Guantanamo

This.

Blame game

The financial crisis blame game is picking up steam. Many people blame financial executives, who ran the companies at the center of the crisis.

I will not defend the performance of those managers, many of whom threw prudence aside in the fear of being left behind as competitors grew quicker and took on more sexy risk.

However, I am skeptical of the accusations that these executives are less ethical than a random group of other people. Some observations:

• Receiving performance bonuses is not unethcial, and they are received (happily) by people in many different industries and functions.
• Wanting and accepting high performance bonuses is not unethical, nor is awarding sky-high bonuses to an executive if you believe this is to the best of the firm.
• The crisis is a system crisis, of a scale and complexity that cannot be attributed to one of the component parts of the system. It is more plausible to blame those whose job it was to oversee the system - central banks, regulatory bodies and governments.

End note: No complex economic system has yet gone on a smooth path to bliss. Marxist communism just collapsed and never got up again, Maoist communism killed tens of millions of people with its Great Leap. Capitalism is prone to boom and bust, but it is still the "least bad" alternative.

Friedman says renewables are "the next IT"

New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman just published a book on renewable energy. He talks about it in this podcast interview. If you can spare 10 minutes, it might just make you see things in a new light. It did for me at least.

Will waste be the Sin of our generation?

I'm not a great fan of the concepts of "sin" and "guilt", and yet I've spent some time thinking about possible "moral blind spots" for our generation. In a previous post, I suggested that primate rights might be that one, big blind spot.

I heard another suggestion on one of the Inside Renewable Energy podcasts. Chris Luebkeman thought that in the future we would be amazed that we were actually creating "waste" and consuming non-renewable resources as if they were never ending. A couple of years back I would have scoffed at that thought, I think.

Three things that make me happy

There is a rumor that things will not make you happy, but I now know this to be untrue. I would be less happy without the following three things:

• iPhone
• Katie Melua: Pictures
• Terry Pratchett audiobooks (especially those featuring Sam Vimes)

Holodomor

In 1933, the Soviet Union under Stalin inflicted a famine upon its people - mostly Ukrainians - that killed many millions. Each village got a "quota" of agricultural products they had to deliver to the communist state, the only problem being that the quota was higher than the total production. Then, Soviet soldiers were sent to confiscate all food from the villages. The goal was to enforce the communist plan of taking the land from the farmers and putting it into collectives.

"Holodomor" was 75 years ago, and I've lived half of that time without ever hearing of this particular atrocity. It is quite depressing that there are more crimes against humanity being committed than even an interested person is able to keep up with.

Also depressing is the current propaganda war going on between Russia and Kiev regarding the famine. Kiev is seeking international recognition for the famine as a genocide against the Ukrainian people, which would distance the country from Russia. Moscow responded to the commemoration with rhetoric rather than declarations of sympathy.

For my part, I am just reminded of why I deplore extreme ideologies in general and communism specifically.

Charity money down the drain

Money that are given to a charity go to cover two kinds of costs:

1. The cost of raising the money
   
2. Doing whatever the charity is trying to achieve

The way you give to charity has a big impact on how much is lost in the first category. Responding to a direct mail? You pay not only for the one you got, but for your share of those sent to people who didn't respond. Paying by credit card? VISA just took 3,65% of your gift. Signing up with a representative from the charity stopping you on the street? An hour of his or her salary and/or commission was just deducted from your gift.

Going carbon neutral

My wife and I just purchased carbon quotas (EUA) to cover the carbon emissions from our 2008 consumption and travel. We did this via the Norwegian Government's recently launched Voluntary Carbon Offset Scheme. At their site I just entered our air travel, our electricity consumption, car driving and "other", and then simply hit "purchase quotas" and paid by credit card. This cost NOK 6000+ (approx. US$ 1000), based on a high estimate of our emissions.

The way this EUA works is that large emitters in the EU need to purchase emission quotas to be allowed too emit carbon. The number of quotas is fixed, so that when we buy quotas for 38 tonnes of CO2 and then avoid using them, that is 38 tonnes of CO2 emissions that have to be cut by whichever company would otherwise have bought these quotas.

There is also another scheme called Certified Emissions Reductions (CER), which is administered by the UN and which achieves emissions reductions in developing countries. I must admit I was very unsure about the effectiveness of this program, and rather went for the more expensive EUAs to be certain. Afterwards, I've met a friend who works with CERs at the World Bank, and after interrogating him for a while I was much more reassured that the emissions achieved are real.

Is this a good use of $1000, when the same sum could provide vaccines for hundreds of children or some other positive outcome? I do not think this is the right question to ask. Decent people clean up any mess they make, and now that there is a sure-fire way for anyone to do this we simply have to.

Nevertheless, I've given some thought to the pros and cons. Here is my list:

Cons

• Voluntary reductions may reduce the pressure for politicians to pass the necessary legislation and to reduce the number of available quotas sufficiently
• Those are early days of the quota schemes, so their effectiveness is not conclusively documented

Pros

• Voluntary cuts demonstrate to the politicians the interest for this issue, making them feel safer when they push for e.g. improvements to the CER scheme
  
• If we can get a "snowball effect", then those of us who started early have made a contribution far beyond the actual effect of the quotas we bought

In the end, it is the principle of the thing. If I spill something in a public place or at a friend's home, I clean it up. When I spew 38 tonnes of CO2 into an atmosphere that can't take it, I can't just pretend it didn't happen when there is something I can do about it.

Are you a slaver?

I've often pondered the following question:

Ethical thinking has always been in evolution. People living in the late 19th century looked back with disgust upon their forebears for keeping slaves, but were in turn thought of as oppressors by people living a couple of generations later (for their suppression of womens rights).

