I think that one of the reasons they go after Apple is precisely because they believe Apple's customer base is more environmentally conscious than, say, your average Dell or Lenovo buyer. Hence, calling for Apple to improve, even if they're already doing a good job by the standards of other electronics manufacturers, is more likely to result in pressure from Apple's customers.
I don't think Patrick Moore is a monster by any stretch of the imagination. But the fact that he's a disaffected former member of Greenpeace, who now makes his living doing environmental consulting for the very industries that Greenpeace demonizes, should be given due consideration by anyone who thinks he's merely an objective historian of the movement.
Going by the material available about his activities, it's very difficult to tell whether Moore is improving the environmental impact of the companies he advises, or merely providing a nice coat of greenwash for them.
When you hear about Operation Rescue blockading an abortion clinic and harassing the people trying to get in and out, do you make a donation to Planned Parenthood?
When Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, did you donate to the Venezuela Solidarity campaign?
Doubtful. But every time PETA crosses whatever bright line exists inside your head, you feel the need to make a chicken suffer for it? Talk about misplaced aggression.
From KFCCruelty.com, a PETA-operated website:
KFC suppliers cram birds into huge waste-filled factories, breed and drug them to grow so large that they can't even walk, and often break their wings and legs. At slaughter, the birds' throats are slit and they are dropped into tanks of scalding-hot water--often while they are still conscious. It would be illegal for KFC to abuse dogs, cats, pigs, or cows in these ways.
KFC's own animal welfare advisors have asked the company to take steps to eliminate these abuses, but KFC refuses to do so. Many advisors have now resigned in frustration.
You're willing to support behavior like that, simply because you don't like the behavior of the messenger? Ask yourself why that is.
I give you two specific links that demonstrate Greenpeace's involvement, and this is your response? Because a magic search string failed to uncover documentation of an event that likely preceded their website by at least half a decade, that they must not have been involved in it?
Shoddy. The institutional memory of the Internet as a whole is about five years. Lots of things happened in the early nineties that aren't easily googlable.
Your evidence of their disinterest is slim at best. But let me ask you, what would you need to see, in order to change your mind? Obviously, the involvement I demonstrated isn't enough for you. If Greenpeace activists had flooded Kuwait and chained themselves to the oil wells, do you think they could have prevented it? Or would the Iraqi army have simply lit the wells anyways? What pressure could Greenpeace have put on Hussein, to make the situation any better?
For that matter, what pressure could they have put on the U.S., or Kuwait? The U.S. was already doing everything in its power to get the oil fires under control. If you think that Greenpeace's reaction was somehow inadequate, tell us what they should have done.
1) Would you please define "rational environmentalism"?
2) When have "anti-globalism activists" ever decried the Internet, the SMS text messaging protocol, etc.?
3) I'm certain that I'm much better informed about what modern environmentalist groups are actually saying than you are, and I've never, ever, ever, ever, ever heard someone claim that all technologies after [INSERT YEAR HERE] should be abandoned. Prove me wrong.
It's one thing to point out that the long-lived stuff isn't particularly hot, and that the hot stuff isn't particularly long-lived. You're saying something orders of magnitude more stupid: that nuclear material is useful for as long as it's unsafe, and safe once it's no longer useful. I don't think you'll find much to back you up on this.
Once the waste of the nuclear industry is so low-level that fifty pounds of the stuff wouldn't make a good dirty bomb, maybe you'll have a leg to stand on.
Plus, you're arrogant if you think that only serious thinkers such as yourself grasp the concept of "background radiation levels". If you're going to go after unavoidable sources of radiation, you could at least use Potassium-40 in your scaremongering (which gives us about 40 times as big a dose of radiation as carbon-14).
Can you point to Greenpeace taking any of the communist governments to task for their appalling environmental record?
YES. In fact, just google for 'china' and 'greenpeace', and your overarching thesis (that Greenpeace ignores governmental misdeeds) is proven false.
How about any peep of protest when Saddam Hussein ordered the burning of the Kuwaiti oil fields?
