Stanford's power plant is a full-fledged natural gas cogen plant which powers the entire campus as well as the hospitals. (It's a real power plant, not just a spare).
Natural gas is burned to produce electricity and chilled water for cooling.
Recently construction of a large ice chilled water tank (one of the largest in the West) was completed. This allows the plant to chill water at night when electricity is cheap, serving as inexpensive large-scale energy storage.
The biggest problem is the persistant NIMBY (Not in my backyard) attitude of people. There is no way you are going to be able to build a new power plant in city limits.
One possible solution to this problem is the development of more scalable clean power plants, such as fuel cells. Fuel cells can be nearly as efficient in generating electricity on a car scale as a large power plant scale, or even more efficient because of lower line losses.
One nifty use of this I have heard of is to have car fuel cells running all day, and supplying power to the grid while parked in company lots.
The quicktime player is a simple (800k) application which makes calls to Quicktime. All of the important code is in Quicktime, which is implemented on the system level. Several hundred applications support Quicktime; it's a very simple way to add powerful video/sound/graphics support to an app. It's an API.
It really is not comparable to RealPlayer, which is a standalone media player.
This is not an attribute of the market itself, but of the legal structure in which it exists. Many free-market advocates are fans of strict liability which would internalize those externalities. The process is not hard -- just remove the tragedy of the commons incentives through privitization.
Privatization is important, but this is privatization as in "drawing boundaries where it can be done", as opposed to private as in "Not Government".
In some cases, such as greenhouse gas production, the boundary is drawn at Earth. Everyone is affected regardless of who is creating the gas. Thus the boundary needs to be drawn at Earth to produce the most efficient solution. Thus, the governments of the world work together to produce a plan to reduce the emissions in total.
In a case such as harmful air pollution, the boundary might be drawn at a region which is affected. Thus, some regional organization deals with minimizing the air pollution.
For an overfishing problem, the boundary would be drawn around those region's fishermen, who would work on a solution which would produce the maximum fish over time, rather than each fisherman taking as much as he can, since fish and waters cross conventional property boundaries.
Corporations could not use every last drop of water or cut down every tree, because they would not have any left. instead, they would be required to plan to keep themselves alive, and we would see some systems that are already in effect become more common (eg growing saplings and planting them as new trees where old trees have been cut down).
corporations, and people, will not try to take care of land if they do not own it and have no incentive to do so. no one will pollute their own property to disgusting levels if they know they will have nothing in the future.
You're making the assumption that "property" can be claimed. This is very difficult for many resources. Using your examples: Trees are there and may be maintained, but trees not only benefit the company which "owns" them, they benefit the world by serving as a CO2 reservoir. The corporation doesn't see this benefit. If the corporation does what is in its best interests, it will underweigh the total benefits because all of the benefits do not go towards it. Your other example was water. Water flows. It will not be confined within the company's property. If the company decides to pollute the waters, the pollution will eventually flow out of the property and degrade the water quality for everyone. If the company does what is in its best interest, it will continue to pollute, because it is not being negatively affected, the people are.
You can't draw property lines around everything.
Re:The Environment is a Property-Rights Issue
on
Natural Capitalism
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· Score: 1
The environment is a property-rights issue. In a capitalist system, each owner/lessor/etc of property has a right to not have that asset devalued by others against their will. If someone ran into your house and released a could of poinsonous gas, you could shorgun them right then and there, and rightly claim self-defense. How is it different when, a mile down the road, a poisonous gas gets released and then floats into your living room?
The problem here is that lawsuits (or a shotgun) are coarse solutions. Lawsuits only become efficient in large scales of pollution, say, only when the pollution causes ~$1000 of damage and there is a single polluter (for example, if a chemical company releases gas and puts you in the hospital). However, much pollution is highly distributed and has no single offender. For example, each driver/car driving 100 miles might cost you $.0001 in additional medical cost due to lung damage due to their pollution, but it's far too fine to address with a lawsuit, because you'd have to sue millions of people for $.0001. Thus lawsuits are an inadequate means of protection for much of the pollution which occurs.
Take, for instance, the currently fashionable idea of 'investing' social security taxes in the stock market.
This is somewhat offtopic, but this was one of Clinton's proposals. There is a more reasonable proposal out there (by some other politician) which would let you choose where your Social Security money is invested, just like with an IRA.
This model is appealing to companies in the tech industry simply due to the low cost of replicating their product. I fail to see the incentive in a material goods economy such as carpet sales. Why would a company want to shackle itself to the quality of your much-abused rugs? How could they possibly benefit?
