Like the three dollar Starbucks caffè latte of yore, the three dollar reusable grocery bag has taken the nation by storm. In the now, to be hip is to be eco-chic. Anya Hindmarch proved that in late 2007 when her "I'm Not a Plastic Bag" tote became an instant hit, despite being nothing more than an ordinary canvas tote bag with the aforementioned phrase emblazoned on the side.

Thus, in a bid to stay on the cutting edge of eco-chicness, a number of organizations have deployed incentives designed to encourage consumers to shy away from their single-use grocery bags and, instead, opt for the more environmentally conscious reusable alternative. Whole Foods, for one, decided to stop providing its customers plastic bags. Other chains, such as Swedish housewares retailer IKEA, have opted to charge customers a nickel for each single-use bag at checkout.

Let me begin by making a few disclosures. First, I love Whole Foods. I usually make at least one trip a week to my local Whole Foods Market location. Second, I love IKEA. Ingvar Kamprad should receive an award for being such a brilliant and wonderful person. Third, I believe the world would be a more sustainable — albeit only very slightly more sustainable — if shoppers brought their own reusable grocery bags to the store.

Yet, I would characterize the efforts of Whole Foods and IKEA as feeble and pointless, so far as weaning consumers off plastic bags goes.

Whole Foods accomplishes virtually nothing by only eliminating plastic bags. Sure, paper bags are recyclable. Paper bags also require far more energy to manufacture than paper bags. Therefore, in terms of environmental impact, means paper bags begin life having already done more to kill polar bears than their plastic brethren. Further, just because paper bags can be recycled does not mean customers will actually recycle them.

Without a doubt, a Whole Foods shopper probably has a higher propensity to recycle than John Q. Consumer, but keeping single-use paper bags on offer still puts thousands of bags in landfills.

If, on the other hand, Whole Foods took a European approach, and offered customers no complementary bags whatsoever, I have no doubt everyone would migrate very quickly to reusable bags. What's more, Whole Foods would probably make a killing on its line of high-margin reusable grocery bags, made from recycled plastics, naturally.

IKEA does no better with its nickel-a-bag initiative. Even the prototypical cash-strapped twenty-something shopping for an inexpensive set of flatware probably won't mind parting with a nickel or two to carry her assemble-yourself BENNO CD tower to the car. A nickel is not enough motivation.

Charge $5, on the other hand, and I suspect far fewer people will buy and use one of IKEA's much-promoted reusable blue bags.

People respond to incentives. But some incentives encourage more of a response than others.

Every so often, I receive an invitation to join some Facebook group with a title like, "I dropped my phone in the toilet and I need your numbers!" Clearly, a demand exists for technologies that backup the contents of a phone to, say, a computer. Much to many peoples' surprise, a technology for doing just that exists, and has existed for almost seven years. Yet, few people realize this and even of those in-the-know, few people backup their phones. I blame poor human interface design.

Just about every phone sold in the last two years has a Bluetooth radio. This Bluetooth technology enables devices — such as a computer and a cell phone — within 30 feet of one another to talk, wirelessly. Thus, just about everyone who has purchased a cell phone in the last two years could backup their phone — names, addresses and phone numbers included — to ensure they needn't reenter their hundred zillion contacts using one of those painfully cramped numeric keypads.

But almost no one does. And, for the longest time, I could not figure out why. In the last five years I have gone through five cell phones. (Four of which have been iPhones. Apple keeps giving me duds, though they have replaced them all free of charge.) With each of those five phones I have never spent more than five minutes loading all my contact data onto the device, thanks to Bluetooth.

It occurred to me, however, as I restored my latest replacement iPhone yesterday afternoon, how much easier it is to load contact information onto the iPhone, and how much more difficult it was for me to coerce my old Nokia to do the same.

At that point I realized it all comes down to human interface design. First and foremost, most PC manufacturers do not include a Bluetooth radio in the computer by default. Thus, for the vast majority of the Windows-using world, it's technically impossible to backup its phones via Bluetooth!

This is a tremendous oversight. Many, many people want to backup their cell phone. Many, many people also own cell phones with a Bluetooth radio. Finally, a Bluetooth radio costs a computer manufacturer a whopping two dollars. That two dollar addition can make a person's computer a whole lot more useful.

