Google's Buzz Screw Up Reveals a 'Childlike' View of Society

Having only recently cleaned the merde off their shoes from the Google China embarrassment,  here they are stepping in it all over again with Buzz.

What exactly have they done ?    Keen to join the 'social networking' mainstream they launched Buzz - an easy-to-get started network, linked to Gmail (Googlemail) accounts.   Their mistake was to by default make up a "starting friends list" based on the most frequently mailed parties in your Gmail address book (stored on their servers, of course).  

This meant that new users trying it out,  found that lots of people they communicated with using Gmail were unexpectedly introduced to each other by appearing in the user's network.    A recent interviewer described reaction as ranging from "furious" to "extremely furious".  

This is no surprise,  as the gurus of social networking - across all the networks - fail to recognise a simple reality of grown-up relationships :  adults have networks of friends and contacts, yes, but we don't automatically "pool" them all as one - there are a host of reasons why we don't wish everyone in our circle to know everyone else.  

The simplest reason for this is business:  many of us associate and socialise at whatever level, with people we do business with:  but I certainly don't want all my suppliers,  to know who my customers are:  nor frankly do I want all my suppliers to know about each other - that changes my relationship with them radically.    

This is true of course in personal relations too - one alarming concern instantly raised with Google over Buzz, was the potential number of women with past abusive partners, who might now be provided with information about their new partners and friends and so cause new trouble or threats.  

The root cause of Google's pratfall over this is simple : social network sites like Facebook, Twitter and the like all started life in the innocent, simple society of students:  indeed Facebook takes its very name from the Harvard fresher's introduction book.   But students are at a time of life when they are happy developing a big pool of 'mates' :  they're early in life and so free of relationship baggage, and have few worries about what people read about them.    Those of us a few years further down the track know that revealing everything about  yourself online is very far from a wise route.   Perhaps over time these networks will 'grow up' enough to be useful to the adults. 

Accept it, Carbon Reduction is a Lost Cause: 2

Monday 7th December 2009:   "Copenhagen summit urged to take climate change action".

Yvo de Boer there tells us encouragingly that an unprecendented number of new countries are pitching in with positive action  -  like South Africa:  they've promised to  "reduce the rate of growth of carbon emissions by a third in the next decade".    

Did you you spot that ?   "reduce the rate of growth of  ... carbon emissions  ... by a third...".     Oh goody - so instead of their emissions increasing steeply as industry develops, they'll only now grow two-thirds as steeply.    Excellent.   Lots more toxic smog,  just two-thirds of the amount of extra smog toxic per annum, that was previously contemplated.  

It's this kind of double-talk  -  like China's new reductions in "carbon intensity"  -  i.e. increasing carbon emissions annually, but at a rate a bit less than industrial output grows   -  that devalues this whole enterprise.  

It's clear - and it's absolutely no surprise at all  -  that given every chance to look "green" while sidestepping the real, difficult action needed to actually reduce emissions from current or even 1990 levels,  every slippery politician on the planet will take the easy route.   From here on, expect to hear about a lot of  "...reduced rates [of growth].. of emissions.."  and "reduced carbon intensities".   All the way to the cosmic ashcan.  

Kyoto was meant to be committment to hard reductions targeted up to 2012.   The Americans trashed that by turning their back on it.   Now here they are again stitching up a deal to point onward to .... where ? 2020 ?   No doubt at that stage more brows will be furrowed, and more earnest calls to action made - in a scheme probably then targeting 2050. 

Obama has found a new way to insult the process, much more elegant in form that George Bush's  "we will do nothing that will damage the American economy".  He's going to pop in to Copenhagen...   but just for one day.   Then a little light shopping for gifts and off back home.     How more completely could he damage this event except by staying away altogether. 

Perhaps the subject will begin being taken seriously when Obama's and Hu Jin Tao's ankles start getting wet.   

Accept it, Carbon Reduction is a Lost Cause: 1

India today reveals their "carbon reduction" plans for the decade ahead and, big surprise, they've borrowed China's bright idea of "carbon intensity".    Never heard that term before last week, did we ?  the trick being to define "carbon intensity" as your carbon emission per unit of GDP : thus neatly allowing industry to claim earnest best efforts in eco-sensitivity while keeping on growing and belching smoke.

This neat ecological hip-swivel allows grimy economies to go boldly on growing, provided the new industries are just a little less stinky that the ones which grew in previous decades... not hard, really.

And overall ?  it is just another confirmation that carbon emission reduction, as a general premise for supposedly saving the planet, is just not going to happen.

That truly is the reality : the 'BRICs' economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China) - who together have half the population of earth within their borders - are going to enjoy their own industrial revolution this century : and there just will not be the political will to give anything more than lip-service to the idea of reducing carbon emission radically.

For those of us not just recently out of the nest, this is old news: it was plain in the 1970's that we were on the road to gently wrecking the atmosphere and the time to have started doing something about it was then : it's just too late now.   Modern economies hose carbon into the atmosphere like cash into a wall street [b]anker's wallet and they are not about to cease doing so.

And Joe Public doesn't have the will either : to really cut back on our emissions, would mean closing down most of our productive industry and reverting our mode of living back to the eighteenth century: it's just not going to happen.   There are six thousand million of us seething like locusts on this planet, everyone loving their modern appliances and cars and warm homes.  Want to save some energy ?  put on a thick sweater and turn the heat down.   Is that going to happen in middle America ?  No.   Is China going to stop building power stations ?   No.   Is Brazil going to stop industrialising ?   No.   Is India ?   No.



SO : if carbon truly is a lost cause, what then ?    Well we will have to adapt, that is all.

Adaptation is the real option (and one we could be getting on with now instead of the political time-wasting over carbon which will go on for the next decade or two).   Yes the temperatures will shift a bit (they do anyway).    Yes the water levels will rise a bit, and some island nations will have to move.    Yes some coastal regions of Europe and North America will flood a bit (stop press !  house price drama in southern England .... ).    JUST GET OVER IT.  

Later, when it is patently obvious our options for fixing the problem are nothing to do with dreaming hopelessly that the world will fall out of love with energy,  there will be some practical answers : some quiet scientists have already been looking at ways of altering the opacity of the upper atmosphere and actually reducing the amount of incident solar heat in a practial way.   Politicians will dismiss these ideas as crackpot for a few more decades - because they find it easier to waste a few hundred billion on pointless wars than on actually building the industries that really could do something useful toward fixing some of these problems.

And what is the most exasperating aspect of this collective governmental stupidity ?  If instead of wasting two or three hundred billion dollars on the illegal invasion of Iraq, America and the west had spent that money on fusion research,  we would by now have cracked that difficult but marvellous technology.    By now we would be beginning to deploy that final, clean electricity generation technology which will be the one which finally allows us to stop emitting carbon.