The service model allows for an easier way to measure the full cost of a good. Instead of paying, say $10000 for a carpet which you have no idea how long will last, you can pay $1000/yr to have the carpet maintained. The service will be more likely to look into ways it can lower this total cost which is really what is important in the end, while the one-time-purchase tends to be short-sighted, looking only at what is the cheapest initial cost.
One example of this which the carpet servicer would take advantage of is placing carpet in segments rather than one huge roll. This way, only worn segments (under your chair, high traffic areas) need to be replaced, lowering total cost. The initial-cost solution would tend towards something cheaper in the initial installation, choosing a big roll of carpet because it's initially cheaper. Additionally, there's a scaling benefit that a service has over a one-time purchase.
I don't trust most environmentalists with economic matters--most
That's the sort of over-generalization that comes from people out of the industry which is very unfortunate. It's the equivalent of some Joe User saying "I don't like computers because I don't trust Microsoft" or "I don't trust politicians because Bill Clinton lied to me".
It's not "greens vs non-greens"; it's an optimization problem. The extremists on both sides will always look stupid; their purpose is not to promote a rational viewpoint, it is to promote change.
So I always wonder about the gas price problem when people yell about it. I think it's some sort of purely psychological thing:
Gas price has a strong psychological effect for several reasons. First, it's very visible--It's the only price that's visible when you just walk or drive down the road. This makes it stick in people's memories. It's more variable in price than typical consumer commodities. It's something people buy often, once or twice a week. It's heavily reported by the media.
(None of this explains any rationality behind the American obsession with gas price, of course)
The issue with such salary comparison programs is that they typically just lookup a table of percentages and scale the salary linearly. This is reasonably valid over some range of salaries, but once you go beyond the range, the linear estimate loses relevance.
There are fixed costs which don't vary much depending on region, then there are costs like housing which vary greatly on region. There are substitution effects; if it costs $1 million to get the same house in Palo Alto that you had in BFE for $100k, you're probably not going to go for it; you'll probably get some smaller house, and with the money you save you can spend less time at home and more vacationing or outdoors. You'll find some cheaper way to increase your quality of life.
Naturally, all this depends on strongly personal preferences; if you want a big house with an acre lot, Silicon Valley is a bad place to be. Clearly, many people have decided that the increased opportunity is worth the higher cost of living.
The salaries out there seem to only be about 1/2 again as much as what they are around here, but the cost of living is roughly double.
That's mainly only true for people who buy a home. For renters, the cost of living is a bit lower. Additionally, if you make twice as much in an area that costs twice as much, you usually come out ahead since there are many fixed costs which aren't twice as high, and you don't spend all of your income on cost-of-living expenses.
Car related expenses are also sky high in the Bay area... Gas is more expensive -- I can buy the 90 octane mid grade here for $1.49 a gallon.
Gas is about 30% more expensive in CA. That comes out to about $150 more per year for me. Not a big deal.
Insurance is double or triple that in the midwest.
It's still cheaper than on the East Coast, typically.
Cars themselves are more expensive because they have to have 'California Emissions'. Getting your car smogged all the time is not only expensive, it is a pain in the ass.
Smog checks are done once every two years for older cars (once they get beyond four? years old). That's a whole $40 every two years. In return we get cleaner air, and get older smoking vehicles fixed or off the road.
When you factor in things like a commute of less than 20 minutes, actual friendly neighbors, lower gas and utility prices, and weekend entertainment that wont break the bank, the move becomes TOTALLY worth it
Uh..ok. But you have to live in SACRAMENTO! Augh!:)
I can certainly see how living in the middle of nowhere with 100 degree heat every summer can be appealing if you are a family type. But if you're young and non-family and apartment-dwelling, it doesn't make much sense to go out there.
Produce is great in CA; you can get it straight from farms. Food prices are a bit high, but I'd estimate that they are balanced by the temperate weather. In the Bay Area you don't need much heating or AC, so you save quite a bit on energy costs and appliances. Since there's no snow and no road salt, cars tend to last longer. Overall it's housing that makes a large majority of the difference in costs of living in CA.
People should have a say in where their copyrighted material goes. I think most people would feel pretty bad about writing a book and then having it yanked from your hands and copied all over the place without receving a penny for any of it.
On the other hand, no one seems to mind all that much that a library can buy a single copy of a book, and lend it out to hundreds of people (who may otherwise have purchased the book) each year.
It sounds like if Lars knew that mp3 had a little quality problem (again, in normal use) he, and presumeably Metallica, would also have a little less of a problem with Napster.
