The monkey on ones back
I've just been listening to stories from a friend of mine about his new
place of work. Simple things like getting support have to go through
other departments and are quietly filed and ignored. New software is
anathema. Fixing problems is impossible, because it would admit that
the problem existed. People are regularly bullied into doing things
that are way outside their job descriptions. No-one knows the passwords
to any machines and point the finger at other people in an endless
circle. Managers actively suppress any dissent.
But the worse is yet to come. This place uses billions of tax-payers money and its budget continues to expand. Even revealing the name of this organisation or any substantiated claims can be considered treason and is a criminal offence. The money gets used on projects that regularly get cancelled, delayed and changed and often end up costing orders of magnitude more than originally budgeted. Any questioning of the spending is considered unpatriotic. Powerful people with distinguished careers have stood up to this organisation only to find themselves cut off and facing the sharp end of the law.
How does society get rid of this cancer? The theoretical function of
this organisation and its actual activities are so different as to
almost be antithetical. Yet it seems impossible to actually change
it, fix it or remove the harmful elements from it. Surely the only
thing to do is to scrap the entire thing and start afresh. Yet that
too would be considered heretical or traitorous by some. What can we
do?
posted at: 16:00 | path: /society/politics | permanent link to this entry
New-age terrorists develop homeopathic bomb
New-age
terrorists develop homeopathic bomb
Imagine the terror that the world could be brought to with this new technique. All it would take would be a couple of drops of sugar solution or vitamins into the town's water supply, and tapping the reservoir in a specific way, to cause mass outbreaks of disease and poisoning (for if the toxin creates the antitoxin, something beneficial must create something harmful). A couple of taps by a nefarious homeopathic passer-by on your glass of water and whatever good elements that were in it could be instantly transformed into a deadly drink. And it would be completely indistinguishable from ordinary harmless water.
If, of course, homeopathy was actually true.
The question I want to put to a homeopathist is: how do you remove the memory of all the other stuff from the water? Surely just as you're tapping the water to activate the memory of the antitoxin of arsenic or hemlock or whatever, you're also activating the memory of the antitoxin of the urine and whatever else has been put in that water over time, diluted over centuries and millennia of use. I mean, there are lots of other questions to ask - how do you know you've processed the water enough? How does the toxin create the antitoxin? How does the memory stay in the water? Why do you continually refuse to go with any kind of scientific, double-blind trial of your medicine? and so forth. But I'd like to know why it is that they can be so sure that this phial of water is just carrying the one specific treatment and is now not just a broad-spectrum cureall for every disease and illness that have ever been in the water at all?
It's all garbage. The sooner these deluded people are taken out of
the system and prevented from administering placebos to people that
need real medication, the better.
posted at: 11:54 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Political dogma
I, like pretty much everyone now, am opposed to the Australian Federal
Labor Party's 'Clean Feed' mandatory internet filtering proposal. It
won't stop paedophiles getting access to child pornography, it won't
protect children from abuse, it won't stop people getting access to
illegal content or content on the Refused Classification list, and it
will almost certainly generate a huge number of false positives,
blocking much legal content. It will slow internet access down, it
has enormous potential to be abused for political or commercial gain,
the list of refused classification sites has no judicial or public
oversight, and Senator Conroy has avoided any actual definition of what
goes on the blocked list. It's stupid, it's bound to fail, and no-one
wants it.
So why, why, are Senator Conroy and Prime Minister Rudd continuing to not only support it but insist that it be put in place?
Every time this issue comes up, at work or with friends, that is the question on everyone's lips. Why does the minister continue to insist that it must be put in place? Why are they ignoring the overwhelming technical flaws in its implementation? Why do they even think that it will do what they say it will, when everyone else has positive proof that it won't? Why are they defying the wishes of the actual citizens who voted them in, 90% of whom don't want any internet filtering? Why?
I think we can conclusively say, from the evidence of Stephen Conroy's and Kevin Rudd's words, that this has gone beyond a debatable issue. They continually label everyone else's views as extremist and denigrate opposition as supporting the things they claim the filter is against. They continually ignore all the evidence that says that the filter will not work and insist that it will. This is no longer reasonable - this is dogma. They have an absolute and unwavering faith that the filter will work - that it must work - and nothing is going to change that view at all.
