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.