If we ignore all other hypothesis and we turn out to be wrong with the whole CO2 thing, then we're going to spend some incomprehensible number of dollars reducing our CO2 output over the next 100 years for no gain[emphasis mine].
I have two responses to this: 1) The notion that there's no gain from reducing carbon emissions - even in the unlikely event that there turns out to be no effect on long-term global temperatures - is patently absurd. Offhand I can name benefits: improved air quality with attendant lower of non-carbon aerosols like mercury and uranium (which would lead to lower incidence of many diseases), less acidification of lakes and other bodies of water, reduction of ecosystem damage in bodies of water like the Gulf of Mexico (large stretches of which are now hypoxic to anoxic), an extraordinary leap in energy efficiency as a generation of industrial machines are upgraded to modern versions, and finally a reduction in global economic instability as energy sources are made more distributed. And that's just off the top of my head. So it's hard to argue that this money is a vast waste.
2) There is a very simple and very reliable way to approach situations where the outcomes are not well known: risk analysis. Every day, all over the world, people assess the severity of risks and the likelihood of that contingency occurring. By basically multiplying (convolving, whatever you like) the risk by the severity of the outcome, you get a good metric for whether to try to mitigate a particular risk. In this case, the risks (as Gore's movie well illustrates) are extraordinary, so even those with less likelihood merit active mitigation strategies. And given that the conversion from emitting to non-emitting energy sources does not require science particularly beyond our grasp to accomplish, it's impossible to argue that we can't take active steps to mitigate the risk. So why do the same people who employ risk mitigation all over the place (e.g. insurance, tort "reform") argue so furiously against anything like this on a large scale?
Finally, it bears mentioning that the scientists in this article (only two of who are named) are an extraordinary minority - the vast bulk of climate scientists (and I know many personally, thanks to a degree in ocean physics) are in agreement that human activities are contributing to global warming. So while these folks are entitled to their opinions, scientific or otherwise, it's pretty misleading of this here Canada Free Press to present them as a mainstream view.
I'm also a HIPAA security officer, but for a tiny startup, so it's only a small fraction of my job. But you hit the nail right on the head here:
But, again, its the individual workers who matter. Like the time I found out our billers couldn't remember their countless insurance company BBS passwords, so they had a nice spreadsheet they shared. I couldn't get rid of it, but at least I had them put it in their drawers.
HIPAA marked a big transition in regulation because: a) enforcement is complaint-driven, rather than having an inspection apparatus. b) It "scales": for many provisions, you can provide an explanation why you should be able to take an alternate (less onerous) measure. c) it explicitly focuses on management controls much more than data specifics.
As a practitioner, I think this was a good approach (note that part c was taken up in earnest by Sarbanes-Oxley). Data privacy is an extraordinarily complicated affair, and one that is still evolving. Frankly, it's not like other industries in charge of personal data (e.g. finance) have done all that well either. And regulation itself takes time to settle down. Neither of these issues were explored at all by this article. I'd say given how much HIPAA differed from other regulation, and how dynamic the situation is, the implementation timeline has also been reasonable.
Additionally, medicine is an extraordinarily fractured industry. There is no smooth "supply chain" type model for moving patients or data through the system, rather nearly every transaction is negotiated. The parent touched on this, but I'll go a bit further: a large fraction of medical transactions require human intervention to move data, and a huge amount of medical data has yet to be digitized. This is in stark contrast to physical industries like airplanes or retail, all of which have systematized many or most of their transaction chains.
I'd say the right thing to do is to give the regs more teeth by prosecuting a few of the worst offenses. Basically, make it easy to show how and why disclosures caused damaged. This will put people on notice that the government is serious about the regs. If that doesn't work, the regs themselves can be tightened up, hopefully in the context of broader data privacy legislation.
Has anyone else found that Suse is really, really slow in releasing updated Postgres binaries? Are they tied to SLES releases? Anyone know anything?
I know I'll probably get a million flames telling me to compile from source, but I'm not really that fond of supporting my own compilation job on a production server.
Very interesting and knowledgeable comment. Perhaps you can answer a question I've always had:
To my mind, the only reason the telcos have any ability to even fight this fight is their government-sanctioned monopoly on the last mile. Basically as long as most consumers and small businesses have to start their traffic on telco copper, the telcos can restrict their access to all the other "backbone" providers. If that monopoly were broken, then a consumer could in choose whether they wanted a net-neutral ISP or a paid-content ISP. The market can dictate who ends up connected to what kind of "backbone"/peering arrangement. Many consumers might well opt for the paid-content ISP, since it would basically be a TV+phone+internet bundle, while businesses and geeks and those visiting Wikipedia would go for net-neutral service. And that's not even mentioning the myriad other benefits breaking that monopoly would have: true competition between all ISPs, lowered cost of local service, and no stupid games like forbidding bandwidth-sharing. The beginning and the end of this problem is the government-granted monopoly the telcos have on last-mile connectivity.
So I say cut the following deal: back off on enforcing network neutrality, but use regulation to open the last mile to all comers, including wireless mesh, broadand over electrical, etc. With that resolve, the market can resolve how bandwidth should be apportioned.
If I had mod points, I'd give both parent and grandparent credit for insightful statements. The claim that politicization of the economy is responsible for bad and bogus ideas making it through is almost certainly true. The Army Corps of Engineers is a shining example of that. Not only that, but economic development money almost always involves government picking the winner somehow - that's a tough pill to swallow, and something we should always be wary yet. At the same time, there's no doubt that government investment has been critical to the development of nearly every technology we use today. Barring a few altruistist or self-proclaimed visionaries, private capital simply does not have the incentive or wherewithall to make 20 year investments. The only conclusion I can come to is we need good government - transparent, accountable, and well overseen. And that takes a lot of effort from the citizenry, which why the notion that government is fundamentally incapable and hence should be dismanteled frustrates me so much. Government is only as capable as we make it, and it may be less efficient at delivering goods and services, but it's about the only choice we have for making critical long-term investments, so we'd better work on making it as good and efficient as we can.
Does the bridging dimension have to be the same one each time? Does the amount of bridging, if such a thing is possible have to be the same? In other words does brane theory allow for it not to be an "oscillatory" university, but rather something like a Lorenz attractor universe?
It sure is cleansing to have a universe that destroys itself in a cataclysm one every so often.
I think you're on to something but I'd add another quality of electric cars that will capture several categories of people who have little or no interest in environmentalism or gadgeteering: they're quiet.
a) high-gloss women. The prospect of having a car that's quiet enough to talk on your cellphone with the windows down, does not require fillup stations full of dirt and chemicals (see post above about drop-in batteries) and creepy men - shoot, if you just commute, you can plug the thing in at home and at work and never go to a gas station - is extraordinary. Make em cute and feminine and silent inside.
b) Parents. Again, being able to take your baby monitor in your car and listen to Preciouscito's every gurgle is a big advantage. Not to mention that all that noise and vibration makes you even more tired than 4 soccer practices in a row. And your exurban driveway will remain as quiet and green as when the agent showed it to you at 2AM on a Monday morning.
c) Parents, for their teenagers. You can easily build an electric engine whose power is software-limited so the parent can restrict the power or speed of the engine for young Mr. Got-A-Learners-And-Ready-To-Rumble, and then use a biometric key to turn that restriction off for older Mr. Midlife Crisis.
