From Streetcars To Spaceships

The best essay on process management ever written.

A document written by a programmer at Google has recently come to light. Here it is. Read it. Memorize it. use it as a catchecism for any management trainees you've got. Download a copy for local archiving in case this link goes down. This, my friends, is the shit. Much more than internal details about Amazon ad Google. Much more than just a review of implications of service-oriented architecture. This is a parable of how operational philosophy shapes behavior and how the consequences of that behavior also, in a competent organization, shapes operational philosophy.

Read it. Read it now. 

Almost every kind of job is going away. Really. I mean it.

A few years back I wrote about how automation, changing demand, and resource depletion were going to result in far fewer jobs relative to level of prosperity. That for a population of constant size to maintain the same degree of material prosperity will, in the not too distant future, require far fewer hours worked. That even the creation of a new multi-billion person middle class only delays this shift. It doesn't prevent it. And I wrote that this automation would encompass not only "brute force" jobs but also white collar skilled work such as skilled cooking, most legal practice, and service jobs.

Well, look at this article in Slate. And the discussion on Slashdot that it has engendered. The links and refs here should give you more if you want to dive that deep.

This is real, folks. It's happening right now. 

Which, among other things, makes even further hash of the bullshit that the executive class-backed media is trying to sell us that anybody who is unemployed somehow deserves it. If for ten adults to live to the limits of a "middle class" income only involves four of them having jobs then no amount of badgering or sermonizing or even retraining will make that unemployment go away. And, as precictably as gravity, that wealth will tend to concentrate in the hands of a subset of that shrinking percentage who have jobs.

Let me go over each of those again in more detail.

- Assume a world where for ten adults to live "well", ten of them must have jobs.

- Change the means of production and other factors such that only four of them need to work to maintain that same degree of prosperity. Not only does this leave the majority of people unemployed, it also, means (under most forms of government) that a minority of the people will be making most of the choices about how that work gets done.

I'm not only talking about the big decisons here. I'm talking about the ten thousand little ones of which each of those big ones is made. If ten of ten people do the cooking then everybody knows how the ingredients get used. If one does the cooking then there will always, ALWAYS, be a power imbalance where that one person can put goodies aside, give them preferentially to their friends, sell them off for bribes, etc. Try to stop this with thousands of descriptive rules and mostly what you'll do is create black markets and end up micromanaging the person doing the work. Which almost never works out well.

- Therefore, when the percentage of people with jobs decreases, power and wealth concentrates.

- And once power and wealth become unevenly distributed, those who have wealth already will push to even further gather that wealth to themselves and others like them.

And if you think that this can be countered by having everything done by consensus or some such then I recommend that you spend some time working in your local food coop and see how that works out for you. And a food coop, mind you, is a case where participants have the option of withdrawing and so there's constant pressure on the group to not get too caught up in bureaucratic idiocies lest everybody walk out.

It is past time that we admit the truth. Now and more so every year those with wealth need to get used to either subsidizing or at least giving access to land and other resources to a population that is on its way to being bigger than that which is "gainfully employed." It's either that or starvation followed by brutal repression and almost certain violent revolution.

Note, please, my second option. When I write "giving access to land…" I'm talking about changing zoning codes to allow any number of things that we now consider squatting. I'm talking about not persecuting those who choose to live disconnected from the grid. I'm talking about making it expensive and difficult for property owners to "warehouse" those properties, either to create scarcity or simply because they can't be bothered to keep it in use. I'm also talking about not treating it as a sin to be short on money. About raising our children to understand that a person can be honorable and disciplined and smart and hard working by nature and still not have any money.

This also means a world where the obligations of citizenship are less frequently denominated in money. When a few percent of the people control just about all the money and where our government "does its business" entirely in money then it's very simple. That three or four percent will own the country. And, sooner or later, will reduce most of that other ninety-something percent to peonage. Slavery.

