Assorted Afflatuses

Much to my surprise, Inspector Foyle returned to the airwaves on Sunday night, as a part of PBS's rechristened Masterpiece Mystery block. For those who missed the first four series of Foyle's War, the series features DCS Christopher Foyle, played by one Michael Kitchen, who unravels the assorted misdoings of criminals in World War II England. While I object ever so slightly to the soap opera-esque move to bring DCS Foyle out of retirement, I enjoyed watching the first episode of the latest series.

But, as the credits began to roll, I asked myself why all historical television series -- or at least all historical television series worth watching -- are dramas. Humor, to the best of my knowledge, existed in the 1940's. As I continued to think, an idea popped into my head, call it "The Bourgeois Next Door": one part "Desperate Housewives," one part "Rome," one part "Arrested Development."

The plot would center around some 18th century nobleman in Europe, say an Earl named Earl, who discovers one day that he has not a farthing to his name. Unable to extort enough money quickly enough from the serfs in his earldom to pay his creditors, Lord Earl sells the bulk of his land to the wealthy bourgeois on the adjoining estate.

Then, faced with the prospect of maintaing his and his family's lavish lifestyle and maintaing his standing at Court, Lord Earl uses his standing as a respectable gentleman to obtain a loan to start a highly profitable mercantile enterprise of some sort.

Of course, all that sounds rather dull and historical -- the perfect denouement for some sappy 17th century love story where the wealthy son of the Lord Earl can marry the beautiful girl from the village. But there is a twist.

As strange as it sounds, many people -- especially members of the titled aristocracy -- looked down upon the sort of "self-made man" or entrepreneur that most of the world, especially Americans love so much. To actually work for money was the ultimate faux pas for a 17th century noble.

So, "The Bourgeois Next Door" would be colored with the hilarious exploits of Lord Earl as he tries to hide his massive, wildly successful mercantile exchange enterprise from his family, his friends and the rest of the nation.

Just a thought. I highly doubt I will write the pilot script in the near future.

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.

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.

Watching this lovely little video last night, I had a brilliant idea.

In the her five-minute talk at TED, Alisa Miller outlines an interesting problem facing America. On the one hand, ever more Americans have an interest in what she calls, "overseas news." Opposite that, the American news media spends fewer and fewer dollars collecting and reporting that so-called "overseas news" because international coverage costs a fortune. In an era when most newspapers struggle to subsist, much less maintain vast numbers of foreign bureaux, this is understandable, but troubling nonetheless.

A little more digging produced an equally interesting cartogram from the Online Journalism Blog, which also provided a little more insight.

As far as I can tell, the amount of coverage a particular news outlet gives to a region is predicated on the language spoken there. It hardly seems surprising to learn L'Humanité, an infamously liberal, once-communist French-language daily, spends much of its time coverage France and French-speaking regions of Africa. Nor does it challenge logic to discover The Australian focuses its coverage on the United Kingdom, South Africa and India, all regions with concentrations of English-speakers.

So, I thought, why not hunt down a glut of polyglots to translate news from foreign sources and repackage the content online in some sort of editorial context? After all, such a model would allow the editors to find the right balance of global coverage, therefore no region of the world would receive a disproportionately small amount of coverage, and, by simply translating existing coverage rather than sending reporters everywhere from Sao Paulo to Shanghai, the huge cost barrier disappears.

Naturally, I failed to take intellectual property rights into account.

For, as I quickly recalled, translations of copyrighted works (i.e., the articles published by foreign news outlets) were not free to commercially exploit. One needs to obtain permission from and, in most cases, pay some kind of royalty to the rights holder.

In many cases, this extension of copyright protection makes sense. Joanne Rowling might have had less of an incentive to publish if she knew any foreign-language translations of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban would not net her a penny, while some unknown Vietnamese translator made a fortune with his translation of her work.

Of course, foreign news outlets would only stand to gain from licensing English-language translations of their stories to my theoretical international news aggregation service. But even if they were intelligent and agreed to license their content, I suspect my theoretical start-up firm would be unable to afford the licensing fees.

Which more or less sinks my idea. Without content, I would have no way to amass a following of readers sufficiently large to provide the revenue to pay for the content. A Catch-22 if ever one existed.

After watching a week of protests and violence in Burma, the public has decided that the United States and the rest of the Occidental world needs to impose sanctions on the military state. But sanctions — at least on the part of the United States and Western Europe — will do nothing to affect the military government. Burma, a very resource-rich nation, will manage to find at least one country or corporation to buy its natural gas and oil. As most analysts have pointed out, China's influence is likely the only reason the Burmese military has not done more to quash protest. Russia — not exactly a staunch ally of the West — also has no interest in putting pressure on Burma: the Burmese military regime sources most of its military equipment from Russian aerospace and defense contractors.

On the other hand, the Burmese people have very little contact with and even less access to the outside world. According to the CIA World Factbook, Burma has a whopping two radio stations and another two television stations. Less than 31,000 people — out of 43 million — have access to the Internet from a whole 42 Internet hosts. (Compare that to the 195 million in the United States.) The Factbook also mentions that the Burmese telecommunications infrastructure, "barely meets minimum requirements for local and intercity service for business and government."