No protest will work. No petitions will sway them. No carefully crafted arguments will change their mind. Stupid attempts to DDOS Government websites will only make them more committed to ignoring all nay-sayers. Don't bother to blow up a bus or threaten to start shooting parliamentarians, it won't change their minds. In my opinion they will be ignoring their friends, their fellow Senators and Ministers, and they will be talking to all of them trying to convince them of the truth of their dogma, so while we should all write to our representatives in the houses of parliament - local, state and federal - little will be done by this; we will get form letters but the volume of complaints will make some small difference.
So what do we do now? How do you win an argument with a person who denies everything you say is true and calls you a supporter of the bad guys? How do we, the people of Australia, conduct a Representative Democracy when our elected Senators and leaders refuse to listen to us?
What do we do?
posted at: 00:42 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Lost Opportunities 001
Attention anyone looking for a business proposition - set up an electric
vehicles parts supplier business on the eastern coast of Australia.
There is a small but thriving market here for batteries, motors, controllers, and most importantly the peripherals that bind them all together. The problem for most hobbyists - and that which puts them off committing more money sooner - is that each one of these parts has to be individually sourced, often from the USA or China. Few people like paying thousands of dollars, including lots of shipping fees and import duties, and waiting weeks or months in order to find out whether the part they've ordered works with their planned setup or not. Having a local supplier would mean a lot more purchases.
Sure, there's EVWorks over in Perth. Dennis has been relatively helpful to my enquiries and stocks a good range of batteries and other things. I'll probably buy most of my stuff from him. But he's very busy, not only with running the store but with his own instals, and I still begrudge having to freight a hundred odd kilos of batteries across from Perth to Canberra. Having a supplier in Sydney or even Melbourne would cut down on that considerably.
If I was able to, I'd do it; but overcommitment and inexperience prevent
me from pursuing it. So I'll have to hope that someone else takes up the
baton.
posted at: 23:20 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Capitalising on success
I watched "RiP: A
Remix Manifesto" the other day on SBS - good on them for showing it
on mainstream TV. I fear it won't really have reached many more than
people like myself, who already know the problems and want to get to
the solution, but on the other hand any activism is good in this issue,
because there are a bunch of memes we're fighting against here that need
taking down good and proper.
The main one that struck me now is that the underlying theme is hypocrisy. The copyright industry is hypocritical in so many ways that it just permeates the whole process. Take, as an example, Walt Disney animating the old fairy tales - Snow White, Pinnochio, Cinderella, and so on; these were stories that had no copyright attached, and then Walt Disney (by redoing them) attached a copyright to them and prevented anyone from using them. That's perhaps a broad statement, but just imagine reprinting the story of Snow White and illustrating it without being a target for lawsuits from Disney Corporation - it's basically unthinkable. That's how much Disney has appropriated an out of copyright story and put their own copyright on it. The film documents countless other examples of artists using a riff or melody from someone else who's no longer around (or large enough, or is still naive enough to think that it's OK), and then suing any further artists who try to do the same thing with the melody they've just appropriated.
Strangely, I see this hypocrisy as actually now forming the basis of the whole "intellectual property" castle in the sky. Ask yourself why we have the laws of copyright, patents and intellectual property. Well, you tell yourself, imagine I'm some inventor with a brand new gadget, or a musician with a new song, or a film-maker with a new movie. If I don't "protect" that new thing, someone's going to come along and rip it off, and all my hard work will have been wasted because the cost of duplicating my work is much less for them than for me. That's why we have "All Rights Reserved" on CDs - because the idea that someone could take your hot drum lick and make the next Amen Break out of it and become instantly famous without paying you a cent and leaving your less popular work mouldering in the dust is a harsh thought to bear.
But let's think about this for a moment. Who is actually likely to carry out this threat here? Well, it might be someone you know or someone you show your thing to, but even in the days of ubiquitous internet distribution that's still a tiny tiny fraction of the actual people around. (Remember, we're ordinary people, we're not already famous - so we're unlikely to have people targeting us specifically.) For the most part the people that actually appropriate our work are going to be people just like us - artists, inventors, photographers, sculptors, and so on - and we all know what goes around comes around, and sooner or later if I copy my next door neighbour's work she's going to find out. Likewise, they probably don't have a huge internet following or lots of money to print CDs or pictures, so their ability to actually capitalise on taking our idea is limited. So it's not likely that we are the people who will take our fellow person's intellectual property and rip it off.
