your neighborhood or a new community P-patch or a collective third place for your friends.

Sure it’s a different kind of challenge.  Most cities have more rules about modifying your surroundings than Black Rock City.  But as the years go on, the differences are shrinking.  BRC has strict fire codes and (less strict) building codes, and as the community expands, increasingly restrictive community decency standards.  You can always put up your own Jiffy Lube sculpture in your back yard.

At Burning Man, I can be myself

“Radical self expression” has been one of Burning Man’s philosophies from the beginning.  The ability to be yourself in your normal life seems on the surface like it really should be easy, but is often extremely hard.  What’s preventing you from being yourself?  Often it’s social inertia.  People who expect you to act a certain way — a way that maybe you’re tired of and want to move on from.  If this is the case for you, I’ll offer some bold advice: try spending less time with those people, and more time with people who reinforce the version of yourself you prefer.

If on the other hand you enjoy being somebody different only while you’re in the desert, then you have a harder choice to make.  Is that other person who you really want to be?  Perhaps they’re just a costume you enjoy wearing like for Halloween.  But if that other person has a real home, and you are living as an outsider, then this choice bears consideration.

At Burning Man, strangers are friendly and awesome

This one can be hard, especially for people living in certain cities.  After my first burn, my campmate and I decided to try to bring some of the playa attitude back to Los Angeles.  We attempted what we later termed “attack smiles” because their effect on sidewalk passersby was the exact opposite of what we hoped.  Within a year we both left LA for friendlier pastures.  So in the “tough choices” department, moving is always an option.  You might not feel at home because your home isn’t a very friendly place.  But I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion too quickly.

It might be cliche, but scientific research has shown that good moods spread through social networks.  Happiness is contagious.  Especially amongst friends.  So spend more time with your friends and friends of friends, and bring that same energy you bring to the desert.  Build community. (This is the simplest, strongest advice I can give.) Bring the cultural principles that you love into your 98%-of-the-year community.  It’ll take a lot of work over time.  But I bet your friends will be on board to help, and the end goal is absolutely worth the effort.

Obviously there are huge differences.  Chernobyl was a massive disaster that killed thousands of people, the only accident to ever reach level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES).  When I started writing this article, Fukushima was classified as level 4, although that was before the containment building at reactor 3 exploded, and trouble really started in reactor 2.  I had written that it was likely to be re-classified as level 5, and now lots of people are saying they think it might end up as level 6.  I had written that I think it’s extremely unlikely to reach level 7 where thousands of people die from radiation poisoning, but the way things are going, I’m not so confident of that any more.  :(

For a decent explanation of the defense-in-depth strategies of the Fukushima reactors, read this overly-optimistic article.  This article has been widely distributed and republished because its “you’re all over-reacting” message is a nice one to hear and it comes from a seemingly credible source, a scientist at MIT.  But the article has an interesting past, originally including a major technical confusion, mixing up moderators which speed up nuclear reactions with control rods which slow them down.  This mistake was fixed fairly quickly, and then article moved to a new location hosted by MIT, along the way shedding its re-assurances that nobody would get any more radiation than from “a long distance flight”.  Clearly things are worse than that.  Nonetheless, Fukushima was built with many layers of protection, making a Chernobyl-scale disaster much less likely.  But things just keep getting worse there.

Fukushima faces the same problem Chernobyl was trying to fix

As we’ve all probably heard, the Chernobyl reactor exploded while performing an experiment.  The causes of the disaster are many, but most fundamentally the reactor design was unstable.  Relying on cooling water as a nuclear damping material gave the RBMK-style reactors a positive void coefficient meaning that as the water boiled from liquid to gaseous state, the nuclear reaction accelerated.  This is fundamentally unstable since it can create a positive feedback cycle, as it did during their fateful experiment.  The reactor heats up, which boils water, and since steam is less dense than liquid water there is now less nuclear damping material to slow the reaction, so it goes faster.  (Modern reactors don’t do this.)  In fact just 36 seconds after operators started the experiment, somebody hit the “Oh Shit” button (which unfortunately due to even worse design actually exacerbated the problem), and seconds later the reactor core tragically exploded.  Chernobyl’s core didn’t have time to melt — it just exploded.  Then large amounts of radioactive graphite burned in a hot fire which carried toxic ash high into the atmosphere.  Thousands got sick and died.

Despite what the Soviets wanted everybody to think afterwards (and even convinced the IAEA for 7 years), the motivation for the experiment at Chernobyl was wise and well-intentioned.  The operators were not insane, stupid, nor psychotic.  They knew that their reactor relied on the external power grid to run its cooling systems.  Of course they had backup diesel generators on site in case the power grid failed, but they also knew these generators could take up to a full minute to kick in.  That seemed like too long of a gap, so they were trying something creative — using the momentum in the plant’s own steam turbine to power the cooling pumps as the turbine was coasting down, unpowered.  They were thinking to themselves “hey, we’ve got this great power source, why don’t we use it to run the cooling pumps instead of relying on the external grid.”  Great idea.  They’d tried the experiment a couple times before.  It hadn’t worked.  This time it really didn’t work.  But because the reactor was so unstable when the experiment started that a slight decrease in cooling caused it to explode, not because the idea was flawed.

The heart of Fukushima’s problems are the same — the electrical grid around them was taken out by the earthquake.  They shut down their own reactions almost instantly after the quake, and thus were no longer producing their own electricity.  So to power the cooling pumps they needed to switch to backup power.  Unfortunately the backup generators failed, most agree due to the tsunami.

