And a willingness to blame everyone bar ourselves.

Well that’s my take on the global financial melt-down. And climate change. And just about everything. Phew.

So how can it be that huge financial institutions crumble and fall? Well you can take a philosophical stance and say it’s part of the ‘natural’ cycle of things, that it will fall and rise over time and we have just hit a big, bad fall. Sure, it will correct itself, but if we leave it to the pure market folk it’ll fall further and harder and may take a long, long time to recover. So be it? I think not. We need to intervene now and soften the blow. We don’t sacrifice people’s lives to our monetary theories any more.

So it is that we should have intervened earlier, when we could sense something was amiss. Greed was afoot. If we go back to the immediate post-War period, say 1950 or so, we embarked on a voyage of rebuilding. Great strides were made to make peace, build strong, uncorrupted institutions and create wealth. However these new – and positive – political and social connections between nations and the advent of faster transport options meant that we began to link peace, wealth and freedom with travel, consumption and freedom. It used to be that freedom meant freedom to move about, or to speak our minds. Gradually we allowed it to mean freedom to buy a car, an airline ticket or anything we wanted, irrespective of the hidden costs of doing so. It became an expectation that everyone should have everything. What got left behind was reality.

One of these unrealities was linking income streams with a global commodity market. So popular musicians could leverage high selling albums and singles to generate inordinately large incomes. The record companies siphoned off even more of this income, as did everyone else involved, depending upon their individual bargaining “power”. Big deals, big payouts. Fat cheques to artists, fatter cheques to executives. It was so good an idea that it spread. Every CEO wanted in on it. Sports stars. Even bankers. As we globalised, commoditised and held out for better offers we bumped up the cost of everything we desired as surely as we sucked in the cash. Big  cars. Big houses full of big TV screens. And big loans as we borrowed to make up the difference.

We knew one day it would catch up with us; but the huge CEO salaries, the multi-millionaire entertainers and sports stars, the mega-rich media moguls and the wannabe financial traders kept on keepin’ on. And we all supped on our lines of credit, if we had one. And now it’s pay-back time.

We knew it was wrong. It will still be wrong when we climb out of this hole and forget about it all again. It’s just a cycle, after all.

Personally I think speed limiters on private cars are inevitable. It won’t be as simple as a governor or throttle restrictor, it will instead be a logical device that takes note of conditions (eg road type and weather) and location (eg GPS or RFID coordinates) to reasonably balance traffic flow and safety. You don’t, after all, save any time by speeding except on a clear road. And speeding – ie exceeding the speed limit – adds risk. The risk goes up because you are generating an unpredictable range of speeds for other drivers to contend with, everyone has decreased time to react, and energy levels in an accident are raised. There’s nothing bright or clever about it. Speeding is either by choice or by neglect.

But that’s not all. Speeding and the political games played by politicians, journalists and car makers ultimately encourages civil disobedience. We are told by some that speeding is not as dangerous as lawmakers think, and that fines are “revenue raising” only. Whilst that is obvious hokum (the revenue is actually tiny, laws are costly to police and enforce so the “profit” is even smaller, and general taxation revenue in fact pays for our roads), worse is that the whole law-breaker-law-maker vortex criminalises otherwise decent people, sometimes robbing them of their livelihoods and community respect.  We shouldn’t be doing this!

But wait, it gets worse. On most roads you have mixed traffic, intersections, potholes, pedestrians, accidents – you name it. So mixing into that some speeding is not a good idea. And there’s no point to speeding if all you do is catch up to the traffic ahead of you. And in so doing create a traffic jam to curse at. The irony of the speeding motorist is that in their haste to get somewhere quicker they cause the traffic jam that slows them down.

No matter how you cut it, we don’t need it – get on a racetrack if you want to speed. So it’s interesting to read this: “He said the rate of crashes per kilometre for 16-year-old drivers was almost 10 times that for drivers aged 30 to 59, while excessive speed was the biggest killer on Australian roads.” Which makes perfect sense. But less compelling to read this: “Speed-limiting is valuable but … occasionally to get out of trouble it is useful not to be limited by speed. You might need that extreme speed to avoid a collision,” he said. Occasionally? Exactly when does it happen that exceeding 130kmh (the governed speed mentioned in the article) saves lives? The contention would be when you are already doing 110kmh and someone crosses your path, or is about to – and that doing 130 will “get you out of trouble”; but dropping to 80 may equally get you out of danger. And 130 may simply get you out of one mess and into another, bigger one. Especially for an inexperienced driver.

Let’s face it – we demand absolute standards of safety of our public transport systems, including a disciplined approach to speed. For too long we have erred in the car maker’s favour, allowing “anyone” to drive by simplifying the controls and compromising safety in favour of “accessibility for all”. Whilst a case can be put to do this, to facilitate independent private travel as a “freedom”, car makers have a vested interest in making it as easy as possible to buy a car, get a licence and drive. And vested interests are prone to misjudgement of what is right and good for everyone else. Just look at the car mags and their constant bleating about speed laws. They, like the manufacturers they serve, are blighted by the corruption of self-interest. IMHO, of course

Yes, I know, I do go on about it. Labels. Again. I also mention video gaming, right at the bottom…

But to start with labels, and where better than with Astrology?  Astrology “works” for many people both because it is so accurately imprecise and because it taps into what seems to be true. You believe you really are a Scorpio, for example, because the description is so vague yet targeted: variously a noble, lofty eagle of destiny coupled with a vicious sting. Truth is that everyone has a sting of some sort in their tail, so it rings a bell. And everyone feels noble aspirations at times, so again it “fits”. You can do the same with all 12 signs. And you want to believe that it’s you because it sounds right and it’s generally a pretty safe flag to wave. None of the signs – even the promiscuous Pisceans – are so utterly bad and nasty that no-one wants to “belong”. They are safe homes defined more by the position of solar and planetary bodies than ourselves, so they are apart from us and “objective”.  These are clubs we automatically join just because, and we find it agreeable to so so. Of course if we don’t find it so agreeable and believe ‘this just doesn’t sound like me’, we can always delve deeper into the obscurities of rising signs and oppositions and have an ‘ah-ha’ moment that welds us to our charts. Or simply adjust our time of birth a fraction because mum wasn’t sure about that, was she?

Of course it may be that there’s something “to” astrology, other than possible psychic forces at work (maybe) and a small correlation with the planet Mars (true), but it hasn’t been proven – yet.

