Light and Heavy

I've been thinking about two things that commonly have the adjectives "Light" and "heavy" attached to them.  Specifically, rail, and industry.

While light and heavy rail have disputes on the border between these two, both are transportation systems involving a track, and a train that rides upon them.   The light rail systems typically involve fewer cars, are more passenger oriented, and stop more frequently.  The heavy systems are more cargo-oriented, have many more cars, and stop less frequently. Industry, meanwhile, comes from the Latin word industria, meaning "productivity."    Light industry tends to be companies that require less capital to start up, produce more consumer goods than industrial ones, and use the results of heavy industry as its primary feedstock. Heavy industry tends to be more expensive to set up, starts with raw ores, and produces primarily industrial goods. As examples, steel is heavy industry, whereas soap dispensers made of steel are light industry.

A national economy requires all four of these things. A lack of heavy rail means that all goods transportation are made with relatively inefficient means, be it muscle-based transportation (by humans in the poorest of economies, by animals in slightly richer ones), or by massive trucks that cause massive smog. A lack of light rail hinders the movement of human beings. Even the car-based transportation in my part of the world is inefficient, as the downtown region inevitably clogs on a daily basis, resulting in transport taking an extra hour, or in particular aggravating times, two. A lack of heavy industry means that all goods are based on things you can farm or import. A lack of light industry took down the communist economies, as at first, the nearly starving peasants were happy to be working at all, but eventually, the inability to buy things other than food and shelter started to grate on people. The economy resorted to military keynesian policies, meaning that lots of people were making tanks, who then had basically nothing they could buy with those wages.

Clearly, a good economy is, among other things, diverse.

CEOs and Free Speech

And lo, suddenly politics hijacks everything.

A major story brewing in the US news is about the Mozilla foundation, who just hired a new CEO. They then had a massive shitstorm over that CEO's political activities, which included large donations to California's Proposition 8, a political measure to ban gay marriage that ultimately was found to be against the state constitution and thus discarded.

Most of the stink came from the Mozilla employees, who are quite diverse, and some of them are, yes, gay. The project exists in Silicon Valley, a very competitive environment where recruiting talent is bitterly contested, and companies need every advantage they get to keep employees, as well as not piss them off too badly. Once this became public, though, various business libertarians, gay rights activists, gay rights opponents, and a million other interest groups weighed in.

I'm of two minds. On one hand, I thought that Proposition 8 was an abomination, brought forth and paid for by hostile interests outside the state, (especially from Utah) that it was a step backwards for society, back to when people wanted to pretend that gay people didn't exist, and that any sexuality other than married sex for the explicit purpose of creating children was unacceptable. It also drew questions about the fairness of a person who supported that, though to his credit the CEO has stated that he does intend to treat his gay employees just like his straight employees.

On the other, it irks me the way that businesses are treated as personal fiefdoms with wanky personal interests enforcing orthodoxies. I know I would be personally outraged to be discriminated against, passed up for promotion, or fired, merely because of a private opinion. Is someone's politics truly relevant to the running of a company, and is even asking a step back to the bad old days of nepotism?

Another issue is that the position of CEO is largely seen as the public face of the company. Unlike most positions, the work doesn't stop when you go home for the day. Even after your time in the offices, you're writing press releases, you're doing charitable works, you're doing everything in your power to make everyone like you, and to be seen as someone who can be trusted. It's a deficiency of freedom that most of us would find completely unacceptable, but that's why you make the big bucks. I will never be a CEO, because aside from my general odd-ness, my lack of Christianity makes me unacceptable to the American public.

Your thoughts would be appreciated, though this is a sensitive topic, and a large amount of tact will be required.

EDIT: Somewhat after this occurred, the CEO resigned from his position.

The Trolling Tax

According to Slashdot, there's a new game coming out. Depending on how you play, it could be free. Or it could be $60, plus another $100 for the ability to speak to other player with a microphone. This fee depends on if you're a nice guy who helps other players, or a shameless troll. The article doesn't explain the exact mechanics, but I assume that there'll be a fee for the game as usual, but players who are well behaved will collect refunds until they have all their money back.

