ethics

Compare and contrast: The 4 day work week.

So there’s a pointer to this Inc. article in my inbox this morning. I don’t need any convincing about the potential for a company to form its own work schedule. But it seems to me that this article is lying, or the author is fooling himself, or worse, he’s taking advantage of his employees. To wit: The Case for a Four-Day Work Week

The extra time for research makes for a well-informed team and the realization they have something unique.

So they work 40 hours in 4 days. But then, they get to do research on their “day off”. Huh? How is that helping? I realize that they can run errands and do other things at home since their not expected in the office, and mot likely do not have to answer email, the phone etc. But this smacks of creating a 48 hour work week to me. Either include the research in the work week (“Hey, I need my people to keep up!”) or crow to Inc. magazine how you you fooled your employees into a 48 hour work week and here’s how. Or, one more possibility, no one’s doing anything significant for the company on that day and he knows it. Which makes the article a lie about the benefits of time for research.

Now compare that to how Jason Fried talks about the topic of his company’s schedule:

I don’t believe in the 40-hour workweek, so we cut all that BS about being somewhere for a certain number of hours. I have no idea how many hours my employees work — I just know they get the work done.

Only half the people in the company lives in the area where they could possibly come into the office. But there’s no requirement to at all. They don’t track hours because that’s not the goal. The goal is getting stuff done. I’ll bet there are weeks where people work many more than 40 hours, and times when they work less. Does it matter? Being home to “meet the plumber” shouldn’t be a benefit, but common sense. Not being able to schedule appointments and handle the trivia of life adds enormous stress to people. Do you want a bunch of stressed out, unfocused, people working with you? (do you think the leak held? No shower this morning, gah. etc. throughout the day) Do you want to create an environment where people consider lying as a time management strategy? (Hmm, I should call in sick so I can take care of this.)

Anyway, regardless of whether any of this works for you or your company try not to use it as a means of extending the work week rather than embracing the real benefits.

Insane Entitlement: EMI Sues Irish Gov’t For Not Passing SOPA-Like Censorship Law

Insane Entitlement: EMI Sues Irish Gov’t For Not Passing SOPA-Like Censorship Law:

The sense of entitlement exhibited by the legacy players in the entertainment industry is now reaching positively insane levels — highlighted by the news that major record label EMI (in the process of being acquired by Universal Music to make it the largest record label by far) is suing the Irish government because it feels the Irish government is taking too long to pass a SOPA-like law that would require ISPs to censor the internet and block access to sites it doesn’t like. I’m not kidding. Apparently, because the legislative process is too slow, it feels the need to sue.

[Yuck.]

Source: Techdirt

Google and Facebook… they’re never free.

Pusher 2.0:

This also puts the “new business model” mantra in a new light. Remember that the classic business model is a simple monetary trade: the customer gets something of value and they pay money for it. It is fair and easy to understand. The further we go from it, the closer we come to a point where we are forced to choose between going out of business or throwing business ethics out of the window. In order to maintain the illusion that the customer can get something valuable for free, we may have to introduce the illusion that they are getting it for free (while in reality, we collect stuff from them that they may not be inclined to give away). Once you cross that moral event horizon, it becomes much easier to do other objectionable things. I mean, that’s how the new economy works, right?

I’m just thinking out loud and I have no ready-made conclusions to offer, but perhaps we should be a little more hesitant to sing praise of “revolutionary” new ways of doing business. Unless there’s a clear element of trade evident and the terms are set out, chances are that somebody’s getting cheated. Continue reading →

[This piece continues my theme that the more convoluted transactions become the more problems they create for our society—Stay close to the source. If I drive to a store and purchase something made by the individual selling it (or at least the person in the shop in the back) that has tremendous social value. And it doesn’t matter if that’s a kitchen knife or software or a bicycle. The longer the chain gets from “I did it” to “you bought it” the chances for negative social effects increases, and happily the positive social effects increase the closer you get to the source. In the case of Google most of us were happy users because of their great search results. That was a long time ago, and they started tracking me long before I paid any attention to them. Facebook’s “sale” takes place when you sign up, with no explanation of the game whatsoever. I recently saw a news program where individuals were asked about the GOP candidates by name. And while I realize it was a produced segment (edited for results) they had no problem finding people who didn’t even know the names of the candidates, never mind anything about them. Considering the barrage of coverage and the endless debates… imagine what people don’t know when it’s actively being hidden from them? ]
Source: The Cynical Musician

Cut, Paste, Innovate – The Business of (Stolen) Art

Cut, Paste, Innovate – The Business of (Stolen) Art | The Cynical Musician:

The reality is that even the best tools are seldom enough and that although the Internet has solved some problems, the biggest ones still remain – the chief of those being the ability to make your existence known to a wider audience. Plus, the same tools that enable you to enter the market at lower cost also make it easier for bad actors to do so – lifting your work in the process. If Love Lieberman was able to make any money from Art4Love, he did so by exploiting the standard pirate advantages – costless access to a large and varied body of work and the risk-minimsation that comes with it. He could even tailor the site’s offer to reflect the results achieved – phasing out disappointing works, introducing new ones and promoting those that found the most buyers. No individual artist could do the same, since they’d be restricted to the work that they had produced themselves.

Whenever an online business decides to profit from piracy – and gets called out on it – we hear the usual suspects crying out that “rent-seeking Big Media” is trying to crush “innovation”. I put it to you that most of the time what we’re actually seeing is just the “cut (or copy), paste” bit.

[Powerful piece. Rings true to me.]

Inspiration vs. Imitation

Inspiration vs. Imitation:

1. It’s OK to copy people’s work.[GIANT ASTERISK!]

2. Not everything you make should be on the internet.

3. Diversify your inspirations.

4. History is important.

5. Train your eye.

6. Just because it’s not illegal doesn’t mean it’s ethical.

7. Everybody knows everybody.

Most of the time the offenders aren’t aware of how obvious their inspiration sources are. We’re all guilty of it when we’re starting out, but hopefully this article will remind some of you to keep that practice work out of your portfolio, which will keep the angry blog commenters off your back.

Always keep practicing (and practicing, and practicing), keep looking at beautiful work, keep researching others to look up to and be inspired by. In no time you’ll be making beautiful original work of your own.

[There’s a lot more to this piece. And the issues are often complicated. But no doubt there is value in being yourself. First and foremost is… no one can be a better you than you.]
Source: Jessica Hische

Why the Keurig K-Cup is the beginning of the end for great coffee « Muddy Dog Roasting Co.

Why the Keurig K-Cup is the beginning of the end for great coffee « Muddy Dog Roasting Co.: Do you think that vision is crazy?  Let’s see.  How easy is it to buy a Walla Walla onion?  Never heard of it?  I’m not surprised.  I grew up with them, but they’re already a thing of the past.  Hundreds of vegetable varieties have already gone extinct, solely due to our desire to homogenize, to have crops that ship well, regardless of how they taste.  Only 5% of US apple varieties that existed just 200 years ago still exist today.   Ninety percent of vegetable varieties have gone extinct over the last 100 years in the UK. The crimson flowered broad bean, the Champion of England Pea, the Bath Cos Lettuce, and the Rowsham Park Hero Onion are just a few examples of vegetables that are lost forever.  Hundreds of heirloom vegetable varieties are on the brink of extinction.  And there are all kinds of other foods that are falling victim to this same phenomenon. Try to buy a really great charcuterie today – Boar’s Head is as close as you’ll get in most places.  A beautiful creme fraiche?   How about Yoplait?  Great cheeses?  We got your Kraft, RIGHT HERE.  Don’t believe me? Go check out Slow Food’s Ark of Taste.  Oh, what’s that, you would like to have a nice meal at a cute bistro?  Sorry, all that’s available now are chain stores like Panera, TGI Friday’s or Appleby’s.  But you can probably score some Jack Daniels chicken wings, or some other ill-advised mess.  I can sum it all up in one word: Monsanto.

[And while Jim of Muddy Dog Roasting Company explains from his perspective. I think this particular paragraph worries me more (I’m not a coffee drinker) in that it is part of a larger problem, which expressed perfectly above. And in case it isn’t obvious the lost biodiversity is not just a loss of taste and experience. That’s bad enough. But it has become entirely clear that eating different foods is healthy for you, and having variations of each food makes that easier (you eat a tomato, but it’s a different tomato). The varying balances of the “ingredients” of a fruit or vegetable is a fundamental goodness. And the craft of growing and preparing food, where the results are not consistent at the “Monsanto” level and don’t try to be is also a fundamental goodness. It’s the same thing that is appealing about anything hand made. Sure, a dreadnaught style guitar has certain fundamental qualities. But each one is different. Hand build a bicycle and each one will have some personality even if you use the same measurements and tube set. That variation is good for us. And we need to be extremely careful that we don’t lose it in a chase to the bottom in the name of efficiency and money.]
Source: Marco Arment

