Slashdot Mirror

https://www.dissentmagazine.or...
To escape long blackouts many times a year, Germany is planning to back up every gigawatt of wind and solar average capacity with another gigawatt of gas or coal. As it builds its intermittent fleet it will not be able to shut down existing fossil-fueled plants; they will remain in service, complete with staff, maintenance, and overhead expenses and the infrastructure of transmission lines, coal mines, and gas pipelines. And because the dispatchable nuclear generators that could have backed up wind and solar are being shuttered, additional coal and gas plants must be built to take their place—as we see happening now. Those coal and gas plants will emit large quantities of greenhouse gases even when idling in standby mode. ...
Onshore wind is currently guaranteed at least €89.3 per megawatt-hour (MWh) for the first five years of operation, after which the tariff resets to about €49, a little above market rate. Offshore wind will get €150 per MWh for the first twelve years before a downward reset, with long extensions if the facility is located more than twelve miles from shore or where water is at least twenty meters deep. Photovoltaic solar gets roughly €120-180 per MWh, depending on the size of the rig, for a full twenty years. The tariffs are funded by a “renewable energy surcharge” added to electricity bills. A utility will pay a FIT of, say, €180 for a megawatt-hour of solar power; it will then sell that electricity on the wholesale market for perhaps €45 and charge the difference to the renewables surcharge. ...
Even as the Energiewende staggers under exorbitant costs, renewables boosters tout its success in lowering electricity prices. The strange truth is, they’re not wrong. Tides of wind and solar electricity are forcing down prices on European wholesale markets and eroding the profits of conventional plants. French business leaders have complained about the competitive advantage their German rivals get because their renewable power is now cheaper than France’s nuclear electricity.
Is renewable power winning a price war with Big Fossil and Nuclear? Not really. Germany’s feed-in tariffs disguise the fact that intermittent wind and solar power isn’t cheap at all—although it is often worthless. German grid operators are legally required to buy all the electricity wind turbines and solar panels produce, demand or no demand, at prices far above market rates. Having bought it, they then have to get rid of it, because an excess of electricity supply will crash the grid. So they dump it on the wholesale electricity market at bargain-basement rates. Midday solar dumps in sunny weather particularly eat into the profits of conventional plants by pushing down prices during times of elevated demand.
These subsidies and market distortions do not yield a systemic lowering of electricity costs. They are simply transfers from German households that drastically overpay on surcharges to renewable generators—and to electricity-hogging industries that are exempt from surcharges but benefit from lower wholesale electricity prices when wind and solar flood the market.

No.

I'll take even your own example of a unicorn. IF I had only claimed 'a unicorn exists because I say so, but I can't be bothered to provide proof' - much like you do with your arguments - then one would have a point. However, if I link to a scientific paper stating unicorns do exist and why, then, when you still claim it's not true, it's for you to demonstrate the earlier conclusion is false - with counterarguments that are also verifiable. Saying you can't be bothered to read it, or that it's 'old data' doesn't cut it.

So the matter is not your preconceived idea about whether unicorns do or do not exist - which was what you were implying with the use of such an analogy - but whether it can be demonstrated by falsification whether it exists or not.

In the case of the stochastic nature of the weather, I already gave you the definition of stochastic - so no semantic discussion can arise -, I logically argued why the weather conforms to that definition, and I even gave you a link to a scientific paper which confirmed it.

your only answer basically is, that it isn't because you say so. and you can't link to any proof of what you say, because it isn't. that's a tautology. Since the paper claims differently, one can reasonably assume other papers would contradict it, if it were true, as you so vehemently keep insisting that it isn't. Well, then: I merely ask that you provide a link to sites or papers that show the opposite, and confirm your claim. Idem for the 'no need' for backup of gas/coal/oil plants.

And, here, I'll give you some more links that demonstrate the fact that renewables need backup of classical plants, ALSO in Denmark and Germany:

The 'hidden' coal plants are not hidden at all - if you bother to do some basic research before claiming something, that is. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). And of course they also have gas-fired power stations too. For the necessity of Denmark to rely on gasturbines/plants as backup: https://carboncounter.wordpres...
and for Germany: https://www.dissentmagazine.or... and https://www.bcgperspectives.co...

