De-Carbonization Series: Retail vs E-Commerce – Life Cycle Analysis

The Environment

Life cycle analysis is a “systematic approach of looking at a product’s complete life cycle, from raw materials to final disposal of the product. It offers a “cradle to grave” look at a product or process, considering environmental aspects and potential impacts.” (Life Cycle Analysis: A Step by Step Approach, 2009, Aida Sefic Williams). When comparing emissions of e-commerce versus traditional retail, getting a product to the consumer is just one part of the puzzle. There’s also what happens before delivery, especially inventory logistics and packaging.

I’m going to cut to the chase: e-commerce beats traditional retail hands-down. Here are a couple quotes. First from Life Cycle Comparison of Traditional Retail and E-commerce Logistics for Electronic Products: A Case Study of buy.com:

“Our results confirm prior findings that e-commerce delivery uses less primary energy and produces less CO2 emissions than traditional retailing. Considering retail and e-commerce logistics differences, the three largest contributors were customer transport, packaging, and last mile delivery. Customer transport encompassed approximately 65% of the traditional retail primary energy expenditures and CO2 equivalent emissions on average. For e-commerce, packaging and last mile delivery were responsible for approximately 22% and 32% of the e-commerce energy usage, respectively. Overall, e-commerce had about 30% lower energy consumption and CO2 emissions compared to traditional retail using calculated mean values.”

In the picture is worth a thousand words department:

CO2-Retail vs E-Commerce

 

 

 

 

And this from The Environmental Impact of Online Shopping: Nitty-gritty by Anna Argyridou, in which the author compares online and traditional book buying. Her conclusion:

“…The bottom line? Unless you’re walking or biking to the bookstore, buying a book online results in lower carbon emissions than purchasing it from a traditional bookstore. Light-duty delivery vehicles operated by companies like UPS and FedEx travel well-designed routes that serve multiple consumers in a minimum of trips, achieving fuel economy higher than that of a typical individual consumer driving alone to make the same purchase.”

So I say: buy online when possible. Yeah, there’s a certain community feeling of buying stuff at Mrs. Smith’s shop (though I’ve never been that sentimental about the shopping experience, which for me and many people has been more impersonal wandering of malls and superstores than sharing a moment with the neighborhood store clerk). If social bonding with acquaintances is what you’re looking for, there are alternatives, such as cafes, restaurants and YMCA classes – which you’d be better able to afford with the savings made possible through online shopping.

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Loosen Those Chains of Certainty!

Explorations Outside the Box

For those who want to understand the Other Side better, here’s a few do’s and don’ts:

Don’t paint the Other Side with a broad brush; realize there is a range of opinions within all groups.

Don’t attribute the opinions of the most extreme of the Other Side to the whole group.

Don’t psychologize or otherwise reduce opinions you don’t share to the personal qualities or motives of those who hold them.

Don’t mindread – that is, ignore the Other Side’s expressed thoughts and motivations in favor of what you consider their “real” thoughts and motivations.

Don’t indulge in caricature or cartoonish portrayals of the Other Side.

Do try to engage the Other Side’s arguments on their merits.

Do try to see that many disagreements turn out to be a matter of degree and not absolutes.

Do try to find the common ground – and then try to expand it.

Do try to understand the relation between what seems to be irrational statements and the broader reality they speak to. When in doubt, ask – start a dialogue.

Be humble. Loosen those chains of certainty. Listen. Disagreements about fact or emphasis won’t completely disappear but the extent of disagreement will shrink, making compromise and constructive problem-solving much more likely.

A Less Happy Mind is not an Unhappy Mind

Observing Mindfulness, Scientific Encounters

Comment on: A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind by Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert; 12 November 2010 Vol 330 Science p. 932

In this study, the authors asked study participants to rate their feelings, current activities and mind wandering. The authors state that the results revealed study participants “were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not and were considerably unhappier when thinking about neutral topics… or unpleasant topics than about their current activity”. Although participants’ minds “were more likely to wander to pleasant topics (42.5% of samples) than to unpleasant topics (26.5% of samples) or neutral topics (31% of samples), they were no happier when thinking about pleasant topics than about their current activity.” The authors conclude “a wandering mind is an unhappy mind”.

