cwan

The Obama administration internally believes that cap and trade will cost the average family $1761 USD/year: http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/09/15/taking_liberties/ent... - and that's their estimate that's almost certain to be light ignoring the impact on industry itself.

Now what happens in actual implementation? Read http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/europes-cap-and-trade-m... and http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/csiro-bi...

It's difficult to know what to make of this. There seems to also be such a massive disconnect between other media voices over what the impact of revelations like this are to the overall global warming / climate change thesis.

There has been a stunning lack of intellectual curiosity/skepticism by journalists on the issue and if anything, much of the media seems outright hostile to the possibility that the overriding thesis could possibly be wrong.

This wouldn't be such a big issue if it weren't for the policy recommendations that would have us greatly change our way of life by people who by and large are insulated from proving their work has intrinsic value/subject to markets/or even the costs if they're wrong. It is to the Telegraph's credit that they've stayed on this story but I'm not sure if I'm more surprised or worried that these revelations have not caused a greater level of introspection or reached a wider mainstream audience.

That said, it would seem at least the news is trickling out: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8500443.stm. It does make me wonder even more about the news industry before internet use became pervasive.

Not sure any of these players are great "buy and holds" as the race is far far from over. First Solar is just one of a handful that look like they're breaking the $1/watt milestone. Another promising one is http://nanosolar.com/

Then you have to look at how cheap natural gas will be over the long term - particularly given the new and massive abundance of shale gas. Gas in particular has the potential to push out adoption of solar. If there's one thing for certain, it's that coal fired power is going to be largely replaced - but the question is by what. Nevertheless, that firms are breaking the $1/watt barrier, is very good news for end users of power.

I generally find criticisms like this a bit odd. The issue seems less about PowerPoint than it is about how the message/information gets presented and used. It's sort of like blaming the web for websites where companies just cobble together some of the hardcopy content from brochures and newsletters.

I don't know if it's "clearly false". Anti-trust/anti-competitive business practices are an area that personally make me uncomfortable but again, here too, companies are having increasingly difficult control over maintaining dominance if they don't provide the best products/services and focus instead on trying to suppress competitors (e.g. browser wars, high end computers - apple v pcs). I'd also be pretty uncomfortable with governments making the determination of what's "good" and "bad" as there have been some bizarre anti-trust rulings over the past few decades.

Here's Cato's take on anti-trust: http://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb105-39.html

Related discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1101508

(And my comment which probably is more salient here: from Reason.com - "Stop the Car, Larry. I Want to Get Out", excerpt: "While the folks at Cato would respond to special-interest lobbying by reducing the size and scope of government so less of life is politicized and there is less to lobby about, Lessig would respond by amending the Constitution to restrict freedom of speech.")

From a historical context, I do find it a bit odd this fear of "corporations". It's really difficult to argue that they function in any way as a cohesive group. Sure it can be argued that they're all profit seeking (some more than others) but the search of profits is done in such radically different ways.

If anything, the power of corporations has been lessening simply because of the nature of the net/web (just think how difficult it's been for even politically authoritarian societies like China to maintain a control over what people hear/see/think). Fortune Magazine tracks the life of the average Fortune 500 company and it's been in steady decline. The dominance of any individual company is far from permanent and made even less so with continually falling barriers to entry.

The perverse irony is that larger firms like regulation because they're the most able to adapt to them and can use them to keep upstarts out.

Something of a broader response from Reason.com - "Stop the Car, Larry. I Want to Get Out", excerpt: "While the folks at Cato would respond to special-interest lobbying by reducing the size and scope of government so less of life is politicized and there is less to lobby about, Lessig would respond by amending the Constitution to restrict freedom of speech."

http://reason.com/blog/2010/01/28/stop-the-car-larry-i-want-...

A company may be an entity and not a citizen, but how do you differentiate between GE and its spending through its subsidiaries to broadcast various views (or Fox for that matter) from other companies? This ruling seems to simply level the playing field with other companies (especially given the case on which the ruling was based). Just because corporations are allowed to spend money to broadcast a message doesn't make it convincing or effective - but why should they be denied the ability to broadcast a message?

