• Survival Planning

    by  • April 20, 2008 • 0 Comments

    Rant excerpted from an email. The problems that I’ve seen in survival planning at a community level come from trying to streamline costs by creating implicit bureaucratic systems of control. We’ll have a water team, that takes money from a budget, and Does Water. Farming team that Does Farming and so on. But, in practice [...]

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    The systemic risks model for survival

    by  • April 20, 2008 • 0 Comments

    I’ve been working towards a simple model of survival for some time. The Hexayurt Infrastructure Package is based around a “substitution” model: * instead of your electric cooker, a wood gasification stove * instead of your toilet and the sewage plant, a composting toilet and so on. The problem with this model is that it [...]

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    The five virtues of a viable solution

    by  • April 20, 2008 • 0 Comments

    * simple – easy to understand and to evaluate * easy – can be done without extensive preparation or heavy engineering * clean – does not produce unwanted side effects * cheap – or raising the money to do it will be harder than doing it * smart – should use deep insight into the [...]

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    The dangers of subverting the free press

    by  • April 20, 2008 • 0 Comments

    The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation. These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated. Internal [...]

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    How Ikea designs products

    by  • April 20, 2008 • 0 Comments

    “When we decide about a product, we always start with the price,” Deboehmler said. “Then, what is the consumer need?” For example, the product designers might begin thinking about designing a new flat-screen-television stand. Assuming that there’s evidence such a product is needed–like a trend of many people buying flat-screen TVs–Ikea will set out to [...]

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    Bothering Barnett on Biofuels

    by  • April 18, 2008 • 0 Comments

    Commenting on http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/2008/04/robbing_peters_meal_to_gas_pau.html I agree with you completely on hunger from biofuels. That’s been expected for a while. I wrote a paper predicting this scenario in 2003 and I was far, far from the first. Worse, biofuels are basically useless in the big picture unless you move to algae as a feedstock. Consider: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/311/5760/435 Which [...]

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