I'm obviously no marketer, but I definitely think there's fertile soil in electrics or hybrids that are not sold as geeky green wimpmobiles.
You're on to something, but I don't think it's just the money. While a big influx of capital and corresponding big expansion is almost always hard to pull off, Microsoft has several other factors that squelch a really exploratory culture. First of all, there's the slavish devotion to the Windows platform - everything at Microsoft must ultimately drive revenue on the Windows platform. That's due to their fundamental formulation of attracting developers by building tools around the Windows platform, rather than around some domain of tasks and. Google is not built on browser or not-browser or any language, framework, or toolkit - it's built on search. Unless Windows Live really deeply gets this, R&D dollars will almost certainly fail to change Microsoft's course. Then there's the slavish devotion to backwards compatibility - it definitely keeps their platform alive. And finally, because of their vast visibility (security-wise, DOJ), the culture has evidently become very process-oriented, and it's hard to be exploratory in that environment.
Microsoft has many very, very smart people working for it, but it is fundamentally a business-run company and not an new paradigms company. Their problem is neither lack of money nor lack of smart people to do "R&D" - it's that their leadership has refused to change the fundamental course of the company. Until they do that, "investments" are moot. Probably the easier thing for Microsoft to do would be to try to subtly shift their business model from being the Wal-mart of business computing to being a higher-margin, enterprise-focused software vendor like Oracle or SAP. With their capital and market reach, their odds look rather good in the ongoing consolidation of that space. As long as they try to merge the consumer space with the enterprise space by tying both to the Windows platform, they'll continue to lumber more and more slowly.
While I agree that his claims are not as well baked as they should be for "research" - for example, did he do any analysis of IPs, or attempt to find any patterns of edits - his article raises a really important point about how companies and institutions are portrayed in Wikipedia. This goes far beyond whether you're pro-Walmart or anti-Walmart. Is Wikipedia a medium for individuals or institutions? The present article reads like an investor fact sheet, spending far more time on corporate figures and other issues of institutional interest (this is who we are, what we do, and what we've accomplished) than it does on items of individual interest. Should Wikipedia's Microsoft page be limited to the vast revenues and shareholder value it should be generated, along with all it's charitable ventures, and defer issues of monopoly abuse and manipulation of standards to outside links? Or should the page explore those questions? For example, one of the items of interest around Walmart is how Walmart's wages compare to other retailers and to other industries. That's of substantial individual interest, whatever the conclusion (if wages are good, it should encourage people to work there, if not it should discourage them). For individual interests, this should be explored within the page, while for institutions these are "external issues" - something unendorsed that someone else has said about them.
Given that it's likely trivially easy to find all the stuff in the Walmart page on the company's own site, I think a Wikipedia page is a far greater resource as something that explores those issues right there in the page. A good newspaper isn't (or well, shouldn't be) a haphazard collection of facts, it's a careful assembling of facts into the larger narrative to be told by those facts. This page specifically avoids that, and the quality suffers for that.
Although I detest Tom DeLay, I'd call his particular present circumstances more of a garden-variety scandal that the Dems would have engaged in. Jack Abramoff type corruption in concert with Duke Cunningham selling an extraordinary number of defense contracts to Mitchell wade is much more rare - that really only comes around once every 20 years or so. It's closest modern cousin would probably be the Keating Five. I don't think it's fair to compare that to the House Post Office nonsense that proved to be Jim Wright or Torricelli's taking some watches, etc.
What is close to unprecedented is the combination the K Street Project and the extensive blockading of the minority party in the Senate - everything from midnight voting sessions held open only long enough for the leadership to twist the arms of wavering Republicans to commitee meetings. Partly this is possible because parties have lined up so clearly along many political divides, and so each party has fewer outliers in it in general. But it also due in large measure to the combination of the very tight party discipline the Republicans have acheived with the growing predominance of the Lee Atwater/Karl Rove scorched-earth tactics of the modern GOP. So is this equivalent to the Democratic excesses of the 90's? Doubtful. It's far more pervasive than that, probably more like Boss Tweed or the Mayor Daley, but at federal level (and hence with more dollars in play).
The basic problem is that most Republicans don't believe in good government, they believe in government getting out of the way. So they don't have a coherent philosophy of how government ought to be set up to do the best job it can. And whether it's individual cynicism or "starve the beast" collective cynicism - imagine how it would work if someone was "starving the beast" at, say, Ford, as a downsizing strategy - it leaves an awful lot of room for hooking up your friends and future business partners.
Really, there is a small but significant subset of environmentalists that literally wouldn't be happy until humans are extinct. We need to ignore those people and try to inject some common sense into our environmental discussions.
Well, I have two reactions to this. One is that the environmental movement does seem to attract enough cranks that there's almost always a subset opposed to some form of energy; usually they're lusting after soom even "purer" idea. The other is that it does seem a pity that a few people can give a very broad movement (and largely a set of ideas whose time has come) a bad name and provide fodder for opportunists (e.g. the real estate developers mentioned in the article) to block public progress.
It's quite clear that we haven't gotten every last drop of the stuff out of the ground, nor will we ever. The problems are this. One, our current economic well-being is pretty closely tied to cheap energy, and much of our industrial infrastructure is built around oil. So the calm transitions you describe in the consumer space are in fact tremendously wrenching events over most of the economy, requiring an extraordinary amount of capital investment to retool a lot of things. The other area where you're being a little too sunny is _how_ the prices go up. If a political faction in Turkmenistan knocks out a major pipeline to Europe, world oil prices double overnight, and that decimates oh, say, 64% of the American airline industry, who happened to bet on modest price increases rather than stratospheric ones. You're probably right that oil won't go away, but even forced reductions in its use could be tremendously disruptive.
As you might guess I happen to think the price of energy will in fact go up, and that oil price shocks are a real threat. I also think infrastructure changes and their corresponding investments take a long time, so we'd better get started early and not wait until the market obligates us to move quickly. We can mitigate both the threat of global warming and of oil shocks by having the government make it economically reasonable to plunk down some do-re-mi on a less oil-dependent infrastructure. I've been scoffed at countless times by conservatarian market "purists" who insist that the government can't possibly do something like this, but it's hard to argue away the obligation of good stewardship, both of the economy and of the environment.
You should read the response on Grist. The post's author immediately accused Moore of being a shill for industry, a fake environmentalist, etc. A hate to say it, but a lot of the environmental movement is still fueled by counterculture utopianism, and I'd put myself strongly in camp that the environmental damage of various types is a crisis-level problem. So Moore is right that environmental movement needs reform, but I'm not sure if he's done a great job delivering that message, or if he's even the right guy.
