Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Climaquiddick 3.0

8 Comments

The password has been released:

If someone is still wondering why anyone would take these risks, or sees only a breach of privacy here, a few words…

The first glimpses I got behind the scenes did little to garner my trust in the state of climate science — on the contrary. I found myself in front of a choice that just might have a global impact.

Briefly put, when I had to balance the interests of my own safety, privacy\career of a few scientists, and the well-being of billions of people living in the coming several decades, the first two weren’t the decisive concern.

It was me or nobody, now or never. Combination of several rather improbable prerequisites just wouldn’t occur again for anyone else in the foreseeable future. The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen. Later on it could be too late.

Most would agree that climate science has already directed where humanity puts its capability, innovation, mental and material “might”. The scale will grow ever grander in the coming decades if things go according to script. We’re dealing with $trillions and potentially drastic influence on practically everyone.

Wealth of the surrounding society tends to draw the major brushstrokes of a newborn’s future life. It makes a huge difference whether humanity uses its assets to achieve progress, or whether it strives to stop and reverse it, essentially sacrificing the less fortunate to the climate gods.

We can’t pour trillions in this massive hole-digging-and-filling-up endeavor and pretend it’s not away from something and someone else.

If the economy of a region, a country, a city, etc. deteriorates, what happens among the poorest? Does that usually improve their prospects? No, they will take the hardest hit. No amount of magical climate thinking can turn this one upside-down.

It’s easy for many of us in the western world to accept a tiny green inconvenience and then wallow in that righteous feeling, surrounded by our “clean” technology and energy that is only slightly more expensive if adequately subsidized.

Those millions and billions already struggling with malnutrition, sickness, violence, illiteracy, etc. don’t have that luxury. The price of “climate protection” with its cumulative and collateral effects is bound to destroy and debilitate in great numbers, for decades and generations.

Conversely, a “game-changer” could have a beneficial effect encompassing a similar scope.

If I had a chance to accomplish even a fraction of that, I’d have to try. I couldn’t morally afford inaction. Even if I risked everything, would never get personal compensation, and could probably never talk about it with anyone.

Anthony has already found a couple amusing bashes of Mann by his colleagues:

No justification for regional reconstructions rather than what Mann et al did (I don’t think we can say we didn’t do Mann et al because we think it is crap!)

But we do, don’t we?

I hope that history will view this person as a world saver.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Fossil Fuels

6 Comments

Gaia loves them:

In the end, Japan’s work in this field is good news. This is still a very new technology, and it is likely to become significantly safer the more we learn and study it. More R&D needs to go into the technology supporting offshore drilling for methane hydrates before we can seriously consider doing this, but the potential is certainly there.

The energy revolution just keeps getting better.

But it makes Baby JeebusAlgore cry.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

My Corporate Dystopia

18 Comments

What the heck happened to it?

At its best, science fiction imagines a future that illuminates the present, but on the subject of the social role of the corporation, science fiction has long been backward-looking, out of touch with the reality it would analyze. The cultural imagination at large shares this error, though it is difficult to say how much this defect in science fiction is a result of the cultural error and how much it is the cause. But it would be difficult to overstate how deeply the specter of the villainous corporation shapes American political thought. The influence is more visible the farther to the left one moves along the political spectrum. Occupy Wall Street was probably at least as much influenced by science-fiction visions of corporate dystopias as it was by any kind of organized political thought. There were unmistakably Maoist elements to Occupy, but the sinister connotations of the very word “corporation” are by no means heard by only those ears attached to the addled heads of committed leftists.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was set in 1992, Blade Runner in 2019, yet here we are, well into the 21st century, and there is still no colossal Tyrel Corporation bestriding the globe, and nothing like the corporate sovereignties of Jennifer Government. As myth, the corporate dystopia remains undiminished in its power. But the function of myths is to illuminate reality, and the reality is that there is no Tyrel Corporation today, and none on the horizon. If you want to know what the corporation of tomorrow looks like, don’t think Cyberdyne — think Groupon.

…The fetishization of the political through regulator-heroes such as Jennifer Government relies on the point-counterpoint of corporation and state; without the threat of the monolithic, immortal, all-powerful corporation hovering silently in the cultural background, the rhetoric and philosophy of (for instance) Elizabeth Warren is faintly ridiculous. Which is not to say it is entirely indefensible in every particular — Senator Warren is right in demanding to know, say, why nobody at HSBC has been charged with a crime as a result of the bank’s money-laundering case, which involved such worrisome entities as Mexican cartels and Saudi financiers of terrorism. (Senator Warren might think about addressing some of her questions to the president rather than browbeating his underlings at a politically safe arm’s length.) But the overarching narrative — if not for the far-seeing, brave, and selfless heroes of the political class, we’d end up living in the world of Jennifer Government — is a fantasy, and a childish one at that.