Left unmoderated, the average Internet community quickly declines in quality, as trolls and other attention seekers make the area significantly more annoying to be around. The attention seekers will go to any length of effort to be the center of attention, and the trolls just like pissing people off for the sake of being obnoxious. This is bad for business, as you now have a community of people who annoy the crap out of you pretty much for the sake of annoying the crap out of you. And players who get insulted, harassed, or intimidated too often will stop playing. There's not enough funds from these obnoxious jerks to pay for the server alone, so clearly they must be punished.

The helpful players, however, tend to encourage additional sales. A community of useful and helpful people is fun to be around, to the point where you'd pay money to stay. And this is what the company is banking on.

Most other games just charge everyone the same price, and then ban players who become excessively obnoxious. And even then, the bar is set rather high, as a banned troll will stop paying on the spot. I'm quite familiar with this model, as my own job revolves around removing the unproductive customers that pay $19.99...and then cost the company $10,000 in bad behavior.

The parent company, Valve, is now quite famous for their unusual payment plans. They recently made one of their games, Team Fortress 2, completely free to play, but made customization options available for extra cash. These customization are super popular, as it differentiates your character from the teaming masses, and players are gleefully paying out the nose for the chance to show some personality.

This is not the first time the Internet confronted these issues either. Cracked's David Wong wrote an article several years ago about the radical moves that would be required to prevent trolls from destroying the Internet. Why? Because people want to make money, and obnoxious people are threatening to ruin that. And if there's one thing I've noticed about America, it's that threatening people's income never goes well.

Pirate Drone

The Pirate Ba has had an ongoing arms race with the media companies that produce the content that they are distributing. The servers are seized by court order, and blocked at the ISP level. To get around this, a new, utterly insane plan has been brought to bear. The new plan is to build servers that operate in aerial drones, reaching the internet through radio link, and periodically alnding to change batteries and other maintenence. To take the drone offline, it wouldn't take a police action. It would require an air force. Due to the current state of international law, the air force would have to be the air force of the local nation (Sweden), or else it's an act of war. Should the authorities convince the Swedish air Force to attack the drones, the drones could quite easily fly to Finland while the planes are taking off. Should the Finnish Air Force then deploy, then the drones would fly to Russia, since Russia doesn't care about electronic piracy. Authorities would have to jam the radio link, which is harder than it sounds.

Economic Creativity

The Korean, a Korean American man with some very fascinating takes on both his respective cultures and their interactions, has a fascinating article on why Korea will never produce a company quite like Apple. For cultural reasons. Wait, what?

The first surprising one is the superpower status of the home country. We Americans tend to think of our status as a superpower mostly in hard-power terms: Extensive military might, so many trillion dollars that we could outright buy at least 3 quarters of the countries out there, and the like, but the soft power is what's driving things here. People in incredibly diverse nations still love American ideas, culture, clothing, and inventions. That iPods and MacBooks are American designed is an active selling point in all but the most virulently anti-American areas of the world. The Korean points out that if the iPod were, say, Italian, it'd have difficulty selling outside of Italy. The modern internet's love of bands like Caramell (Swedish), O-Zone (Romanian), and singers like Eduard Khil (Russian) is actually an aberration historically, as most people prefer music in a language that they already speak, in a style appropriate to their own culture. Another culture's music typically sounds vaguely preposterous, unless that culture is a superpower that you feel you need exposure to for success. If the iPod was Korean....it'd probably be doomed unless well stocked with American music.

The Korean then went on to report that there used to be a site very much like Facebook many years before Facebook. It was perfect for Korea...proper language support, a style that suited Korean culture, and so on. One out of every four Koreans used it, a prospect that gets most businesses drooling. It then failed to expand past the borders of Korea when, surprise, things assumed to be true in Korea turn out to be totally false in other countries. The glam and glitter that appealed to Koreans looked like a cornball thing for a five year old girl in other countries. The extensive use of high density images that gave it its luster in Korea made it load slower than flowing glass in countries that didn't have as good a high speed network, which is pretty much all of them. And so today, those Koreans use Facebook. The network effect took off to the point where the older site just doesn't have your friends on it and facebook does. And today I've seen people use facebook to have friends across five oceans.

