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Sun, 06 Jun 2010

Don't "save the planet"

(Updated a few minutes after posting to clarify what I want.)

Lisa was visiting Philadelphia a few months ago. We were walking around the "Please Touch" Museum.

I don't remember how we got on the topic, but suddenly there we were. Lisa explained, exasperated, "The planet doesn't need saving. The planet will still be there, no matter what we do to it! It's humanity that needs saving."

On the surface, it's obviously correct: a warming climate won't change the fact that there is a planet with that climate. There's also a deeper truth that really struck me. I thought about the times I've been asked to recycle; as far as I can recall, it's been for a "greener planet." So I asked, "Do you think that, if we talked to people about saving humanity, rather than the planet, we'd have more success?"

"Of course," she replied.

In short

I want more people to say things like this: "Look, we're all racing toward the destruction of civilization. Do you want to contribute to that? No, right? So recycle. Here's how it helps."

In the future, when people ask me to minimize my carbon footprint, I want them to put things in more dire terms. And when companies talk about how they've "gone green," I want to hear them say, "We realized that civilization is on the brink of collapse. We decided that we didn't want to push it along." Some mumbling about how they've "gone green" and that "saves you green" doesn't make me excited.

Why do I hear "save the planet" rhetoric?

With Lisa, I wondered aloud about why we talk about saving the planet. I don't know a great deal about the history of the words used by what is now the conservation movement. You might imagine that, if we were to start a conservation movement today, we would quickly come to Lisa's conclusion and choose her terminology.

Today, instead, I imagine a coalition of many different groups on a conference call together. Some are promoting a broader sense of self- and earth-consciousness; closer to the hippie end of the spectrum, they have the laudable goal of bringing humans in touch with their bodies and the rest of the physical world we inhabit. I have the sense that these sorts of people are the inspiration and motivation behind a lot of conservation activists.

It feels good to publicly show allegiance to the people who are one's inspiration. But if it's true that other people would respond better to appeals not about the planet, and instead about saving civilization, then I would say that all this talk about the planet is just holding us back.

P.S. From Auto-Tune The News #2....

One of the Gregory Brothers has the following exchange with Katie Couric:

Katie Couric: "At the North Pole, new satellite photos show arctic ice is melting so fast"--

Gregory Brother: "Oh snap, how fast?"

Katie Couric: "Many scientists now predict it will be gone within thirty years."

Gregory Brother: "Surely you jest! I'm under cardiac arrest!"

When Katie leans in to warn, "Some researchers think, it could disappear in just six," the Gregrory Brother swears. As she discusses the importance of the polar ice, and how temperatures could rise even faster after it melts, the Gregory Brother looks increasingly scared. The segment concludes with Katie Couric's words (in two-part harmony), "If we all don't take bold action, and take it soon, we will find ourselves on very thin ice."



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Sun, 01 Mar 2009

Tax cuts: expire

When I see that MoveOn has put this in my email box: 

Subject: 10 Things You've Gotta Know About Obama's Plan

I procrastinate reading it, and I prepare for the worst.

Finally, later in the day, I manage the strength to open it. The list is not the doom and compromise I expected but instead ten lovely things.

The article cites the New York times and declares, "[Obama's budget] lets the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire."

With grace, President Obama lets the worst of the Bush cuts expire; they're just a thousand memories.

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Sat, 31 Jan 2009

Hope Watch begins

I attended Obama's inauguration ceremony in DC a bit over a week ago. It was inspirational and rendered me to tears.

I'm awestuck in the same way to read (a few days late) from Larry Lessig that "Rick Boucher is taking over the Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet (renamed Telecommunications Subcommittee)".

In 1998, Congress passsed a bill that made circumventing any copy protection scheme illegal; since then, even if you just want to play a DVD on a system where an officially-sanctioned DVD decoder has not been written, you are breaking the law. Rick Boucher introduced a bill to the House named the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA) that reverses the most egregious of the pains that anti-circumvention law brought. He introduced it first in 2003 and again in 2005. I read these actions as, "I'm going to introduce this bill that is overwhelmingly reasonable. You all can watch as this corrupt institution drops it on the floor."

