I'm doing a double major - Political Science and Communications (with a minor in history!) This leads to a certain amount of... schizophrenia in one's academic life.
For example, a sentence I heard on Monday in one of my PoliSci classes, representative of the general level of conversation:
"Yeah, but is that in nominal GDP or purchasing-power-parity? Are we talking GDP, or GDP per capita?"
In contrast, a sentence I heard in my Communications class last night:
"Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle is an excellent example of ethnic media."
Well. At least half of my degree will be useful.
Friday, March 17, 2006
Stupid Blogger
Double posts make me angry. Get what you pay for, indeed.
Update: Aw, crap. Now I lost the post entirely. Brilliant.
Update: Aw, crap. Now I lost the post entirely. Brilliant.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
What 3 billion degrees means
So a few days ago, the Sandia National Labratories' "Z machine" achieved a pretty spectacular milestone - they generated a plasma that reached 3 billion degrees fahrenheit, or 2 billion kelvins. Hot stuff, coming through!
Aside from the pure scientific value, this is interesting because it is quite a bit higher than necessary for hydrogen-boron (pB11) fusion. I've written about Focus Fusion before, who are just one of a couple of competing groups working on pB11 fusion. I've avoided writing about them too avidly, because of the snake oil potential.
In any case, the people at Focus Fusion have a message reacting to the news from Sandia:
Even if fusion doesn't give us the energy we need to desalinate the Indian Ocean and irrigate the Sahara (ambitious, much?) something that can keep China and India from building their economies on coal will do quite enough, thank you very much.
Of course, a cheaper supply of electrical energy would also make yesterday's plasma/FT ethanol process more economical.
And yes, I would absolutely favour nuclear fusion as an alternative to coal, oil, gas, and conventional nuclear if it were anneutronic (radiation free.) Hell, if Focus Fusion delivers, I'd prefer it to wind and solar!
Aside from the pure scientific value, this is interesting because it is quite a bit higher than necessary for hydrogen-boron (pB11) fusion. I've written about Focus Fusion before, who are just one of a couple of competing groups working on pB11 fusion. I've avoided writing about them too avidly, because of the snake oil potential.
In any case, the people at Focus Fusion have a message reacting to the news from Sandia:
The Sandia machine could potentially be used to burn pB11 fuel, if a pellet containing the fuel were placed at the center of the array. However, there are serious obstacles to a Z-Pinch being used as a practical fusion reactor. For one thing, the giga-gauss fields needed for generating practical amounts of fusion energy are not achievable with the Z-Pinch unless it can be used to form plasmoids. Second, the Z-Pinch destroys the electrodes with each shot, so rapid pulsed operation is precluded.The focus fusion website is full of all sorts of wonderful promises - cheap, limitless energy from seawater for example. I want to believe, I really do. If nothing else, if we're going to avoid an environmental calamity we need a technology that can make coal obsolete for electrical generation. The Focus Fusion site claims a potential capital cost per watt of about 3-6 cents per watt, which would make it an order of magnitude cheaper than coal.
The Sandia result does confirm two important conclusions of focus fusion research — that high ion temperature can be obtained from a pinch machine, and that huge differences between ion and electron temperatures are possible.
Even if fusion doesn't give us the energy we need to desalinate the Indian Ocean and irrigate the Sahara (ambitious, much?) something that can keep China and India from building their economies on coal will do quite enough, thank you very much.
Of course, a cheaper supply of electrical energy would also make yesterday's plasma/FT ethanol process more economical.
And yes, I would absolutely favour nuclear fusion as an alternative to coal, oil, gas, and conventional nuclear if it were anneutronic (radiation free.) Hell, if Focus Fusion delivers, I'd prefer it to wind and solar!
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Mexico announces new Supergiant field
So Mexico has announced a new super-giant field, potentially holding 10 billion barrels of oil. Good news for Mexico, pretty much a non-story for the rest of the world. Consider:
-Humanity uses 10 billion barrels every 4 months.
-This field holds "as much as" 10 billion barrels, which is something very different from actually having 10 billion barrels. The South China Sea was supposed to be the New Persian Gulf(tm) and that never happened. Same with Kazakhstan. I expect this discovery will be retroactively lowered. I certainly wouldn't count on seeing more than 5 billion barrels actually make it to market.
-This is an offshore field in the Gulf of Mexico. I don't know the exact location, but the odds are good that this field is going to be subject to hurricanes, like pretty much all of the Gulf of Mexico.
-Hurricane season '05: Sucked. '06: Gonna suck. As climate change gets worse: More suckage. Who wants to bet on this trend not holding?
-Mexico's largest field is already in decline. At best, this field will simply fill the growing hole in Mexican production. At worst, Mexico faces some lean years as existing production declines before they get the new field online.
Sorry to rain on your parade.
(Link via The Oil Drum.)
-Humanity uses 10 billion barrels every 4 months.
-This field holds "as much as" 10 billion barrels, which is something very different from actually having 10 billion barrels. The South China Sea was supposed to be the New Persian Gulf(tm) and that never happened. Same with Kazakhstan. I expect this discovery will be retroactively lowered. I certainly wouldn't count on seeing more than 5 billion barrels actually make it to market.
-This is an offshore field in the Gulf of Mexico. I don't know the exact location, but the odds are good that this field is going to be subject to hurricanes, like pretty much all of the Gulf of Mexico.
-Hurricane season '05: Sucked. '06: Gonna suck. As climate change gets worse: More suckage. Who wants to bet on this trend not holding?
-Mexico's largest field is already in decline. At best, this field will simply fill the growing hole in Mexican production. At worst, Mexico faces some lean years as existing production declines before they get the new field online.
Sorry to rain on your parade.
(Link via The Oil Drum.)
I Heart... The Army Corps of Engineers? Huh?
Weirdness incarnate. The Army Corps of Engineers - the agency whose corporate ideology was once described as "build a dam on anything wet" - has put together a report (PDF) on the energy security of the United States. And it's good. And I don't mean "good, considering it's written by the Army Corps of Engineers." No, I mean it's good.
On oil: "The oil market will remain fairly stable in the very near term, but with steadily increasing prices as world production approaches its peak. The doubling of oil prices from 2003-2005 is not an anomaly, but a picture of the future. Oil production is approaching its peak; low growth in availability can be expected for the next 5 to 10 years."
On nuclear: "Assuming an annual usage of about 150 million pounds per year, this equates to about a 33 to 43 year supply at current consumption rates. Here again, since uranium is a non-renewable natural resource, it supply will eventually reach a peak and trend downward."
On renewables: "Renewables have significant potential in the United State to contribute energy in a more environmental friendly format, close to where it is needed. The economics of renewables will change over time as they begin to receive some of the subsidies that have been the largess of the more traditional power sectors. Also, their costs will continue to drop as deployment increases and economies of production scale and standardization can take effect. Most are significantly more environmentally friendly than the fossil fuel or nuclear alternatives. Clean energy technologies will impact faster and to a greater amount than current projections."
Oh, Army Corps of Engineers, you had me at "Hello."
(Link via Past Peak.)
On oil: "The oil market will remain fairly stable in the very near term, but with steadily increasing prices as world production approaches its peak. The doubling of oil prices from 2003-2005 is not an anomaly, but a picture of the future. Oil production is approaching its peak; low growth in availability can be expected for the next 5 to 10 years."
On nuclear: "Assuming an annual usage of about 150 million pounds per year, this equates to about a 33 to 43 year supply at current consumption rates. Here again, since uranium is a non-renewable natural resource, it supply will eventually reach a peak and trend downward."
On renewables: "Renewables have significant potential in the United State to contribute energy in a more environmental friendly format, close to where it is needed. The economics of renewables will change over time as they begin to receive some of the subsidies that have been the largess of the more traditional power sectors. Also, their costs will continue to drop as deployment increases and economies of production scale and standardization can take effect. Most are significantly more environmentally friendly than the fossil fuel or nuclear alternatives. Clean energy technologies will impact faster and to a greater amount than current projections."
Oh, Army Corps of Engineers, you had me at "Hello."
(Link via Past Peak.)
Neato New Ethanol Source
I continue to bolster my argument - whatever problems we have with biofuels (and they are numerous) the one problem we won't have is a lack of source material.
Latest example: a company has devised a plasma reactor that takes used tires, whips them up to about 30,000 degrees (fahrenheit, celcius, does it matter?) and thus dissociates the carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen into separate gases. The reactor then cools the gas, and reacts it through a catalyst in to ethanol.
That 30,000 degrees sounds like it would cost a lot, in terms of electricity. But ionized plasmas are well-understood, and you can buy plasma torches commercially. The company's press release (yes, grain of salt) says that the output should be at least 4x as much as the energy input.
In the 1970s, the Soviet experimented with a coal-fueled plasma reactor for electricity generation. It was hugely expensive in terms of capital, but had zero particulate emissions and was extremely efficient. So this isn't really buck rogers stuff.
I'm not certain, but it looks to me like this kind of reactor could potentially take almost any kind of carbon-rich waste (plastics, biomass, garbage, dried sewage) and convert it to ethanol. As a bonus, the reaction doesn't need a direct source of natural gas, like conventional ethanol. The ionizing plasma just needs a supply of electrical power, meaning we can potentially power this renewably.
It's nice to think of a future where our cities don't emit massive amounts of solid waste, to be buried in the ground or dumped in to our watersheds. We could potentially scale up technology like this to produce ethanol not just from our current flow of garbage, but our massive garbage reserves as well.
Inevitably, however, our civlization will reach a point where we begin depleting our garbage reserves, a point I will call "Peak Garbage." (Alternately, "Dymaxion's Peak.") We will then need to either massively increase our investment in garbage exploration and production, find alternate sources of garbage and sewage, or dramatically constrain our consumption of garbage. Are we ready for this earth-shaking era in human history?
(Story via Energy Blog & Green Car Congress.)
Latest example: a company has devised a plasma reactor that takes used tires, whips them up to about 30,000 degrees (fahrenheit, celcius, does it matter?) and thus dissociates the carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen into separate gases. The reactor then cools the gas, and reacts it through a catalyst in to ethanol.
That 30,000 degrees sounds like it would cost a lot, in terms of electricity. But ionized plasmas are well-understood, and you can buy plasma torches commercially. The company's press release (yes, grain of salt) says that the output should be at least 4x as much as the energy input.
In the 1970s, the Soviet experimented with a coal-fueled plasma reactor for electricity generation. It was hugely expensive in terms of capital, but had zero particulate emissions and was extremely efficient. So this isn't really buck rogers stuff.
I'm not certain, but it looks to me like this kind of reactor could potentially take almost any kind of carbon-rich waste (plastics, biomass, garbage, dried sewage) and convert it to ethanol. As a bonus, the reaction doesn't need a direct source of natural gas, like conventional ethanol. The ionizing plasma just needs a supply of electrical power, meaning we can potentially power this renewably.
It's nice to think of a future where our cities don't emit massive amounts of solid waste, to be buried in the ground or dumped in to our watersheds. We could potentially scale up technology like this to produce ethanol not just from our current flow of garbage, but our massive garbage reserves as well.
Inevitably, however, our civlization will reach a point where we begin depleting our garbage reserves, a point I will call "Peak Garbage." (Alternately, "Dymaxion's Peak.") We will then need to either massively increase our investment in garbage exploration and production, find alternate sources of garbage and sewage, or dramatically constrain our consumption of garbage. Are we ready for this earth-shaking era in human history?
(Story via Energy Blog & Green Car Congress.)
Chongqing
The Guardian has a staggering (but short) piece on China's fastest-growing municipality, which already has more people than Canada:
One of the ongoing issues in China is the turmoil in the countryside as inequality between rural and urban areas grows. What isn't always commented on is that the same thing has happened in many countries, including the US. As agricultural productivity increases (in terms of hours of labour) there's naturally a depopulation of the countryside. This happened in the US with the innovation of industrialized farming, beginning in the 1940s and proceeding into the 1970s. In the case of the US, however, the main victims were blacks who were denied most of the federal aid that helped white farmers make the transition to industrialized farming. (Read Lost Revolutions by Pete Daniel to get a better grasp on this period.)
The same thing is happening in China, albeit on a nearly-incomprehensible scale. 8.5 million people move from the countryside to the cities every year. When they get to the cities, most of them are there illegally and so have to take whatever jobs they can get - though the CPC is reforming some laws to allow migrants greater protections. Still, it's a rough time to be poor in China - which is to say, it's the status quo.
One particular irony of all this is that China recently released it's human rights criticism of the US, including a criticism of American wealth inequality. This is funny, because China is actually a more unequal society (according to the Gini index) than the US. Not that I imagine Beijing sees the humour.
Britain has five urban centres of more than a million people; China has ninety. A few - Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Nanjing - are well known around the world. The names of many others - Suqian, Suining, Xiantao, Xinghua, Liuan - are unfamiliar even to many Chinese. Nowhere is the staggering urbanisation of the world more evident than in Chongqing. Never heard of it? This is where the pace and scale of urbanisation is probably faster and bigger than anywhere in the world today. This is the Coketown of the early 21st century.The last time I heard about Chongqing, it was spelled "Chungking" and was the provisional capital of the Republic of China during WWII. Which is a good indication of how serious a student I am.
