A rather momentous decision

by Paula | 21 December 2009 | permalink | comments
Tags: news, personal

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been making a rather momentous decision. Or I should say, the decision has made itself and I’ve been allowing it to form more completely in my head and my heart.

I’ve decided I am not going to build websites for individual small business owners anymore. These folks have been my bread-and-butter for about 10 years now, first as a freelancer and then as owner of my little biz Rabbit Mountain.

Don’t get me wrong, I love individual small business owners. I am one, after all. But I’ve found that the amount of hand-holding and education I have to do ends up being a money-losing situation. I’ve tried charging for being on-call 24/7 and/or for training, but no one wants to pay for this and in the end website issues go unresolved and I look like a dolt who builds half-assed websites. I’ve tried flatly refusing to work beyond the confines of the contract, but what do you do when a client calls you up in tears? I know the smart business response is to simply say, I’m sorry I can’t help you with that it’s not in the contract, but then (a) I feel really bad leaving someone so upset; (b) word will get around my small town that I do not provide adequate customer service. Competition is brutal as it is without having an obstacle like that to overcome.

So in the end, my relationship with my individual business owner clients ends up being like some sort of codependency thing or something, with me enabling their lack of understanding at my own expense. I just simply can’t do it anymore.

I do have a few ideas what I will do with Rabbit Mountain. Top of the list is some sort of e-book, webinar, in-person seminar or something like that which teaches individual small business owners and solo entrepreneurs what they need — nay, NEEEEEED — to know about the web. The web is not optional anymore; any business that does not have at minimum a functioning, up-to-date website is sacrificing something like 60% of prospective leads. Not worrying about the web is as bad as not worrying about unlocking the front door or answering the phone.

I also wouldn’t mind trying simply building sites to sell. These could range anywhere from simple blogs all the way up to complex ecommerce sites. In at least one instance, I have a full web infrastructure in mind for a type of venture that doesn’t exist yet.

I may also just fold Rabbit Mountain, get a job, and blog about whatever the hell I want. My interests extend far beyond just business, and as fascinating and promising as I think a decentralized capitalism is, it is not my sole obsession by any means. Well over half my books are on subjects related to spirituality; and probably about half of those are about astrology. I also have many books pertaining to anthropology, mythology, various sciences especially physics and astronomy, the arts especially anything related to printing and lithography… on and on. Oh and of course, computer geeky stuff from detailed technical manuals up to high-level, long-term social implications type stuff.

So, all this is up in the air. All I know for certain at this point is that after this past year, I can’t go back to doing what I was before for both financial and peace-of-mind reasons. 

Copenhagen and the price of civilization

by Paula | 12 December 2009 | permalink | comments
Tags: evolution, systems

Last night I was listening to Democracy Now on my way home from my nephew’s birthday, mainly because WPSU was the only station that came in clearly on the radio, as the road from my brother’s house is sandwiched between two of those long Pennsylvania ridges. Anyway, I normally wouldn’t listen to Democracy Now as I find Ms. Goodman to be every bit as clueless and irrelevant an ideologue as her counterparts on the right; but in the interest of curiosity I gave it a listen. And I must say, I am deeply disappointed with what’s coming out of Copenhagen.

If you haven’t tried this yet, give it a whirl: track down coverage of Copenhagen from genuinely diverse sources. It’s like watching a bunch of monkeys in a burning cage battling over who’s going to get burned to death first. The rich monkeys are farthest from the flames and they’re not willing to trade places with the poor monkeys. The poor monkeys, for their part, jump and shout and shrill about the unfairness of it all. And meanwhile, not a single monkey dares voice the observation that all are trapped in a cage, that they all got in there somehow which means there must be a door through which to leave.

But no one at Copenhagen dare utter the truth: environmental degradation is the price of civilization. There’s just simply no way around this. There has never been a sustainable civilization — never, not even once, ever, in all of human history.

Without stopping to consider what they were doing, various political and economic deciders over the past 50 or so years have enlarged civilization into something that has never before happened: a global civilization that envelopes nearly every square inch of both land and water on the planet. Global environmental devastation is the only possible result.

Reallocating capital is not going to fix this. Sleek new technologies are not going to fix it. Cap-and-trade is not going to fix it, increased population density is not going to fix it — and for that matter, a massive global reduction in population won’t fix it either.

