2 posts tagged “sustainlane”
I spent all weekend at the SF Green Festival. I have all sorts of thoughts about it that are tied into work, because SustainLane.com was the main sponsor of the event and we had a pretty huge presence in front of an estimated weekend crowd of 50,000. But one feeling I had most of the weekend was that a lot of the exhibits were missing the point. One of our booths, for example, was across from invitees from the Rennaisance Fair. How you spend your free time is your business, but you're certainly diluting the idea of green pretty far there, no?
anyway these thoughts from another attendee, le, which i think are very pertinent:
on saturday it was so crowded i could't move, and was very frustrating and not fun because of that. sunday was better, i actually managed to buy a couple of things and ran into some friends.
my mixed feelings revolve around this thought: part of being "green" should be to reduce consuming items we don't need and a LOT of what was happening at the green festival was crap people just don't need for sale. that was disheartening. a lot of organizations were giving out a lot of useless paper in the form of brochures and one pagers, which will just be thrown away later.
i'd like to see the green festival give out a green festival branded pen and pad to everyone, so they can write down URLs, and then ban their participants from handing out brochures.
so busy as of late that i haven't kept up with posting or reading. i am swamped, officially, although it is paying off.
New York Magazine presents: What if 9/11 never happened? Not in the conspiracy sense, but in the history can go a million different ways sense. [via]
The US ranks among the lowest in the world in acceptance of evolution. Next you'll tell me that dinosaurs were real.
Fifteen of the most important websites of ALL TIME! I could quibble with some of this (like the implication that napster's current 500,000 paying subscribers have anything to do with its all-time relevance, or friendsreunited, which can't be that important since i've never heard of it), but it's a pretty solid list of the pretty solidly obvious. But man oh man, they're missing a huge one. If they only knew. [via]
Having worked in customer service (over email and a one-time phone call that ended with the other guy saying, "this game is the only fun i have in my life. please fix it"), I can sympathize with these guys. But I've also been the caller, haven't we all. [a different via]
no chance i can effectively comment on things like this right now, but i think about them. I need jobs that revolve around thinking through things like this. I've got one this summer but it's over in a week. [via]
i've always trusted the us news & world report college rankings, but i've read a couple of arguments against it lately - mostly here. similar to the above article about gaming digg, you can game the usn&wp as well. the washington monthly rankings take a different approach to college rankings. personal anecdote: i didn't take a friday class my junior or senior year of college. i later learned that the school had only in the last ten to fifteen years begun to have friday classes, as their existence - wait for it - factored into the algorithm.
this is sorta funny; i'm only linking to it cause a lot of people are ending up in new york these days.
a wifi router that includes 160 gig drive, itunes, bittorrent & ftp. i very rarely use bittorrents, but it strikes me as a huge leap forward. i see down the path to totally on-demand cable, where content comes from all over instead of through huge traffic, and you'll buy youtube videos for a penny (or a cool grand, following hyperinflation), sopranos episodes for 1 to watch or 3 to save, movies on similar prices, and you can manage what you want to pull down from the web from your pocket or laptop. hell, price could go up or down depending on how often you watch something. the point is, now that anyone can get or contribute content so, so easily, (insert your local cable provider/isp/cell phone service here) has less and less control over the market. my hope with net neutrality is that there now that we can bypass the "lay cable all the way around the world" phase with satellites, can't you see the harvards and stanfords, as well as the gates and bransons and buffetts of the world, fronting for a satellite to provide information to the people? i definitely can. hell of a tangent but something i've been wanting to write out for a while. carry on.
ben casnocha's observations on travelling and such. pretty amazing guy who's taking a year off between high school and college to travel. and he started his own company, about four years ago.
from get rich slowly, ten secrets of success by john paul getty.
ibid, how to raise a family on one income. unsuprisingly, many of the techniques for saving money are techniques for living sustainably.
and finally, how to protect your search information - i'm not sure there's an organization i like more than the electronic frontier foundation. [via]
