Only slightly bent

As another year is soon coming to a close, it’s again a good time to take stock of the year that has passed. I dug through my photo archives to find a dozen representative photos from 2006 and thought I’d share them with a few thoughts, comments and memories from the past year. You can click on [most of] the thumbnails to view the full photo (only the February and November photos don’t have a bigger version due to their extremely non-artistic subject).

January got off to a really good start – mostly because it began in another country where it was warm & sunny and all that Finland wasn’t at the time. Our first vacation in Morocco was a success by all standards; the biggest surprise was the wonderful food we ate there – I had not expected the trip to be much of a culinary experience but it also turned out to be that.

Unfortunately the rest of the month didn’t go in too sunny moods and not just because by the time we got back to Finland, real winter had descended upon us.

Talking about real winter – it is a well-known but unfortunate fact that it isn’t until February that Finland hits the temperature lows of the winter. Last February experienced some cold spells, with this photo of a thermometer showing an appreciable 42C difference between the inside and outside temperatures.

However, -20C is by no means unusual even in the south – it isn’t until the temperature drops to -30C or so that we start experiencing some noticeable problems. Somehow our pets think that winter is over in February and start waking up from hibernation in February; little do they know it’s still months til the summer, but it’s nice to see them up & about anyway.

With the sun starting to re-emerge in March, there was a period with some awesome winter weather and a feeling of early spring in the air. But such moments are still usually illusions – just when the sun has melted away an inch of snow during the day, the next day there’s a snowstorm bringing a foot more.

Nevertheless, at the end of March I finally invested in a long-overdue thing: a new bike. Bikes are by far the nicest way to get around in the summer, so with my 15-years old bike starting to resemble a pile of semi-moving garbage with questionable stopping abilities it was about time.

As early as late April, we got a preview of summer. With temperatures approaching +20C, our balcony experienced perfect t-shirt & shorts-weather. Unfortunately the “heat wave” was short-lived and it was another 6 weeks or so before the summer really started.

In April we also started our small interior renovation project by painting one bedroom wall mauve. This project would continue on & off for some 6 months longer.

In May, we got a chance to visit Paris. Of the cities I’ve only visited (i.e. not lived in), Paris was one of the few places where I immediately felt that I need to go back to someday not too much into the future. While I couldn’t really understand the language, the people were anything but rude and the city really felt – and tasted – wonderful. Sarita, rather fluent with the language, also helped with the acclimatization.

In Finland, the biggest story was the arson of the VR storehouses next to the railway station. With the whole place already earmarked for demolition, I somehow failed to understand the massive public uproar that this caused. (Not that arson is ever acceptable.)

Summer enters the country in June, though the vacation period doesn’t start until July. Still, as the sun is shining for most of the day, opportunities for short excursions into the nature and the coastline bring welcome variety to the daily routines.

Something that I always find ironic is that exercise and enjoying nature is easier and more versatile in cities than in rural areas. At least Helsinki offers much more of an exercise and outdoors paradise than would having a house in the countryside; natural stuff like cliffs, forests, beaches, rivers and the sea are all right there nearby, as close as manmade stuff like paved roads for rollerskating, pools for swimming all year round, tennis courts, golf courses and so on. People who think our small capital is a concrete hell are so wrong.

July is the vacation month of the entire country and things seemingly shut down for the month of July. One thing I (re)discovered last summer was that normally decent restaurants should be avoided as their normal chefs and other staff are most likely off enjoying the summer. What this brings is sub-standard service and at best mediocre food to many of the traditionally good places, which is a shame. Some really good places have the sense to close for July, though it’s a difficult decision with many tourists being in the country in the summer also.

One of the best memories from August was a daytrip to Porvoo with some of our friends; this quaint small town half an hour east of Helsinki makes for a perfect summer daytrip. The old town has some beautiful buildings and excellent restaurants, plus a lot of charming small boutiques and stores. It’s become a tradition for us to visit it at least once or twice every summer.