The people we have to most watch out for have three basic properties. One is lots of money - it means that any costs of duplicating our ideas isn't going to be an immediate barrier. Two is lots of distribution - not just big servers or copying machines but the ability to take that idea and distribute it to lots of people to generate some sales. Three is legal untouchability - not that they might be right in taking our thing (we've already established that we're using patents or copyright or whatever to prevent that) but the ability to entangle us in legal battles far beyond our resources to fight - or even the ability to take that new spatula idea and sell two million of them in China where you never go and have no knowledge. Who has all these three properties in one?
Well, it's obviously a what: the big corporations. That's right, the same big corporations who have been telling us that copyright and patents and intellectual property is for our own good; that it protects the artists who are just like us, that it stops people doing things we don't want with our ideas, and (in the case of patents) it helps puts ideas in the public domain for everyone to use. And we know that at the same time they're telling us its for our own good they're forcing us to pay for everything and fighting against every possible fair use of their products. It's hypocrisy on such an awesome scale that it's hard to take it all in.
I mean, we know that companies like Microsoft regularly rip off everyone else's intellectual property (e.g. the i4i lawsuit) at the same time as their vigorously defending their own intellectual property (e.g. the Tomtom lawsuit). We know in the software industry that its an unwritten rule not to look at anything that even hints of anyone else's intellectual property lest you be found to be deliberately infringing (rather than just 'accidentally' coming up with the same idea). We know that our ideas down here at the bottom of the heap don't matter one whit and its only the big end of town that gets a patent on every little idea they have and enforces it. We know that that "intellectual property" is being so vigorously enforced that DVDs force you to watch their ads and CDs install root kits to prevent you copying them and other forms of massive collateral damage in the neverending hopeless quest to prevent ideas doing what they do naturally, which is spread.
And yet to sell us on the idea that it's for our own good that we submit to this kind of intellectual thuggery takes guts. Guts, I'd argue, and a complete and childlike faith that the system is right.
Because we know that "intellectual property" is really a dead end. It's a noose that the corporations have made for us, but it tightens not around our necks but theirs, slowly choking them of talent and ideas and good will until they thrash around gasping desperately for the people that will not buy their goods and will not sell their ideas to them and will not buy into the marketing. We've known this since before John Lennon wrote "Imagine", but a more forceful statement of the truth is hard to find.
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one; I hope some day you will join us and the earth will live as one.
Postscript: I'm surprised that it's not made more of in the film, but the
absolute key statement of the pro-copyright position is in the section
where a spokesman from the RIAA talks to a bunch of schoolchildren about
illegal copying. One kid asks him why they charge so much for copying
each song (with the tacit comparison to the little you can pay for the
same song if you'd bought it on a CD), and he goes briefly into a spiel
about copyright. He posits writing a song about love, and as an aside
says "Of course, I can't copyright the idea of love, boy, I'd love
it if I could do that..." (emphasis, of course, mine). If they
could get away with it, they would copyright the idea of love, and
charge everyone who feels it in whatever form at whatever time howsoever
derived. The fact that he even thinks it not only contemplatable but
desirable that one person could own the idea of love and prevent others
from thinking about it or feeling it shows how truly beyond rationality
the intellectual property corporations are.
posted at: 00:26 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Rocket fuel to the fire
I am finally moved to ponder on the Israeli invasion into Gaza. Of course,
I would like to see an end to the conflict and I think Israel's attack is
fairly high-handed. But it seems to me to be an act of sheer lunacy for
Hamas militants to fire more rockets into Israel. What's their
logic? Do they think that Israel will suddenly be cowed by this display
of defiance? That if they try to even up the 10:1 ratio of Palestinian
to Israeli deaths in the conflict that Israel will get cold feet? That
Israel will be pressured into withdrawing and then Hamas can try to get
some kind of pathetic revenge? That there's far too many virgins in heaven
and every Hamas militant should get their fair share? That while everyone
is watching Israel a few rockets and civilian deaths will go un-noticed?
Really, it's not only stupid but actually harmful behaviour. It's the kind of moronic eye-for-an-eye retaliation that gives the lie to any claims to be the victim in the conflict. If I were in Israel's position, with a bunch of barely-controlled militant lunatics with delusions of importance and a determination to wipe my nation off the face of the earth whatever the cost, I wouldn't exactly be tippy-toeing and being polite to them in every circumstance either. The sad thing is that Palestine has brought this on itself - Hamas recieves considerable (questionable) funding, it got elected on the basis of spreading this money about, and then Palestinian civilians are getting caught in the cross-fire between their own lunatic fringe government and the hornets nest they decided to stir.