Now with the “Generations” label it’s much the same. We are born into it, for starters. It “sounds” right and it has a wealth of scientific-sounding correlation to back it all up. If you are a classic boomer born after the 2nd World War you can feel the connection with other boomers. Maybe you lost relatives in the war. Maybe you remember the shortages, the rebuilding, the focus on doing things right and better this time. You remember the fear, the anger, the pain. You grew up in dour, struggling families with little hope. And it affected you; you determined within yourself to break free, to declare war on war itself, to expand the mind and give peace a chance. You gained optimism out of shared heartache and helped build a better world. And then you feasted on it, taking the wealth that you created and building more. And you remembered where it came from: hard work, loyalty and dedication. And kept it for yourselves.
Alas your kids didn’t share the immediate post-war privations and struggles and shrugged off the idealism and optimism off the 1960s. They were Generation X and they were angry. They didn’t want to just accept what their parents wanted for them, they saw things differently. Jobs were harder to find and they took what they could. They saw wealth all around but couldn’t share in it. They were disenfranchised. They latched onto technology and travel and meandered through their lives, rejecting the home-style values of their parents and making for themselves a more mobile, flexible and detached lifestyle. Oh, and they grew up with the fear of an imminent nuclear holocaust, too, so that affected them lots, eh? But out of all that we got a services-based economy with 24*7 fast food, so it must be all right. And they too grew up and had kids and trips in the country.
Except that the Next Generation has to work those poor hours for low pay and no overtime, whilst bathed in the light of a computer screen, one ear on the MP3 player the other on their mobile. Of course it’s what they want, but, isn’t it? They want flexibility in everything because that’s what they have grown up in. They don’t want a career now, do they? They want to flip and flop and dabble. And those aging boomers had better understand that, rather than whinge about the youth of today and their techno-babble, lack discipline, poor grammar, lousy spelling and loose morals. Oh, but they still eat at Maccas, travel widely and take drives in the country
I could go on. You can smell the truth in there, can’t you? It rings true, if only because the media bombard us with this message about generations and differences on a daily basis. We never hear about similarities, only the differences. We don’t get good news, just bad. Kids are never going to be good enough in this world and we’re going to tell them all about it. Older people just don’t get it – especially if it involves technology – and never will. Kids these days don’t display loyalty and they shift from job to job relentlessly – but that’s because it’s what they want, not because it’s how our modern economy works. I think you get the drift.

Of course it’s labelling. It’s black and white and filled with generalizations. But if you randomly sampled a thousand people across these ‘generations’ you’d get a thousand variations of life, genetics, experience, preferences, skills and education. You’d find common ground in emotions, feelings and human urges like reproduction, of course. And you could say that generally the youngest people have the least influence on society, the least independence, and the least accumulated wealth and experience. But you could do that sample at any point in history and it would ring true. It may shift temporally – we on average live longer and stay at school longer as well – but it’s part of our human reality.
Of course the labelling starts with some innocent marketing surveys. You’d find that at one end of the scale ‘older’ people tended to like big band music, but then they went to dance halls and listened to the steam radio, so what do you expect? They didn’t have MTV or MP3 players after all. And post-war ‘boomers’ tended more towards rock, but this was the great age of rock and roll, so again what do you expect? Some of them actually hated rock, and some didn’t care. Some like surf music. Some liked country or classical. Some still listened to swing, for goodness sake. But we didn’t ask them that.  And underneath they are still human, with feelings and emotions based on a million years of humanity. Why do we latch onto the merest, thinnest skin of our being and label people X, Y and Z? Because it’s easy. Because it makes targeting markets easier. We can spin a convincing story around a product and say it targets “generation Y” and throw our dollars into youth websites and viral campaigns. And because we are fond of joining clubs, especially clubs we have automatic membership of, we accept our labels.

The biggest thing to take away from my ranting and raving is that people remain people. Our environment is important, sure, but we remain human. And we continue to learn and grow and adapt throughout our lives. It may be easier for young kids to adapt to and use the latest techno-gadgets but they aren’t the only ones to use them or to see the usefulness. Not all young people are gadget-focused, either. Old or young, each and every one of us is individual – so let’s de-emphasise “generations” and just treat us all as equals.

Which brings me, perhaps surprisingly, to the future of video games. If you click on the link you’ll see that the Nintendo Wii has outsold its competitors from Microsoft and Sony. How has it done so? By de-emphasising the “generational” focus and simply becoming easier to use. With fewer controls, a more natural action and a broader (read less male-centric and techno-focused) approach it appeals to more people. You’d imagine that someone would have thought of this earlier… now if they applied this thought to more techno-gadgetry imagine how quickly we may all adapt to new technology, irrespective of our generation or our labelling?

From Forbes mag: http://www.forbes.com/2008/02/08/future-video-games-tech-future07-cx_mn_de_0211game.html?partner=alerts

It’s summer in Australia and it’s – cool? So much for global warming, I hear you say. Hey, not so fast… just because we get one cooler summer out of the last decade doesn’t mean that global warming has become global cooling. I noticed on the TV news someone already claiming that Australia is back to its “normal cycle” of drought and flooding rains after a long – perhaps the longest – drought. Well, maybe, but isn’t it hard to be certain with just one sample? It’s certainly raining now, and raining like crazy, but isn’t that also a prediction of global warming? That our rain will come in bucket loads with ever more powerful and unseasonal storms? Hmmm. It’s rather a bit more complicated than ‘it’ll just get hotter and drier and it’ll never rain again’.
After all Global warming is global, not regional, for starters. We are looking at the overall heat balance of the planet, not your particular country, state or city. The naysayers still believe that ‘puny’ humans can never influence climate and that we are arrogant to even imagine we have such power. They are looking at tiny humanity and contrasting our weak force and size with the immensity of our planet, its atmosphere and its oceans. They are drawing the conclusion that no matter what we do there’s so much water and air on the planet that our emissions are barely noticed. And yes, they are relatively small in percentage terms. But they are growing and have been doing so in abundance since the beginning of the industrial revolution. China and India are still emerging in this regard and many people remain without the means to pollute, at least to the degree that the rich western nations can. Imagine what happens when the rest of the world catches up.
The second argument is that “we have always had cycles of heating and cooling”, which is true. The contention is that the global warming theorists have just mistaken the warming phase of a natural cycle to be caused by humans, which is again a reasonable thing to propose and investigate. The trouble is that the naysayers don’t seem to go out and investigate. They say “wrong” really fast but don’t back it up with any research. None that I’ve seen, anyway. As I’ve already documented in earlier posts it’s clear that we humans have raised the carbon dioxide levels to a higher but still small percentage of the overall atmosphere, but that this level is actually accelerating faster that ever before and is already at higher levels than have ever been found. This is corroborated by samples taken from ice cores, for example. It needs also to be mentioned that there have never been over 6 billion humans on the planet before, let alone the number of cars, houses, factories and power stations we have these days. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that by ceaselessly clearing land and burning coal and oil we will at some point have an effect on local patterns of weather, if not regionally. And if El Nino/La Nina is anything to go by then these regional influences can have intra-regional effects. And if Australia and affect Peru in that fairly large way then it’s likely that we are impacting climate generally in at least some small way.
I won’t go on. You’ve read it all before. But here’s an article in Science mag that notes the rising temperatures in the North Atlantic over the last 50 years and quite fairly mentions that the human cause – or otherwise – is hard to prove. Indeed. So do we sit and wait and continue to clear land and churn out pollution, or do we take action against a sea of troubles? Your call.