How do we counter that? We should start by admitting that all of us inherited most of the wealth extant now. And that morality alone should compel us to provide basic means of sustenance for everybody, refusing to do so only in cases of severe scarcity.

What does that mean? Again, let's take that part by part.

1.) We have vast reserves of wealth. If one includes the resources that we keep idle or use profligately, we have almost incomprehensible amounts of wealth.

2.) Even correcting for increasing raw materials scarcities, wealth creation is getting easier and the rate of that increase is accelerating. So our children, if we just sit still, will have even more wealth per citizen than we do.

3.) Most of our wealth was here when we got here. We inherited it, as Elizabeth Warren articulates very well in this video clip.

4.) Therefore, nobody now alive can legitimately claim to have created most of it or even found it.

5.) Therefore, we're all, to some extent, living on the backs of somebody else's labor, innovation, and sacrifice.

6.) Therefore, it is morally unsound for some to hold to themselves the resources that none of us "earned."  (Some of you may disgree with this but I'm not going to get sidetracked right now.)

7.) Therefore we have the means and a moral pressure to let loose at least enough of that wealth from private ownership to ensure subsistence for all.  

8.) Such a transfer is not a favor. It is not charity. It is giving property over to people who already have legitimate claims to it.

9.) It is crucial that our citizens, and in particular our children, be taught to see such systematic and permanent distribution of wealth as just, reasonable, and normal.

Obligatory, several year, separated periods of duty national service would also be a damn good start. Not just as people with guns. But serving in the ways that we pioneered quite well in the thirties and forties. As teachers. Park rangers. Builders. Many, many things.

And yes, this would break most of the unions.

But let's be honest please for a minute. As constituted now most of them are dying and/or zombified already.

All of this comes down to one conclusion. Our world as it is shaped now won't work for the circumstances ahead. Either we change voluntarily now, with minimal disruption, tragedy, and waste or we wait. And get to watch something like the French Revolution get enacted with over five billion likely combatants, modern propaganda techniques, and nuclear weapons.

That's the truth. Period.

 

Reason depends on acceptance of complexity.

A determination to reduce all things to a few conflict-free sentences is one of the biggest forces behind fascist movements from the Armenian Genocide to the Tea Party. Complexity and nuance are at the very heart of responsible adulthood. Fight that as such and you are an enemy of democracy and reason. When a situation is reduced to one factor, to "the thing that really matters is…", it cannot be understood in any useful way.

Watch this talk. She gets it just right.

Then read this and think about the dangers that we face.

I hate those who need to reduce everything to comfortably tidy simple stories. Hate them. They are enemies of all that lives. We are facing problems defined by their complexity. Global climate change.

My father was born in Missouri. My mother was born in New York City. They met and married in California, where they both lived for years and where I have spent quite a bit of time myself, from San Diego in the early 70's to the Bay Area in 2009. My stepfather was born in Tennessee. I was born in Panama City, Panama. I have lived in Panama City, New York City, Pittsburgh, Portland, OR, and Milwaukee. Which am I? Am I a New Yorker? A Panamanian? An Oregonian? Which is the "correct" answer? That's a stupid question.

About this whole "we killed Osama" thing…

Okay, it looks like the tumult about the claimed assassination of Osama Bin Laden and raiding of his compound has moved past the initial reactions and on to at least slightly more considered responses.

For what it's worth, I give a lot of credit to this Washington Post article for having provided a considered, detailed, and level-headed view of all of this early and in a high profile place.

So, what do I think? Well, first of all, I'm still not certain of anything but that something big happened in Abottabad, that our military was involved, and that there was plenty of shooting and almost certainly dying. That Al Qaida and their supporters look to have been thrown into turmoil. And that our government is saying an awful lot of things, some of which look to contradict each other.

I'll also say that from the looks of it, the SEALs did a fantastic job of some kind of assault deep in a very unsafe location and made a clean break back for home.

But even given that the fundamentals being stated by the U.S. government are true, I agree with this article right down the line.