Set in the middle reaches of the Yangtze, this former trading centre and treaty port has long been the economic hub of western China. But after its government was given municipal control of surrounding territory the size of many countries, it has grown and grown, becoming what is now the world's biggest municipality with 31 million residents (more people than Iraq, Peru or Malaysia). The population in its metropolitan areas will double from 10 million to 20 million in the next 13 years.
One of the ongoing issues in China is the turmoil in the countryside as inequality between rural and urban areas grows. What isn't always commented on is that the same thing has happened in many countries, including the US. As agricultural productivity increases (in terms of hours of labour) there's naturally a depopulation of the countryside. This happened in the US with the innovation of industrialized farming, beginning in the 1940s and proceeding into the 1970s. In the case of the US, however, the main victims were blacks who were denied most of the federal aid that helped white farmers make the transition to industrialized farming. (Read Lost Revolutions by Pete Daniel to get a better grasp on this period.)
The same thing is happening in China, albeit on a nearly-incomprehensible scale. 8.5 million people move from the countryside to the cities every year. When they get to the cities, most of them are there illegally and so have to take whatever jobs they can get - though the CPC is reforming some laws to allow migrants greater protections. Still, it's a rough time to be poor in China - which is to say, it's the status quo.
One particular irony of all this is that China recently released it's human rights criticism of the US, including a criticism of American wealth inequality. This is funny, because China is actually a more unequal society (according to the Gini index) than the US. Not that I imagine Beijing sees the humour.
My Fatwa Against Sony Continues
I can't help but laugh my shadenfreude-filled laugh on the announcement (via Slashdot) that Sony is delaying the release of the PS3 until November. The commentary with the Slashdot piece basically makes all the points you need to know: This is great news for Microsoft, good news for Nintendo, and a huge blow against Sony. It's now likely that the US release of the PS3 won't come until 2007, meaning that by the time the PS3 makes it out, the Xbox 360 will already have been out for a year, and have a much larger stable of games available.
Haw haw!
(Just a small note - I don't own any game station more advanced than a Super Nintendo. My partisanship is fully explained by the fact that Sony makes crap gear and hates its customers. As opposed to Microsoft... never mind.)
Haw haw!
(Just a small note - I don't own any game station more advanced than a Super Nintendo. My partisanship is fully explained by the fact that Sony makes crap gear and hates its customers. As opposed to Microsoft... never mind.)
Why We Love/Hate Economists
Brad Delong has a debate:
Agathon: And when do your models predict the dollar will fall?
Kapelikos: 2003.
Agathon: Three years ago?
Kapelikos: Yep.
Agathon: But as long as people believe the argument on the other side, the dollar doesn't decline, and the argument looks correct?
Kapelikos: Yep--for one more year.
Agathon: How many more yars are you going to be saying, "Wait just one more year"?
Kapelikos: Until I can say, "I told you so."
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
We Won't Always Be Invited
xhris said in comments:
It's important to distinguish between the simple use of military force, and the idea of "humanitarian intervention." For HI, you could argue that an invitation, or at least the acceptance of the population, should be required. But Afghanistan, bears some comparison with an actual war, not traditional HI missions. The Taliban was seen to have comitted an act of war by harboring Al Qaeda, so they had to be destroyed. Liberating the Afghan people is really secondary, just as the liberation of Germany was secondary to the goal of destroying the Nazi government.
I bring this up simply to ask a question - what is our mission in Afghanistan, specifically in the south? Are we there as peacekeepers, humanitarian workers, or are we still at war with the Taliban? This is an important question, it seems to me. My conception of it is that we're still effectively at war, but I welcome counterarguments.
I would add a fourth requirement: [to the use of military force.]I agree that this would be nice to have, but we can't make it a requirement. 12 million Germans died defending their country from the Allies, which to me signals rather conclusively that we weren't welcome. In retrospect, the Germans may now feel different, but we had no idea that would be the result at the time.
is the 'war' supported by the civilians who actually live where it's happening???
The opinions of citizens of the invading forces are another matter.
It's important to distinguish between the simple use of military force, and the idea of "humanitarian intervention." For HI, you could argue that an invitation, or at least the acceptance of the population, should be required. But Afghanistan, bears some comparison with an actual war, not traditional HI missions. The Taliban was seen to have comitted an act of war by harboring Al Qaeda, so they had to be destroyed. Liberating the Afghan people is really secondary, just as the liberation of Germany was secondary to the goal of destroying the Nazi government.
I bring this up simply to ask a question - what is our mission in Afghanistan, specifically in the south? Are we there as peacekeepers, humanitarian workers, or are we still at war with the Taliban? This is an important question, it seems to me. My conception of it is that we're still effectively at war, but I welcome counterarguments.
Super Mario Day
I've long wondered why some people bring their laptops to class. Sure, the professor can't tell if you're playing solitaire while he's speaking, but why even bother to come to class if all you're going to do is goof off? (Yes, I'm apparently 62.)
On the other hand, it never occurred to me that I could play Super Mario Bros. 2 in class. That game in particular has a certain attachment to me, as it was the first videogame I ever finished all the way through. It was really fun to watch some guy a few rows ahead of me finish off the boss (Wart, a bubble-spewing lizard), though I think I could've done better if he'd let me play.
On top of that, some evil genius has made a mash-up of the Uma/Gogo fight scene from Kill Bill and Super Mario Bros sounds. Brilliant.
And while I'm at it, if you've got 15 minutes or so, watch this video on why us honkies get all the fine asian girls. Very funny.
(Links via Boingboing, and Vicki.)
On the other hand, it never occurred to me that I could play Super Mario Bros. 2 in class. That game in particular has a certain attachment to me, as it was the first videogame I ever finished all the way through. It was really fun to watch some guy a few rows ahead of me finish off the boss (Wart, a bubble-spewing lizard), though I think I could've done better if he'd let me play.
On top of that, some evil genius has made a mash-up of the Uma/Gogo fight scene from Kill Bill and Super Mario Bros sounds. Brilliant.
And while I'm at it, if you've got 15 minutes or so, watch this video on why us honkies get all the fine asian girls. Very funny.
(Links via Boingboing, and Vicki.)
Natural Gas Crisis in the UK?
Yeesh. Bad times for England:
We should all be paying attention to the UK in the next few weeks, and see how this turns out. It should be educational.
(Oh, and despite my recent reading of V for Vendetta, I resisted the urge to use the catchphrase "England endures." Aren't you all proud of me?)
The problems really started Thursday 16th February with an accident at the Bravo gas rig some 18 miles off the East coast of Yorkshire. This platform is a key component in the Rough gas storage facility, the UK's long term gas storage facility holding the vast majority of our stored gas. The facility is not expected back online until at least 1st May now.The UK is presenting us with an early vision of what North American winters may look like in a decade or so, if Dave Hughes is right. Canada and the US only have 8 years or so of conventional natural gas left, if current reserves are right. Meanwhile, we're now digging more and more wells (3x as many as in 1997), and we're only barely holding the supply level. It's unlikely that North American gas production willever increase substantially again.
With Rough out of the picture daily gas supply over what can be directly extracted from the North Sea gas fields and imported through the continental interconnector has been met from the medium and short term storage. Whilst this storage is capable of meeting all but the most extreme demand daily flow rates (luckily we haven't had any really cold weather) the flow rates can't be maintained for long since the volume just isn't there.
After almost four weeks, the short term storage has been reduced to just 724GWh and medium term to 2,311GWh. At the maximum rate of extraction (likely due to cold weather and long term storage being offline) these reserves will last for 1.1 and 7.6 days respectively. At immediate threat is the short term storage with a maximum flow rate of 526GWh (~48 million cubic meters). That 48mcm represents 13% of current daily demand.
We should all be paying attention to the UK in the next few weeks, and see how this turns out. It should be educational.
(Oh, and despite my recent reading of V for Vendetta, I resisted the urge to use the catchphrase "England endures." Aren't you all proud of me?)
Monday, March 13, 2006
Logical Conclusions
via The Torch, I am reminded of something a friend mentioned to me a while back - the US Navy is phasing out the F-14 Tomcat.
The F-14 is the Navy's dedicated air superiority fighter. It is contrasted with the (apparently, easier to maintain) F-18 strike fighter, which engages surface targets as well as airborne ones.
The Navy is getting rid of the F-14.
This is the same Navy that is busy hyping China as a potential threat in the Pacific.
Now, I'm not saying the F-18 sucks or anything like that. But do we really think there's anything to worry about if the US Navy is so confident, they're willing to go without a dedicated air superiority fighter? Certainly, I think it says a lot about their confidence against the PLAAF.
Watch what they do, not what they say.
The F-14 is the Navy's dedicated air superiority fighter. It is contrasted with the (apparently, easier to maintain) F-18 strike fighter, which engages surface targets as well as airborne ones.
The Navy is getting rid of the F-14.
This is the same Navy that is busy hyping China as a potential threat in the Pacific.
Now, I'm not saying the F-18 sucks or anything like that. But do we really think there's anything to worry about if the US Navy is so confident, they're willing to go without a dedicated air superiority fighter? Certainly, I think it says a lot about their confidence against the PLAAF.
Watch what they do, not what they say.
My Problems With God, and With the Godly
I've been harping a lot on religion lately in class recently. The bizarre thing is that I've been defending religion in class, which is bizarre for anyone who knows me. Me and organized religion parted ways a long way back. Probably about the time the nun told me God made the Challenger blow up. But whatever.
Last week, in one of my classes, we were discussing the witch burnings of the 16th and 17th century. Someone trotted out the number 6 million dead, and compared it to the Holocaust. That alone was pretty offensive to me, both for the moral and historical ignorance. (6 million dead women is not a credible number. Most historians believe less than 100,000.) Someone else called it genocide, and I had to physically keep my mouth shut from snapping at that moron. But the prof asked a decent question - why has the western, Christian obsession with witchcraft persisted? We still see it rear its ugly head in the occasional Harry Potter book-burning. (Book Holocaust? Book Genocide?)
The other students in my class offered a number of explanations, and they were about what you would expect from a leftist, academic perspective - basically mocking the religious, and denigrating the idea that people could be legitimately concerned about their children's well-being by wanting Harry Potter banned. Now, normally I'd join in the mockery, but I felt the need to balance the debate a bit, so I pointed out that for the most pious Christians, Harry Potter isn't just children's literature, it's blasphemy, possibly idolatry, and pretty certainly a ticket to hell. If you believe in hell, then Harry Potter is a massive threat to your child's future happiness.
I didn't quite get back a sea of blank stares, but I don't think the class was very receptive to my arguments. In any case, it's worth pointing out that not all Christians seem to believe in hell or Satan, based on regular polls. This makes me wonder what exactly being a Christian means in this day and age. I'm relatively certain that the New Testament makes it clear that Satan took control of Judas and caused him to betray Jesus. So it's not like Satan plays a small role in Christian mythology or whatever. I doubt a lot of ancient Greeks were walking around claiming to be devout, while not believing in Zeus.
Speaking of, in class tonight a fellow student said something which shocked me: An openly gay man, he said that his friends who were also gay hated the current Pope, didn't go to mass, but called themselves Catholic. And I had to restrain myself from shouting, "No, they're not fucking Catholic!" Just so we're clear, I'm not Catholic either. I'm pretty sure that atheists aren't welcome in that particular club. But the Catholic Church has some pretty clear rules on who is and is not a Catholic. Ironically, this young man's gay friends aren't disqualified from being Catholics because they're gay - they're just sinners. (Join the club. No, really. We've got less rules, and no membership fee.) No, what disqualifies them from being Catholic would be the whole hating the Pope, not going to mass, and presumably not taking communion.
This bothers me, because we've come to think of faith as something that is simply asserted, not something that is conferred, or even earned. So this guy's homosexual protestant friends get to call themselves Catholics, and it has about as much basis in reality as me calling myself a solider, or an NFL linebacker.
Let me put it this way - I don't call myself a Christian anymore, for the simple reason that I don't believe that Jesus was the son of God, that he was resurrected three days after he died, or that he ascended to heaven. Now, I do believe that Jesus' teachings are excellent ones to follow, but that isn't enough for me to earn that label. Why not? Because the Christian churches have this little thing called the Nicene Creed, which puts some pretty definite limits on who does and does not qualify. Guess what - I don't. And I'm fine with that. It doesn't leave me bereft, and I certainly don't feel like it limits my ability to criticize Christian acts or theology.
Words have meaning, especially in religion. Which is how it should be. And yes, the Catholic church does get to set the rules for who can and cannot call themselves Catholic, and Christians do get to do the same for the word "Christian", and Jews, and Muslims, and so on. Otherwise these words become meaningless. I don't claim to be a black, jewish homosexual, because I'm not. That, and it would be offensive to black, jews, and homosexuals for me to try and claim their status. Similarly, I'm offended for Catholics when this guy's friends claim to be Catholic. Not because it's right that the Church condemns them (it manifestly is not) but because they don't meet the entrance criteria. It's not like gays aren't welcome at other churches. Frankly, if you've got the courage to come out of the closet, you should have the courage to leave the Church of Rome, right?