So Fukushima has this ironic problem.  They have an incredibly hot thing.  Even 48 hours after stopping the fission reaction, the core is still producing megawatts of decay heat.  Enough heat to boil 20 tons of water each hour.  They need electricity to run the pumps to cool down this incredibly hot thing.  But they don’t have any electricity.  There’s an electrical power plant (a device to turn heat into electricity) with tons of heat coming off of it, but they don’t have any power to run the cooling pumps, so it overheats.  Ironic, no? This irony was at the core of the experiment that Chernobyl was attempting — use the energy of the offline plant to run the cooling systems.

Safer designs are possible

In principal it seems you should be able to design a reactor that uses this vast quantity of heat (which is power — heat equals power) to run the systems needed to cool the thing off.  Fundamentally this is just an engineering problem.  Shouldn’t we be able to design something that can keep itself cool using its own energy even when disconnected from the grid?  Happily the answer is yes.  But sadly the answer was not yes in the 1970’s when these plants were built.  Not quite at least.

In fact, these old GE Mark I reactors do have emergency core cooling systems designed to help with this, but were never meant to be a complete solution, and clearly didn’t work.  New experimental designs achieve cooling completely passively without any need for active pumping.  But AFAIK these designs have never made it to commercial scale.

A major lesson of Fukushima is clear: extremely unlikely disaster events are highly correlated with each other.  So safety systems should not have external dependencies.   I believe nuclear power has an important place in our path away from fossil fuels towards renewables, but to get there, we need safer designs.

• Hosting any kind of service person – plumber, electrician, cable, etc
• Grocery shopping and cooking
• Gardening
• Dealing with house insurance
• Maintenance such as painting, roofing or windows

The key here is that the amount of effort required to do this for a large house with say 2xN people is less than twice the amount of effort required to do this for a normal house with N people in it.  In some cases it will hardly require any more effort at all for a large house.  But even for something like waiting for the cable guy, the amount of effort required will probably increase slightly for a large house — because the large house will require somewhat more cable services than a small house would.  But generally, the bigger house is more efficient.  My simplified representation was “effort = tasks / people” which is reasonably accurate for a number of useful cases.

There are some ways that economics of scale can work against you.  Specifically with utility prices.  Utilities like water get more expensive the more you use, as a way to discourage people from using more water than they need.  This works against you when you have many people living in a single house which the city classifies as a “single family house” and charges penalizing prices when usage goes above what they consider reasonable for a single family.  Right now, I recognize this as a limitation that I’ll just deal with because the absolute cost is not very high.

Another factor that scales badly is relationships.  That is to say, with lots of people around, there are many relationships to be maintained.  Every additional person you bring into the house forms a relationship with every existing house member.  Each relationship has a reciprocal pair — I have one with you, and you have one with me.  So the number of relationships in a house with N people is N*(N-1).  (This assumes your housemates are sane enough to not pick fights with themselves.)  If any of these relationships sour, then there’s a problem which can make the whole house uncomfortable.  For this reason, it’s valuable to pick housemates who are low-drama.  This table numerically lists the number of opportunities for drama as a function of number of residents in the house:

There’s another limiting factor in increasing the size of a house, which is decreased responsibility of ownership.  When a valuable object is owned by a single person or two people, they typically take very good care of it.  They know that if anything bad happens to it, they need to fix it, or deal with it being broken.  But as the number of owners increases, the sense of ownership and responsibility that comes with it diminishes.  At the extreme end of this are publicly owned goods like subways or parks.  As your house gets bigger, people will care less about taking care of it.  There are aspects of our house where we feel that we are bumping up against this limit practically speaking, and if we took more residents on, we fear the quality of life would degrade.

Although I’ve been talking about this kind of ideal since the 1990s, I am not nearly brave enough to try a life-defining social experiment like this without some evidence that it can actually work.  Fortunately, some of our friends are braver than me.  A few years ago we watched two couples both with pregnant wives buy a house together with the intention of raising their kids together.  It has worked out fabulously for them. They have been an inspiration and a model for many of us who have followed.  I put together this map  on the right to demonstrate how the idea has spread.  The green points show houses just like ours — where multiple unrelated / unmarried people have come together to co-own a large supposedly single family house (with a single kitchen) with the intention of raising their kids together.  The blue dots are houses of friends of mine whose that are very similar but don’t meet all those criteria.

I seeded this map with just my friends’ houses around Capitol Hill.  If you know of others and want to add them, feel free to go edit the Google Map yourself.  For security reasons, I haven’t included any identifying information about the houses, and have only located them as accurately as the closest intersection, and I encourage you to do the same.

The point of all this is to show that we might be crazy, but we’re not the only ones.  As another point of support, the map below comes from cohousing.org showing the locations in the greater Seattle area of larger planned cohousing developments.  Click through to find similar communities across the country.

Our house actually operates on consensus for most decisions. Operating on consensus is short-hand for everybody has to agree before something happens.  Another way to put this is that everybody has veto power over everything.  It is this fact which most leads to the slowness of decision making that I alluded to.  It can take a long time to reach consensus on issues.  But people are generally happy when they do.  The biggest source of stress is often that things aren’t moving quickly enough.  This leads me to joke sometimes that an issue is “working its way through congress” before it gets decided, which I think contributed to me mis-representing the governance system that we use.

