In the article, Stein points out that hedge fund managers, who make millions upon millions of dollars each year, have found tax loopholes that enable them to tax their payments under a 15% capital gains tax rate, instead of the normal tax rate most Americans pay on their income. If you make between between 31,850 – 77,100, your 2007 tax rate is 25%. This means that the middle class is paying a disproportionate amount of their incomes to the, which Stein correctly points out we appear to be losing, while the rich pay a lower proportional tax on their income. Now, you can look at that and still say that the richer among us are still paying more in taxes overall, I believe that everyone should have to play by the same rules. As it stands now, those with more money to spend on higher priced accountants get rewarded by paying fewer taxes. That just doesn’t seem right to me. Does it to you?

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Small, buzzing bees. They bothered you at your picnics when you were a kid. You never really took much notice of them, until one day, they started to disappear. Sounds like science fiction, right? Well believe it or not, bees all over the country have been disappearing at an alarming rate over the past 6 months.

Dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, by scientists, this phenomenon is leading to millions upon millions of honey bees mysteriously dying. Well, big deal, you say.. I really don’t like the bees anyway! Many people aren’t aware of this, but the bees ability to pollinate crops is absolutely crucial to the entire agricultural industry in the United States. Crops such as apples, almonds, cotton, onions, broccoli, carrots, sunflowers, cantaloupe and honeydew melons are pollinated a majority of the time by honey bees. Without the bees, the crops don’t get pollinated, and therefore the fruit won’t grow. This creates a problem for not only farmers, but consumers as well. Some fruits may start to see slight increases in price as the lack of bees affects the production numbers across the board.

The CCD phenomenon has been reported in some 30 odd states across the country, with more and more states chiming in to report a strange loss of the bees as well. It has even been reported abroad in countries such as Canada, India, Brazil, and some regions in Europe as well. The House Subcommittee on Horticulture and Agriculture even held a hearing on March 29, 2007 to try and flesh out the exact nature of the problem and some potential solutions. The most interesting part is that in most cases the bees never even come back to their hives – they just disappear.

There are several theories as to why this is happening, including lack of genetic diversity, contamination of their environment, disease, or a combination. The most interesting theory, in my humble opinion, is that the proliferation of mobile phones may be to blame. Scientists from Landau University have done a study whereby they placed a cell phone near a bee colony, and the bees refused to return to that colony. They believe that the radiation may be interfering with the bees navigational systems.

Another facet of this problem that you should be concerned about is the financial aspect of it all. What if the major agri-businesses saw huge losses in most of their crops? What if you were invested in those companies – would your portfolio take a big hit because of the lack of bees? Now you may think that I’m just over-exaggerating everything, but to be honest I really am concerned. Not only are the small farmers all the way up to the major company farms at risk, so are all the companies and people along the supply chain. We have done so much damage to the planet in recent times that things may be slowly falling apart around us. I hope that some solutions crop up to help deal with the loss of these bees and hopefully reverse the slow deaths of such large numbers of colonies, but only time will tell.

For further reading, you might want to check out GNN’s excellent article, “Please Lord, not the bees”, or the Wikipedia entry on Colony Collapse Disorder.

Second Life is the more established of the two (Yes I’m ignoring There and a few other worlds, there’s no time man!), so let’s look at SL first. The blog Second Life Insider tracks the daily movements of money on Second Life, and for April 26th $1.2 million US dollars were spent, and $30,000 of stock was traded on the WSE (World Stock Exchange). Wow. That is unbelievable. Where do they come up with those numbers, you ask? On the Second Life’s official Economic Statistics page, of course! Those numbers alone should make businesses stop and take pause, if nothing else.

What are the business uses of Second Life? Well since everything is user created, there is a market for clothing, items, and other do-dads that have been designed by builders. Several shopping websites have been setup, that can take dollars, transfer them to Lindens (The official currency of Second Life), pay them to the seller, then facilitate the transfer of the purchased item to the Second Life user in-world. One example of these is SL Exchange. One interesting item would be the Virtual Reality Room, which in essence is just like the Holodeck on every nerd’s favorite show, Star Trek. It allows you to load up any type of environment you can think of, just like a Holodeck. Wired evan wrote an article entitled “Second Life’s Must-Have Stuff”, so people are definitely making money that way. Even American Apparel is getting into the clothing on Second Life act, opening up a store in the Linden Labs world.

Besides offering goods, one can offer services. This is where most of the companies are currently making inroads into Second Life. For instance, H & R Block even bought its own island and created a “virtual tax experience” where people can go for free tax information. They can also purchase a discounted version of the company’s “Tango” product. I prefer swing dancing, myself.