Last week, in one of my classes, we were discussing the witch burnings of the 16th and 17th century. Someone trotted out the number 6 million dead, and compared it to the Holocaust. That alone was pretty offensive to me, both for the moral and historical ignorance. (6 million dead women is not a credible number. Most historians believe less than 100,000.) Someone else called it genocide, and I had to physically keep my mouth shut from snapping at that moron. But the prof asked a decent question - why has the western, Christian obsession with witchcraft persisted? We still see it rear its ugly head in the occasional Harry Potter book-burning. (Book Holocaust? Book Genocide?)
The other students in my class offered a number of explanations, and they were about what you would expect from a leftist, academic perspective - basically mocking the religious, and denigrating the idea that people could be legitimately concerned about their children's well-being by wanting Harry Potter banned. Now, normally I'd join in the mockery, but I felt the need to balance the debate a bit, so I pointed out that for the most pious Christians, Harry Potter isn't just children's literature, it's blasphemy, possibly idolatry, and pretty certainly a ticket to hell. If you believe in hell, then Harry Potter is a massive threat to your child's future happiness.
I didn't quite get back a sea of blank stares, but I don't think the class was very receptive to my arguments. In any case, it's worth pointing out that not all Christians seem to believe in hell or Satan, based on regular polls. This makes me wonder what exactly being a Christian means in this day and age. I'm relatively certain that the New Testament makes it clear that Satan took control of Judas and caused him to betray Jesus. So it's not like Satan plays a small role in Christian mythology or whatever. I doubt a lot of ancient Greeks were walking around claiming to be devout, while not believing in Zeus.
Speaking of, in class tonight a fellow student said something which shocked me: An openly gay man, he said that his friends who were also gay hated the current Pope, didn't go to mass, but called themselves Catholic. And I had to restrain myself from shouting, "No, they're not fucking Catholic!" Just so we're clear, I'm not Catholic either. I'm pretty sure that atheists aren't welcome in that particular club. But the Catholic Church has some pretty clear rules on who is and is not a Catholic. Ironically, this young man's gay friends aren't disqualified from being Catholics because they're gay - they're just sinners. (Join the club. No, really. We've got less rules, and no membership fee.) No, what disqualifies them from being Catholic would be the whole hating the Pope, not going to mass, and presumably not taking communion.
This bothers me, because we've come to think of faith as something that is simply asserted, not something that is conferred, or even earned. So this guy's homosexual protestant friends get to call themselves Catholics, and it has about as much basis in reality as me calling myself a solider, or an NFL linebacker.
Let me put it this way - I don't call myself a Christian anymore, for the simple reason that I don't believe that Jesus was the son of God, that he was resurrected three days after he died, or that he ascended to heaven. Now, I do believe that Jesus' teachings are excellent ones to follow, but that isn't enough for me to earn that label. Why not? Because the Christian churches have this little thing called the Nicene Creed, which puts some pretty definite limits on who does and does not qualify. Guess what - I don't. And I'm fine with that. It doesn't leave me bereft, and I certainly don't feel like it limits my ability to criticize Christian acts or theology.
Words have meaning, especially in religion. Which is how it should be. And yes, the Catholic church does get to set the rules for who can and cannot call themselves Catholic, and Christians do get to do the same for the word "Christian", and Jews, and Muslims, and so on. Otherwise these words become meaningless. I don't claim to be a black, jewish homosexual, because I'm not. That, and it would be offensive to black, jews, and homosexuals for me to try and claim their status. Similarly, I'm offended for Catholics when this guy's friends claim to be Catholic. Not because it's right that the Church condemns them (it manifestly is not) but because they don't meet the entrance criteria. It's not like gays aren't welcome at other churches. Frankly, if you've got the courage to come out of the closet, you should have the courage to leave the Church of Rome, right?
Really and Truly?
"Of all the reasons that President Bush is in trouble these days, not to be overlooked are inadequate REM cycles," the Washington Post reports. "Many of the president's top aides have been by his side nonstop for more than five years, not including the first campaign, recount and transition. This is a White House, according to insiders, that is physically and emotionally exhausted, battered by scandal and drained by political setbacks."Only if there's a just and caring God.
Said one White House official: "We're all burned out. People are just tired."
Meanwhile, a Philadelphia Inquirer profile of White House chief of staff Andrew Card Jr. says he "sometimes sounds like a man about to lose his job."
Am I Fired?
I have to make a confession - one that could end my blogging career.
I lack a strong opinion on Canadian participation in Afghanistan.
Shock! Horror! I know- a blogger without a strong opinion isn't really a blogger. But what can I say? On balance, I think Canada should be there, helping to try and put that country back together. And this necessitates a certain amount of military forces, especially in areas where the unreconstructed Taliban are still strong.
That said, Afghanistan is a long way from here, and my usual rule for Canadian military participation anywhere still holds:
1) Can military force help?
2) Can Canadian military force help?
The answer for Iraq (as prosecuted by the Bush administration, certainly) for both questions, is, was, and always will be no. That is not to say that the answer for both questions in Afghanistan is yes. I'm far more optimistic about our mission in Kandahar than anywhere else. But if either question is answered "no" in the case of Afghanistan, then I have to assume we don't belong there. (There is, of course, a third question - Is it worth doing even if it's a success? I think Afghanistan deserves our help, so I say yes.)
More depressingly, our new Prime Minister has taken a page from the Bush manual of "how to lose a war without trying" by a) making a secret trip to go buck up the troops, and b) has started describing the debate over Afghanistan with mindles sloganeering, such as "staying the course" so we don't "cut and run." The Conservatives and their supporters should realize that empty slogans haven't helped in Iraq, and they won't in Afghanistan. Free tip: The way to win the war is to actually win the war.
Anyway, for now I won't be able to express a strong opinion either way. But when I'm ready, have no fear - the accusations of treason will fly fast and furious, to make up for lost time.
I lack a strong opinion on Canadian participation in Afghanistan.
Shock! Horror! I know- a blogger without a strong opinion isn't really a blogger. But what can I say? On balance, I think Canada should be there, helping to try and put that country back together. And this necessitates a certain amount of military forces, especially in areas where the unreconstructed Taliban are still strong.
That said, Afghanistan is a long way from here, and my usual rule for Canadian military participation anywhere still holds:
1) Can military force help?
2) Can Canadian military force help?
The answer for Iraq (as prosecuted by the Bush administration, certainly) for both questions, is, was, and always will be no. That is not to say that the answer for both questions in Afghanistan is yes. I'm far more optimistic about our mission in Kandahar than anywhere else. But if either question is answered "no" in the case of Afghanistan, then I have to assume we don't belong there. (There is, of course, a third question - Is it worth doing even if it's a success? I think Afghanistan deserves our help, so I say yes.)
More depressingly, our new Prime Minister has taken a page from the Bush manual of "how to lose a war without trying" by a) making a secret trip to go buck up the troops, and b) has started describing the debate over Afghanistan with mindles sloganeering, such as "staying the course" so we don't "cut and run." The Conservatives and their supporters should realize that empty slogans haven't helped in Iraq, and they won't in Afghanistan. Free tip: The way to win the war is to actually win the war.
Anyway, for now I won't be able to express a strong opinion either way. But when I'm ready, have no fear - the accusations of treason will fly fast and furious, to make up for lost time.
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Dept. of No Kidding
OTTAWA (CP) - A secret study by Canada's spy agency says insurgents wreaking havoc in Iraq would see a U.S. withdrawal of troops as "a significant victory" unless Baghdad first has a stable government.Gee, why would the insurgents see the defeat of US forces as a "significant victory", I wonder? Maybe because it would be a significant victory?
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service paints a bleak picture of "dire proportions" in which determined fighters are exploiting divisions between the Shiite majority and Sunni minority in Iraq. [...]
The study was prompted by speculation last summer from Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S. ground operations in Iraq, about reducing personnel numbers.
I know our current government doesn't want to believe it, but the Americans are going to lose in Iraq, and the insurgents stand a very good chance of winning. (The outside chance is that some form of Iraqi government may keep things together. But I'm not optimistic.) It behooves us to actually face reality, and admit that even the leviathan can be defeated. But so far all we can admit is that the enemy "would see" their victory as a victory. It's too early to admit that defeat is possible, apparently. It's this same bizarre use of the English language that allows so many Americans to believe that they didn't lose Vietnam, frankly.
I have no idea why CSIS felt the need to state the obvious, and then couch it in such bizarre language.
Oh yeah
Vote for me!
The Koufax voting is open, and Angelica kindly nominated me for best new blog. So if you go here, and leave a comment saying you vote for me, then there's a chance I might win.
Well, probably not, but you should vote for me anyway, to deny someone else the chance at victory. That's me, the Ralph Nader of the blogosphere.
Go here and vote!
The Koufax voting is open, and Angelica kindly nominated me for best new blog. So if you go here, and leave a comment saying you vote for me, then there's a chance I might win.
Well, probably not, but you should vote for me anyway, to deny someone else the chance at victory. That's me, the Ralph Nader of the blogosphere.
Go here and vote!
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Some Quick Links, and the Tar Sands continue to suck
-Ontario is about to join the list of jurisdictions offering a standard premium for renewable energy. This is similar to the programs European countries have for wind and solar, though the premiums are not expected to be as generous. McGuinty may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's nice to have a sane energy policy in this province again, in marked contrast to the preceding Conservative government. Of course, given that the Tories ruined the electrical system in Ontario it's not hard to beat them.
-Staying with wind energy, Engineer-Poet has an excellent post on why nuclear is obsolete - by the time we can get one (1!) reactor up and running, the wind industry could potentially install hundreds of reactors worth of generation.
-Meanwhile, the tar sands are getting a bit of attention for two reasons: A report from the Polaris institute (PDF) which says that Alberta is essentially being desecrated to fuel American imperialism. (This is news?) While we're busy selling poison to the yanks, another report also notes that Albertans are poisoning themselves to do so. Are we seeing the beginnings of an anti-oil movement in Alberta? My bet is no.
That report by the Polaris Institute makes the argument that Canada should at the very least renegotiate NAFTA to eliminate the "proportional exports" clause which requires that Canada maintain high levels of exports exclusively to the US. This is usually sold as an example of American imperialism by the left, but it's important to note that the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney offered that to the Americans - it wasn't demanded by Washington. To put it bluntly, we were whores, not battered wives. We shouldn't try to play the victims on this one - we were stupid for electing Conservatives in the first place. Sadly, not something that's gone out of style.
Obviously, I can't imagine Harper and the new Conservatives seriously renegotiating NAFTA. That would require that the government (either party) take Canadian sovereignty and Canadian interests seriously, and not just use them as a campaign gag. Besides, if you read the comments at The Oil Drum, the idea of invading Alberta seems to occur way too naturally to Americans. Jon Stewart jokes about it, but some people don't seem to get the punch line.
-Staying with wind energy, Engineer-Poet has an excellent post on why nuclear is obsolete - by the time we can get one (1!) reactor up and running, the wind industry could potentially install hundreds of reactors worth of generation.
-Meanwhile, the tar sands are getting a bit of attention for two reasons: A report from the Polaris institute (PDF) which says that Alberta is essentially being desecrated to fuel American imperialism. (This is news?) While we're busy selling poison to the yanks, another report also notes that Albertans are poisoning themselves to do so. Are we seeing the beginnings of an anti-oil movement in Alberta? My bet is no.
That report by the Polaris Institute makes the argument that Canada should at the very least renegotiate NAFTA to eliminate the "proportional exports" clause which requires that Canada maintain high levels of exports exclusively to the US. This is usually sold as an example of American imperialism by the left, but it's important to note that the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney offered that to the Americans - it wasn't demanded by Washington. To put it bluntly, we were whores, not battered wives. We shouldn't try to play the victims on this one - we were stupid for electing Conservatives in the first place. Sadly, not something that's gone out of style.
Obviously, I can't imagine Harper and the new Conservatives seriously renegotiating NAFTA. That would require that the government (either party) take Canadian sovereignty and Canadian interests seriously, and not just use them as a campaign gag. Besides, if you read the comments at The Oil Drum, the idea of invading Alberta seems to occur way too naturally to Americans. Jon Stewart jokes about it, but some people don't seem to get the punch line.
Shorter Me
In reaction to the season finale of Battlestar Galactica:
AAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
The longer version is just more of that, plus some Heston-esque "You maniacs!!! You did it!!!"
Seriously. Major, major kudos to the creators for an extremely.... gutsy choice for which way to bring the story. However, I don't want to spoil it for Canadians who aren't torrenting the episodes as they air in the US (Space is a couple of months behind Sci-Fi.) Be warned, the spoilers are big ones. So seriously, don't read if you don't want to ruin the rest of the season for yourselves.
Click here for the spoilerrific goodness.
AAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
The longer version is just more of that, plus some Heston-esque "You maniacs!!! You did it!!!"
Seriously. Major, major kudos to the creators for an extremely.... gutsy choice for which way to bring the story. However, I don't want to spoil it for Canadians who aren't torrenting the episodes as they air in the US (Space is a couple of months behind Sci-Fi.) Be warned, the spoilers are big ones. So seriously, don't read if you don't want to ruin the rest of the season for yourselves.
Click here for the spoilerrific goodness.
Friday, March 10, 2006
The English language needs new words for old things
So I'm still listening to the Stars, which is my usual pattern - listen to new music obsessively until it starts to bore me or drive me mad. But one song in particular ("The first five times") got me thinking - the English language is woefully inept at describing romance. Specifically, we seem to be left with one word - "love" - to describe a number of different emotional states. Worse, there a kind of noun/verb problem in the way we use the word - love is something you do, but also something you have for someone.
