Although the title of this piece derives from the antepenultimate sentence of The Communist Manifesto, it is a phrase that has long occupied the back of my mind when thinking about the future of telework. Specifically, what would happen to the growth rate of telework if all workers had portable health care and pension plans?
I suspect that the numbers of teleworkers—particularly telecommuters—would quickly show a major increase. If your are dissatisfied with your job, and you have marketable skills and experience, what is holding you back from changing it? Continue reading …nothing to lose but their chains→
Past 100 dollars US per barrel of oil, that is. I made the forecast to some friends early this year that we would see $100 oil by the end of this year. It seems that that day has arrived—or shortly will arrive. Apparently the message of ever higher-priced oil is finally beginning to penetrate the global mind. Not a minute too soon.
As one indicator, the Tokyo auto show, just ended, had a number of green cars in it. These included a 400kg plug-in hybrid Toyota 1/X and an innovative all-electric Nissan Pivo with a 360-degree revolving cabin and wheels that can turn 90 degrees to slide directly into parking places. Of course, you can’t actually buy one of these yet. Maybe in a few years.
So what can you do now while gas prices continue their inexorable climb and the interest portion of your adjustable-rate mortgage follows suit? Continue reading Blowing past 100→
For those of you who have been wondering, the military action in Iraq is really about oil, not Weapons of Mass Destruction. It must be true because Alan Greenspan wrote it in his recently released book, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. Ordinarily I try to refrain from posting statements related to politics in this blog, but this one was just too much for someone interested in long term sustainability. In this case, the issue definitely emphasizes the need for decreased worldwide dependence on oil.
Not only that, but the world could do with a lot less of the hypocrisy prevalent in political (and other) circles. As an example of American hypocrisy, George Lakoff editorializes in Truthout:
One of the persistent problems of teleworking, for those telecommuters and other teleworkers who have multiple “offices”, is keeping files synchronized between locations. In the earlier days of telecommuting we even had one telecommuter who dragged file drawers from the main office, put them in the car trunk, and trundled the whole works home the evening before starting a telecommuting day. Well, now there’s a better way, at least for Windows users.
One of the factors we don’t explicitly calibrate when we evaluate telecommuting programs is the health benefit of staying off the road. Well, we do actually assess a benefit in terms of the days of sick leave not taken by telecommuters (roughly 2 days annually less than non-telecommuters). But, thanks to an article in Forbes.com (and a tip from our colleague in Buenos Aires) you can assess your own health risks if you’re still commuting frequently.
Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times on July 23rd, made the point that, thanks to regulatory policy over the past 7 years, the US has dropped from being the world leader in per capita access to the Internet to somewhere past 10th place, depending on the details. The reason? The big phone and cable companies have been allowed to stifle the growth of bandwidth available and overcharge the customers of Internet services.
As several of my posts have noted, oil is by no means an infinite resource. Although oil has some very positive characteristics, such as its utility for all sorts of transportation applications, there are definite downsides as well. These include: Continue reading Going up?→
Recently, Eric Britton of ecoplan (and the dynamo behind the Kyoto World Cities 20/20 Challenge) asked some of us for comments regarding possible long-term energy policy issues and options. His specific request was:
Given what you know about the long term needs, trends and prospects, (and please do specify a bit, is that out to 2020, 2030, 2050 and/or beyond), would you help us to understand what you think governments and policy makers at various levels, the key industrial and financial groups, and others should be concentrating their attention on in the next 3-4 years, say from 2007 to 2010?
What got me started investigating telecommuting in the 1970s was snarled traffic. As LA’s population grew so did the traffic jams. We all looked forward to the opening of a new freeway between home and work. It was only later, sometimes as soon as a few months, that we learned, or relearned, Parkinson’s Law of freeways: Traffic grows to clog the roads available. Over a period of three decades it always seemed to take half an hour to forty minutes to get to the office 16 miles (26 km) away, regardless of the number of “improvements” in the freeways. Now, of course, a forty-minute commute is on a good day. That is, it would be if I were still commuting. The snarls keep increasing.
Roughly two decades ago, when I was still in charge of the Information Technology Program of the Center for Futures Research at the University of Southern California, my associate, Omar El Sawy, and I cooked up a seminar for prospective entrepreneurs. Omar called the seminar project UNAIMIT, an acronym whose meaning I have forgotten. The idea was to engage the seminar attendees into developing a plan for a new technology-based business. We decided that the fledgling business would be a custom, high tech shoe factory.
The technology twist was that there would be a small laser scanner that would develop a 3 dimensional computer model of the prospective shoe purchaser’s feet. This model would then be sent to another computer that would select the shoe components, shapes, colors and sizes in accordance with the model and the customer’s fashion decisions. An automated, customized, guaranteed-to-fit pair of shoes would be produced at an affordable price! The engineering details would be handled after the seminar.
