Is Sirius XM in a death spiral?

I recently had the experience of being at a diner for an extended period, during which time the satellite radio provider Sirius XM was playing. What struck me was the surprising quantity of advertisements that played in between songs--advertisements for Sirius XM subscription services and various highlighted stations.

The concept of satellite radio is simple: businesses (and to a lesser extent individual customers) pay Sirius to provide ad-free radio. Needless to say, the more advertisements Sirius interjects into its stream, the less valuable the subscription service becomes relative to the free + advertising radio models out there. If Sirius XM is introducing ads hoping to lure new customers, they run the risk of alienating existing customers on the margin.

In the worst-case scenario, this process edges into a 'death spiral', where the loss of existing customers forces Sirius to include more ads to cover the revenue losses.

Jeff Bezos on books

"The most important thing to observe is that books don't just compete against books. Books compete against people reading blogs and news articles and playing video games and watching TV and going to see movies. 

Books are the competitive set for leisure time. It takes many hours to read a book. It’s a big commitment. If you narrow your field of view and only think about books competing against books, you make really bad decisions. What we really have to do, if we want a healthy culture of long-form reading, is to make books more accessible. 

Part of that is making them less expensive. Books, in my view, are too expensive. Thirty dollars for a book is too expensive. If I'm only competing against other $30 books, then you don’t get there. If you realize that you're really competing against Candy Crush and everything else, then you start to say, “Gosh, maybe we should really work on reducing friction on long-form reading." That’s what Kindle has been about from the very beginning."

That's from a very good interview from Business Insider.

Four overused corporatespeak items

1. Taking something "off line"
2. Referring to emails as simply "notes" (why?)
3. "leverage"
4. "reach out" (as in touch?)

Big companies can do big things

Slate has an interesting article about how Walmart is the by far the biggest player in the commercial rooftop solar market:

Big, mature companies often struggle to innovate and adapt to changing consumer demands, but Walmart's experience with solar and organic foods (and Home Depot's with sustainably-harvested lumber) show that big companies can also have a big impact, simply by virtue of their size. While it's entirely possible that Walmart is coming out ahead financially from these investments, the less-tangible benefits in the form of positive buzz and brand equity are surely a big driver of the push.

Additionally, Walmart is implicitly hedging against future policy action by governments, both national and regional, to combat climate change. Companies that proactively set themselves up to respond quickly to a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system (by investing in clean energy and acquiring talent) will very likely see themselves with an enviable competitive advantage.

Vox.com is Underperforming Relative to My Expectation

When I first heard that Vox.com had snagged nearly every one of my favorite bloggers (Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Brad Plumer, Dylan Matthews, Evan Soltas, Tim Lee, Sarah Kliff) I was obviously excited and anticipated a one-stop-shop for econosphere policy blogging. Several months into the new venture, I'm not super-impressed.

While it's certainly one of the better news websites out there, a couple of things bother me. One is the excess coverage of movie and television shows. It's a nice thought to try and expand the 'wonkblog' idea to other areas, but Vox's culture coverage isn't doing anything new in terms of analysis. And novel topics like visual art or fashion are left out.

Perhaps relatedly, Vox's best writers are actually not writing very much. I assume this is because the top bloggers--Klein and Yglesias--have taken on major editorial roles, but it really dilutes the site's concept. Instead of leveraging their incredible all-star team, more often than not all the top posts are from their second-stringers. By not showcasing Vox's superstars (by say, providing unique blogs/pages (they have these notebook things with and unreadable design)), they're selling themselves short.

The last point is that their website organization is a bit restrictive--but I think this will change over time (they're said as much).

Creative Corporate Social Responsibility

As I've previously noted, non-profits have a set of structural issues that stack the deck against them delivering services efficiently and effectively. Not mentioned was the fact that many big nonprofits provide services by deploying small armies of volunteers from various big companies engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR).

The New York Times recently had an interesting article about Toyota's CSR relationship with the Food Bank Of New York City, one of the largest free-food distribution organizations in the US. Instead of writing checks or sending unskilled employee volunteers, Toyota leveraged its efficient-business-process expertise to help make Food Bank better.