OK, I love cars and bikes. I love wheels, basically. I love the ability to travel much further, far easier than on foot. (And I love walking, too.) Trouble is, cars take up too much space, spew fumes and their drivers act like it’s a personal affront to slow down and give pedestrians and cyclists a chance. The ‘modern’ world is simply unbalanced in its love of roads, parking and ever-bigger cars and has forgotten that people actually live here, too, and want to (a) breathe (b) not be intimidated by traffic to the extent where simply crossing a road or even walking alongside one is an ordeal. At this point I publish in toto and excellent riposte by Sydney’s Lord Mayor to the numbskulls at the Aussie National Roads and Motorists Association (of which I am a long-standing and increasingly disenchanted member):

Clover Moore January 11, 2008 “THE NRMA, unsurprisingly, claims that few cyclists use the Epping Road corridor each day. The NRMA, like the big oil companies, has a vested interest to protect, and it is depressing that private car use in Sydney is still rising, with vehicle kilometres travelled increasing at twice the rate of population growth. We are past the day when we have any choice but to pursue alternatives: oil is running out and global warming is increasing at an alarming rate. Our streets are becoming impossibly congested, polluted and unpleasant to use. The health costs, in respiratory disease and obesity, to name but two, are well-documented. Many people choose cars over bikes because they can get directly to any destination. Get on a bike, and you’ll be lucky to find continuous safe passage. Cyclists are expected to levitate through impassable gaps in the network and risk their lives inches from tonnes of speeding metal on car-dominated roads. Despite this, nearly 1.5 million bicycles were sold in Australia last year, 40 per cent more bikes than cars. And this is the eighth year in a row that bikes have outsold cars.

“At last year’s C40 Large Cities conference in New York, I cycled with the mayor of Copenhagen. In the Danish capital 40 per cent of people use bikes to get to work and study. International experience shows that if you provide the facilities, people will use them – but it does not happen overnight. Our top need is for a clean, efficient, sustainable and integrated transport system that includes cycleways and mass transit to move the million-plus people who use the city daily to their destinations. Recent research by the City of Sydney indicates that Sydneysiders would be more likely to cycle if there were dedicated cycle lanes and better awareness by motorists of bicycle safety. Even under the present, less-than-ideal conditions, the Roads and Traffic Authority has reported a 45 per cent increase in bicycle traffic in the CBD in the three years to 2005. The city’s own counts show that about 500 cyclists use Oxford Street each weekday between 7am and 9am – a sixfold increase over the past decade. While there are major recreational cycleways – such as the Sydney Harbour route and the planned Alexandra Canal path – the city’s cycle strategy aims to create an effective and accessible network with major routes less than five minutes’ cycle from every residence. It also includes strategies to increase community awareness about the benefits of cycling, to provide better signage and safer, separated cycle lanes. We are encouraging end-of-trip facilities including the provision of parking, storage, change and shower facilities – which progressive firms like Lend Lease are now providing in their headquarters. On the other side of the harbour, North Sydney Council has its own proposals for getting cyclists safely to the bridge, and local governments across the metropolitan area are looking at ways of creating a cycling network that can get people to work, recreation and educational destinations.

“According to the British urbanist Charles Landry, the average US male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car – driving it, sitting in traffic, parking it. Adding in the time spent working to pay for it, for petrol, tolls and other charges, he calculates that same person spends over 18 per cent of his life on his car. Sydney people have surely got better things to do with that 18 per cent of their lives.”

Clover Moore is Lord Mayor of Sydney and the independent state MP for Sydney.

It seems that way, like it’s a war between people and cars. The cars are simply inanimate objects, sure, but they behave like angry bees looking for a fight. Or like the worst sort of human bullies, pushing themselves and everyone else out of their way. How did we get into this state? Why do we allow this anti-social behaviour to continue? Of course the root of this evil is simple – “drivers” are no longer people, or so it seems; instead they are themselves a collectivist entity known as “cars” or “traffic”. Yes folks, step inside this tin can and de-humanise yourself. Become as one with the machine.

OK, it’s a broad brush but as a person, a pedestrian, a cyclist and a driver I see otherwise “nice” people suddenly take on bizarre aggressive traits whilst driving. And they defend their anti-social activities to the death, sometimes literally. “Bikes should not be on the road, roads are for cars”. “We pay road taxes and registration and licence fees, and they don’t”. “It’s not right to slow cars down or to blame them for pedestrian stupidity, instead pedestrians should take more responsibility”. “Speeding fines are just for revenue raising.” And so on. It’s a litany of denial, of abdication of responsibility and a dereliction of due care. And they believe it, too.

I am prompted to write this because of what another rider – Cadel Evans, the number 1 professional rider in 2008 – has been reported to have said, namely: “I’ve cycled in every continent in the world, other than Antarctica, and it’s incredible. Drivers in America and Australia just have attitudes. I don’t necessarily say attitudes towards cyclists, but towards other road users … . people just don’t realise the danger they’re causing other people.” In Evans’s experience, the worst offenders come from the ranks of very young and very old drivers. He despairs that cyclists have to contend with people throwing bottles and driving dangerously close to them.

And I can but agree. It’s been like this in Australia for some years. I gave up commuter cycling for a while because of it. Bullying drivers who leave no room (despite clear laws about keeping to your own lane) and who intimidate, or simply abuse. I had a can thrown at me in a quiet backstreet and a speargun aimed at me at 6:30 in the morning. For no reason. At 5:30AM a bus swerved across 2 empty lanes seemingly to  simply scare me. Several times buses have ignored my presence and just cut in front, barely, and trapped me against the kerb. Cars turn in front of me, or sweep me into the gutter. Or overtake where it’s not safe out of some misplaced desperation to “get ahead”. One friend had a gun pulled on him – he escaped down the Cook’s River canal.

You can see the problem. These are not people, these are “cars”, “buses” and “drivers”. At worst they are arrogant owners of the road. At best they grudgingly give some space. If you met them face to face there’d be no problem. But in their steel tanks they take on a new, angry outlook that leaves no room for anyone else.

Well, I ride, walk and I drive. I pay taxes. I see mistakes being made by people in cars as well as on foot or on bike. Yet I can calmly share and give a bit of space to all, and can slow down and give others some room. Now if I can see all sides of this, and plenty of other people can too, and we can all get along fine, what’s your problem?

Well it’s obvious to me, anyway. Of course land clearing has made our climate hotter. You only have to go for a short bike ride or simply walk in the right places to spot the difference. Whether you travel the hot plains of suburbia or the shadeless wastes we call farmland the only blessed relief from the heat is the shade of the uncleared forests. Around my part of Australia the temperature can drop 5 degrees in the blink of an eye as I pedal through remnant tall gum forest. Now it’s the shade effect, sure, and that’s stating the bleeding obvious. But there’s more to it than that. Forests conserve water by raising the humidity of the air captured under the canopy. Forests also keep the blast-furnace northerlies at bay. Forests are also less likely to radiate the heat back into the atmosphere, unlike our black bitumen roads and red-tiled roofs. They also sequester carbon.

Now plenty of people think we humans are too puny and insignificant to affect global patterns of climate – whilst offering no proof of that other than their blind, optimistic faith. On the other hand I can’t prove that human activity is to blame for climate change on a global scale, either. But I do think it plausible that over 6 billion humans chewing through our planet’s resources will have some effect on the planet’s weather – although the degree of effect is probably still small. I hope. What I am certain of is that human activity – especially land clearing – drastically alters patterns of weather, including rainfall. Now if enough people in enough places are doing the same thing…

From the SMH:Land clearing has led to climate change in Australia, a University of Queensland-led report says. UQ’s Dr Clive McAlpine said their research showed the clearing of native vegetation had made Australian droughts hotter. “Our findings highlight that it is too simplistic to attribute climate change purely to greenhouse gases,” said Dr McAlpine of UQ’s Centre for Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Science.