Of course, the problems don't end there. On the Windows side, most cell phone manufacturers use proprietary software to sync their phones with users' computers. This proprietary software may, or may not, be included in the box with the cell phone. Either way, the user has to actively install the software from a mysterious CD in the box with his or her cell phone, or go online, hunt down and install a software package.

And, inevitably, those software packages do not make it easy for the phone and the computer to speak with one another.

On the Mac, it's a little easier. First and foremost, just about every Mac sold in the last four years comes with Bluetooth. Most cell phones also communicate with Apple's iSync software out of the box, without any additional drivers or downloads. But even on the Mac, for the mythical "average" computer user, setting up the sync is complicated. One has to first pair the phone, which, depending on the cell phone can be tricky, and then setup iSync, a program Apple says little about, thus reducing the chances the "average" user knows about it.

The only phone I know of that makes backup truly painless is, of course, the iPhone. I plug it in, iTunes opens and, voilà, synchronization.

But that begs the question, why doesn't everyone make syncing so simple?

If the technology companies decided to worked together, they could easily come up with some standard protocol for making cell phone sync painless.

Computer manufacturers could include a Bluetooth radio with every computer sold, and Microsoft and Apple could develop some kind of system, integrated with the operating system, that "listens" for nearby cell phones with Bluetooth. Then, when a user powers on their cell phone in proximity to their computer, it could prompt the user to setup sync.

There are some rather obvious problems with such a simple solution — I can easily see myself sitting in an airport terminal and going insane as hundreds of prompts to "Sync with Bob Smith's Cell Phone?" crowd my screen. Perhaps cell phone manufacturers could include a prominent "Sync" button either in the phone's interface, or on the phone itself to put the phone in its discoverable mode.

Collectively, people waste thousands of hours reentering millions of phone numbers, simply because technology companies cannot make phone sync simple. At this point, I say everyone should just buy an iPhone. Which is a great reason for everyone else to think about making the synchronization system simpler. As for the toilets, waterproof phones would just be too bulky and clumsy.

For the last year or so, I have made a concerted effort to buy goods produced in the "industrialized world" whenever possible. My logic being that a scarf woven in Scotland of Scottish wool, while warm, soft and generally wonderful, also reduces my impact on the lives of others. Scotland, after all, has a well-developed, regulated economy that tries its best to ensure workers receive adequate wages, people have access to medical care and the environment does not suffer too greatly at the hands of industry.

Bangledesh, on the other hand, where other wool becomes scarves, does not offer these benefits. Workers toil day in and day out for small sums of money, citizens have little or no access to high-quality medical care and industry has far more scope to exact whatever cruelty it wishes on the environment.

Of course, the reduced environmental and social impact of the Scottish scarf comes at a relatively huge cost to me, the consumer. While someone could buy a warm, soft, well-designed scarf for, say, $20 at Macy's, or some such establishment, that same person could also spend, say, $100 for a Scottish number, in the hope of reducing the social and environmental impact of the purchase.

So I thought.

I just finished reading Jeff Scahs' excellent book, The End of Povery. While Sachs may be one of the world's foremost economists, as the title of his book suggests, he wants everyone — not just people in the developed world — to be happy, healthy and wealthy.

Yet, according to Sachs, those huge textile manufacturing operations in Bangledesh where workers earn next to nothing are the key to Bangladeshis escaping poverty. He notes that every nation — with the possible exception of India — who has already eliminated extreme poverty, or is currently making good headway toward that goal, has begun with cheap textile production. With relatively higher wages, workers can save more. With the skills learned in the factories, workers enter the modern world with usable skills. Eventually, as we see today in China, people begin to move up the economic ladder.

So we arrive at American Apparel. I have never really liked the company, though for all the wrong reasons. Their CEO is just too weird. Brilliant at doing business — the American Apparel concept is golden — but he is really weird.

Now, however, I have a firm basis for my opposition to the company. In some sense, American Apparel is to the United States' poor as the giant, nameless textile plant is to the Bangladeshis. The American Apparel employees earn relatively meager wages, though higher wages than they might earn elsewhere, and the company provides educational programs for employees.

