Ed Dowding

How Different Groups Spend Their Day – Interactive Graphic – NYTimes.com.

Source: http://blog.alexkelleher.com/2009/08/10/an-average-day/

I’ve just been revising a contract we use for websites we build and so having to deal with one of my pet annoyances. I don’t like contracts. They’re boring, stop me doing the fun stuff of work, and seem to spend more time building walls than bridges. The point is that you’re working together, surely?

Of course I know why we have contracts. It’s for when it something goes wrong, or there’s something new, or one party gets over-excited and asks for more than was understood at the beginning, and so on.

But they always seem to be written in such a way that doesn’t embrace and work with the fact that you’re working together for mutual benefit. There may be differences along the way, but the key point is that you’re both going to be better of working together.

(I suspect mankind may be in a more civil position had Darwin highlighted symbiosis and cooperation as equally vital aspects of life, and given us a working vocabulary with which to discuss and use the concepts, as well as bequeathing us the contagious, yet brutal, meme of “survival of the fittest”.)

Maybe I’m just contractophobic, and others have a far more civil and welcoming approach to contracts, but I’d like a contract which:

• Makes it clear we’re starting from a position of trust
• Deliberate does not try to pre-empt all eventualities (and is therefore shorter)
• Provides a framework for getting things back on track
• Provides a framework for wrapping things up as amicably as possible, should it come to that stage
• Is written in clear, straightforward, English of largely Anglo-Saxon (not Latin) origin
• Uses a lexicon of cooperation and advancement in place of limitations and thresholds

I’ll drop the Creative Commons folk a line to see if they have any ideas. Meantime, please comment!

In the 1970s, India dramatically increased food production, finally allowing this giant country to feed itself. But government efforts to continue that miracle by encouraging farmers to use fertilizers have backfired, forcing the country to expand its reliance on imported food.

India has been providing farmers with heavily subsidized fertilizer for more than three decades. The overuse of one type—urea—is so degrading the soil that yields on some crops are falling and import levels are rising. So are food prices, which jumped 19% last year. The country now produces less rice per hectare than its far poorer neighbors: Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

…

“The soil health is deteriorating, but we don’t know how to make it better,” he says. “As the fertility of the soil is declining, more fertilizer is required.”

Increased demand and the soaring price of hydrocarbons, the main ingredient of many fertilizers, have taken India’s annual subsidy bill to more than $20 billion last year, from about $640 million in 1976.

Source WSJ India, via ViewsFlow

“Hubris” is pretty much the dominant theme of the last 50 years, isn’t it? No wonder the Greeks considered it to be the gravest crime there could be.

‘How Bad For The Environment Can Throwing Away One Plastic Bottle Be?’ 30 Million People Wonder

All agreed that disposing of what would eventually amount to 50 tons of thermoplastic polymer resin wasn’t the end of the world.

“It’s not like I don’t care, because I do, and most of the time I don’t even buy bottled water,” thought Missouri school teacher Heather Delamere, the 450,000th caring and progressive individual to have done so that morning, and the 850,000th to have purchased the environmentally damaging vessel due to being thirsty, in a huge rush, and away from home. “It’s really not worth beating myself up over.”

“What’s one little bottle in the grand scheme of things, you know?” added each and every single one of them.

Source: The Onion, again

In other news, please please please please don’t buy or drink commercial bottled water. It’s such a patently ridiculous idea, which consumes so many resources so utterly unnecessarily to deliver something which is cheaply and abundantly available that it brands anyone who drinks it as a naive idiot. Like driving your children half a mile to school in a Hummer, it’s only really justifiable if you’re in an desert war-zone.

And please don’t come back with that “but they give their profits to charity” plea. Unless of course you have £100,000 and would like to invest in my ethical landmine company? We’re going to change the dirty world of weapons by working at it from within. Biodegradable plastics which only start decomposing once the product has been used, and fair-trade, recycled explosives! (We’re providing as many as TEN jobs for Congolese amputees, just another of the ways we’re changing this dirty business! Even our workforce of amputee employees will be sustainable!)