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Going for a Joyride?
Here's a phrase that describes Zipcar: love-hate relationship (Zipcar Makes the Leap, March). I love getting a car from the local garage. I love reserving online and renting for only a few hours. I hate getting a car that is in serious need of cleaning or repair. I hate it even more when those problems are blamed on me because I didn't have time to call their 800-number to report the problem -- the wait time for each call can be fairly brutal.

And the worst? Getting to my Zipcar to find the air bag fully deployed and no other cars available. Their Web site could use a few tweaks, too, to make it more useful and less "omg, it's so cute."

Renee Colwell
New York, New York

Greenwashing
Thanks for getting real and telling it like it is (Green Business, March)! No happy label on a toxic or wasteful product will ever change its contents. As consumers, we have the power, and the responsibility, to create our reality. And, yup, we may just have to create a new economy in the bargain. Oh well, that, as they say, is the way the cookie crumbles.

Abby Straus
Garrison, New York

Creative Clusters
Thomas friedman is correct: The broadband Internet world is flat (In Praise of Spikes, March). If you have an idea, then implement it for yourself before someone implements it against you. Richard Florida also is correct: The flat world is a network that links clusters of people who find solutions to local issues. Some of those solutions can scale but others cannot.

If we put Friedman and Florida together, we get a perfect description of what is happening in the world today. At the global level, it is becoming flat (networked), digital (machine to machine), and virtual (ideas based). This flat world is a networked economy that does not obey nation-state governments or regulations -- subprime networked debt was based on a set of financial ideas, not on a set of home mortgages. Clusters are local. They are people based, and they are increasingly wireless (24-7 connectivity), personal (providing a customized experience), and reliant on new revenue models (passive income streams). Our world is changing in remarkable ways, and there are no right or wrong descriptors for what is evolving.

Richard Lipscombe
Melbourne, Australia

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