By the beginning of August, most of our interior remodeling was finished also – we installed heat treated beech hardwood floors and some tiling for the hallway; base boards turned out to be the biggest headache of the entire project, but in the end we were both very happy with the end result.

September was still, quite unusually, what could be called a summer month. Daytime temperatures reached t-shirt levels even in Finland. At the end of September, I got the rare opportunity to visit home for a few days – Boston, that is. While it was a business trip, there was some time to meet friends and visit all the dear and great places of that wonderful city. Every now and then I think we should move back there for good, but let’s see about that..

October began nicely with a quick business trip to NYC; a nice enough city to visit, but not a place where I’d want to live for good. When back home, it was time for to get closure on a project that had lasted most of my adult life – I finished my MSc studies at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki. It still hasn’t quite sunk in that I’m done with the studies. And the vast amounts of free time that finishing the project was supposed to free up haven’t really been all that evident – maybe next year.

The partying for the abovementioned happening was left to November, with some 30 friends and family coming over. I was particularly impressed with Rowena flying in from London (thanks for that!), which was great. The party, though lasting past 1am, went very peacefully what comes to Finnish parties – only moderate amounts of strawberry margarita were consumed and pretty much everyone (I hope) was happy playing boardgames we forced them to.. Kakkukeisari again proved to be a reliable supplier of excellent cakes. Them along with a bunch of self-made stuff hopefully left no one hungry.

In November I also got to do something for the first time in many, many years – building a new computer component by component. Now that’s always a fun (though expensive) thing to do, especially with some good stuff out there this year like the Intel Core 2 processors. At least none of my computer-related projects will be hardware-limited (like was the case before) for some years to come.



Like the Baltic Sea in the photo here, many things refused to freeze in December. This was of course aided by the unusually warm and wet weather – it looks like the winters are moving “forward” with the real winter not beginning until in January or so. December is always the time for wrapping up all the activities of one year and trying to prepare for the next one. While the winter is still for the most part ahead of us, things start in a sense going downhill in the beginning of the year, somehow accelerating towards summer with the increasing daylight hours.

Apologies in advance for the long post, but with a holiday coming up most of you should have the time to read a bit more

My latest finished book is “Plan B 2.0″ by Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute. Non-fiction books are always a bit difficult to review as the reviews tend to become summaries; this is no exception. In this case a simple “Read it!” would be quite sufficient as a review and a summary is impossible, but some points are worth raising anyway.

The book is divided into three main parts; the first goes into some depth on all the burning issues facing mankind and the planet – while the climate change obviously plays a major role here, we’ve got a host of other issues to deal with also. The second part focuses on outlining the measures – and costs – needed to reverse the harmful trends on all the fronts. At first “Plan B 2.0″ seems to have a lot in common with Jared Diamond’s Collapse, but by reading on it goes in a way further than Collapse did; Collapse explained the situation of several past and present civilizations in quite some detail and got us to acknowledge that we are facing a very real possibility of a societal collapse. Plan B 2.0 provides a much shorter glimpse into that territory but instead goes further and into some detail on how to fix things, complete with budgets, change proposals and detailed reasoning.

While I would love to summarize everything that’s in there, the text is already quite condensed and I’ll have to bring out just a few points from here & there.

Part I: Civilization in trouble

As already mentioned, part I shares a lot of the same topics as Collapse did – however it only focuses on issues that we currently are facing and skips detailed handling of past civilizations. The issues discussed are life beyond peak oil, water shortages, rising temperatures & sea levels, shrinking forests, soil loss, collapsing fisheries and a lot more. One of the interesting discussed topics is the fact that soon, with the rising demand of biofuels, food and fuel production will be competing for the same resources. It’ll come with a whole new set of ethical issues – should a producer produce food for the people or fuel for the cars?