Journalists have it tough. They must report factually (never easy when truth can be so dull). They must separate fact from opinion (which requires both insight and time-consuming research). They must meet their deadlines (don’t we all?). And they must write appealing prose that targets their readership or audience. In other words they are horribly compromised by eternal conflicts of interest and can never be trusted. If you’ve ever been involved with putting stories together with journalists you’ll know that your words are often accepted holus-bolus (which is great if you want to get your spiel out there) as that’s the easiest (ie laziest) approach for them. However if your story is too insipid, or if they want to prove a point of some kind then don’t expect much of your story to get ‘out there’. Instead it will vary from ‘enhanced’ to ‘total fabrication’. You can’t blame ‘em really.

Anyway, today’s brave words are from news.com.au: MORE than 50 of the world’s airlines can’t be wrong in their choice of Boeing’s hi-tech Dreamliner ahead of the A380 “big bird” from Airbus.

Wow, that many airlines can’t be wrong, eh? Airlines are never wrong, never make mistakes when choosing one aircraft over another, no. Never. Funny how this gushing story also coincides with the arrival of the first commercial flight of the A380 into Australia.

The article continues to enthuse with:The moulded carbon-fibre “plastic fantastic” has yet to fly but is already the most successful new airliner in aviation history. Yes, the fastest selling commercial airliner yet to be seen… and indeed it hasn’t been seen in the air, either. But gee that A380 already has its wings… can’t let Airbus get any leverage out of that, can we?

Anyone got the original Boeing press release handy?

I can’t help but watch the cars go past. We live on what is almost an island, just a ridge of mountain with a swampy strip on each side connecting us to the mainland. In the old days there was no road in, all traffic was via the wharves on the southern side of the peninsula. As the settlement grew and the land cleared it became viable and desirable to connect the the old Yow Yow settlement to Kincumber parish, and the first road (Elvy’s) was driven up over the ridge. It’s still there but impassable in places, at least by cars. Bullocks would’ve been the ‘heavy’ traffic, carting timber from Kincumber down to the boat builders at Davistown. And then the road was pushed to the west along the swampy strip, connecting us to Green Point and Erina, and by punt from there to East Gosford. So as I say, there’s now just one road into the place.

So when I stand at my front door I can see all of the traffic to Saratoga and Davistown. In what passes for peak hour it’s a constant stream. Car after car, plus buses and trucks. The buses are full of schoolkids, at least by the time they roam around and collect a load, then quite empty. The cars are mostly driver-only, no passengers. By my rough count we see 50 cars a minute for 2 hours, and 40 a minute for another 3 hours, then 10 a minute for 10 hours. Much less overnight but at a constant trickle.

Now this is a small community. One set of about village shops for Saratoga, another much smaller set of shops for Davistown. One small grocery shop, a fruit shop, a butcher, a baker, a hairdresser and some estate agents at Sara and a newsagent and a take-away in each. Yet when you look at the traffic it’s at least 50*120+40*180+10*600 vehicles during the bulk of the day. That’s 19,200 vehicles passing by every working day and somewhat less at weekends. Let’s be generous and forget weekends. So that’s 96,000 vehicles per week, in and out. The speed limit is 50kmh but most do 60. All of them buzz past houses, children, pets and wildlife and either disturb their rest, their play or just their daily lives. Kids can’t play in the street, nor can they cross the road safely. Even adults have to wait for a break in the traffic before crossing and cyclists are blasted by horns for daring to venture forth.

Now we chose to live here, and it’s relatively quiet behind our screen of trees. We could live in a cul-de-sac. But not everyone can live in cul-de-sacs, or afford the premium paid for a quieter street. And whilst Davistown Road is a funnel that concentrates the traffic, plenty of other streets here and elsewhere have either more or somewhat less traffic to deal with.. and to be honest I am wondering why we allowed this to happen. Why are we encouraging these immense numbers of vehicles to terrorise communities? Is terrorise too harsh? Well imagine a world where kids could play in the street safely and where anyone could just cross the road when they wanted, without waiting for 10 minutes or more. Yes, we love the utility of jumping into our cars are going places but is the traffic, the exhaust, the noise and the fear generated really worth it? Have we blinded ourselves to what we are doing when we swap feet, boats, buses and bikes for cars?

Absolutely.

This has been a bee in my bonnet (which sounds a trifle nasty, doesn’t it?). Generations don’t happen in waves, they happen all the time, seamlessly. To say that because some individuals are born in a particular cluster of years “makes” them a “Boomer” or a part of generations “X” or “Y” and thus gives them certain shared characteristics ignores individuality, parental modeling, the role of genetic variation and the fact that humans are adaptive and will change their behaviours to suit conditions.

At worst it’s just lazy, convenient labelling. At best? Well it’s harmless fun, innit? I don’t doubt that people are affected by both their environment and the events within their lives, but just because the World Wars demonstrably affected a wide selection of the world’s population severely and disastrously doesn’t make it follow that forever more whatever happens will be reflected in some measurable mass generational change of mindset. If we look hard enough we’ll find “something”, but that’s humanity for you – looking for patterns and finding “something”. Like a face on the moon and animal shapes in clouds, or the stars above.

So in today’s Sydney Morning Herald we finally find a change in thinking: There is a little bit of generation Y in us all, says a leading researcher who believes it is time to rip up the generational rulebook and rethink the way we view people’s behaviour. Rather than break down the population into demographics based on age, Mark McCrindle says it is time to look at a whole chunk of Australia as one group based on attitude, or as social analysts like him call it, psychodemographics. And, he says, the prevailing mind-set in the future is that of generation Y.

It’s still a case of looking for a pattern and giving it a label, but at least we are shaking off this “born in year ‘x’ therefore you act like this” rubbish. Which only applies to the rich Westerners who are targeted by marketers anyway. But people are people, wherever they are, and individuals. Let’s treat them as individuals.
Or am I just acting like a wrathful Scorpio?

