a few discoveries from my recent explorations…
I went backpacking last weekend and fell in love with these flowers, which covered the sunny, drier mountainsides of Big Sur. They’re what sakura would look like as a California plant—with similarly small, pink, delicate bursts of fluffy petals.
Gary Kremen, who founded Match [dot] com and was the plaintiff in a lawsuit over a fraudulent transfer of his domain Sex [dot] com (and subsequently won $65 million in the case and later legitimately sold it for $15 million), now sits on the water board for Santa Clara county and his passion now is water purification and recycling.
I found this out during a tour of a new water purification center yesterday. He seemed so passionate and excited about his new venture and his enthusiasm for the topic was weirdly contagious.
I’d like to think if I miraculously became a millionaire somehow I’d also try and do something impactful and super pragmatic like improving public infrastructure…among some other things.
I’m reading This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, and it’s amazing, but also amazingly dense with facts and anecdotes.
Anyway, one thing I didn’t expect her to say was how massive, new infrastructure for renewable energy systems can’t happen without it being a people-driven, cooperative exercise. Of course that wouldn’t be possible without some drastic regulatory changes and new economic incentive programs, but the systems themselves, according to her, can’t be top-down or centralized.
It’s also making me re-think many aspects of trade agreements that until recently I had taken as granted. In sum, I’m not so sure that the so-called traditional trade issues ought not to be questioned or probed in regards to their impact on climate change or what they mean for “jobs”. I’m not taking her critiques and policy proposals without skepticism, though I’m pretty sympathetic to many of her arguments.
We’ll see, I’m still workin on the book.