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Ever see one of those corporate-sponsored “fact” articles about how our manufacturers have gone “green” by reducing the material used in the production of the cans, bottles, tetrapaks, cartons, etc. that we all consume and dispose of every day? I recall an info-graphic showing a comparison of the construction and wall-thicknesses of soda cans over the years. The techniques used to produce the cans could easily be seen to be a better use of raw materials, more streamlined, etc., the weight had come down, the number of parts for each container has been reduced, the “Laverne & Shirley” style assembly line was made redundant, and cans, bottles et al themselves are lighter, stored better, have a full recycling life behind and in front of them, and have been seen by most people as a model of what could be done by marrying modern industry with a full undersdtanding of Earth Stewardship.

New! Improved! [Profit Margin!]

We’re paying the companies to make those improvements, with every instance of their product we buy. And when we recycle the container that we have used, we are effectively being paid way less than minimum wage to procure the raw material used to make the cans, back to the companies that will sell the product back to us, time after time after time.

Then we need to look at what we are actually purchasing in these containers. Such clever designs these days. all the ribbing, which adds to the strength and rigidity of thinner, more ergonomic containers. Drip-free caps. Splash-proof containers.

Waste? What’s that?

How much of the contents of your purchased consumable can you actually get out of the container? Do you dispose/recycle your containers with 1% of the contents sticking to the insides? Half a percent? That’s nothing, right? To you, and me, it’s nothing. We’re going to eat it, drink it, wash with it, spray it, etc. Even spill it. But for every drop you can’t use because the design of the container ensures you can’t empty it, that’s probably an additional 2 or 3 extra purchases per person per year. How many tubes of toothpaste does your family go through in a year? In a 100 ml tube, I’ll bet that the average person throws away 5%, because it’s impossible to get it out of the tube. Multiply by years, and total customer base, and you’ve got additional sales based on the idea of actual consumption being somewhat less than the promise of consumption, by my estimate of an additional half to 2 percent. Doesn’t sound like much, but that’s the typical sales commission for a Financial Planner, or a sales guy at your local massive furniture warehouse. I really would find it hard to believe that the priority for packaging design has “ensure contents can be consumed completely” is in the top 5 on the brief. Or even in the top 20.

This has got me a bit peeved. I strongly believe that humanity has got to take better care of the resources we have on this one, small planet. My kids wear a lot of recycled clothes. We ALL don’t need a car, a lawn mower, bicycles, etc. Most of us use these things a very small fraction of the time, yet we all seem to “need” them, because sharing is just too inconvenient. So why are we all paying the corporations that sell us this stuff for the privilege of reducing their value-chains through our training to help them with their waste?

Service Charges Galore

It’s not just physical goods either. Notice the service charges on your bank statements? Those weren’t there 15 years ago. Banks have reduced physical presence, invested in cheaper, faster and more distributed information infrastructures. Their costs have gone way, way down since the invention and mass-rollout of ATMs and on-line banking. Yet we are all paying more than we used to for the privilege of using these services as a “convenience fee”. Effectively, you’re paying extra to reduce the overheads for the banks. Does this seem reasonable?

The corporations claim that the costs per customer are tiny, and that someone has to pay for supporting all the services we all have access to. Does this mean that we have more services available to us than in our parents’ time? I don’t think so… My parents seemed to have more free time back then than I do now. Then again, CEOs only earned 50 times what the average employee did back then, instead of the 500 times of today. All that money’s gotta come from somewhere…

I’m currently following a Tweet-bot for a Web 2.0 creative sourcing service… you know, a Tweeter that posts jobs from oDesk, and other “crowd-sourcer, lowest bid with the most work wins” places, and it struck me that this kind of Tweet Account is the digital equivalent of the Contractors’ trucks circling the places where illegal immigrants hang out, waiting to get picked for those “cash only, no paperwork” day jobs so that the “employers” don’t then have to deliver benefits, or insurance, or even human rights!
Please tell me I’m out to lunch… please…

Microsoft is ending support for Windows XP SP2 in less than 30 days: http://j.mp/9B4zOS

This is kind of a big deal. The headline made me think about how many instances of Windows XP there still are out there, happily doing the work they were designed to do.

I can’t think of a single Windows-based client of mine that DOESN’T use XP. They’re either Mac based, or WinXP. I’m clearly not working at any big corporates, or even (today) mid-size companies, but that’s not where the real Corporate money will come from. Sure a few hundred high-end sales guys and their teams will get big payoffs for selling the licenses (!?!) to upgrade the JCN Corporation from Windows to Vista, then to 7. That’s already happened. I’m talking about the tens & hundreds of millions of private computer owners, and the small businesses and the home businesses, and the restaurants, clothes shops,  convenience stores, etc. that use XP as the base OS for their cash registers.

And I’m not just talking about the cost of the software. If the underlying hardware was groaning with the load of XP, imagine what it would be like with Vista or 7 on it? Gotta upgrade, people.

“Well, then I won’t upgrade. I’ll just keep on running XP” they’ll all say.

Ummm, I wouldn’t do that, if I were you. How many security patches get downloaded a week? A month? How long before some Belarus or Nigerian or Brazilian or Vietnamese programmer from Minsk or Lagos or Saõ Paolo or HaNoi  finds yet ANOTHER hole in the beautiful, elegant, finely thought-through and lovingly-crafted collection of 3 MILLION plus lines of code, creates an exploit, cracks your XP machine and steals all your data, damages some piece of firmware in an EPROM on the mother board, wipes your hard drive and causes your power supply to explode?

Yes, we in this room know that the previous paragraph is unlikely to happen, but those mom & pop stores, school teachers, families with 2 & 3 computers barely strung onto a WiFi LAN so they can all access the Internet at the same time won’t know that. It’s about as likely as getting hit by lighting. And I’m not saying that some people don’t put on chain-mail suits, stick an antenna on their heads, and go dance around in a thunderstorm. (YOU know who you are!) When you’re talking about risk, there will always be people like those that the journos point to, and the story will spread like wild fire across the Internet. The FEAR is the actual purchase driver, not the actual measurable risk.

And, oh, one other thing. New OS? New (secretly negotiated) legislation coming into effect GLOBALLY (ACTA) regarding Piracy and Copyright and 3-Strikes and people being kicked off the Internet by ACCUSATION of infringement?

Yesterday on Twitter, @CamCavers posted a link on  to this article from the Onion regarding World Domination from Starbucks. Funny, but it’s the wrong Multinational doing the execution!