I know that Rick Boucher being the chair of this committee does not mean that a re-introduced DMCRA will immediately become law. But I believe in gestures, and this one feels like a personal message from this new Democratic Party under President Obama to me that the issues I believe are important have a chance of being addressed.

So here we start Hope Watch. Somehow, here in reality, actions by Congress touch me with hope that we might make this country and world a dramatically better place. If something else touches me, I'll try to make a note.

What an overwhelming feeling that is.

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Fri, 21 Sep 2007

Fascism 2007

Some notes on American Fascism:

Presumably, we should taser more people who are asking why they're being arrested (vid1, vid2) while a former presidential candidate just keeps talking as if nothing's wrong, and lock up more innocent people in jails where they can't ask why. It's the mainstream.

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Sun, 09 Sep 2007

Do something great for your country

Is the above about Canada, or Lonely Planet?

If it is about Lonely Planet, is it telling you to serve the United States by getting off This Island Earth?

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Wed, 29 Aug 2007

Contacting Congress

Let's say Alan, a regular citizen with no income (at least, that's who I was a few months ago) has a website. Let's say I'm agitated about some issue of national concern, and I want to get my readers to contact their Congresscritter. Let's say those readers don't even know who they elected. How do they do it? That person is missing two crucial pieces of information:

Shouldn't the information of which parts of the country are represented by be information anyone can use to promote democratic engatement?

Okay, so the Senator name is easy - those are two per state, easy to look up. And f you look at the House of Representatives website, they let you put in your ZIP code and tell you who represents you. If house.gov needs more information, it will ask.

But that only tells you who, not how. Different Congress-people want to be contacted in different ways - phone, web form, or email. It would be nice to have a publicly-available database of that. But who will do the hard work to maintain it? And if it's a web form, then those are different on a per-representatve basis. And when Bob uses Alan's website to contact his member of Congress, Alan would prefer to that Bob always see Alan's page templates, advice for what to put in the fields, and so on. So this information should be not only available, it should be machine-usable.

A proposal

So here's a proposal for how to maintain this information:

First of all, a technical note: All the data extraction described below can either be done by a central server that is asked every time someone wants to know, or client-side code that runs on Bob's computer/browser that does the extraction. The advantage of the latter is that it's much harder to block as well as more impressive in the server logs at house.gov.

Who's my Rep or Senator?

It is always going to be easy (in a technical sense) to determine which field on house.gov is the ZIP code entry field. (If Bob doesn't know his ZIP, you can just look it up with e.g. the USPS website.) The responses will be easy to parse, too; just see, of the results returned, which ones actually are a known possible choice according to e.g. Wikipedia.

How do I contact him/her?

All Senators and Representatives do provide web forms. In general they have a common set of fields, and then some have more advanced ones. The central component is just listing which form fields are required; Bob's computer/web browser can just dynamically create a form that matches, all within the look of Bob's site.

If you want to store the results for performance reasons, you don't have to worry about storing it for every possible location or representative. Just cache it once a client requests for about a day, I'd say.

What about reliability?

What to do if the House of Representatives website (or its form handling) is not online at the moment? Recall there are two ways to architect the form submission: Either Bob's computer could directly submit to the form on his representative's web site, or he could submit to a central computer that would do all the submissions. The advantage of the latter is that the central computer can enqueue form submissions that were problematic just like mail servers queue email.

In fact, the same strategy could be used for the form itself! Imagine that Bob wants to submit to his rep's web form but house.gov is unavailable. If the central server doesn't have the form cached, then at least

Why go through all this trouble?

Well, as a public service. It would be nice if anyone could run their own Action Alert site without having to pay or otherwise submit to the will of third parties.

Exactly how much trouble is it?

As I've described it, the whole system is automated. Optionally, a human can call representatives and see how they like to be contacted. If each conversation takes about five minutes, and there are fewer than 600 Senators and Representatives, it takes only 3,000 minutes or 50 man-hours tops to contact everyone and ask their preferred means of contact. This can be done in one shot, or it could be done by volunteers spread across the country.

Now, it would be really interesting to apply this on a state level. Cheap and widely-used action alerts to state senators would make for much more interest from state legislatures in what their constituents think....

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