We do have a separate politburo-style committee which is responsible for financial decisions.  For issues like when to refinance it makes sense for only certain members of the household to contribute: those with a direct vested interest in the outcome.  Maintenance and repairs of the house similarly get dealt with in this sub-group, not because other residents don’t have a vested interest, but because it’s our responsibility and we generally figure the other residents would rather not deal with things like hiring a painter.  Even if they did, their incentives would differ slightly.  Sometimes meta-issues around residency like how many people the house should have sometimes get taken up by the politburo, but we do our best to keep these discussions open.

I know of other group houses which operate with similar multi-tiered governance systems.  The hierarchy often seems to follow legal ownership of the house, which makes sense.  Sometimes more power is reserved by the owners.  Clearly there’s a continuum of possibilities here which would get unhealthy on either end.  A strict dictatorship by the owner would probably make all other residents unhappy fairly quickly.  On the other side a house where the owner has no more power than the other residents, and gets out-voted on issues pertaining to physical maintenance could lead to the house falling into dis-repair.  I’ve heard that the Evergreen Land Trust model sometimes has this problem.  ELT is something I don’t know very much about, but deserves its own write-up.

One closing comment about house governance relates to communication.  When decisions need to get made, how will your house communicate the discussion?  We use a combination of an email list and periodic in-person house-meetings which are fairly formal and infrequent.  I know other houses rely fairly heavily on SMS, or chance discussion.  As in most things with co-housing, there are many right answers.  The key is finding a system that works well for everybody you live with, and being open to change if it seems not to be working.

Hello Board of Directors,

I am writing to express my deep concern with your active support of Estrella Creamery.  I have been a long-time supporter of yours going back to the central co-op days.  But the issues with Estrella have me currently avoiding your store.

I see two fundamental values of the co-op at odds here.  The co-op wants to support small and local food producers.  Great.  But the co-op also has a mission to provide healthy products to its shoppers.  Estrella has a very troubling trail of documentation showing that their food has not been reliably safe.  But the co-op is choosing to place more weight in the local/community value than the health value.  I find this extremely troubling.  Having a pregnant wife, I refuse to shop at the co-op until this issue is resolved satisfactorily.  In fact I am actively discouraging my friends from shopping there as well.

I have heard many weak excuses for why Estrella’s food isn’t that dangerous.  For example “nobody has been proven to have gotten sick from our food” is a claim they’ve made.  This does little to bolster their case — tracking food-borne illnesses is difficult even for large national producers where dozens of illnesses help mark the trail.  Additionally it demonstrates naivete in how risks should be assessed.  It is analogous to saying “I never wear a seatbelt but I haven’t been hurt in a car accident.”

I’ve also heard arguments to the effect that people should have the right to choose to eat high quality but dangerous food.  That is a fine argument.  But it goes directly against the co-op’s mission to provide healthy food.  I loved the fact that the co-op avoids stocking food with high-fructose corn syrup and trans-fats.  I thought that by shopping with you I could spend less time worrying about what I was putting into my family’s bodies, even if it cost me a bit more.  Your vocal support of Estrella has destroyed my trust in your store to put my health first.  Clearly healthfulness is just one of several competing priorities for you.  I wish it weren’t.  Health is far more important to me than supporting the artisan lifestyle.

Please recognize that your own stated values are in conflict here.  Whether you realize it or not, your store is at a turning point in defining itself.  You are likely to lose customers either way you decide.  But I strongly encourage you to do so deliberately, with a sense of purpose.  Selfishly, so that I may again have a great store in the neighborhood that I trust, I hope you choose health.

Sincerely,

Leo Dirac

Simultaneously, technological advances have allowed advertising to progress along a different axis – to become more targeted.  Advertising used to only be broadcast widely through newspapers and television shows.  The best an advertiser could do to ensure their message reached the right kind of people was to select the aggregate demographics of everybody who read a particular magazine.  Now the internet allows ads to be targeted as precisely as you’d like.  Today, Google lets you get your message only in front of people who are about to buy a product like yours.  The ability to connect to people who have expressed an intention to “buy digital camera” is a literal gold-mine, making billionaires out of Larry, Sergey and Eric.  As effective as it is, targeted advertising won’t replace broadcast advertising, because there is still value in abstract brand-building.  Rather, the two will complement each other.

Enter Social Media

Social media has been all the buzz recently.  At its core it’s just a more convenient way for friends to communicate.  The “killer app” for computers has always been helping people communicate, and this is just another chapter in that book.  With this new communications medium comes a new opportunity for organizations to tell their stories.  In fact, I believe that social media will bring another tectonic shift in the entire marketing industry, possibly as important as search-based advertising.  As consumers have gotten more and more sophisticated at filtering out advertising from broadcast media, advertisers have gotten more and more desperate in their attempts to connect with people.  Social media marketing offers a new path – instead of hearing about products and services through ads, people can hear about products and services from their own friends.  Exactly how this will play out through Twitter/Facebook/Foursquare/whatever is not at all clear to me right now, but I fundamentally believe this change is coming, and it will take the entire marketing industry with it.  Klein and her fans are free to unplug from popular culture in order to avoid the onslaught of brand advertising, but they would be foolish to stop talking to their friends just because their friends are happy with things they’ve bought.

This vision is one of the main things that prompted me to jump off the comfy Google cruise liner and start paddling hard in Banyan Branch’s crowded dinghy.