What I believe will drive serious momentum on the environment is when a set of technologies start moving into the marketplace that give energy and other heavy industrial companies a way forward: an exit strategy from their current business, and enough of a hedge that they can start seriously thwacking their rivals with the regulatory stick. If a company can find a way to keep its own waste costs low and drive up the waste costs of others, they just need to be convinced that it's a matter of time before the public wants more costs applied to environmental degradation (generally true even in the US), and they will be compelled to move in the green direction. So seeding the energy and green technology could have a very large impact on industry in general.
Speaking of strawmen: CO2's role as a feedback is far smaller than its role as forcing and that does nothing to change the fact that you're relying on an incorrect view of water vapor as forcing. Not only that, but your own argument that carbon's effect should not be overstated because it's a "trace" gas is contradicted by your argument that sulphates might mitigate global warming - at their peak, sulphate emissions were several orders of magnitude smaller than carbon emissions. If sulphates have a notable effect, so does carbon.
I'm certainly not here to dispute that many important engineering breakthroughs occurred in the private sector, nor that government has typically done a poor job bringing science breakthroughs to market. Nor am I trying to defend NASA's indescribable wastefulness with all these non-scientific manned spaceflight programs (which largely come about because NASA is dominated by people who think that the public will care more about space if it sees Top Gun Goes to Mars). But it's a stretch to suggest that the private sector has been responsible for nearly as much infrastructure development as government. Which is all fine; government's role is to build the infrastructure for the public - as individuals and as businesses - to use.
Your defense of the market's role in "creating demand" for freeways is speculative - after all, people had had to pay the full costs of roads out of pocket, who's to say they would have adopted cars in the same way. On the other hand, the fact that the government - whatever its rationale - dumped a huge amount of money into the freeway system, and continues to do so is indisputable. Likewise the argument with the internet - when I got on in the early 90's, the backbone was still run by NSF. Point being, the government made an infrastructure investment that the market later picked up. And while people who suggested the notion of a hyperlink before Berners-Lee (CERN - government) or Mosaic (UIUC/NCSA - government) deserve plenty of credit it takes a lot of work to write out government's pivotal role. And likewise the entire space program: regardless of who did or does the work, the government comissioned and paid for it, making it a government-sponsored action. And again with railroads, government commitment to building them, in the form of emminent domain and outright purchases of land was sine qua non to their being built.
Your points on the economy seeking the lowest common denominator under a scheme like Kyoto are indeed reasonable. And it's certainly true that inflated concerns over nuclear have been allowed to stymie its growth to a far greater extent than they should. However, if some intervention makes the costs of seeking out the alternatives high enough, and the investment in alternative energies strong enough, the market can greatly accelerate the deployment of those technologies. That's the goal of the carrots-and-sticks approach: to goose the market rather than let it slowly wind its way there. That's what we've always done, and I think it's worked rather well.
Aaaaaahahahahahah! No more "water vapor overwhelms carbon" bullshit. No more. None. It's awfully hard to take the repetition of this outright misrepresentation about carbon being a smaller greenhouse gas than water vapor. Water vapor is not a forcing, it's a feedback. Period. You cool the air, water comes out. You heat the air, it goes in. And its residence time in the atmosphere is 10 days, so except stratospheric water (something with real potential for problems) water does not count as a forcing for global climate change. Please get it straight before getting on your soapbox.
I happen to agree with your point 3 that no matter what course we had or do take, our systems are insufficiently flexible to accomodate climate variability and severe weather events in general. However, doesn't that speak for not doing things that have even a moderate risk of exarcebating the problem? As for your point 2, more research for climate would be a great idea. How about suggesting to our government that it increase NASA's funding for climate studies rather than cutting it? Or that it not muzzle NOAA. And I'd be careful of putting your we-can-keep-emitting-carbon-no-problemo eggs in the paleoclimate basket. Polar ice cores demonstrate a very clear correlation between atmospheric carbon content and global average temperature. So yeah, let's have more of all climate research, including paleoclimatological research. Look, I'm all for open scientific debate about climate change, including to what extent one ought to be swayed by Lindzen's disagreements with the rest of the climate community. But "skeptics" continually resort to non-scientific explanations in the service of why the rest of the climate science community has been wrong for years and is getting wronger every day, and that's really pretty hard to swallow.
Changing energy supplies is an infrastructure issue, a big one. You seem to be under the impression that the advances in our country's infrastructure were largely due to the action of the market. Who built freeways? Who built railroads and secured the property to build them on? Who researched and launched satellites? Who invented and built the internet? Who funds research into nearly every area of technological advancement? Yep, that's right, good old government with it's nasty market-interfering ways. Government intervention has played an important role in nearly every technological advance.
A sea change in energy infrastructure takes carrots and sticks, and lots of them. And of course there's the small fact of the limited supplies of oil around (somewhere around 3-6 years from now the price really starts going up). At this scale, the only entities that can induce the kind of massive infrastructure transformation that's needed mitigate the twin risks of climate change and rapid price increases in oil are governments. Yeah, Kyoto had flaws, especially in the China and India areas. But it's a stick, and I have yet to hear of any climate skeptic suggest any other measure to promote this kind of energy transition.
The media stooped lower than usual this time. The least they could have done was shown some slight respect for the guy and his kids, and obscured the names.
There's probably a backstory in itself there. Did the report actually talk to him? If so, how did Mr. Lightspeed expect to be portrayed vs. what happened?
That said, I really don't feel that bad for the guy, nor do I think the WSJ wrote anything terribly out of bounds. They didn't name his kids, pass along rumors or unsubstantiated remarks, insinuate that he has personality defects, carry on about how sleazy the industry is, etc. The story was about the guy, his company, and his ambivalence about revealing his job. It's the media's job to report what's going on, not to tiptoe around someone's reputation. If he really feels that bad about the reputation of the industry he's in, he can cash out and do something else. If somebody founded a vastly successful manure-hauling company that managed to attract a bunch of customers because of clever composting or something like that, wouldn't you expect the media to write about the phenomenon and use a person to illustrate the industry, even if the guy became know as Mr. Manure (sorry ladies,no manure for you all).
There's certainly a migration path from trivially basically designed-on-the-fly apps such as basic PHP and ASP pages to something much more formlly designed. Microsoft has at various points tried to offer this, but seems to frequently shoot themselves in the foot by going back to recruiting newer developers (notice that nearly all of their documentation builds logic right into event code).
PHP is already pretty easy to set up and run on a RedHat box. JBoss with Web Services is not. If RedHat can give themselves a little edge in that setup department, they have a well-integrated open source product to offer enterprise. By acquiring JBoss, RedHat can control the migration pathway and provide a complete platform at both the low end and the high end. They can offer migration tools from PHP to Rails/JBoss, or even some tools to get you into a basic JBoss instance (and after you hose it you pay them to rescue you).