Is this a reasonable conclusion? Let’s look more closely at the evidence:  subjects answered a happiness question (“How are you feeling right now?”) on a continuous sliding scale from very bad (0) to very good (100). Now I’m assuming that for most people, anything under 50 would be leaning unhappy – from a little bit to a whole lot – and anything over 50 would be leaning happy. Here are the approximate* mean happiness scores for mind wandering categories: pleasant mind wandering – 69; neutral mind wandering – 61; and, unpleasant mind wandering – 42. Ok, stating the obvious: except for unpleasant mind wandering, these means do not reflect unhappiness. And is it even newsworthy that unpleasant mind wandering is associated with unhappiness, given that “unpleasant” and “unhappy” generally go together? It’s like saying “When I think unhappy thoughts, I feel unhappy”. Duh.

The authors’ unwarranted conclusion, and the title of their paper,  isn’t even an example of calling the glass  half empty. It’s calling a glass that’s three-quarters full half empty.

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*I say “approximate” because for some reason the authors only show the means as bubbles on a graph but don’t provide the exact numbers.

The Basic Income Guarantee (BIG), Student Aid and Unemployment Compensation

Politics and Economics

If I were president, we’d have a modest BIG, which would be paid for out of the existing federal budget, as follows:

$150b – elimination of safety net programs (TANF, EITC, and SSI)
$150b – state matching funds related to the above
$ 70b – half of SSDI funds
$ 25b – half of the HUD budget
$ 25b – budget reductions in some remaining programs (e.g., Pell/SEOG grants)
$ 25b – elimination of redundant programs (guided by US Gov. Accountability Office)
$100b – unemployment compensation

Ok, $545b budget. Long story short: all wage earners would have their BIG withheld for taxes as the default, but could tweak their withholdings to get more now/possibly pay more in taxes later. However, households in the middle quintile and above would essentially receive no net BIG after taxes. After all, taxes pay for the BIG – it’s not free money.

Under this scenario and budget, the bottom quintile would receive a net BIG of $800 a month (plus SNAP if they qualify); the second to bottom would receive, on average, a net BIG of $400/mo. Decreases in net BIG for the 2nd quintile households would be incremental as their income rises so as not to disincentivize work.

Pell and SEOG grants would be eliminated, as the BIG (worth up to $9600 a year) could be used towards post-secondary school expenses. An important psychological advantage of BIG compared to Pell grants and tuition waivers is that the BIG is a limited resource with alternate uses – and for someone with a limited income, the alternate uses are likely related to current necessities and for things that have long-term benefit (e.g., car repair, savings cushion for moving). As a consequence, the BIG would be experienced as “my” money – and I’m much more responsible and budget-minded when I’m spending my money than someone else’s. This is especially the case when the latter isn’t fungible – that is, it doesn’t have alternate uses – like with Pell grants or tuition waivers.

Less student financial aid would have the added benefit of reducing tuition inflation – many analysts have noted that increases in tuition rates track increases in aid amounts, especially in private schools. Don’t worry though: there will still be sources of financial aid: between scholarships, loans and state programs like Cal grants (which are currently up to $12,240/year for the University of California system). Also, under this BIG scenario, individuals who become unemployed could retroactively claim withheld BIG payments in the current tax year (i.e., not yet paid in taxes), which would help make up some of the rate difference between BIG  and Unemployment Compensation – the latter abolished to help pay for BIG.

What’s not to like?

De-carbonizing the Economy: Home Delivery versus Get-It-Yourself

The Environment

For much of the last century, buying stuff has meant driving to a store, at least for most Americans most of the time. According to the federal government, “shopping and errands” accounted for 35.4% of all household vehicle travel in 1990 – more than double that of 1969. But the trend is reversing: in 2009, shopping and errands accounted for just 30.7% of household vehicle travel.

Other sources confirm that Americans are driving less to shop. The decline in leisure shopping is well-known. Less well-known is that Americans are taking fewer trips to the grocery store. Demographic change, revitalized urban centers and the “casualization of American life” all contribute to this trend. And then there’s the increasing popularity of online shopping.

Leaving aside a certain nostalgia for the in-person shopping experience, and the dilemma of what to do with all that empty real estate, and looking just at the net effect on CO2 emissions, I think the ascendancy of online shopping is a good thing.

With online shopping, vehicles, usually trucks, deliver purchases to many homes on a single route. On average, home delivery results in fewer emissions per item than get-it-yourself shopping.

The energy inefficiency of get-it-yourself shopping is partly offset when we buy a bunch of items in one trip. But it takes a whole lot of buying to neutralize the home delivery advantage: when customers buy fewer than 24 items per shopping trip, CO 2 emissions per item are still likely to be lower under home delivery.