The only thing that can fix the problem of anthropogenic environmental devastation is to do away with civilization. That means either a return to hunter-forager style societies or the development of a new kind of civilization, so different it would probably require a word other than “civilization.”

Lots of people subscribe to the notion that a return to hunter-forager life is appropriate, and I completely understand why and sympathize with their desires. I personally am not too keen on permanent camping, however, so I tend to focus on the other direction.

Civilization is a system that is completely dependent upon material inputs from the environment in order to exist. Moreover, the civilization system doesn’t just simply sit on top of the biosphere and suck up its life force. It sits laterally on the planet next to the biosphere and competes with it at its point of origin: sunlight.

In any topside ecosystem, plants draw nutrients from the soil and combine these with the energy of sunlight in a process call photosynthesis. The result of photosynthesis is the building of plant cells, which we see as leaves, stems, flowers, seeds and such.

Plants are called producers because they almost magically take the invisible and make it into something material and useful. The nutrients and energy they originally used are stored in their cells, which get eaten by primary consumers — herbivores such as rabbits, deer, and seed-eating birds. These animals concentrate the stored nutrients and solar energy stored in the plants’ biomass as muscle and organs. These, in turn, are eaten by secondary consumers, which are carnivores such as cats, hawks, canines, snakes and such, which concentrate the stored nutrients and sunlight even more densely. Decomposers break down the waste from these and return nutrients to the soil. And the cycle continues.

Civilization usurps the normal flow of sunlight and nutrients through an ecosystem by wiping out all plant life on a given piece of land and replacing these with a handful of producers that serve its own ends. These of course are the cereal grains: wheat, rice, corn, oats and the like.

Then at harvest the sunlight and nutrients stored in the cereal grains are divorced utterly from the natural food chain. The energy and nutrients are converted into gold and silver, representing the sunlight and soil nutrients contained in the grain — in other words, representing their value, a thing that does not exist outside of civilization. The gold and silver are then systematically concentrated among fewer individuals at increasingly removed distances from the grains’ point of origin, a dim reflection of the flow of solar energy and nutrients through a proper food chain. And because there is no way to turn waste directly into gold or silver — it is waste because it has no value — the waste piles up with no civilized counterpart to shit-eating bugs and microorganisms. (How uncivilized!)

For this reason, any response that does not address the bifurcation point that is agriculture completely misses the mark. Even the ecovillage and/or subsistence-farming-for-all “solutions” miss the mark because these do not address the problem’s point of origin. At best, these are like monkeys in a cage who strive to keep the fires burning at a level that poses no immediate threat. That is, until some other monkey gets thrown into the cage who decides to build the fire bigger.

If there is ever to be such a thing as an ecologically sustainable civilization, it must begin by not only measuring the value undisturbed ecosystems have to civilization, but also by somehow making that value available for use within civilization. In our current global economic and ecological circumstances — arguments about “what should be” or “what shouldn’t be” are useless, we can only start where we are — that means monetizing the value of undisturbed ecosystems.

If this can be done, it would mean big corporations stop plundering and start replanting because it is more profitable to do so. It would mean there’d be more money to be had in reducing carbon emissions than in creating them. It would level the playing field between rich nations and poor nations, because poor nations haven’t had the money to plunder their landscapes the way we rich nations have. It would mean coal left in the ground would generate more jobs and more returns on investment than coal pulled out of the ground and burned. In short, it would erase the bifurcation point that agriculture currently represents, and align civilization with normal, natural Earth processes. It would allow us monkeys to not only open and leave the cage, but to then turn around and put out the fire properly.

This is why I focus on business. Such a re-alignment isn’t going to come from academia, or activism, or any political process. None of these can even imagine anything other than left versus right inside the cage. Business, however, is not so limited. Money, like water, takes the shape of its container, and it is business that is the container for money. It would take just one person to profit once by leaving an ecosystem alone in order for that business model to spread through the economy. It would allow civilization to evolve, to adapt, to our given realities.

Such business plans do exist. It’s very unfortunate they get so little air, and certainly will not have any place at Copenhagen. Thinking outside the paradigm is nearly impossible but there are some who can manage it. I do hope Copenhagen spurs them to start speaking up. 