The notion that this gives RedHat an equivalent stack to MS is right on.
This is known in oceanography circles as "the geritol solution". While it's true that researches were able to produce surface plankton blooms by seeding iron into the ocean, there's a lot between that and permanent sequestration of carbon. First of all, it's not clear how exactly these blooms would propagate up the food web, and what would happen. Would the plankton growth quickly be blocked by another limiting resource? Would zooplankton populations rise quickly to control this growth? Would the organic carbon "shower" be taken up in the water column or at the benthic layer? Would degradation of increased amount of particulate organic carbon (POC) lead to hypoxic waters at subsurface levels and thus shut off other parts of the food web? Would some macrofauna eat up the zooplankton and knock out the carbon sequestration?
Because there are so many unknowns, with plenty of potential for further damaging the ocean ecosystem, most oceanographers are pretty reticent to try this technique.
Every credible climate model includes changes in solar radiation as a forcing factor, and this is universally considered (even by "dissenters") not to be a big factor. So Mars may be changing temperature, but it is not the cause of climate change. Damn those socialist, industry-hating scientists and their tendency to ignore irrelevant facts!
Oh for Pete's sake, this is a science site, can you spare us the tired disinformation? Let me address a few of the issues in your link:
First the old water vapor trope: "Water contributes to 95% of greenhouse effect". Water vapor is a feedback, not a forcing. Water has a 10-day residence time, so it basically exerts no forcing on long-term climate change. Except that (from the link above, written by actual mainstream climate scientists):
Only the stratosphere is dry enough and with a long enough residence time (a few years) for the small anthropogenic inputs to be important.
which is why airplane contrails are a cause for concern.
Second, the notion that because delta-carbon/carbon is small therefore there is no forcing from increased carbon content flies in the face of all scientific logic. There is no a priori reason to believe that a particular scale of delta-carbon is required to effect changes in temperature, so there is neither a logical nor an empirical assertion here. Unlike real climate research, this site makes no effort to ask how sensitive climate is to changes in carbon dioxide on any scale, and instead presumes that delta-carbon over carbon must be "large" (presumably closer to 1) to exert a "large" impact on climate.
Third, this link uses vaguely defined "natural" and "man-made" categories to try to dilute the effect of humans on carbon content of the atmosphere. "Natural" effects involve equilibrium and non-equilibrium cycles, like absorption by the ocean, reaction by the biosphere, etc. So is the fact that the ocean has been taking up carbon in reaction to increased carbon content "natural" or "man-made"?
Given that this is a scientific site, your argument would carry a lot of more weight if it had any basis in current science. I suggest reading a real climate science site, like RealClimate.org. There are legitimate scientific disputes in the area of climate change, but the question whether anthropogenic carbon is affecting climate is settled. Try a new argument.
I'd say there's a small kernel of truth in the overstated assertion that environmentalists were trying to "destroy industrialization". One of the things that long frustrated me about environmentalism was its Original Sin of Man against Mother Earth mentality (despite the prevalence of pooh-poohing about the same Original Sin meme from Christians). This was the source of a general nostalgia for bucolic pre-industrial life (back to nature), and a general distrust of things industrial. That made a lot of people anti-growth.
However, as environmentalism has matured (and as a younger generation has taken over), a lot of that has dissipated. Many of us would now say what we want is post-industrialism - a world where industry has been retooled so that sustainable management of inputs, outputs and waste are all part of the business model (rather than only the first two, and without regard to global issues). Industrialization was not only a vastly leap forward for humanity and its quality of life, but was in fact good for much of the environment: before industrialization people burned an awful lot of trees, farmed a lot of land poorly, and relied on massive animal stocks for transportation, and none of this was all that friendly to the earth. Now that we've seen the negative consequences of our current industrial methods, it's time for the next major leap forward. And despite all the propaganda, it's clear that pushing green industry will very quickly drive enormous economic growth and likely help humanity solve persistent problems like global poverty.
To answer the critics who say "if this is so great why doesn't business do it itself", I have a couple answers. First, as anyone who's worked at a startup or on a new product launch can tell you, markets move incrementally and businesses outpace them at their peril. So to get the market to surge forward, you often need external intervention. Second, much of what's needed is massive capital investment for long-term gain: in research, in infrastructure upgrades, and in capitalizing new technologies. Businesses generally do not have a 20 year mandate to improve infrastructure, whereas the government has exactly this mandate. And yes, the government intervention does makes mistakes, can promote inefficiency, or can produce unintended outcomes. But it almost always gets the market moving in the intended direction, and the mistakes can be cleaned up later.
If this all sounds a bit breathless, get me a gig at Wired. But I really do believe that investing heavily in this jump will give tremendous results for people, business, and countries.
I am not saying democrats would be different but the individual leading them could be.
Interestingly, the individual within the Democratic Party who would be the most different by rights should have been President. Al Gore is a long time environmentalist (about to release his own documentary about global warming), and very knowledgeable about scientific matters in general.
That said, your point is well taken. If the Democrats really wanted to make global climate change a plank, they could start by making a lot more reference to the Apollo Alliance. It's gonna take an awful lot of clout and will to get through to the industries that are primary emitters of CO2, as well as rolling out all the infrastructure needed to actually change emissions. I'm not convinced the Dems presently have enough of either to make real changes happen.
All they want, right now, is a business model that allows them to get revenues from both content providers and consumers.
Right now, they have to claw back pretty much all revenues from consumers.I don't see why you think this is a bad thing. After all, what the market really wants is undifferentiated bandwidth - a commodity. The telcos know that the minute they lost their monopoly power, the market for bandwidth would commoditize and their margins would plummet, especially as all distinctions between type of data carried become blurred. This would be the best situation for everyone except the telcos - bandwidth would be close to free. The telcos want to get around this by being able to meter different types of content rather than amount of content, and charge a "brokering" fee for figuring out how fast that packet needs to move. The stuff about optimizing packets is a load of crap - if you want better delivery of your packets, buy more or better bandwidth. And if the content provider wants its packets to arrive to you faster, they need to buy more or better bandwidth. Simple, no brokering needed by the carrier.
I'm glad you mentioned that. People tend to think of wind turbines as having no effect, and while at the current scale their effects are minimal
I also think you're overly disparaging of biofuels - while corn and soy biofuels are indeed a sop to agribusiness, there are lots of other cellulose-type things to turn into oils. The point here is to get the process moving - get the market interested making them broadly available.