But the United States is not Bangledesh. As Sachs notes in his book, the increase in the Bangladeshi savings rate has a huge impact, not because, with more money in the bank people in Bangladesh can suddenly afford computes, but rather because it enables the children of those textile workers to go to school. American children receive that benefit free of charge.

No, the kinds of inner-city schools where many of those American children will learn are not the world's foremost centers of primary and secondary education. Nevertheless, I would venture a guess that those schools are a lot better than the average school in Bangladesh.

I have no doubt American Apparel has improved the lives of some needy people. Yet I see a greater need in places like Indonesia, where poverty means a lack of potable water, not a government subsidized apartment and cable television. I will probably continue to buy scarves made in Scotland, not least because Scottish scarves is a marvelous alliteration. I will not, however, feel quite as guilty about the iPhone manufactured in China.

Really John, can you think of nothing better? John McCain's latest proposal to wean the United States off our oil habit — a $300 million prize to the first company who manages to create the next great battery technology — serves as yet another sign that the Arizona Senator does not merit a stint in the Oval Office.

Every manufacturer of battery-powered goods already has a huge incentive to develop better battery technology.

Toyota expects to deliver some 64,000 Prius hybrid-electric vehicles this year, which use batteries at a core component of their hybrid system, each worth about $24,000 in revenue to the automaker. Given that Prius sales alone account for about $1.5 billion in yearly revenue for Toyota, the company has a huge incentive to improve their battery technology. What's more Prius sales alone do not take into account the half-dozen or so other hybrid vehicles Toyota could make more appealing to the consumer by improving their battery technology, and thus their vehicles.

Of course, Toyota is just the tip of the iceberg. Computer manufacturers love better battery technology too because it means they can make laptops thinner, lighter and more powerful, all without decreasing the amount of time the computers can operate unplugged. Industry analysts predict consumers and corporations will buy some 297 million laptop computers this year. Even conservatively assuming that the average laptop sells for $500, 297 million units represents $148.5 billion dollars in revenue. The $300 million McCain battery prize represents a whopping 0.2% of the laptop market alone, which would boost the marginal revenue on a laptop to $501 from $500.

Given the size of the existing market for batteries, the huge existing incentives and the lack of oomph $300 million would provide, John McCain's proposal has no merit. The money probably would do more good funding one of his much maligned "pork barrel projects" or, better yet, paying down the Federal Debt to aid the beleaguered greenback.

If John McCain — or Barack Obama, for that matter — is serious about taking on the climate change issue, he needs to take much bolder action. The US government's fleet of cars, trucks and vans is enormous. Senator McCain could have promised the first automaker to develop a viable zero-emissions vehicle a monopoly on vehicle sales to the government. That's an incentive that might make a difference.

Like a home improvement project gone awry, my website redesign took a little longer than I had anticipated. Now, however, I can finally say — save the design glitches I will doubtlessly find and quash in the coming weeks — the revamp is complete.

I spent more time than I care to admit vacillating between one color or another, or one width of a box or another. Still, I like what I managed to cook up.

Though I'm beginning to think the pink is a little overpowering.

While I hope Senator Barack Obama becomes the next President of the United States, I have long held that his policy vis-à-vis trade takes too projectionist a stance. The New York Times ran a great piece this morning that picked apart some of Senator Obama's statements on trade.

One of those assertions concerned the South Korean auto industry. As the senator correctly notes, the US imports far more cars from South Korea than South Korea imports from the US. Of course, as the Times article explains, South Korea imports very few cars to begin with, and US automakers — well-known for making cars with big engines — suffer from South Korean restrictions designed to minimize the country's environmental impact. European and Japanese automakers, attuned to their domestic markets' demand for small, gas-sipping vehicles, fare better.

But, more than anything, I was shocked that the South Koreans even imported American cars in the first place. In my mind, the American automobile occupies an ugly gray area.