So who else has shown up? Scion released a virtual car into Second Life to promote itself, along with Pontiac and Toyota. Coldwell Bankers has entered Second Life in an effort to get into the online real estate business. This really is serious stuff, and companies are spending a lot of money to get things going online, although it pales in comparison to traditional advertising outlets. Maybe that’s why it’s so popular! (As of today, the LindeX (the online currency exchange over at Second Life) shows a ratio of 267 Lindens to every dollar. Pretty soon Second Life is going to have a GDP that will rival small countries!)

Sony’s Playstation Home has yet to be released, so I’ll just be touching on it briefly. It’s scheduled for release in Fall of 2007, and will be available as a free download for PS3 owners. In Second Life, you must pay a monthly fee to own any land; I wonder if Home will be the same. Right now, the biggest difference to me is the space in which you enjoy each virtual environment. Second Life is only available for computers, and as such is usually enjoyed in the comfort of your bedroom (or maybe the family room if that’s where your computer lies), whereas Home will be used in a PS3, and as such will be proudly displayed on the biggest television in the house. Why would you do that, you ask? Well it just so happens that Sony plans to make movies available for download directly within the Home environment. So you could be hanging out with all your friends online, then all decide to watch a movie, and it would immediately be streamed to everyone’s televisions, so you could all enjoy the movie simultaneously. Who really notices the person next to you in a movie theater anyways? (Unless you just needed a place to get away from Mom and Dad so you could make out with your new girlfriend).

The key question is, how does Sony plan to make money off of this, because of course money drives our wonderful capitalistic society. Turns out that they plan to lease space to companies, which can then offer their own games or products or services or whatever, but Sony has been curiously quiet about which companies have signed up and how many there really are. Now I’m sure businesses will be lining up at the door to target that ever-so-hard-to-reach 13-21 year old male market that spends gobs of money on video games every year (Incidentally, a study by the Wall Street Journal found that more money had been spent on video games than movie theater tickets over the past two years, to the tune of $8.9 billion versus $7.3 billion in box offices receipts), but what will their capabilities be? In Second Life, users can use a scripting language to create anything, but it remains to be seen whether Home will be that open and available to either companies or users. Honestly, I know of not a single friend that owns the PS3, and although I have heard of people buying it simply because it’s a cheap blu-ray disc player, I wonder if this will help Sony with PS3 sales, or if this is merely an effort to capitalize on a trend! Only time will tell…

In the end, online virtual worlds could become the next World Wide Web – what consumers will use when they go shopping for clothes, immersed in an online exotic locale before they take the leap to buy plane tickets to the real one, how they interact with their friends (This stuff makes Web 2.0 look so last year!), and maybe even how they met their husbands or wives. The potential is out there, unfortunately nobody knows what the best iteration will look like in ten years, so companies should really just hedge their bets and be everywhere, and that way when the next big thing hits the front cover of Time magazine, they’ll already have mastered it. And for you individuals, spend some time on either service and see if you feel comfortable building houses, selling clothes, running a detective agency (There really is one on Second Life!), and maybe it could become your hobby/business venture. You won’t know until you try.

Astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have observed that planetary systems – dusty disks of asteroids, comets and possibly planets – are at least as abundant in twin-star systems as they are in those, like our own, with only one star. Since more than half of all stars are twins, or binaries, the finding suggests the universe is packed with planets that have two suns. Sunsets on some of those worlds would resemble the ones on Luke Skywalker’s planet, Tatooine, where two fiery balls dip below the horizon one by one.

Now obviously the people over there at NASA have somewhat of an infatuation with Star Wars, as the press release is replete with pictures from the movie and references to the planet of Tatooine and its twin star system. That is a pretty amazing thing to contemplate – that a scene from a science fiction movie that was conceived specifically because of its impossibility in our world may actually turn out to be true. I wonder how many other things that have been depicted in science fiction movies as fiction are in fact closer to science. I also wonder how many scientists at NASA grew up watching Star Wars and Star Trek, and were influenced by the various films and tv shows. A documentary that appeared on the History channel entitled How William Shatner Changed The World featured a discussion with Martin Cooper, inventor of the cell phone, who said the design of Star Trek’s communicator was his inspiration for the cell phone.

The second is an post over at Mind hacks entitled Violence linked to price of beer, believe it or not. The post states

A research report published in Applied Economics has found that the number of patients with violence-related injuries treated in hospital emergency rooms is related to the price of beer.