But the big problem for me is that basically "love" seems to be used to describe everything that ranks higher than a platonic friendship - whether it's a more serious friendship, family, a girlfriend, whatever. As a personal example, I've described my relationship with Vicki as being in love with her for some time now, even though my own feelings for her have changed substantively (definitely not for the worse) in the 5 and a half years that we've been together. I loved her when we celebrated our first anniversary together. Now that we're getting ready to move in together as I return from school, it feels like I should have different words at hand.
I imagine I'm not breaking new ground here. But it really astounds me that for something as central to our lives, we don't really have a good grasp of how to describe love. You'd think it would be like the Inuit and snow, or something.
Of course, the argument has been made to me before that the English language is woefully inept at describing everything. An old English teacher complained that English is great at describing what things are "like", but horrible at stating what things are. To my mind, this makes those who actually do manage to express beauty in English a rare breed indeed.
But the big problem for me is that basically "love" seems to be used to describe everything that ranks higher than a platonic friendship - whether it's a more serious friendship, family, a girlfriend, whatever. As a personal example, I've described my relationship with Vicki as being in love with her for some time now, even though my own feelings for her have changed substantively (definitely not for the worse) in the 5 and a half years that we've been together. I loved her when we celebrated our first anniversary together. Now that we're getting ready to move in together as I return from school, it feels like I should have different words at hand.
I imagine I'm not breaking new ground here. But it really astounds me that for something as central to our lives, we don't really have a good grasp of how to describe love. You'd think it would be like the Inuit and snow, or something.
Of course, the argument has been made to me before that the English language is woefully inept at describing everything. An old English teacher complained that English is great at describing what things are "like", but horrible at stating what things are. To my mind, this makes those who actually do manage to express beauty in English a rare breed indeed.
Harsh
Nobody is quite as clear-cut on these things as Katha Pollitt:
Imagine a vaccine that would protect women from a serious gynecological cancer. Wouldn't that be great? ... Not so fast: We're living in God's country now. The Christian right doesn't like the sound of this vaccine at all. "Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful," Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told the British magazine New Scientist, "because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex."...Meanwhile, it turns out that sex plays an important evolutionary role that we didn't know about:
I remember when people rolled their eyeballs if you suggested that opposition to abortion was less about "life" than about sex, especially sex for women. You have to admit that thesis is looking pretty solid these days. No matter what the consequences of sex--pregnancy, disease, death--abstinence for singles is the only answer. Just as it's better for gays to get AIDS than use condoms, it's better for a woman to get cancer than have sex before marriage. It's honor killing on the installment plan.
Turns out sex might have evolved as a way to concentrate lots of harmful mutations into individual organisms so they could be easily weeded out by natural selection, a new computer model suggests.Not that sex needs the help, but if you needed more encouragement, here it is: Have sex for the good of the species!
The classic explanation for the onset of whoopee, about 1 billion years ago, is that it provides a way for organisms to swap and shuffle genes and to create offspring with new gene combinations that might survive if the environment suddenly changes....
The new work could help test a hypothesis first proposed nearly 20 years ago, stating that sex evolved as a way to purge harmful mutations from a population. According to this view, the random shuffling of genes through sex will sometimes have the effect of concentrating many harmful mutations into single individuals.
These individuals will be less healthy than their peers, and therefore more likely to be weeded out by natural selection, the thinking goes.
Some words don't belong on food
Me, last night: Ah, supermarket, show me what you have on sale. For I am poor, yet require sustenance. I shall proceed to the meat aisle.
Meat aisle: Poor student, I have a surprise for you! Steak at a serious discount!
Me: Goodness gracious! That is a serious discount indeed. But this word "clearance" troubles me. Should meat be sold at "clearance", in this age of avian flu and mad cow disease?
Meat aisle: Listen, do you want steak or not? You think you can buy a $3 t-bone any day you want? TAKE IT ALREADY!
Me: I am uncertain...
Meat aisle: SHUT UP AND BUY THE MEAT!! YOU KNOW YOU'RE GOING TO!!! STOP WASTING MY TIME!!!!
Me: Don't hurt me, meat aisle! Here, I'll take two!
Meat aisle: Glad that's settled. Stop by the produce and pick up some potatoes while you're at it.
Me: Yes sir.
Meat aisle: Poor student, I have a surprise for you! Steak at a serious discount!
Me: Goodness gracious! That is a serious discount indeed. But this word "clearance" troubles me. Should meat be sold at "clearance", in this age of avian flu and mad cow disease?
Meat aisle: Listen, do you want steak or not? You think you can buy a $3 t-bone any day you want? TAKE IT ALREADY!
Me: I am uncertain...
Meat aisle: SHUT UP AND BUY THE MEAT!! YOU KNOW YOU'RE GOING TO!!! STOP WASTING MY TIME!!!!
Me: Don't hurt me, meat aisle! Here, I'll take two!
Meat aisle: Glad that's settled. Stop by the produce and pick up some potatoes while you're at it.
Me: Yes sir.
BSG is the future of TV
Perhaps as a continuation of my thoughts about HD DVD, I thought I'd share some more thoughts about how Battlestar Galactica, the best SF show on TV today, is the future of successful TV production.
Not just because of great acting and writing - those are eternally valuable. No, the difference between BSG and the way TV has been made in the past is more fundamental. Essentially, from the early 1960s or so until effectively now, TV was relatively easy money. TV producers will tell you this is bullshit - that TV is a high-risk industry, where a flop series can be a disaster for a network. And this is true, up to a point.
However, for decades now networks (who, except for a small window in the 1970s, have always owned the content they air) have found risk-mitigation strategies. For the most part, this has meant two strategies: Block buying, and foreign markets. Block buying is when a network forces an affiliate or other broadcaster to buy less successful content instead of just the one popular show. It is impossible for Global TV here in Canada to buy (say) 24 alone. In order to get 24, Global will have to buy at least one other series from Fox as well - and often several other projects. Movie studios do the same thing to theatres.
The other strategy complements the first. The US TV market has an advantage over all other TV markets in the world, in that it is possible for an American television show to pay for itself in the domestic market alone. This is impossible in Canada, and nearly so in most smaller countries. This, more than any other reason, is why American television dominates Canadian airwaves (and is at least a strong presence in other anglosphere countries.) The ability to collect all the necessary costs of production from the domestic market has allowed American networks to dump their content on foreign markets at well below the cost of production - it costs Canadian producers literally an order of magnitude more to produce Canadian content than to buy American shows. This is why they only do the bare legal minimum.
The point of this discussion is to realize that once a TV series has been produced, it's almost guaranteed to make some profits, through the two strategies above. More importantly, there's no real changes made between the content as it's produced in the US, and how it's aired in foreign markets. (With the exception, of course, of translations in to foreign languages.) So for zero to marginal costs, there's a lot of easy money to be made once a show's made it to air, regardless of how long it lasts.
Battlestar Galactica is starting to change that, slowly. One example is the weekly podcasts that the Executive Producer, Ron Moore, makes available for free on the Internet. For fans who want to, here's a way to get the audio commentary of a DVD without waiting. Meanwhile, when the DVD's are released, the commentary is already made, and ready to be slapped on to the disc. However, it was something Moore mentioned in one of the podcasts that sparked this post - that the DVD of Season 2 would contain an expanded version of the episode Pegasus. There's no new content being produced - just stuff that had to be cut from the epsiode as it aired.
This is a natural addition to the now-ubiquitous feature of "deleted scenes" on DVDs, but it also points out what I think will be the next strategy for TV producers - deliberately shooting more film than will necessarily make it to air in a 42.5 minute episode, and packaging "directors cuts" on the DVD box sets. This serves two purposes: 1) For only a little extra cost, it adds a significant extra value to the DVD box sets relative to making a home library of episodes as they aired. 2) Related to that, it helps fight piracy - most episodes that are downloaded are recorded from the original broadcast. If the DVD has a guaranteed advantage to the pirated versions, people are more likely to buy them.
I think this is great, frankly. But it probably is going to be adopted by the TV producers in baby steps, because they're still used to the era of "easy money." That era, however, is dying. What BSG shows is that the new way TV is going to succeed is still going to be profitable, but TV producers are going to have to work for it. Commentaries on every episode, expanded directors cuts, plenty of blooper reels, whatever it takes to make consumers stay with the product, even watch it several times. "Easy money" is dead, long live "hard money."
This won't be true for all forms of TV, certainly. But hour-long dramas are already very expensive. $2 million an episode isn't out of the question anymore. For dramas at least, it's going to be necessary to secure additional revenue, and this is almost certainly the way they'll do it.
Not just because of great acting and writing - those are eternally valuable. No, the difference between BSG and the way TV has been made in the past is more fundamental. Essentially, from the early 1960s or so until effectively now, TV was relatively easy money. TV producers will tell you this is bullshit - that TV is a high-risk industry, where a flop series can be a disaster for a network. And this is true, up to a point.
However, for decades now networks (who, except for a small window in the 1970s, have always owned the content they air) have found risk-mitigation strategies. For the most part, this has meant two strategies: Block buying, and foreign markets. Block buying is when a network forces an affiliate or other broadcaster to buy less successful content instead of just the one popular show. It is impossible for Global TV here in Canada to buy (say) 24 alone. In order to get 24, Global will have to buy at least one other series from Fox as well - and often several other projects. Movie studios do the same thing to theatres.
The other strategy complements the first. The US TV market has an advantage over all other TV markets in the world, in that it is possible for an American television show to pay for itself in the domestic market alone. This is impossible in Canada, and nearly so in most smaller countries. This, more than any other reason, is why American television dominates Canadian airwaves (and is at least a strong presence in other anglosphere countries.) The ability to collect all the necessary costs of production from the domestic market has allowed American networks to dump their content on foreign markets at well below the cost of production - it costs Canadian producers literally an order of magnitude more to produce Canadian content than to buy American shows. This is why they only do the bare legal minimum.
The point of this discussion is to realize that once a TV series has been produced, it's almost guaranteed to make some profits, through the two strategies above. More importantly, there's no real changes made between the content as it's produced in the US, and how it's aired in foreign markets. (With the exception, of course, of translations in to foreign languages.) So for zero to marginal costs, there's a lot of easy money to be made once a show's made it to air, regardless of how long it lasts.
Battlestar Galactica is starting to change that, slowly. One example is the weekly podcasts that the Executive Producer, Ron Moore, makes available for free on the Internet. For fans who want to, here's a way to get the audio commentary of a DVD without waiting. Meanwhile, when the DVD's are released, the commentary is already made, and ready to be slapped on to the disc. However, it was something Moore mentioned in one of the podcasts that sparked this post - that the DVD of Season 2 would contain an expanded version of the episode Pegasus. There's no new content being produced - just stuff that had to be cut from the epsiode as it aired.
This is a natural addition to the now-ubiquitous feature of "deleted scenes" on DVDs, but it also points out what I think will be the next strategy for TV producers - deliberately shooting more film than will necessarily make it to air in a 42.5 minute episode, and packaging "directors cuts" on the DVD box sets. This serves two purposes: 1) For only a little extra cost, it adds a significant extra value to the DVD box sets relative to making a home library of episodes as they aired. 2) Related to that, it helps fight piracy - most episodes that are downloaded are recorded from the original broadcast. If the DVD has a guaranteed advantage to the pirated versions, people are more likely to buy them.
I think this is great, frankly. But it probably is going to be adopted by the TV producers in baby steps, because they're still used to the era of "easy money." That era, however, is dying. What BSG shows is that the new way TV is going to succeed is still going to be profitable, but TV producers are going to have to work for it. Commentaries on every episode, expanded directors cuts, plenty of blooper reels, whatever it takes to make consumers stay with the product, even watch it several times. "Easy money" is dead, long live "hard money."
This won't be true for all forms of TV, certainly. But hour-long dramas are already very expensive. $2 million an episode isn't out of the question anymore. For dramas at least, it's going to be necessary to secure additional revenue, and this is almost certainly the way they'll do it.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Next, we'll have dogs living with cats
Has Microsoft made a quality product? Will wonders never cease...
Now all we need to do is disinfect the Windows out of there. I figure the thing is begging to be homebrewed like the PSP, right?
SEATTLE/HANOVER (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. on Thursday unveiled its 'Origami' project, a paperback-book sized portable computer, which is a hybrid between a laptop PC and a host of mobile devices that the world's biggest software maker hopes will create an entirely new market.The pics look very interesting - basically, it looks like it's about the size of Sony's ebook reader, except far more capable.
Lighter than two pounds (0.972 kilograms) with a seven-inch (17.78-centimetre) touch-screen, the new "ultra-mobile" PCs (UMPCs) use microprocessors from Intel Corp. (INTC.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and run a modified version of Microsoft's Windows XP Tablet PC edition.
Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Taiwan's Asustek Computer Inc., and China's second largest PC-maker, the Founder Group, are expected to release the first three ultra-mobile PCs, which Microsoft had code-named 'Origami' in an elaborate marketing campaign.
South Korea's Samsung's product goes on sale in April.
Now all we need to do is disinfect the Windows out of there. I figure the thing is begging to be homebrewed like the PSP, right?
