How much energy is in a barrel of oil?

In The World in 2050, Laurence C Smith states that

Packed inside a single barrel of oil is about the same amount of energy as would be produced from eight years of day labour by an average sized man.

As at 30th Jan, the spot price for a barrel of Brent Crude Oil is $98.75, which in pounds is £62.23.

The minimum wage for someone over 21 in the UK is £5.93. Eight years of day labour, full time, at that rate would earn you:

£5.93/hour x 37 hours/week x 52 weeks = £91,274.56

So if all you need is energy, it is 1,467 times cheaper to use oil than muscle.

Why you should use RSS

Without going in to the details (for which, click here) RSS feeds are a great and inexplicably under-used way to read blogs and other regularly updated sites. Basically, you subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favourite blogs and sites and each new blogpost is sent directly to your feed reader. I use Google Reader, so I log in with the same details as my gmail account, and in one go I get all the updated content of all the blogs I am following.

Since I started using Google Reader, my blog perusing has improved in two ways:

• First, I give newly discovered blogs a better chance at retaining my attention. When I come across a new blog that seems interesting, I always subscribe to the feed so I can get automatically updated. I used to very easily forget about blogs I had stumbled upon, now they come to me!
• Second, I will more ruthlessly ditch blogs that I have read for ages but are now wasting my time. I just unsubscribe, whereas in my pre-RSS days I would just visit the site out of habit.

So, I find it easier to discover good blogs and ditch bad ones. Recently I’ve unsubscribed from some UK politics blogs, basically because they were my equivalent of watching soaps – fundamentally pointless human dramas with no real point.

Of course, if you feel so inclined you can subscribe to this blog! Just click on the “Click here for RSS link” link, and copy/paste the resulting URL into your feed reader (that will make sense if you have one).

The ecology of cities

As water flows along streams and rivers, maybe spreads out, and creates a habitat; so money flows and creates an industrial quarter in a city. Sometimes the river is diverted, or dries up, and the watery habitat disappears, and is replaced with something else. Sometimes too, money is diverted, and the industrial habitat disappears, and is replaced with something else.

When an industrial area loses its sustaining flow of money, a typical ecological succession ensues.

First to populate the newly vacated habitat is broken glass, graffiti and litter. These pioneer species indicate that the habitat is changing. These are typically followed by Buddleia and discarded shopping trolleys – hardier species than the pioneers, but slower to colonise. These species slowly spread to dominate the area over several years.

Later, when the area seems to have reached equilibrium, giant grazing animals appear. These noisy, smelly yellow animals feed on bricks and building materials, the carcasses of the inhabitants from the earlier times. These act as “ecological engineers”, species that significantly change the habitat. Where once skeletal structures were, there now are flattened areas of rubble. Encroaching at the margins of these are the pioneer species, but more significant are the new arrivals – temporary car parks and their attendant signs, cones, and cars.

Later still, a distinct breed of human re-emerges, having been all but chased out when the money dried up. These are the artists and artisans, living at the fringes of the economy and in need of cheap space. They generally form a mutually tolerant relationship with the few light-industry humans that survived the money drought.

These humans encourage a trickle of money to re-enter the area, at which point the noisy smelly yellow animals begin to reappear although these ones, unlike their forerunners, begin to convert the temporary car parks back into new buildings.

The climax community of such a succession is one of superficially attractive but over-priced city-living, and computer games developers. Typical species thus include young city professionals (lawyers, accountants, consultants) and computer programmers. The former head to the city centre to graze during the day and return at night; the latter graze in the area during the day and leave at night to rest elsewhere.

Human nature, and why you shouldn’t get in a tizzy about it

I’m currently reading Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand, sub-titled “Why dense cities, nuclear power, genetically modified crops, restored wildlands, radical science and geoengineering are essential”. It’s a cracking book, with a light touch of style that leavens a wide-ranging, quote-heavy discussion on a lot of environmental issues.

A standard eco-pessimist could announce almost triumphantly in 1992:

“Modern humanity is rapidly destroying the natural world on which it depends for its survival. Everywhere on our planet, the picture is the same. Forests are being cut down, wetlands drained, coral reefs grubbed up, agricultural lands eroded, salinised, desertified, or simply paved over. Pollution is now generalised – our groundwater, streams, rivers, estuaries, seas and oceans, the air we breathe, the food we eat, are all affected. Just about every living creature on earth now contains in its body traces of agricultural and industrial chemicals – many of which are known or suspected carcinogens or mutagens.

