Thank you, Facebook

It's become a ritual that whenever Facebook changes anything, people throw up their arms and quickly update their status that they'll stop using the site. I laugh at the inherent irony of such posts.

Lately, it's been a lot of anti-privacy stuff, and quite predictable impulsive responses result. This makes me laugh, too, because facebook wouldn't be able to share one, single thing about you if you didn't type it in. Now, if FB were a fee-based site, we could complain and ask for changes, but with FB, we are all getting waaaay more than we pay for. (On this topic, watch Danah Boyd talk about it back in March at SXSW, or better still, read her full text. It's a great speech.)

I'm on the record for being a big facebook lover. I love seeing what friends are up to--especially those of you I don't see regularly. I like that FB has effectively disposed of the FW: FW: FW: chain emails. It has largely become the "home page" for my blog reading. I turn to FB when I want a reference or when seeking travel advice. Odds are, you're reading this after linking through my facebook post. 

So, recently, facebook announced something called the Open Graph. I'm no computer programmer, but it seems that FB is opening up our posts for commercial purposes. I'm cool with this. I'm much more comfortable with FB doing this than Google. Mashable lists 5 ways that this will affect e-commerce. I'm cool with all five of those ways. Seems like FB wants to compete with Google and Amazon, and competition is always good for us normal people. And, if all this results in is more advertising aimed at me for the stuff that I want, so be it. I hate shopping. If FB can make shopping easier for me, then I'm all in.

Why we should pay more for gas

Check out the video at the end of this page from Yahoo's Green Blog. In it, several things strike me. 

First, is the bit on hair soaking up oil. I'd heard about the use of hair-in-nylons to clean up oil spills, but the video here includes a very impressive classroom demo. If only for that demo at the end, please watch the video. But that's not why I'm writing about it. The data cited astonish me.

To start with, much of the waste from our cars and other machines find its way to our ground and ground water to the tune of about 1 million gallons of motor oil every day. The contamination of our drinking water will be a growing problem as freshwater resources dwindle as our populations grow. But that's not all: 726 million gallons of oil are spilled in over 1,200 spills annually! That's about 2 million gallons/day. The Exxon Valdez "disaster" released "only" 11 million gallons, but even more than that spills every week?!? It is outrageous that these numbers exist in our normal world.

The timeliness of this post is, of course, due to the Deepwater Horizon explosion. I have always been wary of the honesty and truthfulness of the corporate world and its environmental consciousness. While BP has met and exceeded all safety regulations, clearly this disaster is testament that further regulation is needed. But regulation cannot be the final solution. 

Demand for energy will continue to drive oil companies to the fartherst, coldest and deepest corners of the earth. We, the billions of consumers in this world are responsible for this. We live in the suburbs. We pay for airlines to take us on vacation. We love our stuff made of plastic. We know the repercussions of our lifestyles, yet we don't change.

What you will never see me do is complain that gasoline and airline tickets are too expensive. The only way that we will fly, drive, and air-condition less is if it costs us more. A lot more. I've supported a comprehensive energy tax ever since the idea was brought to my attention by Al Gore in 1992. If everyone, businesses and government included, had to pay for all of the energy we consume--in any form--then we would all consume so much less, and numbers like those above would start decreasing. The truth of it is that our dollars drive companies to build monsters like Deepwater Horizon, coltan mines in central Africa and more and more roads. As long as we buy more and more stuff, there will be more and more Deepwater Horizons. That's the inconvenient truth we must face.

Update 2014. The first link above is gone to cyber-eternity, but go here for similar videos. 

Coffeetalk

For the past few months, I've gathered every other Friday to get some coffee/tea with some friends and their friends. We're a very worldly bunch, hailing from several countries, and most of the participants having either lived abroad or traveled significantly, especially in Africa and Mexico. The conversations often take a turn outside our American borders.We like democracy, we like foreign aid, we like traveling. And we LOVE ideas that cross cultures.

For example, this Friday, our talk was guided by a couple who are fillmmakers from South Africa who are temporarily working in Austin. We learned of South African politics, investment cooperatives, and the lives and dreams of filmmakers. In the end, we were ready to start a film-making coop and brainstorming ways to get people to chip in, $100 or so, and become the funders of independent films on an ongoing basis. It's a novel idea to us, and we're going to pursue the notion seriously--on Saturday, some internet domains were, in fact, registered.

I don't know, we may be just a bunch of dreamers, but we're not the only ones, right? Anyone have some similar ideas out there? Want to join our discussion as it proceeds?