The Onion continues to rule
BAGHDAD — In schools and coffeehouses, parlors and public squares, Iraqis are discussing and debating the revolutionary teachings of activist Iyad al-Naqib, who is being hailed by some as the "Iraqi Mahatma Gandhi" for his commitment to practicing "a bit less severe" forms of violence against infidels and crusaders.
Known for sayings such as "An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind, so extract a pinky for an eye," al-Naqib, 46, is both praised and vilified throughout the Muslim world for his radical, slightly less violent teachings.
Al-Naqib's followers are instructed to bomb discos on weeknights, when they are less crowded, and to equip suicide bombers with hand grenades rather than multiple sticks of TNT.
Such views earned al-Naqib this year's Mideast Peace Prize, an award administered by the Yemeni government and presented to individuals credited with encouraging what its literature characterizes as "anything remotely close to a rough approximation of peace in the region."
Meet the new OPEC, Same as the old OPEC
It was bad enough when those pesky foreigners were just rationing the oil they sold us. Now OPEC nations are working towards controlling the supply of refined products - gasoline, diesel, and kerosene. Ouch.
The problem, of course, is that generally speaking the industrialized countries of the west have regarded oil refining as a strategic asset they need to control - you don't want foreign countries to control your supply of gasoline, apparently.
Of course, there's almost nothing we can do about this. If Russia and Saudi Arabia declare that it's illegal to export unrefined petroleum, then a huge chunk of the oil exports are going to stop. Effectively, this could make the price of gasoline as global - and volatile - as that of oil.
Fun times, I'm sure.
But the oil-producing countries of the Middle East are about to go on a refinery-building boom that, according to energy consultants Wood Mackenzie, will boost refining capacity in the region by 60% over the next 10 years. OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) members alone would increase their refining capacity by 50%.This comes on the heels of news that Russia intends to do the same. In mid-February, Moscow mulled a similar plan - basically, oil producers aren't interested in being the bulk exporters anymore - they want to export the refined products. And you can understand why: there's a large profit margin that OPEC and Russia have basically ignored until now. My only question would be why they've waited this long.
That's great news for the companies that engineer, supply and build refineries throughout the world: The International Energy Agency puts refinery spending in the Middle East at $89 billion between 2004 and 2030.
But it's not good news for oil-consuming countries striving for energy independence. If Part Two of the oil-producing countries' energy strategy works, the countries of the Middle East -- which really means Saudi Arabia, since that country has the cash flow to build the most refineries -- will dominate the supply of refined-petroleum products at the margin, just as they do with oil. And that will give the oil producers control over the global price of gasoline, heating oil, jet fuel, feed stock for plastics, etc.
The problem, of course, is that generally speaking the industrialized countries of the west have regarded oil refining as a strategic asset they need to control - you don't want foreign countries to control your supply of gasoline, apparently.
Of course, there's almost nothing we can do about this. If Russia and Saudi Arabia declare that it's illegal to export unrefined petroleum, then a huge chunk of the oil exports are going to stop. Effectively, this could make the price of gasoline as global - and volatile - as that of oil.
Fun times, I'm sure.
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Some thoughts on HD DVD
So another big name has jumped ship - or rather, has jumped on to the fence. LG announced today that it would support both HD DVD and Sony's Blu-Ray DVD standards in it's players. This is certainly a blow to Sony, who just 6 months ago looked like they had an insurmountable advantage in the standard wars. These days, it looks more and more like at the very least we'll see bi-compatible players be the norm. Sony - being the usual retards that they are - will refuse to make bicompatible players, and will thus lose market share.
I won't pretend to have Robert Cringely's chops when it comes to predictions, but this is something I've given a lot of thought to lately, so I thought I'd share. I don't think the next generation of digital video discs is going to take off the way DVD did. First of all, both HD DVD and Blu-ray are supposed to be backwards compatible, which is convenient for the consumer but not necessarily great for the studios. People won't have the incentives to replace the large libraries that they already have, for two reasons: a) for many movies, the advantage of HD DVDs over DVDs won't be enough to buy new copies, and b) replacing old TVs with HD-TVs will continue to be a costly proposition for most people.
Meanwhile, there's a number of examples where people have in fact chosen inferior standards because they offer more of what the customer wants - MP3 players are a perfect example. Any vinyl-phile will tell you that CDs sound worse than vinyl, and MP3s are themselves worse than CD. But they aren't so much worse that people won't use them. Similarly, look at examples of downloaded television. The best pirated TV you can download is still inferior to broadcast, but it offers a number of advantages that some consumers (yes, thieves) prefer. Hell, people pay for TV on their iPods, and the video is crap.
This is important because the demographic that would normally be most likely to be an early HD DVD adopter is the same demo that is going backwards, from a video quality measure.
So in short, I don't think HD DVDs will take off. They'll sell well enough, but we won't see anything like the growth we've seen with DVDs. And that's a good thing, because Hollywood can only make me buy Apollo 13 so many times, the bastards.
Meanwhile, despite the fact that we're in early days, I think Sony is going to lose this standards war. The BR players are going to be too expensive, I don't think the PS3 is going to sell as well as the X-Box, and the same people who should have bought the PS3 may still be pissed off at Sony for trying to break their computers last year.
It's really a miracle - a company has managed to be so completely boneheaded and hostile to its customers that Bill Gates looks user-friendly. Sony, you've managed to raise Lazarus. We salute you. Now piss off.
I won't pretend to have Robert Cringely's chops when it comes to predictions, but this is something I've given a lot of thought to lately, so I thought I'd share. I don't think the next generation of digital video discs is going to take off the way DVD did. First of all, both HD DVD and Blu-ray are supposed to be backwards compatible, which is convenient for the consumer but not necessarily great for the studios. People won't have the incentives to replace the large libraries that they already have, for two reasons: a) for many movies, the advantage of HD DVDs over DVDs won't be enough to buy new copies, and b) replacing old TVs with HD-TVs will continue to be a costly proposition for most people.
Meanwhile, there's a number of examples where people have in fact chosen inferior standards because they offer more of what the customer wants - MP3 players are a perfect example. Any vinyl-phile will tell you that CDs sound worse than vinyl, and MP3s are themselves worse than CD. But they aren't so much worse that people won't use them. Similarly, look at examples of downloaded television. The best pirated TV you can download is still inferior to broadcast, but it offers a number of advantages that some consumers (yes, thieves) prefer. Hell, people pay for TV on their iPods, and the video is crap.
This is important because the demographic that would normally be most likely to be an early HD DVD adopter is the same demo that is going backwards, from a video quality measure.
So in short, I don't think HD DVDs will take off. They'll sell well enough, but we won't see anything like the growth we've seen with DVDs. And that's a good thing, because Hollywood can only make me buy Apollo 13 so many times, the bastards.
Meanwhile, despite the fact that we're in early days, I think Sony is going to lose this standards war. The BR players are going to be too expensive, I don't think the PS3 is going to sell as well as the X-Box, and the same people who should have bought the PS3 may still be pissed off at Sony for trying to break their computers last year.
It's really a miracle - a company has managed to be so completely boneheaded and hostile to its customers that Bill Gates looks user-friendly. Sony, you've managed to raise Lazarus. We salute you. Now piss off.
You're both stupid
Two Quebec families are locked in a battle over a prize SUV after a 10-year-old girl named Marilou dug out a winning coffee cup from the trash on Tuesday.My personal belief is that a) the first girl should get the cup, and b) neither family should get anything, because the last thing the world needs is another obnoxious twit in an SUV.
Marilou found a Tim Hortons coffee cup featuring the company's popular "Rrroll up the rim to win" contest in the garbage bin of her primary school in St. Jerome, Que.
When she found her small fingers lacked the strength to roll up the tough cardboard rim, she asked an older schoolmate for help -- with success. The girls found that the cup entitled the holder to a $28,700 Toyota RAV4 SUV.
Why the pessimsm?
Well, I'm convinced: Whatever other problems we have with oil production peaking in the near future, we will be able to keep our cars running, albeit perhaps expensively. I was just poking around the IAGS website, one of the members of the Set America Free Coalition (one of the earliest, loudest voices in favour of plug-in hybrids.) A tidbit from their page, "sources of methanol."
Is this enough methanol? Let's see. In 2004, the US consumed almost 9 million barrels of motor gasoline a day (PDF). A barrel is 42 gallons, meaning that the US consumed about 140 billion gallons of gasoline in 2004. Methanol isn't as efficient a fuel as gasoline, getting roughly half the mileage. That means we need 280 billion gallons of methanol, assuming all we do is convert existing cars to methanol-powered cars. (This is eminently doable, at reasonable cost.) This is only 60% of the potential - which gives us lots of room. The surplus methanol can be used to make dimethyl ether, a diesel replacement.
Note the milage thing - one gallon of methanol will only get you half the distance of a gallon of gasoline. So obviously the desire is to keep the price of methanol to 1/2 the price of gasoline if we don't want to hurt consumers anymore than they're already hurting. Given that gasoline in the US is averaging $2.35-$2.40 a gallon, while methanol is averaging $0.90 a gallon, this seems a reasonable assumption. Again, the one caveat is that the price of methanol will go up if we make it exclusively of biomass, not coal.
And, if we ever get working fuel cell cars, methanol is a good hydrogen carrier - methanol fuel cells are already on their way for personal electronics. And all of the above totally ignores the potential to replace liquid fuels with electricity - either partially or completely. My guess is that we'll see a move towards gasoline-free and gasoline-optional cars that will reduce methanol demand to well below the 280 billion barrels that I've noted here. This could free up diesel production to drive long-haul trucking, maritime shipping, and trains.
Once again - the problem with fueling the future is not going to be a lack of options. Building the infrastructure will be expensive in many cases, but economics and politics all eventually have to bend to reality. Of course, "eventually" can seem like a long time, especially under the Bush administration.
Biomass can be converted to syn-gas by a process called partial oxidation, and later converted to methanol. Biomass is organic material, such as urban wood wastes, primary mill residues, forest residues, agricultural residues, and dedicated energy crops (e.g. sugar cane and sugar beets,) that can be made into fuel. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates 2.45 billion metric tons a year of biomass are available for U.S. fuel production. One ton can be converted to 186 gallons (721 liters) of methanol.That math works out to a potential of 455 billion gallons of methanol from biomass alone. Methanol can also be made from other sources, such as natural gas and coal. But we want to concentrate on renewable energy first and foremost, obviously.
Is this enough methanol? Let's see. In 2004, the US consumed almost 9 million barrels of motor gasoline a day (PDF). A barrel is 42 gallons, meaning that the US consumed about 140 billion gallons of gasoline in 2004. Methanol isn't as efficient a fuel as gasoline, getting roughly half the mileage. That means we need 280 billion gallons of methanol, assuming all we do is convert existing cars to methanol-powered cars. (This is eminently doable, at reasonable cost.) This is only 60% of the potential - which gives us lots of room. The surplus methanol can be used to make dimethyl ether, a diesel replacement.
Note the milage thing - one gallon of methanol will only get you half the distance of a gallon of gasoline. So obviously the desire is to keep the price of methanol to 1/2 the price of gasoline if we don't want to hurt consumers anymore than they're already hurting. Given that gasoline in the US is averaging $2.35-$2.40 a gallon, while methanol is averaging $0.90 a gallon, this seems a reasonable assumption. Again, the one caveat is that the price of methanol will go up if we make it exclusively of biomass, not coal.
And, if we ever get working fuel cell cars, methanol is a good hydrogen carrier - methanol fuel cells are already on their way for personal electronics. And all of the above totally ignores the potential to replace liquid fuels with electricity - either partially or completely. My guess is that we'll see a move towards gasoline-free and gasoline-optional cars that will reduce methanol demand to well below the 280 billion barrels that I've noted here. This could free up diesel production to drive long-haul trucking, maritime shipping, and trains.
Once again - the problem with fueling the future is not going to be a lack of options. Building the infrastructure will be expensive in many cases, but economics and politics all eventually have to bend to reality. Of course, "eventually" can seem like a long time, especially under the Bush administration.
Maybe they're not all crazy in Texas
Or at least, they're crazy in a way I like:
A Texas bankruptcy judge replied to a Defendant's motion with a ruling that concluded, "The Defendant's motion is accordingly denied for incomprehensibility." With the following footnote:
"Or, in the words of the competition judge to Adam Sandler's title character in the movie "Billy Madison," after Billy Madison had responded to a question with an answer that sounded superficially reasonable but lacked any substance,Mr Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I've ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response was there anything that could even be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.Deciphering motions like the one presented here wastes valuable chamber staff time, and invites this sort of footnote."
Monday, March 06, 2006
Wow, you can taste the stupidity
A Fortune article titled "Energy independence is a disaster in the making". You know this is going to be dumb, but really - how could you expect it to be this dumb?
Let's take a refresher course in Econ 101 here - the price of oil is being driven by scarcity in oil markets, combined with a fear premium that terrorism will knock out some more production in the Middle East. But high prices are almost entirely demand-driven at this point. It doesn't matter what the cost of production is at this point - if Saudi oil were free, they could still charge $65 a barrel, and we'll still pay it because we prefer that to not driving as much.
