You might not be a Republican if...

I just read this little missive from Randall Hoven over at americanthinker.com. I've never heard of him, but he and I seem to hold the shared goal of driving moderates out of the Republican party. I hope he appreciates my assistance:

If you think global warming is more than a socialist plot to control our lives, or if you suspect that the vast majority of climate scientists should be given more credit than a handful of oil-funded skeptics, you might not be a Republican.

If you think that the person who rings you up at Wal-Mart deserves to be paid well enough that she can hope to someday send her kid to college, you might not be a Republican.

If you think that government has a role in protecting us from pollution and unsafe working conditions, you might not be a Republican.

If you think government has a role in preparing for and responding to natural disasters, you might not be a Republican.

If you think that health care is something everyone should be able to access, rather than a reward for not being unemployed or impoverished, you might not be a Republican.

If you think that not all of the twelve million illegal aliens in America have come here to flaunt our laws, steal our jobs, and defile our women; if you think many of them came here to work hard and make better lives for themselves, you might not be a Republican.

If you didn't like the way the Bush administration engaged in wars of choice, undermined the government's ability to enforce its own regulations, handed out no-bid contracts to politically favored cronies, fired talented and dedicated civil servants to replace them with party loyalists, and labeled critics of these actions "traitors", you might not be a Republican.

If you heard Rush Limbaugh say that Colin Powell only endorsed Barack Obama "because he's black", and your stomach lurched a bit, you might not be a Republican.

If you think the rich should shoulder more of the tax burden, you might not be a Republican.

If you don't find the comedic stylings of Ann "We Should Invade Islamic Countries, Kill Their Leaders, and Convert Them to Christianity" Coulter hilarious, you might not be a Republican. Or you might just be a sane Republican, which is cool with me.

If you think that every person deserves society's support in making the most of their lives, you might not be a Republican.

If you think giving the next generation a clean environment and healthy bodies is more important than passing on ever bigger houses and ever wider flatscreen TVs, you might not be a Republican.

If it worries you that the United States incarcerates proportionally more of its citizens than any other country in the world, you might not be a Republican.

If you look at the military budget of the United States -- which is roughly equivalent to the military budget of the rest of the world combined -- and think that some of that money could be better spent elsewhere, you might not be a Republican.

If you think President Obama is a decent human being, an inspiring orator, and (despite some mistakes) is doing his best to fix the mess he inherited, you might not be a Republican.

If you think life ought to be a joyous journey of discovery, rather than a red-toothed battle against enemies real and imagined, you might not be a Republican.

If you think teaching children to share their toys is good parenting, rather than preparation for a life of subservience to a socialist dictatorship, you might not be a Republican.

i tweetz mah statsuses

I have a twitter feed. Nobody but Barack Obama wants to follow me, though.

I've reposted the feed in the sidebar, because, hey, free RSS. Dad always taught me never to turn down free.

As seen on Salon.com!

Is education being rationed?

Clearly, education is being rationed. But I don't think it needs to be. We're doing something to vastly inflate the costs of education.

Consider: what resources are required to successfully pursue an education? People in this discussion are talking about throwing out the luxurious dorm rooms and recreation centers, then dumping the multi-millionaire coaches. But we can think bigger.

Drop the library. Drop the computer lab. Drop the buildings, drop the campus, drop the frat houses, drop every damned thing until you're left with nothing but the exchange of information itself.

All you need to pursue an excellent education are materials to master, projects to practice your knowledge, and expertise to guide your study. The cost of the materials should rapidly be approaching zero. Laugh if you want, but a growing mind could do worse than a steady diet of Wikipedia articles. MIT's OpenCourseWare is putting vast quantities of course material online for free. http://www.academicearth.org/ is a warehouse of thousands of course lectures, the same lectures being given at our most prestigious universities. http://research.google.com/video.html (Google Tech Talks) let you peek in on what happens when the brainiest company in the world brings in outside experts to fill those brains. Open source books are rapidly approaching -- hell, often exceeding -- the quality of books currently being used in the classroom.