We tend to focus on the energy we put into the car – you know, that liquid energy we currently use as fuel – rather than look at the total energy budget of the car. Which of course would be fuel over lifetime of car+car manufacture+car repairs and maintenance+fuel to move raw materials+share of cost of infrastructure and so on. That would include roads, ships that transport cars, port facilities for cars, car parks and even the family garage. It would include opportunity costs as well (you know, what you could have done with all of that land and money if it wasn’t tied up as freeways and so on). People install fluoro lightbulbs and offset their petrol expense and then declare themselves ‘carbon neutral’, when of course they are not even close. Worse still they buy a hybrid car and think ‘job done’. Baloney, it’s just job started.
Now it has been said that roughly 40% of the total energy budget of a car is expended just in its manufacture. Other people have suggested 60%, some much less. It depends of course on the size of the car, the cost of raw materials and fuel and how far that car travels in its life time. But is it true? Could so much of the energy expense actually occur just in manufacture? Now if you extend the life of the car (and continue to drive it, of course!) you increase the likely absolute cost of the fuel whilst diminishing the proportion of energy used in manufacture. But of course nothing is ever that simple, is it? You should factor in a share of the infrastructure, too. Can’t drive a car without roads after all (even off-road vehicles end up on road at times).
Unless of course we make it simple, just to prove a point. So let’s calculate how much energy is expended in making a car by setting aside the (probably!) much larger infrastructure costs for the moment. We could calculate this by breaking the car into material types by weight and looking up melting points of metals and so on and calculating back from there, but let’s just do a rough calculation simply based on retail price. We will assume that there are no energy subsidies (when of course there are) and that the price is fair, i.e. not below cost (or “dumped”). Big assumptions, yes. But we can’t be too far off, surely? (He writes, hopefully.)
Anyway if we choose 3 cars – a Hyundai Getz, a GM Commodore and an Alfa Romeo Brera and make a few more rash assumptions we may get some answers. The recommended retail of these cars in Australia is $A15,490 for the Getz 1.6l; $A39,900 for a Commodore Berlina V6 and $A87,990 for the Brera AWD v6. We will assume that the dealer makes 3% on the Getz, 8% on the Commodore and 15% on the Brera. (I’m assuming a very competitive market where more money is made on servicing and value-adds than selling the car itself – I could be way out!) There are many such layers of margin and tax to peel away, so here’s a table to show my calculations…

I have to tell you I was somewhat surprised at the estimated factory cost of the Alfa Brera. It must be wrong, surely? Somewhere my assumptions have gone awry, because seemingly the prestige European sports luxury car has a lower base cost per vehicle than the locally built sedan. But then I wondered if the still-somewhat protected nature of the small Aussie car manufacturing industry may have distorted the real cost of manufacture. So I bumped up the factory margin for the GM Commodore; but perhaps I should also knock the Alfa factory margin down somewhat? I thought a prestige car must attract a good margin, but maybe not so much when it’s an Alfa?

So let’s peg the Alfa back…

OK, these figures are still fantasy and probably out of kilter all over the place, but it’s still remarkable that the $80K+ RRP Alfa Romeo comes so close to the factory costs of the local Aussie sedan and the imported Korean small car, but there you go. You can play with the numbers yourself and get a somewhat different result – but it does illustrate how taxes alone distort pricing. And I didn’t even factor in the now-small import duties. Oooops – well you can do it yourself, and it just shows again why we probably shouldn’t be making cars in Australia. It may well say something similar if we chose to decompose US car prices, but I’m too lazy to go to further trouble.

Anyway, our aim here is to estimate energy costs, and you can see immediately that the factory’s raw material + transport + energy costs are going to be quite small individually, but proportionately larger for the ironically more economical small car. If I was to hazard a guess I’d say transport of resources currently would be 20%, energy 20% and raw materials 60% – but that is a guess.

Which would in any case give us this result:

If that breakdown is even close it means that the fuel cost will quite quickly overtake the cost of the energy used in manufacture. Of course we aren’t dealing with a level playing field at all, in fact various governments at times make decisions to subsidise development and infrastructure for export industries, so the real numbers are probably a few – maybe many – percent higher. I’m still surprised at the moderately low manufacturing costs overall, but that’s modern manufacturing at work isn’t it? Note also that if we ramp up energy costs we’d certainly change the nature of the whole manufacturing game. Transport costs would go through the roof for starters and the percentages will go south. But so will fuel prices…

It’s not easy, is it? We want to include everyone in our society, to extend our care and concern generally across the community, so that all share equally in the greater good of our civilisation. Everyone wants that, or they say they do. They want us to have our freedom, to do as we like – as long as we don’t hurt others in the process. From that grow our laws, be they enshrined in public legislation or religious text. And as everyone also knows, the law is an ass.

I recently wrote this: And as a consequence we go lightly on both driver qualifications and reprimands for driver ‘infringements’. If we applied tougher rules, or even applied our existing rules in a diligent manner then we’d actually remove that accessibility for a large number of people and hurt them socially and economically, and as a corollary hurt the politicians who act on our behalf. And I believe it’s true. We want everyone to have access to the freedom of personal transport. However as a western society we have ploughed far more investment into car ownership than public transport, so we have ended up with a society where logistically it is difficult to get everywhere and anywhere, easily, without a car. And we have made it easy to get a drivers’ licence, and cheap and easy to buy a car. So we all go out and get cars, and our expectation is that car ownership is a right, not a privilege. However we want to make driving reasonably safe (and we have settled for a dangerous level of accident and injury in our compromise, too, may I add) and thus we impose laws to control errant behaviour. Some things are perfectly obvious, like stopping for red lights and keeping right or left. But other laws are contentious or simply difficult to enforce. People like to speed, car manufacturers like to make ever faster cars, and some people seemingly lack the skill or judgement to not monitor and control speed. We then catch them and fine them until they lose their licence, their job, and their social status. We create enemies within, with a grudge against law makers and enforcers.

It’s akin to setting people up to fail. We encourage and reinforce car ownership and freedom with easy access to licences, cars and roads on one hand, then crack down on people who lack the skill, talent, experience, maturity or judgement to obey the laws. We let them in, then punish them for coming onboard. Why not raise the licensing and ownership bar and keep them out in the first place, so that they don’t go through this agony and loss of privilege? Because we want to be seen to be inclusive? Because we are all sadists at heart? Or because we don’t want to pay for the public transport infrastructure that supports non-car-drivers?

Well it’s a thought, anyway. Another option is to make cars fail-safe, so they cannot exceed posted limits. The technology is certainly here, with GPS, RFID and car-based computer power and ‘fly-by-wire’ controls. It’s just a matter of political will. Who is prepared to take on the car makers who sell speed as well as function with their “hero” car marketing? Who will stand up and be prepared to save thousands, if not millions of lives, by simply rendering cars safe from law-abuse? Whoever takes this on will be called undemocratic for starters – the “freedom fighters” of this world will say that it’s not the car that breaks the law, it’s the driver. And haven’t we heard that line before?

Here’s one less pollutant to worry about – for now. From Sciencemag.com:

The 100,000 or so ships that make up the global commercial and military fleet collectively travel billions of vessel-miles every year, producing a large fraction of the pollution contributed by fossil fuel burning in the transportation sector. In addition to the direct radiative effects of their emissions, caused by the light-scattering properties of the particles themselves, aerosols from the exhaust plumes can produce thin lines of very low clouds in the marine boundary layer, an example of the aerosol indirect effect. It has been shown that the local effects of these clouds can be large, up to 100 W/m2 (for comparison, the average solar flux at the top of the atmosphere is about 340 W/m2), but how large an influence they exert on the global albedo has been an unresolved concern. Schreier et al. analyzed a full year of satellite data derived from ENVISAT AATSR (Environmental Satellite Advanced Along-Track Scanning Radiometer) in order to estimate the size of the radiative forcing caused by ship tracks. They found that, contrary to fears arising from previous global model estimates, the global annual mean radiative forcing from ship tracks was small, 0.4 to 0.6 mW/m2, and negligible compared to estimates of total net anthropogenic radiative forcing, 0.6 to 2.4 W/m2. Thus, it seems that ship tracks are too inconsequential to affect the rate of anthropogenic global warming.

