Daniel LaLiberte's Blog (11)

Hans Rosling has used GapMinder to demonstrate what is happening with several issues concerning women.





Three issues are closely related: maternal mortality, childhood mortality, and population growth.



Maternal mortality



It is estimated that half a million women die during pregnancy and childbirth, but the uncertainty makes it difficult to determine if we are doing the right things that will reduce the number… Continue

There many ways to save energy, generate it more cheaply, and use renewable sources. How I would do it is focus on adding much more insulation to my house, switching over to heating, cooling, and hot water heating with geothermal energy from below my house, and telecommuting rather than taking the commuter train. Many people should be doing similarly, and we would save a huge percentage of our energy.



Helping my neighbors do the same kind of things will help me as well, because then we… Continue

This is partly a response to a comment by Ezra in my blog "Money is information, but does it want to be free?" in which I asked that question, and this blog will provide my answer. Part of Ezra's argument regarding money is in "An Irrelevant Problem in a Resource-based Economy"



If I understand correctly, Ezra claimed that money was invented to provide a… Continue

Everything we need to do to become 100% sustainable boils down to having two things: enough renewable energy and the time to use it.



The good news is that we have more than enough renewable energy available to us to do everything we need. The question is whether we will have enough time to use it, to clean up our global messes before numerous ecological crises become… Continue

First, let's understand how money is information.



Money is a representation of value that we use to trade for other things of value, that is, when we buy and sell things. We could do without the abstraction of money, by trading the things themselves, such as trading your baseball cards for a skateboard, or bartering your gardening services for a home cooked meal. Money was invented as just a fancy kind of… Continue

We have a water problem in our town and the surrounding territory. Our problem is too much water, at least at the moment. Wish we could give some of our "problem" to those parts of the world with the opposite problem of not enough water.



We don't live in a swamp, but there are swampy wetlands all around, separated by rolling hills. We happen to live up on a hill, so there is not much risk of a flood for our house, though others in town closer to the water occasionally experience the… Continue

This mission is a difficult one for many people, myself included. Food is fundamentally essential for life, of course, so you would think we would think about it more. "We" being the part of the world that has arranged that we have plenty of food, we don't have to worry about it too much. So what do we need to do? And what about the rest of the world?… Continue

Our area of the world, in the Northeastern corner of America, does not have much in the way of grain production which we need for carbohydrates. I learned about this from Amos Meeks' blog "Food Security in Affluent Communities" (which I learned about from Wintermute's blog "Satisfied but not secure", which I learned about... oh… Continue

In 2020, I am at home, living in a small town not too close or too far from a large urban metro region. It is good to be close to nature, but also close to people and all that civilization offers. Continue

Hans Rosling is my hero, partly because he helped create the Gapminder software, but moreover because of how he uses it to make it clear how the world has been changing, and how it is likely to change in the future.

In particular, everyone needs to be aware that the population explosion is ending - growth has been slowing since 1980, and the population will peak at about 9-10 billion by 2050. Most of the world is rapidly moving towards having 2-child families with average…

Continue

One of the innovation tips I immediately took issue with was "Don’t fight culture". I want to change whatever is not working, so my reaction to reading this was, "What, how can that work?"



But I must admit, it is critically important that we work with culture as it is, mostly because it is very difficult to change culture, even when it doesn't appear to be working to its own best advantage. Culture is what it is because people steeped in the… Continue