As a result of our activities, it is probable that thousands of species are being made extinct every day. Only a fraction of these are known to science… By destroying the natural world in this way we are making our planet progressively less habitable. If current trends persist, in no more than a few decades it will cease to be capable of supporting complex forms of life.”

(That was Edward Goldsmith’s opening salvo in The Way: An Ecological Worldview. His worries are accurate individually, but they are selective, one-sided, and over-aggregated into a paralysing spasm of angst.)

I don’t entirely agree with Brand’s point that Goldsmith’s fears are “accurate individually”, but I agree with his general conclusion of a “paralysing spasm of angst”.

The question to ask of that statement is: What is it for? What is the point? No doubt it made Goldsmith feel better in writing it, but what could it possibly achieve? It’s all very well “alerting” people to what you perceive to be the state of affairs, but as I’ve said before, “raising awareness” can be a complete waste of  time, if not actively unhelpful. Reading that paragraph, assuming you take it as correct, how do you feel? Do you feel energised to go and find out about what he is talking about, to understand the problems, and to find and implement solutions? Or do you feel like it is all too much, and why bother trying?

This is the perpetual problem that environmentalism has – presenting your view in order to impress upon people the magnitude of the problem as you see it makes the whole situation seem an insoluble mess.

However, a lot of people do find out more, they do look for causes (if not necessarily solutions), so the awareness raising isn’t necessarily wasted. But all too many people come to the conclusion that the problem is human greed. The obvious corrollary to this is that if we solve or eliminate greed, the problems will be solved.

Let’s step back a bit from the idea of greed. It’s an emotive term, let’s think about it. Think about greed as being a subset of the more general human desire to want more stuff. Not all stuff-wanting is bad. A starving man wants more stuff – to eat – so that he doesn’t die. He also wants more stuff so that his family doesn’t die either. He will then want more stuff so that he and his family are protected to some degree from the elements and from misfortune; and then so there is surplus, enabling his children to go to school instead of having to work. And so on. At some point on this scale of actually having more stuff, people declare that the point at which all reasonable demands are satisfied, and that any more is just plain old greed. Probably, most people think that that point is just a little bit above where they are on the having stuff scale.

So, the point at which greed starts depends on where you are on the scale, and anyway it is the result of a hard-wiring that we have which makes us want more stuff because, for essentially all of evolutionary time, we have only ever been a couple of pieces of stuff away from death. That’s quite an incentive.

Now, consider diving in football. Diving is a perfectly rational response for as long as the potential benefit (getting a free kick or penalty) outweighs the risk (being caught and booked). Apart from the diver no-one really likes diving, so lets get rid of it! According to the greed-causes-environmental-problems hypothesis, what we need to do is instruct the players to slightly diminish their will to win. After all, if we were all less greedy we wouldn’t have environmental problems, right? So if footballers were all less keen to win we wouldn’t have any more diving. Yeah right.

Newsflash: human action is dictated by human incentives. Get used to it.

You won’t get rid of greed, however the hell you define it. Even if it were true that greed does cause environmental problems you won’t “solve” greed, so you’d better look somewhere else for your solutions.

But why do people plump for the greed hypothesis (and by implication the non-greed solution)? Because the presentation of environmental problems as an existential crisis that can only be understood or appreciated in the abstract invites similarly abstract, existential solutions.

If the problem is presented in discrete chunks, solutions are easier to conceptualise, develop, and ultimately implement. And you don’t have to change human nature to do it.

The World is Changing. Or is it?

Why can fifty thousand volunteers successfully coauthor Wikipedia, the most serious online alternative to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and then turn around and give it away for free? … Without a broadly accepted analytic model to explain these phenomena, we tend to treat them as curiosities, perhaps transient fads, possibly of significance in one market segment or another. We should try instead to see them for what they are: a new mode of production emerging in the middle of the most advanced economies in the world— those that are the most fully computer networked and for which information goods and services have come to occupy the highest-valued roles. [emphasis added]

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks

I’ve just started studying a course entitled Networks and the Digital Revolution: Economic Myths and Realities. The first lecture discussed whether or not the “network economy” is really all that new.

