Month: May 2023

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Peace and War, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , ,

Today, along with feeling gratitude for those millions of people over the US’s history who served in the military to defend democratic ideals, I’m feeling troubled that so much of the world still sees war as a way to solve problems.

War only creates problems. It doesn’t solve them. But when someone else starts an aggressive war, are there other choices?

The war in Ukraine has been going on for about 15 months, since Putin’s invasion. Some people say it’s been going on since 2014, when he annexed the Crimea. Putin certainly had other choices–but once he invaded, did Ukraine?

Yesterday, I came across two very different perspectives that both feel to me like they have validity, even though they contradict each other.

First, Marianne Williamson, who has a long history of opposing military intervention and imperialism, sees Russia as the imperialist here, and feels keeping Ukraine from being swallowed is absolutely crucial:

A withdrawal of US support from Ukraine at this point would not lead to peace; it would lead to the most horrifying climax of the war.  Russia would simply deliver its final brutal blow to Ukraine, pummeling it to the point where it would no longer exist as a separate nation…

Regardless how we got here, our only choice at this point is to either support Ukraine or to not. While the United States should do everything possible to support a negotiated settlement, our goal should also be a negotiated settlement in which Ukraine still has a chance to exist.

But she recognizes the need to address the root causes:

The best way to solve conflicts is to prevent them from occurring to begin with, and if I had had the choice, I would have made very different foreign policy decisions related to Russia over the last 40 years. We must set an entirely new and different trajectory of military involvement in the world, one in which we are not the world’s policeman but rather the world’s collaborator in creating a world in which war is no more.

And it’s important to remember those decisions she hints about. I hear so many people express bewilderment that Putin attacked, without a cause that they see and understand. But the reality is that while war is absolutely the wrong way to solve them, Putin does have legitimate reasons for concern, particularly regarding the question of whether Ukraine should join several other former Soviet republics as a NATO member.

Well to the left of Williamson (the most progressive candidate in both the 2020 and 2024 US presidential elections, so far) is Stephen Zunes. Earlier this week, Zunes participated in a team debate at Oxford. On the opposing team was ultra-right-wing former US Ambassador to the UN and National Security Advisor John Bolton. While Bolton’s team went on about the need to defend democracy by force in order to make it clear that aggression has consequences,

Zunes however further cautioned against intervention. “Before we start talking about fighting dictatorships, we should stop propping up dictators”, he advised, highlighting the fact that 57% of the world’s dictatorships receive arms from the US. Instead, he appealed to the success of nonviolent methods.

And in fact, nonviolent methods were very prominent in the Ukrainian early resistance.

Meanwhile, one of the other team members arguing against militarized intervention pointed out that the US’s claim that it’s a democracy is a lot weaker than it was:

Closing the debate, Peter Galbraith argued that we must use the effectiveness test when determining whether to fight for democracy. “Yes, there are times we should fight and we have fought successfully,” he proclaimed, but “the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate why it is not feasible to fight for democracy outside the West.” He criticised the Reagan administration’s embracing of Pinochet, under which Bolton served at the time.

Galbraith further argued that both an independent judiciary and political parties accepting election results are essential features of a successful democracy – neither of which the US possesses. He claimed that the Supreme Court has “become more partisan, more extreme right wing, more an instrument of the Republican Party” since 2000. This is referencing George W Bush’s electoral victory in Florida, where a divisive landmark Supreme Court ruling stopped the recount of votes. If the count hadn’t been stopped, Bush’s opponent Al Gore could potentially have won…

Galbraith concluded: “Rather than looking for authoritarian dragons to slay far from home, America should be fighting to save our democracy at home.”

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Consumer Issues, Entrepreneurship, Ethics: General, General Commentary, Innovation, Technology, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , , ,

Here’s the secret, buried in technobabble within this report written by an engineer at Google: the monopolists have already lost! You don’t have to understand all the jargon to get the point: Today’s chat universe is already out from under the grip of corporate control. And it isn’t going back into the box. The report compares Google with Open AI (a major for-profit competitor and the creator of ChatGPT) and with new open-source chat and AI (artificial intelligence) tools. The report concludes that the open source tools are faster, more nimble, and much faster to deploy and train, despite far less access to resources than projects at companies like Google and Microsoft:

Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13B params  [13 billion parameters] that we struggle with at $10M and 540B. And they are doing so in weeks, not months.

This has enormous ramifications in every aspect of society. Private profit will not be a driver toward centralization of control and limiting who can play. And that will drive enormous innovation, in ways that I at least can’t yet imagine,  let alone describe. Some of it will be monetizable, just as Red Hat monetized an open source operating system (Linux) and Google has monetized its no-charge search engine. But almost none of it will be controllable.

If you’re an investor, know that you can’t buy your way into control–but you can invest in promising developments that will leapfrog to higher good on the basis of freebie systems. And knowing that going in,  you’re much less likely to get burned. You won’t, for instance, make the enormous mistake that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp did when it bought MySpace (at the time, the dominant proprietary social network), spending $580 million on something that became relatively worthless as soon as Facebook began to hit its stride; News Corp sold it just six years later, to Justin Timberlake, for a mere $35 million. That was a loss of more than half a billion dollars.

