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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. 

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.›

Blogging around 05.20.2009

by Paula | 20 May 2009 | permalink | comments
Tags: news,

• Scientists hail stunning fossil — “The fossil, nicknamed Ida, is claimed to be a “missing link” between today’s higher primates — monkeys, apes and humans — and more distant relatives.” I love science.

• Wolfram|Alpha — everyone’s all a-buzz about Wolfram|Alpha. Note, this is not a search engine, but it looks like it will be quite useful for looking up demographic data and such for business planning & strategizing purposes. Example: a search for Pennsylvania reveals all kinds of information you’d have to track down through census data. For more general feedback here’s the Twitter search for WolframAlpha.

• Ganja #1 cash crop in the US — Gee whiz, imagine that. (Via CAF.)

• Microformats and decentralized online currencies — From Guillaume’s Blog, a super interesting idea for open-source digital currency: a microformat to track who owes whom and how much. Reader comment suggests doing away with the “store of value” aspect of this currency in order to diminish security costs & issues. Definitely worth a read, as this would be way easy to implement compared to existing alt-digital currency proposals floating around out there. Warning: geek speak ahead.

• The Renewables Hump: Digging Out of a Hole — The ever awesome Jeff Vail gives a breakdown of the math involved in planning and financing a transition to renewables. I think the financial implications of EROEI have been pretty plain to most of us who think about these things, but as far as I’m aware Jeff is the first to lay it out explicitly. This article is evidently the first in a series; can’t wait for the rest.

• Main Street Cash — An online magazine dedicated to local currencies, emphasis on the present. Nice!

Blogging around 05.10.2009

by Paula | 11 May 2009 | permalink | comments
Tags: news, peak oil

• Attacked From Within — Anyone putting all their survival eggs in the “community” basket needs to read this article.
  To wit: community doesn’t scale; when community reaches a critical mass of participants it collapses into society; society requires formal regulation and therefore bureaucracy; movement from society to community requires shrinkage.
  This massive article offers potential solutions to online community problems, which may or may not be portable to meatspace communities.
  I do wish people would start discussing the problems of so-called “community” and of group dynamics. “Community” in isolation from economic and other considerations is definitely not the path to a soft landing.

• Carolyn Baker reviews John Michael Greer’s The Long Descent — Old news, but new to me since I generally read neither Greer nor Baker. In her review, Baker deconstructs Greer’s myopic, retarded brand of “denial lite.” (Great taste! Less filling!) It’s heartening to see someone respond to Greer with something other than fawning praise.

• Citizen action restoring passenger rail in the UK — Sweet! A coalition of citizens’ groups are working to restore the New Somerset and Dorset rail lines between Bath and Bournemouth in the UK. There’s tons of room for this sort of thing in the United States, given the great love railroad enthusiasts have for lost railroad glory. Don’t miss the detailed Google map of the New Somerset and Dorset lines.

• Peak Oil for Programmers — Oh my god, I think I’m in love. <swoon /> If you make your living writing code you cannot afford to miss this post, and probably this blog as it gets rolling. The takeaway: if programmers don’t start getting visionary you all will soon be out of a job, and the world may go to shit faster than necessary for lack of proper software. I’ve linked here to Part II, Part I is an overview of peak oil.

• Resource Scarcity: What Does It Mean For Business? — from Lloyd’s of London. It’s about time.

• Running On Empty — “The lack of innovation in pop music suggests that we are experiencing an energy crisis in culture at large.” Interesting hypothesis. I would entertain the thought that on a collective unconscious level we all know that things are winding down, and this reality is manifesting in pop culture. On the other hand, it could just be that the internet has dropped distribution costs to zero and the most talented artists are no longer dependent upon the Big Four to make a living.

Blogging around 05.02.09

by Paula | 2 May 2009 | permalink | comments
Tags: news,

Some interesting tidbids from around the web today.

• Fantastic infographic from NPR — Power Hungry: Visualizing the U.S. Electric Grid

• This writeup about Lewes Pounds includes a pretty fascinating aside: £1 Lewes Pound notes trading on Ebay for up to £35 each. I checked Ebay and there are indeed Lewes Pound notes trading there with prices ranging from US$1.47 for one up to US$66.84 for three. It looks like some people are treating them as a kind of numismatic paper.

• from BoingBoing: Craigbucks

• New Currency Frontiers blog has some interesting speculation about using social media as the basis for alternative currencies. In fact, such a thing already exists: Ripplepay

• Very, very interesting take on money at our current historical juncture from anthropologist Keith Hart, author of Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World:

The dominant social form of the last 150 years has been the nation-state formed through an alliance between capitalists and the military landlord class whose defeat was the principal aim of classical political economy. It was an alliance between big money and specialists in crowd control. They came together in a linked series of national revolutions in the 1860s, spilling over into the next decade, in order to secure industrial capitalism and the nation-state from the threat of the urban masses. These were the American civil war, the abolition of serfdom in Russia, Italy’s Risorgimento, Japan’s Meiji restoration, Britain’s second Reform Act and the formation of the Anglo-Indian superstate, German unification, the Franco-Prussian war and the French Third Republic. All of these moves by the main players in twentieth century history established a political framework capable of subduing and mobilizing people by a combination of capital, violence and the appeal to cultural unity. I call it national capitalism, the attempt to manage money and markets through central bureaucracy; but this has always been in dialectical tension with financial imperialism, a force for globalization that flourished for three decades before WW1 and for the last three decades, with disastrous consequences in the first instance and potentially for us too.

The economists understand money and markets exclusively through impersonal models, so anthropologists and sociologists have focused on how people make money personal and concretely social. But the economy exists at more inclusive levels than the person, the family or local groups. This is made possible by the impersonality of money and markets, where economists remain largely unchallenged. Money is the principal means for us all to bridge the gap between everyday personal experience and a society whose wider reaches are impersonal. As a token of society, money must be impersonal in order to connect individuals to the universe of relations to which they belong. But people make everything personal, including their relations with society. Money in capitalist societies stands for alienation, detachment, impersonal society, the outside; its origins lie beyond our control (the market). Relations marked by the absence of money are the model of personal integration and free association, of what we take to be familiar, the inside (home). This institutional dualism, forcing individuals to divide themselves every day, asks too much of us. People want to integrate division, to make some meaningful connection between their own subjectivity and society as an object. It helps that money, as well as being the means of separating public and domestic life, was always the main bridge between the two. That is why money must be central to any attempt to humanize society. It is both the principal source of our vulnerability in society and the main practical symbol allowing each of us to make an impersonal world meaningful.

If the proliferation of personal credit today could be seen as a step towards greater humanism in economy, this also entails increased dependence on impersonal governments and corporations, on impersonal abstraction of the sort associated with computing operations and on impersonal standards and social guarantees for contractual exchange. If persons are to make a comeback in the post-modern economy, it will be less on a face-to-face basis than as bits on a screen who sometimes materialize as living people in the present. We may become less weighed down by money as an objective force, more open to the idea that it is a way of keeping track of complex social networks that we each generate. Then money could take a variety of forms compatible with both personal agency and human interdependence at every level from the local to the global.

Unfortunately Hart goes on to recommend either replacement of 1940s-era global institutions or even a world government. His assessment is, in my opinion, largely correct; however, he seems to ignore the ecological realities underpinning those national revolutions that began occurring in the 1860s. Focus on global institutions or even one-world government is absolutely the wrong strategy. What we need is a world network of networks of networks of low-energy local and regional economies. Hart’s thinking looks like it might shed some light on the issue of developing this kind of economic structure.