That's not all that relevant; even if sound compression methods were unavailable, people could still trade uncompressed sound files from CDs. Sure, the file sizes would be ~10x bigger, but in 3-4 years, there will be at least 10x more bandwidth, 10x faster computers with 10x more storage.
What is relevant is that even the uncompressed digital bits on the CD are still just a representation of the music; the real music is what the musicians play and sing. You cannot digitally copy that; it is purely analog.
How do artists protect their copyrights without bankrupting themselves with consultant and lawyer fees, while at the same time not interfering with legitimate copying?
They can do what the software industry has done with regards to software piracy. Forget about it because it's not really worth the time (and is sometimes beneficial), except in the case of large piracy rings.
In the end, music is still a very human, analog artform. No digital recording will ever replace the real music which comes from the mouths and instruments of real human performers, not 1's and 0's. That has been and is the way the majority of musicians make money (though certainly not the way the majority of money in music is made).
he has a right to say what can be done with his stuff.
Wrong. He sold many of those rights to the record companies.
Regardless, once you release something, it is less in your control. If you want to keep it under absolute control, just don't release it; don't sell it.
I hear that in some communities, they have these buildings called "Libraries", where people are free to enter and freely browse copyrighted intellectual property, with no payment to the authors. Most of them offer printed material, but i hear that some now offer digital music and anonymous computer use. I even heard of a couple which will let you borrow computer software.
Right. For RIAA to get the control they want over digital music, they'd need to control all the hardware and software that can play digital music (much like what has been done with DVD). They'd have to stop simple ways of extracting music, like asking your sound chip to dump the output to a disk, and preventing you from having digital sound inputs. In other words, there is no technical way to stop piracy of sound. Software makers already tried various forms of copy protection to much failure, despite software offering some possibilities for reasonable piracy protection.
please look at page 3 of the manual and type in the second character of the second sentence to continue
There's not much positive in splitting off the Mac group, and there's much negative. MS Apps would certainly continue and probably increase development on Mac Office, because it would be even more profitable than for MS alone (since the lower Windows revenues it causes would not affect the apps company).
On the negative, you lose communication between the windows and mac office teams, which could cause more problems with compatibility between the products. You'd also lose the ability to leverage shared code and other resources.
Please give reasons for your beliefs; "it would make sense" doesn't really have much weight. One issue i find seriously lacking here and in the media is any knowledge of plain economics and business.
Harsher-than-what-is-most-efficient-presently punishment can create good by discouraging others from committing similar crimes. For example, if Microsoft is only punished so that they are in the same state as they would have been had they never exploited their monopoly, they will have lost nothing by making the decisions which did this exploitation. Had they not made these decisions, they would be in the same place they are post-punishment, so making these decisions to break the law could only help. It's as if you robbed a bank, and the punishment if you were caught was only to return that money.
So, if a company that has some monopoly power looks at this as an example, they'd say "wow, we can't lose anything by exploiting our monopoly; at worst the gov't would push us back to the same state as if we had never exploited the monopoly, so there is no point to not exploiting it".
Let me ask you this, do you think that there is a market for selling Apache support?
Certainly. Plenty of unix-oriented consultants already do this sort of work.
Selling support for Open Source Software doesn't work as an exclusive business model because unlike proprietary software most people who have jobs working with OSS have a clue
That's a false premise. Many workplaces use linux, and have employees who couldn't fix a bug or even figure out how to compile a program using the machines. As linux grows, the numbers of these people will grow.
lines, users of OSS can simply fix the code or ask on a newsgroup and get a faster and sometimes better response from some enterprising hacker than from some tech support flunkie.
Good and rapidly supplied information is worth more than a newsgroup posting from a stranger.
I see selling Linux support being like selling toys online, anyone can do it but the market will only support one or two major players while the rest will flounder and die.
Umm..What sort of reasoning are you basing that on? Linux support is already done by many small companies in the computer consulting field. There is little competitive advantage to being large in this field; I don't see why a firm of 2000 consultants would have a greater profit margin (%) than a firm of 20 (The primary advantage of a company like IBM or Sun is name recognition, not size.) Overall, consulting is a highly competitive business with little room for poorly managed companies.
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Natural gas is burned to produce electricity and chilled water for cooling.
Recently construction of a large ice chilled water tank (one of the largest in the West) was completed. This allows the plant to chill water at night when electricity is cheap, serving as inexpensive large-scale energy storage.
One possible solution to this problem is the development of more scalable clean power plants, such as fuel cells. Fuel cells can be nearly as efficient in generating electricity on a car scale as a large power plant scale, or even more efficient because of lower line losses.