Of course, some of us are able to walk, bike, or take public transportation to go shopping. But for most of us, and for most products, these are not reliable options. Plus, the larger stores have lower prices, and they tend to be in areas that favor cars, or at least would be time consuming and a big hassle to get to by other means. And that’s really important for people with limited time and budgets.

For instance, in one recent USDA study, the closest grocery store was an average of 2.0 miles away from low-income households, but the store primarily used for grocery shopping was, on average, 3.4 miles away. Value and not proximity predicted where these households shopped. A whopping 95% of those surveyed used a car to do grocery shopping.

Delivery trucks may also be more fuel-efficient than many cars, especially SUVs. UPS, for example, has invested millions of dollars in alternative fuel technologies, and its fleet includes thousands of low-emission, hydraulic, hydrogen fuel cell and electric vehicles. Fed Ex has a large hybrid fleet and is testing all-electric vehicles.

Delivery is only part of the emissions picture though. The environmental edge in home delivery may be lost, or at least minimized, by higher emissions at an earlier state of the product life cycle. For instance, e-commerce packaging practices – with all that shrink-wrapping, padding and boxing of individual items – is hardly a model of energy efficiency.

Next up we’ll zoom out and look at the entire product life cycle to better gauge the net emissions impact of online shopping.

Observing Thoughts and Thinking Out-Loud

Observing Mindfulness

To truly observe a thought as it “unfolds” would disrupt its progression. As soon as we direct attention to the thought, it loses its vitality. It stops moving. The thought-process chokes. Observing a thought is more like hearing the echo of what just passed. An echo is a dead thing: it has no vitality. Observing a thought kills the thought. But our thoughts die and are reborn or die and are replaced by new thoughts all the time.

Hard attention stops thoughts in their tracks. But we can’t keep a hard focus for long; our focus becomes softer, more diffuse. Thinking happens in the interstices of hard attention.

Thoughts do appear to unfold as they are expressed, like with speaking or writing; hence the phrase “thinking out-loud” – the act of expression clears a path for the thought to move forward, towards a sort of clarification or realization. Of course, not all thoughts are worthy of expression or elaboration. The interesting thing about thinking out-loud is that it involves a relinquishing of control, a yielding to something else that is taking over. It can be embarrassing; we can regret it – and yet, the process of thinking out-loud (like typing away) can generate great insights and understandings. Or lead us down a thorny path we’d rather not go. Or both. Or neither.

Observing Thoughts and Surrendering to Thoughts

Explorations Outside the Box, Observing Mindfulness

Observing thoughts is like registering words without trying to understand what is being said. If we’re talking to someone, we want them to listen to us, not observe us. Listening requires relinquishing control, allowing oneself to enter another world – to be taken into that world. To follow the sprites. Listening involves a lot of non-listening – attention to something other than the just the words: gestures, facial expressions, inflections, interpretations of what we’re hearing, inchoate reactions, incipient responses partly rehearsed. All this happens very quickly, on the order of seconds and milliseconds, much of it non-verbal. Thanks to echoic and working memory, and a speed of cognitive processing faster than the speed of talking, we can still do a pretty good job of following what somebody is saying even though our attention is not always fastened on the words.

So it is with listening to our thoughts:  they speak and we weave in and out of listening to them, weaving out being just as important to understanding, learning, accepting, rejecting, appreciating, inferring, having one’s assumptions tested, realizing an unknown that had been an unknown unknown, and all those other happy accidents made possible by a mix of control and surrendering control that enriches our lives.  Going astray is part of the risk of yielding. We try to control risk by pulling back and “observing” but there is no movement without being sucked in.

Does psychotherapy work and why

Explorations Outside the Box, Scientific Encounters

Let’s define “work” simply as of perceived benefit to the individual.

In a previous Scientific Encounters post, I provided “percentage of variability of outcomes” in psychotherapy – care of Laska and Gurman (2014) and Lambert and Bergin (1994).

