Change This

“Everybody has dreams regarding work, relationships, health and personal development…

But what does it take to go from Dream to Dare and, eventually, Do? What are the secrets of real and lasting change?

You know exactly how it feels: you are frustrated, angry and unhappy. It’s time to make that change. It’s time to improve your relationships, start your own business, get that promotion, lose that weight, get those abs tuned, stop smoking, see your friends more often, start saving for your kids education, start applying for a different job… etc,etc.

Good luck! You will need it, because the odds are against you.

Of all people who consciously start personal change, more than 80% will have returned to their old habits within two years. No wonder the world is filled with cynical people, that are still in the same job they have hated for over 10 years, still smoke 2 packs of cigarettes everyday and still spend too little time with their kids.

It’s time for change.”

View the manifesto

the Atlantic

Design-conscious urban cyclists have a new object of desire, the Pacific Cycles IF Mode bicycle. With an enclosed chain drive, two-speed heel shifter, disc brakes, trispoke wheels, and elegant folding mechanism that takes 20 seconds to operate, it would have been a great Bauhaus thesis project, and the price is museum-grade, too: about $2,200.

But you don’t need a Wall Street bonus to buy a good folding bike. You can get one these days for about $500, according to Bert Cebular, owner of NYCeWheels–one of many shops that have sprung up in U.S. cities to cater to folder aficionados. With more than 100 companies now making folders, their share of the global cycling market has expanded. (Even DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that backed the Internet, has gotten into the act, funding a collapsible mountain bike for special forces troops.) Joshua Hon, vice president of Dahon, which has 60 percent of the folder market, estimates that they account for 25 percent of Chinese and 40 percent of Korean bike sales. Before the recession, his own company was posting 20 to 30 percent annual growth, and now sells about half a million folders a year.

Inventors were patenting collapsible bicycles soon after the regular diamond frame emerged from in the 1890s as a mass-market standard. Some of the first folder buyers were European armies drawn, like DARPA, by visions of speedier infantry. But most folders remained too expensive for the masses, and too heavy and too fragile for warfare, let alone racing.

What accounts for today’s folder boom is not some technological leap–though, like their standard cousin, folders have benefited from steady improvements in materials and mechanics–but a confluence of socialsocietal trends.

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New Geography

Advocates on opposite sides of urban debates often spend a great deal of time talking past each other. That’s because there’s a certain Mars-Venus split in how they see the world. In effect, there are two very different and competing visions of what an American city should be in the 21st century, the “high quality” model and the “high quantity” model One side has focused on growing vertically, the other horizontally. One  boutique and ignores the mass market. The other focuses more on the middle class, like a Costco and Target. It should come as no surprise that there’s seldom agreement between the two.

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GOOD Magazine

A group of roughly 100 well-known apparel brands and retailers have developed a software tool to help them measure the environmental impact of their apparel and footwear, from raw material to garbage dump. Ultimately, the companies hope to display an eco-value on a tag or package, much like the Energy Star rating of appliances.

The “Eco Index” will debut during August’s Outdoor Retailer trade show in Salt Lake City. It won’t include luxury brands, but it will rate clothes and shoes from the likes of Nike, Timberland, Brooks, Adidas, and Levis on the basis of their environmental and human rights impact. If the index is effective—and trustworthy—then we might see a marketplace where brands compete to improve their ratings, which will benefit everyone.

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