I tend to think that donating cash directly to charity organizations (or better yet, people themselves) is a much more effective way of making people's lives better compared to volunteering or direct service. The cost incurred by training, overseeing, and in some cases feeding new volunteers every day is too high, and biases organizations towards devoting resources into activities that can accept and use human volunteers. Charity organizations would be better served by receiving discretionary funds and then deciding--freely--what to use them for. Maybe it means the soup kitchen hires some servers (tasks previously done by volunteers), or maybe it means buying a better machine. Or maybe it means offering a high salary to steal away some lowly-but-valuable consultant to come run things. Who knows!

But clearly scrapping a volunteer program in exchange for a marginal increase in funding (most big companies that provide volunteers also provide institutional funding) would deprive companies of the branding component of CSR. And here's where Toyota's program is such a brilliant CSR coup. They managed to ditch the volunteering gig, which is relatively ineffective, while retaining--even enhancing--the branding and reputational benefits of their relationship with the Food Bank.

Now possibly this is just due to the novelty--if every business copies Toyota I'm guessing the New York Times articles will dry up. But in a broader way Toyota's branding success here shows that trying out innovative alternatives to boring-and-ineffective volunteer programs can pay off big time.

Milk is Doomed

Via @Coreycore, the dairy industry has dropped it's "Got Milk" marketing in favor of a new "Milk Life" ad campaign emphasizing nutritional benefits over humor. Despite the fact that the new ad is terrible and just a little gross, I see a deeper reason why the re-brand will probably fail to convert new "milk lifers".

Milk has lost popularity in part because people think it's high in fat and calories, which mainstream nutrition tells us is unhealthy (it's not). The dairy industry seeks to confront this nutrition-based aversion head-on by trumpeting the protein found in milk. But by focusing so heavily on the nutritional dimension of milk (rather than, say, cultural heritage or taste) the industry is locking themselves into a justification scheme that will eventually turn on them.

Nutrition science is slowly undergoing a paradigm shift where the key drivers of unhealth and obesity aren't fat and calories but instead things like low-fiber carbohydrates and sugar--anything that spikes your insulin levels. As this framework becomes more publicly available and sugar becomes increasingly demonized for its adverse health effects, the fact that lactose is just sugar will become an increasingly burdensome marketing handicap. Training consumers to evaluate milk using a nutrition-and-health frame will become a disadvantage, not a clever opportunity.

Bandwidth Discriminators Must Be Cautious

With the recent destruction of the FCC's net neutrality rule, it's theoretically open-season for potential bandwidth discriminators. Quartz cleverly identified one big loser from the decision: Netflix, which currently consumes a massive amount of bandwidth and could be priced out of business by newly-enabled ISPs.

The internet has recently taken great delight in analyzing the various reasons why Netflix's business model doesn't add much value and must either change or collapse. Although I agree that Netflix faces various existential threats, bandwidth discrimination doesn't seem like a big one to me.

The reason is basically that powerful and important people in government and journalism love Netflix, and thus are highly sensitive to its well-being. Elite DC was obsessed with House of Cards for a while. If some over-eager ISP decides to crush Netflix with rate hikes, forcing sudden service and pricing changes, the town will freak out. Similar to the sequester debacle, when Congress acted only when their own creature comforts were threatened, Netflix commands a special prominence within the policymaking elite (and their interns).

My advice for ISPs searching for new profit opportunities created by the ruling is to cautiously test pricing models in areas unlikely to galvanize politically-powerful groups. Even better would be to employ a 'bootlegger and baptist' maneuver and ally with moralizing groups already opposing some internet region. Surely nobody would defend a 'bandwidth sin tax' on streaming pornographic videos or the websites of Colorado marijuana dispensaries, right?

Facebook Isn't Doomed

Jay Yarrow in Business Insider today had an interesting piece on Facebook, saying it's doomed because sleeker one-function apps like Snapchat and Twitter will crush its individual services, which are complicated and burdened by the need to all fit together. This is certainly a real problem, but I think he underappreciates the resilience of Facebook's position and the simplicity with which the issue could be fixed.

Facebook has a tremendous advantage simply by being the first, biggest, and most popular social networking service. Good networks are all about scale, and Facebook remains the most important medium for maintaining relationships across time and space. Additionally, by bundling together different services, Facebook insulates itself from the failure of any single one. This allows time to adapt and incorporate whatever innovation an upstart competitor may have created. The rise of Twitter was a major challenge for Facebook, but its existing customizable profile pages, simple messaging service, and weird "poke" thing remained enjoyable enough to allow the rejiggering of the "wall" into the Twitter-like news feed.