This isn't to say that being creative is not a cultural trait the Koreans have. My Korean-built cell phone is plenty creative. Korean ships can be found in every port. The creativity is clearly still there, but the domain and expression tends to be very different. Since Korea's independence in 1945, it went from the poorest country on earth (basically totally wrecked in World War II) to today in the top 7 wealthiest nations.

Nations are probably best off figuring out their strengths, and playing to them. If I wasn't so tired, I could probably draw a profound conclusion from this.

Hub and Wheel Transport

Shipping company FedEx has a very interesting system for achieving shipping efficiency: It all goes through one point. Hub and Spoke seems like a poor model for moving goods, especially considering it can up to double the distance that a given package has to travel. The primary advantage is in the economy of scale.
Let us take the example of mail. I can mail a letter to a faraway country for a mere $5, which will travel by plane and be in the recipient's hands by the end of the day. This could not possibly be so if this were the only letter going, because it costs $40,000 for the plane to even take off, and the plane cost several million dollars to purchase in the first place. However, there are lots of letters going. The plane will be full of letters, and each letter writer has paid $5 to send the letter. The millions of letters have funded millions of dollars for the operation to go through, and so it does, and everyone gets their letters for a reasonable price.
Similarly with the parcels. Lets say that I'm sending Christmas presents to various friends and family members located all over the country. A traditional distributor has to put them all on separate trucks that all race to their respective destinations, but the hub and spoke model can take them to the nearest big city (Houston), which puts them on a train with all the millions of other packages. One big advantage of a train is that once you have one going, adding one more package is so trivial as to be practically free. All of this goes to the center distributor.
And at that center, they have a concentration of expertise. People who excel at making sure the package is definitely on the right train, knowing that "Settle" is a common typo of "Seattle," knowing that people tend to mispell "Jonston Road" or whatever, and being able to fix it. And again, the train going to Seattle has every package in the country that's headed there. One train is way way way cheaper than ten thousand trucks.
This makes me wonder if there would be a way to do this for personal transportation. One very fast subway takes you to a big station at a common location (like the center of a large city), and from there, one can take very fast trains straight to whatever other place you need to go to. All trains would be high speed express trains, and collisions would be impossible because no two trains overlap in any way. You might have to go from point A to point B first, but B to your destination C isn't interrupted by all the people who first want to stop at D, E, or F.

Synthetic Hair

A number of charities allow you to donate hair. You wouldn't think hair would be useful, but the most common use is making wigs for little girls who have cancer. The treatment for cancer costs them their natural hair, and having a wig makes them feel more...normal...about the whole thing. For this reason, they want long hair pretty much exclusively. If the hair is too long for the recipient, she can always cut it. If the hair's too short...well, not much can be done about that. If hair isn't long enough for that, it's also proven well at absorbing oil slicks. Or it can be made into brushes.
All hair use, however, is just a little insufficient. We get a lot from haircuts, and from Indian widows who are required, for religious reasons, to shave their heads when their husbands die, but we need so much more. So it's time to look into substitutes. Doll hair uses nylon fibers, and kind of resembles hair good enough for a paint brush. Not quite good enough on a human being.The texture is vaugely wrong, and not quite bouncy enough. A better substitute can be found in animal hair. Horses have some very good hair for this purpose in their manes and tails, and angora rabbit's hair would be perfect if it could be gotten long enough. Either would be fine with being shaven in hot weather. In fact, horses often prefer it, as their natural mane has a way of getting dirty and tangled, requiring vigorous brushing. Ask a parent with a toddler what their child thinks of being brushed, horses are about the same about it.
I think the best solution, however, would be reverse-engineering the way that horse and rabbit hair grows, and producing an artificial version of the same, be it chemical or biological (grown in a vat). Then we'd have all the hair we want. Wigs? One for everybody. Insulation? Now with hair for extra creepiness! Oil slick? We'll drown it in nylon hair bags!