Of course, the author barely acknowledges the role renewables can play, and brazenly declares that replacing domestic oil would necessitate the building of more coal plants. This is like saying you're going to replace your intake of milk with steak - you guessed it, it makes no sense whatsoever, until someone invents the coal-fired car. I don't know how many times it needs to be said - oil will not be replaced with coal - they aren't the same type of energy. What we need is liquid fuel, not just another fossil fuel. True, we do need more electricity to power plug-in hybrids, but not for a while yet. The utilities in the US estimate that PIH's could reach 30% market penetration before a single new plant would be needed, assuming the cars were charged in off-peak times. By the time we're ready to do that, the wind and solar industries will be more than able to meet demand. These are bold predictions, but I feel very confident about them.
The simplest way to get the most out of what we spend on energy is to keep energy costs cheap,Because as we all know, people use cheap, plentiful resources with parsimony and reason. Like the way my mom leaves her air conditioner on all day in the summer, because she doesn't like coming home to a hot house. Or maybe - just maybe - people use resources more efficiently as prices increase. I think I read that somewhere.
and the best way to do that is to take full advantage of global energy markets. Right now it costs less to pump oil from the sands of the Arabian peninsula than from pretty much anywhere else on earth. Why exactly would we want to punish ourselves by cutting ourselves off from the cheapest oil?This is simply retarded. Does anyone seriously think that the price of oil is determined by the price of production anymore? Sure, and a CD at HMV costs me $1.50, right? How does someone this illiterate get to be an Editor at Large for Fortune?
Let's take a refresher course in Econ 101 here - the price of oil is being driven by scarcity in oil markets, combined with a fear premium that terrorism will knock out some more production in the Middle East. But high prices are almost entirely demand-driven at this point. It doesn't matter what the cost of production is at this point - if Saudi oil were free, they could still charge $65 a barrel, and we'll still pay it because we prefer that to not driving as much.
Of course, the author barely acknowledges the role renewables can play, and brazenly declares that replacing domestic oil would necessitate the building of more coal plants. This is like saying you're going to replace your intake of milk with steak - you guessed it, it makes no sense whatsoever, until someone invents the coal-fired car. I don't know how many times it needs to be said - oil will not be replaced with coal - they aren't the same type of energy. What we need is liquid fuel, not just another fossil fuel. True, we do need more electricity to power plug-in hybrids, but not for a while yet. The utilities in the US estimate that PIH's could reach 30% market penetration before a single new plant would be needed, assuming the cars were charged in off-peak times. By the time we're ready to do that, the wind and solar industries will be more than able to meet demand. These are bold predictions, but I feel very confident about them.
Check Your Facts, Blogger
So a few days ago I breezily wrote "If we're really lucky, then maybe we can reverse the decades-long trend of declining per capita energy consumption that has correlated with stagnating standards of living in the west, combined with disastrous declines in the poorest parts of the world." This is one of those things I read somewhere, and stupidly (it turns out) assumed was true. It isn't. A post at The Oil Drum provides a useful corrective:
So per-capita energy consumption has actually increased, after a bit of waving between peaks and valleys. As the Oil Drum post mentions, the recent increase is due almost entirely to increased coal consumption. This presumably means India and China, which both get the vast majority of their electricity from coal (75%+.)
So let that be a lesson to us all - I cannot be trusted.
So per-capita energy consumption has actually increased, after a bit of waving between peaks and valleys. As the Oil Drum post mentions, the recent increase is due almost entirely to increased coal consumption. This presumably means India and China, which both get the vast majority of their electricity from coal (75%+.)
So let that be a lesson to us all - I cannot be trusted.
Wi-fi TO
Toronto Hydro Corp. will announce Tuesday that it plans to turn Canada's largest city into one giant wireless hotspot, directly challenging the country's major mobile phone carriers for a chunk of the $8 billion a year wireless market.Unsurprisingly, the telcos are unhappy. Expect court challenges:
With the deployment, which sources say could be available in the downtown core as early as this fall, Toronto joins a growing list of North American cities, including Philadelphia, New Orleans and San Francisco, that have announced plans to bring low-cost, broadband wireless access to their citizens and businesses.
Municipal Wi-Fi projects aren't without controversy. In the United States, major wireless carriers say municipalities have no experience selling consumer services and are abusing their monopoly over taxpayers' funds. They also fear that their own Wi-Fi services, increasingly offered in airports, restaurants, coffee shops and hotels, will be undercut when it comes to price.Waaaaaaaaaaaahhhh. To translate from BCE-Rogers to common english: "Hey, WTF? We got billions in taxpayer subsidies over decades, not to mention that we've never been prosecuted for our obvious anti-competitive practices, and now you're actually going to challenge our business with a superior product at a lower price? HOW DARE YOU!!!"
I'm now even happier that I'll be moving back to Toronto in a few short months.
(via HaJo.)
Damn You, NBC
It looks like the NBC lawyers have taken down the video I linked to here. The video is Natalie Portman going all gangsta on us. This link is working for now.
A Closer Look at EEStor
A few weeks ago I blogged with baited breath (try saying that three times fast!) about a company called EEStor, whose alleged product could revolutionize the energy industry. From my earlier post:
Needless to say, it's encouraging to see that this is being taken seriously. In terms of disruptive technologies, this may do for energy what the Internet did for communications - undermine and reshape the old infrastructure. I'm not fluent enough with the kind of math I'd need, but my bet is that a lightweight car like Loremo's could probably get much better mileage on a full charge than the 150 miles I estimated earlier. 300 miles on a full charge is probably not out of the question.
Whenever FGC announces it's new car, I'll be as close to the front of the line as I can be.
The full article on EEStor in the Star is here.
According to the Energy Blog, the "product" that EEStor is producing weighs 400 lbs and holds 56kwh. 56kwh is enough - even with some pessimistic estimates - to power an electric car for more than 150 miles. More importantly for electric vehicle purposes, the power the product can deliver is astonishing - something like 400 horsepower, according to one estimate.It gets better. According to a new article in today's Toronto Star, a number of big names are stepping up to take EEStor seriously.
Adding more intrigue to the story is the fact that Colin Powell, the former U.S. secretary of state, joined Kleiner Perkins last summer as a strategic partner. Sources speculate Powell has been briefed on EEStor, which from a government and military perspective could bolster the Bush administration's energy security policy and efforts to break America's "addiction to oil."...Oh, and finally:
Besides Kleiner's involvement, EEStor has also attracted big names to its five-person board. The Star has learned that Morton Topfer, former vice-chairman of Dell Computer Corp. and widely known as Michael Dell's mentor, has joined the company as a director. Topfer founded and is managing director of Austin-based private equity firm Castletop Capital LP and has close and invaluable ties to big Texas money.
There's a Canadian angle to all of this. Before Kleiner's involvement, EEStor struck a relationship with Toronto-based Feel Good Cars [FGC] that has translated into a $2.5 million (U.S.) licensing agreement.... Ian Clifford, the company's co-founder and CEO, says he has secured exclusive worldwide rights to purchase EEStor's product for use in any vehicle up to 1,200 kilograms, about the size of a Honda Civic.I'd hope that FGC is paying attention to weight on their next car: if a lightweight car can seat 4 and get 157mpg when it's made of carbon fiber - and come in at less 450kg! - then that 1,200kg "limit" shouldn't be a tough one to stay under. One of EEStor's capacitors is supposed to weigh only about 180kg, after all.
Needless to say, it's encouraging to see that this is being taken seriously. In terms of disruptive technologies, this may do for energy what the Internet did for communications - undermine and reshape the old infrastructure. I'm not fluent enough with the kind of math I'd need, but my bet is that a lightweight car like Loremo's could probably get much better mileage on a full charge than the 150 miles I estimated earlier. 300 miles on a full charge is probably not out of the question.
Whenever FGC announces it's new car, I'll be as close to the front of the line as I can be.
The full article on EEStor in the Star is here.
The Chinese Take Food Seriously
Mmm, noodles:
LANZHOU, China — One difference between China's remote west and the rest of the country is what people choose to put in their stomachs. Noodles, not rice, are the favorite dish, none more so than the steaming bowl of beef noodles named after this decaying provincial capital on the Yellow River.Effete New York Intellectual score: +10 points for using the word "contretemps" in an english-language paper.
So in February, as noodle patrons across the city arrived for their morning fix, an unexpected notice awaited them: The price of a bowl of Lanzhou pulled beef noodles was going up. A large bowl, once only 27 cents, would now cost almost 31 cents.
"Beef Noodle Price Hike Touches Off Nerves Everywhere!" declared The Western Economic Daily, a feisty local paper.
And so it did. A full-blown noodle controversy arose, with price fixing by a noodle cartel being alleged. Polls gauged public opinion (Answer: not pleased). Even People's Daily, chief mouthpiece of the Communist Party, registered its indignation. Local officials promised to investigate.
But on the streets of the city's Anning District, where more than 70 noodle shops are crowded into several square blocks, the noodle contretemps was also a reminder of the millions of Chinese who still live on margins so slender that a bump of 4 cents for a bowl of noodles constitutes real money.
"All the expenses are going up," said Zhang Yuxiao, 31, the owner of the Gazhang shop. "We're just following the market."I'm sorry, I'd keep reading but I fell over laughing at the whole "beef noodle price fixing scheme".
But was it really just the market? The number of noodle shops in the city has risen, increasing supply. In early February, price increases in other districts of the city had already attracted attention.
Then a day after the increase in Anning, The Western Economic Daily broke a major scandal: "The Beef Noodle Price Hike, a Price-Fixing Scheme." The paper documented a coordinated pricing scheme, led by a small group of noodle shop owners, who had made threats against any owners who resisted.
User Hostile
I almost wish I'd watched the Oscars last night, just to see the film industry's pathetic attempts to hector people in to not buying DVDs. Apparently, they're getting desperate.
Let's be clear - there is no, none, zero threat to the "movie industry". There is a GIANT, unstoppable threat to the movie theatre industry. People are spending way more money on DVDs, because guess what - a pair of admission tickets to a first-run theatre costs as much as most DVDs do - about $23 for two people, last time I went. The movie industry doesn't need to compete with pirates - it needs to compete with the comfort, convenience, and cost of DVDs.
I don't think they can do it.
Let's be clear - there is no, none, zero threat to the "movie industry". There is a GIANT, unstoppable threat to the movie theatre industry. People are spending way more money on DVDs, because guess what - a pair of admission tickets to a first-run theatre costs as much as most DVDs do - about $23 for two people, last time I went. The movie industry doesn't need to compete with pirates - it needs to compete with the comfort, convenience, and cost of DVDs.
I don't think they can do it.
And Whose Fault Is That, Mr. Lucas?
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Leave it to "Star Wars" creator George Lucas to pronounce the death of the Hollywood blockbuster.Blockbusters had a pretty good run there for a while - basically, a quarter century of market dominance in the film industry. But I disagree with Lucas - in the future, the only thing on big screens in multiplex theatres will be dust and cobwebs. This is an industry that seems to be incapable of delivering a service that is enjoyable and makes you want to come back again. (Here I make an exception for small, second-run theatres, which are still affordable and not hostile to their customers.)
"The market forces that exist today make it unrealistic to spend $200 million on a movie," said Lucas, a near-billionaire from his feverishly franchised outer-space epics. "Those movies can't make their money back anymore. Look at what happened with 'King Kong.[...] I think it's great that the major Oscar nominations have gone to independent films," Lucas told me, adding that it's no accident that the "small movies" outclassed the spectaculars in this year's Academy Awards. "Is that good for the business? No — it's bad for the business. But moviemaking isn't about business. It's about art!"
Was that a smirk? "In the future, almost everything that gets shown in theaters will be indie movies," Lucas declared. "I predict that by 2025 the average movie will cost only $15 million."
The irony of Lucas saying this, however, is too much. This is the man who made three horrible blockbusters, and now wants to blame "market forces" to cover up the fact that he made crap.
Update: Westacular defends Lucas in comments using - gasp! - "research" and "facts", and totally demolishes my argument that Lucas is bitter about his crappy Star Wars prequels. What Westacular fails to address, however, is that I'm bitter about Lucas' crappy prequels.
No Shame for Canada
This has been percolating in my brain for a while. Matt Yglesias wrote a while back:
No, I think I'll keep my smugness, thank you.
More seriously, I think this speaks to a serious problem among American liberals/progressives - the inability to understand just how fucked up American politics are by conventional political standards. This isn't just the Republican party, either - the Democrats are unable to advance serious moral arguments about (for example) health care or the war in Iraq because American culture is no longer receptive to moral arguments in favour of fairness, or against mass murder.
And here I will drop my Canadian smugness for a moment and say that we in Canada have abandoned the moral argument in favour of health care for more than a decade now. We - like our southern cousins - have been reduced to making arguments about economic and policy efficiency, when the argument that will win is simply that health is a right, and the government is the only body that can protect and enforce that right. This is what Tommy Douglas said here in Canada, and it's what no American leader has been willing to say - and stick with.
And I haven't even touched on the American fetish for the death penalty, or treating their women like chattel.
The funny/sad thing is, there was a time when the American liberal was able to make strong, moral arguments against the power of wealth. Unlike today's "to be rich is glorious" Democrats, there was a time when the Democratic leadership understood that the power of wealth was directly and irreconcilably opposed to democracy.
That time? 1933.
America has never seen as unflinching a critic of its own house as FDR in the White House. Had RFK been elected in 1968, it's possible he might have done something similar. Of course, we know how that turned out.