The issue of too many functions creating too much noise could possibly be corrected with better sorting algorithms or design, but here's an even simpler solution: break Facebook into chunks. If problems arise when many different services have to be packed together on the same webpage or application, why not release a bunch of apps that do just one thing? Have a "profile viewer" app, a messenger app, a photo app, etc.  By erecting optional barriers between Facebook's different services, it could partially replicate the design advantages of its competitors. Having a number of minor Facebook apps would also allow experimentation with different color schemes, something that might be helpful in establishing a sheen of "newness" for all those cool-hunting kids.

Unionization is Tough at the Low End

Wonkblog has an interesting and somewhat rambling discussion of the various troubles at one of the nation's biggest unions, IAM. The end contains an interesting nugget about some of the underlying dynamics of decreasing unionization in the US:

"If you're trying to organize a new group, it's usually a low-paid group, and how are you going to tell them they have to pay $70 a month, and they don't know what for?" Asuncion said in an interview. "It's the dues structure that's killing us."

I often hear liberals talk about the failure of workers at the low-end of the skill/wage spectrum to unionize and how it's an error of short-term thinking, but I think this quote is telling. Although low-wage jobs have less turnover than one might expect, not supporting unionization may very well be a rational economic calculation. Unions provide economic benefits to their workers in a less concrete, more long-term way. Dues, on the other hand, are paid monthly and take a greater share of total wages the lower you slide on the income scale. Add to this that the primary weapon of unions--the strike--is a potentially devastating strategy for low-wage workers who are struggling to get by each month. If employers know that strike threats have no teeth, the bargaining position of unions (and the benefits they can promise) becomes shakier. Additionally, an increased emphasis on organizational culture and employee engagement by business undercuts some non-economic functions of unionization, such as establishing a shared identity, improving workplace conditions, and aggregating information from lower organizational levels.

On a semi-related note, many professional athlete unions have difficulty bargaining with owners because their strike threats are equally romantic: if nearly all of your total lifetime income is made within just a few years as a sports star, losing just half a season is potentially very costly.

A Feminist Defense of the Taxi Cartel

In most major US cities, the taxi industry is highly regulated, mandating all sorts of service standards and ownership rules. Unsurprisingly, many of these rules seem to be designed to restrict the supply and innovation of new market entrants, thereby protecting incumbents (taxi drivers and taxi companies) by keeping prices high and revenue streams secure. The flip-side of this arrangement is that for most people, getting someone to drive you around in a car is more difficult, more expensive, and less convenient than it otherwise would be.

With the rapid adoption of smartphones, a few upstart companies (Uber, Sidecar, Lyft) are attempting to break into the field, offering consumers the promise of radically convenient transportation options through gps-hailing and ridesharing. These innovations threaten the high wages of incumbent taxi operators, and currently an ongoing political battle is being waged in cities across the country to negotiate the entry and potential disruption of the industry.

In general I've been very sympathetic towards the disruptors: they're bringing technology to an outmoded industry, they're helping usher in the 'service-and-flow' economy (also known as the sharing economy), and most importantly they're helping to increase the real income of city-dwellers by reducing the price and increasing the accessibility of transportation.

Most of the pushback I've heard defending the status quo typically revolves around either concern for the livelihoods of taxi operators, or safety. The first point is silly: existing taxi operators have no substantive claim on special wage supports compared to any other service sector, and the gains realized from reform would mostly flow to consumers, of which there are many.

Up until recently, I've been content to brush off safety concerns as basically a 'bootlegger and baptist' phenomenon: cartel defenders talk about ensuring minimum safety standards and the moral solemnity of taxi drivers, but that's just a marketing ploy to keep themselves well-protected from competition.

However, in a recent conversation on this topic I was a bit thrown off by a safety-based argument I hadn't truly considered: that because I was a man my framing and analysis of this issue had led me to undervalue the potential safety issues of a more unregulated taxi industry. The habit of getting into a random car with a total stranger without a second thought is a social achievement that's been built up over time in part because of government's explicit backing of taxi operators. Any potential change in this situation runs the risk of undermining the relationship of trust implicit between taxis and riders. It would probably only take a few highly-publicized murders or sexual assaults for a new unregulated technology-mediated taxi industry to lose trust and collapse.