It seems like a big one to wipe of the list, but it’s just one of many “big ones”. Just off the top of my head, how about (in no particular order):

1. Jet exhaust at altitude
2. Jet-related contrail formation at altitude
3. All fossil fuel exhausts at any altitude
4. Methane release from garbage
5. Methane release from cows
6. Carbon release from land clearing
7. Carbon release from intentional fires
8. Carbon release from unintentional fires
9. Diesel particulates
10. Wood stove and wood heater particulates and carbon release.

It’s a side issue to my pet subject of global warming, or to society generally, but one I find curiously unexplored in the media. It’s treated as a joke, a laugh, something of little consequence rather than a clear case of inadequate lawmaking and ongoing civil disobedience. It’s the question of why we let virtually anyone drive, and then let them do practically anything once they are driving. Yes, we expect them to keep to the left or right, and to not actually hit anyone else (but they do). But generally we just let them go off and do what they like within some very broad guidelines. However the road laws are indeed law, and laws are meant to be respected. So why do we let people hit each other, to speed, to park wherever they like, fail to indicate, fail to stop at stop lights and stop signs, and often to just disregard the rules of the road? Why is that?
Do you disagree? Did you just cop a speeding ticket and are indignant about it? Well being caught may hurt for a short while but honestly you have been getting away with it for years, haven’t you? What did you expect? A public service medal? Most people simply get away with it, most of the time. More than likely you have been ‘getting away with it’ for years yourself and have habituated speeding or other sloppy habits. Just check out any public street, and watch the lawbreakers as they zoom past or park haphazardly. OK, so it’s not that I am advocating a police state, and yes, road rules like other laws are also there to be challenged, but the challenges have to be scrutinised and pass muster on a broader community level, surely. So why do we treat core safety issues like speeding, that is disobeying the posted speed limit, so lightly? Now if a transport professional breaks a reasonable and related law they are reprimanded, punished and disciplined until they conform. And the media comes down on them like a ton (or perhaps tonne) of bricks if they don’t. Whether it’s a airline pilot, a train driver or a bus driver, they can expect to be brought into line, generally, and swiftly. And certainly not let off lightly like it doesn’t really matter. Yet the unprofessional driver is let loose, largely to just get on with it. If they get caught and fined it’s often portrayed in the media as ‘revenue raising’ and written off as something that we all do and, well, ‘what the heck’. Only if they are elderly (and by definition doddery and therefore a danger to us all) or young (and surely inexperienced, menacing hoons, and thus also dangers to us all) are they castigated on a regular basis. But why is it so, and should we let it be, or should we actually do something about it?
Well the answer’s obvious, and it comes in 2 parts. Firstly we can’t afford to police the entirety of the wide open road. It’s too broad, with too many miscreants out there to catch them all, all of the time. Secondly we’ve created a (western) world where we need to travel by car. Shops are often too far away to walk, jobs are no longer confined to ‘traditional’ working hours and are scattered about, and public transport is often patchy at best. So economics alone dictates that we make cars simple, cheap, easy to use and available to all who need them. And as a consequence we go lightly on both driver qualifications and reprimands for driver ‘infringements’. If we applied tougher rules, or even applied our existing rules in a diligent manner then we’d actually remove that accessibility for a large number of people and hurt them socially and economically, and as a corollary hurt the politicians who act on our behalf. If they hurt the number of people they’d have to hurt to fix the problem they’d simply get voted out. Cars have been democratized, it’s effectively enshrined as a freedom.
We could try education. Or praise rather than punishment. And we could move the punishment closer in time and space to the actual law-breaking, but this is just the trimmings. Fact is that most people choose to break these laws, knowing the consequences, or the lack thereof. There’s a disconnect here, between what we see as unacceptable when it happens to us, and how we perceive our own actions when we ourselves are breaking the rules. I’ll prattle on some more, later.

“Car! Car! Car!” He’s done it seemingly spontaneously – “car” came hot on the heels of “dad”, “mum” and “that” in his now 18 month-old vocabulary. Neither of our girls took to the car with such delight and obvious enthusiasm, so maybe (on this small sample) it’s genetic? It wouldn’t surprise me if it is, as cars are basically a male-centric invention and should appeal, I would happily assert, to boys more than girls. If you agree there’s a sex-difference in how our brains are wired, of course, then this is but one expression of that.

So please accept that to be the case, or not. In any event most of our Western world has been shaped – driven even – by men, not women, so we have an immediate imbalance in how we address the world. We have sized and shaped our manufactured world around what fits the male taste and then we males have complained bitterly when women generally fail either to appreciate or to fully comprehend the marvelousness of it all. Look at map reading for instance. Men come up with the concept and then laugh at those who don’t quite so naturally grasp the visio-spatial relationship between a 2-D map and the 3-D (plus time) real world. Of course some men also have a problem with maps, but they often hide that fact and join in the laughter when a woman gets the map reading wrong. OK, I generalize, but it’s called setting someone up for failure and “we” have done it over and over again, be it intentionally or not.

Whilst all of that is percolating through my brain I was asked by a market research firm just how excited I was about some new styles of Coca-Cola packaging. Whoopee. Actually it’s not the sort of thing I get excited about I’m afraid. Like toilet paper it has its uses but it’s not a big part of my day. Actually toilet paper has far more of a daily impact on me than Coca Cola or any other soft-drink. And I guess most people are like me – we may have our tastes and preferences but we don’t actually get too passionate about daily necessities or trivial wants. I may be wrong, I certainly prefer Coke over Pepsi, but it’s not at the forefront of my thinking, either.
But in this modern world we do get passionate about some things, and often they are not clearly so connected with our real needs but more with unreal wants. Cars again spring to mind. Why do people – mostly men – get passionate about cars? Sure they matter, but not so much that you have to polish and protect them like some prized rare religious artefact. Cars seem to tap into something that mere transport never could. Walking doesn’t rise above more than ‘useful’ and an occasional past-time for most people, yet many car-owners take every aspect of their transportation device and worship it. We even invent tribal passions about cars where none logically should exist. We become fiercely loyal to GM or Ford, or Alfa Romeo or Ferrari, or whatever brand we choose – regardless that it really doesn’t matter. The differences are so slight between the comparative utility of these same-type vehicles that it should really matter which one we buy. They all work, so why pay a premium? Oh, status you say?
OK, so cars are exciting in a way that just going for a walk isn’t. There’s no status in walking, although it looks healthy it’s usually frowned upon and made difficult by poor footpaths and inconsiderate car drivers charging around trying to hit pedestrians. But cars have style, substance and make noise in a way that attracts attention – if only so we get out of the way before we get hit. And we have managed somehow to drive the car’s market penetration on the back not just of utility but indeed of that tribalism and deep inner want to both fit in and show off. Again the automobile makers just love this, that buyers not just select their purchase on the basis of utility and value but that they “stick” to a brand and continue to feed them money. Indeed more money if they can get that “status” thing happening.

Which brings me back to this game of life and the imperfection of it all. I think I’ll go for a walk.