I'll even give the quote:

"Prices in 2023 may therefore be 10 to 20 percent higher than those in 2013. (See Exhibit 8.) Note that this calculation includes all applicable taxes and levies, including a “security of supply component” (hidden today in grid use fees) used to finance the development of sufficient backup capacity to cover peak demand hours that lack sufficient feed-in from renewables."

Note that, while it deals with prices, it mentions the fact that part of it is due to develop sufficient backup capacity. Ergo - let's use logic here - if there WAS NO NEED for backup, they wouldn't need to develop it, nor augment to prices for it. Hence, backup is needed.

And if you're still not convinced: http://energytransition.de/201...

I'll give you the relevant quote yet again:

"Essentially, Germany needs to have a dispatchable installed capacity at the level of its peak demand for the year, which is currently around 80 gigawatts and occurs on winter evenings – when the sun does not shine. A large part of that 80 gigawatts therefore needs to be built as dispatchable gas turbines."

Again: it is CLEARLY stated that gasturbines are needed as backup. Once again, the conclusion can only be that renewables ARE de facto, in need of backup. And they will always be, until one has developed storage-capacities that can cover long time-spans (several weeks at least). And I hve also already indicated in my first post

https://www.dissentmagazine.or...

An interesting debate on the issue.

This is a series of little articles that go back and forth between two people.

Think what you will but you should find that interesting. My points are well represented in there and I think yours are as well.

Show me someone from the open source community who has helped and donated more towards charities than Bill Gates. Uh huh, that's what I thought.

Bill - is that you? Don't forget to lodge your claims for charitable donations - we filed it under "the spit shield fund".

the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (foundation) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust. Both entities are tax-exempt private foundations that are structured as a charitable.

One good thing Bill Gates has done. Though not everyone agrees.

Cut off POTS, cut the Post Office down, same idea as this from not too long ago (hat tip to Metafilter):

Look the negative in the face

"In the early 1970s, arson became a spectacular growth industry. Buildings throughout the borough were burned intentionally in an effort to recoup much of their lost value. In 1976 Roger Starr, city housing commissioner, later New York Times urban affairs editor, proposed a plan he called “Planned Shrinkage.” The city, he said, is divided into neighborhoods that were “productive” and others that were “unproductive,” a drag on the tax base. We have to eliminate the unproductive. This meant to “stop the Puerto Ricans and rural blacks from living in the city.” If we turn off water, electricity, sanitation, and stop making repairs when systems break, we can drive the unproductive out. In the past, the urban system took “ the peasant . . . and [turned him] into an industrial worker.” But now “there are no industrial jobs,” and it is our task to “keep [this man] a peasant.” We must “reverse the role of the city” as a world-historical force. " -- Marxist philosopher and lifelong Bronx resident Marshall Berman, who sadly passed away last year talks about the attempted urbicide of the South Bronx and how it rose up again from it in his last public lecture at the City College of New York

Yeah, see that's where you have to take those green colored glasses off and realize that its not working in Germany and its not going to work in the US either.

Germany's green energy is
Generally
Considered
A failure.
It's not getting better
Any time soon

There simply isn't enough windy places to power all of the United States 24/7. The sun doesn't shine at night, and we can't build a grid to someplace where it does.

Grid is a substitute for storage and local generation. But grids simply aren't world wide, and aren't likely to be.

I think there are a bunch of links in this Slashdot discussion claiming otherwise. On the surface, it makes sense: shut down nuclear plants, and what else are you going to do? Solar just can't produce that amount of power (yet).

To confirm this, I just did a quick Google search for "Germany Coal Nuclear Solar":
https://www.google.com/search?q=germany+coal+nuclear+solar&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
which seems to confirm the increase in coal burning, although the Poland connection seems to be false.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-G-N/Germany/
"More than half of Germany’s electricity was generated from coal in the first half of 2013, compared with 43% in 2010." but it says nothing about the shutdown of nuclear reactors.

http://cleantechnica.com/2013/02/05/debunking-common-myths-about-nuclear-coal-power-in-germany-this-time-repeated-by-the-guardian/
"coal (including lignite) is up around 5%...have nothing to do with nuclear in Germany."

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Energy-Voices/2013/0716/The-dirty-coal-behind-Germany-s-clean-energy
This sites the 5% figure but doesn't mention why. "Germany has managed to be praised by environmentalists more than any other developed nation and yet is building more coal plants than more or less any other developed country" but it has no specifics.