Capitalism Will Soon Bring Artisanal Pumpkin Spiced Lattes to the Masses

Quartz this week has a shockingly in-depth look at the current state of automated coffee-brewing machines, and their prospects for disrupting Starbucks-model coffee chains. While it's a fascinating question where the savings might flow if cafes start ditching expensive paid workers in exchange for robot coffee kiosks (bigger stockholder dividends vs. comfier couches and faster wifi), the big social gains from these machines will probably be found in quirkier areas.

Starbucks did humanity a great service by making upscale customizable coffee relatively cheap and convenient. But its reach has always been limited by the demands of running physical locations with upkeep and staffing and supply chain constraints. Recent drops in the cost and size of capsule and automated coffee brewing systems (already common in nice restaurants and hotels) promise to fulfill the dream of making great coffee available everywhere. Soon every small town with insufficient demand to sustain a Starbucks-model cafe will have impressive coffee-brewing capability (in diners, gas stations, etc.).

The most obvious market opportunity for advanced coffee robots is the airline industry. Airplane coffee is notoriously weak and terrible, and efforts to establish brand relationships with major coffee companies are half-measures. The ability to order an extra-shot soy latte while hurdling through space in a metal tube would be an historic accomplishment, and likely a big money-maker. Budget fliers who are hesitant to plump for expensive food and and alcohol might see splurging on nice coffee as more acceptable.

Explaining The Twin Movie Observation

Photo Credit: CircadianHour reddit user

Reddit this weekend discovered the strange phenomenon of Hollywood releasing similar movies at the same time. Brushing aside the methodological ambiguities of what constitutes a movie pair, the best explanation seems to be some combination of 1) informal knowledge sharing due to agglomeration effects (social relationships between studio employees, industrial espionage, etc.) and 2) many studios responding to the same exogenous factors (public demand, current events, etc.).

While that's probably correct, I can't help but offer a skeptical take. It's entirely possible that this effect is actually an illusion. If you assume a heavy dose of randomness regarding which movies end up getting made and which ones don't (a safe assumption) and when, then by pure coincidence you'd expect, occasionally, to see similar movies get released close to each other. It might seem like this happens a lot, but we probably tend to notice two similar movies released together more than two different movies released together (because it's funny). And of course there are many, many more unrelated movie pairs than there are related movie pairs.

To accurately verify the twin movie hypothesis, you'd need to set up some stricter measurement guidelines (time categories, theme similarity, etc.). Using Google keyword associations would probably be a good start (Search: "asteroid movie" etc.). A richer approach would also look at different industries with similar observed outcomes. Both music and fashion, which also churn out many artistic innovations, rarely end up with product pairs: if an idea takes off, everyone copies it. But industries where we do see product pairs also tend to have only two major competitors--Hollywood has dozens of major studios. The twin movie hypothesis resembles a duopoly nested within the product differentiation strategy of firms competing in a crowded field. It would be interesting to see if any other economic models (game theory, Cournot competition, etc.) could shed some light on this interesting phenomenon.

Dealing With Cable Internet Providers Is Unpleasant But Unavoidable

This video has been making the rounds:

The broadband internet industry is changing so rapidly that previously-reasonable regulations designed to encourage infrastructure investment are now stifling innovation. Here's an interesting analysis on the problem of broadband monopoly power, and check out this fascinating interview about the regulatory constraints faced by Google as it experiments with its super-high-speed fibre network.

As for the terrible customer service, less competition probably means less of a reward to companies that provide excellent customer service, but I don't think that's the whole story. Errands requiring a physical visit to the retail store are never desirable or pleasant, and it's no surprise that many service companies have found a competitive advantage in finding ways to eliminate the ordeal. We deposit checks by app, change our cell phone coverage online, etc. All of that wonderful change is conditional on free-flowing internet, and to a lesser extent phone services. Internet is the core foundation for retail-visit destruction, but purchasing internet itself is a second-order dilemma: you can't enjoy the fruits of internet-based retail innovation to purchase the internet itself. So we're stuck taking a number at an overcrowded TimeWarner service center.