In fact, the protests in Burma were catalyzed by an increase in fuel prices, which proved too much for the already cash-strapped Burmese people. They came about not, as one might have expected, because the Burmese were unhappy with their military overlords.

Bearing that in mind, I think the United States and European Union ought to impose reverse sanctions on Burma. We should encourage our citizens to tour Burma and expose the oppressed, information-deprived population to human rights, freedom and the social contract theory of government. We should feed and encourage a Burmese hunger for Western literature, entertainment and journalism. If a modest increase in fuel prices can spur action that merits above-the-fold coverage in The New York Times, then it does not seem inconceivable to think that the Burmese, with the right information, might have their own American-style revolutionary war.

For a backward country, we need to adopt a backward strategy.

Three days on, my Google AdWords campaign has netted me a whopping one click. And no, that is not a typo. Of the 1,992 people in the Portland, OR area who have seen my lovely little text ads to promote my business venture, just one has actually clicked through to visit my company's website. I have endlessly tweaked keywords and exclusionary keywords to no avail. Google searchers, it seems, just do not care about my advertisements.

So I asked myself, "Where else do people 'hang out' online?" MySpace came to mind first, but the idea of supporting such a terrible service and its owner, the infamous News Corporation, deterred me. Facebook, on the other hand, is the clean, high-net-worth alternative to the somewhat dodgy slum that is MySpace. And, as a Facebook user, I have noticed the slick little text advertisements that pop up on the left side of the screen.

A little exploration took me to the Facebook Flyers page, which allows one to purchase advertisements both on a per-impression and a per-click basis. Curiously, though, the per-click system does not allow advertisers to specify which networks or groups see the ads, while the per-impression system does. It seems like a waste to advertise my small business, which operates only in the Portland, OR area, to every Facebook user in the United States. Admittedly, I have a great deal of exposure — in the first minute Facebook displayed my ad to over 2,000 sets of eyes — but it strikes me as extremely inefficient not to offer locally targeted advertisements.

Nonetheless, I have much higher hopes for the Facebook campaign. In the first fifteen minutes of its existence, three people have already clicked through.

George W. Bush does not have the most stellar record when it comes to the environment. At the same time, however, none of the "electable" candidates vying for the Democratic or the Republican nomination in 2008 have laid out policies that take sufficient action to prevent or, perhaps more pragmatically speaking, moderate, the effects of climate change.

Certainly Barack Obama would do a better job than our current president, but even his plan stops far short of what is truly necessary. In a speech he delivered early in 2006, just after the president's State of the Union address, Mr. Obama advocated that the United States, "raise fuel economy standards by 3% a year over the next fifteen years, starting in 2008." In practice, Mr. Obama's policy would take a GMC Suburban, which currently manages a meager 11 miles to the gallon, and push its fuel economy up to an unimpressive 17 miles per gallon. Hardly something to write home about.

On the other side of the Atlantic, however, England's Liberal Democrats have proposed a much more radical, and much more appropriate, set of policies designed to combat climate change. Their policies, simply put, aim to make the United Kingdom a carbon-neutral country by the year 2050. In practice this includes a proposed ban on all petrol-powered vehicles starting in 2040 and specialized "green mortgages" designed to incentives the construction of eco-friendly homes. Admittedly the pace of the Lib Dem's proposed reforms are much slower than might be ideal, but such a policy does a far better job of correctly identifying the scope and the immediacy of climate change.

Unfortunately, though, the Lib Dems have little chance of putting their policies into effect, at least for the foreseeable future: they have neither the numbers in the British Parliament nor sufficient support from other MPs. Still, their policies signal a marked departure from the ineffectual and rather wishy-washy policies set out by other political parties or individual politicians, especially those in the United States, with regard to the environment. I still have reservations about the current crop of presidential hopefuls here in the states, but, given the somewhat unexpected and decidedly bold shift in policy overseas, the seeds of hope have been planted in my mind. Much can — and undoubtedly will — change in the next fourteen months.

Iowans have more power than they ought to. Their caucus — the first in the nation — has so much influence on the race to the White House that any politician even contemplating a stab at the presidency has no choice but to back ludicrous policies, simply because they appeal to Iowans. More troubling still, the politicians who generally consider presidential runs are senior politicians, who also happen to greatly influence the broader policy of their political parties. As a result, the entire legislative branch winds up supporting some truly idiotic ideas because the Iowans like them.

America's policy vis-à-vis ethanol epitomizes this problem. Rather than integrate the American ethanol market with the global ethanol market, the United States has built the Great Trade Wall of Iowa. Essentially, any ethanol coming from any other country has such an enormous tariff imposed upon it by the government that it becomes woefully uncompetitive with other, US produced, ethanol. Naturally, Iowa produces a great deal of corn. The same corn, in fact, used to create corn-based ethanol fuels. Good for Iowans, terrible for the rest of the world.

For, while injecting some cash into the Iowan economy is not necessarily a bad move, a de facto US monopoly on ethanol in the US has disastrous environmental, political, security and economic effects to every person on earth. Brazil, for one, has already worked itself into a tizzy over the fact that they, effectively, cannot sell their sugar-based ethanol products in the US, straining our diplomatic ties with that particular southern neighbor.