But frankly, I think the best thing we can do is simply mandate that all cars be plug-in hybrids as soon as is feasible. Oil-based fuels are like assembly language - they get the most out of the engine on the spot, but they are a big pain to maintain. We already run a perfectly good electrical distribution system, and that does efficiency costs, but the modularity is well worth it. If all our cars were electric, we could simply switch off most carbon emissions within 5-10 years, and prices might go up a bit, but that would be it. As it stands, humanity has to engineer a way to swap out the trillions of oil-burning engines for either minimal-oil or non-oil engines. That's a massive undertaking, particularly when you reflect on that fact that cars rarely stop being used - they just migrate down the food chain until they are the taxis you see in 3rd world countries. A serious, mandated commitment to electric vehicles would make the creation of batteries/fuel cells, clean transport of electric energy a huge bounty. And that massive market is what it will take to slowly work through all those oil-burning vehicles.
Ahem, Google. Think ODF export from Writely, from IBM's Workplace tools, from a Lotus email, from tax prep software, etc. All these players would love to have a standard not controlled by MS. If those products crowd out your use of Word, then the switching issue becomes much less relevant.
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I have two responses to this:
1) The notion that there's no gain from reducing carbon emissions - even in the unlikely event that there turns out to be no effect on long-term global temperatures - is patently absurd. Offhand I can name benefits: improved air quality with attendant lower of non-carbon aerosols like mercury and uranium (which would lead to lower incidence of many diseases), less acidification of lakes and other bodies of water, reduction of ecosystem damage in bodies of water like the Gulf of Mexico (large stretches of which are now hypoxic to anoxic), an extraordinary leap in energy efficiency as a generation of industrial machines are upgraded to modern versions, and finally a reduction in global economic instability as energy sources are made more distributed. And that's just off the top of my head. So it's hard to argue that this money is a vast waste.
2) There is a very simple and very reliable way to approach situations where the outcomes are not well known: risk analysis. Every day, all over the world, people assess the severity of risks and the likelihood of that contingency occurring. By basically multiplying (convolving, whatever you like) the risk by the severity of the outcome, you get a good metric for whether to try to mitigate a particular risk. In this case, the risks (as Gore's movie well illustrates) are extraordinary, so even those with less likelihood merit active mitigation strategies. And given that the conversion from emitting to non-emitting energy sources does not require science particularly beyond our grasp to accomplish, it's impossible to argue that we can't take active steps to mitigate the risk. So why do the same people who employ risk mitigation all over the place (e.g. insurance, tort "reform") argue so furiously against anything like this on a large scale?
Finally, it bears mentioning that the scientists in this article (only two of who are named) are an extraordinary minority - the vast bulk of climate scientists (and I know many personally, thanks to a degree in ocean physics) are in agreement that human activities are contributing to global warming. So while these folks are entitled to their opinions, scientific or otherwise, it's pretty misleading of this here Canada Free Press to present them as a mainstream view.
HIPAA marked a big transition in regulation because:
a) enforcement is complaint-driven, rather than having an inspection apparatus.
b) It "scales": for many provisions, you can provide an explanation why you should be able to take an alternate (less onerous) measure.
c) it explicitly focuses on management controls much more than data specifics.
As a practitioner, I think this was a good approach (note that part c was taken up in earnest by Sarbanes-Oxley). Data privacy is an extraordinarily complicated affair, and one that is still evolving. Frankly, it's not like other industries in charge of personal data (e.g. finance) have done all that well either. And regulation itself takes time to settle down. Neither of these issues were explored at all by this article. I'd say given how much HIPAA differed from other regulation, and how dynamic the situation is, the implementation timeline has also been reasonable.
Additionally, medicine is an extraordinarily fractured industry. There is no smooth "supply chain" type model for moving patients or data through the system, rather nearly every transaction is negotiated. The parent touched on this, but I'll go a bit further: a large fraction of medical transactions require human intervention to move data, and a huge amount of medical data has yet to be digitized. This is in stark contrast to physical industries like airplanes or retail, all of which have systematized many or most of their transaction chains.
I'd say the right thing to do is to give the regs more teeth by prosecuting a few of the worst offenses. Basically, make it easy to show how and why disclosures caused damaged. This will put people on notice that the government is serious about the regs. If that doesn't work, the regs themselves can be tightened up, hopefully in the context of broader data privacy legislation.
Has anyone else found that Suse is really, really slow in releasing updated Postgres binaries? Are they tied to SLES releases? Anyone know anything?
I know I'll probably get a million flames telling me to compile from source, but I'm not really that fond of supporting my own compilation job on a production server.
Very interesting and knowledgeable comment. Perhaps you can answer a question I've always had:
To my mind, the only reason the telcos have any ability to even fight this fight is their government-sanctioned monopoly on the last mile. Basically as long as most consumers and small businesses have to start their traffic on telco copper, the telcos can restrict their access to all the other "backbone" providers. If that monopoly were broken, then a consumer could in choose whether they wanted a net-neutral ISP or a paid-content ISP. The market can dictate who ends up connected to what kind of "backbone"/peering arrangement. Many consumers might well opt for the paid-content ISP, since it would basically be a TV+phone+internet bundle, while businesses and geeks and those visiting Wikipedia would go for net-neutral service. And that's not even mentioning the myriad other benefits breaking that monopoly would have: true competition between all ISPs, lowered cost of local service, and no stupid games like forbidding bandwidth-sharing. The beginning and the end of this problem is the government-granted monopoly the telcos have on last-mile connectivity.
So I say cut the following deal: back off on enforcing network neutrality, but use regulation to open the last mile to all comers, including wireless mesh, broadand over electrical, etc. With that resolve, the market can resolve how bandwidth should be apportioned.
Does this make any sense?
If I had mod points, I'd give both parent and grandparent credit for insightful statements. The claim that politicization of the economy is responsible for bad and bogus ideas making it through is almost certainly true. The Army Corps of Engineers is a shining example of that. Not only that, but economic development money almost always involves government picking the winner somehow - that's a tough pill to swallow, and something we should always be wary yet. At the same time, there's no doubt that government investment has been critical to the development of nearly every technology we use today. Barring a few altruistist or self-proclaimed visionaries, private capital simply does not have the incentive or wherewithall to make 20 year investments. The only conclusion I can come to is we need good government - transparent, accountable, and well overseen. And that takes a lot of effort from the citizenry, which why the notion that government is fundamentally incapable and hence should be dismanteled frustrates me so much. Government is only as capable as we make it, and it may be less efficient at delivering goods and services, but it's about the only choice we have for making critical long-term investments, so we'd better work on making it as good and efficient as we can.
Does the bridging dimension have to be the same one each time? Does the amount of bridging, if such a thing is possible have to be the same? In other words does brane theory allow for it not to be an "oscillatory" university, but rather something like a Lorenz attractor universe?
It sure is cleansing to have a universe that destroys itself in a cataclysm one every so often.
