"Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened."

Good-Enough

I have stumbled over a few recent instances of high concept ‘good enough’ thinking.

Good-enough marriage:

[via Elizabeth Weil, Married (Happily) With Issues]

In psychiatry, the term “good-enough mother” describes the parent who loves her child well enough for him to grow into an emotionally healthy adult. The goal is mental health, defined as the fortitude and flexibility to live one’s own life — not happiness. This is a crucial distinction. Similarly the “good-enough marriage” is characterized by its capacity to allow spouses to keep growing, to afford them the strength and bravery required to face the world.

In the end, I settled on this vision of marriage, felt the logic of applying myself to it. Maybe the perversity we all feel in the idea of striving at marriage — the reason so few of us do it — stems from a misapprehension of the proper goal. In the early years, we take our marriages to be vehicles for wish fulfillment: we get the mate, maybe even a house, an end to loneliness, some kids. But to keep expecting our marriages to fulfill our desires — to bring us the unending happiness or passion or intimacy or stability we crave — and to measure our unions by their capacity to satisfy those longings, is naïve, even demeaning. Of course we strain against marriage; it’s a bound canvas, a yoke.

And a good enough revolution in consumer products:

[via Robert Capps, The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine]

The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they’re actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as “high-quality.”

And it’s happening everywhere. As more sectors connect to the digital world, from medicine to the military, they too are seeing the rise of Good Enough tools like the Flip. Suddenly what seemed perfect is anything but, and products that appear mediocre at first glance are often the perfect fit.

The good news is that this trend is ideally suited to the times. As the worst recession in 75 years rolls on, it’s the light and nimble products that are having all the impact—exactly the type of thing that lean startups and small-scale enterprises are best at. And from impact can come big sales. “When the economy went south before Christmas last year, we worried that sales would be affected,” says Pure Digital’s Fleming-Wood. “But we sold a ton of cameras. In fact, we exceeded the goals we had set before the economy soured.” And this year? Sales, he says, are up 200 percent. (Another payoff: In May, networking giant Cisco acquired Pure Digital for $590 million.)

To some, it looks like the crapification of everything. But it’s really an improvement. And businesses need to get used to it, because the Good Enough revolution has only just begun.

If you think of marriage as a social service that married couples provide each other, maybe it is a single trend? Maybe they all stem from an appreciation that something else is the higher goal — not the camera, not the married state — and that these intermediaries are merely the means to some other end.

Today, Boliva; Tomorrow, California

The destabilizing impacts of disappearing glaciers are enormous, as the events unfolding in Bolivia show:

[via Elisabeth Rosenthal In Bolivia, Water and Ice Tell of Climate Change]

[…]

The glaciers that have long provided water and electricity to this part of Bolivia [the city of El Alto] are melting and disappearing, victims of global warming, most scientists say.

If the water problems are not solved, El Alto, a poor sister city of La Paz, could perhaps be the first large urban casualty of climate change. A World Bank report concluded last year that climate change would eliminate many glaciers in the Andes within 20 years, threatening the existence of nearly 100 million people.

[…]

Scientists say that money and engineering could solve La Paz-El Alto’s water problems, with projects including a well-designed reservoir. The glaciers that ring the cities have essentially provided natural low-maintenance storage, collecting water in the short rainy season and releasing it for water and electricity in the long dry one. With warmer temperatures and changing rainfall, they no longer do so.

“The effects are appearing much more rapidly than we can respond to them, and a reservoir takes five to seven years to build. I’m not sure we have that long,” said Edson Ramírez, a Bolivian glaciologist who has documented and projected the glaciers’ retreat for two decades.

The retreat has outpaced his wildest dreams. He had predicted that one glacier, Chacaltaya, would last until 2020. It disappeared this year. .

But global warming alone cannot be blamed for the longstanding woes of this exotic but desperately poor landlocked country, where per capita income is around $1,000. Urban water supplies are also taxed by population growth as well as checkered management, in part because there is little money to manage anything, but also because the government nationalized the water company a few years ago, having declared water a human right. El Alto still does not employ a full-time water technician.

[…]

In fact, when taps dried up in Celia Cruz’s neighborhood, the Solidarity District of El Alto, rich La Paz residents still had water. In a nation that has rallied behind socialist rhetoric and indigenous rights, there were complaints. “The sense of injustice is palpable,” said Edwin Chuquimia Vélez, an official in El Alto formerly in charge of water.

Glaciers are part of the majestic landscape here, visible from almost everywhere in the neighboring cities of La Paz and El Alto, each with one million people. Their disappearance from certain vistas is as startling to Bolivians as the absence of the twin towers is to New Yorkers.

Chacaltaya, at 17,500 feet, was the world’s highest ski area from 1939 until 2005, when the glacier retreated beyond the slopes. The lodge, still stocked with rental gear and decorated with ski murals, sits mostly abandoned.

