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We all know the second Iraq war of recent times was about oil. It wasn’t about overthrowing an evil dictator who had fallen out of favour and it wasn’t about seizing weapons of mass destruction. Frankly, the tangled interests of Western governments and related corporate interests wouldn’t be prepared to pay the exorbitant cost of achieving either of those goals. Oil however, well, that’s a different matter.

There’s been much discussion about how much the war has cost; maybe $500 billion to-date. It may possibly cost as much as $3 trillion. The original estimate was $50 billion and questioning this official line was a sackable offence.

The other oft discussed point is Iraq’s 115 billion barrels of oil yet to be pumped out of the ground. I’ve yet to find much conflation of these points but, with Western oil companies circling the spoils of war and the price of a barrel going up and up, maybe it’s worth highlighting that at today’s prices ($145) that oil is worth $16.68 trillion.

So you know what, if you don’t shed tears for human suffering and if when someone talks about ‘cost’ all you see are dollar signs; if all an election  means to you is keeping the whole crumbling edifice of special interests on the road for a few more years then the occupation of Iraq is a resounding bloody success.

$500 billion spent. Over $16 trillion to make. You have to spend money to make money. In this case you spend taxpayers money and civilian lives then let the private sector reap the ‘rewards’. For our leaders, both government and corporate that cost is cheap at six times the price and more besides.

I seem to encounter more inconsequential pleasures in the kitchen than anywhere else. The other day I was making borscht which usually involves me grating beetroot by hand, a very awkward and tiring job given the quantity I usually make. This time though I had the Magimix:

This is a great piece of design. It feels solid, the plastic exterior wraps around a weighty motor that could run forever, indeed, this Magimix is around 25 years old. Best of all it has no buttons. To operate it you do no more than set the container on the base and snap the lid into place. Genius. It is so straightforward I find it charming. No instructions are required; it cannot work any other way. Not only isn’t it overcomplicated, it also doesn’t add complexity to the tasks it’s designed to help accomplish.

I’ve watched the WWDC 2008 Keynote Address and it gets interesting from about twenty minutes in when new iPhone apps are presented. The two demos I really liked were:

• Finding out where friends are and what they’re doing with Loopt
• Retrieving local news with the Associated Press

They’re interesting because they rely on geolocation to provide relevant information which is a really useful implementation of the technology. The functionality of the iPhone looked seamless across the board; in fact the whole Keynote with its map of the iPhone’s coming world domination was extremely slick. Worth a look.

Normally I stick to saving interesting sites I find to del.icio.us. You can see the latest finds at the bottom of the column to the right. This site merits a special mention however. It’s The Big Picture, a photo blog from The Boston Globe’s news site. It collects the best photography from key events happening around the globe with each image comfortably sized to fill your browser window at standard resolutions. Apart from a caption to give a little context there is no story with the photographs, the images are left to speak for themselves. A brilliant idea and one bound to become very popular very quickly due to the quality of the photographs chosen. Check out these images from the Chaiten Volcano erupting in Chile:

Daylife offers something similar to explore, but without the careful choice of a range of pictures, although this one caught my attention.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Carlos Gutierrez

As mentioned in my post about switching from Blogger to Wordpress I took Adam up on his recommendation to use 5quidhost.co.uk for hosting. I had no problems setting everything up but following the one-click upgrade to move to Wordpress 2.5 I started getting the error ‘HTTP 406 Not acceptable’ when saving posts I was editing. A lot of other people have had a similar experience, apparently it’s related to mod_security settings and some of the advice was to switch this off via the .htaccess file. Presumably it’s on for a reason and I don’t know enough to go messing so dropped an email to support at 5quidhost. The issue was resolved that day. That’s pretty amazing service so if you’re looking for cheap hosting with great customer support then they get my recommendation.

Ye gads. The Guardian is reporting Ban Ki-moon as saying that world food production needs to rise by 50% by 2030. Perhaps we could magic up a source of cheap energy, de-salinate seawater and irrigate the desert? Or perhaps increases in production to feed the hungry we already have could go hand-in-hand with a crash programme of policies to reduce our population and hence our ever greater demands on an over stretched biosphere? Just a thought. Oh, hang on, The Guardian’s article is topped by a photo of Ban Ki-moon with the Pope. Rational and workable solutions to overpopulation will just have to wait. Have more kids, we’ve got the loaves and fishes on standby.

From 19.20.21:

“The rise of supercities is the defining megatrend of the 21st century. In 1800 less than 3% of the world lived in cities. In 1900 150 million people lived in the world’s cities. More than half the people on Earth now live in cities.”

