About time. And product. And being more deliberate.
I just got word that another of the Sun Developer projects I’ve been working on lauched today:
Now in addition to masthead-level access to Java APIs (you’re welcome), there’s a prominent menu item for all the community venues within the Sun.com domain (blogs, wikis, forums, SDN Share, etc). This change lets the ‘Communities’ menu (at the top of the screen) focus on affinities/projects, rather than needing to accommodate all the communities and all the ways they might publish.
First off, I’m all for minimizing landfills and maximixing the use of our resources. But, I’ve been thinking more and more about the economics of ‘recycling’ since listening to Mike Munger on EconTalk in July.
Right at the start of the podcast, Munger asks,
“I have something in my hand, I want you to guess, is it a resource or is it garbage?”
Surprising, it’s a pretty straight-forward answer,
“Would someone pay you for it or can you make something from it that’s higher value?”
Hmmmm.
Every month we pay someone to haul off our garbage in one truck and our ‘recycling’ in another. We’re not paid as the second truck drives by. Plus, the reason the items are on the curb to being with is that I’m done with them.
Earlier this autumn, when our kitchen was demo-ed, the contractor set a number of the old metal pieces aside the dumpster. After sitting there for a few days, a single beat-up pickup truck rolled by real slow, and a kid – no more than 14 – jumped out, quickly sorted throw the metal, threw a couple pieces in the truck and hopped back in.
If there was a market for ‘recycling’, I imagine we’d see lots of trucks competiting for whatever’s in my orange and green bin every other Tuesday.
Instead, metal, glass, plastic, and paper go into the same bucket (“single-sort”) and transported by one of only 3 vendors to an amazing $3 million machine sorting through everything. Salvaged materials transported to mills and ‘spoilage’ transported to incinerators 1.
I don’t know about the exact margins in all those transactions, but they feel pretty tight – especially considering all the transportation involved.
In addition, there doesn’t seem to be a strong push by my waste vendor or the city for making sure what goes in the single-sort bins are actually ‘recycleable’. No weekly report from the waste hauler on my compliance this month. Simply a few bullet-points encouraging me to rinse glass and cans out.
From this, I can only conclude that spending our time and clean water cleaning waste is the only way to make it valuable again. That doesn’t sound like a good deal holistically, especially with that multi-million dollar sorting robot downstream.
Makes me wonder when the costs of driving 2 trucks around will become too much and our waste haulers will take back one of their buckets leaving us to truly single-sort.
Elsewhere 13 Aug 2007
1. Assumptions I made from the details in the meeting notes from Anoka City Council Oct 3, 2005 [pdf].
Yesterday, I was listening to Bruce Schneier’s talk at DefCon 15. As always, fantastic. While some of it was familiar, one new bit I picked up from him is the legal ramifications of not owning the data we create. We don’t know when it’s being used for secondary purposes.
“And the 4th Amendment doesn’t work to protect our privacy (secure our person and papers) when our papers are not in our desks, they’re in our SMS messages, ISPs and Google, etc.” – Bruce Schneier
Ouch. I’m not sure lack of Constitutional protection is mentioned in ‘I agree to the terms and conditions’. Puts a whole different price tag on ‘free’ services.
It also helps me better grok the Vendor Relationship Managment project Doc Searls is heading. If individuals control their data – the chances of massive data breaches1 seem less likely, as do the Facebooks. Plus, individuals start to have some idea of the market value of their information. Hint – it’s greater than zero.
Elsewhere:
“I don’t deal with applications, I deal with data” – John Gruber, Daring Fireball
P.S. For those of you playing along at home: BINGO!
1. Techdirt does a great job of tracking this issue.
I was forced out of my podcasting hiatus by the The Moustache Rangers, a highly-entertaining, improv’ed, space-comedy duo. Aric (also of MakeMeWatchTV and LeastDangerousGame fame) and Cory share the backstory of the Rangers, the mythos of the Great Moustache, and the emotional power of guacomole.
If like me, you’re a fan of Teknikal Diffikulties, you’ll probably dig TMR. It’s a great mix of improv, parody, and low tech.
The Moustache Rangers will be performing live at the Brave New Workshop‘s Improv-a-go-go on Sunday, November 18, 8pm. $1.
Rex Hammock confirms Mac OS X 10.5’s Mail.app supports reading RSS. While I’ve yet to see Apple implement RSS in a smart way, RSS in Mail.app proves RSS support will be ubiquitous.
Just as I mentioned last month.
Can’t wait to see if Mail.app is a better podcast-receiver than iTunes.
If you’ve got Leopard installed – is it easy to dynamically add an RSS item (title, link, etc) to an email sig dynamically?
Ben and I have been exchanging late-night previews of our respective side projects for a while now.
The idea behind Ben’s project – Cumul.us asks, can we turn the weather into Wikipedia? (Wisdom of the clouds – hehe).
Will we get better weather predictions from it? Dunno. From what I’ve seen of the site, it’ll be fun trying.
Tyler Cowen gets all uncov on Ben:
“I predict this will fail — how many government agencies already work at predicting the weather?”
I’m glad we got out of the way even before launch.
AJ gave me call today wondering when there was going to be another First Crack podcast. Thanks AJ!
The answer – Soon. I hope. I’ve been working on a new podcast receiver app, which is eating up all my podcast production time.
Then there’s the bit about needing some new inspiration. There’s something new fermenting. I’m excited about it, but more excited about what I’m calling a ‘feed curator’.
Until then, I’ll be posting at garrickvanburen.com and on Twitter.
This week, I file my first major complaint with Rails.
I was innocently running tests and tweakings some views – when I discovered function that should work longer did.
A little background, my app is filled with routes the make the URLs more contextually appropriate and memorable than the standard REST URL construction. If you have any Rails experience – you can see the problem with using the link_to helper
Rails likes to turn this:
< %= link_to 'Edit', :controller => 'items', :action => 'edit', :id => '1' %>
into this:
/items/1/edit
Now my standard routes are more like this:
/name_of_item_1/edit
If I do something like this, consistent with how my routes are structured:
< %= link_to 'Edit', :controller => 'items', :action => 'edit', :item_name => 'name_of_item_1' %>
link_to doesn’t pick up the item_name. If I throw other variables into the mix, say to pre-pop some attributes, link_to grabs it’s 3 perferred variables and forgets the rest.
Makes me feel like link_to is a lot like scaffolding: great for getting things up and running quickly, but something you want to clear out once you get serious.
IsItChristmas.com makes me giggle – especially because it has a feed. Thanks davedelaney.
I asked twitter about good MN business blogs and Mike Keliher mentioned the new Twin Cities Business Magazine site, while it’s not wholly a blog, there’s an editor’s blog and a very short list of local business blogs, including Graeme Thickins’ blog.
I’m not confident in getting the whole story from a single source, so who else needs to be on the list?
Add links in the comments and I’ll put together an aggregation.
Thanks.