Last night, I went to see Stars... It occurs to me, however, that while Canadian indie rockers have been having a field day with American politics for the past five years, it may be time for them to give it a rest. With Stephen Harper now in power north of the border, a little less smugness is in order from our new Montreal-based overlords.Why? Because our new Prime Minister - the most conservative we've had in decades - is still to the left of Joe Lieberman? Because his power is constrained by the weakest minority government since the 1970s? Because he might be able to partially dismantle the already-existing universal health insurance system that we have here?
No, I think I'll keep my smugness, thank you.
More seriously, I think this speaks to a serious problem among American liberals/progressives - the inability to understand just how fucked up American politics are by conventional political standards. This isn't just the Republican party, either - the Democrats are unable to advance serious moral arguments about (for example) health care or the war in Iraq because American culture is no longer receptive to moral arguments in favour of fairness, or against mass murder.
And here I will drop my Canadian smugness for a moment and say that we in Canada have abandoned the moral argument in favour of health care for more than a decade now. We - like our southern cousins - have been reduced to making arguments about economic and policy efficiency, when the argument that will win is simply that health is a right, and the government is the only body that can protect and enforce that right. This is what Tommy Douglas said here in Canada, and it's what no American leader has been willing to say - and stick with.
And I haven't even touched on the American fetish for the death penalty, or treating their women like chattel.
The funny/sad thing is, there was a time when the American liberal was able to make strong, moral arguments against the power of wealth. Unlike today's "to be rich is glorious" Democrats, there was a time when the Democratic leadership understood that the power of wealth was directly and irreconcilably opposed to democracy.
That time? 1933.
Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. ... Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men....That's Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his first inaugural. No Clinton-era liberal, he. Just in case you don't belive me that Roosevelt was as radical as his first inaugural suggests, here's the kind of things he kept saying, for years:
The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.
Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.... Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.
I am not for a return to that definition of liberty under which for many years a free people were begin gradually regimented into the service of the privileged few. -Fireside chat, 1934Really, the whole of FDR's first two terms was as revolutionary as anything America has ever seen. Of course, that took a back seat to the war - even by 1940 FDR had basically started to rearm the US in preparation for the inevitable. But for eight glorious years, an unabashed revolutionary held the White House, and made no bones about using the power of his democratic office to wage a moral campaign against the rich. And, lest we forget, they more than responded in kind.
We have earned the hatred of entrenched greed. -Message to Congress, (!!!) 1936
Out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties... The royalists of the new economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. -Acceptance speech at renomination, 1936
I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their Master. - October 31, 1936 [just days before the election!]
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. - Second inaugural, 1937.
America has never seen as unflinching a critic of its own house as FDR in the White House. Had RFK been elected in 1968, it's possible he might have done something similar. Of course, we know how that turned out.
Saturday, March 04, 2006
Random Music Post
I have, far too late in life, started listening to the Stars. You see, if I started listening to music when it actually first became current, then I wouldn't be as lame as I regularly claim to be. Ergo, I need to wait anywhere between 9-18 months after a group becomes famous to start listening to it. In any case, they're as good as everybody says, and you should all listen to them too.
While I'm writing about music, let me just praise my MP3 player - an RCA Lyra player that has 1G of flash memory, a line in, a microphone, and an FM tuner. I believe, that with the right combination of keystrokes, I could get it to make me coffee and a bagel. This would be evidence of it's malevolence, as I drink tea. It is also terrifyingly intelligent. It has analyzed my music, and often seems to be mixing songs on a theme. I can only assume that my MP3 player is ready to pass the Turing test.
In any case, my AAA-powered wonder has discovered my love of covered songs. Yesterday, for 12 songs in a row, it played nothing but assorted covers of various artists. I may not get all the songs the player covered, but in no particular order I present covers that I prefer to the original performers' versions:
Aimee Mann - Coldplay's The Scientist. (Live) Simply fantastic. Mann's voice is a much better fit for the lyrics of this song than what'shisname from Coldplay. Add to the fact that Mann is a much better performer live than on her studio recordings, and you've got a great track.
Tracy Chapman - Bob Dylan's The Times, They Are A-Changin'. (Live) This one is on the Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert CD. Pretty much every track on this double CD has 2 things going for them: 1) They are written by Bob Dylan, but 2) they are not sung by Bob Dylan. Sorry Skippy.
Any version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. See Dylanitis, above. But for a recent excellent version, see k.d. lang. While you're at it, check out lang's version of Helpless, if you've been living in a cave and haven't heard it yet.
The Weakerthans - Phil Och's Ringing of Revolution. Take one Phil Ochs song, which lasts 7 minutes when sung to an acoustic guitar. Replace with electric and speed it up by 50%, and you have a lot more fun with it. Plus, it's all about murdering the last rich bastards on Earth, so you know I'm there.
10,000 Maniacs - Patti Smith's Because the Night. From back when Natalie Merchant was with them. More energy than Smith's original.
Eric Cartman - Asia's Heat of the Moment. From the episode where Kenny dies. Every time Cartman starts singing, I can't stop singing back to him in the role of the various congressmen. Ask Vicki.
Barenaked Ladies - Bruce Cockburn's Lovers in a Dangerous Time. Honestly, it was only a few years ago that I realized this was a Bruce Cockburn song, and having heard the original I basically forgot about it and kept listening to the Ladies. Oh, another song that is indelibly linked to the coverer, not the original artist (for me): Killing Me Softly. Honestly, my head never hears this song except from Lauryn Hill's voice.
Leave your own suggestions in comments. Or tell me I'm insane. I'm expecting hate mail from Skippy for impugning The Dylan anyway, so you won't be alone.
While I'm writing about music, let me just praise my MP3 player - an RCA Lyra player that has 1G of flash memory, a line in, a microphone, and an FM tuner. I believe, that with the right combination of keystrokes, I could get it to make me coffee and a bagel. This would be evidence of it's malevolence, as I drink tea. It is also terrifyingly intelligent. It has analyzed my music, and often seems to be mixing songs on a theme. I can only assume that my MP3 player is ready to pass the Turing test.
In any case, my AAA-powered wonder has discovered my love of covered songs. Yesterday, for 12 songs in a row, it played nothing but assorted covers of various artists. I may not get all the songs the player covered, but in no particular order I present covers that I prefer to the original performers' versions:
Aimee Mann - Coldplay's The Scientist. (Live) Simply fantastic. Mann's voice is a much better fit for the lyrics of this song than what'shisname from Coldplay. Add to the fact that Mann is a much better performer live than on her studio recordings, and you've got a great track.
Tracy Chapman - Bob Dylan's The Times, They Are A-Changin'. (Live) This one is on the Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert CD. Pretty much every track on this double CD has 2 things going for them: 1) They are written by Bob Dylan, but 2) they are not sung by Bob Dylan. Sorry Skippy.
Any version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. See Dylanitis, above. But for a recent excellent version, see k.d. lang. While you're at it, check out lang's version of Helpless, if you've been living in a cave and haven't heard it yet.
The Weakerthans - Phil Och's Ringing of Revolution. Take one Phil Ochs song, which lasts 7 minutes when sung to an acoustic guitar. Replace with electric and speed it up by 50%, and you have a lot more fun with it. Plus, it's all about murdering the last rich bastards on Earth, so you know I'm there.
10,000 Maniacs - Patti Smith's Because the Night. From back when Natalie Merchant was with them. More energy than Smith's original.
Eric Cartman - Asia's Heat of the Moment. From the episode where Kenny dies. Every time Cartman starts singing, I can't stop singing back to him in the role of the various congressmen. Ask Vicki.
Barenaked Ladies - Bruce Cockburn's Lovers in a Dangerous Time. Honestly, it was only a few years ago that I realized this was a Bruce Cockburn song, and having heard the original I basically forgot about it and kept listening to the Ladies. Oh, another song that is indelibly linked to the coverer, not the original artist (for me): Killing Me Softly. Honestly, my head never hears this song except from Lauryn Hill's voice.
Leave your own suggestions in comments. Or tell me I'm insane. I'm expecting hate mail from Skippy for impugning The Dylan anyway, so you won't be alone.
Because We Hate America
I'm watching CNN right now, and Larry King is interviewing Jon Stewart. King, apparently addled by age, asked Jon Stewart if as a comedian, he kind of enjoyed things going bad because it helped his materials. Jon Stewart's response was perfect:
Update: Thanks to LeoPetr, I've fixed the transcript (I originally had it from memory), as well as a partial clip at Crooks and Liars.
KING: So, you don't want it to be bad?It was really perfect - I can't capture Stewart's tone. It was the perfect mix of incredulity and near-outrage. Loved it.
STEWART: Did you really just ask me if I want it to be bad?
KING: Yes because you...
STEWART: What are you -- I have kids what do you think? Yes, I don't want them to have any kind of a -- I want things to corrode to the point where we're all living in huts.
KING: Not all living in huts but generally comics political comics like things to go a little wrong, don't have to be the end of the world.
STEWART: Like things to go a little wrong like birdshot to the face of a guy that will survive.
KING: That's right.
STEWART: Not like things to go wrong until it's like Mad Max, every man for himself, let's all ride around with machineguns on, which seems to be the way that it's...
KING: You don't want Medicare to fail?
STEWART: Are you insane?
KING: No.
STEWART: You're literally asking me if I would prefer -- yes, Larry, what I'm saying to you as a comedian I want old people to suffer, old and poor people to suffer. That is -- that is -- what we want is -- what seems absurd to me is the length that Washington just seems out of touch with the desires of Americans to be spoken to as though they are adults.
Update: Thanks to LeoPetr, I've fixed the transcript (I originally had it from memory), as well as a partial clip at Crooks and Liars.
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Good rules of thumb
From Andrew Leonard at Salon.com:
I know who I believe.
O.K., folks, now it's time to get worried. When Exxon tells us to relax, Armageddon is undoubtedly right around the corner.You might have to click through an ad to read the post, but don't bother - basically, Exxon is saying (surprise!) that Peak Oil isn't happening.
I know who I believe.
Cuba after Peak Oil
When the Soviet Union collapsed, one of the countries hardest hit was Cuba, which lost a cheap supply of oil that it had depended on and built the national economy around. Sound familiar?
This article has an interesting (if a bit wide-eyed and optimistic) account of how Cuba turned around and managed to make the transition from oil to post-oil.
This article has an interesting (if a bit wide-eyed and optimistic) account of how Cuba turned around and managed to make the transition from oil to post-oil.
This need to bring agriculture into the city began with the fall of the Soviet Union and the loss of more than 50 percent of Cuba's oil imports, much of its food and 85 percent of its trade economy. Transportation halted, people went hungry and the average Cuban lost 30 pounds.The solution to Cuba's agricultural collapse involved going back about a century, and using draught animals instead of tractors. Good idea, but I'm not sure how those of us who don't live in tropical socialist dictatorships will cope.
"In reality, when this all began, it was a necessity. People had to start cultivating vegetables wherever they could," a tour guide told a documentary crew filming in Cuba in 2004 to record how Cuba survived on far less oil than usual....
"Try to image an airplane suddenly losing its engines. It was really a crash," Jorge Mario, a Cuban economist, told the documentary crew. A crash that put Cuba into a state of shock. There were frequent blackouts in its oil-fed electric power grid, up to 16 hours per day. The average daily caloric intake in Cuba dropped by a third.
Eeeewwwww
I feel dirty. Jonah Goldberg (don't ask why I was reading the Corner) and I agree that last week's episode of Battlestar Galactica was good, and hopefully marked a turning point in a series that had started to get stale.
It was kind of funny - I was in Vicki's room, watching the ep on her computer (through headphones) while she was reading a book. Every few minutes, I'd look up, point at the screen, and say "this is so great! I'd tell you about it, but you haven't watched enough of the series yet."
Two points to draw from that anecdote: 1) I am a considerate person, not disturbing my girlfriend, or ruining a great tv series for her. 2) I am incredibly lame, and have no better ideas for what to do with a beautiful woman in her bedroom.
It was kind of funny - I was in Vicki's room, watching the ep on her computer (through headphones) while she was reading a book. Every few minutes, I'd look up, point at the screen, and say "this is so great! I'd tell you about it, but you haven't watched enough of the series yet."
Two points to draw from that anecdote: 1) I am a considerate person, not disturbing my girlfriend, or ruining a great tv series for her. 2) I am incredibly lame, and have no better ideas for what to do with a beautiful woman in her bedroom.
By "Nobody" we meant "most everybody"
Oh yeah, and in case you missed it, we can add "Nobody predicted the levees would breach" to the long, long list of Bush Administration lies designed to hide their enormous fuck-ups.
That list is far too long for Bush to stay president until 2008. Please god, let us have a Democratic congress this November.
That list is far too long for Bush to stay president until 2008. Please god, let us have a Democratic congress this November.
The Clenched Fist and The Dagger-Thrust
I haven't seen anyone else say it yet, so I'll just point out something - Jeff Goldstein's ranting that the war is going badly because of the people who were right about the war going badly can only be called a fascist ideology.
To believe what Goldstein believes - that dissent has a material effect on the outcome of the war on the battlefield - you need to believe that there is not just a moral virtue to unity (itself a dangerous idea) but an actual physical, mortal threat posed by disunity.