It's the same sad process of politics, really - you vote John Howard in
because he said he wasn't going to put in a GST, and then he turns around
and says it wasn't a core promise; you vote Hamas in because they said
they were going to pay for hospitals and schools and instead they smuggle
rockets and arms in and take pot-shots at Israeli civilians. And the
world gets stuck with the fall-out.
posted at: 17:07 | path: /society/politics | permanent link to this entry
Words For The Next Decade
I had a realisation last night that there's a new word that I suspect will
be entering the news lexicon soon. That word is
The Urban Dictionary, which I won't link to here, has an alternate definition which basically is a derogatory term for someone too obsessed with the environment. I don't think this is using the -pathy suffix - meaning 'suffering or disease' - correctly; but then I'm sure the Urban Dictionary doesn't really care.
What it comes down to, for me, is that I believe that there are people and
companies whose view point on the Earth and the natural world is that it is
simply there for exploitation. They seem to believe that we can not just
keep on doing what we've been doing, but actually find new ways to exploit
the world, and the consequences simply don't apply to them. In this, my
basic stance is completely the opposite - I believe it's time to do
everything we possibly can to save the planet we live in. I also side with
my dad's line of reasoning on this, in that I can afford to be wrong, but
they can't.
posted at: 10:54 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Go to the Courts
There is a state in playing Go
where one recognises that a move might seem to give one a small gain in
pieces now but gives more power to ones opponent in the long run. While
I still struggle with this, and the larger question of 'what should I
play so that I do gain advantage over my opponent in the long run'
is one I still find exceptionally difficult to grasp, I have at least
started to recognise that getting a single eye now may actually give my
opponent a double eye later.
It occurs to me, albeit as a layman with little knowledge of the real processes of law in and out of the courts, that there is a common pattern to high-profile law cases. If the objective is for A to win over B, then it is:
So what's odd in the whole Nine versus IceTV is that Nine has done this:
I'm sure the legal minefield starts well back at the start of that previous paragraph, and so I defer to Kim Weatherall and other experts, but when courts start handing down legal judgements that imply that almost any information is copywritable by someone makes the whole existence of facts in the public domain highly tenuous. Can someone copyright my name? My address? Do I somehow own a copyright to my particular choice of phone number and address that means that Telstra owes me money every time they print a phone book? (Note here that when it came to moving house most recently, I was given the choice of a couple of numbers by Telstra and I chose the one I liked - therefore, it wasn't Telstra's creative input that determined my phone number, it was mine.) If someone uses the word "PaulWay" in a way that I don't like, and I've been using it since 1992 and therefore have 15 years of established usage to back it up (again, having chosen that name creatively), can I sue them for copyright infringement without ever having to register it as a trademark? And if it's a copyright infringement, do I get those penalties that the APRA and ACA and so forth have fought for - penalties that are much worse than if it was just a defamation or trademark infringement case? Can you go to prison for creating a post-it note that copies your bus timetable or a person's phone number?
Yes, I know, it's all wild speculation. But this whole judgement feels completely at odds with how people really think about facts and raw information. While I respect the old style of directory compilation, to me it still doesn't equate to a monopoly on the information so collected. The whole "sweat of the brow" protection - that the labour itself makes it enough to be protected - doesn't wash with me, especially in a world where facts, information, opinions and news wash over us almost continually.
Anyway, back to my point. I think that Nine has, in their attempt to
get their way in the short term, actually meant that IceTV will triumph
in the end. By presenting a case based on such a skewed interpretation
of the Australian copyright laws as they apply to facts and information,
they've opened it up to the High Court leaning in the opposite direction
and blowing Nine out of the water (and, I'd say, causing a considerable
re-evaluation of the Desktop Systems vs Telstra case).
posted at: 16:57 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Tougher recycling
At the moment, recycling is by and large a voluntary affair. We
private citizens mostly have recycling bins, and a reasonable
proportion of the populace put the correct stuff in them. Companies
and Government too are catching on, with recycling bins appearing in
tea rooms and beside desks and photocopiers. I've even been bringing
my own compost bin into work, and that's been getting a reasonable
quantity of scraps in it.