Cars. I like them, I really do. 200 years ago only the most intrepid or desperate of us ventured outside of our villages, and it involved great risk to do so. In some measure the automobile and its accompanying infrastructure has facilitated the breaking down of barriers between villages, towns and cities, even more so than the train or ship. It has made it far more practical to go and visit the unknown and opened the eyes of many more people to the fact that there really is nothing to fear but fear itself. It’s akin to what the aeroplane has done to help break down barriers between wider geographies, like nations themselves.  Of course cars and planes are not the only factors – trade is a big one, and breaking down barriers to trade has probably had a bigger impact again. The idea that a country or region has to be self-sufficient and can’t rely to any great extent on other regions persists today but has fewer supporters. In this new global world we have more trade because we have a more fair and open approach to markets; and the gains made include a more peaceful relationship between nations as well as vastly more trade and thus economic activity. On the back of that we see more air, road and sea traffic between cities and nations.

This increased traffic and freer trade (it’s not perfect yet and imbalances abound) has allowed our economic system to drive increased specialization and a greater reliance upon more efficient producers, wherever they may be. Unfortunately part of the success of that system has relied upon subsidized oil. Because it seems so important to trade, we have fostered an imperfect market based on unreal costs. Now’s a great time to look at those costs and start balancing the equation to set things right. We need to preserve the good effects of almost-frictionless trading whilst pricing the oil, coal and gas appropriately, in a way that reflects the real costs.

Which really is my thought for the day. Perhaps the IT industry will assist us in keeping the barriers down between nations, if the Internet is kept free and open with no massive vested interests (like governments and corporates) dominating and blocking communication. Of course it’s not always free and open now, and there are always limits set, openly or by stealth. I have no easy answer, but there are some tough decisions to be made all round, aren’t there?

This dropped into my mailbox from Harvard. It’s basically discussing the difference between the old school thought that corporations just did what they do best and kept away from the social consequences, which is handled better by governments, and the new-school thinking of Corporate Social Responsibility – which brings ethics and responsibility into the balance sheets. From Harvard Business Online: Although social issues are indeed the purview of government, in reality, global corporations are creating a de facto set of international standards that collectively rise above the social obligations imposed by any one government – and to compete in the global economy, companies are finding that they must abide by this emerging code of conduct. Government intervention is required for America to solve its major social problems — whether in education, health care, or the environment — but consumer tastes and political will are ultimately inseparable. If US consumers don’t care about global warming, they won’t buy a Prius — but they also won’t demand that politicians tax carbon emissions either. It is the attitudes of our consumer-citizens that drive both politics and profits.

About which I am thinking how CSR can help to more quickly address – or nip in the bud – some of the social consequences of global corporate activity. It’s not going to solve every problem but it’s a welcome change from the “not my problem” buck-passing that has gone on in the past. Possibly the best way to solve the downstream impacts of innovation and change is to properly and fairly price those impacts. Which of course assumes that we know the real costs before they actually happen – a big if, but one that we could set about addressing. A carbon-offset program is one such example – put a price on carbon and use economic theory to resolve the out-of-control emission of carbon into the atmosphere. Now if we had used our heads back in the 1970s when it became apparent that we had a global warming problem we could have set something up and saved ourselves a lot of future pain. But “we” labelled those people the “looney left” and “greenies” and just laughed. Some of us are still laughing as we sink into the mud, oblivious to it all.
Of course global warming just is the tip of the iceberg. I’m thinking of all of the social impacts of our innovations, and asking questions like: “Do we price the health impact of remote controlled TVs into our electrical goods industry and provide a cost recovery cash stream for health care?” and “Do we price the medical consequences of automobile accidents into our auto manufacturing industry and provide that funding back to our medical system?” And of course the answer is typically no – because it’s ‘too hard’, or would “hurt” employment somewhere. But if we don’t recover real costs from the real users then what we are actually doing is not capitalism, it’s socialism. What we do when we isolate these downstream effects from the cost of manufacture is to protect and subsidise that manufacture. Which promotes inefficiency and hides the real causes behind so many changes in our society. And leaves the rest of us picking up the tab.
Now I’m not against socialism, or capitalism. I just want to bring these imperfections to light and help strike a balance.

So you don’t think we are changing the world – and us – more quickly now than ever before?

Let me give you just one illustration of this time-line crunching; let’s look at how we get around. First up, we have moved from the fabulous foot (our first innovation, let’s say, be it by evolution or gift of god) and much, much later to my youngest daughter’s favourite, horse transport (another innovation, perhaps several thousands of years back from now). And gradually over time we have leveraged our invention of the wheel  (which must surely go back a long, long way) in many different ways and with various animals helping us out. This all involved the passage of time – many thousands of years, by most accounts. We certainly had time to see the effects, adapt our ways and move on. More recently we found new ways to exploit metals and handily came up with the bicycle (by about 1817 or so). This opened a real Pandora’s box of new ideas. The bicycle freed us like never before from both our own walking pace and from reliance on other animals to shift heavy loads.

It was inevitable then that our minds kept working on how to build on the bike idea and eliminate the need for animals to haul carts and for us to push the pedals. Man the innovator – or perhaps man the lazy sod – they are 2 sides of the one coin. Thus we come to Daimler’s first motor-powered bicycle in 1885 and on to the first gasoline-powered 4-wheel automobile by 1893. And since 1893 we have gone from a handful of production motor cars in the hands of the wealthy to literally hundred of millions of cars owned by – at least in the wealthiest nations – the masses. In fact we could say that the automobile as a modern ‘necessity’ has only come about since World War 2, and is still finding new markets.

The obvious point to make from that example is that we had maybe a million years to refine our walking style and to gradually develop paths to walk on, but it’s only been in the last 30,000 years or so that we have developed shoes to protect our feet and allow us to cover greater distances. And since then whilst we’ve made more paths and better shoes we’ve clearly taken some larger technological steps (ha, ha – sorry) in a much shorter time to get now to the ever-proliferating automobile.

The less obvious point is that whilst humans were once few in number and at greater risk of predation, accident and even extinction, they are now clearly numerous and largely in control of their environment (extreme weather and earthquakes aside). So the impact of human travel is far greater now than ever before. Even less obvious is that we have ‘chosen’ or perhaps ‘de-selected’ other options along the way. It’s natural that we walk, of course, but not ‘natural’ to wear shoes or drive a fossil-fuelled car (or catch a train or a plane for that matter). We have made decisions as a broader community to encourage shoe-wearing (try going to work without them) and thus created the shoe industry itself; and even to encourage production of some styles of shoe over others. That work boots get a tax-credit, a subsidy, is just one small example. There are even health and safety laws to tell us what sort of shoe we may wear and when we must wear them. You can see how we had both the time and inclination to develop the infrastructure and some degree of control around the practice of making and wearing shoes. It seems logical enough.