I was surprised to find anything on teh Int3rw3bz regarding what Greenpeace was doing in 1991. But it turns out that they did in fact consider the burning of the Kuwaiti oil fields serious enough to warrant amending the Geneva Convention to turn such acts into war crimes. source
The eBay ad underneath? "Looking for Civil War War Crimes? Find exactly what you want today. www.eBay.com"
Is that the "any peep" you were looking for? Are you so blinded by your hatred of Greenpeace, that you would automatically assume that they'd ignore one of the biggest environmental disasters of the 20th century, simply because Saddam Hussein wasn't a prime target for extortion?
The fact is, every one of the issues they're tackling right now requires the cooperation of government and the private sector. According to their recent press releases, they've gone after non-corporate entities including Democratic Congresscritter Dingell, the Brazilian government, the World Bank, the Bush Administration, and pretty much every NIMBY bastard standing in the way of the Cape Wind Project.
Planets only share one causative agent (the sun), and that hasn't changed for squat.
Only evidence for Mars is a few photographs of a melting (actually, sublimating) southern pole. No evidence that it is a global, rather than a local phenomenon.
Pluto is said to be warming as well, but that is based on very limited data, and is probably solely due to the fact that it's at the nearest part of its highly eccentric, 248 year orbit.
Wrong. Those vehicles cost substantially more to manufacture, and at least some of that cost is pushed onto the buyer at the dealership, with the rest being eaten by the manufacturers who have a marketing need to appear greener than the next guy.
Of course they cost more to manufacture. The point is that, when gas hits $3.00/gallon, money saved on gas fully offsets that extra cost. If gas prices go higher than that (an inevitable situation), buying a hybrid makes economic as well as ecologic sense.
That difference is passed along to purchasers of their other products.
Shred of evidence, please.
And of course, you're ignoring the really ugly reality of the toxicity in the production and disposal of the batteries.
Toyota claims that the Prius' NiMH batteries are fully recyclable, and offers a $200 bounty for anyone who brings them a set. (details)
Further, the people that buy these often do so because of some tax benefit they get for doing so. Which, again, is just them pushing that tax burden off onto other people, most of whom can't afford the hybrid penalty in the price of a vehicle.
If you think that tax collection in the U.S. disproportionately affects the poor, I strongly suggest you write your congresscritter. I fully support incentives for fuel efficient technologies. It's a useful intervention in the market (unlike the subsidies granted to SUVs).
Why should I have to link people who support the leftier side of Gore's base with people like Chavez when they're doing it FOR me
I don't care if you link any particular Democrat with Chavez (since the Left is generally less hostile to him than the Right). I think where you lost me was when you started running around screaming "CHAVEZ! SOCIALISM! DEMONIC! GONNA KILL US ALL! AAAAAAAHHHH!" and then drove the point home by slicing your wrists open. It was a remarkable spectacle, to be sure, but hardly a substitute for actual informed criticism of Chavez or his policies. I think his decision to nationalize the oil industry was wise, his land reforms are laudable, and his outright hostility towards America... well, maybe one of these days *he'll* try to stage a coup to overthrow *our* government, just so we can know how it feels.
Well, which is it? Reducing emissions, or reducing costs that you're most worried about?
Given that energy efficient technologies would do both, I'm not sure I understand the question.
You can't seriously be saying that serious person who seriously advocates a serious reduction in hydrocarbon fuel use wouldn't understand the serious repercussions of thinking that the tiny flow of juice that will come from even seriously improved windmills deployed by the tens of thousands (at over $1m each) would even slow the rate at which we're falling behind in keeping up with demand and distribution. Seriously.
Amateur! Do you really believe that all I was trying to do in that sentence was use the word "seriously" as many times as possible? God knows, had that been my intent, I would be ashamed to only manage three. No, the sublimity of the humor stems from the triply nested subjects, each scorning the other. By forcing me to explain this comedic tour-de-force, you have simultaneously tarnished the joke and demonstrated your unworthiness as a recipient of my efforts.
I won't try so hard this time. Instead, I will simply point once again to the plummeting costs of solar, wind, and geothermal energy as evidence that nuclear energy is unnecessary, remind you of the long-term waste and security issues presented by nuclear power, and raise yet again the question of what sort of quality w
Tell your hurricane insurer to listen to this. It's a lecture on hurricanes and global warming from the University of Utah's Frontiers of Science series, delivered by a very well regarded scientist named Kerry Emanuel. According to him, AGW hasn't increased the frequency of hurricanes noticeably, but it has a huge effect on how strong they get and where they go. He also points out that most hurricane-attributable economic damage has occurred in the last fifteen years, simply because we've built more infrastructure in hurricane-prone areas (a trend unlikely to reverse itself).
