“I just want to get started.” How commonly uttered is this phrase in the life of a new project?
My wife is tiling our bathroom and she’s carefully laying out tiles, measuring, preparing to make cuts that accommodate the cabinets, and various other tasks that are required before anyone can lay a single tile on grout and have it stay there forever. She lamented to me, “I just want to get started.”
“You’ve started!” I replied. “You’re doing this project. This is what it takes.”
“Yeah, I know, but I just want to get to it already.”
It’s the same thing with any software project. Coders are always saying they just want to get started. Writing code is fun. Figuring out what code to write or how to write it … not so much fun.
Visual progress on a bathroom with newly laid tiles is fun. Planning, measuring, cutting, and laying it out before grouting … not so much fun.
It’s all part of the project. In fact, it’s the essential part. Fred Brooks, Steve McConnell, and other software luminaries have already demonstrated that actual construction (coders writing code) represents a minority of time for a well-run software project. Requirements, design, and testing the fidelity of the implementation is the bulk of software development costs.
But we all just want to get started.
This How-To article shows how you can make your own seedling starter pots from newspaper! Very cool idea. My plastic trays are getting crumpled from continuous reuse and buying new peet pots is expensive. I’m going to try using newspaper as described in the article. Cheap new pots in perptuity!
http://whipup.net/2007/05/21/raising-seedlings-using-recycled-newspaper/
Spring is officially here and the growing season has begun! I have high hopes for these pole bean sprouts.
Some are deficit hawks and truly believe we should have a sane, balanced budget. Others claim to be deficit hawks but upon closer inspection, you realize their feathers are different. They aren’t hawks at all. They are deficit peacocks who love to strut and preen but do very little to address the real problems facing America today.
Go read this article to learn how to identify deficit peacocks and why our solving our Federal budget gaps is a much, much harder problem to solve than the peacocks like to admit.
Full link: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/01/deficit_peacock.html
Colorado Springs is dying. Dramatic budget gaps and an electorate unwilling (and politicians unable) to consider tax increases force the city to cut crucial services across the board. There are fewer cops, fewer firefighters, no recreation centers, all museums are closing, no public pools, no one to mow the lawns in the park, and no trash cans in the park at all because there will be no one to empty them. Visitors are encouraged to take their trash with them.
Voters in Colorado Springs decried “big government spending” and emphatically voted against raising taxes to fill budget gaps. Why? Because voters did not “trust city government to wisely spend a general tax increase and don’t believe the current cuts are the only way to balance a budget.”
The result is a general deadening of the city.
The very citizens who voted against tax increases complained that “cuts to bus services, drug enforcement and treatment and job development are attacks on basic needs for the working class.”
Today, as always, we want all the services big government provides but we are unwilling to pay for any of it.
Ronald Reagan raised taxes. His deficits were unsustainable. The Tea Partiers will one day see the light. Until then, we’ll get “small government” and complain about the death of public services.
The Economist has an interesting article talking about the true cost of goods and services we take for granted when the environmental impact is measured and accounted for. This is also Lester Brown’s argument, which I wrote about recently. Mr. Brown calls it a Global Ponzi scheme.
In The Economist’s article, the author writes about the destruction of mangrove swamps in Thailand to make shrimp farms. Profits per hectare were nearly $10,000 and accounted for by the private sector, but the public cost of the farms include generous government subsidies, increased pollution, and the loss of the mangroves’ natural role in the ecosystem which includes protection against violent storms and a source of food and medicine for local people. What looks good in an accounting ledger for the private sector masks the public cost spread over society as large that appears in no ledger at all.
My wife taught agroforestry in Cameroon for the Peace Corps. Her job was to teach her village how forests protect their farms by preventing the wind from blowing away all their topsoil. Preventing erosion is noted in The Economist article’s second sentence:
In 360BC Plato remarked on the helpful role that forests play in preserving fertile soil; in their absence, he noted, the land was turned into desert, like the bones of a wasted body.
Some things never change, though the lessons often need to be continually relearned.
South Carolina weather is good for an extended growing season. Here is my broccoli after Christmas.
Lester Brown has an interesting take on the unsustainable economy we live and work within.
http://www.grist.org/article/our-global-ponzi-economy/
He argues, for example, that “expensive” $3/gallon gas does not reflect the true cost of the fuel in our cars. Mr. Brown believes the cost of gas isn’t just pumping, refining, and shipping gasoline. It also includes the military cost of protecting oil in a politically unstable region, the costs incurred by climate change, subsidies to energy producers, and the health care costs of we the people breathing polluted air.
We’re overfishing our oceans, overgrazing our pastures, overpumping aquifers, and overpolluting the atmosphere to levels where the earth cannot regenerate. We are borrowing from the future in ways that an unsustainable in the long term.
This is the very same point made by Thomas Friedman in “Hot, Flat, and Crowded.” The planet is able to sustain a single American-sized consumption-based economy, which is profligate, wasteful, and dirty. The problem is that India and China have each created 1 America-sized economy in terms of consumption and pollution and have several more incubating. All our environment problems are going to get much worse.
A green revolution is just that: a revolution. It can’t happen piecemeal. We need to shift from a consumption-based economy to one that develops sustainable trends. This is the first time our industrial economy has faced this challenge and it flies in the face of 200 years of history.
If healthcare is hard to fix, I can’t wait to watch this fight develop in Congress and parliaments around the world.
“When I have a dollar to blow on a bottle of water, I buy Perrier!” quipped Robin Williams in his late ’70s stand-up days.
It killed. The audience howled at Williams’ derision of paying a lot of money for something we get nearly for free from the tap, especially when the EPA does a very good job enforcing water quality standards in the country.
Today, bottled water is a $50 billion business globally. We consume copious amounts of energy and fossil fuels to produce, fill, and ship plastic bottles of water while 1/6 of the world’s population (over a billion people) do not have access to reliable potable water.
The math from a recent Fast Company article is particularly illuminating:
If the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000.
Enjoy: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/117/features-message-in-a-bottle.html
Energy Secretary Steven Chu has advocated painting roofs white as a cost saving measure that also reduces the impact of climate change. The theory is that more heat would be reflected, thereby lowering a building’s cooling costs, which in turn reduces greenhouse gas emissions because we’re using less power to cool the building.
An article (blog entry) on Time magazine’s website says studies have concluded that whitening a roof actually works and can make it 20% more cost effective to cool your house on hot days. I’d love to see links to the studies, but the physics makes enough sense that I believe it.
You can read the article here: http://cheapskate.blogs.time.com/2009/07/30/why-isnt-your-roof-white-already/
Here in sunny South Carolina, I spend more on air conditioning in summer than I do on heating in winter. When my roof is due for an overhaul (and those shingles are getting pretty old), I will be looking into a light colored rooftop.