Is marketing intrinsically evil?

I sometimes feel a need to justify this line of work to those who think that marketing is inherently dirty.  I admit that I’m more of a capitalist than many of my friends, but I certainly recognize that capitalism has its limits.  The vast majority of economic transactions are both consensual and mutually beneficial, and I will argue vigorously that there is nothing wrong with an economic system consisting of these transactions.  The biggest exception to this happens when transactions are not mutually beneficial because one party is not fully informed.  But what we’re doing is helping people share honest opinions and feedback about the things they buy and use.  By lubricating the flow of information between real people, I believe social media will reduce the effectiveness of deceptive marketing.  Moreover, it will help companies connect to their customers and hone their goods to people’s real concerns and desires.  It will help hold companies accountable for their mistakes, and enable companies to better make things that make people happy.

Additionally, I will point out that my employer represents no small amount of “pure good” for the world, including organizations such as The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Vittana, helping them tell their stories.

Taking a chance on a startup

Why did I choose this opportunity out of the sea of possibilities?  I evaluated the landscape as an investor would, since I am investing no small chunk of my life in this effort.  From my entrepreneurial training and experience, I know that smart investors care more about the people than the specific business plan.  The plan will almost certainly change, but the key management will not.  Having known one of the founders of Banyan quite well for a number of years, I am certain that many key elements for success are in place.  The corporate culture and governance will be solid.  I will be working in an environment where I am supported, and where I can learn and grow as a manager and a technologist.

Exactly what will I be doing or building?  I admit I’m not sure yet, but I have some very interesting ideas that I won’t be sharing here anytime soon.  I am sure that my work is very well positioned to be a part of a major shift in an entire industry — a rare opportunity.  Whether or not my work will play a key role in this shift is somewhat out of my hands — these things are always a roll of the dice.  But in another sense, it’s entirely within my control, and this is what I love about working in a small company.  There’s almost nothing but work between me and effective execution of our ideas.  Many people tend to exaggerate the importance of the idea itself, forgetting that it is incredibly important to execute well on whatever ideas you have.  I’ve heard people say that they had the idea for YouTube years before YouTube did.  How quickly we forget the dozens of other companies all working on the same problem in 2006, which almost all fell by the wayside because they didn’t execute as well as YouTube did.  Ideas matter for sure.  But hard work is critical.

If you’d like to jump on this raft and start paddling too, get in touch with me.  I need a few key rock-star developers who are’t scared of chaos and can think creatively about business problems.

In the course of learning about people’s personalities for helping them get dates, they also gather deep demographic data.  Recently they analyzed these data with respect to politics.  They show a series of graphs that would make Edward Tufte proud, analyzing people’s preferences along the political plane defined by permissiveness vs government control over economic and social issues.  They look at how these preferences change with age, and how relatively important each axis is.  Their conclusions match exit poll data quite nicely and demonstrate analytically that the Republican party is much more focused in the issues it cares about, while the Democratic party draws in people whose opinions are much more diverse.

It’s a long article, but I heartily encourage you to read it, or at least skim the diagrams and play with the animation on the 6th chart.  Nice analysis.  Very nice presentation.  Nice job, folks.

I’ll be developing marketing and distribution programs to broaden access to clean water for families living on as little as a few dollars a day.  Every year over 1.6 million people, largely children under the age of 5, die of diseases caused by unclean water and poor sanitation.

I really admire Jeremy for his can-do attitude, working on very important problems that are not at all close to home.  I invite all of you to follow along on his blog Clean Water For All and if you feel so moved to help them out.

But there’s a dark side to this rescue that I haven’t seen anybody discuss.  The reason the guerrillas allowed those hostages to get on that helicopter without firing a shot because they thought it was operated by a humanitarian group.  It’s true that the operation relied on intercepted communications and a spy in the FARC’s command structure.  But the operation relied on a having military helicopter painted white and its crew claiming to be apolitical.  The press even describes the acting lessons the soldiers took to pretend to be NGO workers.  Oh those foolish rebels who fell for such a simple trick by trusting aid workers.  What dupes!

Now look at this from another angle.  Imagine you really are an NGO worker, trying to provide some kind of support service to remote Columbia.  How does knowledge of an operation like this make you feel?  Scared, probably.  From now on, rebels are going to doubt the legitimacy of all NGO workers.  They might think you’re in the Columbian military trying to take advantage of them again.  They might even start shooting down Red Cross helicopters.  The negative externality of this rescue is that all legitimate humanitarian work in the area has just gotten a lot more difficult and dangerous.

So as Santos brags that this rescue "will go down in history for its audaciousness and effectiveness" he ignores the fact that he just cashed in a bunch of good will to make this happen.  This stuff doesn’t grow easily like coca plants.  I’m glad those people have their lives back, but I am in no way convinced it was worth the sacrifice.  What’s going to happen next time there’s a public health crisis in the area?  The moral calculus is undoubtedly complex.  But ask yourself, would you trade the freedom of a dozen captives (including three Americans) for risking the well-being of many thousands of needy individuals?  How about for the lives of a half dozen International Red Cross workers murdered by suspicious rebels?