I’ve never understood the “progressive” mindset that fears big corporations more than it fears big government.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Five And A Half Trillion

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That’s how much additional debt the nation has amassed since the Senate last passed a budget:

If you want a sense of just how massive the nation’s debt problem is, consider this: The U.S. added $226 billion in new debt in just the 35 days since President Obama missed the legal deadline to submit his budget.

That’s more than the government will spend this year on education, homeland security, law enforcement, housing aid, energy and the environment, combined.

A 1921 law requires the president to submit his budget plan to Congress on the first Monday in February, but Obama so far hasn’t produced one, and the White House says it won’t release its plan to get the nation’s deficits and debt under control until sometime in April.

Laws are for the little people. Hey, did I mention that the Senate was controlled by the Democrats that whole time?

Business, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Educational Malpractice

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Is the fact that the majority of children in public schools are not learning to read malice, or incompetence?

Now, I realize that an illiterate peasantry is needed for a proper neo-feudal regime, but I wonder how many of these people are actually malicious, and how many are just full of their own self-importance and convinced that they are doing what is best for these children?

Judging by those I dealt with, most of them aren’t bright enough to see any overarching social aims in this. They are simply full of their own “good intentions” and they’ve been TAUGHT this is the best way of teaching to read. In fact, if you push them they become either irate or lachrymose and tell you that you don’t UNDERSTAND, you’re not an expert and you weren’t taught the latest METHODS. (This reminds me of when we stayed in NYC in a new hotel and every night our bed was, essentially, short sheeted – it’s more complicated than that, but that was the effect. When we complained the maid, with an accent stronger than mine, informed us it was “latest, Russian bed-making technology. … that one too didn’t end well, at least as soon as I stopped rolling on the floor laughing.)

Dave, yesterday, made a comment that the public school system for all its flaws might teach a kid to read who would otherwise not know how. Since I don’t know every teacher in every corner of the US – but I know from other contexts that at least some of them will be decent and competent and tell the system to stuff it – nor every kid, nor every school, this is POSSIBLE. What I guarantee and would put my hands in the fire for is that the percentage of those is dwarfed by the MASS of what would otherwise be competent “middle brow” C students, who could read and express themselves passably in writing, if they were left alone/had online teachers with just a class supervisor/were taught by anyone (retirees? Mothers?) BUT people who had been convinced they were education experts and that teaching children to read – something that village teachers managed for centuries. (And BTW my first village teacher was a discarded fallen woman, whom some guy had seduced and set up in a little cottage with no running water and only two rooms. She was, it was rumored “of good families” and left with no other means of support, taught the kids to read and fancy work (needlework, guys!) to the girls and died respected and almost revered in her eighties.)

But whether it’s from malice or misguided credentialism and do-goodism, what I can tell you is that our system of education is accomplishing the “miracle” of turning out a population MORE illiterate than the poor never-taught people in Tudor England.

Malice or incompetence, it comes to the same. If you have kids in the system, look to their future. If they read by “guessing” (the signs are easy. They’ll think words that start and end with the same letter are the same) stop that right now and teach them to sound it out. They’ll hate you for a month, but the hatred will pass and the literacy will remain.

Always remember J. Porter Clark’s law: any sufficiently advanced cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice. (I think it was originally prompted by spammers.)

Over thirty years ago, a report on public education started out with words to the effect (if not literally — it may have) that if some foreign power had imposed on us the educational system with which we’ve afflicted ourselves, it would rightly be considered an act of war. If anything, it’s gotten worse.

Business, Technology and Society

Thunderbird Spam Filter, WTF!?

13 Comments

OK, I’ve been living with this for too long, and I can’t find anything about it anywhere with web searches.

Thunderbird’s spam filter is absolutely stupid. Every effing day I have to dig through the junk folder to find legitimate email from people whom I’ve repeatedly (as in dozens of times) told it are not spammers, and from subjects (e.g., mailing lists, like arocket) that I’ve repeatedly told it is legitimate email I want to read. It absolutely refuses to learn. I can handle false negatives in spam reporting, but when it continually buries legitimate emails after I’ve implicitly whitelisted them, I can no longer tolerate this.

Am I the only one with this problem?