Though all glaciers expand and retreat over time, recent research has found that small, relatively low-altitude glaciers, like those in Bolivia, are particularly vulnerable to warming temperatures, a phenomenon that glaciologists compare to the fate of small ice cubes in water.

[…]

In the last few years, Bolivian lives have also been buffeted by an almost biblical array of extreme weather events, many of which scientists believe are probably linked to climate change. — though this is currently difficult to prove because poor countries like Bolivia have little long-term scientific data. This year brought scorching temperatures and intense sun. A drought killed 7,000 farm animals and sickened nearly 100,000.

Severe storms normally associated with El Niño periods, every seventh year, now occur regularly. Warmer temperatures mean new crop pests — crickets and worms — as well as diseases like malaria and dengue fever.

[…]

This year, the last days of November provided a bit of wet relief — the rainy season had started, about a month later than usual. The pipe outside Ms. Cruz’s house started running.

But the rain that had added ice to the glaciers now often just increases their runoff, because it is too warm to freeze anymore.

“Right now we’re living on additional glacier melt that won’t be here in a few years,” said Mr. Hoffmann, of the climate change program. “Isn’t that ironic?”

This is very similar to what is happening in California. As the snow pack decreases because of warmer winters, there is significantly less runoff in the spring and summer, which leads to increasing contention over water. There is no real ‘answer’ except a decrease in population and movement of water-intensive businesses (like agriculture) out of the drying region.

In the case of Bolivia, that would translate to climate refugees. In the US, it is still an opportunity for sensible policies to gradually adjust, but I fear that the opposite will happen: a growing, acrimonious battle over water between agriculture and industry on one side, and large municipalities on the other.

One of the reasons I left San Francisco for the (wetter) East Coast.

There Is No ‘Humane’ Execution

[via NY Times, There Is No ‘Humane’ Execution]

Since 1973, 139 people have been released from death row because of evidence that they were innocent.

This is madness.

Through The Looking Glass

[via Paul Krugman, Disaster and Denial]

Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.

In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” As Democrats have pointed out, three days before the House vote on banking reform Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies. But it also reflects the extent to which the modern Republican Party is committed to a bankrupt ideology, one that won’t let it face up to the reality of what happened to the U.S. economy.

Kruman has hopes that the Democrats are not living in a similarly warped parallel dimension to ours, but I am less optimistic. 27 Democratic lawmakers crossed the aisle to vote down recent efforts to reregulate the banks, and Obama is under the spell of Wall Street wizards.

"And if the money really is gone, there will be a significant demographic shift within the expatriates who constitute the majority of the population. We all come here for the money. Some choose to stay for the lifestyle, some for the lack of a better alternative. Many see life in Dubai as a welcome break from civic responsibility; the expat can skim the surface, cream off the good, ignore the bad, live the dream. As long as there’s an economy to speak of. If that fails, you have to leave. No work, no visa, goodbye."

These Days by Jackson Brown

Well I’ve been out walking
I don’t do that much talking these days
These days—
These days I seem to think a lot
About the things that I forgot to do
For you
And all the times I had the chance to

And I had a lover
It’s so hard to risk another these days
These days—
Now if I seem to be afraid
To live the life I have made in song
Well it’s just that I’ve been losing so long

I’ll keep on moving
Things are bound to be improving these days
These days—
These days I sit on corner stones
And count the time in quarter tones to ten, my friend
Don’t confront me with my failures
I had not forgotten them

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

San Marino

[via San Marino - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

The Most Serene Republic of San Marino /ˌsæn məˈriːnoʊ/ (help·info) (Italian: Serenissima Repubblica di San Marino) is a country situated in the Apennine Mountains. It is a landlocked enclave, completely surrounded by Italy. Its size is just over 60 km² with an estimated population of almost 30000. Its capital is the City of San Marino. One of the European microstates along with Liechtenstein, the Vatican, Monaco, Andorra, and Malta, San Marino has the smallest population of all the members of the Council of Europe.

San Marino is the oldest recorded sovereign state and constitutional republic in the world, having been founded on 3 September 301 by stonecutter Marinus of Rab. Legend has it that Marinus left Rab, then a Roman colony, in 257 when the future emperor, Diocletian, issued a decree calling for the reconstruction of the city walls of Rimini, which had been destroyed by Liburnian pirates.^[3]

The constitution of San Marino, enacted in 1600, is the world’s oldest constitution still in effect.^[4]

I think I want to emigrate. I will look into that.

"I think the guitar solo in ‘Whole Lotta Love’ is possibly some of the greatest notes ever put on tape. I had a cassette of that when I was seven, and I rewound it so many times there was nothing left. I still have that feeling when I hear that song on the radio. There’s something incredibly explosive there."