However, it seems to me that there are two barriers to this being a much more wide-spread and profitable industry. The first is that in many places it's difficult to know exactly what can be recycled. In many instances, things which can be recycled aren't marked with the appropriate symbols, or the bins which take the recycling aren't marked to say what exactly they can take. As another example, if you move house in Melbourne (for example) what you can actually put in your recycling bin, as well as its size, can vary dramatically. In my view, people will tend to be conservative and not put things in the recycling bin which could be recycled in case they can't, instead of the more optimistic opposite approach.
But it seems to me that this is a minor concern compared with the fundamental problem, which is illustrated in my first sentence. The fact that it's completely voluntary, combined with the complete absence of any feedback regarding whether you're doing the right thing or not, means that the wasters out there have absolutely no incentive to change. They can keep on throwing their cans, cardboard, plastic boxes and bottles and paper into the garbage and it will keep on being merrily taken away and put into landfill, and they never have to lift a finger to change.
As a case in point, I noticed on the way into my work that there is a large skip outside the deliveries entrance. It's being used because there are building renovations going on and the scrap material is going into the bin. It was quite easy for me to see that there were may cardboard boxes and metal wall divisions, all of which could be easily recycled. While I know that a couple of the waste skip hire companies in Canberra do actually send all their rubbish through the recycling centre here, I'll bet three to one that the majority of skip hire companies in most other capital cities in Australia don't do this. Canberra has an aggressive No Waste by 2010 policy, but how the ACT Government intends to get that last 10% fixed in the sixteen months remaining is beyond me.
Imagine, for a moment, random house bin inspections. A note in your letterbox gives you a score of how good you are at recycling, and what things you may have missed. Houses with good scores might receive a discount on their rates, and houses at the bottom end might recieve fines (to compensate). A follow-up with the worst offenders in a week or two might find other ways that the household could reduce their waste, energy use and costs. A similar scheme for companies would be easy to implement, and for businesses that have a lot of variety in their waste types - restaurants and builders, for example - might be linked up with other programmes (such as worm farms for spoilt food waste or recycled building supplies resellers) to help them reduce their waste output or get it going to the best use available.
The one great flaw in this plan, however, is that Governments have tried to avoid any confrontation with the public - any situation where they have to tell people to change their ways for the good of society. There are obvious exceptions, but the key difference I see between this kind of recycling enforcement and a programme to get dangerous cars off the road or to curb violent behaviour is that the latter things break laws and are 'provably' dangerous to other people. On soft issues like good parenting, good recycling or good social responsibility, the Government has heard the NIMBY and Nanny State lobbyists and realised that it's much easier to get people to do something if opposition can be branded as somehow bad. It's much easier to get people to give up their civil liberties and freedoms if you can say that anyone who wants to walk around taking pictures of arbitrary places (for example) must be a terrorist.
Ahem. Got carried away there.
Anyway, the other side to this is for state, territory and federal Governments to make sure that they aren't providing unnecessary subsidies to industries that are deliberately wasting resources. If these companies can't see the writing on the wall when it comes to climate change, then should we really be propping them up? Lobbyists from the coal power industry love to say how other methods of power generation aren't profitable, while conveniently overlooking the hundreds of millions of dollars in funding that they get from the Government to shore up their own 'we-can't-do-any-better' behaviour.
Capitalism gone right, on the other hand, looks like ACT Skip Bins. Other companies might whinge and moan that they can't possibly recycle everything as it costs too much. Then ACT Skip Bins not only goes and does it, but then makes money from the recycled materials as well.
But despite this, I still end up thinking that there are a lot of
people and companies who not only just don't care but don't have to.
And until they get hit in the hip pocket, they won't care either.
posted at: 18:01 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Faith in Atheism
I was in the office of a church hall on Friday, picking up the keys for
the hall for our Canberra Irish
Set Dance Weekend, and while waiting for the people to work out the
bill a leaflet for an upcoming talk at the church caught my eye. The
topic of the talk was:
Why I Don't Have The Faith To Be An Atheist.
Now, I will freely admit that that's a catchy title, because it certainly caught my eye. And while I endeavour to understand other people's points of view I am often blinded by my own ideas of what is sensible and reasonable. But I cannot fathom how that that topic can be debated seriously in the affirmative.