Here is a direct link to the study for you to read yourself, if you don’t believe me (And I wouldn’t blame you). This is a very interesting thought, as I’m sure we are all aware that alcohol consumption can lead towards violence, but who would have thought that cheaper prices for beer can be directly linked to increased violence. The study concludes that a major policy consideration should be raising the price of alcohol to lower violence. Now of course this is done in England, but I’m sure that things aren’t too different here. Californians recently voted against Proposition 86 in last November’s election, which would have added a $2.60 tax increase to the price of cigarettes. Jennifer Friedman, a spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C. nonprofit Tobacco-Free Kids, stated “For every 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes, youth smoking is reduced by 7 percent. And overall cigarette consumption is reduced by 4 percent” (Link). Should we raise prices of alcohol and tobacco to keep people from being able to afford them? Is that a moral thing to do?

First off, before I begin this retort, I’d like to point out that there is a comment system setup for people to actually comment on my posts and start a discussion. And if you are going to write something like this, common courtesy would have you inform the writer so that he had the opportunity to respond to any criticisms. But I digress; I had to read about Adam’s post through the magic of Technorati. As soon as this is posted I’m going to leave a comment and send an email letting him know about my post.

He starts off with this statement, in response to when I wrote: Why is it when you put a random collection of people together the discussion inevitably shifts towards a baseline that all people can understand, and why in our society does that baseline revolve around celebrities, movies, and sports?

One: do those discussions inevitably shift towards a common baseline? Do they really? Is there never a time when people tell their personal stories, which the others enjoy but did not exactly partake of? Do conversations always go towards some general common denominator like the movies or sports? Seems like kind of a massive generalization to use as one’s starting assumption.

Two: even if it’s granted that there is a general tendency to go for the common denominator, how exactly does one demonstrate that a “baseline” “revolves” around sports or movies or celebrities or anything, for that matter? If this guy’s any indication, I guess you don’t–you just treat it as a given.

Well I don’t know Adam, they certainly have shifted towards a common baseline most of the time I see people interacting with one another. I do know that according to James Q. Wilson in The Moral Sense, “Just as Labradors are born to fetch, we are born to bond.” Obviously I have not done a rigorous study claiming either way, and since I don’t see any material published by you to the contrary, I have to assume that you are, in fact, simply giving your opinion. For further reading, perhaps you could read Dr. C. George Boeree’s discussion of Defensive Conformity, which “is usually brought on by social anxiety — fear of embarrassment, discomfort at confusion, a sense of inferiority, a desire to be liked, and so on.” Perhaps the discussions centering around topics globally uniform to our society is a form of defensive conformity within a group setting. Again, I speak of a baseline because I draw from personal experiences such as the night I referenced at the beginning of my post, when it seemed people were most comfortable interacting through stories and ideas revolving around such society-wide concepts as sports or celebrities.

Next, Adam talks about my discussion of corporations pushing products we don’t need to us in order to increase their bottom line and my contemplating of the effects on our economy if we didn’t wastefully consume at such an aggressive pace.

The fixation of some people on the “bottom line” and “profits” as if they were the prime mover of everything is kind of hilarious. So what, Ryle, the fact that a company will go out of business unless it makes a profit somehow compels consumers to feel the need to support those companies…or are you arguing that the companies have somehow brainwashed people into buying their products, something that would not occur if we didn’t live in this fictitious “consumption drive society” you’ve concocted? What exactly is a “consumption driven society”?

Well Adam, I personally do not feel as if the bottom line and profits should be the prime mover, but I believe the literature out there supports that it is. An article in the magazine Frontline entitled Capitalisism Recycled states, “Global business firms are ultimately interested in one thing: profit“. Or perhaps the Wikipedia article on Capitalism, which reads: “From this perspective, in process of self-organization, the profit motive has an important role. From transactions between buyers and sellers price systems emerge, and prices serve as a signal as to the urgent and unfilled wants of people. The promise of profits gives entrepreneurs incentive to use their knowledge and resources to satisfy those wants.” (This quote is itself cited at the bottom of the entry as: Herbert Walberg, Joseph Bast. Education and Capitalism, Hoover Institution Press (2001) p. 87-89 ISBN 0-8179-3972-5). Therefore profit is in fact what drives the economic engine currently pushing us all forward known as Capitalism.