Inside the Black Box

I recently saw Margin Call, a new film offering a fictionalized account of the 2007 market collapse. The movie takes place almost entirely within the Manhattan trading offices of a faceless financial institution presumed to be a major player in the unregulated mortgage-backed securities market. The action starts when a junior risk analyst discovers that the company is exposed to catastrophic losses, setting off a crisis mode within the management team. With disaster imminent, the firm faces two awful choices: be the first to sell off as many toxic assets as possible (directly causing a crash but ensuring the company's survival), or doing nothing and waiting until some other firm sees the danger and starts its own fire sale. As you may have guessed, there's not much of a choice.

The film is technically well-executed, with a great cast and an energetic pacing, but its main strength is in the sheer number of interesting questions and concepts packed into each scene. Chiefly among them is the inherent tension between the interests of the company and its employees. Throughout the film, there are two distinct narratives: one concerning the survival of the firm, and the other focusing on the economic "survival" of the individuals working there. The former is a linear narrative unfolding over the course of the whole movie; the latter is more interesting in that each major characters' precarious situation is only revealed gradually and in sequential order, moving up the layers of corporate hierarchy.

We start with the lowly risk analysts and traders. Then on to the department and floor managers. Then the division heads and VPs. And finally, after an artful build-up, the almost mythical CEO is revealed. At every level, the higher-ups are portrayed as living embodiments of the corporate will. Only after the attention shifts up a level do we see their very human predicament and the harsh incentive structure forced upon them which induces such misanthropic behavior. If the institution needs something to be done and an employee won't do it, then they're out. And someone new comes in who will.

Margin Call seeks to muddy the moral waters of the 2007 crisis in a most delightfully challenging way--by confounding the culpability of the rich one percent banksters we love to hate. To cite a classic example: assume one manages to balance a pencil straight up on its eraser. Obviously it will be precarious, and will soon topple. How shall we best assess causation in this example? In one approach we could  identify the particular wind gust that finally tipped the pencil from its perch. In reality, however, this situation is best explained by stating the obvious: that the pencil was tenuously balanced and obviously would soon topple, in one direction or the other. To blame a particular wind gust would be foolish. Its the system that counts.

Other topics explored include equality, the moral deserts of Wall St. traders and executives, and the work/play balance of life. It's a great movie, check it out.

The Airline Industry

Richard Posner analyzes the industry's woes:

The airline is providing a bundled or “one size fits all” product to most of its customers, and unbundling can increase demand by enabling a better matching of price to consumer preference. But except for the tiny sliver of flyers who can afford private planes, the cost structure of the airline industry, rooted in airliner design, prevents significant quality differentiation. 

The crux of the issue is this: airlines want desperately to differentiate their products so as to compete on the basis of services (food, customer experience, etc.) instead of simply ticket price. Two factors make this difficult: 1) technological constraints (airliner design largely determines the parameters of service) and 2) a huge set of travelers who care only about price (magnified by small, low-cost carriers). Consequently, this homogeneity (and commodification) of air travel has resulted in a decline in service quality. The new Department of Transportation consumer protection regulations set minimum requirements for service but, perversely, further entrench the air-travel-as-a-commodity trend.

The Usefulness of Bubbles

Businessweek is out with a great article on the current tech bubble. The article asserts that this bubble, built around social media and online advertising, is wasting a generation of talent and channelling innovative capitol towards a category of technology whose social benefits are ambiguous.

An economic bubble is basically a localized trend of inflated asset prices. Since prices are the conventional measurement of a thing's social utility, inflated prices result in misallocation of productive forces, like money, talent, or even social prestige. Most bubbles quietly deflate before anybody notices, but sometimes they continue to grow and end up popping suddenly. This usually causes financial turmoil and triggers broader economic hardship.

On the surface, this article's premise is straightforward: bubbles are terrible for the economy, and the current tech craze is exhibiting disturbingly bubble-like behavior. Thus the current tech craze is terrible for the economy. I generally agree with this logic, but it does paint diverse economic situations with a very broad brush. Within the framework of "bubbles are bad," what's the best way to compare potential bubbles (e.g. bubble A is worse than bubble B)?

Magnitude is important, but if we're looking at potential bubbles instead of past bubbles, this can be difficult. Given the extreme uncertainty of future economic events, I'd argue that one good test would focus on a candidate bubble's social usefulness. All bubbles, in varying degrees, maul the economy and ruin countless lives. Yet when the dust settles, they always leave behind certain new technologies or structural changes. Even if we can't predict how damaging a bubble will be, we can still ruminate on and compare these after-effects.

