Commentary

New Blog theme - stuff I've heard about. Part 1: Industrial Ecology

2009-11-07T10:43:00.003-04:00

Ok, so... I run into so many interesting concepts in my frequent podcast listening (BBC is amazing and puts out a bunch of free stuff) that I feel like writing about them. And since this blog is just mainly a place for me to write whatever I want, it's perfect for that purpose. In case anyone actually reads this, here are the podcasts I'm listening to at the moment, with the average length and frequency that they're updated:

BBC Podcasts:
- Africa Today (15 minutes, every business day)
- African Perspective (20-25 minutes, weekly)
- Analysis (a short but in-depth summary of a current event or issue, 20 minutes, weekly)
- Beyond Belief (Religion and society, 25 minutes, weekly)
- The Bottom Line with Evan Davis (Business, 25 minutes, weekly)
- Business weekly (25 minutes, weekly)
- Crossing Continents (weekly, 25 minutes)
- Digital Plaet (25 minutes, weekly)
- Discovery (Science, 25 minutes, weekly)
- Documentaries (20 minutes, twice weekly)
- Dr. Karl and the Naked Scientist (45 minutes to an hour, weekly)
- Forum - a world of ideas (45 minutes, weekly)
- From our own correspondent (25 minutes, weekly)
- Global News (30 minutes twice daily)
- Interview (30 minutes, weekly)
- Material World (Science, 30 minutes, weekly)
- One Planet (Environmentalism, 30 minutes, weekly)
- Peter Day's World of Business (30 minutes, weekly, some overlap with Business Weekly)
- Thinking Allowed (30 minutes, weekly)
- This week in Africa (30 minutes, weekly)
- You and Yours: Environment (variable, usually 10-15 minutes, but sometimes an hour or more, variable posting schedule)

Non-BBC podcasts
- CBC News World Report (10 minutes, daily)
- CitizenShift Social Issues Podcasts (various lengths, intermittent posting intervals)
- Quirks and Quarks (Science, 50 minutes, weekly)
- Security Now (IT Security - 1-2 hours, weekly)

Thank god for the double-speed function on my Ipod! :)

So anyway, in my first installment of "stuff I've heard recently that was interesting, is this quote, from the Material World on October 29th:

"After milennia of mining, we're aware of the location and size of almost every
deposit of every industrially interesting metal around the world. What we've not mapped so well until now is where those metals end up after they've been extracted ... clearly there's a shift from mines to centres of population, but there's a lot more to it than that, and it could help us make better use of the metals in future."

Apparently there's a new study of where our metals resources go. I've thought for a while that garbage dumps must be great sources of materials, what with the purifying processes that these products have already gone through to get them from bits of rock to industrially useful things (I heard recently that 95% of everything we "produce" in industrial processes is waste, vs. only 5% useful product at the end of it. And then we throw out that highly refined 5% - 99% of the things you currently have in your home will be in the dump within 6 months, statistically speaking.) So the fact that there is such a thing as industrial ecology makee sense.

Here are some links I'm going to browse some more when I have a chance:

- wikipedia
- An introduction to industrial ecology from the University of Michigan including graphs and tables listing materials flows across the world (32 pages, PDF)
- An industrial ecology blog

They have a term for finding sources of valuable materials that are "in-use stocks" - they call it "urban mining". Makes perfect sense to me, and I'm glad people are finally starting to take stock of this. I like this in no small part because what they're finding is that while the developed world has run out of mineral resources in the ground, and is now transporting large quantities from the developing world, the developed world has the largest quantities of minerals in landfills and in-use stocks. So if we can access those resources, there will be less transportation required. Seems obvious, but why exactly shouldn't we treat landfills as sources of valuable materials? I know that in some places the "recycling" of computers is done at least in part by dumping them into a large pit and then treating it like an open mine, using the same processes that we've used to seperate valuable minerals from not-so-valuable stuff in mines, to economically extract valueb from electronic waste.

On One Planet recently, I heard a British person say that he now flushes all of his vegetable waste down the toilet because he hopes that his city is using sewage waste in a methane digester (this practice is not unheard of). So really, we've got two large sources of waste (organics and metals) which could easily be taken care of. Now it's only the composite plastics (like those found in plastic films like Saran Wrap, and packaging for consumer products) that are non-recyclable.