On the one hand, to me it requires much more faith to believe in an arbitrary, contradictory, and often non-sensical set of teachings that fly in the face of the evidence around us than to not have to believe any of that. My Australian Concise Oxford gives its first definition of "faith" as: Reliance or trust in; belief founded on authority - the other definitions are the type of religion one believes in and a promise or intent (as in in good faith). In that context I would say that all religions have some authority, be it a book or a person, that is the foundation of their belief, whereas Atheism makes no such demand. Atheism has no book which is quoted chapter and verse, no authority figure that tells people to not trust science and believe what they teach in contradiction to the evidence.
On the other hand, if this is some kind of sophistry - some kind of cunning argument or uncommon definition of "faith" or "atheism", then I think one is entitled to ask if the speaker is going to be serious at all. If it's a straw man argument, then really what's the point of it? I can respect people who stick by what they believe even as they acknowledge the flaws in their own arguments - I can't respect someone who tricks their audience with a conveniently quelled paper tiger.
I was half tempted by Kate's sensible suggestion to actually go and see this just to actually solve this logical problem before it threatened to burst my brain. But as I have this sneaking suspicion that the whole thing will be preaching, appositely, to the choir.
I must now hide myself from the metaphor police.
posted at: 21:10 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Kangaroos saved, who cares about anything else?
Once again the kangaroo cull at the old Belconnen naval signalling base
has stalled again, with the animal liberation protesters calling it a
victory. The pity is that these people are really protesting about the
wrong thing.
On the one hand, they're protesting about the culling of 400 kangaroos. I wonder if they have realised that ACT Forestry has a license to cull 4,000 kangaroos - ten times that number - per year in the national parks. If I remember rightly, ACT Parks also has a license to cull 3,000 on other public land. So killing 400 as a once-off cull is hardly the great tragedy that it's being painted as.
On the other hand, there are animals and plants on that land that are highly endangered and under threat from the kangaroos. There's not only the Perunga Grasshopper and the Mouthless Moth in that area, but a rare species of grasslands flower that is being eaten by the kangaroos. While I'm a bit disappointed that the Liberals have chosen to make this one of those "if we were governing this wouldn't happen" issues, they're totally right - everyone's getting all upset because cute furry animals are going to die. And it looks like the Liberals are only making a fuss because Defence is flip-flopping, not because anything else might face extinction as a result of overgrazing by the kangaroos.
I got this information from a friend who wrote the policy on land care and kangaroo culling in the ACT. So I can't quote chapter and verse, because the conversation was informal and I didn't take notes. But I do think that the "animal liberationists" are way out of line. Don't get me wrong - generally I would like to avoid the kangaroos being killed at all. But to blow this out of proportion shows exactly the kind of loony-fringe unreasoning stupidity that these groups accuse their enemies of and that does their own credibility the most damage. And if you've got any species that is overrunning its ability to survive on the land, it's going to die off some way or other. Killing them quickly is far more humane than letting them starve, whether on a block in the ACT or elsewhere in NSW.
If only the human race would learn this and seriously consider
population control of itself.
posted at: 11:17 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Solar Power For Free
I have an idea which I think would revolutionise the power industry.
Of course, it requires a lot of venture capital to set up, something
which I am unable to provide nor have the knowledge to find. I offer
this up on my blog in the hopes that someone might read it, form a
business out of it, and change the world. If I get mentioned or
gain something from it, then that'd be nice, but making solar power
easy for everyone to get involved in is enough reward for me.
Let's call the company Solar Sails. They offer to install a set of solar panels and the necessary equipment to feed power back into the grid for free. When you sign up with them, you pay only for the difference between the power that you use and the power your solar cells generate. If that balance is zero or negative in the billing period - say a month - then you pay nothing for your power. That's the deal for the consumer. Solar Sails itself makes its money by selling the extra power you produce (over what you consume) back to the grid.
From what I recall, the pay-off time for solar panels - the time taken for your lower power bills to recoup the cost of installing the panels - is about ten to fifteen years, and that figure is probably going to get shorter as the technology ramps up. (As Dr. Karl pointed out in a recent lecture, the power pay-off time - the time taken for the solar panels to generate more power than they took in their production - is only about two years or less). There are plenty of businesses who look at investing money in processes with longer pay-off times. Admittedly, Solar Sails is only going to get a fraction of the money those solar panels earn (since the meat of it is going into paying for your power), but on the other hand they can negotiate better deals with the grid supply companies and with the solar cell and technology providers than we as individual consumers can.