Artificially cheap fuel has created lots of bizarre situations and setups – things that will inevitably unravel with the realization of peak oil, and that unraveling will not be pretty. For us in “rich” but northern countries, it’ll be the end of fresh fruit airlifted from halfway around the world. For others, though, the problems will be more fundamental. Like for countries like Egypt; they currently import 40% of their grain supply.

The unsustainable state of farming in many countries is also brought up – water tables are falling in many countries and the crop yields are rising only due to water mining; essentially, drawing unsustainable amounts of water. Not only will it eventually lead to collapse, the recovery may be very slow indeed due to soil salination. And the scale of the problem? Countries overpumping their aquifers in 2005 had a combined population of over 3 billion, half the worlds population. Artificially and temporarily rising yields by mining water essentially creates a food bubble economy. And bubbles tend to burst.

Some people often say that rising temperatures will be good for the crops with rising yields – only it won’t. The majority of the worlds crops are quite specific in the temperatures they thrive at, and a “small” increase of 1 degree Celsius in temperature has the effect of decreasing the yields by 10-20%.

Part II: The Response – Plan B

With the list of imminent crisis seemingly unsurmountable, what can be done? A lot, in fact. But only by action – a discouraged attitude is something that we must avoid. Incredible changes can be made at “wartime” speeds as witnessed by the rapid change of industrial production in US during WW II – one interesting proposal is to retool some of the struggling US car manufacturing facilities to produce wind turbines in order to rapidly raise production capacity for wind power. Another interesting suggestion was that as wind power is essentially free once the initial investment has been made, the off-peak hours of wind-generated electricity could be used to generate hydrogen.

When you add the fact that farmers can, with no investment from their part, earn $3,000 – $5,000 per year in royalties from utility companies from a single large wind turbine (the total electricity production from a single turbine is worth $100,000 per year with current prices), the case for wind power becomes very strong indeed. Compare this to the $120 a year that the same amount of land would produce with, say, corn, and you’re talking of a potentially major drift from the “not in my backyard” to “put it in my backyard” approach to wind power. Within a matter of years, thousands of farmers could be earning more from electricity sales than from cattle or crop sales. While energy planning is just a small part of the whole equation, Brown makes a convincing case for wind power as well as other renewable energy sources.

Another topic that I’m highly interested in is city planning – cars are simply not an option in future cities. With traffic jams polluting the air and clogging up most major cities on a daily basis, city planning needs to focus on optimizing mobility of people instead of planning for more roads. This calls for increased usage of bicycles and mass transportation. Not only is biking more environmentally friendly, it’s a remarkably efficient mode of transportation and also fights obesity which is a major problem in many western countries. And it, along with efficient mass transportation, can dramatically reduce the need for cars, the source of much of the unhealthiness of the cities:

Another cost of cities that are devoted to cars is a psychological one, a deprivation of contact with the natural world – an “asphalt complex”. There is a growing body of evidence that there is an innate human need for contact with nature. Both ecologists and psychologists have been aware of this for some time. Ecologists, led by Harvard University biologist E.O. Wilson, have formulated the “biophilia hypothesis”, which argues that those who are deprived of contact with nature suffer psychologically and that this deprivation leads to a measurable decline in well-being.

Meanwhile psychologists have coined their own term – ecopsychology – in which they make the same argument. Theodore Roszak, a leader in this field, cites a study that documents humans’ dependence on nature by looking at the rate of recovery of patients in a hospital in Pennsylvania. Those whose rooms overlooked gardens with grass, trees, flowers and birds recovered from illness more quickly than those who were in rooms overlooking the parking lots.

In addition to making cities more livable places, food production needs to move closer to the cities, up to the point of utilizing rooftops for tiny-scale farming. The logistics of many cities are incredible – Los Angeles gets its water from almost a thousand kilometers way from the Colorado river and Beijing is planning on drawing water from the Yangtze river, nearly 1,500 kilometers away.