All of this is progress, and it makes me happy :)

Electricity Consumption

2008-05-25T15:12:00.000-03:00

Ok, I got my electricity bill today, and decided to follow through and figure out my average consumption. Over the past 10 months, I've used up 292 KWH/month. The most I ever used was the first month (445) and the least was last month (221) although there have been significant variations month to month, and last month I was only charged for 27 days, as the power company decided to move the "end of month" date from the 18th to the 15th for no apparent reason.

So, my goal is to reduce my consumption by 20%, which means 59 KWH. The goal is to average 235 KWH per month. This is going to be very hard, because the reason my bill was highest in the first month was because my air conditioner was running, and it's currently 33 degrees out, and the air conditioner is almost a requirement. So we'll see how well I do.

Some more facts

2008-05-17T15:11:00.000-03:00

A followup to the "the oceans absorb a lot of carbon dioxide and are slowing global warming" fact. A study published today in Science about the antarctic ocean shows that it's now basically full enough of CO2 that it can't absorb any more. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070517.wocean0517/BNStory/Science/home I wonder how long before this happens in the Northern hemisphere. According to the Globe and Mail, scientists figured that this wouldn't happen until about 2050. They call the southern ocean one of the world's largest carbon sinks, accounting for about 15% of all the areas where we can store carbon worldwide. I recall that one of the places the Bush administration had suggested we could put CO2 captured during carbon sequestration at power plants and refineries was in or under the ocean, so I don't know how this impacts that idea.

To give a scale to the amount of CO2 the oceans absorb: "Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the world's oceans have absorbed about a quarter of the 500 gigatonnes (500 billion tonnes) of carbon emitted into the atmosphere by humans"

Hm. I'm reading a FAQ by the IPCC, and according to them we're currently at 379 PPM of CO2 in the atmosphere, so my earlier estimate was a bit high. They've got a good estimate of CO2 concentration for the past 650,000 years, and it's ranged from 180 PPM to 300 PPM. It's a 35 page FAQ, so I'll have to read it later.

Also, another question. Apparently warming of the land causes an outgassing of carbon dioxde, which will accelerate global warming. I'll have to get more information on that because the BBC just stated it with no explanation, so I don't know where it comes from. Increased rates of decomposition? Carbon stored in rocks or soils? I'll have to find out.

Expansion of the tropics - also ahead of schedule

2007-12-02T15:19:00.000-04:00

Listening to another article, it appears that it's not just the arctic that's far ahead of the climate models. Most models predict that the tropics will expand by 2 degrees of latitude by the end of this century, but there's a report being presented at the Bali climate conference that says that amount of expansion has already happened.

By the way, the Bali conference which runs for two weeks, is the start of the process of negotiating a successor to the Kyoto Accord. The hope is that negotiations will be concluded by 2009, while Kyoto expires in 2012. But even the person leading this conference advised the BBC interviewer to keep his expectations of "success" extremely low. Even the perosn chairing the conference, in other words, doesn't expect much to be accomplished there.

Arctic ice melt - WAY ahead of schedule

2007-12-01T15:18:00.000-04:00

Just listened to a BBC "One Planet" documentary on the northwest passage. I knew that the Northwest passage was ice-free this summer for the fist time ever, but I didn't quite understand how big of a deal this was. I already understood less ice = more warming = less ice next summer, but I'll jsut quote David Bancroft's explanation. He's director of the Canadian Ice Service, which is the government agency responsible for monitoring sea ice.

DB: "I think it was some time around mid-august that I was looking at it and thinking that this was something out of a science-fiction setting. It's stunning. It's... I had no expectation of seeing this rapid a reduction in sea ice frankly for the next 10 years. There is no hint of this in the climate models for decades to come. And it happened in this last summer."

Interviewer: "Some scientists say this might be a kind of tipping point. Talk us through what you think."

DB: "It means that it can accelerate. The more open water you have in the summer time, the more sunshine gets trapped in the oceans, the more it warms up, and the faster it retreats. Eventually it can get to the point where there is no ice in the summertime. And the concern of some scientists is that we may have reached that point with the summer of 2007, where it's just going to retreat until there is no summer ice.