• Pickup trucks — many models, small and large
• Full-sized vans — think church-group van or delivery van, not soccer-mom minivan
• Mercedes — 3 models: E-class sedans, R-class station wagons, and GL-class or M-class SUVs.  All $45k+
• Volkswagen Taureg 2 — VW’s SUV has a diesel option starting at $68k
• Jeep Grand Cherokee — starting at $37k for diesel

Color me underwhelmed.  I might have missed something, but as far as I can tell there is exactly one non-SUV non-pickup diesel car on the market in this country: the Mercedes E-class.  Yowza.   Seriously, what gives?

In Europe, diesel cars are totally common-place.  While here we’re all abuzz about our fancy hybrids that can get 40+ mpg, Europeans can choose cars like the Citroen C4 which gets 46 38 mpg city and 71 59 mpg on the highway!  [Correction: These are per imperial gallon, which are 1.2 US gallons.]  I drove a Citroen (might even have been a C4) from Paris to Tuscany and back a couple of summers ago.  Let me assure you these are not stereotypically crappy French-engineered clunkers, but actually pretty nice cars, and not old-world tiny either. 

That number bears repeating.  71 59 miles per gallon on the highway.  When is this country going to get it together and raise the CAFE standards in a meaningful way and not just for show?  It’s for everybody’s good.

[Photo courtesy of Robert Candelori]

The night before a database upgrade got confused half-way through with no possibility to roll back.  One of the two production databases got upgraded to the new schema and the other didn’t.  As you’d spent most of the day diagnosing, the new schema didn’t quite work with your app — some fraction of pages generated from this database came out wrong.  Busted.  Missing.  Scrambled.  Paper white.  Ugh.

After hours of group futzing between you and a couple dozen other folks, you’ve managed to get the problem mitigated.  Your app now appears to be reliably generating correct non-borked pages.  But the site that the world sees is still messed up, because of your content distribution network (CDN) partner.  The CDN caches copies of your site across the world, moving it closer to customers for faster display and reducing the load on your own app servers.  But over the course of the day, the CDN has cached copies of many broken pages.  You can of course clear the individual cache for any broken page you find, causing the CDN to fetch a clean accurate copy from your app servers.  But the site has millions of pages — how are you ever going to find all the pages that need flushing?  With 30 minutes until press time it’s not impossible. 

The only reliable way to clear all the broken pages out of the cache is to wipe clean the whole CDN cache.  Push the big reset button.  This is a fairly big deal because it means millions of cached pages will have to be wiped from the CDN and fetched from the app servers again.  Is there time before the peering eyes of Wall Street come looking?  Clearing the caches takes about 15 minutes.  Filling them back up again — who knows.  The popular stuff will fill in fast, but the long tail will probably take a while.

To make it worse, clearing those caches will mean a big increase in traffic to the app servers.  You’ve hit the button before during code releases.  But always very late at night when traffic is light.  Early afternoon is about as high as traffic gets.  These systems are not the most stable in the world right now — you’re not sure if they’ll survive a cache clear in the middle of the afternoon.  Any web site will slow down with lots of traffic.  But too much traffic and these systems crash.  Break.  Stop working at all.  And often won’t get back up without a lot of help.  Sometimes such crashes will ripple back through dependent systems and it takes hours to figure out what’s happened.  Maybe even take the whole company off-line for a while, and that’s always fun to explain to the execs afterwards.

This is the risk of hitting the big button and clearing the caches.  Best case is the site runs slowly for a while as the caches repopulate.  Worst case, the whole system goes completely south while the analysts are checking it out.  Alternately you could just leave the site in its somewhat-broken but mostly working state for the analysts to look at.

So, what do you do?

A friend from college pointed out to me that engineers get paid for their judgment.  Doing rote calculations doesn’t demand a high salary.  Using your experience and opinion to weigh alternatives does.  Considering the relative merits of trade-offs, especially when the stakes are high — that’s where you really need somebody who is wise and experienced.

I have to digress for a moment to consider what’s really going on here when I say "the stakes are high."  In this industry, a big stupid mistake where you muck with live running machinery that you shouldn’t be means thousands of people don’t get their web page for a while.  Compare this to a friend who makes cheese for a living, and mucked around with live running machinery and got badly hurt.  A mistake on the production web servers potentially could have destroyed millions of dollars of abstract shareholder value.  But nobody was going to get their arm ripped off.  (Warning — these pictures are really gross.)  Anyway…

So what did I do when faced with this dilemma recently?  Me?  I went for it — I hit the button.  And everything was fine.  For a while the site was really slow while the caches refreshed.  Many CPUs were pegged from our app tier back through the databases that the whole company relies on.  But nothing broke.  And when pages finally loaded they looked good.  After about an hour, everything was back to normal.  Most everybody never noticed a thing. 

Just another exciting, adventurous, yet entirely unglamorous day in the life of a software engineer.

So while I’m always happy to go there and get some  hands-on market research and competitive analysis done, or try to close some deals with partners, I’m also generally just as happy to go home.  This year, I didn’t even cruise the show at all, except to go between our booth and conference rooms, which was fine with me.  Until I got home and saw pictures like this…

CES 2007 was the unveiling of the prototype hardware for Nick Negroponte’s $100 laptop, now called XO (or is it OX?), and delivered under the program "One Laptop Per Child" or OLPC. 

I absolutely love this initiative.  I consider contributing to it to be one of the most moral things anybody can do with their lives.  It is one of the only means I can foresee that could help bring the continent of Africa out of poverty — pure grass roots education.  A life goal of mine is to try to help enable children’s education to be limited only by their talent and motivation, not by their surroundings.  OLPC is trying to do this.  Someday soon I hope to help.