I think you're on to something but I'd add another quality of electric cars that will capture several categories of people who have little or no interest in environmentalism or gadgeteering: they're quiet.
a) high-gloss women. The prospect of having a car that's quiet enough to talk on your cellphone with the windows down, does not require fillup stations full of dirt and chemicals (see post above about drop-in batteries) and creepy men - shoot, if you just commute, you can plug the thing in at home and at work and never go to a gas station - is extraordinary. Make em cute and feminine and silent inside.
b) Parents. Again, being able to take your baby monitor in your car and listen to Preciouscito's every gurgle is a big advantage. Not to mention that all that noise and vibration makes you even more tired than 4 soccer practices in a row. And your exurban driveway will remain as quiet and green as when the agent showed it to you at 2AM on a Monday morning.
c) Parents, for their teenagers. You can easily build an electric engine whose power is software-limited so the parent can restrict the power or speed of the engine for young Mr. Got-A-Learners-And-Ready-To-Rumble, and then use a biometric key to turn that restriction off for older Mr. Midlife Crisis.
I'm obviously no marketer, but I definitely think there's fertile soil in electrics or hybrids that are not sold as geeky green wimpmobiles.
You're on to something, but I don't think it's just the money. While a big influx of capital and corresponding big expansion is almost always hard to pull off, Microsoft has several other factors that squelch a really exploratory culture. First of all, there's the slavish devotion to the Windows platform - everything at Microsoft must ultimately drive revenue on the Windows platform. That's due to their fundamental formulation of attracting developers by building tools around the Windows platform, rather than around some domain of tasks and. Google is not built on browser or not-browser or any language, framework, or toolkit - it's built on search. Unless Windows Live really deeply gets this, R&D dollars will almost certainly fail to change Microsoft's course. Then there's the slavish devotion to backwards compatibility - it definitely keeps their platform alive. And finally, because of their vast visibility (security-wise, DOJ), the culture has evidently become very process-oriented, and it's hard to be exploratory in that environment.
Microsoft has many very, very smart people working for it, but it is fundamentally a business-run company and not an new paradigms company. Their problem is neither lack of money nor lack of smart people to do "R&D" - it's that their leadership has refused to change the fundamental course of the company. Until they do that, "investments" are moot. Probably the easier thing for Microsoft to do would be to try to subtly shift their business model from being the Wal-mart of business computing to being a higher-margin, enterprise-focused software vendor like Oracle or SAP. With their capital and market reach, their odds look rather good in the ongoing consolidation of that space. As long as they try to merge the consumer space with the enterprise space by tying both to the Windows platform, they'll continue to lumber more and more slowly.
While I agree that his claims are not as well baked as they should be for "research" - for example, did he do any analysis of IPs, or attempt to find any patterns of edits - his article raises a really important point about how companies and institutions are portrayed in Wikipedia. This goes far beyond whether you're pro-Walmart or anti-Walmart. Is Wikipedia a medium for individuals or institutions? The present article reads like an investor fact sheet, spending far more time on corporate figures and other issues of institutional interest (this is who we are, what we do, and what we've accomplished) than it does on items of individual interest. Should Wikipedia's Microsoft page be limited to the vast revenues and shareholder value it should be generated, along with all it's charitable ventures, and defer issues of monopoly abuse and manipulation of standards to outside links? Or should the page explore those questions? For example, one of the items of interest around Walmart is how Walmart's wages compare to other retailers and to other industries. That's of substantial individual interest, whatever the conclusion (if wages are good, it should encourage people to work there, if not it should discourage them). For individual interests, this should be explored within the page, while for institutions these are "external issues" - something unendorsed that someone else has said about them.
Given that it's likely trivially easy to find all the stuff in the Walmart page on the company's own site, I think a Wikipedia page is a far greater resource as something that explores those issues right there in the page. A good newspaper isn't (or well, shouldn't be) a haphazard collection of facts, it's a careful assembling of facts into the larger narrative to be told by those facts. This page specifically avoids that, and the quality suffers for that.
Although I detest Tom DeLay, I'd call his particular present circumstances more of a garden-variety scandal that the Dems would have engaged in. Jack Abramoff type corruption in concert with Duke Cunningham selling an extraordinary number of defense contracts to Mitchell wade is much more rare - that really only comes around once every 20 years or so. It's closest modern cousin would probably be the Keating Five. I don't think it's fair to compare that to the House Post Office nonsense that proved to be Jim Wright or Torricelli's taking some watches, etc.
What is close to unprecedented is the combination the K Street Project and the extensive blockading of the minority party in the Senate - everything from midnight voting sessions held open only long enough for the leadership to twist the arms of wavering Republicans to commitee meetings. Partly this is possible because parties have lined up so clearly along many political divides, and so each party has fewer outliers in it in general. But it also due in large measure to the combination of the very tight party discipline the Republicans have acheived with the growing predominance of the Lee Atwater/Karl Rove scorched-earth tactics of the modern GOP. So is this equivalent to the Democratic excesses of the 90's? Doubtful. It's far more pervasive than that, probably more like Boss Tweed or the Mayor Daley, but at federal level (and hence with more dollars in play).
The basic problem is that most Republicans don't believe in good government, they believe in government getting out of the way. So they don't have a coherent philosophy of how government ought to be set up to do the best job it can. And whether it's individual cynicism or "starve the beast" collective cynicism - imagine how it would work if someone was "starving the beast" at, say, Ford, as a downsizing strategy - it leaves an awful lot of room for hooking up your friends and future business partners.
Well, I have two reactions to this. One is that the environmental movement does seem to attract enough cranks that there's almost always a subset opposed to some form of energy; usually they're lusting after soom even "purer" idea. The other is that it does seem a pity that a few people can give a very broad movement (and largely a set of ideas whose time has come) a bad name and provide fodder for opportunists (e.g. the real estate developers mentioned in the article) to block public progress.
It's quite clear that we haven't gotten every last drop of the stuff out of the ground, nor will we ever. The problems are this. One, our current economic well-being is pretty closely tied to cheap energy, and much of our industrial infrastructure is built around oil. So the calm transitions you describe in the consumer space are in fact tremendously wrenching events over most of the economy, requiring an extraordinary amount of capital investment to retool a lot of things. The other area where you're being a little too sunny is _how_ the prices go up. If a political faction in Turkmenistan knocks out a major pipeline to Europe, world oil prices double overnight, and that decimates oh, say, 64% of the American airline industry, who happened to bet on modest price increases rather than stratospheric ones. You're probably right that oil won't go away, but even forced reductions in its use could be tremendously disruptive.
As you might guess I happen to think the price of energy will in fact go up, and that oil price shocks are a real threat. I also think infrastructure changes and their corresponding investments take a long time, so we'd better get started early and not wait until the market obligates us to move quickly. We can mitigate both the threat of global warming and of oil shocks by having the government make it economically reasonable to plunk down some do-re-mi on a less oil-dependent infrastructure. I've been scoffed at countless times by conservatarian market "purists" who insist that the government can't possibly do something like this, but it's hard to argue away the obligation of good stewardship, both of the economy and of the environment.