Interviewer: Now, there have been lots of forecasts for the date at which the Arctic in the summer would be ice free. It used to be 2100, and then 2080. How does this summer fit in to those forecasts?"

DB: "This point here [apparently pointing at one of the computer models they had displayed for this past summer] at the minimum ice that's shown, closely resembles what we see in the models or simulations of climate for the year 2040, on the worst case scenario [his emphasis, not mine.] So the summer of 2007 was stunning because it was decades ahead of where we expected to be in reduced sea ice."

Luckily 2008 is designated international polar year, so there will be a lot more research into this area of the earth, but we'd all better hope that the other climate models aren't also 35 years too conservative...

Specific numbers - the cost of carbon

2007-05-28T15:16:00.000-03:00

I just read an article http://finance.sympatico.msn.ca/investing/news/businessnews/article.aspx?cp-documentid=4929410 that says Air Canada is offering a "carbon offset", where you can pay for the carbon dioxide your flights generate, to a company called www.zerofootprint.com.

I've read a bit of the zerofootprint.com site, and it seems kind of light on facts (as in "How much of my money actually goes to the carbon offsetting prices?" "Well, we can't say exactly because the price of carbon, as a commodity, is constantly fluctuating. But we have very low overhead, so a lot of your money goes where it should." Still, it's an interesting idea. What I'm most interested in is the fact that they've done estimates of how much carbon dioxide gets emitted per person on a flight. According to ZeroFootprint, an Air Canada flight from St. John's to Vancouver will take about 0.5 tonnes of CO2 emissions, per person. The cost to offset 1 tonne of CO2 emissions appears to be $16.00

By contrast, they say that the average person's share of emissions per year is 20 tonnes.

So... According to this calculation, we ought to be able to offset our total carbon emissions for an annual cost of $320 each. less than $1 per day. This seems a little bit low, considering the hand-wringing over how impossible it's going to be for us to deal with climate change.

Specific Numbers - Canada's Kyoto Targets

2007-05-27T15:13:00.000-03:00

According to Environment Canada, on the 25th, Canada submitted its annual national greenhouse gas inventory for 2005. Why there's a year and a half lag before we submit numbers, I'm not sure, but at least it gives us something to go on. So here's how we're doing.

As of 2005, we were 1/3 above our Kyoto targets. In total, we emitted 747 million tons. Kind of makes the 1 ton challenge seem less significantl (this was the ad campaign with Rick Mercer in it about a year ago, where we were encouraged to reduce emissions by 1 ton per person.) If everyone did reduce their emissions by 1 ton we'd make a cut of about 30-35 megatonnes.

By contrast, in 1990, we had emitted 596 megatonnes. Our Kyoto targets are 563 megatonnesby 2012.

So, why have greenhouse gases gone up by 25% since 1990? THe standard answer is "economic growth", as we've grown at around 3% per year most years (total increase of 50%). But it's becoming widely acknowledged that this economic growth is mainly benefitting those who are already well off. Wages aren't rising, and in fact I saw a statistic recently that said that wages have fallen by 12.5% for males in the workforce over the past 30 years (not sure whether this is in dollar terms or inflation adjusted, but even if it's inflation adjusted it's a bad figure). So how are we better off, with this 25% increase in energy use? Would it be so bad to go back to how things were in 1990, for most people? I don't remember mass anarchy and economic collapse (although to be fair the early 90's was a significant recession). And yet the government says that the Kyoto targets are unattainable because they would lead to negative economic consequences that are too severe to bear.

One interesting thing in these statistics: the greenhouse gas emissions have been basically stable since 2004 (total increase of 0.3%), while the economy grew. Reasons: Katrina hurt the oil and gas sector, and we've had warmer than average winters. So it's not sustainable and it will be interesting to see what the 2006 and 2007 figures come out as, since of the 150 megatonnes increase ince 1990 137 came from the oil and gas sector and the transportation sector.