- Every terrorist or terrorist group we treat as a military rather than police issue legitimizes those we attack and terrorism as a political tool overall.

- Given that Osama Bin Laden was, in fact, buried at sea, our military has a long history of burial of enemies at sea with the full requirements of that enemy's culture. A notable example would be the sailors of a Soviet nuclear submarine who we brought to the surface and then buried, complete with a U.S. military band playing their national anthem and suitable religious observances. If we could do that decades ago and swiftly provide film of the burial to the Soviets then we could have done the same and provided film within hours today. Whatever may be going on, "we're working on it" is a bullsh*t answer and is not only weasely, it undermines the reputation of America and particularly of Americans in uniform and reduces the chances that our soldiers whose bodies end up in enemy hands will be treated respectfully or that their loved ones will ever be informed of what occurs.

- Whatever scale of threat Osama Bin Laden and his people may have been, they pale compared to people like the Nazis or even the Serbian government. If bringing them in alive for trial was the right approach them how can we see him as an exception?

- Given the logistical difficulties there look to have been, I say again, now that we've spent over a trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives (at the very least) on the "War On Terror" we should have been capable of finding Pakistani factions to back who could have gotten us Osama Bin Laden alive.

- imprisonment without trial and torture as interrogation technique did NOT get "validated" by this.

- And last but not least, this is yet another brute force attack that would have been far less necessary if we had goddamn well had responded on September 12th, 2001 as many of us begged at the time, by making an absolute full court effort to train as many Americans as soon as humanly f*cking possible to speak foreign languages very, very well and learn foreign cultures and not crippled what expertise we *did* have in right-wing "Bible"-fueled attacks on crucial military and intelligence personnel because of their sexuality and/or beliefs.

 

Re Greg Mortenson, how deep does the rot go?

I see that people are finally reading my post from six months ago about Greg Mortenson and the CAI (Central Asia Institute). The 60 minutes piece and the CNN article and all the rest have changed things, haven't they? I never went into details last year about what might be in it for the people who I have long suspected are behind him. So I guess that's kind of overdue.

First of all, I'm going to say it yet again. If you want to get a handle on what's going on in that part of the world, personally, I say drop "Mortenson's" books. Instead, read Charlie Wilson's War (The movie's not bad in its own way), Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, by Ahmed Rashid, and The Root of Wild Madder: Chasing the History, Mystery, and Lore of the Persian Carpet, by Brian Murphy.

Just for starters, this would also be the time to say that I was born in Panama. To parents who had spent quite a bit of time in Mexico. And each of whom has since spent ample time in the developing world, from Sri Lanka to Kenya to Nicaragua. And very little of that in hotels or other "Americanized"and protected zones. My best friends when I was a little kid were the missionary family down the hall. Their mom was from a Wyoming family of evangelists (she eventually spent years in China) and their dad grew up in a mission in Burma and did his thesis on U Thant, who was then just a local notable. I'll get back to him later.

I could go on with the long list of missionaries and NGO folks and ethnobotanists and mountain climbers in my life or the time I've spent in my own kinds of places that aren't exactly "U.S. mainstream" but let's just say that when I wrote six months ago about having a visceral sense of Mortenson's books being wrong, it wasn't in comparison to Discovery Channel specials. It was in comparison to things like, oh, god, my father is caught in a "civil revolt" again and I'm really impatient to hear from him. Or once, oh crud, here I am arguing with my mother about is it worth keeping our appointments while the smoke from the protests and Guardia Civil's tanks wafts into our room?

Okay, that having been said, it's time for me to speculate.

My guess is that there were people in, well, let's just say the Mary Bono/Mellon-Scaife world, who were uncomfortable with the various movements by people like BRAC to route around the horrific but very controllable "education" infrastructure in south Asia.