Blogging around 12.03.09

by Paula | 3 December 2009 | permalink | comments [1]
Tags: news,

I normally can’t stand the Archdruid but last week he made a good point:

…the statisticians of some imaginary Bureau of Honest Figures might sort things out something like this:

The gross primary product or GPP might be the value of all unprocessed natural products at the moment they enter the economy – oil as it reaches the wellhead, coal as it leaves the mine, grain as it tumbles into the silo, and so on – minus all the costs incurred in drilling, mining, growing, and so on. (Those belong to the secondary economy.)

The gross secondary product or GSP might be the value of all goods and services in the economy, except for raw materials from nature and financial goods and services.

The gross tertiary product or GTP might be the value of all financial goods and services, and all money or money equivalents, produced by the economy.

He goes on to state that, “the chance that any such statistical scheme will be adopted in the United States under current political and social arrangements is effectively nonexistent.” Yep. However, there’s no reason these can’t be calculated at all. Lots of people have econometric know-how. I think the Oil Drum puts forth a good model for open-source stats calculations, how about a similar blog dedicated to econometrics? The Gross Domestic Blog, anyone?

Back in November, Gregor asked:

As I’m quite interested in energy transition more generally, the electrification of transport, and also the reintegration of agriculture into cites, I find the work of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab quite compelling. The social and economic question I have, however, is who will capture the savings from continued advances in efficiency? Will benefits accrue to city government budgets and city dwellers, or, to those who own the Big Data? Or will it be shared?

Astute readers will note this is fundamentally the same question Catherine Austin Fitts asked back in the 90s — and she ended up being hunted across the country by thugs for her audacity. Her Solari business model would optimize local efficiencies to the benefit of absolutely everyone involved: local residents, global investors, Solari staff and officers. I’m still all doe-eyed over Solari. ‹insert little floating hearts here.›

Here’s some doomer pr0n from the Denver Post.

Martin attempts to answer George Monbiot’s question: why is climate change denial spreading?

There seems to be a megatrend signalling that the emergence of the modern connected man is accompanied by a decreasing belief in truths which is instead replaced by the more pragmatic and quick concept of truthiness — the kind of truths you don’t look up in books but search your guts to know if they are true!

I would add that media manipulation by uberfunded denial-based and so-called “intelligent design” organizations also plays a very strong role. ‹cue up Glenn Beck tears here.›

Back from the netherworld

by Paula | 2 December 2009 | permalink | comments [3]
Tags: collapse, recession

Has it really been six months since my last entry??

Like so many others I too fell on hard times this year. I’ve spent the last several months descending to an underworld of Western distress and clawing my way back up to the land of the living. Happily, things have stabilized once again and I now have a new address for both my studio and my home. I have electricity, food, a working vehicle, plenty of personal hygiene products, telephone and internet service, furniture and appliances. It feels like palatial opulence.

Over these last months I’ve gotten a small peek into what Dmitry Orlov means when he says, “Collapse, for you, is likely to turn out to be a deeply personal experience.” Although my experiences pale in comparison to those Dmitry’s long blockquote cites, they did provide me with an unexpected perspective as an outsider looking in on the true heart lurking beneath nice, clean, suburban, Christian America.

I knew it was cold and nearly retarded in its stupidity. I guess I’d hoped it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared.

I’ve learned a lot this year, important things that have deeply informed my approach to both life and business. My time this morning is too short to get into detail but I plan to share some of these things as I get back into the swing of blogging again.

For now I’d just like to say it’s good to be back and many thanks to those who continue to stop by on the off-chance I’ve posted something new.

(Sidebar: due to an inordinate amount of spam, comments are now moderated. Rest assured if you post a comment I’ll release it to the blog shortly.)

Using Backpack for nonlinear business planning

by Paula | 7 June 2009 | permalink | comments [1]
Tags: business planning, peak oil

Last fall, I published a blog post called Engineer your own soft landing? The nonlinear business plan which described a planning strategy that takes into account various decline scenarios. In a nutshell, the goal is to develop miniature business plans for each of a number of different scenarios, the pieces of which can be mixed and matched depending upon how events play out.

This is a followup to that post and describes how to use the free online tool Backpack to develop, and keep current with, a nonlinear business plan.

What is Backpack?

