John Mackey on corporations as do-gooders

Part 54 zillion in a series of musings about capitaltruism, an excerpt from a New Yorker article about John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods:

[Mackey] "...This is a paradigm that has polarized our country and led to bad thinking. It’s holding the nation’s progress back. It’s as if there were a wall. And on one side of the wall is this belief that not-for-profits and government exist for public service, and that they’re fundamentally altruistic, that they have a deeper purpose, and they’re doing good in the world, and they have pure motives. On the other side of the wall are corporations. And they’re just selfish and greedy. They have no purpose other than to make money. They’re a bunch of psychopaths. And I’d like to tear that wall down. Human beings are obviously self-interested. We do look after ourselves, but we’re capable of love, empathy, and compassion, and I don’t see that business is any different.”

He went on, “We’re trying to do good. And we’re trying to make money. The more money we make, the more good we can do.” By this, he had in mind not the traditional philanthropic argument that more money earned equals more to give away but, rather, that a good company—that is, his company—which sells good things and treats its employees, shareholders, customers, and suppliers well, can spread goodness simply by thriving.

This was a variation on what he calls “conscious capitalism,” which some people, smelling an oxymoron, or worse, snicker at. His idea is that business should have a higher purpose—that, just as doctors heal and teachers educate, businesspeople should be after something besides money. It may be an easier argument for a grocer to make; he feeds people, and if he feeds them properly he heals and educates them, too. But it borders on humbug when you apply it to, say, Wall Street. Consciousness, as it relates to capitalism, is in the eyes not so much of the beholder as of the capitalist.

via Kottke.
Read the whole article at your leisure.

Paint fumes: the solution

My latest million damn dollar idea: Scented Paint.

We've been painting our bedroom, and the work has been dormant for several days due to travel, sickness, and ennui. But even dried paint still smells a little bit like wet paint.

BUT! What if it was lilacs instead? Or bubblegum -- whatever people like to smell, I don't know. What if you could engineer a way for that smell to linger, so your freshly painted bedroom smelled like lilacs for months after? You could make it scratch 'n' sniff. Unscrupulous landlords could hide odors AND stains by painting over them.

Some chemical scientist get on that, and send me my royalty check when you're done.

Hijinx: I didn't know I thought that fast

I'm going to a game convention next month. Yesterday the organizer asked me to run Hijinx, the d20 mini-game of cartoon bands I wrote approximately one thousand years ago for Polyhedron magazine.

When the game came out in 2003, it met an audience brimming with indifference. A few people loved the humor and the gall of the idea. A few people hated it, and called it wasted space. But mostly nada.

It was my favorite thing I wrote that year though. I'm still grateful to the editor, Erik, who took the big goofy gamble with me, and Kyle, the art director, who made it look pretty good.

But when Kevin asked me to run it yesterday, I froze for a few minutes. Could I even do that? My embarrassing (but in retrospect, obvious) confession is that I never even playtested the damn thing. I wrote 20,000 words on inspiration and deep rules knowledge. Is it... is it even playable? Do I know what to do with Quickenstein's monster? Would I get stagefright? Sometimes I get stagefright!

A few hours later, without any conscious effort, I had a setup, a villain, a plot outline, and a crazy topicality which, I daresay, would make a fantastic new millennium episode of Josie and the Pussycats. Just like that. Inspiration and rules knowledge just showed up again.

So I said yes. Now I have to reread the rules and figure out if this thing is playable in the next two weeks. Loving my goofy ideas helps a lot though.

Student loan forgiveness gains traction

Someone else has hit upon my idea of the federal government covering student loans, according to the Baltimore Sun:

But as the economy still sputters along, Robert Applebaum thinks he has a better idea: Cancel all the outstanding student loan debt. The impact would be immediate, he says, as people paying hundreds of dollars a month on their student loans could instead spend that money elsewhere.

Applebaum estimates student loan debt about 12 times higher than I do. (Psst Rob! Use my math, and it looks even BETTER!) And he has a Facebook group with a zillion members, which means about as much as an online petition does.

Still, this is a really sane idea which frees up our best-educated, most motivated citizens to invest in other things, while returning liquidity to the responsible lending institutions that made these loans in the first place.

The arguments posted against it are pretty weak. I can't believe someone even bothered offering up the argument that it's unfair to some people. We left "fair" bleeding in a ditch 'round about October. Also note, I paid off my student loan aggressively after college, and I'm out. My wife has some student loan debt, but nothing debilitating. This doesn't benefit us really. It's not "fair" to us, but it's still a good idea.

See, I just want something that works, and playing chess with bankers? That's not working.