Now the horse brought similar changes along the lines of better, wider pathways and the development of an industry to support horses and their riders as they traveled. You saw investment in hostelry as well as saddlery and so on, and laws to control the ownership and use of horses, especially in towns. It was a transparent, reactive process that developed as the need arose. The bicycle leveraged much of this infrastructure and brought with it the need to adapt laws like that banning ‘furious riding’ to cover the new man-powered steed; and it took advantage of old crafts whilst layering on new needs like that for robust but comfortable tyres. Still it wasn’t a huge change, more of an evolution, and again we had the time to absorb what was happening and adapt our ways. And our environment could adapt as well.
But what of the automobile, hard on the heels of the bicycle as it were? Again we leveraged the existing paths but over time demanded bigger, smoother and more numerous paths – roads, if you like. The scale also changed from what was clearly a well-made path (perhaps the “Roman Road” is a good example of the top-of-the-range in path technology – wider, smoother and far easier to travel than a simple path worn through the bush) to a concrete and tar multi-lane motorway. The car itself went from what was effectively a simple and light motorised quad-bike to today’s much more complex and massively heavier machine. The performance went from a bicycle’s then fearsome 20-30kmh (or a little more for the fit of lung and leg) to whatever you wanted, really. You can add in all of the extras that go to support the car and the massive changes in the way we lay out our towns, how fit we are and how far we are prepared to travel to buy food, access services or commute to work. The laws were changed as we went, but the time to respond has been far less. We are still debating and reacting to the social costs whilst enjoying the luxury of comfortable, fully-enclosed (or top down, if you prefer) motoring and the wider accessibility of shopping, sporting and cultural services.

If you can see my point – that almost by stealth the car (and truck, for that matter) has arrived on the back of our previous innovations, and not just leveraged the infrastructure but ramped it up enormously whilst simultaneously eliminating much of our local community – or village – life. We have chosen and indeed subsidised this development; but then again, did we really? We may have been worried about horses or bicycles careering down our streets in the late 1800s, and enacted laws against unseemly or dangerous riding, but now we calmly allow – encourage, even – ever more massive cars to travel just inches from us at far higher speeds. Even when we impose speed limits in ‘built-up’ areas they are often at least twice the speed of a typical bike rider and at least six times that of a fast walker. And the motor vehicle will weigh a tonne or more, whilst the driver is now sealed inside and isolated from their environment rather than directly exposed to the environment like a horse or bicycle rider. And the car driver may be distracted by passengers, a sound system and probably their cell phone as well, in ways that horse and bike riders – or pedestrians – are not. Their personal contact with their surroundings and their ‘skin in the game’ is simply reduced.

We also prefer ‘villages’ over shopping malls, yet cars demand parking and scale begets greater scale. Thus we have dumped local shops and corner stores in favour of centralised shopping malls and multi-level car parks. And emptied our local streets in the process, apart from people out for a jog because they no longer get the exercise they would have got from walking to the shops.
I think you see the point I’m making – or I hope so! Things are speeding up and innovations – plus their social adaptations – are added on top of innovations. Yet heavier, smoother, quieter and faster cars scythe through our suburban streets on the back of laws which just barely dealt with bikes and horses. And as new technologies are added to cars – like sound systems and cell phones – we can only react after the event by passing laws to help drivers pay a bit more attention. But what if the problem is deeper and broader than this? What if we actually got it seriously wrong several decades and layers of amended legislation ago? And what happens next, when cars are faster still, quieter again and filled with new distractions like onboard Internet?
Now I’m not a Luddite out to destroy innovation, but I am concerned that we aren’t caring for our communities in our rush to make new “stuff”. I see a problem with not just transportation but a whole range of industries and products that have crept into our lives without a lot of fuss, usually on the back of of a bigger idea that was welcomed initially. For example I welcome cars as personal transport, but I don’t like them travelling past my house – and children – just feet, yards or metres away and at speeds out of alignment with the idea of a safe village environment for everyone. The thought that a hybrid car could come up behind my kids as they play, powered almost silently on its electric motor only, driver engaged in conversation on their cell phone, windows closed and aware only of obeying “the speed limit” is a bit chilling.

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This may take a while to explain, so bear with me. About a year or so ago now I had a yarn (or rather I exchanged emails with) IBM’s then chief technologist Irving Wladawsky-Berger. The subject was our collective responsibility to manage the future as well as the present. (I work for IBM too, by the way, but not at Irving’s altitude, if you know what I mean. And these are of course my views, not necessarily IBM’s.) Now this exchange was along the lines of my previous post, but rather than just asking ‘how did we get here?’ I instead asked ‘what happens if we just innovate and release, ever quicker, and repeat ad infinitum?’. It was in part a technological conversation, where as a technologist Irving was keen to expand upon the benefits to humanity of – you guessed it – technology.

And of course I agree. Technological innovation is not just a special gift of humanity but a vital tool by which we meet the challenges and threats to our lives, such as to our food and water supplies and to our general comfort, security and wellbeing. To meet these challenges swiftly may very well be critical to resolving the issues we face and surviving as individuals (or even as a species). So we don’t want to hold things up unnecessarily. On that count both Irving and myself would probably agree (and I’ll stop speaking for him now – you can find Irving’s insightful blog here).
My real bone of contention is that whilst we are very creative animals, we don’t necessarily respect or adequately consider the consequences of what we do. We may well ask ‘is anyone going to buy this?’ and I bet we’ll ask the ever-popular ‘will we capture the lion’s share of the market and make a killing?’, too. We will probably also ask ‘is it legal?’ and ‘can we patent it?’, but we won’t necessarily ask ‘will this product lead to consequences we don’t understand, or can’t control?’. I don’t blame anyone for answering along the lines that we have to trust the social and legal system to monitor and adapt to these downstream effects, for that is the system we have. When releasing a new product we are asked simply to meet the legislated requirements of any particular market and we tend (as humans do) take advantage of any loopholes. Some companies may take a more ethical or wider social view than others but in principle we innovate within set guidelines and then release. The community itself has evolved social, legal and economic systems that are meant to self-adjust to our innovations. Typically this means that if something goes awry down the line it’s spotted by someone, somewhere, at some time. It’s a downstream effect, and it may be cumulative, and – crucially – may not necessarily be direct. It will almost certainly be reflected in changed human behaviour, and maybe acknowledged also as a ‘hurt’ to an individual. 

If the changed behaviour is small or painless enough we’ll just forget about it and go on with our lives. But if we are hurt in some way by the innovation we’ll notice it. If we can identify the source of the pain then we’ll mount a legal case or perhaps lobby for a new law. Subsequently it may enter the wider public debate and sometimes – eventually, in the fullness of time – it may become a new law, guideline or requirement. If the originator was identified then they may be compelled to modify the product or service. Now that’s a great, self-correcting system, surely. After all, that’s what we have been trusting, revising and relying upon for the last 2,000 years at least, so why not just continue as before?

I’m sure you can see already that this largely reactive system (there are exceptions of course, but it’s generally reacting to a ‘hurt’) isn’t going to respond well to lots of small, relatively painless and increasingly speedy innovations. In the time elapsed between innovation and resolution of any hurt (be it physical, emotional or financial pain) there’s an indeterminate number of people out there with a problem of some sort. Or maybe a set of changed behaviours that will not hurt right now but will cause discomfort to future generations. And let’s not forget that this is arguably the greatest period of human change and innovation, ever. I say that with some trepidation, but I’m thinking we have over 6 billion people on the planet now, and even if they aren’t all innovating like crazy, by sheer weight of numbers a heck of a lot of them surely are. And they are increasingly connected in ways that we hadn’t even thought of just 20 years ago. So my contention is that, sure, we have ethics and laws and regulations and governing bodies in place to provide the checks and balances – but what if we just overload those institutions by sheer volume of seemingly innocent yet cumulative change?

Perhaps we already have.