Why I stand up for Stallman

Why I stand up for Stallman: A few years ago I met Richard Stallman, in Berkeley. It was arranged by my friend Sylvia Paull, who was his publicist (she might still be, I’m not sure). It was amazing, because one of his associates there (whose name I don’t remember) was teasing me just like people in workgroups on the net were. I looked at him, and asked him if he seriously was going to do this, in front of Stallman. Yeah, he kept at it. That’s how pervasive this culture of disrespect is. To Stallman’s credit, he not only stopped it, but dug in. He wanted to understand what was at the root of this. I told him I had GPL’d my life’s work. And this is the kind of treatment I was getting fairly widely. It wasn’t a long conversation, but I could see in his eyes the empathy that Sam had been looking for so many years ago. People think Stallman is oblivious, but my feeling is he’s a lot more aware than most people.

[Anil Dash in the comments on the above story: “using that power to cow conference organizers and academics into submission to an arbitrary set of whims, the same as a rock star refusing to eat certain colors of M&Ms. Just make good music, and ignore the unwelcome M&Ms in the bowl. And be thankful someone wants to hear what you’re singing.”

Here’s where I step in… most people get that story wrong and Anil does here. And I think it helps make a point, I’m simply trying to be pedantic about a often mistold story.

The “no red M&Ms” (or whatever color) wasn’t about arbitrary control and power but about trust. Setting a venue for a show requires a lot of technical work. There’s an awful lot of voltage flying around those lights and plenty more in the audio systems. Cross connect something by mistake, lift a ground in the wrong spot, etc. and you greatly increase the chance that someone will get electrocuted and seriously harmed (if not killed).

The remove one color of M&M while it seems arbitrary was a test. For something that the venue or promoter might feel is bullying or a power trip, if they attended to the detail of it, chances are that they’re attending to the details that really matter as well. It’s a litmus test for attention to detail.

While I had no problem pointing to a story about Stallman’s inconsistency’s, that’s not a reason to jump on him. It doesn’t smack of power trip to me. It simply seems like the a “possibles bag” of collected things that have gone wrong in the past, and an attempt to improve things in the future. Anyone who has done even some of what he does knows that expectations aren’t ever clear enough. You arrive to give a talk and suddenly “could you just” do this event or something. And a million other assumptions that may or may not be true. That document rings true to me, although some of it might seem odd. So what.

So while Anil has a point in the “you must call it” section, you might want to consider that most of this has probably happened and is there to prevent it from happening again, if at all possible, and is no more a power trip than saying “These things have gone wrong in the past”.]
Source: Scripting News

Tour withdrawal

Tourmalet_finish_2010.png

What you still need to know is this. Before a dream is realized, the Soul of the World tests everything that was learned along the way. It does this not because it is evil, but so that we can, in addition to realizing our dreams, master the lessons we’ve learned as we move toward that dream. That’s the point at which most people give up. It’s the point at which, as we say in the language of the desert, one dies of thirst just when the palm trees have appeared on the horizon. Every search begins with beginner’s luck and every search ends with the victor being severely tested.

—Paulo Coelho, from The Alchemist

Billykirk: We must all remember it’s not just reaching our goals, no matter what they happen to be, but also what actions we used to attain them.

That said…

Our family moves on to the back half of the “summer” (not the season, but the school year defined break) now that the Tour is over. Watching the Tour is a family institution, possibly even a celebration ritual of our summer. If only we got the month off, it would be far easier to follow along. Yet, we make the time.

Which leads to what we’re trying to do now… such as clean up the house, move projects forward, some of us hope to visit friends, and I’m trying to think about the Philly Challenge. If you have a second… I’d appreciate a donation. I’ve got some cool swag to give away and any donation greater than $5 is eligible for a prize. (Multiples of 5 equal one entry per 5, so $25.00 gets you 5 entries…)

Tweets about the Livestrong, cancer, and Fat Cyclist communities are aggregated here.

New FTC Guidelines Governing Blogs Featuring Products

New FTC Guidelines Governing Blogs Featuring Products:

We thought you should know that the Federal Trade Commission just published new guidelines about – among other things – blogs that feature product endorsements.

That sure caught my attention.

The Guides, which have been around since 1980, have been freshened up to “specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.”

Then I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

See, there’s a seedy underbelly to media where some journalists – crappy, amoral journalists for sure (there are many names for these people: swag hags, freebie queens, whores, shills) – but still journalists, who too enthusiastically accept gifts (like bikes and components), giveaways, expensive meals, all-expenses-paid trips and the like in exchange for editorial coverage. If you’re a keen reader, you can probably already spot this perversion, aptly called “advertorial.” So far it has flown silently under the radar because the FTC has no authority to regulate speech unless it’s specifically commercial speech.