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/green-energy-bust-in-germany
This one claims the same thing.
"Germany is indeed avoiding blackouts—by opening new coal- and gas-fired plants. Renewable electricity is proving so unreliable and chaotic..."

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/57035
"they are now building coal-fired electricity generation and shuttering nuclear power plants..."

I don't know what to believe now. Ultimately, we would need to see the energy mix numbers from the German power companies/government to know for sure. Just pointing out that new coal plants are being built doesn't mean much. They might be replacing existing ones, or making cleaner/smaller ones.

I think that whoever wrote this summary is being unfairly critical of charter schools, and even more unfair to those rich donors who are actually *trying* to help (as opposed to those who just hoard their money and or just their wealth to buy new Ferraris).

If you read TFA http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781 you'll see what the problem is. These billionaires aren't simply giving money to local innovative schools. They're using their money in a heavy-handed way to shape policy for the public schools used by less-affluent, less-powerful taxpayers.

They promote bad policy, and when the evaluations show they don't work, they ignore the evaluations and keep promoting the bad policy -- in public schools as well.

They've affected federal policy, under No Child Left Behind, so that schools can't get this federal money unless they accept the whole package of "reforms," many of which turned out not to work, such as destroying large neighborhood schools and replacing them with small schools, high stakes testing, and promoting charter schools (which according to major nationwide evaluations http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/studies/charter/ using the tests they love so much, are worse on average than public schools).

TFA http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781 doesn't have a problem with billionaires helping poor kids get an education.

The problem is that billionaires don't free up resources for public schools. As a result of their lobbying, public schools actually lose money, for example through penalties under No Child Left Behind, if they don't implement these "reforms" many of which have been proven not to work.

As TFA says, the billionaires are trying to change the public schools that only get tax money. They're doing it by using their money not so much for direct teaching but for setting up "think tanks", lobbying, and even paying public school educators in ways that might be considered bribery.

My biggest problem is that they're implementing fad solutions, like charter schools, financial bonuses, etc. that haven't been shown to work -- and have sometimes been shown not to work.

For example, some charter schools have been evaluated by the NAEP http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/studies/charter/ in rigorous studies, and overall they did worse than public schools.

Tell me -- if the evidence demonstrates that something doesn't work, why would you want to roll it out across the whole school system?

It's a neutral test made by a third party.

I agree that parental involvement is the most important factor, but teachers are fighting the wrong battle by pitting themselves against standardized tests. They will not win because their position defies common sense. Everybody understands the need to measure outcomes and the need to compare those measurements.

These "neutral" tests are also invalid tests. As TFA http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781 mentioned in passing, the National Academy of Sciences and other organizations reviewed the current tests and found out that they don't do what they're supposed to do: They don't tell you whether a teacher is good or bad.

The New York City department of education was using a test to determine whether new teachers would continue on the job. The test had a complicated formula that (literally) no one could understand, to try to correct for things like the students' family income and previous test scores.

The test told one middle school teacher that she was in the bottom 6%, and had to be fired. Her principal didn't believe it, and didn't want her to be fired, because she was a good teacher, her students got into the competitive high schools, etc. But that 6% had a confidence interval -- from 0% to 51%. So actually, she was either among the worst teachers (0%), or among the best half. If you don't know what a confidence interval is, there's no point in my talking to you, but that means the test results are statistically invalid. You might as well fire teachers by throwing dice.

These tests are made under contract by testing companies, and they haven't been tested for validity. There's a huge amount of research on this. They can't distinguish between the effects of family income and effective teaching. It's not common sense to fire teachers based on these tests.

That's what TFA is all about. http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781

Everybody knows that the one factor that is most strongly associated with grades is family income. If you teach low-income kids, they're going to start with low grades and their grades will rise slowly. Test scores reward teachers for having high-income students.

You make a good point. It's stupid to fire "bad" teachers. If your tests are so good at identifying good teachers, find out why they're good, and teach their techniques to other teachers.

If a teacher is hopelessly incompetent, I don't defend keeping them on, but that's not what Rhee was doing. She was just a right-wing hero who wanted to destroy the union and attack teachers.

Read the USA Today story about Rhee (or the Wikipedia article).