Quick Facts

2007-05-09T15:10:00.000-03:00

Ok, haven't had as much time as I would have liked to work on this, but since it's a hobby sometimes other things get in the way :) Did manage to pick up the answer to one of the questions I posed in the last post, though. Currently we're about about 425 parts per million (PPM) of CO2, or 0.0425% of our atmosphere is CO2 right now. In order to meet the IPCC goals of limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees we'll have to keep that to around 650-700 PPM over the long term. I recall from high school biology that whenever that book was published (I took the course in 1997 or 1998, so the figure is probably from around 1995) the atmospheric concentration was at 0.03%.

In other news, I've heard from a like minded co-worker (no confirmed written source) that they're predicting this summer will be a few degrees above normal. Which makes limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees over the long term seem highly unlikely.

After the rant comes the action

2007-05-04T15:08:00.000-03:00

Ok, after 1 day, I feel like I need to do an update. Not that many people are going to read this, because right now it's limited to my messenger list, but still. I saw an article today that got me even more concerned. It's currently available at http://news.sympatico.msn.ctv.ca/National/ContentPosting.aspx?feedname=CTV-NATIONAL_V2&newsitemid=CTVNews%2f20070502%2fipcc_canada_070503&showbyline=True, and if it becomes unavailable and someone wants it I've got it saved. It's about how Canada's environmental policy stacks up against the standards set be the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its most recent report, which is due to be published tomorrow (CTV got an advance copy). Among the things it says:

- The conservative government's plan isn't nearly enough (knew that - their plan is to reach the Kyoto target 13 years after Kyoto accord's deadline, in 2025 ish.)
- If we take really strong action now, the target the IPPC is setting is that we'll be able to limit climate change to 2 degrees celsius. (Ok, but what does that mean? Here it comes...)
- Assuming we can do that (which seems unlikely since several major emitters aren't on-board), climate change will leave 1/3 of the world's population (2 billion) with water shortages, and threaten 1/5 to 1/3 of the world's species with extinction.

Think about that for a second. If we do manage to get things under control and stabilize the climate, the best case scenario is that we get to watch as 20 to 30% of all life on earth dies. Not our kids, or our grandkids. Us. And this isn't from some lunatic fringe hippie environmentalist group who makes a habit of chaining themselves to trees, it's a group of thousands of scientists from around the world, many of whom come from places that have an interest in disputing the science. So it's credible.

So what can ya do? I'm not quite sure, yet. But there are two things I'm going to do, to start off with:
I'm going to see exactly how hard it is to meet the 20-30% initial reduction targets that everyone seems to be throwing around at the moment (the EU has set itself a target of 20% by 2012, I think, and will increase it to 30% if the US and China agree to cut). I think my current electricity consumption is about 250-350 kilowatt-hours per month, but I'm going to get out my power bills and figure out exactly what it is, and then see if I can mange to reduce it by 20%. It's going to be tough, because I already know where most of my electicity goes, and mostly it's not things I can cut. Plus I haven't had to heat my condo much at all because the people below me seem to be toasty warm, but I will probably have to air condition it this summer. But I'll find a way, and keep a log here of how it goes.
I'm going to learn about this. Right now there are some things I know, but a lot more I don't know, and I think it would he helpful if lots of people knew more. There are thousands of pages of IPCC reports and other information available, but so far there doesn't seem to be a clear place where I can find answers to questions like:
- How much greenhouse gases can the earth handle, and how is this changing over time as the CO2 level changes, and we cut down forests?

Side note: Two components of the earth's ecosystem are actually helping us out at the moment - trees are growing at a faster rate because of the increased CO2 availability (although cutting down the rainforests isn't helping...), and the ocean is absorbing hundreds of millions of tons of CO2. The fact that the ocean is doing that may be a bad thing, though. Ever see the video of a tooth in a glass of coke? Well, the tooth melts like that because dissolving carbon dioxide into water makes it acidic (apparently), and the same thing is happening to the oceans. Unfortunately, plankton have hard shells, which they kind of need. I think they're sort of like like really tiny shrimp. In any case, their shells can't stand the acid, and so they're dying. Very bad, because plankton are the base of the food chain in the ocean, like plants are on land. I just hope that this is only happening in some climates (I read about it in the ocean off Newfoundland, and I think this is the first study of the issue because I've never heard of it before about a month ago) and that hopefully there are some species of plankton that can stand it.