In other words, there were, by the late nineties, any number of groups, most native to south Asia, that were working to build schools, many also for especially for girls, tying this into microcredit (note how CAI has now positioned themselves as a gatekeeper for microcredit as well) and enable things like access to birth control and health care for women. In other words, groups that were and still are generally taking a decentralized, locally controlled, collaborative approach to the systemic problems that have kept women (and actually, to some extent, everybody not from the ruling families) relatively powerless in that part of the world for, at the least, centuries.

Now, I don't know about how much y'all followed the Reagan period approach to policy there but a key part of it was a systemic approach to do just the opposite. To keep things such that oil companies and our local totalitarians could "smoothly" keep doing their thing. I've long since lost track of the number of schools U.S.-backed people like the Contras burned down or how many teachers they tortured and killed. And it's not like U.S. foreign policy has exactly become simon-pure since then or avoided such techniques before.

Not to mention that birth control, especially in the developing world, is a big no-no to such people. They feel that it's VERY important to keep groups backing that on the margins. Our Congress has given us demonstrations of just how hard and viciously the right will fight for that quite recently, haven't they?

So they found an American, a charismatic guy raised in a missionary outpost, a very controllable, very ambitious, very Christian guy who was already doing something in the field and happily admitted that he wanted to hand off things like publicity and managing money, and they turned him into a front man they could position publicly as THE voice of education reform in that part of the world. It's a game as old as Alfred Sloane. If you can't kill a threatening movement you build your own organization under your control (G.M. backing Greyhound Lines, anybody?) and position it as the "more legitimate" and emotionally compelling substitute for the people who are threatening your power.

And Greg Mortenson would have been, I suspect, a very controllable front indeed for the person who knew what buttons to push. I don't think that my friends' dad ever quite got the hang of American culture and his permanent confusion about what "America" meant is pretty common among people who grow up overseas in missions. I strongly suspect this applies to Greg Mortenson. They grow up on idealized and very fraught stories of the U.S. and visits from friends of their parents and workers for the mission and some of these former mission kids seem to have trouble all their lives with a certain kind of "in-betweenness" and need to get back to what feels "real" conflicting with a guilt that they should want to be "back" in the U.S. where they've been told they "belong" but never entirely feel comfortable. Except when spending time with others from the same backgrounds which just leaves them driven to go back "overseas" again. Sound familiar?

So if Mortenson's would-be backers/handlers can drape their "suggestions" and "advice" in the language he was brought up in, then he'd be eager to agree and go along. And as, over time, that advice grew to include money and organizational help and maybe now and again "one of our people who'll drop by and fix that little problem you're having with your accounting" he would be quite possibly relieved to be able to turn his back and not look too closely at the details. And as the "help" shifted over to them buying him expensive suits and flying him around on private jets, there would always be somebody there to tell him that this wasn't a bribe or a luxury. Just a selfless part of doing the job. And as the Pakistani and then U.S. military stepped in, he could just keep saying that it was all for the purest of reasons. And as for his millions in "personal expenses", he wasn't stealing CAI's money. It was all for the greater good, really, and surely not at all, well, sinful. I don't think that any of us will ever know how deep the lies went in his head and among the staffers at CAI. But we know that one way or another the answer was "pretty deep."

At the moment the world out there is enjoying their high dudgeon about "this is an OUTRAGE!" but they aren't, from what I've seen, asking the question, "so, if this has been going on for over ten years, why weren't you covering this in, say, 2007, when he was already a celebrity but hadn't gotten the massive support from everybody from the New York Times to Oprah Winfrey that he has now had?"

This is about centralization of power, and the coordination and propaganda machines that play such a key role in making that centralization possible. It's also about the media's collective habits of what to cover and how.

 

And that makes it everybody's business.

 

-Rustin

 

Greg Mortenson should be no model to anybody.

Greg Mortenson and his group have built some very admirable things in the mountains of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the rest of that part of the world, material and organizational. But I am convinced that he, deep down, is a dangerous and willing tool of the authoritarian right wing and that we should all be damned careful before giving him or his group a penny of our money or a second of our support. You want to help children in that part of the world? Wonderful. Find other ways to do it.