I was at the lecture, and the charts he showed did not include the economic effects of Hurricane Katrina, which would have dwarfed everything that came before. But we can't prove that Katrina was actually made worse by global warming, so we must be safe, right? Right?
The energy carried by a hurricane is a function of the cube of the wind speed, and the economic impact has been estimated to be something like the seventh power of the wind speed. Throw in the fact that hurricanes are more frequently wandering into areas that have never seen them before, and whose building codes don't account for them. Despite your know-nothing rhetoric, hurricane fear is still very much in play.
You mean the "big ball of fire" whose output hasn't changed in the last thirty years? THAT big ball of fire?
Talk about deliberate falsehoods. You say something that sounds so perfectly reasonable to the layman, then when confronted with the simple and compelling fact that the sun isn't putting out any more heat than it was thirty years ago, you start babbling about third- and fourth-order effects of changes to the sun's magnetic field, and how they maybe someday might possibly be shown to have some effect the amount of cloud cover on Earth. It's really rather pathetic and desperate.
The ozone hole has been shrinking? Wow, that must prove that the scientists behind the Great Ozone Swindle must have been dishonest idiots. Except, wait, didn't we ban the very substances that they claimed were wrecking the ozone layer? You're right. I'm sure that had nothing to do with it.
Do tell us, what "pattern of the sun" does it follow? We have satellite telemetry dating back to the 1970s, and in that time the solar output hasn't varied by more than a half a percent.
Further, don't even try to pretend that the "global cooling" scare of the 1970s ever had the sort of substantial scientific support that global warming does today.
That's WAY to naive or disengenuous (some basic math comparing the personal cost delta of keeping a car that gets 25mpg vs. having industry build for you and then buying a car that gets 30mpg shows that it's likely a money LOSER, rather than "paying for itself").
He's citing the fact that, at $3.00/gallon, consumers pay no price premium when buying a new hybrid (as opposed to a traditional new vehicle). Did you really think he was claiming that every time someone trades in a vehicle for a more fuel-efficient one, the buyer always saves money? It just makes you look desperate to find something to criticize.
Creating a climate of fear, and then proposing feel-good-do-little/nothing measures, and riding the warm and fuzzy glow of having made those recommendations into political power is BS.
You mean, like pumping up the threat of terr'ism into the Single Greatest Threat to Democracy, then invading a country that had nothing to do with the attacks and posed no threat to us, then winning re-election by smearing your opponents as "soft on terr'ism"?
Or maybe like trying to link your political opponents to frequently loathed figures like Hugo Chavez and Karl Marx? How is your hackneyed red-baiting anything but a shameless attempt to control others through fear? At least with global warming, the concern is grounded in a real and important global phenomenon.
Nuclear power is not the solution. It's not the cheapest, it's not the cleanest, it's not the safest. It's a much more mature industry than solar or wind power, so we can't expect to see the costs of nuclear power falling the way solar and wind have. Nuclear energy also has foreign policy issues, since only the countries on Santa's nice list are allowed to enrich their own fuel or reprocess their own waste. Nuclear energy requires the effective and intrusive government oversight of the entire energy sector, to keep The Bad Guys from getting a hold of radioactive material. It is hugely subsidized by the government, in the form of unlimited insurance that nobody in the insurance industry is crazy enough to provide. Finally, at the moment it is far cheaper to reduce demand for electricity than to increase supply.
You can argue over any specific point if you like, but there are legitimate concerns to be raised. You're also ignoring the falling cost of solar and wind, along with the untapped potential of geothermal. Anyone who says that anyone who does not take nuclear power seriously should not be taken seriously should not be taken seriously.
Well, if every time I bought a copy of MS Office, they printed a second copy and sent it to the third world... okay, stupid example. It takes them what, two bucks? So never mind.
I want one of these things, just so I can wander around outside and do some writing/brainstorming while I'm there. The fact that the unique design makes it a good conversation starter is also a plus. I've never seen anything quite so well suited for that. I'm a bit nervous taking my current laptop anywhere.
Plus, if I accidentally throw it off a cliff in a drunken rage, then another damned kid gets another damned laptop. I consider this a huge advantage over my old laptop (may she rest in peace).