Goldstein tries to waffle a bit on this point (mainly so he doesn't have to march fellow Conservatives to the firing line) but the conclusion is inescapable. Once you've bought in to this dangerous, idiotic idea, the next step comes naturally. If dissent poses a threat to national security - by undermining the military effectiveness of the United States - then dissent needs to be suppressed, just as we suppress all activities which we see as threats (like murder, drug dealing, arson, etc.)
Jeff Goldstein is espousing fascist ideology. It's that simple. Barring a retraction and an apology, his opponents have no obligation to treat him seriously. Anyone of good conscience should shun him.
To believe what Goldstein believes - that dissent has a material effect on the outcome of the war on the battlefield - you need to believe that there is not just a moral virtue to unity (itself a dangerous idea) but an actual physical, mortal threat posed by disunity.
Goldstein tries to waffle a bit on this point (mainly so he doesn't have to march fellow Conservatives to the firing line) but the conclusion is inescapable. Once you've bought in to this dangerous, idiotic idea, the next step comes naturally. If dissent poses a threat to national security - by undermining the military effectiveness of the United States - then dissent needs to be suppressed, just as we suppress all activities which we see as threats (like murder, drug dealing, arson, etc.)
Jeff Goldstein is espousing fascist ideology. It's that simple. Barring a retraction and an apology, his opponents have no obligation to treat him seriously. Anyone of good conscience should shun him.
The (almost) All-Electric Future
Ian Welsh at Tilting at Windmills has an interesting post on the competing energy ideas favoured by the Democrats and Republicans, and an idea of his own:
Meanwhile, the intermittency problem with renewable energy may soon be eliminated by adavanced energy storage - I've been excited in particular by ultracapacitors, because of their long lifespan. But there's any number of competing technologies. The point is that if we can power our cars even partially with electricity (which seems certain in the near term) then we can also run our homes off of electricity stored during the day - driving 60 miles (a not-uncommon commute) in an electric car would still consume more electricity than an average family uses in their home every day. If we can do one, we can definitely do the other.
The only thing left to do is crack cheap, high-efficiency solar production, and that looks almost certain to come around within a decade. The NREL is already talking about 65% efficiency from quantum dots. Mated to a cheap form of electrical storage, that would make even todays "zero-energy" homes obsolete - the new homes would be energy exporters. At the very least, a homeowner would be able to power all of their energy needs, from cooking and heating to driving.
Ian and I agree on the need to move everything possible off of petroleum - which to my mind means everything. What transport can't be replaced directly by electricity (tankers, trucks) will need to be replaced by biologically-derived fuels, if at all possible. But if we can replace cars, most trucking (more than 100km trips moved to rail) and aviation fuel with electricity, and carry the remainder with biofuels - remembering that agricultural biofuels are only one possible source of fuels - then I think we should be in good shape.
If we're really lucky, then maybe we can reverse the decades-long trend of declining per capita energy consumption that has correlated with stagnating standards of living in the west, combined with disastrous declines in the poorest parts of the world.
The Electrical Economy, the idea, in the early stage, is to move as much of the economy as possible to electricity. While technologies like solar have lousy energy returns (4:1 for solar, for example), if you turn oil into solar panels you get multiplication of energy ratios - so with a 10/1 oil ration times a 4/1 solar ratio - you’ve got a 40X energy ratio. Electrical or hybrid cars, electrical/solar heal (natural gas is going to hit a wall as well), and so on. You can’t move everything off oil, but you can move a lot. Add small local efficient modern nuclear plants which are not designed to create nuclear usable fissiles (and also produce much less waste, are much safer, and have much better energy ratios) to provide baseline energy for times when solar is down, and you have the beginnings of a new energy economy, one which actually has a better energy ratio than the current one.Needless to say, I agree. In fact, I've agreed for about as long as I've had this blog thing. Where I disagree is the inclusion of nuclear. I no longer think that nuclear is the least safe energy option available to humans - that honor probably goes to coal - but it's certainly not the safest, not the cheapest, and not the best option that will be available to us in the future. That might sound like a copout, but the problem is that nuclear takes a long time to build. Far, far longer than wind or solar. With countries like Germany and Spain building gigawatts of wind and solar every year, nuclear simply can't keep up with that kind of rate (40% per year, albeit from a small base.) By the time we're ready to actually turn the reactor on, it will already be obsolete.
Get this right, and you can move to a new boom wave, and turn things around in a way, that combined with other real reform, could lead to a generational good economy. Get it wrong and you can turn the US, and the world, into an economic grey land - unlike the current past thirty years, where the majority in the US have essentially tread water, it will be a long generational decline in standards of living for the great majority of Americans.
Meanwhile, the intermittency problem with renewable energy may soon be eliminated by adavanced energy storage - I've been excited in particular by ultracapacitors, because of their long lifespan. But there's any number of competing technologies. The point is that if we can power our cars even partially with electricity (which seems certain in the near term) then we can also run our homes off of electricity stored during the day - driving 60 miles (a not-uncommon commute) in an electric car would still consume more electricity than an average family uses in their home every day. If we can do one, we can definitely do the other.
The only thing left to do is crack cheap, high-efficiency solar production, and that looks almost certain to come around within a decade. The NREL is already talking about 65% efficiency from quantum dots. Mated to a cheap form of electrical storage, that would make even todays "zero-energy" homes obsolete - the new homes would be energy exporters. At the very least, a homeowner would be able to power all of their energy needs, from cooking and heating to driving.
Ian and I agree on the need to move everything possible off of petroleum - which to my mind means everything. What transport can't be replaced directly by electricity (tankers, trucks) will need to be replaced by biologically-derived fuels, if at all possible. But if we can replace cars, most trucking (more than 100km trips moved to rail) and aviation fuel with electricity, and carry the remainder with biofuels - remembering that agricultural biofuels are only one possible source of fuels - then I think we should be in good shape.
If we're really lucky, then maybe we can reverse the decades-long trend of declining per capita energy consumption that has correlated with stagnating standards of living in the west, combined with disastrous declines in the poorest parts of the world.
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Harry Potter and the Drunken Witch
Okay, on the scale of things a picture of Hermione (okay, "Emma Watson") drinking a beer isn't a big deal, but for some reason it makes me laugh.
Leave your suggested Harry Potter-themed jokes in the comments. Mine? Only muggles drink Corona.
Leave your suggested Harry Potter-themed jokes in the comments. Mine? Only muggles drink Corona.
30-second Analysis
So, according to The Oil Drum, we on planet Earth discovered enough oil and natural gas in all of 2005 to power the planet for 53 days and three months, respectively.
Obviously, if we were looking for a happy number, we would have discovered more than a year's worth of oil or NG - that is, we would have at least kept the supply level. No luck. We're using oil faster and faster. We're using oil 6 times faster than we're discovering it, and NG 4 times. Not a great ratio, all things considered.
Obviously, if we were looking for a happy number, we would have discovered more than a year's worth of oil or NG - that is, we would have at least kept the supply level. No luck. We're using oil faster and faster. We're using oil 6 times faster than we're discovering it, and NG 4 times. Not a great ratio, all things considered.
Dolchstosslegende
Ah, the legend of the stab in the back is starting already. Conservative commentary is already starting to blame the critics of the war - who obviously hold high positions in military and civilian command, and are thus responsible - for the crap outcome of the war to date. Jeff Goldstein:
So the military commanders - who had run the entire country, not just the war - refused to sign the armistice of Nov. 11 themselves, instead bringing in a civilian government to sign the documents. But the important point is this: Those civilians - who had exactly zero influence on the prosecution of the war, or the negotiation of the armistice - were brought in to government specifically so that the commanders who were responsible for Germany's defeat could evade the blame for the disaster they'd brought upon Europe. It was those very military leaders, unsurprisingly, who later blamed the civilian government they'd saddled with the burden.
Eventually, the Dolchstosslegende had become so powerful - especially to the millions of veterans - that even the civilian government couldn't call it for the bullshit that it was without risking political suicide. The fact that no major German party ever publicly repudiated the "stab in the back" by saying that Germany was defeated in the field, not at home, was a great advantage to the Nazis when they took power. By the time Hitler started blaming the Jews (and advocating his own brand of final solution) the Dolchstosslegende was received wisdom - even if it was totally false.
So no, Mr. Goldstein, you aren't being stabbed in the back, nor is the US Army. The Army - indeed, the United States - has been criminally misled by incompetents who refused to admit the power of the opposition. If the US Army is forced to withdraw from Iraq, it won't be because of anything any blogger wrote or any Democrat said. It will be because the insurgents have managed to shoot and bomb the US Army enough times to leave it unable to maintain any kind of control. In that vacuum, the insurgents won't attack the government of Iraq - they'll be the government of Iraq. And the departure of US forces will be swift.
From my perspective, there comes a time when, having registered disagreement with the war, the war’s critics (and here I’m not talking about critics of individual strategical or tactical initiatives, but rather those who have been against the effort from the start) simply wait and—if things fail—rush to brag of their prescience and perspicuity. But in the meantime, actively working to undermine the effort by presenting our enemies with a rabidly partisan divided front (one of their chief aims, remember)—whether it be through suggestions that we are in Iraq “illegally”, or that the President “lied” to take us to war, or seemingly hoping, on a daily basis, that the whole thing devolve into a civil war—matters. And not just rhetorically.I really wonder some days what world the right wing lives in. Apparently, in Goldstein's world Al Qaeda sit around having conversations like this:
Bin Laden: Ayman, did you hear? Those whores of the infidel, the Dixie Chicks, said that they were ashamed of their president! Victory will soon be ours!Of course, the people who back disastrous military expeditions always blame the opposition. The original "stab in the back" at the end of WWI in Germany was a deliberate fabrication by the military leaders who had so misled the German nation. The fact is, the German high command knew by the fall of 1918 that the Entente and the United States would soon be able to invade Germany itself, and that the German army no longer had the ability to win battles in the field after the disastrous campaigns early that year.
Ayman Al-Zawahiri: Osama, my brother, you're behind the times - Kanye West has said that the leader of the Great Satan doesn't care about black people! Surely, we will soon see the Zionists pushed in to the sea!
#3 Al Qaeda guy of the week: Wise leaders, an American blogger named Greenwald has called the war illegal! Ansar al-Islam is at hand!
So the military commanders - who had run the entire country, not just the war - refused to sign the armistice of Nov. 11 themselves, instead bringing in a civilian government to sign the documents. But the important point is this: Those civilians - who had exactly zero influence on the prosecution of the war, or the negotiation of the armistice - were brought in to government specifically so that the commanders who were responsible for Germany's defeat could evade the blame for the disaster they'd brought upon Europe. It was those very military leaders, unsurprisingly, who later blamed the civilian government they'd saddled with the burden.
Eventually, the Dolchstosslegende had become so powerful - especially to the millions of veterans - that even the civilian government couldn't call it for the bullshit that it was without risking political suicide. The fact that no major German party ever publicly repudiated the "stab in the back" by saying that Germany was defeated in the field, not at home, was a great advantage to the Nazis when they took power. By the time Hitler started blaming the Jews (and advocating his own brand of final solution) the Dolchstosslegende was received wisdom - even if it was totally false.
So no, Mr. Goldstein, you aren't being stabbed in the back, nor is the US Army. The Army - indeed, the United States - has been criminally misled by incompetents who refused to admit the power of the opposition. If the US Army is forced to withdraw from Iraq, it won't be because of anything any blogger wrote or any Democrat said. It will be because the insurgents have managed to shoot and bomb the US Army enough times to leave it unable to maintain any kind of control. In that vacuum, the insurgents won't attack the government of Iraq - they'll be the government of Iraq. And the departure of US forces will be swift.
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I've now watched the episode twice, once with the commentary podcast (you already knew I was a giant nerd) and I have to say the speed with which the episode moved nearly gave me whiplash. The idea of the Cylon pursuit ending so suddenly after two seasons, then having Baltar win the election, then the leap forward obviously necessitated the extra half hour for the episode.
But I really have no idea how they're going to undo this next season. Baltar has so obviously screwed things up, you kind of expect a lynching if the Cylons are eventually defeated again. Meanwhile, we've had it made clear that the Galactica and Pegasus are in no shape to actually fight for the colonists again, leaving us to wonder what exactly is going to happen next.
Obviously, this is part of the creative process, but I wonder if they've painted themselves in to a corner on this one. Part of the appeal of BSG has been that the series has occasionally flirted with implausibility, but has always been careful not to simply wave a magic wand and make problems disappear. (With the possible exception of Roslin's magical cancer cure.) The idea of crafting a plausible rescue scenario in this case seems impossible. Either that, or we're likely to get a repeat of the split storyline from season 1 - with Galactica and the fleet in one plot, with "Cylon-occupied New Caprica" in the other.
In case you haven't been keeping count, we've now met 7 Cylon models. There are 5 more to go. On that note, Dean Stockwell's little scene of two Cavils talking to Roslin and Adama was very well done. And Sharron's little bit of contempt for Helo - "They killed my daugher. Do you think I care about you?" was amazingly simple and cutting.
I love the idea of Baltar turning the office of the President in to a drug-filled grotto within a year of taking office. That, and the not-so-subtle references to Bush when Baltar says "I don't have to listen. I'm the President." or "How many attacks have there been since I was elected?"
Needless to say, I can't wait until the summer season starts.
All done.