This should blow Robert J. Samuelson's mind: Nokia has introduced a cellphone with a bicycle-powered generator.
This is pretty cool. I can imagine some upscale Americans buying such a thing in an effort to reduce their carbon footprint, but that's not who this is designed for. The new Nokia Bicycle Charger Kit is being released, first, in Kenya.
This is a cellphone for the poor. It's designed to meet the needs, and budgets, of people who live where electricity is unreliable or just plain unavailable. Which is to say, in sheer numbers, most people.
Most products aren't designed to be affordable or usable for most people because most people — the largest chunk of the 7 billion or so of us living here — are kind of short on disposable income. They are, in other words, poor.
"Build a better mousetrap," the saying goes, "and the world will beat a path to your door." But that's not really true if your mousetrap is priced and designed so that most of the world can't afford it. If you've created a $499 laser-guided, GPS-assisted, 4-G mousetrap with built-in video-editing capability it may be the coolest, better-est mousetrap of all time, but the percentage of the world that can afford beating a path to your door will at best be only a small slice.
Build an affordable, sustainable mousetrap, though, and you'll be able to sell many millions more of them.
Sure, products designed for poorer people will always involve much lower profit-margins and will likely involve a lot more effort to market and distribute. But the pool of prospective buyers may be a million times larger, and that has to count for something.
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Vandalism confuses me. Theft I understand. Predatory
violence or graft or the abuse of power I can grasp the logic of. But
vandalism is a crime with no upside. Rob a bank and you might get caught
and be sent to prison, but you also might get away with a lot of money.
Commit vandalism and you might be caught and sent to prison, but you
might also … what, exactly? Why commit a crime that doesn't stand to benefit you at all?
As with crimes, so with sins. Gluttony has its pleasures, as do sloth, lust, greed. But pure spite, baseless hatred for hatred's sake, seems to offer no upside, not even the counterfeit pleasures those other sins seem to promise. How is such a thing, in any way, tempting? What's the attraction?
Roger Ebert asks those same questions in this lovely response to a horrifically unlovely story from Prescott, Ariz. The story, in brief, is that an elementary school painted a mural of some of the students at the school and some of those students were not white.
R.E. Wall, director of Prescott's Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town's most prominent intersections.
"We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars," Wall said. "We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of [epithet for Blacks] and [epithet for Hispanics]."
… City Councilman Steve Blair spearheaded a public campaign on his talk show at Prescott radio station KYCA-AM (1490) to remove the mural.
In a broadcast last month, according to the Daily Courier in Prescott, Blair mistakenly complained that the most prominent child in the painting is African-American, saying: "To depict the biggest picture on the building as a black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?"
Here's Ebert:
Not along ago I read this observation by Clint Eastwood: "The less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice." Do the drive-by haters feel insecure? How are they threatened? What have they talked themselves into? Who benefits by feeding off their fear? We have a black man in the White House, and I suspect they don't like that very much. They don't want to accept the reality that other races live here right along with them, and are doing just fine and making a contribution and the same sun rises and sets on us all. Do they fear their own adequacy? Do they grasp for assurance that they're "better" — which means, not worse? Those poor people. It must be agony to live with such hate, and to seek the company of others so damaged.
I have, for some time, been trying to figure out the answers to those questions. Ebert frames those questions in such a way as to show what he guesses the answers may be, and I suspect his guesses are right, but like him I can't really do more than offer my best guess. "To live with such hate" must, indeed, be agony, so why do it? Seriously, where's the upside? What's the attraction?
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Speaking of lovely responses to unlovely things, Sam K. pointed me toward this video of a Kansas choir performing Melissa Dunphy's composition "What do you think I fought for at Omaha Beach?"
The words are from Philip Spooner of Maine. You may not remember his name, but I hope you remember his testimony last spring before his state's legislature in support of marriage equality:
I am here today because of a conversation I had last June when I was voting. A woman … asked me, "Do you believe in equality for gay and lesbian people?" I was pretty surprised to be asked a question like that. It made no sense to me. Finally I asked her, "What do you think I fought for at Omaha Beach?"
For freedom and equality. These are the values that make America a great nation, one worth dying for.
My wife and I did not raise four sons with the idea that our gay son would be left out. We raised them all to be hard-working, proud and loyal Americans. And they all did good.
Dunphy's choral setting of those words is almost beautiful enough to do them justice. Sadly, the voters of Maine didn't find those words persuasive. Yet.
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And finally here's one more unlovely thing still awaiting an appropriate response: "Urquhart backs off Hitler remarks after video surfaces."
Republican congressional candidate Glen Urquhart on Thursday backed away from comments he made at a GOP candidates forum in April after a video clip of the statement emerged this week on YouTube.
In the 39-second clip, filmed in a Greenwood barn, Urquhart says the originator of the phrase "separation of church and state" was Adolf Hitler. And he seems to equate proponents of the idea with the same ideology Hitler imposed in World War II.
"The next time your liberal friends ask you about the separation of church and state, ask them why they are Nazis," Urquhart says to the audience.
(Here is where I would usually sum up my reaction with some kind of pithy kicker, but I can't seem to think of any that don't involve lots of profanity.)
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