Rhee gave large bonuses to certain principals and teachers. Then it turned out that there was massive cheating on the standardized tests that Rhee used to evaluate them. The teachers erased the incorrect answers and filled in the correct answers. The companies that mark the test sheets can read the test answers, but their machines can also read erased answers, because an unusually high number of erasures indicates cheating. That's what happened in DC. When the company warned Rhee about this, she refused to investigate it and covered it up.

Everybody really ought to read TFA. It explains why all of Rhee's reforms, including the performance bonus, have been tried before and didn't work. http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781 I admit it's not easy reading, because it has lots of facts and data, based on actual research and the experience that people had when they tried these things out and looked at whether they worked.

Gates is also funding funding other billionaires' aligned initiatives and bankrolling astrotufing-likened school advocacy, raising concerns about undue influence and even a call for eliminating the charitable giving tax deduction. 'This year, governments may lose $50 billion because of tax deductions taken overwhelmingly by the rich for charitable givings intended primarily to enhance their status with their brethren or to attack the public sector,' writes David Morris. 'We can't stop the rich from using their money for their own purposes. But we should not add insult to injury by giving them huge amounts of public sums to attack the public sector.'

Bill's charitable work is actually quite awesome. Among other things, his foundation is very good at making sure that their funding goes to projects that actually work (surprisingly unusual in the non-profit world).

Now, I don't approve of how he made his money, but I do approve of him using his money to help people rather than just hang out and be rich with Warren Buffett all day.

Mr. Gates has great intentions, and he should therefore beware of creating monocultures in his various avenues of venture philanthropy. The public health work is admirable, and the foundation's efforts in education are less so. Full disclosure: I'm a teacher union guy. But, my objection to the Gates-Broad-Walton education agenda is that there's no basis for it other than groupthink. That is, it fails your standard of money going to things that actually work. Without getting too far off topic, let me link this article from Dissent magazine:

On February 16, 2008, the New York Times reported on a memo that it had obtained, written by Dr. Arata Kochi, head of the World Health Organization’s malaria programs, to WHO’s director general. Because the Gates Foundation was funding almost everyone studying malaria, Dr. Arata complained, the cornerstone of scientific research—independent review—was falling apart.

There's more right after that that's also interesting. I admit that it's probably difficult for one person with a lot of money to encourage diversity of thinking when everyone is beholden to them for their research money. Or maybe it's just hard for me to think of ways.

Bill's charitable work is actually quite awesome. Among other things, his foundation is very good at making sure that their funding goes to projects that actually work (surprisingly unusual in the non-profit world).

Are you sure?

In November 2008, Bill and Melinda gathered about one hundred prominent figures in education at their home outside Seattle to announce that the small schools project hadn’t produced strong results. They didn’t mention that, instead, it had produced many gut-wrenching sagas of school disruption, conflict, students and teachers jumping ship en masse, and plummeting attendance, test scores, and graduation rates. No matter, the power couple had a new plan...

From a good article about how the Gates foundation, as well as other billionaire-led philanthropy organisations, effectively controls school policy in the US and is dangerously directing private and government funding towards programs that research is proving do not work.

http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781

The Gates have the right idea regarding vaccines, and it's easy to support their international medical work (although there are some signs that having such a large single philanthropist supporting that is having some negative effects on the programs and research too). But they certainly don't have a perfect track record.

Lengthy critical opinion on gates work in education that i don't agree with on most parts but that i found nonetheless interesting: http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781

You must be benefiting but millions of your countrymen are still disenfranchised through his comically inept and violent rule .

Holy Mother of Godzilla, dood, what pharmaceuticals have you been imbibing? During WWII in Nazi Germany, stuffing people into ovens was "legal" - but amoral! During Idie Amin's reign, cannibalizing his ex-mistresses was "legal" but amoral! The Israeli treatment of Palestinians is "legal" - but amoral! The imprisoning of marijuana smokers is "legal" in America (and no, I've never taken any drugs, nor smoked, for that matter) - but amoral!

And colossal fraud on an unprecedented level has been "legalized" in America (along with usury - once highly illegal) - but it is amoral.

Dwell on this: 16 of the top banks in the USA are insolvent, yet those bankers and senior management affiliated with them became millionaires, billionaires, and in some cases, trillionaires -- now where do you suppose all that mulloh disappeared to???