Of course consumers aren’t feeling pity for these corporations, I never said that. They are however inundated with shows such as MTV’s “Cribs”, which shows how the rich and famous live (awash in goods) and imply that goods are in fact what people need to be considered wealthy and prosperous. That is why people take out home loans they cannot afford (leading to the current subprime lending crisis), or car leases that make no economic sense. They feel as if when they have a nice car or a nice house that they are economically well off and thus more important members of the community. The fact that this is all over television gives credence to Marshall McLuhan, who in 1967 argued famously that the “medium is the message”. By this Marshall meant that it didn’t matter what you watch on television, just that you watched television. The ads and shows would do the work, regardless of which particular ones each individual chose to view.

The concept of a consumption driven society/economy is not all fictitious, and again a simple Google search could have saved you Adam. In an article entitled “The US Economy” published in the Indiana Business Review, Willard E. Witte, Associate Professor of Economics at Indiana University wrote, “From the end of the recession in 2001 through the end of 2005, consumption spending accounted for 78 percent of the increase in output”. Professor Witte later wrote “Consumption has held up pretty well during the past year, comprising 70 percent of growth in the first three quarters of 2006.” 70 percent of growth during the first three quarters of 2006 – that sounds like a pretty consumption driven economy to me. If 70 percent of our growth was taken away during 2006 you can bet that a lot of people would be out of work. Therefore our society is consumption based and does in fact need consumers to maintain high levels of consumption to drive the economy.

Adam then appears to go nuts over a few big assertions he wants to point out, so let’s discuss them, shall we:

1: Americans are afraid to contemplate social issues with our neighbors (true BECAUSE I TELL YOU IT’S TRUE DAMMIT)

2: We are so afraid that we allow terrible things to keep happening

3: American foreign policy caused September 11th. This one book I’m reading proves it, but I’m not really going to bother to elaborate on how.

1) How about this Common Dreams article, which discusses the issue of evolution in schools. It has a quote from Dr. John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, “Teachers are afraid to raise the issue … and they are afraid to discuss the issue in public.” Here’s a line from a website called Freepreach.org under their issues section, which states “It’s not only politics that ministers are afraid to discuss in their sermons”. This is under a heading called Hate Speech Laws.

2) In Hunter S. Thompson’s article Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in the Rolling Stone, Hunter pontificates, “That is how it works in the victory business. You see it every time. The Weak will suck up to the Strong, for fear of losing their jobs and their money and all the fickle power they wielded only twenty-four hours ago. It is like suddenly losing your wife and your home in a vagrant poker game, then having to go on the road with whoremongers and beg for your dinner in public”. The point I was trying to make is that fear paralyzes us and drives us towards making decisions that we otherwise would not have made at a rational moment, such as the passing of the USA Patriot Act by members of Congress without having actually read the act – they were so scared by the thought of terrorism that they decided to grant the executive branch extraordinary powers in an attempt to quell the fear passing through themselves and their constituents. Or how about this quote from an article published by two Michigan State University students stating “Underlying the skepticism about the motivations of Ashcroft and Ridge in issuing warnings and changing the official threat levels has been a more general concern about the use and meaning of terrorism alert warning system. On at least two earlier occasions the threat level was raised to orange in the absence of any publicly obvious event.” Now why would that occur? Maybe it was to keep the climate of fear running strong and reinforce the need for a strong executive branch to save us from the terrorists. Maybe Not. Either way, they raised and lowered the threat levels all the time, and what do you know, but we elected George W. Bush to be our president again. Hmph.

3) Here is a fabulous article which states the case far better than I could, called Blowback: The Cost and Consequences of American Foreign Policy. Check this portion out: “Most Americans find it extremely difficult to accept the proposition that terrorist acts against the United States can be viewed as revenge for Washington’s policies abroad. They believe that the U.S. is targeted because of its freedom, its democracy, its modernity, its wealth, or just being part of the West. But government officials know better. A Department of Defense study in 1997 concluded that: “Historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States. In addition, the military asymmetry that denies nation states the ability to engage in overt attacks against the United States drives the use of transnational actors [that is, terrorists from one country attacking in another].” Hmmmmm!

In conclusion, I am certainly not trying to elect myself as some sort of superior human being or pretentious bastard who has all the answers and carries the moral high ground. I am simply trying to jumpstart a discussion on what is important in our lives, and whether those things we value have historically been the same things and/or are really what matters. I could have done a better job of sourcing the post; that much I agree with Adam. However, I think that my conclusions are still at least worthy of discussion and I am glad Adam has taken the opportunity to do so. I await your response, brother. – Ryle

To me, the answer to both questions revolves around the consumption driven society we live in and the need for corporations to continue to push products and services to us, so that they can increase their bottom line and keep profits rising. If the American people collectively decided they were not going to rush out and buy the latest US Weekly to find out about what Paris is doing, or to spend $12 at the movies to be entertained for a few hours, or even to buy $200 tickets to a football game so they can see their favorite players in person, what would it do to our economy? Well the way things are setup now the economy would certainly suffer. Therefore, corporations have setup vast noise machines to ensure that what they feel should be relevant to Americans is relevant – and these noise machines are working.