Automated Data Entry

Image via Wikipedia

Data entry is a frustrating job with little intellectual satisfaction, and practically a guarentee of carpal tunnel syndrome and other sore finger problems. It requires a clerk to be given reams of paper on a subject, and he or she must type them into a computer, quickly and accurately. Quickly because another shipping crate of paper is coming tomorrow, and because the computer can't really help with this problem until it has the data on hand. Regular saving is a must, as is passing this now computerized data over to IT to plug into the number crunching machine proper.
If one asked me to automate it, I would first start with OCR technology. OCR can, given a scanned page, translate the pixels into words. The reliability is pretty good if one can guarentee that the paper was scanned perfectly straight, and the original page's handwriting is reasonably legible. A mechanical arm would place the paper in the scanner, activate the scanner, and pass the result to an OCR program, and the data entry clerk's job is now reduced to verification. Any words missed or copied erroneously must be fixed, but it's easier than typing out everything by hand.
Of course, this is all expensive and difficult, which is why they pay you to do it.

Stocked from the back

If I had a grocery store, I think I'd set it up that the behind-the-shelf area was hollow, and accessible from the basement. Clerks would stock the goods from the back, the way the milk refrigerator usually is. This would happen perpetually, so all you'd notice is that the supply of goods on the shelf never seems to run out, no matter how much people are buying it. There's probably some reason that supermarkets don't do this, but I can't think of what it is this morning.
Also, why don't supermarkets ever have a second floor? (Okay, many of them do have an upstairs office for administrative purposes, but the customer-accessible area is all on ground floor.) Stairs would be a bad idea, since most shoppers now use carts, but a ramp up to the top would work. Stores could have more selection on less real estate. What, are people too lazy to push a cart up a ramp?

Performance Metric

In programming, people have to assemble instructions on how to get a computer to do something. Complex tasks can take years of time, and it's not always clear how long things are taking. Managers of programmers therefore love to take measurements. Most commonly, they measure the number of lines of code that have been written. More code, more information, therefore more progress, right?
Well, not exactly. You want a certain way of doing things, and an efficient program will do it with less code. (Because computers run instructions per second, and if you have less instructions, then it runs faster, see?) Many programmers love to lampoon their bosses insistence on measuring progress by lines of code, most famously Bill Atkinson's recording of the removal of 2000 unnecessary lines of code, which promptly threw his manager's metrics into a tizzy. The story ends with his managers never asking for this particular measurement ever again.
So, what are some better measurements?
* Features vs. Bugs
Good code offers a number of features that make the software attractive. It also has few bugs, code that doesn't work properly or has unexpected results. The more features and fewer bugs are found in the program, the more progress has been made.
* WTFs per minute
Have someone who isn't the original programmer read the code. The less confused they are by it, the better. ("WTF" being an abbreviation for a particular something a person who is confused or dismayed would say.) Now, admittedly, some of the most genius programming is still immensely confusing, but code that is hard to read or understand is harder still to maintain. Maintenance is necessary, because sometimes assumptions that were valid last year are invalid today. Tax laws change every year. The year 2000 problem emerged from 1970s era computers having code that assumed it would be changed in 30 years. (It wasn't changed until practically the last possible second.) Architecture changes over time too. My computer today is 64-bit, and all values have twice as much space available. If I specified an "word" sized variable on my older 32-bit computer, I'd be able to store numbers from 0 - 65,536, but on my newer computer, now I can store numbers from 0 to 2,147,483,647. Twice as much memory is used. If I ran the Fast Inverse Square Root code (a confusing but genius algorithm) on my computer today, everything it handled would be wrong. Why? The variables that were correct in 1995 now no longer line up correctly. The constants are now wrong. Everything would have to be re-aligned to work again.
* Customer Satisfaction
Most code is written for people who aren't programmers or mathematicians, to help get their work done. The author of a simulation suite says that good software is like a butler, in that it solves your problems, cleans up your messes, and then escapes your notice as it prepares to help you again. So good code would be fun and helpful to use, and the tester is absorbed and not complaining. Bad software would have the tester frustrated and screaming, complaining about a thousand different things. Ideally, this would carry over to the eventual end user buying and being very satisfied with the software.