The new guidelines surfaced due to a recent spate of bloggers trumpeting the virtues of a product that they were either given or were paid to endorse.

[Just to be clear… anything I write about is something that either I purchased or a friend purchased and I’ve used. The exception that comes to mind is stuff donated to QuietlyHelping.org but I will include in the context of the piece that it was donated. I’ll happily except stuff for review, as I already do with books, and occasionally other stuff, but if it appears here, you will know when I was given something. Otherwise you can safely assume I hauled out my wallet.]
Source: Speedgoat Blog

Vaccines

Brent on his piece on vaccines:

An interesting link on Daring Fireball today has me thinking about vaccines.

I’m still living with the effects of the chicken pox I had in third grade.

As a parent this is a complicated issue. I’ll get back to that.

It was the in thing when I was just a wee lad to expose your kids to Chicken Pox when the neighborhood kids etc. got it, because it was usually a fairly benign thing, and it was thought to better get it over with now, and then they’ll be done with it. As Brent points out, that’s not always the case.

For better or worse in my case, it never worked anyway. I never caught them and neither did my brother or sister.

Cut to the end of my first year in college. I go to visit a friend for the weekend, and we in turn go to eat lunch at his brother’s apartment. After we get there, there’s whispering between the brothers, and my friend turns to me saying “You’ve had the chicken pox haven’t you?” Um, no. Too late now it would seem. And of course, I caught a case from that tiny little baby (where you couldn’t even really see the pox they were so tiny, and the case so weak (seemingly).

Unlike Brent, I did not get a horrible case. Oh yeah, I looked like hell, but it wasn’t that itchy, and the fever etc was really far worse than the pox in my case. The timing was bad, as I had a must not miss senior recital to play on Wednesday (The itching and breakout started Friday night), and the senior in question was panicking at the rehearsals I was missing, but other than that… I felt pretty good by Monday morning, and while I had some makeup on and felt weak I actually played in that recital. Thankfully that was before the time of the ubiquitous digital camera.

Unfortunately, my sister caught it from me, and her case was far, far, worse. She had pox in ears and throat etc. and was incredibly uncomfortable. I still feel bad about that, though there was nothing I could do. My brother never did catch them, and years later got the vaccine either when his kids got them or the vaccine I forget which.

Fortunately for all concerned, the worst of it is a pox mark reminder here or there. I’ve been marked worse from playing gigs in bars overall.

As a parent there’s a bunch of issues. One is the “are vaccines really the right approach for all diseases.” For example in the case of influenza which changes so rapidly is there any clear scientific proof that the shot you get actually helps you not get sick? With a thankfully strong immune system, I’ve had the flu once in my life (not that it was any fun). So despite my doctor “insisting” that I get a flu shot is it having any effect? And if it isn’t, is it worth the risk?

The same thinking applies to all the stuff that Noah gets. And further there are the issues surrounding Thiomersal(commonly known in the United States as thimerosal) which is almost 50% Mercury and is used in the multi-dose versions of all (almost all?) vaccines. And even if you think any tie to Autism is bunk, should it be risked? Fortunately, it is not contained in most regular childhood single dose vaccines, but you still need to check. And in the end, is it worth the risk? Thimerosal is known to be very toxic by inhalation, ingestion, and in contact with skin with a danger of cumulative effects. And I should have some portion of this injected into my baby? Seriously? SERIOUSLY? Don’t bother talking to me about micrograms…

Noah has had all his “shots” and we are careful to make sure that they are free of toxins etc as much as possible, and I consider it for myself and Lisa every time the Doc pushes a flu shot or some such. But every shot bring s a sleepless night or two. And how much Mercury has accumulated in my system between the shots and the tuna and who knows what else (Solder fumes anyone?) What’s the tipping point that turns me into the Mad Hatter?

This is not easy stuff, and I understand the concerns of both sides, but it is clear that the functioning of living organisms is not well understood by the medical community. No blame here, just a fact from my perspective. Sure they know a lot compared to 100 years ago, but do they really understand? C’mon. And with that being the case, it is hard to take their arguments seriously except from a statistical basis. If you treat people as numbers it works. But if you think of them as people, the “greater good” arguments get harder to listen to as I get older.

I don’t know what the right thing is for everyone, or anyone. But I think that everyone needs to consider issues like this and not blindly follow anyone else’s advice. That I can advocate with a clear conscience.