In the mean time, other US states have taken notice of this phenomenon and have, accordingly, scheduled their primaries to take place earlier in the year. California, for one, will now hold its primary on 5 February 2008, while New Hampshire — whose state constitution mandates that its primary be first &mash; has moved theirs back to 22 January, just a few weeks into the new year.

The net result is even more attention drawn to the so-called political "horse race" (i.e., who trumped whom in the latest poll) and away from a discussion from actual issues. I cannot remember the last time (or any time) Meet the Press had a panel of medical school professors, say, on the program to discuss which candidates possessed the best healthcare policy. Instead, the Chris Matthews Show features its segment, "Tell Me Something I Don't Know," where the assembled panel of journalists digs up some new piece of dirt on a politician and assesses its impact on their polling.

So, I propose the United States have one day in a presidential election year where every state in the nation simultaneously holds its primary. Preferably, this date would fall somewhere in the middle of the year — say on Saturday — and take place on a Saturday, to encourage people to participate by removing their obligation to take time off from work. I say the date is 5 April 2008, the first Saturday of that month. And, for a little extra zeal, why not give the day a catchy, interesting title to attract younger voters and shrug off that pesky air of stodginess? Say hello to Swashbuckling Saturday, the day America chooses its presidential candidates.

The candidates would likely not actually engage in swordplay (though, admittedly, an épée between Obama and Guilliani would be interesting) or physically hurt one another in any way. They would, however, no longer support the ludicrous policies that benefit a handful of states with influential primaries, in favor of looking more macroscopically at which policies best serve the entire country.

Detractors might argue that this would prompt candidates to visit states with population centers, like New York or Ohio, instead of focusing their attention on smaller states, like Iowa. In all likelihood, such detractors would be correct. But to view that as a something undesired would be foolish. It makes infinitely more sense to have the populations of California and New York — whose combined population weighs in at around 56 million or nearly 20% of America's population — dictate national policy than the much smaller population of Iowa.

Hopefully, by removing Iowa's stranglehold on presidential positions, this country would finally adopt policies on their merits, rather than on their impact to Iowans. Yes, in the short run, Iowans will suffer. But, in the long run, the increased competition will force them to innovate, which has rarely hurt any economy. Swashbuckling Saturday would probably have a small impact on the media, but it would, at least, confines their coverage of the horce race to one, rather than dozens, of different days.

Apparently the lives of small children and golf clubs are quite threatened by the menacing power of the garage door opener. Sates across the nation have, in the last two decades, imposed regulations forcing households with garage door openers to attach small infrared transmitters on either side of the door in the hope that they will manage to detect objects that people do not want crushed by the heft of their designer doors.

But the infernal infrared boxes have now become my enemy. Today, after taking an AP test and failing to find a good bakery at which to eat lunch, I came home to grab my backpack. That exercise was intended to permit the quick retrieval of my school-related effects so that I could make it to school in time to begin my chemistry lab. Then the garage door would not close.

Despite my repeated attempts to nudge, clean and otherwise realign the infrared receivers on either side of the door, it simply would not acquiesce to my will. I suppose, especially as I do not live in a neighborhood with a high crime rate, I could have left the door open. But given my luck over the past two months, I decided against it.

Unlike some people, however, who would simply expound upon their hatred and leave it at that, I have a solution that would — if implemented — save the annoyed and the threatened in one fell swoop: ultrasonic sensors.

New cars from manufacturers like Audi and Mercedes-Benz use a series of small ultrasonic sensors on the front and rear bumpers to alert inept parkers of their distance between vehicles. Similarly, such sensors could discern the distance between the bottom of a garage door and any objects on the ground. That way, whenever the ultrasonic waves detected something more than two inches high on the ground, the garage door opener would stop.

With said system, nothing requires alignment — so I would have made it to my chemistry class — and children everywhere would still be able to frolic safely in our nation's driveways, at least, without the looming dangers of garage doors.

Now if only I could find someone to manufacture this.

For every one aesthetically-pleasing website on the Internet, there are at least twelve-thousand hideous websites languishing languidly in the digital detritus. And on those hideous websites the most common design flaw is not the inappropriate use of clipart or a nonsensical navigation system. Rather, the people who design repellant websites simply cannot choose a harmonious pallet of colors. Fortunately, Adobe has partly solved this problem with their latest online design tool, called "Kuler."

Kuler allows anyone, including artists and creative professionals, to create and share five-color pallets that can be used in web, print or video projects. Think Flickr for colors. You can search Kuler's library of color pallets based on primary color or even based on tags or themes assigned to the color combinations by the pallet's author. Then, once you've discovered a suitable set of hues, you can either cut out the hexidecimal color values or even download a Creative Suite compatible swatch file. It's one of the most amazing online tools I have ever used.

Of course, even with thousands of pallets in their database, Kuler may not have what you want. So, should you want submit your own set of colors, Kuler's "Create" interface has a number of tools that help users follow basic rules of color harmony, which should put everyone on the path to color-based enlightenment.

Pay Kuler a visit. It's pretty great.