Most cars from Japan or South Korea have stellar reliability, though offer only an adequate driving experience. Cars from Europe, meanwhile, are a dream to drive, but tend to have subpar reliability and cost a bundle to maintain. Of course, the Japanese — especially Toyota's Lexus division — have made huge improvements in their car's handling, and the Europeans, save perhaps Mercedes-Benz, have made reliability improvements.

The American car offers neither amenity: it usually has mediocre reliability and offers a flat, unremarkable driving experience. At the same time, the car usually costs more, lacks essential safety features and has a generally unfinished, cheap feeling. Even people in America seem to agree. Last quarter saw Asian automakers, led by Toyota, sold more cars in the United States than our domestic corporations for the first time. In the high-end market, US consumers clearly view domestic luxury cars as inferior goods, as only now, faced with skyrocketing commodities prices, are they so much as considering the purchase of an American vehicle.

With such a mediocre product on offer, it surprises me that American manufacturers manage to sell cars in the first place. American automakers would probably fare better internationally if they actually produced a product people wanted to buy. People in emerging markets dream of owning an Audi or a BMW, but I have never heard a rising Chinese businessman lust after, say, a Lincoln.

It would take a miracle on the order of The Loaves and the Fishes to convince me I should buy a Ford. Unless some brave American engineer starts her own car company, making remarkable, lust-after-able vehicles I actually want to buy, I doubt I shall ever own an American car.

As more details begin to emerge about the impending 11 July release of the iPhone 3G, the sour taste in my mouth grows more acrid. According to a leaked internal AT&T memo, one of my favorite iPhone features — self-activation — is no longer an option. In fact, every iPhone 3G buyer must activate his phone in an AT&T or Apple retail location. I really see no good reason for AT&T to implement such a ridiculous policy.

My two visits to the AT&T store to activate other phones took what seemed like an eon. I had to wait as other consumer asked the salespersons simple questions about phones and rate plans, which the AT&T reps seemed unable to answer in a way that gave the consumers any real guidance. I had to cajole the salesperson into giving me the phone I wanted, rather than some lesser model that gave them a higher commission. I had stare blankly at an unattractive wall of replacement power adapters while the inept salesperson spent half an hour activating my phone.

Needless to say, it was not pleasant.

Buying my iPhone, on the other hand, was as close to cell phone buying bliss as is possible to be. I strolled into the Apple Store, asked for an iPhone, paid and left. At home, I connected the iPhone to my laptop, and, within about five minutes, I had everything up and running. Veni, vidi, vici. So simple.

If AT&T's marketing copy is to be believed, their new policy aims to make consumers' lives easier. Yes, of course! For I so enjoyed spending my Saturday afternoon cramped in an AT&T store waiting for a sales rep to activate my phone.

Of course, the AT&T people would argue that I, a sophisticated computer user and gadget addict, represent a tiny minority of iPhone buyers: the "average consumer" could not possibly navigate the iPhone activation process, with its Byzantine twists and mad Visigoths waiting to take the first-born children of all those who fail to check the correct box.

That, however, is as ludicrous as their unlocking policy (i.e., completely insane). Consider Apple has sold well over 100 million iPods. That represents over 100 million people who successfully plugged their iPods into their computers and downloaded music to their devices.

The first-generation iPhone, I will admit, was not quite as simple as to setup as the iPod. I had to enter some contact and billing information to pay for the AT&T service. But the process is as simple as they come. Anyone capable of navigating the financial transaction required to buy an iPod could handle the extra mental strain.

No, I suspect profits provide the true motivation for AT&T's tyrannical policy. Like the original iPhone, the net price of the new iPhone 3G probably sits around $400. This time around, however, AT&T subsidizes the cost of the phone, such that consumers need only pay $199 for the device. AT&T, then, recoups from the $200 loss through the tariffs consumers pay for their wireless service.

By allowing consumers to simply walk in and buy the device for the subsidized price of $199 without committing to a two-year contract and wireless plan, AT&T runs the risk that the consumer hacks the phone, exports it to an excited Chinese cell phone user and costs the company $200 in revenue. It is, then, understandable that AT&T would want to take steps to avoid this.

But that is not to say AT&T could not have accommodated those who wanted to activate their iPhones in their homes or offices. AT&T could have sold the phones for $399 in the store, but provided a $200 service credit to those people who took the phone home, activated it from the comfort of their Aeron chair and agreed to a two-year contract.