Not only that, but any techniques his group, the Central Asia Institute, put forward as models for wider use should be strictly cost-accounted, broken down to their constituent tasks, and then reviewed with a fine-toothed comb and run past others for confirmation who have done similar work in similar parts of the world before being adopted or publicized.

I'm taking this opportunity, with the New York Times having just name-checked him yet again, to say again that I find many things about "Three Cups of Tea" and Greg Mortenson morally repellant and that I look forward with fervor to the day that people realize that it's no coincidence that Mortenson's strongest Congressional supporter featured in his books, Mary Bono, is a mainstay of the authoritarian Christian right.

I found it interesting and non-coincidental that his writing partner for his first book, David Oliver Relin, is never even mentioned in Mortenson's second book. I suspect that they are no longer even on speaking terms. I'm betting Relin's patience ran out. That the mixed feelings he alluded to in the introduction to Three Cups of Tea shifted further over to the negative as time passed and that Mortenson and his people have erected as tall a barrier as they can manage to block off any role Relin might have in speaking about what's really going on. In fact, I'd give it about one in three odds that Mr. Relin is under continuing pressure to keep his mouth shut or be faced with attack by Mortenson's allies. Allies who I would equally bet have long since threatened Mr. Relin in no uncertain terms with retaliation if he should say "the wrong things" in too loud a voice.

As I read Three Cups of Tea and then Stones Into Schools, a lot of subtle things kept sounding somehow off to me. Credit seemed oddly disproportionate to contribution and was weighted far further to authoritarian, conservative sources than their role would seem to merit. Groups I had heard about doing related work seemed oddly absent. Major help from people here in the Pacific Northwest was glossed over, while much smaller efforts by midwesterners got paragraph after paragraph if not page after page. An especially odd thing given that his coauthor was a Portlander. Gender issues in the areas he was working in were addressed, but in an odd tone. One that would fit well in a 1980's Mormon document trying to show that, no, we're not racist at all. Never were. And some of his actions in the mountains just somehow didn't sit right with me. Didn't quite match what I had heard from mountaineers and other people who had been there about what was possible, viable, advisable.

But, well, I've never really even been out of America's big cities. Certainly never really spent time overseas. Maybe I was wrong. I'm just a techie and publishing guy. What would I know?

So I asked around a bit. And I've got to admit the details escape me at the moment. Well, other than my sources being able to rattle off half a dozen agencies getting more schools built with far less fanfare. Or the mahooah I already knew he was spouting about the availability of earthquake-resistant building techniques. Or the presumption that nobody could have been expected to notice the massive fraud his later "partner" was pulling off as his first big third round funding came in. Or the details of his "lucky" chat with Congresswoman Bono and the military connections thereof.

I've spent plenty of time in my life around the charismatic leaders of do-gooder organizations, from senior officials in the Salvation Army to managers of anarchist community centers, and they all have a certain vibe to them, to some degree or other. A certain sense they give off of how much they're sanding off the serial numbers of other people's work to build their own legend or clouding up the record to cover up the shortcuts they've taken or making their agendas seem more in line with what the general public will find palatable. And I'm telling you that based on those two books and a bit of looking around I've done, Mortenson is over on the greasy-haired preacher end of the equation.

I'm telling you, eventually the honeymoon will end and left and right people will be distancing themselves from Greg Mortenson. And, crucially, making heavy pronouncements that "there was no way we could have known".

Yeah, well. I knew. And I'm just a crippled guy with no special access reading a couple of library books and making a few phone calls in a barely heated studio in a cheap part of town in a city far away indeed from the halls of power.

But even so, I'm telling you, don't believe the hype.

Landfills are the best mines of the future.

I'm finally seeing more proper mainstream coverage of the accelerating trend of mining "waste" for minerals. This N. Y. Times article is a pretty decent introduction. Thermal depolymerization, for one, always was presumed to base their long-term profit margins on this kind of thing. "Urban mines". I like the sound of that.

