Dana Blankenhorn

Wild America Stores

There is no difference between the wild environment and the built environment.

Cities and suburbs are as much a part of the ecosystem as any national park or wetland.

In the last few years my Atlanta backyard, a few hundred feet from a MARTA rail station, has been visited by deer, rabbits, and while turkey vultures, as well as a host of predatory and preying birds and other animals.

If you want to know where the environmental war is being fought, it’s around your house. Millions of people are fighting it. They’re putting up bird feeders, planting trees, running beehives, and letting their plants grow wild.

They’re doing it without retail support. That needs to change.

You will find seed and wild animal chows in hardware stores, pet shops, and even some specialty bird stores. What I’ve yet to see is anyone offering a full set of products and services targeting homeowners who want to create a more natural ecosystem where they live.

There are products for such a store, from feeders to water gardens, from birdbaths to salt licks. Such a store could also sell services. It could send out people to inspect yards and certify habitats. It could provide environmental education and learning products to young people.

Until now, environmentalism has mainly been pursued through non-profit channels, and politics. This is one reason why the environment is losing. The market’s will is all on the other side.

Drop me a line and let’s launch this puppy.

Contradictions of 2022

As we enter 2022, the distance between markets and Washington pundits has never been greater.

The markets keep rising. They point toward continued growth, with more of it concentrated in fewer corporate hands.

The pundits keep screaming about inflation stealing our savings, making everyone poor.

Both can’t be true at the same time. Blue skies don’t fall.

The Metaverse Problem

Back in 2009, I covered Taiwan’s CompuText show, alongside my son, then 18.

We spent four days wandering the halls, on the hunt for “desktop Linux.” We eventually found Linux Foundation head Jim Zemlin addressing a small group in a corner of Taiwan 101, the city’s tallest building, miles from the show’s main hall. It’s become something of a joke between us since then.

The point is there was no desktop Linux. You can argue that Google Android is Linux, or that the Mac OS is based on a Linux, but these aren’t truly open systems. Linux is, and was, primarily a server technology.

This is important to note when thinking about Web 3.0, or the Metaverse, as the buzzword advocates call it. They say it’s the biggest thing since the Web was spun, nearly 3 decades ago. It’s certainly the biggest thing since the Cloud, which Amazon began selling 15 years ago.

Controlling Data for Good

When we talk about control over data, we start with metadata. These are vast stores of data on what people are searching for online, data about data.

Google and Meta Platforms (Facebook) use metadata to control advertising. Metadata lets advertisers reach specific consumers for the same price as the general network. The aggregation and organization of markets, once done through journalism, no longer pays.

The same techniques, applied to content, led us to Trump. Victims stay within a walled garden of propaganda. Facts can never get in. People don’t just vote based on this. They refuse vaccines, buy guns, and die. He who controls the data makes the rules.

The Countryside

When Democrats think about rural America, they think about poor farmers and empty towns.

The towns are empty. But the farmers aren’t poor.

If you own farmland in America, you are wealthy. By definition. Agriculture is manufacturing. Making it work takes big, expensive machines. If you’re actively farming, you also own the machines. If you just own the land, someone else owns the machines, leases your land, while you sit around town enjoying the benefits.

There are poor people in rural America. Most are grifting. They’re getting welfare, which they call entitlements. We’re talking Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ payments, disability. Urban America makes and rural America takes. It’s been that way for a generation. You just didn’t notice it.

Rural Americans don’t take responsibility for anyone but themselves. They spend their time imposing their values on the rest of us. Their religion, their ignorance. Also, their patriotism. Military bases are all in rural America. They provide an enormous additional subsidy, and a place to send any excess kids. Prisons are another rural industry.

Democracy Dies Behind a Paywall

 

I saw a tweet last week that got my blood boiling.

It was from a Washington Post columnist to the effect that people should have to pay for news. Paywalls are necessary for the news to exist.

They’re not.

Before the Web was spun, people did pay for newspapers. But the money only covered the cost of distributing the paper. A generation ago you could also buy a bundle of news daily. Today the Post requires a subscription, a monthly or annual fee. Not everyone can afford it. Even for wealthy people, news they don’t pay for doesn’t exist.

Paywalls can be useful. They allow targeting. A paper focused on the entertainment industry only wants people in that industry reading it. Any circulation outside that is wasted. A paywall maintains circulation quality, thus ad rates.

For a broad based news outlet, it’s the opposite. You write for your readers. If all your readers are upper middle-class, that’s who you write for. You may write about the poor but it’s always from the point of view of the wealthy.

Demand Chain

Every reporter worth his laptop is writing about the supply chain. The supply chain is in trouble. The supply chain is broken. Who is to blame for the failure of the supply chain?

The supply chain is fine.

Our economic problem is the demand chain.

In a normal economy people are doing different things at the same time. Some people are cocooning. Some people are running around with kids. Some are planning vacations, and some are buying luxury goods.

For the last two years, this has not been the case. Everyone has been demanding the same things at the same time. We demand bleach. We demand masks. We demand take-out. Now we demand gas. We demand products. We demand to be entertained.

The Creativity Economy

The ignorance of Washington continues to amaze.

Reporters are all claiming Republicans “must” win in 2022, because the economy will be destroyed by inflation.

The economy will not be destroyed by inflation. The economy isn’t what it was.

Yesterday’s economy was based on resources. The economy before that was built on the rising efficiency of manufacturing. Today’s economy is based on technology and Moore’s Law. It’s built on clouds and devices. It’s centered on software. The gating factor in a tech economy is what I have called “human capital” – trained, empowered brains.

This is the creativity economy. (Shown is Richard Florida, who has  been talking about this since 2002.)

Facebook is Not Immoral

Facebook is amoral.

There’s a difference. The New Yorker knows this.  But, like Mark Zuckerberg, Conde Nast doesn’t care.

An immoral actor deliberately does things they know are wrong.

An amoral actor does things without regard to whether they’re wrong or not.

Facebook can’t afford to be moral. No tech company can. Creative destruction happens so fast I barely have time to call a company “clueless” before it faces the consequences. (Hello, Zillow.)

Corporate graveyards are littered with the molding corpses of companies that tried to defy this axiom. I have been watching tech for four decades now. It’s beyond obvious.

The Gilded Age of Software

Rising prices have given a new boost to software stocks.

It’s because software is the best way to fight inflation. Automate what people did, replace humans with code, and you cut costs. It’s just Moore’s Law in action.

A year ago, the pandemic gave a big boost to software stocks. Software was the best way to keep the economy going.

There’s irony in this because software is still made by hand. And unlike this story, software maintains its utility, even increases in value, the more it’s used.

This has long been obvious in my house.

My wife became a computer programmer in 1982, supplementing my income as a business reporter. My career remained on a high until the dot-bomb in 2000. Since then, hers has gone from strength-to-strength.