I find this amazing for a couple of reasons.  First, it drives home the artificial nature of trans-fats.  I’ve thought of them as similar to saturated fats in a lot of ways — things that are everywhere but should be avoided.  But thinking about what it would mean to not use them in a restaurant makes clear that they’re not so omnipresent.  No crisco vegetable shortening, and no margarine.  Other than that, what ingredients have trans fats in them?  Partially hydrogenated vegetable oil — I’ve never used that.  Have you?

I do want to mention olive oil a bit.  Olive oil is primarily a monounsaturated fat, which is a very healthy kind of oil.  Heating a monounsaturated oil like can turn it into a trans-fat.  Some have concluded from this that cooking with olive oil is unhealthy, and I admit I’ve spread this rumor too.  But from the little research I’ve managed to dig up (1, 2) this process doesn’t occur enough to be a real issue in traditional cooking settings.  I will say this research is thin and minds may change.

I’d like to say a bit about the chemistry involved here.  Trans-fats refers to the configuration of carbons on either side of a double-bond, or a place where the fat is unsaturated — it’s a trans rather than a cis configuration.  Cis fats have marked bends, while trans fats have kinks in otherwise straight chains. I’m guessing the reduced mobility of the unsaturated fats caused by
their bends are related to their health benefits, but I’m not sure.  Here are two monounsaturated fats, in cis and trans forms:

Cis fatty acid: oleic acid

Trans fatty acid: elaidic acid

Also, most of what I’ve been reading assumes that hydrogenation is the only way that trans fats can occur, which is wrong.  Industrial hydrogenation converts unsaturated double-bonds to single bonds, preferentially in the trans configuration.  But other chemical processes can do this too.  Cows naturally produce small quantities of trans fats.

This law is a great example the government taking a broader interest in society values than any individual constituent would.  The government pays for health care, so in this case they do have a direct interest in improving public health, and will likely see a benefit from this, so it’s not a perfect example of the principal I’m expounding.  In general, I think it’s the government’s responsibility to legislate things that are for the "long-term good of society" (in quotes because I recognize that it’s hard to define or agree upon).  This burden falls uniquely on the government when there’s nobody else who clearly benefits from this kind of legislation.  Environmental protection is a classic example of this — do things that won’t directly help us or our kids but rather our great grand-kids.  The Lorax spoke for the trees for the trees had tongues.  Today, NGOs tend to do that speaking, and sometimes the government listens.  I’m surprised, impressed and proud of New York for this bold move!

I disagree.  I think now is the time to

Buy More Stuff!

I have to give props out to all my friends who have been dutifully going down to Westlake center on the weekends to spread the good word.  Someday soon I hope to have time to join them.

The only thing that really surprises me about this is that some (clearly unamerican) people argue with them.  My friends have gotten into prolonged arguments with shoppers and other passersby who don’t like the message they’re  spreading.  My friends retort with "How could you possibly tell your family and friends that you love them except by buying them more stuff?"  But even this doesn’t persuade those who are persistently disturbed by this message.

Maybe someday they’ll get it.  But I’m not holding out much hope.

In this context, moral actions are those that increase the
probability that as a species we achieve technological salvation before we blow
ourselves up. I’d like to explore what
this means in very practical terms by analyzing a number of jobs I’ve had and
considered and seen my friends do over the years.

SEO for e-Commerce

I once seriously considered a job doing Search Engine
Optimization for an e-Commerce company. They offered me truckloads of money to get their web pages to the top of
the google rankings. The work would have
been technically fascinating, but I ended up rejecting the job largely on moral
grounds. I just couldn’t feel good
about the work I’d be doing.

Even without a transhuman perspective, this job clearly has a zero-sum impact on society. Reverse-engineering pagerank isn’t actually building value. Move sales away from other companies and
towards your own only has a positive impact on society if you genuinely believe
your company is creating more value for the consumer than your competitors
do. This kind of corporate
righteousness is dangerous and I just didn’t believe it.

Pure marketing efforts like SEO might as well be selling
used-cars for all the good it has on the long-term story-arc of humanity.

Electronic Music Systems

While at first blush this might seem trivial, I actually do
consider this work (my current primary employment) to be moral from a
transhuman perspective.

Making it easier for people to consume music they love makes
their leisure time more efficient and effective. This makes people happier. Following the logic of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human needs, happy people
have more energy to devote to other causes. So by making people happier, I’m creating more capacity to solve the
meaningful problems. It’s an indirect
effect, but I think it is helping.

A reasonable counter-argument to this is that great creativity
often seems to come from the emotionally tortured, especially in the fine
arts. But I don’t think this pattern
holds up for great scientists and engineers.

Direct Political Activism

There are many reasons to consider the current political
regime in the US immoral from a transhuman perspective. The war on terror stands a chance of cutting
this whole conversation short by achieving the dystopian outcome in this
generation. Stifling stem-cell research
is directly preventing technological advancement. Regressive judgmental social policies like discrimination based
on sexual preference makes many people miserable and stifles creativity per the
earlier Maslow argument. This
government is certainly doing plenty to bring about the eventual destruction of
our technologically advanced society.