A GAO study of American corporations found that between 1996 and 2000 61% of them paid NO taxes....and during the Bush administration that percentage went up considerably!

I don't think facism ended with Franco. The Baath party in Iraq was of indirect Nazi descent.

It was a Vichy-sponsored, Nazi-inspired national socialist party which was founded in Vichy-controlled Damascus and spread to oust the British colonial government in Baghdad. The party then dropped its anti-communist element and allied with the Soviets to prolong their rule. Like national socialism in Germany, the Baathists worked largely on the ideals of a racial struggle between their own pure race and those they considered defilers of that race. Its shift in Iraq to pro-Sunni and anti-Shiite came later, and probably out of convenience.

The Baath party of Iraq was founded as a single-party pro-Vichy, pro-Nazi ruling group for racial Arabs. The Bath Party of Syria used to be the same party, but important rifts had formed between the two parties long before Saddam Hussein's regime ended. Baghdad was the traditional capital of the ideal pan-Arab world many true believers in that movement envisioned, which is probably why the more radical portions of the party ended up there.

In short, Saddam Hussein's government was not only eerily similar to Hitler's, but it was a family resemblance.

Eretzy Isroel
Weekly Standard
Paul Johnson, a historian at Hillsdale College
Dissent Magazine
Free Republic
Syrian Embassy
a well-bibiliographied attack on the Bush family as supporters of the Baath party
International Socialist Review article in support of Iraq vs. US invasion

These references run from very conservative to very liberal, and from very Arab to very Western. Although several of them probably show strong biases, they weave an interesting story when read together.

Perhaps you should do some more reading on the subject then, like the article Soft Surveillance: Mandatory Voluntarism and the Collection of Personal Data by Gary T. Marx. Here's a good quote:

The first task of a society that would have liberty and privacy is to guard against the misuse of physical coercion by the state and private parties. The second task is to guard against the softer forms of secret and manipulative control. Because these are often subtle, indirect, invisible, diffuse, deceptive, and shrouded in benign justifications, this is clearly the more difficult task.

Two decades later the hot-button cultural themes of threat, civil order, and security that Lewis emphasized are in greater ascendance and have been joined by the siren calls of consumption. If our traditional notions of liberty disappear, it will not be because of a sudden coup d'état. Nor will the iron technologies of industrialization be the central means. Rather, it will occur slowly, with an appeal to traditional American values in a Teflon- and sugar-coated technological context of low visibility, fear, and convenience.

The problem with the data brokerage industry isn't that they collect data about me (and sometimes get it wrong).

No, I'd argue this is part of the problem. You can't control the misuse of data if you can't control the circumstances surrounding both its collection and use. HIPPA is one obvious example of how this works in the context of legislation.

You just can't stop data collection. It's going to happen, it's already happening, it's been happening.

If you can create laws to control misuse, surely you could create laws to prevent collection in the first place. In fact, it is necessary to define proper use before you can even talk of misuse.

Organizations and people need to collect and exchange information in order for the economy and society to function efficiently and smoothly. Law enforcement needs information to investigate and prosecute wrongdoers. These kinds of informational needs aren't going to magically disappear.

Organizations have gotten along without this information before now. The economy and law enforcement have demonstratedly operated without it. In terms of law enforcement, there are also very clear sociological implications for this kind of soft surveillance.

I agree with Gary T. Marx when he says:

The first task of a society that would have liberty and privacy is to guard against the misuse of physical coercion by the state and private parties. The second task is to guard against the softer forms of secret and manipulative control. Because these are often subtle, indirect, invisible, diffuse, deceptive, and shrouded in benign justifications, this is clearly the more difficult task.

Data collection of this kind, despite your benign justifications, is primarily a form of manipulative control by the state and private parties. While there are good arguments based on utility that can be employed on behalf of these kinds of measures, most of these arguments fail to account for all the negative repercussions (indeed, this assumes we even understand them all) of the data collection and use, and they do not provide for built in safeguards to address them (which I believe is your point).

However, I think, from a policy point of view, it is best to make laws that criminalize the collection of this information by default. Then, we could have discussion about legalizing specific applications and specify the controls that must be in place that minimize the level of manipulation and protect the rights of individuals. However, if you don't control data collection, you don't control how it will be used. So, it goes back to my original comment that data collection is, in fact, part of the problem.