One nifty use of this I have heard of is to have car fuel cells running all day, and supplying power to the grid while parked in company lots.
It really is not comparable to RealPlayer, which is a standalone media player.
My trash can has a "Designed for Microsoft Windows 98" logo sticker on it. I don't really see what harm this form of advertising can cause.
Privatization is important, but this is privatization as in "drawing boundaries where it can be done", as opposed to private as in "Not Government".
In some cases, such as greenhouse gas production, the boundary is drawn at Earth. Everyone is affected regardless of who is creating the gas. Thus the boundary needs to be drawn at Earth to produce the most efficient solution. Thus, the governments of the world work together to produce a plan to reduce the emissions in total.
In a case such as harmful air pollution, the boundary might be drawn at a region which is affected. Thus, some regional organization deals with minimizing the air pollution.
For an overfishing problem, the boundary would be drawn around those region's fishermen, who would work on a solution which would produce the maximum fish over time, rather than each fisherman taking as much as he can, since fish and waters cross conventional property boundaries.
corporations, and people, will not try to take care of land if they do not own it and have no incentive to do so. no one will pollute their own property to disgusting levels if they know they will have nothing in the future.
You're making the assumption that "property" can be claimed. This is very difficult for many resources. Using your examples: Trees are there and may be maintained, but trees not only benefit the company which "owns" them, they benefit the world by serving as a CO2 reservoir. The corporation doesn't see this benefit. If the corporation does what is in its best interests, it will underweigh the total benefits because all of the benefits do not go towards it. Your other example was water. Water flows. It will not be confined within the company's property. If the company decides to pollute the waters, the pollution will eventually flow out of the property and degrade the water quality for everyone. If the company does what is in its best interest, it will continue to pollute, because it is not being negatively affected, the people are.
You can't draw property lines around everything.
The problem here is that lawsuits (or a shotgun) are coarse solutions. Lawsuits only become efficient in large scales of pollution, say, only when the pollution causes ~$1000 of damage and there is a single polluter (for example, if a chemical company releases gas and puts you in the hospital). However, much pollution is highly distributed and has no single offender. For example, each driver/car driving 100 miles might cost you $.0001 in additional medical cost due to lung damage due to their pollution, but it's far too fine to address with a lawsuit, because you'd have to sue millions of people for $.0001. Thus lawsuits are an inadequate means of protection for much of the pollution which occurs.
Take, for instance, the currently fashionable idea of 'investing' social security taxes in the stock market.
This is somewhat offtopic, but this was one of Clinton's proposals. There is a more reasonable proposal out there (by some other politician) which would let you choose where your Social Security money is invested, just like with an IRA.
The service model allows for an easier way to measure the full cost of a good. Instead of paying, say $10000 for a carpet which you have no idea how long will last, you can pay $1000/yr to have the carpet maintained. The service will be more likely to look into ways it can lower this total cost which is really what is important in the end, while the one-time-purchase tends to be short-sighted, looking only at what is the cheapest initial cost.
One example of this which the carpet servicer would take advantage of is placing carpet in segments rather than one huge roll. This way, only worn segments (under your chair, high traffic areas) need to be replaced, lowering total cost. The initial-cost solution would tend towards something cheaper in the initial installation, choosing a big roll of carpet because it's initially cheaper. Additionally, there's a scaling benefit that a service has over a one-time purchase.
That's the sort of over-generalization that comes from people out of the industry which is very unfortunate. It's the equivalent of some Joe User saying "I don't like computers because I don't trust Microsoft" or "I don't trust politicians because Bill Clinton lied to me".
It's not "greens vs non-greens"; it's an optimization problem. The extremists on both sides will always look stupid; their purpose is not to promote a rational viewpoint, it is to promote change.
Gas price has a strong psychological effect for several reasons. First, it's very visible--It's the only price that's visible when you just walk or drive down the road. This makes it stick in people's memories. It's more variable in price than typical consumer commodities. It's something people buy often, once or twice a week. It's heavily reported by the media.
(None of this explains any rationality behind the American obsession with gas price, of course)
There are fixed costs which don't vary much depending on region, then there are costs like housing which vary greatly on region. There are substitution effects; if it costs $1 million to get the same house in Palo Alto that you had in BFE for $100k, you're probably not going to go for it; you'll probably get some smaller house, and with the money you save you can spend less time at home and more vacationing or outdoors. You'll find some cheaper way to increase your quality of life.
Naturally, all this depends on strongly personal preferences; if you want a big house with an acre lot, Silicon Valley is a bad place to be. Clearly, many people have decided that the increased opportunity is worth the higher cost of living.