Not least of the implications of this is the inevitable event of people paying to buy mining rights to collections of what has previously been thrown away.

Now it seems to me that the kind of conventional mining industry approach the Japanese are using now is far from what may eventually become the norms. Far less brute force options may lie ahead. I've been saying for years that we will eventually see wormlike robots that will spend their days lying in the sun, charging, and their nights burrowing, eating their way through landfills and either simply leaving behind a more readily processed "soil" or themselves storing up valuable minerals, which are then left in little piles to be collected somehow. Another possibility is plants optimized to concentrate selected rare materials, just as some flowers do now, changing color as the contents of the soil they sit on varies, waiting to be picked and used as feedstock for further concentrating techniques.

There are many possibilities. And what they all have in common is that we should get used to thinking of what we now call "waste" as simply "matter out of place" as Burning Man people already do.

It's not waste once you start using it again.

Speaking of wind turbines

Okay, so this one has been drifting around in my head since high school. I keep thinking that any day now I'll come across it in some alternative energy article but the decades pass and I don't. Maybe I'm missing something obvious. Some lethal flaw. Maybe not.

Build a wing cross section. Just for this case let's say that it's two meters long and half a meter from leading edge to trailing edge. Just to keep it simple, the cross-section stays the same from left to right.

Place the wing parallel to the ground with a piston on each side. Put the whole thing on a turntable with a vertical wing above and below to keep the turntable facing into the wind. The wing points slightly downwards such that the wind will push the wing down, just as we've all learned from keeping one hand sticking out of the window of a moving car. The piston has a ratchet so it can go down but not up. As time passes, the wing will push the piston down to the end of its range of travel.

Now it reaches the bottom.

SNAP!

The ratchets realign and the wing does too. Now the wing points slightly up, so the wind will push it to the top of the range of travel of the piston. Up it goes until it reaches the top.

SNAP!

And back down. And up. Forever and ever. Or at least until it breaks.

I'm simplifying the mechanism to explain what it does. Obviously, the whole thing could use chains or cables instead of pistons, the ratchets can be done without in plenty of variants as long as the wing can realign, etc., etc., etc.

So, there are plenty of wind turbine designs out there already. Why should anybody care about this one?

A - Done right, it should be almost silent. Even the realignment can be muffled. In fact, the wing can be built of fabric or something equally plastic and the realignment done just by shifting cable tensions. Motion, typically, can be set to be slow, almost drifty. It's all about how you tweak the pressures needed, ratcheting, and so on.

B - It can be horizontal, not vertical. No complaints when put on a rooftop that it's ruining everybody's view.

C - it can happily sit in intermittent wind of changing speed and direction, blithely pushing up and down, up and down, a simple little pump that just keeps generating power or pumping water or what have you, no matter if it's a quiet spring day or a hurricane. Yield will change but it won't need to shut down or, if built right, get damaged by high winds.

D - It can be built of inexpensive materials. Simply. Any airplane modeler knows how to build a wing. In fact, most of it, including the pistons, pump, etc. can in many cases be built of surplus. Just to test this, I built a test section of wing with steel guide rods back around '88 and it was just as simple as I had expected it to be. Fiberglass from Canal Plastics for the skin. Cut pieces of MDF for the supports. Doped with whatever I had sitting around. I stuck to a 90 degree realignment so the ends of the guide rods were, woo-hoo, squares. No biggie.

Of course, one could spend the rest of one's life coming up with eccentric gears and cogs and sprockets for variations on the beastie but afaic, that's a feature, not a bug.

Just a simple design for a wind turbine. Simple, low profile, almost silent. Suited to cities and areas with more handcrafters than money. I would love to see it start turning up in cities. And over the shops of ambitious auto mechanics in countries most of us haven't even heard of.

Anyway, make of it what you will. There it is.

 

-Rustin

 

If you want to know about what's going on in Haiti, then you really should ask some Haitians.

