Testing, testing… February 5, 2007
Posted by Jim Satterfield in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
I just caught from the corner of my eye an ad saying that RoadRunner had upped the speed on our service from 5 kbps to 7 kbps for the same price. So I went and ran a test and…
Nice. I appreciate it.
Not Going to Read February 5, 2007
Posted by Jim Satterfield in Government, Politics.add a comment
The piece of fiction that is the latest Bush Administration budget.
Currently Reading February 5, 2007
Posted by Jim Satterfield in The Book List.add a comment
The Far Side of the Stars by David Drake.
Time Shows the Limits of Journalistic Imagination February 4, 2007
Posted by Jim Satterfield in Economics, Environment, Futurist Spec, Politics, Technology.2 comments
Time Magazine writes about the inherent environmental footprint of air travel. But is it really as cut and dried as they make it sound? If you leave it to the free market system with no government intervention it probably is. If you look at the short term they’re probably right. But think about it a little differently. How many new materials that are strong enough for many uses on airplanes still aren’t being used because of a short term view of cost effectiveness? How much room for improvement is there in engine design and mightn’t there the possibility of an entirely different kind of engine that just hasn’t been invented yet?
Not according to this article, which this quote makes obvious.
“It’s not like having leaky home windows you can fix with double glazing,” says Leo Murray, a spokesman for the straightforwardly named green group Plane Stupid, which led the criticism of Prince Charles.
In addition there are other possibilities that are ignored. While the kind of adaptations that the environmentalists cited in this article aren’t going to happen (The elimination of air travel and “learning to live locally” being their only solutions.) there are other, wider ones that aren’t really the kind of sacrifice you might think. If for the sake of cutting back on the problems inherent in the modern commuting nightmare we can finally get uberconservative business management types to accept telecommuting and videoconferencing as normal and not career destroying, wouldn’t that open the door for even more imaginative ways to help the environment? Imagine a modern lighter than air craft, faster and safer than the old ones that people are used to thinking about. There is already research in this field, such as the Aeroscraft and the P-791. Imagine that even if you feel you must travel to Asia for business that you ride in a craft that is a descendant of these efforts and use telecommunication and videoconferencing to stay in touch during the necessarily longer flight time and you aren’t stuck in the current airline sardine can configuration. Should the cost per passenger be similar to current costs it would even open the door to leisure travel.
As far as the government involvement I mentioned earlier I’d like to see government sponsored equivalents to the X-Prize for various goals to help with most environmental goals that tend to produce market failures and then tax breaks for implementation of them by industry. I think this approach would help encourage the market to do what it does best…but only when it’s encouraged when it comes to some things.
Shaping the Conversation February 4, 2007
Posted by Jim Satterfield in Uncategorized.5 comments
Sigh. I certainly hope that eventually there are people reading this. Of course there are some things that I’m not doing to “promote” it until after I make the planned move to another web hosting service. But I do view creating this blog as a way to shape the conversation, not to simply pontificate. I want comments. I want to see the kind of reaction that some of the ideas I post will produce. I do want a conversation and plan on reading comments as much as I can, which at this rate pretty much guarantees I can read them all.
When You’ve Defined Government as the Problem… February 3, 2007
Posted by Jim Satterfield in Government, Politics.add a comment
…the most likely thing to happen is that you’ll make a bigger problem. One of the things that the title of this blog came from is my belief that so many people on the right and right of center have bought into the idea of small government is good government so much that they don’t admit to themselves much less to others that any government of a nation the size and complexity of the United States just might not be amenable to that philosophy. The New York Times has an article that points out that the overwhelming desire on the part of politicians to be able to claim that they’ve shrunk the size of government has led to an explosion of private contractors that are doing things that most definitely are appropriate functions of government, that readily lend themselves to conflict of interest and also cost the taxpayer more money than just hiring a government worker would. In addition these contractors, being private corporations do not have any of the transparency that government must have by law. The public has been aware of some of the problems that these contractors have caused and more will come out now that the committees that should have been overseeing them are not being run by conservative ideologues who basically believe that business is good and government is bad.
Conservatives generally deride government workers as unmotivated since they can’t be fired as readily as private sector workers. What does this say about their view of the typical worker in this country? It seems to me that they are saying that no one wants to do a good job because of pride in their skills. They appear to be saying that the only thing that motivates any American worker is fear of their supervisor and fear for their job. It apparently never occurs to them that just maybe there might be people who when they go to work for the government at any level recognize their responsibilities and duties and genuinely want to do well because of that.
I don’t work for the government but I know people who do work for the government. Guess what? Not one of them fits into the conservative view of them. Any group of employees might have rotten apples, people who don’t do their jobs like they should. Anecdotal evidence to this effect about government workers is repeated ad nauseum by conservatives. Somehow they have never seen the private sector people who are no better than their horror stories of bad government workers that I’ve seen. It seems to be a perfect case of what seems to cripple this country lately, ideology uber alles.
A Belief I Miss February 3, 2007
Posted by Jim Satterfield in Uncategorized.add a comment
Andrew Sullivan has a reader who points out a quote from Mark Bowden’s Guests of the Ayatollah. I believe it emphasizes something I miss about the post-Bush United States. We used to able to believe that our government never sanctioned torture. I can’t believe that any longer and it makes me angry that this has been stolen from us by a man for so little valid reason.
The Not-So-Great Debate February 3, 2007
Posted by Jim Satterfield in The Book List.add a comment
OK, I finished John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and it deserves every bit of praise I’ve read heaped on it. I can’t wait for the next ones to hit paperback. But now…what to read next, what to read next? Besides Cascading Style Sheets, Third Edition by Hakon Wium Lie & Bert Bos and WordPress 2 Visual Quickstart Guide by Maria Langer and Miraz Jordan, that is (If anyone else is really reading this do you know of any other books on WordPress? Other perspectives are always a good idea.). In terms of fiction what should be next? Stick to SF or F? Pick up a mystery instead? Thriller? Decisions, decisions…
A Longer History February 2, 2007
Posted by Jim Satterfield in Environment, Politics, Science.1 comment so far
Recognition of the potential threat for Anthropogenic Global Warming, or AGW for short and global warming in the much more common references has a much longer history than most people realize, Naomi Oreskes points out in the Washington Post today.
It was established in the Nineteenth Century that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. In the early 20th Century Arrhenius, one of the foremost chemists of the day deduced that it meant that people producing enough CO2 could alter the climate. It goes on from there with the history of some of the people who built on the earlier realizations. Keep this in mind the next time someone makes a big deal out of the Newsweek and Time articles from the 1970s that spoke of cooling. There wasn’t exactly a consensus for that one as there is now for mankind being largely responsible for warming.
Given a lemon… February 2, 2007
Posted by Jim Satterfield in The Book List.add a comment
It’s amazing how much reading you can get done waiting for someone in the ER. I finished Bridgehead, got halfway through Old Man’s War and read 5 chapters in a book on WordPress last night.
It's the 21st Century, Stupid! 