Here, the book suffers from a problem common to others in this genre. Benkler provides a wealth of anecdotes to illustrate the new economy’s revolutionary nature, but little information on magnitudes. How new? How large? How much? Cooperative, social production itself is hardly novel, as any reader of “I, Pencil” can attest. Before the Web page, there was the pamphlet; before the Internet, the telegraph; before the Yahoo directory, the phone book; before the personal computer, electric service, the refrigerator, the washing machine, the telephone, and the VCR. In short, such breathlessly touted phenomena as network effects, the rapid diffusion of technological innovation, and highly valued intangible assets are not novel. [Emphasis added]

Peter Klein, reviewing Benkler

I can see the idea that in some senses network effects are not new and that there have been world-changing new networks before, of which teh interwebs is merely the latest.  I’m not convinced about the I, Pencil comparison though. I’ve blogged recently about the legendary essay I, Pencil, so go there if you don’t know what the hell I’m going on about. My take on it was that it was the price mechanism (as opposed to central planning) that coordinated all the countless people and activities required to produce a pencil, and that all those people weren’t working directly to create a pencil, they were just responding to incentives through prices. But with Benkler’s example of Wikipedia, there is no price mechanism to do the coordinating. Sure there are kudos and esteem to be had for contributing, but as nice as they are people need to pay rent and bills and for that you need money, not respect. So I’m not convinced that I, Pencil and the system it describes fully accounts for Benkler’s “new mode of production”. It may indeed not be new, but I don’t think I, Pencil captures why.

Beer Beer Beer

Toasters, pencils, and collective intelligence

Matt Ridley claims that

Human achievement is entirely a networking phenomenon

Look around your home, think about the stuff you own and the services you use. Could you have produced any of it on your own? Even if you are handy at carpentry, could you have built even the simplest item of furniture when you consider that you first need to harvest the wood and shape it with metal tools. How much could you – on your own – produce from primary materials, from ore and wood and hydrocarbons?

I, Pencil is a classic essay which talks about how no-one – literally no-one – knows how to make something as simple as a pencil. We depend entirely on a complex and unguided network of people filling there own particular role to produce what we take for granted.

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding!

In this TED Talk, Thomas Thwaites describes his mission to build a toaster from scratch. Maximum points for effort, but the final specimen really hammers home how much we depend on the actions of other people.

In his own TED Talk of last year, Matt Ridley was pursuing the theory behind the practice of Thwaites was demonstrating – ideas having sex.

Speaking authentically

I’m reading What They Teach You at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton, a memoir about a journalist who – partly reluctantly – moves from Paris to Harvard to study for an MBA having had no experience in business, banking or consulting.

Near the end of the two year course Philip and his wife have just had a second child, financial reality is soon to hit and he is going through the painful grind of job applications and recruiter presentations. He gets more and more put off by everyone describing themselves and their companies as passionate, as if being merely competent and hard working is not enough. What next, he thinks?

We bring a panting, sexual intensity to our work

Or

Our analysts share a knee-trembling, quivering, orgasmic degree of focus on company fundamentals

Passionate should be a powerful word, but it isn’t when you use it about yourself. If you were having a normal conversation with a normal human being (i.e. not a marketer or recruiter) and they used the word passionate about themselves, would you believe them? It sounds so fake, like it is either scripted or simply a lie. “I’m passionate about blah blah blah“. If they said it about their job, I’d think they had been a little bit corporately-brainwashed. But if I asked someone how they liked their job and they paused, and then said “You know what? … I f***ing love it!” I’d believe them.

Maybe it’s a verb thing. If you f***ing love something, that’s a verb; if you are passionate about something, that’s just an adjective.

Book group – Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk

Survivor tells the story of the last surviving member of a suicide cult, who “escapes” from the cult (by being the only one left) but quickly gets trapped in a world of artifice and celebrity.

I found the book well written, well crafted, and an easy and diverting read, but I couldn’t see the point of it. It appeared to be a novel-length exercise in fashionable cynicism, something which bores and infuriates me equally. I was in the minority, as most people seemed to love it.

As often happens, the discussion extrapolated from the viewpoint of the book to a wider discussion of modern society. A theme that came up a lot was the idea that we are controlled by our job, our upbringing and the media, presumably with the implication that this is both bad and avoidable. On reflection it’s quite a trivial observation – wouldn’t it actually be really weird if we weren’t strongly influenced by (a) what we have to do to survive, (b) our experiences and (c) the information we get about the world?

“Real” socialism has never really been attempted

That’s what they say when backed into a corner – “Well, real socialism has never really been tried” which, when read between the lines, means “Go away you filthy reactionary; my motives are pure, my theory perfect, how dare you say it doesn’t stand up to cold hard reality?”.

Perhaps it’s true that real socialism has never been attempted, but even so people have attempted to attempt socialism on plenty of occasions. If even trying and failing to do something causes such ructions, perhaps that says something pertinent, no?