You should read the response on Grist. The post's author immediately accused Moore of being a shill for industry, a fake environmentalist, etc. A hate to say it, but a lot of the environmental movement is still fueled by counterculture utopianism, and I'd put myself strongly in camp that the environmental damage of various types is a crisis-level problem. So Moore is right that environmental movement needs reform, but I'm not sure if he's done a great job delivering that message, or if he's even the right guy.
What I believe will drive serious momentum on the environment is when a set of technologies start moving into the marketplace that give energy and other heavy industrial companies a way forward: an exit strategy from their current business, and enough of a hedge that they can start seriously thwacking their rivals with the regulatory stick. If a company can find a way to keep its own waste costs low and drive up the waste costs of others, they just need to be convinced that it's a matter of time before the public wants more costs applied to environmental degradation (generally true even in the US), and they will be compelled to move in the green direction. So seeding the energy and green technology could have a very large impact on industry in general.
Speaking of strawmen: CO2's role as a feedback is far smaller than its role as forcing and that does nothing to change the fact that you're relying on an incorrect view of water vapor as forcing. Not only that, but your own argument that carbon's effect should not be overstated because it's a "trace" gas is contradicted by your argument that sulphates might mitigate global warming - at their peak, sulphate emissions were several orders of magnitude smaller than carbon emissions. If sulphates have a notable effect, so does carbon.
I'm certainly not here to dispute that many important engineering breakthroughs occurred in the private sector, nor that government has typically done a poor job bringing science breakthroughs to market. Nor am I trying to defend NASA's indescribable wastefulness with all these non-scientific manned spaceflight programs (which largely come about because NASA is dominated by people who think that the public will care more about space if it sees Top Gun Goes to Mars). But it's a stretch to suggest that the private sector has been responsible for nearly as much infrastructure development as government. Which is all fine; government's role is to build the infrastructure for the public - as individuals and as businesses - to use.
Your defense of the market's role in "creating demand" for freeways is speculative - after all, people had had to pay the full costs of roads out of pocket, who's to say they would have adopted cars in the same way. On the other hand, the fact that the government - whatever its rationale - dumped a huge amount of money into the freeway system, and continues to do so is indisputable. Likewise the argument with the internet - when I got on in the early 90's, the backbone was still run by NSF. Point being, the government made an infrastructure investment that the market later picked up. And while people who suggested the notion of a hyperlink before Berners-Lee (CERN - government) or Mosaic (UIUC/NCSA - government) deserve plenty of credit it takes a lot of work to write out government's pivotal role. And likewise the entire space program: regardless of who did or does the work, the government comissioned and paid for it, making it a government-sponsored action. And again with railroads, government commitment to building them, in the form of emminent domain and outright purchases of land was sine qua non to their being built.
Your points on the economy seeking the lowest common denominator under a scheme like Kyoto are indeed reasonable. And it's certainly true that inflated concerns over nuclear have been allowed to stymie its growth to a far greater extent than they should. However, if some intervention makes the costs of seeking out the alternatives high enough, and the investment in alternative energies strong enough, the market can greatly accelerate the deployment of those technologies. That's the goal of the carrots-and-sticks approach: to goose the market rather than let it slowly wind its way there. That's what we've always done, and I think it's worked rather well.
Aaaaaahahahahahah! No more "water vapor overwhelms carbon" bullshit. No more. None. It's awfully hard to take the repetition of this outright misrepresentation about carbon being a smaller greenhouse gas than water vapor. Water vapor is not a forcing, it's a feedback. Period. You cool the air, water comes out. You heat the air, it goes in. And its residence time in the atmosphere is 10 days, so except stratospheric water (something with real potential for problems) water does not count as a forcing for global climate change. Please get it straight before getting on your soapbox.
I happen to agree with your point 3 that no matter what course we had or do take, our systems are insufficiently flexible to accomodate climate variability and severe weather events in general. However, doesn't that speak for not doing things that have even a moderate risk of exarcebating the problem? As for your point 2, more research for climate would be a great idea. How about suggesting to our government that it increase NASA's funding for climate studies rather than cutting it? Or that it not muzzle NOAA. And I'd be careful of putting your we-can-keep-emitting-carbon-no-problemo eggs in the paleoclimate basket. Polar ice cores demonstrate a very clear correlation between atmospheric carbon content and global average temperature. So yeah, let's have more of all climate research, including paleoclimatological research. Look, I'm all for open scientific debate about climate change, including to what extent one ought to be swayed by Lindzen's disagreements with the rest of the climate community. But "skeptics" continually resort to non-scientific explanations in the service of why the rest of the climate science community has been wrong for years and is getting wronger every day, and that's really pretty hard to swallow.
Changing energy supplies is an infrastructure issue, a big one. You seem to be under the impression that the advances in our country's infrastructure were largely due to the action of the market. Who built freeways? Who built railroads and secured the property to build them on? Who researched and launched satellites? Who invented and built the internet? Who funds research into nearly every area of technological advancement? Yep, that's right, good old government with it's nasty market-interfering ways. Government intervention has played an important role in nearly every technological advance.
A sea change in energy infrastructure takes carrots and sticks, and lots of them. And of course there's the small fact of the limited supplies of oil around (somewhere around 3-6 years from now the price really starts going up). At this scale, the only entities that can induce the kind of massive infrastructure transformation that's needed mitigate the twin risks of climate change and rapid price increases in oil are governments. Yeah, Kyoto had flaws, especially in the China and India areas. But it's a stick, and I have yet to hear of any climate skeptic suggest any other measure to promote this kind of energy transition.
That said, I really don't feel that bad for the guy, nor do I think the WSJ wrote anything terribly out of bounds. They didn't name his kids, pass along rumors or unsubstantiated remarks, insinuate that he has personality defects, carry on about how sleazy the industry is, etc. The story was about the guy, his company, and his ambivalence about revealing his job. It's the media's job to report what's going on, not to tiptoe around someone's reputation. If he really feels that bad about the reputation of the industry he's in, he can cash out and do something else. If somebody founded a vastly successful manure-hauling company that managed to attract a bunch of customers because of clever composting or something like that, wouldn't you expect the media to write about the phenomenon and use a person to illustrate the industry, even if the guy became know as Mr. Manure (sorry ladies,no manure for you all).
There's certainly a migration path from trivially basically designed-on-the-fly apps such as basic PHP and ASP pages to something much more formlly designed. Microsoft has at various points tried to offer this, but seems to frequently shoot themselves in the foot by going back to recruiting newer developers (notice that nearly all of their documentation builds logic right into event code).
PHP is already pretty easy to set up and run on a RedHat box. JBoss with Web Services is not. If RedHat can give themselves a little edge in that setup department, they have a well-integrated open source product to offer enterprise. By acquiring JBoss, RedHat can control the migration pathway and provide a complete platform at both the low end and the high end. They can offer migration tools from PHP to Rails/JBoss, or even some tools to get you into a basic JBoss instance (and after you hose it you pay them to rescue you).