I don't disagree with that. And I will agree that there are ways for the average person to improve his tax situation. My point was that the reduction in tax liability is very small compared to what can be accomplished by someone with a professional accountant, lawyers and lobbyists.

I'd love for you to share some of these tricks. Outside of estate plans, I've never really seen any. Or perhaps are you only upset with the "rich" people who inherited that wealth? The rest of them had to earn it somehow.

I have no problem with rich people who earned their money. Inheritances do trouble me, but I can accept them (certainly if they were my kids I would want to pass on my wealth). What bugs me is when people take the attitude that they shouldn't have to pay taxes.

A friend of mine likes to travel frequently, and because he accumulates frequent flyer miles he often upgrades and flies business class. Recently he sat next to a guy who was flying down to South America to see his wife, a trip he takes twice a month. He was a retired business owner who had sold two businesses after making them profitable. The two started chatting, and my friend, who makes about $90K annually in pre-tax wages, bemoaned how much of his salary was eaten up by taxes.

"Oh.." said the businessman, "...you pay taxes?" He proceeded to tell my friend that he cleared $25K each month from his various business interests and investments, and paid no tax. He was not ashamed of this - in fact he was rather proud.

Now I'm not against the man having wealth and enjoying it. He clearly had worked hard to build up his businesses, and deserved the fruits of his labor. But to think that he had no responsibility to the society that made his wealth possible is outrageous.

As to how it is done, I am no expert. Surely it is obvious though, that the tax system is tilted so that income from investments is favored over wages. The mere fact that capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than wages is troubling enough. Corporations and wealthy individuals pay lots of money to accountants and lawyers to work the tax code. Take a look the link I posted earlier in this thread for some examples of how corporations shuffle money around in ways that have absolutely no legitimate purpose except to avoid taxes. The main theme seems to be: move your assets into corporations, move your corporations assets offshore.

Anatole France does a wonderful job of pointing out an unfortunate fact of life. He does not, however, propose a solution, does he? I am reminded of an observation from a tax law scholar: The tax law can be simple, or it can be fair, but it cannot be both.

I respectfully suggest that you missed the point of the quotation, which was to comment on your statement that "the same rules apply to everyone". The rules might very well be uniform and applied equally, but the situations of the people affected by the rules are very different. In the context of taxation, if there is a law giving favorable treatment to someone who owns a 100-unit apartment building, who can write off the value of the structure to "depreciation" despite the ever-increasing value of the property (true), said law means nothing to a waitress making minimum wage (and who does not own an apartment building), and whose meager opportunity to avoid taxes on her income from tips is precluded by the IRS assessing her for them without even knowing how much she made! (also true). Of course if the apartment owner has income from tips he will be assessed as well - it's only fair! This is no "fact of life", it is the result of a government policy steered by one class of people to favor themselves.

Anatole France did in fact propose a solution - he was a rabid communist. I certainly don't agree with that approach. And as to the tax law being complex, it's various twists and turns mainly come

This report has an excellent discussion of legal tax avoidance schemes by the rich and their impact on society.

I recently read (Fall 2005) an interesting article in Dissent magazine from Gary T. Marx on this issue called: "Soft Surveillance Mandatory Voluntarism and the Collection of Personal Data."

He makes a number of interesting observations on how DNA as a soft means for the collection of personal data - for example, where police go in and ask everyone in a community for a mouth swab "in order to solve a crime" or in airports as the poster suggests. Marx argues for a system based on clearly defined rules based on meaningful consent. These rules could center around questions like: Would the information collector be comfortable being the subject, rather than the agent, of surveillance if the situation were reversed?

Imagine for a moment a community database of DNA information and the potential for abuse. For example, a criminal might collect hair from a hair brush and plant it at the scene of a crime. Perhaps a swab might be a precondition for health insurance? Etc.

There are many potential problems with the widespread availability of DNA technology. It is also an issue many of us have not given a great deal of thought. Gary Marx has some material available online like Technology and Social Control: The Search for the Illusive Silver Bullet.

If you know of other people addressing this issue that would be worth reading, please reply with a citation or link.

Presidents do not hold absolute power to repeal laws, but judging from Bush's record they can repeal regulations and rules.

Dude, The New Republic is full of neo-conservatives and hardly qualifies as liberal. You want left/center-left, read The Nation or Dissent, or go to the Center for American Progress.