Let’s look at a few examples of how public intellectual property has impacted us in the past:

Where might it take us next? I’m not a futurist and I won’t get super-specific, but I do see a few general trends likely to arise from this:

  • Just as  TV and Internet have converged, so will AI and 3D printing: a combination that will revolutionize tangible goods  with innovations in design, manufacturing, and localization
  • AI could lead to the next miniaturization revolution, making it easier to do things like holographically project keyboards and maybe even monitors that make it possible to use watch-sized computers and phones a lot more easily
  • With the right protocols in place, AI could do a lot of basic research and interpretation of the data o that students could concentrate on learning concepts and following them down unexpected paths to create new concepts–OR, without those protocols, it could be used to reduce learning to something meaningless
  • In a perfect world–and we can help it become more perfect–AI can help us understand and solve our most pressing problems. It could turn us from linear to circular resource use, where every output becomes not waste, but something a different process could use. It could redistribute food, housing, and shelter (and other resources) so everyone has enough and no one has 5 million times too much, using only natural materials, generating zero waste, using zero net energy, and creating zero pollution.

Regardless of how it turns out, expect any sector you’re in–for example, agriculture, manufacturing, distribution, transportation, services, tech, creative arts, nonprofit, academia, government, military, or whatever–expect your world to turn upside down.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics-International, Green Business, Innovation, localism/locavore, People Helping People, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , ,

A lot of people wonder how to get started with creating a social enterprise: a business that from the beginning is designed to improve lives.

Social-good products like this solar-powered LED lamp make a difference AND a profit
Social-good products like this solar-powered LED lamp make a difference AND a profit

[This post was written a few years ago but left unpublished. I’ve decided it’s still worth sharing because it shows one possible model for starting a new social-benefit company from nothing. I’ve tweaked and updated a few things, but left the chronology and my corespondent’s writing as they were. While I got permission to quote the correspondence, I don’t feel comfortable identifying him or the company.]

Some time back, a Facebook friend in the Philippines asked me for advice on a set of amazing goals. I got his permission to share the relevant parts of our conversation. Since English is not his first language, please cut him some slack on the grammar issues:

I’ve been finished trying to change politics for about 5 years. Focused on poverty and the environment here since then. My company is focused on 3 things right now: 1. Disaster relief during calamities. We earmark 10% to that. 2. Trying to raise a new high school within 5 years. There are two towns nearby that have no high school. Those kids stop their education at grade six and enter poverty. We will need to increase our revenue stream in coming years to do that. 3. Making the entire town solar powered. Not only for the environment, but for the people. You see, the electric bill is actually higher than rent here. For instance, my office manager pays 900 pesos per month for rent and 1600 pesos for electricity. If we could convert much of the country to solar, we could change the entire economy, freeing up much more disposable income for the people. Those are my 3 main focuses. Any ideas to help or partner are always appreciated Shel.

I responded:

Wow, wonderfully ambitious and very people-centered. 

First of all, the key to spreading solar is to eliminate the capital expense up front for those with limited resources. So, just as an example (your numbers might vary), you charge 75% of the customer’s current monthly electric bill, allocate 50% of that 75% toward paying off the solar system, and split the other 50% of the 75% into a school fund and a disaster relief fund, both administered by a trusted outside charity that is scrupulously honest and can’t be believably accused of corruption. Since the Philippines is very sunny, it should be easy to convince business people and homeowners to sign up.  Renters might be harder, since they would be improving someone else’s building and they’d also need permission from the landlord, but if the economic incentive is sufficient, it should still work out ok. To cover the up-front capital costs, you could look to the utility company, private foundations (including those based outside the Philippines but working in-country), and possibly government funding. And remember that solar isn’t just electricity. Solar hot water has a much faster payback and can  be done really cheaply.

Don’t forget that building the buildings is not enough; you also have to fund teachers and staff, textbooks, and other operating costs. Of course, you’ll build green net-zero-energy buildings that are clean and energy self-sufficient—or better still, net-positive energy that feed surplus power back into the system).

Second, I would have better ideas for you if you tell me more about what your company does and give me the URL. If it’s in Tagalog, Google will probably translate, but an English-language page would be better as Google does a very poor job.

And received this reply:

Our company is called <name>. We did obtain our url at <address> but we just have a holding page now under construction. Our company manufactures products that I have designed here in the Philippines. I outsourced the factories…and they will sell mainly as exports to the US.

Im planning on funding the solar equip with company money and writing it all off, so no expenditure to the people. About the High School…yes it must be staffed etc. Luckily, my first cousin is a High School Principal already here. She is ready to take the reins on that project when we become ready.

We are launching our first products now Shel. Mostly through the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog company. Some are launching in October, and others in April 2018. We have some pretty unique, one of a kind products. Our first you can see is a one off, the Recreational Tube in the images. The second phase is a line of innovative wood products…and our 3rd phase comes in 2019. It is a line of coolers and food storage containers that will require capital generated in 2018 for injection molds.

What can you take away from this? Here are five lessons I see—and I bet you can spot a few others:

    1. Think systemically. My friend understood the holistic connection between converting to solar and alleviating poverty–a very important connection when you’re marketing to people at the bottom of the pyramid, in economic terms.
    2. It helps to be very specific when describing a dream. Make it tangible for yourself and others.
    3. Know what key pieces you need to have in place before starting, and which you can fill in later.
    4. Be clear on how to keep capital costs down, especially at first. If you would have to spend huge sums to set up in-house manufacturing, start by contracting it out and avoiding all those capital expenses. Even if you’re a one-person business, there are lots of ways to cut costs. I saw a lot of my competitors in my one-person service business spend lavishly on fancy offices and furniture. I started my business working from home in 1981, and I’m still working from home in 2023–which enabled me to start being profitable at a much lower revenue point.
    5. Think like your target market—and if your market has little or no disposable income, think about ways to make it affordable to them.

What would you add to this list?

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