Next question: Where are the greenhouse gases coming from? I've heard roughly 1/3 each from transportation, residential use, and industrial use, but I've also heard that gases other than CO2 are more potent greenhouse gases (methane, from agriculture, for example, traps about 10x more heat than CO2) and are also more actively traded on this "carbon trading market" the international community is trying to set up (an industrial gas that I can't pronounce currently accounts for the majority of all trading in this market, but comes from under 30 factories, by a few large companies). I'd like to learn things like: how much CO2 comes from developed vs. developing countries, and what will happen as the emerging economies develop? If that's a problem, how should we as citizens of developed economies be pushing our governments to act? Is it enough for us to recycle, take mass transit, and buy energy efficient appliances, or will our standard of living have to take a real hit in order to fix this? How much of a difference does living in a multi-unit dwelling make? It's much better on the envirnoment than a suburban detached home, by the way, I have that on good authority from an urban planner friend of mine, and I've heard the same from several other sources. How much investment as a % of GDP should go into research and development of new technologies, what will that mean for us as consumers, and what promising technologies are close to commercialization that might help? From a government policy perspective, what's the best way to go about changing people's behaviour? (The carbon trading system actually seems like a good way to go about it, which I think I'll go into in another blog entry). How much difference does buying locally produced food make? How much of the electricity I use comes from oil, coal, nuclear, hydro, and wind? (I know in NB it's a mix of all of the above, but I don't know the porportions) How is the mix changing over time, and how much does it have to change in order for us to get where we need to get to? How much do each of these electricity sources cost? (In California, wind power started out being much more expensive than other sources, but with the increase in the price of oil and better technology, it's now the low-cost alternative, and there's a backlog of customers waiting to sign up). If we treat CO2 the same way we would other pollutants, how much should companies have to pay for cleaning it up? (The conservative government's regulations will let companies buy a kg of CO2 emissions for $15-20, the IPCC reccommends a price level of between $30-55 to achieve the goals they've set out in their most recent report, and I was just listening to a piece of fiction that suggested it might be $2000 per ton in 2050. I'm one of those sci-fi junkies who likes my fiction to be realistic. $2000 seems a little high, but it made me realize I don't really know).

Anyway, point being, I'm going to take some action myself and also get informed, and then condense the mass of information that's out there into something I can actually understand, and post what I find out and how my energy conservation efforts go up here.

And with that, I'm going to end what I intended to be a short entry, and go to bed.

A rant about today's climate conference

2007-05-01T15:08:00.000-03:00

Ok, just need to vent about world events for a second here.

There's currently a climate change conference on in Thailand, and I was listening to a BBC report about what's going on there. According to the report, the scientific community has drawn up a strongly worded statement warning of "dire consequences" if action is not taken immediately to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Super. Now, of course, you'd expect some countries to object to this, such as those who sell oil or whose economies are heavily dependent on it. Saudia Arabia has objectedto the wording and is trying to get it watered down on the basis that "environmental concerns may reduce consumption of oil in the future".

Really? Wow. Thought getting that said was the entire point of the conference. I understand of course that vested interests will want to skew the scientific results in whatever way serves their needs. But this goes beyond emphasizing the scientists who say things that serve your interests. Speaking of who's interested in this issue, fun fact: China will overtake the US as the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter later this year, several years ahead of schedule. Currently the US emits 21% of the world total, so China must be around that as well. Basically Saudi Arabia, the US and China (the news story didn't mention anyone else, but if Saudia Arabia speaks for OPEC that represents about 40% of both oil production and consumption) have collectively said "we don't want the scientists to say this, because it's not in our interests to listen." Not "We don't want this to be worded so strongly because the debate about this issue has not been resolved" which is what they were all saying last year, when the previous climate change report was revised to say that the science was 90% certain, instead of the 99% many countries were pushing for.

Now, if people who are running countries (let's assume for a second that this requires them to be reasonably intelligent) can use this type of logic, I've been gypped. Apparently, instead of working hard enough to get through university in a reasonable length of time, I could have just said "I think I'll chill out here and party for a few years, rather than starting work". And then when the parents said "there will be serious consequences for that", I could have simply responded by saying "it's not in my interest for you to state things so bluntly that I feel pressured to take some action, so I suggest you reconsider your position, and revise what you're saying so it's less definitive". Man, it would have been a fun few years...