(but leave now, so i can find an apartment!)
That's mainly only true for people who buy a home. For renters, the cost of living is a bit lower. Additionally, if you make twice as much in an area that costs twice as much, you usually come out ahead since there are many fixed costs which aren't twice as high, and you don't spend all of your income on cost-of-living expenses.
Car related expenses are also sky high in the Bay area... Gas is more expensive -- I can buy the 90 octane mid grade here for $1.49 a gallon.
Gas is about 30% more expensive in CA. That comes out to about $150 more per year for me. Not a big deal.
Insurance is double or triple that in the midwest.
It's still cheaper than on the East Coast, typically.
Cars themselves are more expensive because they have to have 'California Emissions'. Getting your car smogged all the time is not only expensive, it is a pain in the ass.
Smog checks are done once every two years for older cars (once they get beyond four? years old). That's a whole $40 every two years. In return we get cleaner air, and get older smoking vehicles fixed or off the road.
Uh..ok. But you have to live in SACRAMENTO! Augh! :)
I can certainly see how living in the middle of nowhere with 100 degree heat every summer can be appealing if you are a family type. But if you're young and non-family and apartment-dwelling, it doesn't make much sense to go out there.
Produce is great in CA; you can get it straight from farms. Food prices are a bit high, but I'd estimate that they are balanced by the temperate weather. In the Bay Area you don't need much heating or AC, so you save quite a bit on energy costs and appliances. Since there's no snow and no road salt, cars tend to last longer. Overall it's housing that makes a large majority of the difference in costs of living in CA.
On the other hand, no one seems to mind all that much that a library can buy a single copy of a book, and lend it out to hundreds of people (who may otherwise have purchased the book) each year.
That's not all that relevant; even if sound compression methods were unavailable, people could still trade uncompressed sound files from CDs. Sure, the file sizes would be ~10x bigger, but in 3-4 years, there will be at least 10x more bandwidth, 10x faster computers with 10x more storage.
What is relevant is that even the uncompressed digital bits on the CD are still just a representation of the music; the real music is what the musicians play and sing. You cannot digitally copy that; it is purely analog.
They can do what the software industry has done with regards to software piracy. Forget about it because it's not really worth the time (and is sometimes beneficial), except in the case of large piracy rings.
In the end, music is still a very human, analog artform. No digital recording will ever replace the real music which comes from the mouths and instruments of real human performers, not 1's and 0's. That has been and is the way the majority of musicians make money (though certainly not the way the majority of money in music is made).
Wrong. He sold many of those rights to the record companies.
Regardless, once you release something, it is less in your control. If you want to keep it under absolute control, just don't release it; don't sell it.
One of the BBEdit folks wrote a hack to let DVD player run when macsbug is loaded.
Stop the libraries before they ruin civilization!
It's especially entertaining if you have a TV card; you can watch TV in ascii!
please look at page 3 of the manual and type in the second character of the second sentence to continue
On the negative, you lose communication between the windows and mac office teams, which could cause more problems with compatibility between the products. You'd also lose the ability to leverage shared code and other resources.
Please give reasons for your beliefs; "it would make sense" doesn't really have much weight. One issue i find seriously lacking here and in the media is any knowledge of plain economics and business.
So, if a company that has some monopoly power looks at this as an example, they'd say "wow, we can't lose anything by exploiting our monopoly; at worst the gov't would push us back to the same state as if we had never exploited the monopoly, so there is no point to not exploiting it".
Certainly. Plenty of unix-oriented consultants already do this sort of work.
Selling support for Open Source Software doesn't work as an exclusive business model because unlike proprietary software most people who have jobs working with OSS have a clue
That's a false premise. Many workplaces use linux, and have employees who couldn't fix a bug or even figure out how to compile a program using the machines. As linux grows, the numbers of these people will grow.
lines, users of OSS can simply fix the code or ask on a newsgroup and get a faster and sometimes better response from some enterprising hacker than from some tech support flunkie.
Good and rapidly supplied information is worth more than a newsgroup posting from a stranger.
I see selling Linux support being like selling toys online, anyone can do it but the market will only support one or two major players while the rest will flounder and die.
Umm..What sort of reasoning are you basing that on? Linux support is already done by many small companies in the computer consulting field. There is little competitive advantage to being large in this field; I don't see why a firm of 2000 consultants would have a greater profit margin (%) than a firm of 20 (The primary advantage of a company like IBM or Sun is name recognition, not size.) Overall, consulting is a highly competitive business with little room for poorly managed companies.