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The free market does a piss-poor job of dealing with external costs (those not paid by the consumer), and the government is the appropriate mechanism for connecting the costs back to the people who create them.

True enough but it's government who's given businesses the power they enjoy. For instance the city of New London, Connecticut used their power of eminent domain to take away people's homes so a business could redevelop the land.

A better approach would simply be to impose a GHG tax -- taxes on the various gasses, for the various industries that produce them.

If you haven't heard of it perhaps you'd be interested in a proposed net zero gas tax. The idea is to raise fuel tax but cut income tax. Then the better your mileage or the less you drive the more in your pocket. If you get a Prius and only drive 100 miles a week, you'll pay less tax. And those who drive their SUVs 200 miles a week will pay more. I was surprised to read this proposal by Charles Krauthammer in the conservative "Weekly Standard"

Falcon

Internic, thanks for your good words about NewsTrust and for your thoughtful observations about the threats of groupthink and ideological homogenization. We're deeply aware of these challenges and don't claim to have all the answers -- but are working hard to find practical solutions, hopefully with your help. We're happy to share info about our current algorithms and rating weights, which can be found here: http://www.newstrust.net/Help/faq_quick_review.htm#disclosure Note that we will be changing these algorithms again in a few weeks, as part of our upcoming V3.0 upgrade. Thanks again for your helpful feedback and good suggestions. We're also very grateful to Robin 'Roblimo' Miller for this opportunity to share our findings with the SlashDot community. We will take your recommendations in mind as we plan our next steps.

The new News for nerds, stuff that matters as endorsed by the old News for nerds, stuff that matters.

I happen to lean left myself and I've read Newstrust daily almost since it came out; it's an excellent resource. But I think it's clear that the selection of articles leans left:

* For example, see this list of the most highly rated posts. You see the NY Times, Wash. Post, NPR, Huffington Post, The Nation, Alternet, FAIR, which range from moderate to liberal. What is missing is right-leaning publications, like the Weekly Standard, National Review Online, OpinionJournal, etc.

* Also, a few months ago, NewsTrust formed a partnership with a partisan liberal publication, The Huffington Post to find new about John McCain. Not surprisingly, the articles that were posted leaned very heavily left.

What can NewsTrust do to address these issues?

I happen to lean left myself and I've read Newstrust daily almost since it came out; it's an excellent resource. But I think it's clear that the selection of articles leans left:

* For example, see this list of the most highly rated posts. You see the NY Times, Wash. Post, NPR, Huffington Post, The Nation, Alternet, FAIR, which range from moderate to liberal. What is missing is right-leaning publications, like the Weekly Standard, National Review Online, OpinionJournal, etc.

* Also, a few months ago, NewsTrust formed a partnership with a partisan liberal publication, The Huffington Post to find new about John McCain. Not surprisingly, the articles that were posted leaned very heavily left.

What can NewsTrust do to address these issues?

I just watched two movies: Control Room (2004) about the media coverage of the invasion of Iraq and Al Jazeera's role and The revolution will not be televised (2003) about the role of the private media in the coup in Venezuela in 2001. Neither of the two might be called very objective, but I see how difficult it would be to find an audience for more scientific analysis.

The common theme in both is how important the media has become. Now this is not really news, but during the last decade the media reaction has been part of e.g. military operation (embedded journalism) and there is a tremendous effort to control the pictures. Not so much to suppress any reporting, since it has become obvious that this will never work, but to control what is fed to the press. And unfortunately the press is not yet up to speed to get their informations from a wider number of sources.

Now with blogging, youtube, flickr etc. there seems to be a much wider range of possible information sources, even harder to suppress than in the past. But today we face the problem which of these sources to trust, there are just so many. There are attempts like newstrust, which tries to be a sort of slashdot moderation system on top of existing news. But I think we need much more of this. Like greasemonkey allows you to attach things to websites that the authors did not intend to be there, we need the option to attach other sources to any news and have a large body of people vote on which of these sources should be taken into account. I have no clue how to realize this, but this is a typical case: the government using FUD to strengthen their position. People can react and argue with the claims, but there should be a way for these comments to reach the public, not only via sites like slashdot, but by default. With the increase of media sources and media power we have to become better at using and evaluating media as a group, not only as single viewers and readers.