If the "third world kid getting a laptop" thing isn't an "advantage" in your mind, then you either have low hopes for the educational value of these laptops, or you're the love child of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman.
There's something to be said for that, but there may be other considerations. With this system, it's clear that you're getting "a donation, plus a free tote bag." If they start putting the price wherever the market demands, then suddenly they're in more direct competition with other low-budget, low-power, ruggedized PCs. That might hurt them. Sometimes it's better to find your niche and thrive there.
There's also something psychologically appealing about the 1-to-1 system. If they place the price elsewhere, and just say "some proceeds will go toward buying an unspecified number of kids some number of computers," it leaves the donor with all sorts of questions about just what he accomplished. I'd suggest that they play it to the hilt. You know, maybe by selecting sponsor kid who e-mails you once a month, talking about his/her life and education.
Finally (and I'll admit this part may be a bit far-fetched, since several million-laptop deals fell through) there may be an upper limit to how many of these machines can be produced, due to part scarcities. If the "optimum price point" is about three laptops to the developed world for each laptop to the undeveloped world, that may undermine the goal of putting as many laptops in third-world hands as possible.
I was right with you until you offered up the proposition that anyone, anywhere could learn anything from that pretentious pile of horse dung that is Andrew Keene's "Cult of the Amateur."
Slashdot Mirror
Your love of civil and considered dialogue and your deep concern for the environment are clearly demonstrated by this post. I tip my hat to you, sir!
I think that one of the reasons they go after Apple is precisely because they believe Apple's customer base is more environmentally conscious than, say, your average Dell or Lenovo buyer. Hence, calling for Apple to improve, even if they're already doing a good job by the standards of other electronics manufacturers, is more likely to result in pressure from Apple's customers.
I don't think Patrick Moore is a monster by any stretch of the imagination. But the fact that he's a disaffected former member of Greenpeace, who now makes his living doing environmental consulting for the very industries that Greenpeace demonizes, should be given due consideration by anyone who thinks he's merely an objective historian of the movement.
Going by the material available about his activities, it's very difficult to tell whether Moore is improving the environmental impact of the companies he advises, or merely providing a nice coat of greenwash for them.
When Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, did you donate to the Venezuela Solidarity campaign?
Doubtful. But every time PETA crosses whatever bright line exists inside your head, you feel the need to make a chicken suffer for it? Talk about misplaced aggression.
From KFCCruelty.com, a PETA-operated website:You're willing to support behavior like that, simply because you don't like the behavior of the messenger? Ask yourself why that is.
I give you two specific links that demonstrate Greenpeace's involvement, and this is your response? Because a magic search string failed to uncover documentation of an event that likely preceded their website by at least half a decade, that they must not have been involved in it?
Shoddy. The institutional memory of the Internet as a whole is about five years. Lots of things happened in the early nineties that aren't easily googlable.
Your evidence of their disinterest is slim at best. But let me ask you, what would you need to see, in order to change your mind? Obviously, the involvement I demonstrated isn't enough for you. If Greenpeace activists had flooded Kuwait and chained themselves to the oil wells, do you think they could have prevented it? Or would the Iraqi army have simply lit the wells anyways? What pressure could Greenpeace have put on Hussein, to make the situation any better?
For that matter, what pressure could they have put on the U.S., or Kuwait? The U.S. was already doing everything in its power to get the oil fires under control. If you think that Greenpeace's reaction was somehow inadequate, tell us what they should have done.
1) Would you please define "rational environmentalism"?
2) When have "anti-globalism activists" ever decried the Internet, the SMS text messaging protocol, etc.?
3) I'm certain that I'm much better informed about what modern environmentalist groups are actually saying than you are, and I've never, ever, ever, ever, ever heard someone claim that all technologies after [INSERT YEAR HERE] should be abandoned. Prove me wrong.
This is an awful line of reasoning.
It's one thing to point out that the long-lived stuff isn't particularly hot, and that the hot stuff isn't particularly long-lived. You're saying something orders of magnitude more stupid: that nuclear material is useful for as long as it's unsafe, and safe once it's no longer useful. I don't think you'll find much to back you up on this.
Once the waste of the nuclear industry is so low-level that fifty pounds of the stuff wouldn't make a good dirty bomb, maybe you'll have a leg to stand on.