Part III: An Exciting New Option

So what do we need to do and how much would fixing the problems cost? A lot, but surprisingly little. One of the biggest problems with the current economical structure is the lack of externalities, particularly the ecological cost of doing business. Encouragingly, some in the “bad” industries also realize the problems as the following quote from VP of Exxon indicates:

Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth.

So what does the budget look like? Below is an overview table (much more details in the book):

With billions flying here and there, it’s good to find something to compare the costs to. $161 billion may sound like a lot of money, but in the scope of world economics, it’s peanuts. The US wars in Iraq and Afganistan is costing the country in $170 billion – this year alone. Compare this to the Plan B budget and what do you get? Then compare the benefits that would come from “Plan B” being implemented (i.e. saving the planet) and the “benefits” that we get out of the Iraq war.

In addition to, for example, shifting money from the world military budgets to environmental needs, we need to fix the global economic model to make it tell the ecological truth. We need to shift taxes (which can be an extremely powerful force) from income taxes to raising levies on environmentally destructive activities. For example, “honest” calculation of the true cost of goods would put gas prices at about $11 per gallon or €2.4 per liter – “only” doubling the gas price in Finland.

And it’s not just the environmentally oriented people who think tax shifting is urgently needed:

Some 2,500 economists, including eight Nobel Prize winners
in economics, have endorsed the concept of tax shifts. Harvard
economics professor N. Gregory Mankiw wrote in Fortune
magazine: “Cutting income taxes while increasing gasoline
taxes would lead to more rapid economic growth, less traffic
congestion, safer roads, and reduced risk of global warming—
all without jeopardizing long-term fiscal solvency. This may be
the closest thing to a free lunch that economics has to offer.”

Conclusion?

With the numbers and the evidence out there, one can only come to the conclusion that people are simply not aware of the big picture and that’s why nothing is being done. That, however, is an unacceptable excuse and the situation needs to be fixed.

Seriously.

If you care about our planet at all, you need to read this book to know where we stand – and take in not only the signs of doom and collapse, but also the very real possibility of fixing things if we just did something about them. Plan B 2.0 completely debunks the myth that saving the planet would somehow be too expensive, lead to an economic disaster or anything of the sorts; quite the contrary, that’ll happen if we don’t implement this plan.

Plan B 2.0 is easily one of the most important books of our time. It’s relatively short so even people pressed with time should be able to digest it; yet it’s thorough and provides plenty of background & backup material for those who want that; it also offers many practical things everyone can do to help the plan being implemented. My opinion of it can indeed be summarized by a simple “read it”.

NOTE: If you can’t find the book from your local bookstore, I’ll be happy to borrow it. What’s more, the entire book is also available online. There are also bulk discounts available if you buy multiple copies from their site.

The Finnish Globalization Report – the other shoe drops

The Part II of the Finnish Globalization Report titled “Suomen vastaus globalisaation haasteeseen”, roughly translated as “Finland’s answer to the challenge of globalization”, was published some days ago (and is downloadable here). In theory, it’s an interesting read that raises some important questions.

And some eyebrows. It’s already been criticized in particular due to its workforce-related recommendations, but I found a couple of other things puzzling, like how they’ve managed to capture some trends so vividly and yet utterly fail to add one plus one. Just a couple of examples below:

• On energy consumption, they rely blindly on the IEA prediction of rising energy demands and how they are met. What about conservation of energy? That would have the very real possibility of lowering energy demand and still be profitable for all parties involved. Similarly, they seem to take for granted the IEA assumption that most sources of new primary energy will be outside the OECD – there’s huge untapped potential in increasing local wind energy production and other renewable energy sources, so I really fail to see how they can just acquiesce to increasing dependence on foreign countries for primary energy. They do seem to hint that it might “be good to do something about it” but that’s hardly a roadmap to success.