The notion that this gives RedHat an equivalent stack to MS is right on.
This is known in oceanography circles as "the geritol solution". While it's true that researches were able to produce surface plankton blooms by seeding iron into the ocean, there's a lot between that and permanent sequestration of carbon. First of all, it's not clear how exactly these blooms would propagate up the food web, and what would happen. Would the plankton growth quickly be blocked by another limiting resource? Would zooplankton populations rise quickly to control this growth? Would the organic carbon "shower" be taken up in the water column or at the benthic layer? Would degradation of increased amount of particulate organic carbon (POC) lead to hypoxic waters at subsurface levels and thus shut off other parts of the food web? Would some macrofauna eat up the zooplankton and knock out the carbon sequestration?
Because there are so many unknowns, with plenty of potential for further damaging the ocean ecosystem, most oceanographers are pretty reticent to try this technique.
First the old water vapor trope: "Water contributes to 95% of greenhouse effect". Water vapor is a feedback, not a forcing. Water has a 10-day residence time, so it basically exerts no forcing on long-term climate change. Except that (from the link above, written by actual mainstream climate scientists): which is why airplane contrails are a cause for concern.
Second, the notion that because delta-carbon/carbon is small therefore there is no forcing from increased carbon content flies in the face of all scientific logic. There is no a priori reason to believe that a particular scale of delta-carbon is required to effect changes in temperature, so there is neither a logical nor an empirical assertion here. Unlike real climate research, this site makes no effort to ask how sensitive climate is to changes in carbon dioxide on any scale, and instead presumes that delta-carbon over carbon must be "large" (presumably closer to 1) to exert a "large" impact on climate.
Third, this link uses vaguely defined "natural" and "man-made" categories to try to dilute the effect of humans on carbon content of the atmosphere. "Natural" effects involve equilibrium and non-equilibrium cycles, like absorption by the ocean, reaction by the biosphere, etc. So is the fact that the ocean has been taking up carbon in reaction to increased carbon content "natural" or "man-made"?
Given that this is a scientific site, your argument would carry a lot of more weight if it had any basis in current science. I suggest reading a real climate science site, like RealClimate.org. There are legitimate scientific disputes in the area of climate change, but the question whether anthropogenic carbon is affecting climate is settled. Try a new argument.
I'd say there's a small kernel of truth in the overstated assertion that environmentalists were trying to "destroy industrialization". One of the things that long frustrated me about environmentalism was its Original Sin of Man against Mother Earth mentality (despite the prevalence of pooh-poohing about the same Original Sin meme from Christians). This was the source of a general nostalgia for bucolic pre-industrial life (back to nature), and a general distrust of things industrial. That made a lot of people anti-growth.
However, as environmentalism has matured (and as a younger generation has taken over), a lot of that has dissipated. Many of us would now say what we want is post-industrialism - a world where industry has been retooled so that sustainable management of inputs, outputs and waste are all part of the business model (rather than only the first two, and without regard to global issues). Industrialization was not only a vastly leap forward for humanity and its quality of life, but was in fact good for much of the environment: before industrialization people burned an awful lot of trees, farmed a lot of land poorly, and relied on massive animal stocks for transportation, and none of this was all that friendly to the earth. Now that we've seen the negative consequences of our current industrial methods, it's time for the next major leap forward. And despite all the propaganda, it's clear that pushing green industry will very quickly drive enormous economic growth and likely help humanity solve persistent problems like global poverty.
To answer the critics who say "if this is so great why doesn't business do it itself", I have a couple answers. First, as anyone who's worked at a startup or on a new product launch can tell you, markets move incrementally and businesses outpace them at their peril. So to get the market to surge forward, you often need external intervention. Second, much of what's needed is massive capital investment for long-term gain: in research, in infrastructure upgrades, and in capitalizing new technologies. Businesses generally do not have a 20 year mandate to improve infrastructure, whereas the government has exactly this mandate. And yes, the government intervention does makes mistakes, can promote inefficiency, or can produce unintended outcomes. But it almost always gets the market moving in the intended direction, and the mistakes can be cleaned up later.
If this all sounds a bit breathless, get me a gig at Wired. But I really do believe that investing heavily in this jump will give tremendous results for people, business, and countries.
Interestingly, the individual within the Democratic Party who would be the most different by rights should have been President. Al Gore is a long time environmentalist (about to release his own documentary about global warming), and very knowledgeable about scientific matters in general.
That said, your point is well taken. If the Democrats really wanted to make global climate change a plank, they could start by making a lot more reference to the Apollo Alliance. It's gonna take an awful lot of clout and will to get through to the industries that are primary emitters of CO2, as well as rolling out all the infrastructure needed to actually change emissions. I'm not convinced the Dems presently have enough of either to make real changes happen.
Right now, they have to claw back pretty much all revenues from consumers.I don't see why you think this is a bad thing. After all, what the market really wants is undifferentiated bandwidth - a commodity. The telcos know that the minute they lost their monopoly power, the market for bandwidth would commoditize and their margins would plummet, especially as all distinctions between type of data carried become blurred. This would be the best situation for everyone except the telcos - bandwidth would be close to free. The telcos want to get around this by being able to meter different types of content rather than amount of content, and charge a "brokering" fee for figuring out how fast that packet needs to move. The stuff about optimizing packets is a load of crap - if you want better delivery of your packets, buy more or better bandwidth. And if the content provider wants its packets to arrive to you faster, they need to buy more or better bandwidth. Simple, no brokering needed by the carrier.
I'm glad you mentioned that. People tend to think of wind turbines as having no effect, and while at the current scale their effects are minimal
I also think you're overly disparaging of biofuels - while corn and soy biofuels are indeed a sop to agribusiness, there are lots of other cellulose-type things to turn into oils. The point here is to get the process moving - get the market interested making them broadly available.
But frankly, I think the best thing we can do is simply mandate that all cars be plug-in hybrids as soon as is feasible. Oil-based fuels are like assembly language - they get the most out of the engine on the spot, but they are a big pain to maintain. We already run a perfectly good electrical distribution system, and that does efficiency costs, but the modularity is well worth it. If all our cars were electric, we could simply switch off most carbon emissions within 5-10 years, and prices might go up a bit, but that would be it. As it stands, humanity has to engineer a way to swap out the trillions of oil-burning engines for either minimal-oil or non-oil engines. That's a massive undertaking, particularly when you reflect on that fact that cars rarely stop being used - they just migrate down the food chain until they are the taxis you see in 3rd world countries. A serious, mandated commitment to electric vehicles would make the creation of batteries/fuel cells, clean transport of electric energy a huge bounty. And that massive market is what it will take to slowly work through all those oil-burning vehicles.
Ahem, Google. Think ODF export from Writely, from IBM's Workplace tools, from a Lotus email, from tax prep software, etc. All these players would love to have a standard not controlled by MS. If those products crowd out your use of Word, then the switching issue becomes much less relevant.