That's a lot of material. Thousands of hours of stuff to wander aimlessly through. There is no better time to be a modern-day Abraham Lincoln, someone who hungers to improve his or her mind. But it's easy to get lost, to be left in the middle of a dark forest without a map or compass.

So we need paths. We need a sophisticated, branching curriculum that guides students through entire disciplines, at least as far as a bachelor-level understanding. You want to be a computer scientist? Fine. We'll need to introduce you to the concepts of data structures and algorithms. We'll also need you to understand some basics of programming. Finally, here's the first set of math concepts you'll need. Go to it.

We also need to be able to evaluate where a student stands in regard to those concepts and materials. In short, we need tests. Exams could be very brief and very discriminating. It should be relatively easy to create software that can quickly gauge a student's understanding of a set of concepts, with nothing but a set of multiple-choice questions. Given the student's responses, it should be able to say exactly which concepts the student isn't grasping, and recommend further study materials that address the concepts.

Teachers aren't going to lose their preeminent positions, but their roles would change somewhat. They would still be defining curricula, but there would be a lot less of that. Rather than teaching an entire course to the same set of students, and figuring out how to lead one group along the entire path, they would master the art of nudging students out of their unique ruts, answering questions, suggesting projects, etc. The students would be learning at their own pace, the software would be doing the day-to-day guidance and evaluation, and the teacher would be troubleshooting from the sidelines. I would hope that there would also be much more time for research.

Once the foundational work is done -- the materials collected and organized, the curricula defined, the software written -- all that's left is for a group of people to have the huevos rancheros to step up and accredit the process, to make the bold claim that their college can give your child a quality education for a couple grand a year (plus tips).

Your children can participate from anywhere. Still living at home? Backpacking through Europe? On work release? It hardly matters. Wherever you and your Kindle are, you have the materials you need, and know what to study next.

The current model is broken as hell. Like the health care industry, we pay too much into it, and get too little out. The difference is, the process of maintaining the vast complexities of the human body is far more difficult -- and necessarily more resource intensive -- than the process of putting knowledge into a human skull. Ninety percent of it is just getting out of the brain's way and letting it work.

The WTBI trends upward

Today, in my efforts to singlehandedly salvage the economy, I have devised an indicator of our overall economic health. It's called the WTBI, the We're Totally Boned Indicator. It multiplies the seasonally adjusted GDP of the United States by the consumer confidence index, then divides by the percentage of Americans with health insurance (not including Blue Cross, because it's crap), then adds the expected number of years until either The Singularity or the Zombpocalypse renders the economy moot multiplied by the eighth root of the national debt, divided by the number of times Glenn Beck used the word "socialism" on his last show. The sum is then multiplied by the Krugman inconstant, which is whatever value it needs to be so that the overall answer is 7.3 (pretty boned).

The bonededness indicated by the WTBI could spring from a variety of sources. But I think it's reacting to early evidence that the government's "bad bank" plan will be a singularly high-bonosity event. Here's the deal: You know all that money we gave to Citibank and Bank of America, so that they would be able to survive despite despite having all those "troubled assets" on their balance sheets? So that they could keep lending out money, so that the economy wouldn't go down like a submarine piloted by rabid chihuahuas?

Well, they're not loaning out the money. We knew that already, both because it's been on the news and because I'm still unable to get financing for the Samuel T. Swartwout Memorial Water Slide and Killer Robot Thunderdome.* We already knew that they were instead using some of that money to buy out their smaller, more responsible competitors. What we've just learned is that they're also using the money to buy up more troubled assets!

Why does this make sense? Three reasons:

1) The banks are gambling with taxpayer money, so hey, why not?
2) When the government starts buying the assets -- correction, starts buying the risks associated with these assets, while letting our corporate masters buy up the rewards -- the troubled assets will be selling for quite a bit more than they can be sold for now.
3) Buying new junk inflates the prices currently being paid in the market, which makes the junk already piled in your backyard look more valuable.**

That fuzzy line between "saving vital parts of our financial infrastructure" and "raining taxpayer money down on the fine Americans who smashed the machine in the first place" just got a whole lot fuzzier.