Think about it: after the financial crisis of 2007-8, what were we left with? Tons of arcane financial "instruments," ridiculously flawed arbitrage markets, and lots of cracked-out quantitative risk models. Some legacy, huh? Now consider the railroad bubble of the 1880s. When it popped, the U.S. economy was badly damaged. But we were left with a massive intranational network of railroads, establishing the infrastructure base for future development and growth.

Consider an environmental technology or energy efficiency bubble. It might pop and crash the economy, but at least we'd have made enormous social progress. By the same token, some people have suggested that we're currently in a higher education bubble, with the cost of college ridiculously high relative to it's value. That may be, but at least colleges and universities are building awesome new facilities and research infrastructure that has tons of lasting value. All bubbles hurt, but it's nice to know that, at the end of the day, our economy's persistent drunken crazes are at least doing something useful.

Quote of the Week

Milton Meuller at The Technology Liberation Front on the AT&T/T Mobile merger:

Let’s begin at the beginning and ask why this merger is happening. It’s not as if AT&T is gaining dominance the way Google gained it in search and advertising, or the way Intel did in chips: i.e., through low prices, superior products and customer loyalty. No, last time I looked AT&T was the carrier with the lowest customer satisfaction ratings, some of the highest prices and one of the weakest network performance metrics. In my opinion there is no reason for this merger to take place other than to make life easier for AT&T by reducing competitive pressures on it. AT&T seems to be driven by the following calculus. It can either grow its services and its network under the harsh constraints of market pricing and competition, or it can attempt to reduce the field to an oligopoly with tacit price controls by using its size and financial bulk to eliminate a pest who keeps downward pressure on pricing and service requirements. I think it is rational for AT&T to try to get away with the latter. I think it’s insane for free market oriented thinkers to support it.

The Liberal Arts and Job Creation

Room for Debate has a fascinating discussion about the types of fields that are likely to produce good jobs, using Steve Jobs and Bill Gates' philanthropy as examples of competing approaches.

The kicker here is to understand that innovation and technological advancements don't necessarily produce very many jobs; think of Google or Facebook's incredible social impact relative to their small workforces. This is a big part of the argument in economist Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation, an eBook.

Business: The Only Way Out?

Over the next ten to fifteen years, where will the majority of environmental solutions come from?  The three broad categories of problems (energy, climate change, and ecological destruction) all have similar causes at the most basic level: structural perversities in our economic and political systems. The three most glaring defects are rampant environmental externalities (who really thinks the price of oil truly reflects all the costs associated with it), state rationality vs. global rationality collective action problems (what's good for a state isn't necessarily good for the planet), and devaluing the future too heavily (high discount rates prohibit smart investment).

Government policy could theoretically do the most good by solving many of these structural problems--change the rules of the economic game and make the free market work for the environment, instead of against it. Steady-state, cradle-to-cradle, restorative, whatever you want to call it. But let's be honest, it's never going to happen, at least not completely. The politics are impossible.

The political sclerosis regarding environmental problems means that all the fascinating solutions developed by academia and policy thinkers over the past decades have little probability of being put into action anytime soon. Even if in the future popular support for radical environmentalist policies make drastic reforms politically possible, it will probably be too late to prevent major environmental changes. In all likelihood the world's environmental problems won't be prevented. Instead, adaptation will be the primary option for protecting quality of life.

The world of private action (business, NGOs, research organizations, etc.) on the whole is a highly resilient, dynamic system. Individual institutions may currently be adapted to a particular political, economic, and environmental context, but as things change so will the composition of successful organizations. For example, some U.S. cities (and businesses located there) will become less attractive under future environmental conditions (think Phoenix), while others will become more attractive (Fargo?). As energy prices terminally increase, local producers of goods will become more competitive with global supply chains.

Admittedly this situation is bleak, especially regarding the implications for inequality and access to choice. Richer people will be better able to adapt to environmental problems (by moving easily, or purchasing energy- or ecologically-intensive products) than poor people. That is a profoundly unjust scenario, but as much as we'd like to prevent it, our politics just won't allow it. If somebody wants to do the most good regarding environmental issues, it seems that there are two options: change our political system (good luck), or work to develop environmental adaptations that are cheap enough to be available to everybody. That means research, technology, investment, scale, and most importantly, trial-and-error. That means business.