Author: alan

How low does a presidential candidate have to go on Intrade before they get de-listed?

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9:47 PM – “Senator Obama will tell you, as the extreme environmentalists do, [nuclear energy] has to be safe.”

Both via.

New Flagpole column. Wherein I broach the topic of systems, how that our living in a closed system may run counter to the idealized versions of our potential and destiny and how that’s just too bad. And quote GW Carver.

I know, I know: Amazing.

I’ve been getting too far away from the marketing end of this phenomenon; there are just too many tall weeds in every direction, it’s like fishing from a submarine. So let’s over-correct.

Evidently, consumer recall of ‘green’ (I’m beginning not to know which word to put in quotes) messaging is very high, with more than a third saying they are in the pocket and know what they companies mean when they say it. Nonprofits have know this for a while. Greenpeace took it’s very name from combining two words outside of their common usage. And remember, they’ve been around since 1971. Fashion brands, like the Diesel ad above, have been going meta on this for a while, offering their products as ‘global warming ready’ and similar tripe, spooning what remains of cheeky glamour onto the crisis just for good measure. No wonder, I mean we seem ripe for it and the extent to which they’re sure we already understand the concept necessarily means they in turn must now include a blast of detached irony with every pair of jeans.

But the non-news that it works to identify your product with this new NEW, as it were, is essentially what our own little virtual inland empire here is all about, that we should define green before it becomes the old new, or whatever. The added folly is that what the ad trends are latching onto IS actually about something that matters, a something that could contribute to the solution though it – conservation, knowing where your stuff comes from – will necessitate the disappearance of most of the products now touting greenery. How’s that for ironicality.

Case in point. To demonstrate at least the partial failing of the truth above, I saw a couple of versions of a green TV ad this weekend, I think it was IBM but I can’t remember(!). Anyway, the commercial/video, which took place in an elevator with an attractive young woman and dorky guy, said very little about green other than IBM or HP was going green. No big surprise that it neither described much less explained what or how they were going envy or young or enviro. But they were advancing the ball down field, and like the surveys report, I’m sure more than a solid third noticed.

They didn’t need to talk about green; it was embossed in the commercial with a cartoon tree and animals chirping around in the elevator. Things were changing, she explained to the dork. And indeed they are.

The style was very much like this. They might be the marketing genii who are bringing the green, but it can’t be just them. So watch for this sorta new imprimatur on more and more ads. The ad companies are realizing that they should just take stylistic shortcuts with things they can’t or don’t want to explain, as if that’s all you need or want to know anyway.

Not to say that stylistic shortcuts aren’t legit, as you can see.

They just need to choke up on the side of substance, then swing for the fence.

Man, have the Elements of Style changed. Okay, not those, but Holy crap. Is this evil? Because if it is, then… No lie, I want to have it on a wall in my house, a huge cellular automata simulating heat dynamics.

But it does go green before it goes blue, before it goes black; remind you of anything? I’m just sayin’.

Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria writes:

The financial industry itself is likely to shrink, and that’s not a bad thing, either. It has ballooned dramatically in size. Curry points out that “30 percent of S&P 500 profits last year were earned by financial firms, and U.S. consumers were spending $800 billion more than they earned every year. As a result, most of our top math Ph.D.s were being pulled into nonproductive financial engineering instead of biotech research and fuel technology. Capital expenditures went into retail construction instead of critical infrastructure.” The crisis will stop the misallocation of human and financial resources and redirect them in more-productive ways. If some of the smart people now on Wall Street end up building better models of energy usage and efficiency, that would be a net gain for the economy.

And I’m thinking quants – quantitative analysts – where did that come from? Then I remembered this short story from Technology Review from about a year ago:

This summer, as a meltdown in the subprime credit market spilled over into other markets, all eyes were on the mathematically trained financial engineers known as “quants.”

It’s stuck behind a paywall (we actually have one of these quaint, old thingies: a subscription), but the writer lays out, unintentionally I think, a pretty bleak picture of what these people described by Zakaria were up to, what pulled them into it and… kind of how the bathroom we all just woke up in was initially plumbed and wall-papered. It’s a dystopian existence all the way around, predicated on mere and seemingly harmless greed, infinite consumption and numbers… real and imagined.

So, we say green is used as slang for money, but we need to unpack that a little. Wealth should stand for much more than financial holdings. There is a wealth of highly educated people, or at least people with access to higher education, who simply want to see the money. And this is only some of the wealth we’re squandering; political ideologies program people, who in turn have little people whom they program. By programming these people only to look out for themselves, to move in for the kill as a career move, we’re cutting corners on key ingredients to democracy and civil, functioning society, green or otherwise. When we, through language, teach them to see their fellow citizens only as consumers, we’re making our own beds.