And the important thing, I feel, to get solar panel technology widely adopted is to lower that 'hump' of initial outlay. The most sensible point for that is at zero, so it costs you nothing to join the scheme. Even the most power-wasteful person has no reason not to join the scheme if it'll start saving them money without any outlay at all. Once they realise that they can save themselves more money by turning off lights and being less wasteful, you've changed their bad behaviour. And even if they don't actually change their wasteful ways, the fact that their purchase will have contributed to helping lower the price for other people (through volume purchasing by Solar Sails). So it's a pretty good proposition not just for getting more power generated by solar power and making it easier for people to adopt but also to change people's habits and reduce power consumption overall.
As usual, I'd love to hear your
thoughts on this idea.
posted at: 23:12 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
We're all sorry
Kate and I went to (New) Parliament House on Thursday to witness the
government saying sorry to the Stolen Generation. Actually, we went
to the front lawn between Old and New Parliament Houses, because
there was no room in the Grand Hall. We watched on big screens as
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said sorry - personally, and as a member
of parliament and as the leader of Australia. That got a big cheer
from the audience; his speech was very well received and, in my
perhaps biased opinion, was very well written.
Brendan Nelson started well but quickly lost his way. His job was never going to be easy, having been under the thumb of a man who ruled his party with an iron fist and refused absolutely to apologise. His basic error was to try and excuse his party's previous views, which required him to justify them; no-one had come to hear this. There was much jeering, clapping to drown him out (useless when you're several hundred metres away watching a broadcast, but impossible to deny the urge) and people turned their backs on him. I eventually felt that I too could not support him by appearing to be interested and turned my back, as futile as it was. He did, rescue himself in some minor degree by finishing by saying sorry.
I also found it amusing that that rabies-infested pit-bull of the Liberal Party, Tony Abbott, found that the only way to criticise the Rudd government was to say that they weren't going far enough in saying sorry and should be giving away money. So now he's not only completely contradicting his own party's previous policies, but doing it in a way which makes him personally look small. Great work, Tony. Keep it up.
The article on living in homeless shelters for five days that Mikal Still referred to makes a reasonable case for giving money as well as other, more policy and planning focussed ways of bring equality to the Aboriginal community. The point made is that money might not solve all the problems, and it might slip into the wrong hands, but it solves a whole lot more problems than the individual hand-outs and concessions can. But Kevin Rudd made the excellent point that giving money to individuals in this situation is going to make far less difference to the Aboriginal society as a whole than to put that same amount of money into health care, jobs, education and training. In my opinion, we also need a whole lot of work done on the media to reverse the 'Aboriginal Cringe' that we have in Australia. Once an Aboriginal, or any person who doesn't look like they grew up in Europe, can walk into any company and not be seen as an outsider, then we really will have progressed.
Saying Sorry is important, but it's still a step on a long road.
posted at: 00:17 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Subverting keysigning - whoop de doo
We have Andrew Chalmers offering tequila for signing his unverified
key. We have Martin Krafft offering fake ID for signing his unverified
key. They talk about how clever they are and how they're making valid
points in subverting the web of trust process. They justify it by
talking about trusting 'reputation' over trusting an anonymous but
identifiable person, or being an "experiment". And my considered
response is "whoop-de-doo". It's the web-of-trust equivalent of claiming
that sexist jokes are 'free speech', defending violent anarchy as
'subverting the police state', or claiming that stomping on someone
else's project is an 'experiment' in destruction. It's still peurile.
The ultimate proof of this is to extrapolate what would happen if
everyone did this: the web of trust would die. Is this what these people
really want? If you don't want that, then don't do it. If you do want
that, then please don't pretend that you're only doing it to make some
highfalutin intellectual point. Shut up and try to behave. It's not a
web-of-friends, it's a web-of-trust-of-identity. I may not be a friend
of Arjen Lentz, but I'll sign his key to say that he's proved to me that
his key identifies him. And, frankly, Chalmers and Krafft make me want
to ignore them rather than befriend them.
posted at: 09:45 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
All posts licensed under the CC-BY-NC license. Author Paul Wayper.
You can also read this blog as a syndicated RSS feed.