I know that the earthquake and resulting several crises in Haiti have a lot of us struggling for answers or at least a better sense of the variables. Like a lot of people I've gone to the sites of CNN, the Christian Science Monitor, and all the other usual suspects.

But some of the best perspective I've gotten has come from a little site called Haiti Exchange. They're not glossy or high tech but whatever you find there will be straght from Pascal Antoine and other people who know these subjects from the inside.

If you have the time, you might also want to visit the site of the U.S. Haitian Consulate. Plenty to see there or to find out about from there as well.

Let's all do the best that we can.

-Rustin

The best way to biofuels is gerrrrrms.

Over at the University of Texas, they're breeding bugs. Buuuugs.

Well, actually cyanobacteria, but "bugs" sounds better.

Anyway, what they're breeding for is bacteria that excrete sugars and easily processed forms of cellulose. Ones that can be readily converted to fuels.

What this means is more fuel created per acre, fuel created without using either land or fresh water that would otherwise be used for growing crops, and, let's not forget, a fuel creation means that can be done, at least on a small scale, in any frackin' wet place that can take the load and gets any sun. Not a lot of sun. Any sun. After all, Fresnel lenses and mirrors really are pretty cheap. So concentrating a whole bunch of sun on, say, squares of a Louisiana parking lot that is kept flooded with brackish water should work just fine. And, in some cases, it may even make sense to provide artificial or piped in supplementary light to areas that get lots of waste heat and will "feed" the microorganisms partially on that. Say, the area on top of a bakery.

It will take some expertise and effort and there will be lots of trial and error involved, but you get the idea.

We should note, however, that like most biofuels production means, this is fundamentally conversion of sunlight to high stored-energy organic compounds. In other words, the more sun per area, the more fuel produced. Seems to me that we're probably heading towards a time when biofuels are largely a thing produced in sunny places with long days, available "scrub" land, and plenty of water. Ideally water that's too salty or otherwise "low value" to be good for watering conventional crops. So my beloved Oregon will never be a good contender, east or west. Malaysia, otoh, may do very well, indeed, especially since they're already investing in biofuels infrastructure.

Another factor is that this looks like it will create yet another round of plantation agriculture. Look to see horrific worker abuses in the future from massive, corporate owned pond farms and tank complexes destroying human lives to cut that last tenth of a penny off their production costs.

I've written about related research before, most notably my note about gliocladium roseum. Now that microbiologists understand what to look for and breed I suspect that we'll be seeing hundreds of species of microorganism being put forward, which is wonderful.

In fact, I wonder if the best solution for most people will turn out to be some "cocktail" of several microorganisms so as to keep the tanks more resistant to changing conditions and better able to fight off unwanted "intruder" microorganisms coming in and bullying out the desired ones. After all, we're seeing folks breed bugs for maximum energy retention, which, by definition means that that they're, shall we say, kinda fat, and therefore, not up to fighting off less aggressive energy burners.

A tank of the organisms we want are kinda like a village full of couchpotatoes who just sit around and eat steak and cheesecake all day. Steak and cheesecake that we provide. People chosen precisely because they were the ones who moved around least and got the fattest. So what happens when a bunch of Mike Tyson and Bad Xena bugs decide that they want some of that steak and cheesecake?

So I'm guessing that corporations will go for their usual monoculture bullshit, complete with expensive and resource hungry "narrow range" control while homebrewers will discover a community of various bugs that may not yield as high (in theory) as the "pure" cultures of the corporate tanks but will be a lot more tolerant of the occasional intrusion of uncleaned air, water, and food.

But what's the bottom line? In about five years we can expect to see significant fuel production coming from tailored microorganisms. In about another three it should be enough to have a significant economic and international policy impact. In fifteen (if we all survive that long as a society), we should see petrochemical producers getting caught moving beyond disinformation (like the recent Exxon takeover of a biofuels study group such that it then announced that biofuels just weren't practical) to flat out sabotage.

Because by then they should be running scared.

-Rustin