Plus, you're arrogant if you think that only serious thinkers such as yourself grasp the concept of "background radiation levels". If you're going to go after unavoidable sources of radiation, you could at least use Potassium-40 in your scaremongering (which gives us about 40 times as big a dose of radiation as carbon-14).
The eBay ad underneath? "Looking for Civil War War Crimes? Find exactly what you want today. www.eBay.com"
Also, Greenpeace scientists were in Kuwait in the months after its liberation, monitoring the air quality.
Is that the "any peep" you were looking for? Are you so blinded by your hatred of Greenpeace, that you would automatically assume that they'd ignore one of the biggest environmental disasters of the 20th century, simply because Saddam Hussein wasn't a prime target for extortion?
The fact is, every one of the issues they're tackling right now requires the cooperation of government and the private sector. According to their recent press releases, they've gone after non-corporate entities including Democratic Congresscritter Dingell, the Brazilian government, the World Bank, the Bush Administration, and pretty much every NIMBY bastard standing in the way of the Cape Wind Project.
Remind me, what was your point?
1999 called. It wants its "Linux sux" gripe back.
Just curious, but how does kTorrent stack up? It seems small and fast. Any reason to switch?
In summary:
Of course they cost more to manufacture. The point is that, when gas hits $3.00/gallon, money saved on gas fully offsets that extra cost. If gas prices go higher than that (an inevitable situation), buying a hybrid makes economic as well as ecologic sense.
Shred of evidence, please.
Toyota claims that the Prius' NiMH batteries are fully recyclable, and offers a $200 bounty for anyone who brings them a set. (details)
If you think that tax collection in the U.S. disproportionately affects the poor, I strongly suggest you write your congresscritter. I fully support incentives for fuel efficient technologies. It's a useful intervention in the market (unlike the subsidies granted to SUVs).
I don't care if you link any particular Democrat with Chavez (since the Left is generally less hostile to him than the Right). I think where you lost me was when you started running around screaming "CHAVEZ! SOCIALISM! DEMONIC! GONNA KILL US ALL! AAAAAAAHHHH!" and then drove the point home by slicing your wrists open. It was a remarkable spectacle, to be sure, but hardly a substitute for actual informed criticism of Chavez or his policies. I think his decision to nationalize the oil industry was wise, his land reforms are laudable, and his outright hostility towards America... well, maybe one of these days *he'll* try to stage a coup to overthrow *our* government, just so we can know how it feels.
Given that energy efficient technologies would do both, I'm not sure I understand the question.
Amateur! Do you really believe that all I was trying to do in that sentence was use the word "seriously" as many times as possible? God knows, had that been my intent, I would be ashamed to only manage three. No, the sublimity of the humor stems from the triply nested subjects, each scorning the other. By forcing me to explain this comedic tour-de-force, you have simultaneously tarnished the joke and demonstrated your unworthiness as a recipient of my efforts.
I won't try so hard this time. Instead, I will simply point once again to the plummeting costs of solar, wind, and geothermal energy as evidence that nuclear energy is unnecessary, remind you of the long-term waste and security issues presented by nuclear power, and raise yet again the question of what sort of quality w
Tell your hurricane insurer to listen to this. It's a lecture on hurricanes and global warming from the University of Utah's Frontiers of Science series, delivered by a very well regarded scientist named Kerry Emanuel. According to him, AGW hasn't increased the frequency of hurricanes noticeably, but it has a huge effect on how strong they get and where they go. He also points out that most hurricane-attributable economic damage has occurred in the last fifteen years, simply because we've built more infrastructure in hurricane-prone areas (a trend unlikely to reverse itself).
I was at the lecture, and the charts he showed did not include the economic effects of Hurricane Katrina, which would have dwarfed everything that came before. But we can't prove that Katrina was actually made worse by global warming, so we must be safe, right? Right?
The energy carried by a hurricane is a function of the cube of the wind speed, and the economic impact has been estimated to be something like the seventh power of the wind speed. Throw in the fact that hurricanes are more frequently wandering into areas that have never seen them before, and whose building codes don't account for them. Despite your know-nothing rhetoric, hurricane fear is still very much in play.
You mean the "big ball of fire" whose output hasn't changed in the last thirty years? THAT big ball of fire?