When Russia collapsed, it was because the entire country was looted from the inside by corrupt oligarchs. Fortunately, we're not Russia. Unfortunately, the main difference is that they knew how to live on vodka and borscht, and were therefore more prepared for the decline. Barack, you promised hope and change? You see what's going on here? Change that!

I'm not hopeful.



* Opens Spring 2017. Closed by health department, Fall 2018.

** Thought experiment. Say that two guys, Bill and Phil, both have a pile of rusty carburetor parts in their backyard. They both have wives, who want the crap gone. They both put up some ads on Craigslist, they each sell the other $300 worth of parts, and then point to the ads and to the successful sales as evidence that the parts are nothing short of rusty gold.

Wait a minute. I think I've found the way to revive our economy. Timmy, get Geitner on the phone!

Arrogance, Irresponsibility, Greed. AIG.

Now that even the crappiest mortgages could be sold to conservative investors, the CDOs spurred a massive explosion of irresponsible and predatory lending. In fact, there was such a crush to underwrite CDOs that it became hard to find enough subprime mortgages — read: enough unemployed meth dealers willing to buy million-dollar homes for no money down — to fill them all.

-- Matt Taibbi, The Big Takeover

You mean, it wasn't poor, innocent banks being forced to hand out bad loans by an evil, socialist government? You, sir, have crossed the line.

If you want to know how we got into this mess, and which people don't deserve to be pulled out of it, read the article.

Recycling coal plants?

So I was doing some research concentrating solar power (read: wandering around Wikipedia), when I clicked on a link to a supposed solar project using a fresnel collector. Huh. Looks like a coal plant. Read read read... it is a coal plant.

Why is this coal plant on Wikipedia's list of solar thermal projects? It seems so obvious in retrospect. Coal fired plants burn coal, which heats water, which drives a turbine. Solar thermal arrays heat oil, which heats water, which drives a turbine. So the plant simply set up a solar collector next to the plant, hooked pipe A up to pipe B,* and turned it into a combined-cycle coal-solar plant with 35MW of solar capacity.

Very clever. I approve.

If we can find existing coal plants in the western states that are also in particularly sunny areas, this would be a fast, cheap way to ramp up our existing solar capacity. Concentrating solar is already cheap, but this would make it even cheaper, by eliminating the need to build the actual generators. The coal plant already has them. It also eliminates the (somewhat overhyped) argument that solar is too intermittent, because the plant can always burn more coal when the solar isn't producing.

True, solar contributes less than 2% of the Liddell plant's energy production. While that's going to double soon, it still seems like a pretty small gesture. Perhaps I should wait until I hear of a coal plant switching over to 50% solar before getting excited.

But it seems like a way forward.

To kill time, I started looking for coal plants in Utah that might be suited for such an upgrade. Most of Utah's coal plants are located in Central Utah, which may limit their utility in the winter, but it's still interesting to contemplate. Thanks to the ever-helpful Sourcewatch, I found The Intermountain Power Station, a plant in Delta. Just going by the Google Maps satellite picture, it looks promising. It's in a flat area, and surrounded by empty space.

Best of all, the plant is owned by the City of Los Angeles, so it may be unusually responsive to political pressures. I think a lot of Los Angelinos would be surprised to find out that their city even owned a coal plant.

But as I said, it's a little outside the sunbelt. Arizona would probably be a more likely target.



* I believe I may be oversimplifying here.

Clay Shirky's cognitive surplus

Clay Shirky's Gin, Television, and Social Surplus was written back in the dark ages of the Internet (early 2008), but I still get a kick out of it. Like me, Shirky is fascinated by online collaboration, and how it's remaking society from the ground up. Unlike me, people listen to him.

Highlights: Wikipedia was built with fewer man-hours than America collectively squanders on watching commercials on a given weekend. As infrastructure develops for capturing societal knowledge in useful ways, this sort of useful, consciously creative activity will supplant much of our TV watching time, and the results will make for a much more intricate and interesting society.