And if you think this sounds Socialist, listen to Soros say it.

Oh, and along these lines major props to Krugman today. Congratulations.

Former cabinet secretary Robert Reich says the Dow is tanking because (American) people are finally maxed out:

The central fact is this: Consumers in the real economy are coming to the end of their capacities to keep spending. They can’t take on any more debt. And with the costs of energy, food, and health insurance all soaring, they’re doing the only thing they can. They’re pulling in their belts. They’re leaving the malls. They’re not buying a new car or TV or anything else they can do without.

Of course I love the ‘what does… ‘ construction. So one set of players is fatally beleaguered, just as another set comes to grips with their own individual and collective irrationality. As another way to try to understand what was going on at the supposed high side, with the traders and fund managers, maybe an analysis of actual brain behavior is in order.

Because we assess risk and reward separately, and not as part of some unified Bayesian equation, we’re able to selectively inhibit those brain areas warning us of risk.

Something, whether it is the age of living on credit or the epoch of trading up on endless expansion, is coming to an end. As it appears that these are the means that transported us to the current enviromental, resource-depleted precipice, perhaps its not such a bad thing. If we had our choice, the party would have gone on forever, or at least until the liquor ran out. But it has run out, AND now we’re living too far from the pack-y to just run out and get some more. Will we sober up first before making a list of exactly what we need?

I’m not talking about things. Economies of scale, a living, human scale, would have to be the party of the first part – the goal of creating and recreating these is decidedly NOT pie in the sky. It’s all about  reconfiguring transportation policy (transit!) and high-density land-use, spending priorities that can set this direction at the federal, state and local level, much as we once set our societal compass toward living apart, in far-flung pockets. Most every sour bet that is being called in right now is the result of the over-leveraging that was required for us to live out of scale with our actual means.

When we’re out of balance, we re-balance. This is necessarily going to mean people. living. closer. together. And yes, all kinds. Having said all this and it being Friday, I’ll leave it with L-F Celine:

As long as we’re young, we manage to find excuses for the stoniest indifference, the most blatant caddishness, we put them down to emotional eccentricity or some sort of romantic inexperience. But later on, when life shows us how much cunning, cruelty and malice are required, just to keep the body at ninety-eight point six, we catch on, we know the score, we begin to understand how much swinishness it takes to make up a past. Just take a look at yourself and the degree of rottenness you’ve come to. There’s no mystery about it, no more room for fairy tales; if you’ve lived this long, it’s because you’ve squashed any poetry you had in you. Life is keeping body and soul together.

Image: logs destined for saw mills stored along the Fraser River, Vancouver, BC

Saw a few minutes of the 60 minutes episode the other night about the electric car industry springing up in Silicon valley. It seems these tech bubble entrepreneurs are pouring many millions into car start-ups or making their dough available as VC. The Tesla coupe looks cool, beyond the concept-phase and they’ve already got a big backlog of orders. GM is getting on board with the Chevy Volt, but the troubles of the big three make this a sucker’s bet by them – too much like gambling really, like a last gasp, hail Mary. But hail Marys sometimes work.

For more Electric car pr0n, check out some of the offerings from the recent Paris Motor show. Slick.

But the whole thing brings up a bigger issue, what Kunstler refers to as the general American paradigm of “Happy Motoring.” The engine on which this model is based – cheap gas – is just not going to be able to continue. So whether electric cars are green seems to be academic when the model itself is pretty much over. But… are electric cars green?

It seems axiomatic to say that greenhouse emissions would drop considerably if we were plugging in our cars, even if they were running on energy from dirty coal plants. But it’s not true.

Coal generates more CO2 per unit of energy than petroleum. As a pure carbon, coal’s C atoms bond to each other. As a hydrocarbon, petroleum’s carbon atoms are also bonded to hydrogen atoms. These are the bonds that are broken in combustion (providing power), which releases molecules of, in the case of petro, H2O and CO2. In the case of coal, only CO2, because there is no H.

So… running cars on coal-fired power plants = double no good. But a long term advantage to developing electric cars is that they could and will be powered from a source of electricity other than coal.

So he was also inventor, which, knowing what we know about what he knew, shouldn’t surprise anybody. An electrical engineer in the UK is bringing back a design patented by Einstein that uses no electricity. The design replaces freon with ammonia, butane and water and

takes advantage of low air pressure to reduce the boiling point of butane. In order to achieve a cooling effect, butane is heated into a gaseous state and then mixed with ammonia before being passed through a water-filled condenser. Here, the ammonia dissolves and the butane is released, before the cycle begins again.

Again, look at the date on the design. 19 friggin’ 30. What have we been doing?