From the article on the original ruling: “When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”

I made a mistake. It's an average of 12 years - where Republicans controlled the budget when they controlled the House - data from CBO here: http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/108xx/doc10871/Historicaltables20...

That said, the numbers are still gargantuan in terms of the increase. If I'm not mistaken though, the CBO numbers include the war numbers.

I think a better compromise would have been to allow for a line item veto which would have also also helped to greatly keep spending under control.

For a more explicit graphic have a look here: http://instapundit.com/79840/ - a comparative of deficits under the Bush administration and what's being currently projected by the CBO/White House.

Two wrongs don't make a right here, but if there's going to be a coming crisis, it's going to be a bipartisan crisis that both parties are very much responsible for. I think you'd find that most Americans - Democrats, Independents and Republicans are unhappy with how much was spent under Bush, but by the same token, I don't think it's unreasonable to note that the deficit under the Obama administration last year alone was $1.074 trillion dollars while the Bush administrations had an average annual budget deficit of about $104 billion per year.

Let me repeat and rephrase given how stunning it is - the Obama administration's deficit last year alone was greater than all the deficits combined under the Bush Administration including all the war spending. I think it's fair to argue that last year was unusual but deficits are also projected to remain high for the forseeable future and the Obama administration has additional significant spending programs in the years beyond his current proposed modest spending freeze.

EDIT - I erred - I used an average of 104 billion under the Bush administration when it was an average of 104 billion under the 12 years of the Republican controlled budgets which extends into Clinton's last administration. However the data including, I believe, war expenditures can be found here (excel file): http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/108xx/doc10871/Historicaltables20...

Small businesses do spend increasing amounts on tax accounting and legal. There's a very real and tangible cost to complexity in both regulations and taxation.

"No. That would be stupid. It has nothing to do with my argument." You're right it would be a stupid argument except according to you, a job is a job. Not sure how it's even a tenuous argument to point out that reducing friction increases jobs as it not only frees up people who have to navigate the complexity - ie the tax accountants and lawyers to doing something more productive but it also reduces the costs of compliance for companies themselves. The US tax code is now over 16500 pages with non-compliance a criminal offense.

I find it remarkable that you don't think there's an increasing cost to this compliance. Ask just about any internal accountant or anyone in a position of leadership and they'd tell you differently especially over the last 15 years.

That I think was the conventional thinking but it's gotten to a tipping point with massive new proposals for complexity / government spending/programs. I think a large part of the popularity of the tea party/'throw the bums out' movement and perceptions of corruption in Washington is the result of push back. Irrespective of political leanings, the loss of the seat Ted Kennedy for decades in Massachusetts to a Republican has to be a shocker (even to the republican leadership that didn't spend much time or energy backing their candidate until the last few days). Simplification means less corruption and fewer costs not only for small business but for everyone.

A useful reference point is to consider the positive relationship between economic growth and reduced regulation and you can see that through the World Bank's Doing Business guide comparing various states (http://www.doingbusiness.org)

It's not just administrative overhead, it's friction in getting things done. There is such a thing as objective value creation.

The complexity of the tax code in the US has been increasing with ever larger loopholes to satisfy lobbyists and curry favor with various special interests. This isn't even about taxes - it's about simplifying something that shouldn't even be complex. Further, the irony is the people who lobby for the complexity are often the "extremely rich people".

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at your argument that moving jobs from tax accounting/legal which attempt to manage friction in transactions to professions that create goods and services people actually want to pay for is just "shuffling the jobs around". As an extension of your argument, shouldn't the government employ everyone by fiat and simply abolish unemployment? This is especially made particularly absurd that the US Treasury Secretary couldn't even figure out how to pay his own taxes but now runs the IRS. There is something very very wrong with this picture.

Too bad he doesn't have any data beyond supposition to support his claim. Here's research from the Kauffman Foundation that qualifies that it isn't small businesses that create jobs, it's new small businesses: http://www.kauffman.org/newsroom/kauffman-foundation-analysi...