• They cite rising energy costs as one big concern, which is right on the mark. Yet at the same time, the report concludes that production of goods will become even further decentralized and globally dispersed. They seem to completely miss the obvious fact that steeply rising energy costs – especially fossil fuel costs – will also inevitably decrease globalization and geographic dispersion and distance of production from consumption. The same applies to food production – the report takes for granted that foreign competition with foodstuff will continue to increase.

All in all the report was quite a disappointment and didn’t really provide all that much new information.

Goodbye Thunderbird, Hello Google Reader? Bloglines? Or what?

A couple of weeks ago, my trusty Thunderbird decided that it didn’t want to update my RSS feeds anymore. No matter what I did, it just didn’t work – restarting didn’t help, creating a new account didn’t help. I decided against a reinstall because that would likely just buy me some time until it breaks again.

Who knows what made it break, but that forced me to move to an online feeds service which is likely a better option in the long term anyway. But which one? So far I’ve tried Bloglines & Google Reader, the latter of which I’m using now. On Google Reader, I like the Google homepage integration possiblity, the starring possiblity and the efficient checking of new feed items (much better than that of Bloglines). One thing I already found I am missing from the online readers; search. I mean even Google Reader does not have a search capability. What’s that all about?!

The transfer of feeds also created the opportunity to clean them up. With lots of blogs no longer being updated (6 months without an update means it’s dead in my books), some no longer interesting etc, I went from 200+ feeds to “only” 120 feeds, company-internal stuff excluded.

Anyhow, any suggestions on what would be the “best” reader are still most welcome.

Pricing goods or services is an interesting subject. For one, it is often painful for both the companies doing it and the customers of the companies. Of course the party charging something is often the happier one of the two whereas the paying party is often substantially less happy, but there are hurdles for both. From noticing how a piece of clothing you just bought was 50% off the following week to dealing with arbitrary “discounts” on cars and other big items, there are many things to be annoyed with in pricing.

To mention just a couple of the numerous annoying examples:

• One of the most blatant examples of misleading consumers is in grocery packaging. Larger packages tend to hint at a less expensive price per unit than bigger packages, right? This is how, according to all logic, it’s supposed to work anyway with less packing materials spent and all that. But next time you’re at a grocery store, check out the prices of some goods. Like the examples below; both identical products with the only difference being the size of the package.

  Orange juice; the larger carton of 1.5 liters is more expensive per liter than the one-liter carton. Not by much, but still.

  

  With eggs there’s a more marked difference the wrong way; the larger package is over 25% more expensive per kilo than the smaller package.

  

  So by saving the store money by buying in bigger packages (and, thus, being more ecological too), the consumer is punished with per-unit price hikes? Nice. Not.

• One of the most persistently user-unfriendly models is pricing for mobile data. I think it can, by now, be assumed that the operators do want people to use data services. That’s what they’ve been saying a long time now anyway. We finally have flat-rate plans for mobile data in Finland, too, but they are not always the cheapest option – to figure out what is, you’re going to have to know how much data you use per month. So how much data do you use? If you’re anywhere near a normal person, you don’t know and you don’t care. And you shouldn’t. The value is not in the data amount, it’s in the service.

   
  So the question really is: why can’t operators automatically select for you, on a month-to-month basis, the plan that minimizes your data costs? Heck, I’m sure they could even charge €1 or €2 monthly for the service. Not to mention it’d be good customer service.

• Banks are great at coming up with “self-service fees”. I fail to see why exactly we the customers would have to pay for doing something ourselves. Sure the new systems like web banking platforms need computers and software and all that (a part I know all too well) but one of the major reason they are trying to move everything to self-service is to achieve cost-savings by firing – oh, excuse me, “letting go”, as if they were being held hostage by their employers and releasing them was somehow positive – the people. Some time ago I talked to a bank teller who revealed that her job description at the moment included instructing people to use the automated bill payment services, knowing fully well that this will eventually make her job redundant. Kind of like software engineers being told to train their outsourced replacement before being fired – not exactly an uplifting task to do.