I still love my iPhone, my Mac and just about every other product I own that bears the Apple logo. (The $29 iPod photo connection gizmo was not worth the money.) I am, however, coming to realize how much I dislike AT&T.

Color me disappointed. This morning, Apple CEO Steven P. Jobs, in his annual sermon to the faithful at Apple's Worldwide Developers conference, announced two less-than-attention grabbing products, mixed with a handful of other minor, technical tidbits.

I'll start with the good. Since Apple announced the iPhone SDK back in April, many — myself included — wondered how applications like instant messaging would work, since Apple forbade developers from running background processes, even after the application quit. In other words, for an instant messaging application, it would not have been possible to receive instant messages while using another application on the phone, such as Maps or Weather.

Fortunately, Apple debuted a brilliant solution to the problem with a push notification service that allows developers to ping a person's iPhone when new information becomes available. Hooray!

Apple's .mac replacement, MobileMe, is nice, but hardly revolutionary. It only makes me feel slightly less idiotic for giving Apple $100 every 12 months for a suite of Internet services. Still, I welcome the over-the-air magic synchronization features, à la Microsoft Exchange, especially since they cost me nothing more than I pay now.

Then came the much-anticipated iPhone with 3G radio, or "iPhone 3G." When first I read of the announcement, I felt good. For $200 less than I paid for the first iPhone last June, Apple would sell me an iPhone with super-speedy 3G data connectivity, a real live GPS module for genuinely accurate positioning and a blessedly non-recessed headphone jack. What was not to love?

Once again, AT&T, that demon of a service provider, stole the whiz-bang magic from Apple's product announcement. While Apple dropped the initial purchase price of the 3G iPhone (with 16 gigabytes of storage) to $299 from $499, AT&T increased the price of the special iPhone cellular service package.

Now, instead of paying $20 a month — plus the price of my voice plan — AT&T wants $30 for the special suite of iPhone cellular services. That lovely little piece of fine print moves my cost of upgrade to $540 from $299, assuming I have the iPhone 3G for 2 years. For not only do I have to buy a new phone, I have to give AT&T even more money for their less-than-perfect service.

I was also a little put out that Steve said nothing whatsoever about the Mac.

After I bought my iPhone last June, it quickly became apparent that I no longer needed a laptop computer. My phone does a more than adequate job of retrieving my email, keeping my calendar in sync and giving me access to information online.

With that in mind, I have been hoping, since June 2007, that Apple would release the chimerical prosumer Mac, a rung above the iMac and a rung below the Mac Pro. I may be a sophisticated computer user, but I do not need two quad-core processors. I would, however, like a Macintosh without a built-in monitor with a little more pep than an iMac and a little more room on the end-user side to modify the hardware.

I suppose there is always next year.

When my upgrade to Movable Type 4.1 broke every piece of my custom tempting scheme, I figured it would be more exciting to just start over and come up with a new, if similar, design.

The process is coming along well, especially now I ostensibly have nothing to do (it's not as fun as most people imagine), though, as is apparent, the look is still rough around the edges. Still, this, unlike the mangled mess Movable Type generated after the upgrade, can at least be read without too much eyestrain.

For most of my life, I have either used a plain vanilla text editor or Macromedia's Dreamweaver to cook up my HTML. But, as much as I have come to know and love those two tools, they have their shortcomings.

Creating markup with a text editor can be unbearably tedious. It's nice to have software that does syntax highlighting, magically indents in the right places and completes certain strings. Without a doubt, Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG editing environment is easy and quick. The markup it spews out, however, often fails to pass muster in multiple browsers, and the software limps slowly along like an overweight tortoise.

Then I discovered Coda. While I will admit the folks at Panic have a few wrinkles to iron out, the software still manages to best every other piece of web development software I have used.

The text editing component has everything I want and then some. Syntax highlighting makes deciphering gigantic amorphous blobs of HTML a snap and the built-in syntax-aware autocompletion feature saves my poor fingers from typing more than they must. It also saves me from those pesky problems that result from missing a letter or forgetting the closing tag, since Coda just drops the text in place.