Furthermore, human beings being inherently social animals, we feel a certain comfort in social interaction with our peers. The easiest way to establish ourselves as relevant members of the community is to show that we have just as much knowledge as other people in regards to what society considers important enough for everyone to have to pay attention to – in this case, celebrities, sports, and movies. (Obviously there could be many more, but those get the point across). Therefore we can sit and have a wonderful discussion about the latest big movie with just about anyone in America. This is also possible because we are all fed the same movies, celebrity news, and sports – someone in LA and someone in New York can watch the same movie, the same news about Paris Hilton, and the same NCAA championship game and converse about it.

Image by: Lee Prouten

However, that doesn’t go all the way to explaining the second question – because it seems as if the discussion (as it does in many other countries) would shift to something that has an impact on our everyday lives such as healthcare, taxes, or the next election. In America we are so afraid to contemplate real social issues with our neighbors for fear that we would offend one another and lose that social bond that we love so much. We sit complacent about war, money wasted, lack of healthcare, and a myriad of other problems currently affecting our great nation; and while these might not seem to have a direct affect on our lives, say that to the people who died on September the 11th. Those deaths were the result of American policies perpetuated by the Government designed to increase America’s status as a superpower and relegate lesser countries to mere pawns (This is further proved by the book I’m currently reading called Confessions of an Economic Hit Man – good so far!).

So what can we do? The only solution is to bring back coherent discussions on what truly affects and shapes our lives. We cannot afford to be fixated upon drunken celebrities stumbling around hopelessly trying to find a purpose for their own meager lives; instead we should focus on those politicians and people who have the true power to use America’s great wealth for the betterment of her people and not for the betterment of the “corporatocracy” (As John Perkins puts it). So go out, say hi to your neighbor, and ask them if they favor universal health care, something that every other developed country in the world has for its citizens. Or ask them if they favor billions in non-compete contracts for Halliburton and Kellogg, Brown, and Root – I bet I know the answer!

Of course, the credit for the original concept is largely given to Neal Stephenson, whose book Snow Crashpresented the first virtual world (Stephenson called it a “Metaverse”) where people simply logged in from home and through a headset visually interacted with other people in a 3D environment.

What could the advent of Home and A Second Life do to our civilization? Perhaps it could make it a more bearable, enjoyable world to live in, if people could work regular jobs during the day (Stephenson’s main character, Hero Protagonist, starts off the novel as a pizza delivery guy) and jack-in to these virtual worlds at night to relieve the stress and anxiety they carry with them in the real world. Virtual worlds would be an excellent environment for psychologists to test out new ideas about how people interact with one another and a plethora of other ideas.

This new technology is amazing, and the virtual environment within Second Life looks very realistic – predictably, the two biggest industries are sex and gambling (from a cursory look at the most popular locations) but since the users themselves generate the content, the possibilities are limitless. Reuters has even setup a journalist to monitor events within Second Life and started a Second Life News Bureau. While Home requires a Playstation 3 which may be out of reach for a great many people, Second Life has a free basic account that simply requires a computer and a broadband internet connection, something which many people worldwide already have. Indeed, according to Second Life’s website, the service already has over 4.5 million residents, 1.6 million of which have logged in during the past 60 days. The biggest question to me is, is our society ready for something like this? It would be all too easy to build up a virtual life that is a great deal better and more fulfilling than our regular lives, and simply stay jacked in as long as possible. Reports of gamers becoming addicted to various online multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft (called MMORPGs, or Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games – say that 5 times fast!) are already becoming widespread, and this element of a virtual life would take the possibility of total immersion and addiction to your computer one step further.

However, in the end, this is an extremely viable business model, which at the same time would enable millions, even billions, of people worldwide to interact in a never before possible manner. New monetary systems, political frameworks, and educational endeavors would all be possible. Business meetings between people on opposite ends of the Earth would be easy and even fun. I’m cautiously optimistic about the future of online virtual environments and the upsides/downsides of interacting within one, but in the end, this just has too much potential. In Part 2 of this post, I will examine the financial/business side of Second Life specifically (since Home has not yet been released) and how it has the potential to revolutionize world commerce!

PS. For more information, check out the Wikipedia entry on Second Life or the Wikipedia entry on Playstation’s Home.