In ancient Greece, even the greatest thinkers of all time took slavery for granted. This means that a keen mind is no guarantee that you will realize that you are doing great evil. If that evil is just taken for granted by "everyone", it is likely that you will never stop to question it.

This leads me to the following conclusion: There is no reason at all to assume that we are the first generation ever to have figured out every rights issue. In fact, based on at least 3,000 years of history, the probability is close to 100% that we are "slavers" - i.e. doing great evil without realizing it, just because our ethical thinking has not advanced far enough yet.

This is a shocking line of thought, and it is important that we have a lively debate to try and identify what we might be doing that we will later "regret" (even if from our graves).

I'll throw out a couple of ideas: Could it be the rights of our fellow primates that are our greatest ethical blind spot?

And after that, in maybe 100 years, AI rights?

Feel free to use the comment field for proposing other ideas - I'd love to hear them.

Helping people by doing business

Hot off the press is Business Stripped Bare, where Richard Branson gives a passionate description of how doing business is a good thing. I particularly liked this quote from his friend Job Butcher:

"Entrepreneurs have literally destroyed poverty in the Western world as the rest of the world knows it, and as history knows it. No other social system can compete with the entrepreneurial free market system in terms of productivity, raising standards of living and creating permanent prosperity. Asia has exploded out of poverty in my lifetime thanks to entrepreneurs. Huge chunks of poverty should be taken out of Africa in the next ten years thanks to up-and-coming entrepreneurs. So capitalism actually works. Communism and true socialism are no longer taken seriously because they simply don't work. They actually hurt people. They've kept entire generations in poverty. They are disastrous though well-meaning systems that have ruined hundreds of millions of lives. Yet somehow there are elements of our culture that still associate profit-making with vice."

A perspective well worth keeping in the current times of financial crisis.

Beggars

I hope I am not alone in this: I feel really bad when I pass beggars on the street, and I don't really know what to do. There are a number of different strategies - the Distant Stare, the Friendly Nod and the Lost-In-Though Expression. No matter what I do, I feel like a jerk anyway.

Of course, this means they are good at their job.

Nevertheless, I do think that many if not most of them could use some help. They are people whose aspirations for happiness most likely do not include humiliating themselves on the street.

I believe just tossing them some coins is not really help, and besides the gift would always be better given to Medecins Sans Frontiers in my point of view. The beggars are stuck in their situation, and need to get out of it (if they are willing to, that is). I also assume that for many, some basic human love and affection is in short supply.

Stopping and taking a real interest when time permits might be the Right Thing. I do not know of anyone who has done this, though (except the Salvation Army, and this is kind of their job). Am I a victim of the Mother Theresa bug when I keep pondering this?

A hero

In 2006, Warren Buffet over $30 billion to charity.

In fact, it is not the figure that impresses me the most (even though it is bigger than the GDP of most countries). What I like the most about what Buffet has done is the selflessness of how he did it, and the thought he put into it.

There is a "Buffet Foundation" (which inherited most of his billionaire wife's fortune), but Buffet decided that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation would do a better job. Most people would put the money into something bearing their own name.

The gift consists of 10 million shares in Buffet's company, Berkshire Hathaway. Each year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gets 5% of the shares from the gift (500,000 the first year, 475,000 the next, etc). This is a very well thought out design. It must give many Berkshire Hathaway employees a fantastic sense of purpose in their work. As long as they manage to grow the company at 5%, the size of the annual donation will never fall. The foundation gets a fairly steady stream of income in the form of these shares every year, and can gradually build up its own investment and fund management capabilities to handle this kind of fortune.

Warren Buffet still lives in the house he bought in 1958, which is thought to be worth about $700,000 (less than the one I live in). He says: "There's nothing material I want very much", and receives only a $100,000 salary from Berkshire Hathaway.

He is one of my heroes.

First post - what and why

If you read this, you are among the 1 billion people who live in affluence on this planet. Most of us are at the risk of living our lives to the end without doing enough of the stuff that matters - I know I do. This blog is about things that matter, and about attempts at finding a way to live a good life (without dedicating it to becoming something like Mother Theresa, Paris Hilton or whatever other extreme role models are out there).

The world is really messed up in many ways and places, and in entire countries there are only a handful of people who have the resources and advantages that are available to me (and probably you). This makes me feel that my contribution to the well-being of those people needs to be very substantial. Simply because we are relatively few people with the resources to do anything about the messed-upness all around, and because even if I spend - say - 10% of my time and resources on this, I will still be enormously better off than if I were born in - say - Somalia or Bolivia.

I plan to blog about quite specific thing rather than lofty principles, but here are the simple ideas that will underly the posts:

1. Do no harm. Quite simply: I want to abolish any negative impact I have on other people and on the world I live in. I want to clean up my own mess, I want to be truthful, I want to be always respectful, and so on. Since I am not the Dalai Lama, I will never even get close. But it will be OK as long as I really tried.
2. Do some good: I have to find some contribution I can make that fits where I am in life. Right now, I have so little time that it is easier for me to contribute money than anything else. Other people have more time (which may sometimes be more rewarding to give, too).
   
3. Look for happiness: Few teams are stronger that the groups of four US Navy Seals who are world class professionals who trust each other with their lives on a routine basis. A very important basis of their team work is, however, each team member's responsibility for looking after themselves. If you don't, then you burden the team. This is a good rationale for looking out for your own happiness: Even if being a good human being means caring for the sum of the happiness of all humanity, then each of us still needs to take responsibility for our own happiness. I like to hold on to this thought when I drink beer and play poker with friends.

Finally, I think it is really hard to write anything on these subjects without coming across as pompous and pontificating. So I probably will at times. Feel free to let me know.