Coda replaces Dreamweaver's cumbersome preview system, which involves switching to an entirely different application, with instant, beautifully rendered WebKit previews, thanks to Apple's WebKit framework. It just works. And it works well.

The clips heads-up-display (or "HUD"), while not a headline-grabbing, awe-inspiring feature, has also proved surprisingly useful. On the surface, it's really nothing more than a glorified copy and paste system, but it still manages to save me a great deal of time. I just drop a blob of code into the HUD, name it and I can quickly add it to any other page.

Even the FTP system has blown me away. I have never used Panic's acclaimed Transmit, but, if it uses the same underlying technology and has the same beautiful interface, its fans have good reason to love it. Unlike, say, the FTP component haphazardly attached to Dreamweaver, Coda's remote site access is fast, effortless and unobtrusive. I can continue to code away while I wait for an image to upload without the constant annoyance of Dreamweaver's petulant FTP status window.

Just in case someone from Panic actually reads this, I will air a few grievances. With large files, the syntax highlighting tends to slow down, to the point I crashed Coda opening an enormous JavaScript file. On a similar note, the ability to collapse code would be wonderful when working on long CSS or JavaScript files. It might also be nice if I could have some way to make Coda automatically complete Movable Type template tags.

Still, Coda is, far and away, the best web development tool on the market. It offers just the right combination of tools in a beautiful, simple package. And, at $80 — less than a quarter of Dreamweaver's astronomical price tag — it's a bargain too.

I love Costco. It's impossible not to like a store simultaneously peddling diamond jewelry, table saws and grand pianos. Yet, some manage to overlook the warehouse chain's low prices, reasonable membership fees, quality merchandise and reasonable employee compensation. And, more often than not, their distain for Costco stems from the chain's "limited" selection. Their favorite toothpaste is nowhere to be found. Frosted Flakes are an inadequate substitute for Cocoa Puffs. Or the world will come to an end because they cannot part with Puffs for Kleenex.

To be sure, I find Costco's limited selection annoying at times. (Though, I suppose, I'm probably in the minority hoping Costco one day stocks cases of fountain pen cartridges.) But the more I consider Costco's strategy, the more I recognize its brilliance.

From a traditional economic point of view, Costco can offer lower prices, making consumers happy, and help its margins, making employees and stockholders happy, by stocking only a few products. The huge orders it places gives it a great deal of leverage in negotiating fantastic prices on toothpaste or breakfast cereals, much the same way Wal Mart has run traditional toy store chains into the ground with its ability to negotiate great prices on Buzz Lightyear action figures.

More importantly, though, I suspect Costco sells more and makes consumers happier by offering fewer choices. A Costco shopper on the hunt for a fancy new high-definition television set, for instance, can quickly make his or her choice, as the average store only carriers two or three sets in each size. John Q. Customer simply considers the size of his TV cabinet, weighs the prices, looks at the sets to evaluate picture quality and snaps one up.

This has a few effects. First, more people hand Costco more of their hard earned cash. Barry Schwartz, in his excellent tome The Paradox of Choice, notes that consumers faced with an abundance of barely differentiable choices often resolve their problem by not choosing at all. A limited selection tosses that problem out of the window.

Second, Costco makes its customers happier about their decisions. Schwartz makes the point that, with so many other possibilities, consumers not euphorically satisfied with their new food processor or seersucker shirt think one of the countless other food processors or seersucker shirts might have been better. Here it's important to note, in addition to only stocking a certain number of products, Costco also spends a great deal of time ensuring the few products it stocks are great products.

I also like to think Costco's stringent process for weeding out bad products helps consumers make better choices in the first place by nudging them, perhaps forcefully, away from inferior products. By simply not stocking questionable, if dirt-cheap, digital cameras, Costco eliminates consumers' misguided temptation to sink below a certain quality baseline at the sake of price.

Do I think Costco's formula needs some improvements? Sure. Those delicious giant muffins they hawk in the bakery department have probably made more than a few people more than a few pounds heavier. All, in all, though, through brilliant choice architecture, Costco manages not only to improve its own fortunes, but the fortunes of its customers too.