We all know rapid changes are occurring in the way people live and interact with their environment and each other. What fascinates me is the little details. This post on The Year in Pictures blog has photos of people in Shanghai wearing pyjamas as outdoor clothing.

Here’s the book in which the photos appear over on Amazon, it’s called Planet Shanghai by Justin Guariglia.

Gordon Brown has been prompted to try and convince people he’s swinging into action over high oil prices by writing an article over on The Guardian’s website. His recognition that demand is going to exceed supply from now into the future is welcome but his plans are hardly reassuring. Suggesting that “getting the world to act together” is not a solution I’d like to rely on happening in the way he is implying. I wonder what will happen as more people realise we’ve squandered a finite resource in an unimaginably careless fashion?

Reading Brown’s article in my head made me feel like I was being addressed by Charlie Brown’s teacher so I produced the wordcloud shown above to summarise what he said. The bigger the word the more frequently he used it. I think his focus around bills, consumers, economy and investment says it all. There’s less emphasis on the environment and renewables and no mention whatsoever of peak oil.

We should all just make like the Amish.

Update: Charlie tipped my off to wordle.net which generates very pretty word clouds from any text you choose to give it. The image below links through to a larger version, again using the text of the Gordon Brown’s article.

So I’m reading this article from The Independent about mountaintop removal mining, another man-made horror inflicted on our shared environment, and read the following:

“Another way to see what’s going on behind the ridge-line is to take a Google Earth virtual tour of an online memorial to the 470 mountains blown up and levelled in recent years.”

I’d like to check this out but there isn’t a link to it. Finding the relevant site wasn’t a problem, I did a Google search and the site ilovemountains.org was the top result. The content on here appears to tally with what the article is discussing. Okay, I’ve found what I was looking for but there is a reason to get annoyed about having to take an extra step and it isn’t just to do with laziness.

Links are what make the web work. They give content a structure I can follow and allow me to interact with this content in all sorts of different ways. They also enable the web to be searchable so I can find other relevant pages. By not linking out The Independent is delivering a poor user experience and impairs my ability to easily investigate the topic further, which, given the fact I’m giving the article my attention, I may well want to do.

What makes this policy of not linking out cynical is that the article gives me the option to ‘Digg It’, bookmark it in del.ico.us, share it via my Facebook profile and add it to Stumbleupon. The Independent would very much like me to promote their article for them via social sharing in order to gain the attention of further visitors. When it comes to sharing the attention itself however it’s a different and more selfish story.

I wrote a post about Amazon recently then discovered a company I hadn’t heard of before that interested me in a similar way. Zappos sell shoes on the web. Stupid idea. I remember when it all went down at boo.com during the dot com bubble! No one thinks buying shoes online is a good idea. What if they don’t fit? You need to go to a shop to try them on to make sure you like them. The fact a shop has a really limited selection is just something you have to accept.

Zappos storefront is so-so… but they do have 133 pairs of etnies to choose from. I notice across the top that shipping is free… and returns are free too… for 365 days! A whole year! Oh, and the reviews from their customers aren’t simply good, they’re outstanding:

Customer service heaven

Zappos.com: 3 steps to great customer service

Zappos has otherworldly customer service

Check the comments:

” Zappos really does go above and beyond, and I’m just as comfortable there shoe shopping as I am in the store.”

It seems they have the problems I thought existed sorted by getting products out to people very quickly, very efficiently and by making returns easy and free. They do in fact have a giant warehouse next to a UPS depot and phone-based customer service is available 24 hours a day. Their philosophy is explained on their site.

So far, not bad. What makes them so interesting? How about the fact that they pay their new employees to leave? Employees get four weeks training at full salary and then are offered $1,000 to quit. Why?

“Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for… and it’s willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later.”

Here’s a great quote:

“Companies don’t engage emotionally with their customers—people do. If you want to create a memorable company, you have to fill your company with memorable people.”

… and this is making them money. In 1999 gross profit was next to nothing. In 2002 it was $32m. In 2005 $370m and they have a target of $1bn in 2008. Tony Hsieh, the CEO, says that:

“Our business is based on repeat customers and word of mouth. We view the money that we spend on customer service as marketing money that improves our brand.”

Why I am interested in this? Because here is a company that not only could not have existed a few years ago but is making the network work for its customers, both on and off-line. How on it are they? Out of 1,600 employees 327 are on twitter. They’re that social; this article explains it well. Each one of those employees is a public expression of commonly held values and creates a palpable feel that people make this organisation.

Update: Oops. Forgot to post the link to the Zappos blog.