Backpack is one of a family of online business softwares engineered by a company called 37Signals, with which you are probably familiar if your work involves the web in almost any way.

From the Backpack website: “Backpack is an easy intranet for your business. Store, share, discuss, and archive everything that’s essential for your team. Safe and secure.” And that’s just what Backpack does — it allows you to keep notes, lists, write documents, keep a journal, and more; and, it allows you to collaborate and share all this with business partners, clients, or whomever you wish to invite.

The organizational features of Backpack make it a great choice for building a nonlinear business plan. It is also incredibly simple to use, and includes both a free version, which I’ve used to set up my example; a solo version for $7/mo that has some additional features; and a series of ever-larger versions for SMEs all the way up to global enterprise.

Getting Oriented

Backpack’s center of gravity is its “Pages.” Pages offer the ability to quickly add notes, lists, writeboards and dividers:

• Notes are brief snippets of information
• Lists are checklists used most frequently for to-do lists, which can be checked off as tasks are completed. They are useful for just plain lists too, however.
• Writeboards are full documents which are composed right in Backpack. What’s nice about these is that Backpack will save draft versions along the way rather than overwriting everything all the time.
• Dividers are simply page dividers that help keep your content sectioned off and more organized.

Pages can also be tagged just as a blog post, a link at De.licio.us, or a photo at Flickr would be tagged.

Each page is assigned its own email address so that users can email lists, notes and such to their pages; emailed content is added automatically, and can be re-arranged later.

Page content items can be dragged-and-dropped onto other pages. This is going to come in very handy for our purposes.

Getting Started

Backpack’s free account comes with five pages. I’ve set up the pages in my example account like so:

• Summary — Equivalent to the standard executive summary of an existing business plan
• Current — This page is set up with the subheadings of the Summary page, but is otherwise blank. It’ll be the repository for scenario planning items as they are needed.
• Scenario 1: Hyperinflation
• Unused
• Unused

The links above go to live, published Backpack pages. They aren’t interactive, but demonstrate pretty well what a Backpack page looks like.

Filling in the Pages

The “Summary” page describes where the business currently stands; this is important information to hang on to and shouldn’t change much. It provides an anchor for recalling where the business has been so that its owner can avoid repeating mistakes, and/or look back to see what worked in the past as the economy rides the bumpy plateau. The Journal feature of Backpack is also useful for keeping track of what gets changed and when, and can serve as a reference for the same purposes.

The “Current” page is where most of the action takes place. I’ll get back to this in a moment.

The “Scenario” pages are for developing actionable alternatives to current business practices. These are just like the Summary page, but the information included under each heading changes to suit whatever scenario requires alternative actions. Compare the section headings on both the Summary and Hyperinflation pages linked above; they are the same, but the Hyperinflation page content is changed to reflect potential actions.

The “Current” Page

The Current page remains empty until needed. This is a record of current maneuverings and will change as conditions change. Content here comes from the Scenario pages: any list, note, or other item added to the Scenario pages can be dragged-and-dropped into the Current page. This allows an entrepreneur to mix-and-match preplanned responses, and to have a nearly instantaneous document to refer to when dealing with investors, creditors, employees, and for personal organizational purposes.

For exmaple, say hyperinflation does set in and money becomes nearly worthless. Barter will become a necessity, but rather than scrambling to figure out how to make barter work, a small business owner has figured out ahead of time what she can offer and what she can accept in trade. She simply drags the relevant items from her Hyperinflation page to her Current page; the Current page can then be emailed to employees, partners, or whomever; it can be printed out; and it can be edited as needed.

When conditions change and these items are no longer effective, they can be dragged back onto the Hyperinflation page to be reused again later.

If you try it

If you give Backpack a whirl for nonlinear business planning, I’d love to hear back from you to know how it goes. I am in the process of developing my own nonlinear business plan in this way and would be interested in comparing notes.

If you need help

If you’d like to try this but need a hand I’d be happy to help. What I’ll do is this: I can meet with you on the phone and give you a tour of Backpack, and walk you through the process of setting up pages and the like. Then you can pay me whatever you think the value of my help is. No set price — if this turns out to be a service I’ll offer through my business I’ll set a price then, but in the meantime you get to decide. If you’re interested drop me an email and we’ll see what we can do.