My new favorite website: TED.com

TED.com is an amazing website. I’m the kind of person who loves the Discovery channel, the Science Channel, National Geographic, the History Channel, History International, Nova on PBS, etc. It’s entertainment that makes knowledge interesting. Somethings they really don’t have to try so hard with. It just naturally pulls you along: Whoa, what? Some Neaderthals had red hair! That’s so cool! I always thought they had a brown, dirty brown colored hair like chimpanzees. The science behind these discoveries is what’s truly amazing. The facts alone are no longer what fascinate me. Facts are facts. They’re there and they’re nice to know. But then you take a step back and wonder, how in the world did anyone figure that out?

So as I showed in a previous post on Ron Eglash, I found a talk by him on this site called Ted.com. That one little search led me to an amazing site. Free talks by some amazing people. They’re roughly around 20 minutes each, less than a short tv show, and only 1 commercial is tagged at the end. Not bad in my opinion. I even watch the commercial because they sponsored the presentation, the least I can do is watch for 20 more seconds.

The next talk I saw was by Al Gore. It turned out to be what I would describe as a mini version of An Inconvenient Truth. I liked that movie, so watching the talk wasn’t difficult. I’ve known about global warming and its harmful effects since every recycling initiative and arbor day they held in elementary school. The concept isn’t exactly new. Growing up, and even up through watching the movie, I had a hard time understanding why our political and industrial leaders weren’t jumping on board. Then I started work in retail. I observed managers and supervisors do things that even they acknowledged were stupid and non-sensical in order to appease a metric, and watched as they sacrificed employee hours in order to assuage a bleeding P&L line not figuring in the long-term alienation of customers whose needs were not met due to poor staffing. I realized that tunnel vision is an epidemic across many companies in our capitalist society. How does a far-sighted person explain what the horizon looks like to a near-sighted person? Here’s an analogy that just occurred to me:

My Dad taught me to drive on the freeway, he said look out ahead about a mile or so down the road. You can see what traffic is doing ahead and the cars closest to you are still in your peripheral, so you won’t miss what they’re doing. It’s easy just to focus on the car in front of you, but if they’re brake lights flash all you can do is step on your brakes and hope you’re braking at the same speed as them – you missed seeing all the cars ahead slowing down for the cop sitting on the side of the road because you weren’t looking at them, you were only looking at the car in front of you.

I like that analogy. It can be used in a lot of situations. At least it makes sense to me. So now that I have a new understanding about retail, I have a new understanding about capitalism. And now that I have a new understanding about capitalism, I have a new understanding about politics. What I realize most is that when it comes down to making the changes that we as a nation need to make to remedy the causes of global warming and find a solution to what has already occurred, in order to be truly heard, we need to talk in terms of P&L. (profit and loss). From corporations to individuals, money defines how well we survive. If the cost of global warming can be monitarily quantitated, (and that estimation believable) it will speak louder than any other statistic. Al Gore talks about a carbon tax, which could expedite change. What would be great would be a personal expense calculator. How much would it cost with current trends, to continue living as one currently does? Compare that to how much it would cost if one incorporated alternative methods? How many years would that take to pay off? I think that information, freely available, is what is necessary to help people think through their wallets. Because we’re going to do it anyway. (And if it already exists, for God’s sake, advertise it!!!!)