Amazon is now pro­vid­ing what they call “frustration-free” pack­ag­ing for some of their products.

Basi­cally, these items are pack­aged at in ready-​to-​ship boxes, minus the retail pack­ag­ing. Amazon can send the boxes with­out using extra pack­ag­ing. It sounds like it saves every­body some money and helps reduce waste. Great call Amazon.

Design-​wise, I’m really dig­ging the way that Fisher-​Price card­board box looks in the pic­ture. Nice and simple.

This past week I’ve been fin­ish­ing up read­ing Noam Chom­sky’s latest book, Failed States. I have had to slog through most of the book because it gen­er­ally tends to be an over­whelm­ingly depress­ing read. Such is the nature of read­ing between the lines of US for­eign policy.

The part of the book that really inter­ested me (and kept me read­ing) was the the last chap­ter on “Democracy Pro­mo­tion at Home.” This is def­i­nitely the best sec­tion of the book. I have often in the past resigned myself to being a hope­less rad­i­cal left­ist; a person whose social and polit­i­cal ideals will prob­a­bly never even come to fruition in the United States (or per­haps even into pop­u­lar dis­course). There was how­ever one survey of US pop­u­lar opin­ion cited by Chom­sky that gave me hope. The survey was con­ducted by the Pro­gram on Inter­na­tional Policy Atti­tudes (PIPA) and titled The Fed­eral Budget: the Public’s Pri­or­i­ties.

In the study, con­ducted in March 2005, people were asked an array of ques­tions about how they would change the pro­posed budget allo­ca­tion. There are sev­eral amaz­ing con­clu­sions can be drawn from the survey:

1. There is a very broad agree­ment that the mil­i­tary budget should be cut (on aver­age by 31%)
2. There is a con­sen­sus that much more money should be allo­cated to social programs
3. The actual budget is essen­tially the oppo­site of pop­u­lar opinion.

The full report in PDF format is avail­able on the web­site. Here are some illus­tra­tive charts culled from the report.

Over­all win­ners and losers in the budget changes:

Changes in social spend­ing:

Changes in envi­ron­men­tal spend­ing:

That last one astounded me. Here are the sur­veys find­ing results on that point:

By far the largest increase in per­cent­age terms was for con­serv­ing and devel­op­ing renew­able energy. This amount was increased $24 bil­lion, from $2.2 bil­lion to $26.2 billion—an extra­or­di­nary increase of 1090%. This was also the area increased by the largest majority—70%.

Per­haps there is hope after all.

Waffle has kindly trans­lated Steve Job’s “A Greener Apple” from PR-​Speak to English.

• Trans­la­tion from PR-​Speak to Eng­lish of Selected Por­tions of Steve Jobs’ “A Greener Apple” Arti­cle

Selected sample:

Apple prod­ucts met both the spirit and letter of the RoHS restric­tions on cad­mium, hexa­va­lent chromium and bromi­nated flame retar­dants years before RoHS went into effect.

Not all Apple prod­ucts met the spirit or the letter of the RoHS restric­tions until just before they went into effect. How­ever, some did, and we’re going to milk that.

Via Daring Fire­ball.

Recently US Sen­a­tors Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., intro­duced a bill to create a National Intel­li­gence Esti­mate on the national secu­rity impli­ca­tions of global warm­ing. Salon.com has the full story:

• Will global warm­ing threaten national secu­rity?

This is an inter­est­ing move to attempt to reframe the debate about global warm­ing. Instead of its tra­di­tional place in envi­ron­men­tal realm (read: tree-​hugging hippie issue), we can see it now in terms of a secu­rity issue (read: soccer mom issue).

“For years, too many of us have viewed global warm­ing as simply an envi­ron­men­tal or eco­nomic issue,” [Durbin] said in intro­duc­ing the new bill at a Senate hear­ing. “We now need to con­sider it as a secu­rity concern.” Durbin char­ac­ter­ized cli­mate change con­se­quences as “a clear and present danger to the United States” and “a poten­tial threat mul­ti­plier for insta­bil­ity around the world.”

Per­haps this will finally get some more of the offi­cials in our gov­ern­ment on board with the issue.

On a side note, this bill is a very inter­est­ing move for Sen. Chuck Hagel, as Salon.com points out.

Hagel, a pos­si­ble con­tender for the GOP pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion, led the effort to block U.S. par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Kyoto treaty and con­tin­ues to staunchly oppose manda­tory restric­tions on green­house gases, but he has been a leader among mod­er­ate Repub­li­cans in moving to address cli­mate change in other, non­reg­u­la­tory ways. “Sen. Durbin and I differ on policy ini­tia­tives designed to reduce the impact of cli­mate change,” Hagel said at the hear­ing. “We do agree, how­ever, on the need to assess poten­tial impacts of the chang­ing cli­mate on U.S. national secu­rity interests.”

Maybe he can sway other gov­ern­ment offi­cials that have his­tor­i­cally been against envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns to think again.

Google has cov­ered all the build­ings on it’s campus in solar mod­ules. 9,212 of them to be exact.

• It’s easy being green: Google goes solar

My favorite part about this is that they didn’t just stop at doing the rooftops, they also cov­ered the park­ing lots:

To gain even more solar sur­face area, Google installed solar panels as “shades” over sev­eral of its park­ing lots, keep­ing cars cool and gen­er­at­ing power at the same time.