Talk about deliberate falsehoods. You say something that sounds so perfectly reasonable to the layman, then when confronted with the simple and compelling fact that the sun isn't putting out any more heat than it was thirty years ago, you start babbling about third- and fourth-order effects of changes to the sun's magnetic field, and how they maybe someday might possibly be shown to have some effect the amount of cloud cover on Earth. It's really rather pathetic and desperate.
The ozone hole has been shrinking? Wow, that must prove that the scientists behind the Great Ozone Swindle must have been dishonest idiots. Except, wait, didn't we ban the very substances that they claimed were wrecking the ozone layer? You're right. I'm sure that had nothing to do with it.
Do tell us, what "pattern of the sun" does it follow? We have satellite telemetry dating back to the 1970s, and in that time the solar output hasn't varied by more than a half a percent.
Further, don't even try to pretend that the "global cooling" scare of the 1970s ever had the sort of substantial scientific support that global warming does today.
Or maybe like trying to link your political opponents to frequently loathed figures like Hugo Chavez and Karl Marx? How is your hackneyed red-baiting anything but a shameless attempt to control others through fear? At least with global warming, the concern is grounded in a real and important global phenomenon.
Nuclear power is not the solution. It's not the cheapest, it's not the cleanest, it's not the safest. It's a much more mature industry than solar or wind power, so we can't expect to see the costs of nuclear power falling the way solar and wind have. Nuclear energy also has foreign policy issues, since only the countries on Santa's nice list are allowed to enrich their own fuel or reprocess their own waste. Nuclear energy requires the effective and intrusive government oversight of the entire energy sector, to keep The Bad Guys from getting a hold of radioactive material. It is hugely subsidized by the government, in the form of unlimited insurance that nobody in the insurance industry is crazy enough to provide. Finally, at the moment it is far cheaper to reduce demand for electricity than to increase supply.
You can argue over any specific point if you like, but there are legitimate concerns to be raised. You're also ignoring the falling cost of solar and wind, along with the untapped potential of geothermal. Anyone who says that anyone who does not take nuclear power seriously should not be taken seriously should not be taken seriously.
Yeah, I'm pretty proud of that last sentence.
Intel has an OLPC knockoff called the Classmate PC. Same target demographic, has some good features, but I think they've put less care into it.
Also, Asus has a mini laptop called the Eeeeeeee!!!!! (second link) It's more of a mass-market device than a child-centric one.
Well, if every time I bought a copy of MS Office, they printed a second copy and sent it to the third world... okay, stupid example. It takes them what, two bucks? So never mind.
I want one of these things, just so I can wander around outside and do some writing/brainstorming while I'm there. The fact that the unique design makes it a good conversation starter is also a plus. I've never seen anything quite so well suited for that. I'm a bit nervous taking my current laptop anywhere.
Plus, if I accidentally throw it off a cliff in a drunken rage, then another damned kid gets another damned laptop. I consider this a huge advantage over my old laptop (may she rest in peace).
If the "third world kid getting a laptop" thing isn't an "advantage" in your mind, then you either have low hopes for the educational value of these laptops, or you're the love child of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman.
There's something to be said for that, but there may be other considerations. With this system, it's clear that you're getting "a donation, plus a free tote bag." If they start putting the price wherever the market demands, then suddenly they're in more direct competition with other low-budget, low-power, ruggedized PCs. That might hurt them. Sometimes it's better to find your niche and thrive there.
There's also something psychologically appealing about the 1-to-1 system. If they place the price elsewhere, and just say "some proceeds will go toward buying an unspecified number of kids some number of computers," it leaves the donor with all sorts of questions about just what he accomplished. I'd suggest that they play it to the hilt. You know, maybe by selecting sponsor kid who e-mails you once a month, talking about his/her life and education.
Finally (and I'll admit this part may be a bit far-fetched, since several million-laptop deals fell through) there may be an upper limit to how many of these machines can be produced, due to part scarcities. If the "optimum price point" is about three laptops to the developed world for each laptop to the undeveloped world, that may undermine the goal of putting as many laptops in third-world hands as possible.
The floating head of Ayn Rand would not approve.
You wins. :)
I was right with you until you offered up the proposition that anyone, anywhere could learn anything from that pretentious pile of horse dung that is Andrew Keene's "Cult of the Amateur."