Here they are again:

Factors common to all effective therapies: 43%

Differences between treatments – <1.0

Specific ingredients of therapies and treatments – 0.0

Adherence to protocol – <0.1

Rated competence in delivering particular treatment – 0.5

Extra-therapeutic events: 40%

Placebo effect (expectations): 15%

Per Laska and Gurman, “common factors” are those that are “necessary and sufficient for change: (a) an emotionally charged bond between the therapist and patient, (b) a confiding healing setting in which therapy takes place, (c) a therapist who provides a psychologically derived and culturally embedded explanation for emotional distress, (d) an explanation that is adaptive (i.e., provides viable and believable options for overcoming specific difficulties) and is accepted by the patient, and (e) a set of procedures or rituals engaged by the patient and therapist that leads the patient to enact something that is positive, helpful, or adaptive.” (p. 469)

Given that trust in a therapist and an “adaptive” explanation create expectations of improvement, it seems to me that the distinction between common factors and the placebo effect is somewhat arbitrary and artificial. Be that as it may, the picture in clear: subtract common factors, placebo effect, and life events, and the actual type of therapy doesn’t seem to matter all that much.

I don’t quite buy it. Partly because separating out the variables in such a clean-cut way is devilishly hard. For instance, did the authors of these studies distinguish between “extra-therapeutic events” that were probably independent of therapy, such as inheriting a ton of money, and those that may have come about, at least in part, because of therapy, such as finding a soul mate. After all, certain behaviors make certain events more or less likely and therapy often targets behavior and the things that influence behavior, like anxiety, social competence and self-confidence.

It may be that successful therapies work not only because of the common factors and  placebo effect but because they include specific ingredients that make it more likely beneficial life events will occur. The efficacy of these ingredients may be hard to detect, because their effects vary according to the person and situation. Some approaches/skills/strategies are useful for some individuals and situations but not for others – no one size fits all. But that isn’t saying the effects aren’t there.

References

Kevin M. Laska and Alan S. Gurman Expanding the Lens of Evidence-Based Practice in Psychotherapy: A Common Factors Perspective 2014, Vol. 51, No. 4, 467–481.

Lambert, M. J., & Bergin, A. E. (1994). The effectiveness of psychotherapy. In A. E. Bergin & S. L. Garfield (Eds.), Handbook of psychotherapy and behavior change (4th ed., pp. 143–189). New York, NY: Wiley.

How to Encourage Savings with the Basic income Guarantee

Politics and Economics

Continuation of the Basic income Guarantee (BIG) chronicles.  I’m thinking that all earnings should have  the BIG withheld for taxes as the default, to encourage savings. One could still tweak withholding on the W-4 to collect the BIG with each paycheck (with the likelihood of having to pay at least some of it back in higher taxes due, at least for year-round, full-time workers).

Savings are important for investments that create opportunities later (e.g., school, car, first/last/deposit for moving) and research has shown that people are  more likely to save when they receive occasional lump sum payments than when they receive modest monthlies.  Also, an important poverty-reducer is geographic mobility and savings makes it a lot easier to move. A BIG should not make it easier to live in low opportunity areas, and if doled out in bits every month, it might do that (at least for some people).

As noted in a previous post,  it is unrealistic to think the BIG would be able to replace all the safety net programs. There will still be a need for social support services for a substantial number of people whose problems will not be solved by a regular basic income: homeless alcoholics and drug addicts; mentally ill folks kicked out of their places; single moms abandoned by their mates and suddenly unable to pay the rent. People will lose their jobs or their health and not have the funds to keep their homes. Sure, a BIG will help soften the blows and arrows of outrageous fortune – but bad stuff will keep happening and some of us will still need other help to get through the tough times.

But if  the BIG is withheld from earnings and a crisis hits,  fewer people would need emergency help from the government because they will have access to a little pot of money to get them through the rough patch.

 

Observing Thoughts and Comprehending Them

Observing Mindfulness

When does observing or awareness of a thought happen? Is it simultaneous with the comprehension of the thought? Or is more mental machinery, requiring a bit more time, needed to actually “process” the thought? Ok, I’m answering my own question: comprehension is pretty much automatic but still takes neural-time, so comprehension happens after a thought has been produced, or – as they say – “unfolded”. I would assume that one may acquire the knack of observing thoughts as they unfold (doubtful, but I’ll grant for the sake of argument,  envisioning this process as similar to what happens during hypnagogic states). But comprehension, understanding, and insight are all more than awareness – they are a kind of after-thought. So awareness that happens before comprehension seems pretty empty, except that it creates a sense of distance from its object.

Comprehension is self-correcting as new information is assimilated. Where does awareness fit into this pattern of production, evolving comprehension, continued production and continued evolving comprehension? What does awareness add? Could “awareness” be just another a brain region that is activated a bit after the comprehension region? And then back-and-forth they go?