But the pendulum of politics swings very naturally back and
forth.  (As evidenced by last week’s election.)  Convincing a few people to
change their votes really doesn’t matter much because the aggregate political
mood has a will of its own. Trying to
alter that will by changing fundamental systems like openness of the press or
campaign funding policies or society’s sense of engagement in politics is
definitely more worthwhile since that work is better leveraged. But working on kicking out the current
damaging regime is a short-term fix that will just get undone after another
political cycle. There is a small
chance that kicking them out prevents catastrophe, and for that reason it’s
worthwhile, but I still haven’t lost my faith in the checks and balances in the
whole system.

Renewable Energy

Running out of energy resources is one easy-to-foresee way
that our advanced society could collapse. As such, work on renewable energy helps to delay or even prevent this
set of doomsday scenarios.

This work is decidedly moral because it extends our runway
giving us longer to do what we need to before things go seriously south. This provides an indirect linear improvement
in the situation. Indirect because it’s
only addressing one possible set of doomsday scenarios. Linear because it’s directly combating the
problem directly – it’s not clear how good work here enables faster development
of good work in other areas.  But this definitely helps.

Research into Neuroscience, Robotics, Computational Linguistics, etc

These and other fields offer great promise in the near term
to advance technology in the direction of technological salvation. A confluence of these technologies with a
few that we don’t understand yet have the potential to realize various scifi
visions of overcoming the physical limitations that will otherwise painfully
drag us back to a more primitive existence.

As such, work in these fields is directing helping to solve
the problem. This is highly moral
work.  It is leveraged in that these advances will spur other advances.

Working on Internet Explorer or Google

Almost 10 years ago I got to contribute in a very small way to IE5.  Back then browsers were still evolving quickly.  It’s not as clear of the value or working on Firefox today, but back then building better browser technology was one of the most
direct contributions to increased human intelligence. Today the best analogy would probably be working on search for Google or MSN.  The ubiquitization of the internet has dramatically improved
people’s ability to solve complex problems quickly. I really don’t know what technological salvation will involve,
but I am sure that getting there will require solving a great many complex
problems.

Work like this that facilitates human communication and
problem solving is extremely moral. By
facilitating all forms of problem-solving, it is accelerating the pace of
advancement in nearly every other field we can consider. This kind of exponential growth is what
we’re gonna need to avoid the bad scenarios.

e-Learning

Electronic learning systems have the potential to improve
the quality of education for everybody everywhere. This means enabling people to better solve complex problems in a
very direct way: they’re smarter.

I firmly believe that the next decade is going to see a
revolution in education at all levels. The net result will be an educational system which is extremely
meritocratic, enabling anybody who is motivated to achieve intellectual skills
close to their full intrinsic potential. A smarter population will make solving every technological challenge in
the future easier. As such, I currently
don’t see any activity more moral than building electronic learning systems.

The idea behind this saying is that times of rapid change are generally quite painful.  Historically interesting times are those involving wars and revolutions — things where lots of people die.  Growth and improvement have only come through very slow gradual change.  But in today’s China, this is anything but true.  Right now is one of the most interesting times in China’s long history, and for the majority of the country, it’s fantastic.  (If we all work hard, that kind of intersting time might be behind us.)

We read about how the Chinese economy is glowing red hot.  Their sustained GDP growth rate would make any head of a western central bank terrified.  In any established economy, a 9% annual growth rate would last maybe a couple years before it turned into inflation, recession or both.  But a very clever set of communist economists are managing to ride the bleeding edge of rapid growth far longer and further than I think anybody outside the country would have believed possible.  I’ve been reading these cold dry numbers in the same places you have.  But being here in China now, these numbers are very real.

Consider Shenzhen, just across the psuedo-international border with Hongkong.  Today Shenzhen’s greater metropolitan area has over 10 million people.  But just 28 years ago when Deng Xiaoping decided to start developing this city, it had but 25,000.  Imagine that — a city nearly the size of LA or NY that was consciously willed into existence in less then a generation.  It almost defies belief.

Having just left Shenzhen, I’m currently in Xiamen, which is the closest mainland city to Taiwan.  On a clear day like today, you can see outlying islands that are politically controlled by the Republic of China, the Taiwanese government.  There is a large and famous sign here pointed out towards Taiwan that reads "One Country, Two systems, Together One China."  The Taiwanese have a similar sign on the other side.

NPR recently aired a story about the northern border of North Korean.  There’s a theme park that is constantly empty and a small family whose job might be simply to picnic under an umbrella to demonstrate to the outside world how happy and successful the closed communist system in North Korea is.  Possibly for similar reasons, Xiamen also has a theme park on the coast facing Taiwan.  But its big roller coaster is occupied until 4:00 AM every night.  On weekends happy local families fill the beaches with their families.  I came here for a holiday 5.5 years ago during Spring Festival.  There are so many new buildings and bridges and tunnels and freeways that I hardly recognize it now.  Real estate prices boggle the mind in a way that only Manhattenites could imagine.  There is also a huge new "trourist ferry terminal" under construction here.  Its stated plans are for ferry service to Hong Kong and to host cruise ships.  The obvious long-term purpose of this project is in the fulfillment of that big red sign. 

Shenzhen is thriving as a psuedo-port for the reunification of Hong Kong.  I have no doubt that within 10 or 20 years, Xiamen will be doing the same with Taiwan.  All polluting factories have been ordered out of Xiamen in order to clean up the air.  The communists clearly want to make Xiamen attractive.  I used to buy in to the American political ideas that we must protect Taiwan from China’s oppressive government.  Taiwanese certainly used to look at it this way — a friend grew up there singing songs about how they would liberate the mainlanders from the communists.  But taking a longer term view of the situation, if I were a Taiwanese resident today, I would look forward to reunification with the world’s largest economy.