The fact that this kind of behaviour is going on on a worldwide scale is worrying. Since even the poeple who have a direct interest in disputing the science of global warming have given up doing so and are now resorting to more direct pressure, the debate really is over, and it's time to grow up and get to work.

Musings on a new job

2005-09-24T15:02:00.000-03:00

Hmmm... It's been two months since I wrote in this. And lots of stuff has gone on. In fact, this is the first weekend since I've been in Fredericton that I can say I don't have anything that has to be done this weekend, and I can just relax. Of course, most of the stuff I've been doing is horribly geeky. Then again, someone I know is working on isomorphic binary structures. Don't even ask, I have no idea. Apparently something that involves letters, and some words, but no actual english, from the explanation I got. So it could be worse.

For those who care to know, I've been learning a lot at the new job. Love it. People who are just a few years older than me, rather than just a few years younger, so there are some peoople at work I can really learn from, but still relate to. It's nice. Plus, I'm learning to put fake enthusiasm into my voice, which is probably going to be a useful skill. It's for reading tech stuff for the courseware I'm voicing, not pretending to care about random stuff, but hey, now that I can, why not?

You wouldn't think it, if you're casually reading this, but reading can be pretty hard. Voicing content requires something similar to the voice training you would need to sing. Not that I've ever had that training, but it's what I think you would need. You need to get the pitch, and intonation and rhythm right. It's fun, now that I'm starting to get the hang of it. Kind of like singing to yourself in a little room, but then eventually thousands of people get to hear it. After it's been digitally edited so that I don't breathe. No joke. Apparently breathing is unprofessional. Who knew?

So anyway, today is my first day of real relaxation since I got here, or actually in about the last 3 months. I passed my first MCSE exam Thursday, barely. Huge milestone, because passing certifications is an important part of my job. I've been studying like crazy fior the past few weeks, so a huge amount of stress off me. And now I've decided to take this day to myself and just do nothing. Just relax, and think about things.

And as I do that, as I just sort of sit back and look around my apartment, it occurs to me how rare that is. Not for lots of people, here in Canada, I know. Lots of people can slack off for a day, a week, or more, and assume that's normal and that they have a right to do it. But for every one of them, there are two or three people working really hard to get ahead. I've been talking to different people in different life situations. Single parents, or people who aren't in good relationships and don't have a lot of support. Older people still in university. People who are just making ends meet, barely. And it makes me think, yeah, I worked hard over the past few months, and I'm doing well, but there are so many people who worked harder, and yet aren't doing as well. There was a guy I talked to recently who works two jobs as a janitor just to get enough together to eat. And then I think about all the people who aren't paid, the parents who stay home and work all through the day and don't get the luxury of a break, or often even recognition that what they're doing is actually more valuable than what I'm doing. It's silly that I'm paid enough to keep me going and be independent, while people who do much more important work are made to be dependent on others, and are put in a position where people rely on them but they don't by themselves have the resources to deal with that effectively.

And notice I haven't even gotten into people outside this country. All the people I've just described come from the "better off" parts of the world's population. Part of the reason I could take this break today is because I don't have to do any of the labour that goes into growing, harvesting and preparing my food, clothing, shelter, power and water supply, furnishings, communications media, and the list goes on. That work is done by other people, and I benefit, and often they don't. Even the work of getting me to be the person I am today was mostly done by other people, when I was younger, who realized what I needed to learn and made me do it. And believe me, making me do things when I don't see the sense in it is HARD work, and has often been thankless.

So if you've had the time to read this, take another minute or so. Think about the people who have helped you along the way, and the people you don't even know who have made your life easier, even if they didn't know it or mean to. Some people feel like they've earned everything they've ever had, and were never given anything, and if you have less it always means you didn't work as hard. But I think, in the big picture, for most of the people who will have the time to take a break and read this, we should be thankful. A lot of where we are and who we are isn't because we deserved it or are entitled to it more than other people who don't have it. So feel lucky you are where you are, and thank someone who's done somemthing for you. And try to pass on a little of what you've been given to others who might need it, and even deserve it, more.