Besides... what jobs would meet his definition of "permanent, enduring and non-transitional" other than some government bureaucracies?

A bit more about the cancellation of the moon program here: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/space/os-no-moon-for-nas...

Hopefully their approach will be to further encourage private space travel. A quote from Rand Simberg, an aerospace engineer: "It’s not NASA’s job to send a man to Mars. It’s NASA’s job to make it possible for the National Geographic Society to send a man to Mars."

Pimco's "Ring of Fire" describes the risk of various sovereign securities. Those in the ring are considered to be getting riskier while those outside of the ring are moving in the other direction. Therefore they imply Norway is becoming more attractive by being outside the ring while the US is less so inside the ring (though to keep the title short, it does mix metaphors a bit).

What would be a better way to measure performance? (It's a sincere question and one that I've long been wondering about). Or is there even a cost effective measure?

I realize that many teachers unions are against standardized testing and any form of performance testing in general, but what's the alternative?

Could the problem instead be how the tests are structured or how cheating gets controlled? I note that at least with respect to SAT's the SAT is only one measure, albeit a significant high stakes benchmark that can change a student's life depending on their admissions. Given limited spots and limited resources, how else should universities be choosing who gets in?

Seems like it may be an incomplete comparison as it underweights/excludes private contributions though it's difficult to tell. I suspect once you add remittances + private charitable contributions, you would see the US punch significantly higher than even its current outlier position.

Private contributions almost certainly bias towards the US where when it comes to foreign aid/charities, the majority comes from private individuals versus almost every other country where the bulk of funds go through official government aid channels.

I have to also imagine that this doesn't include the contributions through the US military (which Michael Moore's site has also cited in its ability to provide enough water purification to a mid sized city through the air craft carrier now stationed there) which cannot be cheap.

While I can appreciate this as a "hack" to get stuff done in India, it seems a bit unnecessary. As others note, the reason why this works is that it's an implicit threat.

The better alternative is to address the underlying reasons for a lot of the corruption - and that's excessive regulation and costs to register and conform with the law. There's been a lot of work in this area with respect to legal versus off the books capital (e.g. Mystery of Capital by Hernando De Soto). You can quite easily see the plight of the entrepreneur/individual by looking at the World Bank's Doing Business reports - here's India's - http://doingbusiness.org/ExploreEconomies/?economyid=89

e,g.: it takes 13 procedures and 30 days to formally start a business in India versus 6 procedures and 6 days in the US.

This obviously isn't just India either. Most developing countries are like this. It's through regulations and compliance that government officials can seek graft. Streamlining has the effect of not only reducing corruption but making any form of transaction with the state far more efficient resulting in higher growth (there's a positive relationship between GDP growth and better rankings on the World Bank's doing business index).

That's why it's useful to consider best case, worst case, best guess scenarios. It's also why different investors can come up with a wide range of valuations when they get down to considering an investment. In my personal experience, few financiers place significant reliance on projected financials - it's the underlying assumptions / notes that matter.

Just because it's difficult to forecast a year out also doesn't mean that it shouldn't or can't be done especially since investors themselves have to assume that they won't be able to exit within a year. Coming up with better projections for ROI just adds more datapoints from the very people/entrepreneurs who should know their space/market best (especially in more stable industries - I note that Wilson emphasizes that this is how he thinks of non-tech businesses).

This looks even worse for Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC:

- The scientist that made the glacier claim now works for Pachauri - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherboo...

- A possible motive? "Pachauri ... may have raised millions of dollars for his New Delhi institute on the basis of the totally bogus ‘glaciergate’ claim by the IPCC that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035" http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/01/23/ipcc-h... (Walter Russell Mead)

Again, a significant majority of journalists polled by Pew (annually) openly consider themselves to be liberal. It can be argued that this bias doesn't come across in their work product but are you claiming that Chris Matthews is either neutral in that he ingratiates himself to whatever power that happens to be or even tilts right?