Can you, my readers, name a better way to measure the development of something abstract as software?

Breaktime Chair

Quite a lot of workers in the US now operate their jobs from chairs, typing at computers. This is a welcome relief from the jobs of hundreds of years ago, which involved shovels, the hot sun, and misery. The chair jobs have disadvantages too, though, namely that they're awful for your health and eyesight. Ergonomic experts recommend that office workers take a 30 second break every 10 minutes in which you look away from your computer and do finger exercises to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome.
I'm imagining a chair that has a timer, and every ten minutes, it vibrates (to remind you that it's break time), then spins the chair around, looking you away from the computer, and the worker uses this time for finger exercises. 30 seconds or a minute later, it flips back, and you're back to work. I would try to make this chair both cheap and comfortable, so companies want to buy it, and workers want to sit in it.
Ideally, it would reduce health & comfort costs to companies, but pessimistically, it'd be another ill-conceived toy collected by hipsters who want steep discounts.

Mining Space

NASA says that the solar system is rich in gold. (And some other things.) Meanwhile, demand for gold on earth has skyrocketed. If the other eight planets (and dwarf planets and meteors) are as rich in gold as the earth is, then there's quite a pretty penny in reaching it. I think the only reason why not is the immense cost of space travel. And there are ways of bringing that down.
A quick investigation into space fountains and railguns could, I think, cut the cost of space travel by a factor of ten. From $10,000/kg to $1,000/kg. Geologists would tell us the most likely locations to find gold, and automated probes would go mine and refine it. The immense cost of setting up this industry would be recouped within a year's operation.
If the price of gold collapses, other materials can be mined as well. Platinum, perhaps, or silver. Even bulk material like iron or lead could be mined in massive scale with no concern of environmental damage, as the non-earth planets of our solar system have no plants or animals to damage. Iron may sell for a mere 2c per pound, but when you can move a billion tons, that adds up to some serious money.
The cost of these materials dropping would be a boon to the manufacturers who make things from them, and and a disaster to the companies who mine it from the earth. (Though, if too many of them object, a change in focus would be doable, maybe even easy.)
Some places would be easier to mine than others. Mars would be easier than, say, pluto, which in turn would be easier than, say, Venus.

WorkCycleBot

Robots have gotten very advanced lately. Modern robots can move about, avoiding obstacles, learning where obstacles are, and can manipulate objects like a pro. This gives me an idea to improve office productivity.
A set of robots, each dedicated to one task, roams the office in a set pattern. One replaces every garbage can with a fresh one. At the end of its route, all the cans are dumped into a larger container. One passes around coffee, tea, and/or snacks. It should also take away old cups, depositing them in a washing machine at the end of the route. One delivers mail with an internal map of which worker is in which cubicle. One brings paperwork left on it to the manager's desk. And one vacuums. (That one has already been invented, and there are at least 4 brands on the market.)
With these robots, workers don't have to worry about trivial tasks, and can keep up flow for a bit longer. They will still require breaks from work occasionally, and I suspect social networking would fill the gap. If they learn any new information from that, their productivity will improve.