Right now, Shirky says most of the examples we're seeing are special cases: a Wikipedia here, a Facebook there. But we'll develop more general-purpose systems that can capture more of our thinking in useful forms.

Also, four year olds demand that their TVs have mice, and even Warcraft is more fulfilling than trying to decide whether Ginger or Maryann is cuter.

Afterword: Writing this, I've just realized that I'm in phase three of the road to personal technological obsolescence*. I believe the road was first described by Scott Adams (the Dilbert guy). It goes, roughly:

1) Age 0-15: this is just the way the world works. It would be unnatural for it to be any other way.
2) Age 16-22: This thing I'm doing is nifty.
3) Age 23-35: This thing other people are doing is nifty, and I think we can make use of it.
4) Age 36-100000: Bah! Why can't kids these days just do it the old way?



* Note: This is a very hard word to spell.

So, who's been president this last week?

Thanks to Stephen Colbert for first asking the question.

The stock market is way up this week, on news that Obama is canceling his original agenda in favor of an "all tax cuts, all the time" program. He's dumped health care reform, kicked carbon dioxide caps to the curb, and brought Grover Norquist in as a special adviser.

In the right's wildest dreams. In fact, the only thing true about that paragraph is that the market is way up.

The Republicans have been piling on since Obama took office, saying that every new slip of the Dow was a vote of no confidence by the economy and -- by extension -- the American people. Forget that it started sliding nearly eighteen months before Obama took office. Forget that we're still uncovering new ways in which our financial institutions screwed us this last decade. Forget that it took Reagan -- the Right's exemplar of how to run an economy -- two years to get the Dow back up to where it was when he took office. No, Obama must immediately turn back the landslide, or be branded a failure.

Hell, that guy who wrote Dow 36,000 at the absolute peak of the tech bubble was even shoveling it out, calling Obama a "Manchurian candidate" sent to assassinate the economy. In the author bio after the article, it touts the fact that that John McCain was taking economic advice from him during the 2008 campaign. That explains a lot.

But I ask you, now that the stock market is rising, in the absence of any indication of a presidential rightward turn, will they start singing the praises of Barack Obama, Economic Wizard? Will they even admit that it might have been simplistic to link the fortunes of the Dow too closely to every presidential utterance?

I doubt it. I think that, for the duration of the Dow's recovery, those arguments will be quietly put into storage, in the hopes of keeping them sharp and free of rust for the next downturn. In the meantime, expect Sean Hannity to take to the airwaves and explain that the market isn't recovering, it's "crashing upwards."

Afterword:

Dow 36,000 guy made some interesting -- and by "interesting", I mean the opposite -- claims about how Obama's agenda would destroy entrepreneurship and innovation. He seem especially disturbed about the idea that some people might start getting free health care. I'll cut and paste my response from Dan Gillmor over at boingboing:

America's health-care system makes it all but impossible for an older worker to try something new.

Even younger startup owners who are relatively healthy and have insurance are just a half-step from disaster. The insurance industry is in the business of not paying claims whenever possible, after all, and health insurers are working hardest to find ways not to cover people who might get sick even as they deny as many claims as possible from people who've been paying premiums.

The day we have national health care is the day that we unleash a wave of entrepreneurship the likes of which we've never seen before. That's one of the best reasons for moving toward such a system.

wherein I point out that Rush Limbaugh is Fat

I'm always the last to the party, but here's my take on the Obama/Limbaugh kerfuffle, with some asides on why Oprah exceeds Rush.

Also from Salon:

On Monday, at 8:30 a.m., I turned on CNBC and started watching the business channel for the first time in my life. Twelve hours later, a long stare through the peacock-colored looking glass had shaken me. I was huddled in the corner of my living room couch, arms hugging my knees, wondering why the angry faces on-screen were yelling at me. [src]

A picture is worth about 40% of what you paid for it

Gather 'round, kids, while grandpappy Bryce tells you how he squandered your inheritance.