Personally I'm not entirely convinced that NPR necessarily tilts left as there was a study conducted a number of years ago that suggested they were actually fairly close to center based on the sources they used in their reporting. Fox apparently only tilts slightly right, and WSJ's news pages actually tilted slightly left.

For Fox News, their rise has only been relatively recent. CNN's massive fall has only been in the last couple years. Further, I would also suggest that the reason WSJ has been so successful is that markets depend on accurate information - and in this, removing bias in favor of details and content is important given their audience makes money on both sides of a trade. Whereas you might say New York Times' aims to influence decision makers, WSJ would attempt to inform them. Of course their editorials tend libertarian/conservative and quite openly so. I completely disagree that most newspaper op-eds tend conservative - particularly given it's the editors themselves who declare themselves as liberal.

However, getting away from bias from a moment, whatever you may think, unabashedly conservative talk radio has found success specifically because it found a rather large underserviced niche. If to you, this means that these people are extremist right wingers is irrelevant. Both the quickly growing audience base of Fox and conservative talk radio (and the failure of Air America) reflect the reality that there was a market that was largely underserviced - and that Air America did not meet that need - despite their medium. It was their underlying message/content that did not resonate.

Not sure I agree. Conservative talk radio has long been gaining momentum even when the situation was reversed (ie Republican House, Senate and White House). Air America was never able to find a viable audience.

I suspect it's more because conservative views have long been an underserviced market (whereas much of the mainstream media tilts left - and quite openly so as per pew poll performed annually if I recall: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1919999).

Have a look here - "The Myth of GDP and Stock Market Returns": http://www.virtus.com/vsitemanager/Upload/Docs/6141_GDPwhite... (PDF).

A few highlights: - "GDP is analogous to sales; stock returns to corporate profits." - "The stock market does not reflect the full economy." - "A company’s profits may be earned outside the country in which it is listed."

I think that's the wrong argument to make. Generally speaking, I think it's wrong for others to force you to be charitable (in the very least, a tax break would be nice if it's about charity) but immigration shouldn't be and isn't about charity.

In fact, most studies point to the positive economic impacts of immigration over time (though there are a number of studies that also point to the short term costs).

He went on to turn the article into a book that was published last month: http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/d...

This is something we're trying to apply to our operations. Definitely not an easy task to convince everyone to use them and like the article says, many people think checklists are beneath them so it's helpful when I can point to data in medicine or now like the article, venture capital.

I agree with you on the unions bit though for the office-less office, I think it's something that will be increasingly common. The barriers to starting your own firm are falling - and falling dramatically, hence the existence of funders like ycombinator. Further, economies of scale have been slowly and quite quickly in some instances, erased because of technology. It should follow that we will see increasingly more (and different types of) small businesses and the ability of people to leverage off their own unique skill sets will rise.

The question then becomes whether or not this will translate into more physical incubator/workspaces or just home offices... this is a tougher call, but with the disappearance of barriers, this will mean more easily that work will happen where it's most productive/valuable - and where this is, because of technology, is changing.

It's not about calling the entire peer review system into question - it's about being skeptical about whether or not results can be trusted on the sole basis they've been peer reviewed - particularly in areas of scientific controversy.

From the linked article: "As Climategate has shown, [the process of peer review] became compromised – causing an instability. As seen in the leaked emails, many within the climate establishment were interrelated and working together to ensure their message of global warming wasn’t diluted. There were even desires to redefine the peer review literature to punish journals that published skeptic’s papers."

It's not just climate science (as I've been reading on nutritional science with Gary Taubes and Robert Lustig).

While serious, I don't think the ramifications of this are greater than the leaked emails - more on that here: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100022157/... (I suspect the words "peer review" will be treated with considerably greater skepticism in the future)

They can and will likely chalk this up to some administrative error, but the underlying contents of the leaked emails, charges of fraud of some of the most prominent authors of the IPCC reports is far more significant. More from a (formerly?) strong supporter of the IPCC reports here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/nov...