Oh, right, the point of all this? I say if customers are made to pay extra for saving a company some money it should at least be honestly stated as to what’s going on. Like maybe with a sign saying “Help us make even more revenue by buying this more expensive option!” instead of trying to dupe the consumers into paying extra.

And the funny/ironic/sad thing about all this is that most of the time when a company has decided to do “the right thing”, it has turned out to be a financial success. (Just read the book on Patagonia for many good examples).

It’s been unseasonably warm in Finland for the past couple of weeks. As weird as it sounds, that’s not always a good thing even up north in Finland.

No, not quite this warm. Anyhow, this here is what December ideally is like. I could be enjoying beaches, surfing & sun in the day and warm, soft & pleasant evenings.

.. if I lived somewhere else, that is. Or at least if I were visiting somewhere else. Like last year.

On the other hand, winter in Finland can also look and feel quite nice.

Like this one here from 2004. Not too bad, right? One could even imagine enjoying this kind of a scenery for a while.

Unfortunately, the winter wonderland of this northern country is not quite up to snuff all the time. Like, for example, when it’s “unseasonably warm”. Like this winter.

So instead of the above two alternatives, this is what we get this time around. In case you can’t really see anything in the photo, it’s because it’s pretty much always dark. And rainy.

I’m in such a wrong country right now.

What makes people miss clear signals of danger or imminent disaster? Companies have for a while now been very keen to learn to detect and act on weak signals, but forget the weak signals for the moment. I’m talking about reacting to signals that are so in-your-face that you’d think even idiots couldn’t miss them. And still it seems to happen, on all scales.

“Small”-scale signal blindness in Egypt..

In Egypt, a “small-scale” incident took place early this year. Listing and having fire onboard a ship are right up there on the list of the worst things to happen on a ship. For one, when a fire breaks out and you can’t immediately put it out, what do you do? You try to contain it. You call for help. You prepare to evacuate the ship if needed. If you can still move, you move towards the nearest harbor. And you do all of these steps.

And what happened in Egypt? The ship Al-Salaam Boccaccio 98 caught fire just 20 miles off the coast of Saudi Arabia, its departure point. The only acceptable course of action is mentioned above: call for help, plan to evacuate, go back to shore. Yet, for some unfathomable reason, the crew makes the decision to push for Egypt’s shores, over a 100 miles away. It continues its journey for hours. No distress call, no calls for help. Supposedly they thought the fire was contained, but that’s the thing with fires – they rarely play nice. So having a list and a fire to worry about, what do they do? Nothing. They would’ve had HOURS to evacuate the ship, call for help, head for shore – nothing. The result? Over 700 dead.

They say hindsight is always 20-20 and it’s probably true here, too. But when there’s potentially big trouble, one would hope people erred on the side of caution.

.. and large-scale denial globally

Erring on the side of caution would certainly be a good thing to do when it comes to experimenting with the health of the only planet we can survive on. The planet essentially also has a fire on board. We know what caused it (we did), we know how to put it out, we know what’ll happen if we don’t and we know that by doing nothing, most on board will perish before we reach the other shore – and yet we still go full steam forward. And I’m not talking about just climate change here.

I’m only like one third of a way through my current to-read book, Lester R. Brown’s “Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a planet under stress and a civilization in trouble“, but I can wholeheartedly already recommend it. I’ll get to it in more detail later with a real review, but it – again – hightlights how human civilization is ignoring all-too-clear signs of the planet being in dire trouble. It’s like we just beg for the inevitable overshoot-and-decline scenario to become an overshoot-and-collapse-scenario instead.

I would really love to see people – especially politicians but really all people – read through just two books for starters. First Collapse and then this one. That ought to shake away some of the complacency that still seems to hold here. The world has urgent issues humanity must deal with and they are not SEPs (Somebody Else’s Problems).