Automated Candy Factory

So about a week or so ago, I was watching an episode of one of those factory shows, where they detail the start-to-finish manufacturing of something. The episode was about candy. How to make jellybeans, jawbreakers, chewing gum, and things like that. I noticed something very strange: Everything was only semi-automated.
Yes, much of it was automated, using conveyor belts, rolling drums, mixing vats and so on. But so much more was done by hand. Sugar and flavoring could have been added via a hose, as they were introduced in liquid form, but were instead ladled in by hand. Transferring from mixing vats or rolling drums could have been done by upturning the vat onto a conveyor belt...but the candies were moved by hand instead. Why?
Okay, sometimes people break automation steps as a quality control measure, on the grounds that a human being moving candies can notice if one is misshapen, unevenly colored, or in some other way defective. On the other, shovelling candy from a mixer to a conveyor belt seems like a really crappy job to have, and the pay can't be that great. Also, the candy workers have to put a lot of effort into remaining sterile. People are going to eat these candies, and people do occasionally have to touch really gross things. I'm sure the workers do great at that, as food poisoning from candy has not happened (to my knowledge) in the entire history of the united states, but with automated equipment it would not be possible at all, as automated equipment would touch nothing but candy.
If one did create an automated candy factory, it would operate 24/7 for cheap. And clean. And reconfigurable by computer. (Well, okay, not by default, but the way I'm imagining it, it would be entirely computer-operated and controlled.) With a computer controlling everything, and able to arbitrarily rearrange the factory, the factory could, with its excess capacity, do some experimentation. Try mixing flavors, or varieties, or try to come up with entirely new candy varieties. Ones no human had ever thought of. In fact, let's apply genetic programming here. Experimental candies are tested with focus groups, and their results quantified. Candies that test well feature heavily in further experiments. Candies that test poorly are avoided.
For randomization, programmers would have a Malbolge-like interface. (Malbolge is a programming language designed specifically to frustrate programmers. Their are multiple steps where the code is encrypted in a way that doesn't make intuitive sense, making all its programs difficult to understand in any way. A finished program resembles a chunk of line noise.) Their flailing attempts to design candies are the seed genetics, which get refined from there.

Diet Donut

You know what everyone wants? To eat sugary fatty donuts and not exercise and still somehow lose weight. And while we're dreaming, I'd like a trillion dollars and an elaborate laboratory on Mars. Under a glass dome, filled with trees.
Back in reality, most "junk food" that people eat could be made way healthier. I'm imagining a donut made with vitamin enriched flour, with a blend of sugar-alcohols for sweetener, so it's actively good for your teeth, plus won't give you the runs. (Such a combination technically exists, but is hard to manage.) The jelly inside in made of a rich apple pectin, giving it a gooey consistency that still cleans your insides like an apple. Several important minerals are also provided (in trace amounts so it doesn't affect the flavor.) Eating this donut is surprisingly good for you.
If you replace half the food in each of your meals with one of these donuts, maybe you could lose weight.

Psychology Metric

Remember long ago when I jokingly reported that people should try to take jobs based on what kind of character they would be, if they were in dungeons and dragons? I think I want to develop a more serious version of that.
Identify personal traits and characteristics that would allow prospective employers to match candidates to ideal jobs with a simple pen or pencil test. No more will we have programmers unable to program, people bitterly angry with their horribly mismatched jobs, or glass ceilings from being limited to doing what you did in the past. (What, people never change, ever?)
I'm not making this test. I don't know nearly enough about psychology to compose the test, nor the interdisciplinary studies to know what kind of person does well where. (Would an investment banker make a good, say, salesman, or lawyer?)
And if you'd like me to do more D&D, yeah, I suppose I could do that too.

Ideal Business Cycle

Ideally, a new product or service, which would make you and your company truckloads of money, would be developed step-by-step across many different departments, each of which has a certain specialty. People suited to one would perform terribly in another, but that's okay, because cooperation and distribution of labor are what civilization is all about.

First, the marketing department determines what the customers need and would pay money to solve. A problem they have. Let's say, as an example, that their feet are cold.

Next, the marketing department explains this to the engineering department. Puzzling through this, they come up with solutions of varying degrees of practicality. Let's say that "battery powered socks" are the best design we get from this.

The industrial design department takes the most practical invention of the engineering department, and remakes it into something artistic and eye-catching. The "battery powered socks" now have an elegant place for the battery, a cotton-like texture that conceals the internal wiring, and resembles an ordinary sock yet keeps your feet much much warmer.

Industrial design passes this on to manufacturing, who make a factory that cranks out ten quadrillion or so, depending on what marketing thought they could sell, of them, packs them, and ships them.

Sales gets the product, produces commercials with help from marketing, and convinces people that its worth trading money to get battery-powered socks, and that your warm feet are well worth what one would pay. This makes the company all the money it needs to stay afloat, pay everyone, keep the buildings operating, and a little extra profit to hand back to the shareholders, who expect this.

Accounting tracks the money flows, and raises the alarm if any spending gets out of hand.