Again, talk about economics can easily obscure what’s really happening here.  Millions of people are graduating from poor subsistance lifestyles up to the comfort and safety of a working class life.  Or up to the relative luxury of a middle-class life.  Or even to the genuine luxury of being able to buy whatever they want — it’s not that uncommon here.  The difference in the quality of life of my friends and the other people I see here is obvious from just 5 years ago — be it having hot water in every room of the house, owning a car, or kite-surfing in their spare time.  These huge cities are physical manifestations of people’s lives being improved on a grand historic scale.  The excitement is palpable.  Positive energy infuses everything.  A note to Naomi Klein: this is what sweat-shops do to people’s lives.  These certainly are interesting times, and I feel priveledged to be able to experience them first-hand.

Thanks to Charles Armstrong for putting this together.

Computers are getting faster and more powerful.  As they do so, they’re helping humans be smarter.  Maybe not invidual humans, as some studies have shown that things like e-mail and powerpoint can actually make people stupider for some definition.  I can see the truth in this by considering several very smart friends of mine who don’t actually remember their spouse’s cell phone numbers.  Because they don’t need to.  Their computer familiars remember these things for them — the external brain.  In combination we get smarter — the synergy of humans and computers or groups of humans connected through computers — whatever you want to call these aggregate life-forms, they are way better at solving difficult problems than any individual human was just 15 years ago, when there was little e-mail and no Google.  In just 15 years, we’ve seen massive improvements in our ability to solve problems!

Moreover, technological change is accelerating.  These changes aren’t going to stop until we have completely overcome biology.  Unless something horrible happens.  Which it could.  To be explicit, I see humanity facing two possible futures on the multi-century timescale:

• Enlightenment by transcending the limitations of biology through technology
• A dramatic, catastrophic, probably violent and painful return to a simpler way of life

Because of this, I feel a sense of transhumanist morality obliging me to dedicate my life’s work to striving for the first option: species-wide enlightenment through technology.

I plan on writing a lot more on this topic.  But I wanted to start by stating a thesis along with a few basic ideas.

It’s parodying a song by Chamillionaire that glorifies smuggling drugs.  Nice work dude — way to be a positive influence on other people’s lives.  This is one of the reasons I really love Eminem.  He sings about how crappy life in the hood is.  You can call me white and nerdy for liking white rappers, and you wouldn’t be far off — I got a soldering gun and I edit wikipedia.  But I don’t encourage strangers to pick up my bad habits.  Like Eminem says, keep off the addictive drugs.

Many years ago I remember a friend of mine saying she was investing in Starbucks because she saw it as an aggressively run company that sells an addictive product.  Wise choice she made.  I’ve also heard several amusing stories recently about how Starbucks got their venture capital.

At business school lectures I’ve had at least two VC’s tell me this exact story: Howard Shultz comes into their boardroom to pitch them on how he’s going to charge $5 for a commodity product that regularly sells for 25 cents.  The VCs listened politely to his presentation, waited for him to leave the room and then laughed their asses off.  This must have happened to him a lot, since I’ve heard about at least two incidents of it.  Barring hindsite, it was a reasonable reaction, IMO.  Now I hear my b-school friends trying to figure out how to charge $5 per brick for really high-end bricks.  There’s one key missing element to this plan: mortaring a row of really nice bricks on Tuesday doesn’t give you blinding headaches on Wednesday if you decide your wall is all done being built.

Interestingly, in order to actually secure funding, Shultz had to prove that urban coffee markets are/were really far from saturation.  To demonstrate the almost insatiable desire of modern yuppies to suck down sweet foamy caffeine drinks, he opened 2 Starbucks retail stores on the same block of downtown Chicago.  The fact that both stores quickly became profitable was proof enough to the investors that this business was going to go somewhere.

And here I am, freshly back on the wagon, having endured my blinding headaches, staring at these two tall tasty tins of temptation sitting on my desk…  rat bastards…

The communist party line in China is also very concerned with responsibilities, but in a somewhat different way.  When a Chinese person gets put in jail for speaking out against the government, Americans cry human rights abuses.  The Chinese might respond by saying that the stability of the government is more important for the entire population than the welfare of any individual.  The jailed person was not fulfilling their responsibility to the rest of the population.  A little twisted, a little tautological, but an interesting perspective nonetheless.

Individuals also vary along this same spectrum.  Some people are much more duty-driven than others.  I’m thinking of Frederick, the "slave of duty" in The Pirates of Penzance, probably because of the fabulous performance I just saw.  But I digress.  Other people have very little regard for how their actions affect others, and are consumed with themselves.

Over the decades, I have swung back and forth on this spectrum without realizing it.  Now that I understand what’s going on a bit more, I am consciously choosing to think about the world more in terms of responsibilities — my responsibilities to my friends, my family, my community and to the world at large.  I also have a responsibility to myself, but I try to consider it in balance with the other responsibilities I have.

This is not to say that I support human rights abuses in China.  But I do think that American collective psychology is fairly conceited, and greedy in a short-sited kind of way.    I should really gather all that paperwork together and turn in my application for an EU passport.  Not that I think I could ever really escape from my fabulous community here in Seattle, but it never hurts to have options.