A study released this week suggests that working from home and shopping online do nothing to decrease pollution and in fact may increase it.

As an Amazon-holic and frequent couch-based worker, I’m a little disappointed to hear this news. I’m not sure how many physical trips I replace by shopping online, but I doubt it averages anywhere near 3.5. I’ve never ordered 25 items at once. And I wouldn’t drive or bike more than 50 kilometers to buy anything.

I don’t shop online or work from home to decrease pollution. I do those things because I’m lazy, and they’re easy. And, sure, I develop maybe a little incidental environmentalist smugness about it, but mostly convenience draws me in.

Still, even if helping the earth hasn’t been my driving motivation, I assumed I at least wasn’t hurting anything. Didn’t you?

Despite believing myself to be a lefty environmentalist-type (I ride my bicycle everywhere, compost my banana peels, and try, with varying degrees of success to take short showers), this news is probably not going to change my behavior—or, most likely, anyone’s. Those of us who shop online regularly are probably not going to hop in our cars and drive across town to a bookstore instead of hopping onto Amazon.com. We’re not going to go into the office when we could be working on the couch, in our jammies. Well, maybe to feel a book in our hands, or to impress our bosses, but not to save the earth.

Will this study change your behavior with regards to shopping online and working from home?

In the tech world, we tend to base our decisions on clear-cut rationales—we weighs pros and cons, we make lists, and we ultimately rest on a logic-based choice. Especially for women in this male-dominated field, it’s tempting for us to demonstrate that we rely on reasoning, not emotion, to make decisions. Consequently, we often bring the prudent processes we use at work into our personal decision-making, but sometimes life requires listening to our instincts and throwing prudent out the window.

Me, I throw prudent out the window all the time. For a technical, left-brained person, I do a lot of leaping headfirst into things. And for all of us who sometimes choose heart over mind, it’s not always easy to know whether we’ve made the correct choice, especially when it comes to things like choosing the right job. Sometimes, though, life hands us validation for a leap-before-you-look attitude.

I’ve had a bit of my own validation with two companies I interviewed at and turned down. Both wound up in the news under ignominious circumstances, making my choices seem far-sighted rather than arbitrary. I didn’t much like the small start-up Spock.com and told the recruiter to forget it (maybe they were going to reject me anyway, I don’t know, but no way I was going to work there). Couldn’t really explain my reasons, just… meh. When I saw, less than two weeks after my interview, that the folks at Spock.com had made a sexist, offensive spectacle of themselves at a Web 2.0 conference, I breathed a sigh of relief. I could have been working with those guys.

More recently, an SF Weekly article reamed Zynga, creators of Farmville and other Facebook addictions, as cheats and thieves. Whether the allegations are true or not, morale has got to be in the toilet these days. And I am so, so glad I told them no, even though I didn’t have a clear, analytical reason for doing so.

Luckily, there’s a complementary experience to be had as well. You can accept a job, and leap into it enthusiastically, without a logical decision-making process backing you up. I’m one week into such an experience, and it’s going fantastically well so far. Sure, it’s only been a week, but I’m confident this job will work out great—my instincts are telling me.

For all of us with similar experiences, it can be hard to truly embrace these decisions. “The place doesn’t feel right” is a tough thing to say to a recruiter or a partner or a friend. So is “this place is perfect for me!” But sometimes it’s the only reason you need. Even if you don’t know exactly why a place isn’t a good fit, even if you can’t quite explain to a recruiter why you love a company, you know it in your heart, and sometimes that’s enough.

When online classified site Craigslist removed their “adult services” offering this week, it declared the act a consequence of censorship. Regardless of anyone’s position on the explicit ads found there, however, removal of the section was not censorship, and Craigslist has shown poor judgement in claiming that it is.

Responding to the public outrage that always flourishes with anything involving sex and crime, attorneys general in 17 states requested that Craigslist remove the adult section, home to paid ads for escorts, massages, and rendezvous. And so Craigslist removed the section, but they did not so do discreetly. Instead, they replaced it with a black box stamped “censored.” For a while. Eventually, they eliminated adult services altogether, a seemingly permanent move.

I don’t know if removing the section was the right thing to do in response to the demand, but I’m quite sure that the “censored” move was disingenuous and even a bit petulant. They caved to public and government pressure. The 17 attorneys general who requested the take-down did just that—requested it. They did not force Craigslist to remove the section; the company did so on its own. Taking it down in this sulky way reminds me of a kid who stomps and pouts when asked (asked) to set the table. We were all that kid once, but we grew out of it, right?

Personally, I was ready to applaud Craiglist’s commitment to free speech and stoicism under pressure, which they had demonstrated for some time. But if Craigslist and CEO Jim Buckmaster want to fight government and public pressure, they should fight it. If they capitulate on their own, they should act like adults making a decision. That’s what they’re supposed to be.

TechCrunch co-founder Michael Arrington has gotten himself into some trouble this week for an opinion piece he posted about women in tech. Often I feel bad for writers who take public heat in the aftermath of an article that was perhaps written in haste. But given Arrington’s ignorant and smug comments, compounded by an equally arrogant follow-up, I not only agree with the critics but I’m going to pile on. Let’s look at a few choice points from his article.

• “Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit driven than almost any other place in the world.” Really? “Most” would agree with that? Who did you poll? I know we like to think that the tech industry is a meritocracy, but for entrepreneurs—the focus of the article—luck is a huge component of success, even in Silicon Valley. You need to win over venture capitalists (most of whom, incidentally, are men). You need to introduce your product at the right time and find a good staff and market your idea, and just generally do all kinds of things that are not about how smart you are or how good your idea is.
• “Statistically speaking women have a huge advantage as entrepreneurs, because the press is dying to write about them, and venture capitalists are dying to fund them.” That argument sounds an awful lot like some guys I knew in grad school. Of course you got into Dartmouth, they’d say to me (the only woman in the room); computer science departments are dying to admit women. It was hard for me to resist the urge to compare GPAs and GRE scores, over which I believe I would have had reason to gloat. The way they talked, you’d think it was so easy for us to get in, the place would be crawling with women.
• “What they probably won’t admit, but I suspect is true anyway, is that the rate of acceptance for female applicants is far higher than for male applicants.” This attitude is a huge part of what works against us. If you’re a woman in tech, you must not be as qualified as the men around you (obviously!), and you have to work twice as hard to prove yourself. Women still have to overcome the condescending attitude that we don’t deserve to be here.
• “The next time you women want to start pointing the finger at me when discussing the problem of too few women in tech, just stop. Look in the mirror.” This point gets at the real heart of the issue. Arrington thinks women need to be more like men, that we’re the ones who need to adapt, not the tech community. Well, computer science was established as a discipline in the 1950s. We’ve had over fifty years of the same attitude. Yet in 2008, women accounted for only 17.5% of Bachelor’s degrees in computer science, and as Arrington himself concedes, a similarly paltry representation among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. So it doesn’t seem to me that this attitude is getting us anywhere.

Trying to get more women in the field is not about “helping women,” as Arrington insinuates. Rather, it’s about helping our whole industry. We need full and equal participation for women (as well as people of color and other underrepresented groups) in order to ensure a robust tech community and to continue leading the world in innovation and technology. Arrington can lose the condescending tone and talk of “helping” women. He should be trying to help the industry help itself.