Executive makes sure none of these departments gets side tracked, fights with themselves or the other departments,
Now, any one link by itself would fail. Marketing or sales alone would have no product to sell. (Except maybe loans, but the financial industry is kind of tapped out right now.) Engineering alone would design functional, but inelegant products, and have no clue of how to convince people to trade money for them. Industrial design could make stuff, but it would be lower quality without the pure-engineering department. Manufacturing alone could only make things they had made before. Accounting alone could tell how much money they had, but it would only dwindle, because there would be nothing to sell, and executives alone....would be Enron. Except with no oil money. Oh, and with no accounting, one unscrupulous person could write themselves huge checks and no one would notice, and with no Executives, the departments would likely quarrel themselves to death. No manufacturing department means everything gets made by hand, which means less of it and it costs way more. Way way more. No sales department means no money, and goodbye company.

And a person well suited to one would work out terribly in another. A marketer thrown into accounting would die of loneliness and boredom. An accountant thrown into sales would bore the customer to death. There's some overlap in engineering, industrial design, and manufacturing, though an industrial designer has to be the most artistic, the engineer has to be the most scientific, and the manufacturer has to be the most practical.

The Mechanic's buddy

People who work on cars a lot may appreciate this one. I'm imagining a complex machine made of many tools that, when shown a car and specified its make and model, completely takes it apart. It is now an empty frame, and a large pile of parts. Why? You can then clean and check those parts easily, replacing any that are excessively worn or damaged. The machine could then reassemble the entire car.
I can imagine this leading to vehicle maintenance becoming way, way more trivial. You might have your car stripped and rebuilt daily, with a short cleaning between each. Your oil will never be able to build up contaminants, because it's removed daily, filtered a bit, and returned. Only a small amount is lost. A small amount with all the crap that ever got in your engine that day.
Why, it would be like having your own personal pit crew. Awesome!

Green Haiti

Haiti doesn't have a lot of wealth. Or, after the recent earthquake, infrastructure. As it is, the locals survive with kerosene stoves, and candles for lighting.
But what the locals really want, according to Discovery news, is a solar panel, because they only have to buy that once. Candles wear down and have to be bought again, but a solar and battery powered light will work day after day after day.
The article reports that even before the earthquake, 70% of Haiti had no electricity. This had negative implications on all sorts of things. Darkness proved hostile to security. (Sociopathic people interpret darkness as a lack of ability for other people to identify them, and thus license to commit crimes.) A knocked over candle is a fire hazard. Manual labor ruled the day, while electricity promises automation. There's not much you can do in the dark, in a tent.

Sharpen the Saw

Productivity experts advise other people, and me too if I ever asked, to "sharpen the saw." It is a metaphor.

If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my axe. - Abraham Lincoln

In other words, you need to spend time on things that make the other things you do more efficient. And you need to do this even while other emergencies are constantly creeping up. The deadline is approaching, but you still have to do the things that let you do the things...faster.
Now in literal terms, I don't know how to sharpen a saw. I know how to sharpen a knife, or other smooth-bladed implement. A saw is probably similar, but I don't know that for sure.
The metaphor is essentially that when you have a large task, represented by the tree, you have to do things that seem to be unrelated (the saw sharpening) in order to cut down the tree. The saw works well as a metaphor because a dull saw WILL cut down a tree, but a sharp one will cut down the tree faster and with less effort on the lumberjack's part.
As an example, for homecare. Let's say you have a washing machine. It's kind of old, so it breaks down. You now face a choice. You can spend three hours fixing it. Or, alternatively, you can wash your clothes in the bathtub, taking 30 minutes per time. (Whereas before you needed maybe 2.) The productivity experts are urging you to fix the washing machine as soon as possible, because there will always be emergencies, and the extra 28 minutes add up pretty quickly.
This doesn't, however, mean that you can avoid tasks you need to do. Not washing the laundry at all in my previous metaphor could probably last a while if you have a big wardrobe, but while you're not washing, you have less and less to wear and more and more sweaty-old clothing, and if you ignore it enough, it does become an emergency. (If for no other reason than you either have nothing clean to wear, or because the massive pile of laundry now blocks access to what you need.)
I now wonder: In your trade or field, how can you "sharpen" your "saw"?