Bye for now

Why people don't have to care about my blogs

2005-07-30T14:48:00.000-03:00

Something has just occurred to me. I could write something just for the heck of it, because I find it interesting, and put it up for everyone to see, and whether or not anyone else actually checks it out or finds it interesting doesn't matter in the slightest.

And this isn't some antisocial "I don't care what anyone thinks" rant, by the way. What has occurred to me is that historically it's been pretty important that when you take the time to create something, somebody, and preferably a bunch of people, care that you've done so. It's been important because it's been ridiculously expensive to create things, and ridiculously expensive to spread thoughts around. This blog, for example, is going to take me a bit of effort to create. But historically, if I wanted people to see it, that would take a whole whopping load more effort. I'd have to get it printed, then take it around to people, or find someone who would give me space to post it up on a wall somewhere forpeople to read. And then the prints would fade, or get lost, or get put in a corner somewhere, and nobody would ever be able to find them again, even if they thoght what I wrote was neat and worth sharing.

Millions have been made on the idea that it costs more to publish content than it does to create it, and that even creating it is too expensive for most people to bother. Huge publishing companies have taken advantage of economies of scale and reputation to make money off of getting content to people, and then funding the creators to create more content. Now, publishing is not entirely free, but is so cheap that companies can offer it for free. Similarly, E-mail isn't free, but storage space and processing speed has become so cheap that E-mail accounts offered for free have as much space as a hard drive I once owned that probably cost about $500, in dollars that were worth more than today's.

Of course, many people have had these ideas before, and if anyone reads this they're probably going to wonder when I'm going to say something original. Thing is, very little is truly original content, and maybe to someone who will read this it will sound original. I'm thinking of writing another entry musing on why people always want to know who had an idea first, but that's for another day.

Thing is, we're always taught that you have to do things that are "important", or of interest to the wider society. Our economy is based on finding things, ideas, and artifacts that large groups are interested in, and then producing millions of those things, and charging a little bit for each one and making a ton of money to cover the huge investments required to produce stuff. The entire multibillion dollar telemarketing, survey and market research industry exists largely to reduce the risk that somebody will produce something that only 5 people want, because under our current set of taken-for-granted assumptions that would be disasterous. But now for information we have a situation where you can just produce stuff because it feels nice, and if people like it they can read it and share it and print it and modify it and maybe even turn it into something millions of people will want. Or not, but either way the cost is basically the same, and is small enough that it can be given away for free. I just read an article that says 60% of the content on the internet (quoted as 800 billion web pages, or over 100 per living person on the planet) is created for free, just because people want to. It also said that nobody predicted this would happen 10 years ago, when the internet was getting started. All the market research said the audience would never get involved in making content, or organizing content (think ebay seller reviews, or item reviews on Amazon and hundreds of other online shopping sites).

So my question for whoever reads this (if anyone) is this: What happens when things besides information are so cheap they can safely be given away for free, like this blog and my E-mail account? We're already getting there. Before mechanization, it took about 100 hours of human labour to make a t-shirt. Now, with robotic manufacturing, if a company feels like giving away a t-shirt to get you in a store, or to get you accept a credit card (and then cut it up and throw it away and enjoy your new shirt) they can do it. Universities can charge $20 for a pub crawl, pay $17 to bar owners for cover, and give everyone a T-shirt to spill beer on. I give my shirts for free to second hand stores when I'm done with them. There are hundreds of thousands of people in the world today who are millionaires, and for whom the necessities of life are as good as free. And every year, productivity in the US, which produces 25% of the world's goods (about $11 trillion) goes up by about 3% per person because we are producing more stuff with less human labour. Now, granted, almost none of this goes to the general population, whose standard of living has gone down by a lot of measures since the 1970's (when one person's typical income could support a family). This is a problem that is addressed elsewhere. If I could remember the address, I'd link to Marshall Brain's Concentration of Wealth blog. I'll do that later. But my point is that we are rapidly approaching (and will see within our lifetimes) the point where the basic necessities of life CAN (not to say WILL) be free for all, in just the same way that this blog is right now. The internet has turned the economics of producing and distributing ideas on its head. What happens when increasing mechanization turns the idea that everyone has to work in order to live on its head?

Something to think about. And not by any means an original idea. Google "Basic Income Guarantee". But to me it's interesting, and nobody else has to care.