Where's It Wednesday—CV

Where in Seattle is this?

Answer next week.

Details on the weekly Where's It Wednesday puzzle here.
Other weeks' puzzles here.
Answer to last week's puzzle, after the jump.

When the Wind Dies Down

Sandy

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 ~ In the breathless coverage of hurricane post-tropical storm storm Sandy, our warming climate gets the cold shoulder.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. We must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.
-- Shakespeare

What is the next tide?

The Invisibility of Knowledge

Ignorance Abounds

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 ~ My first philosophy teacher insisted humankind was growing more ignorant. Quite apart from us dim-witted students in front of him, he had a simple explanation.

He would first draw a circle on the board. (He had a remarkable ability, much enjoyed by his students, to stand with his back to the board and whirl his arm about to create a perfect circle without once looking at what he was drawing.) The inside of the circle represents all that we know. Outside is all that we do not. The boundary represents our awareness of what we don't know. As the circle expands in the course of growing human knowledge, so does that boundary. The more we learn, the greater the realization of our own ignorance.

Perhaps we're not getting more ignorant, but just more aware of how little we know. Ignorance certainly abounds these days, and especially during our election season, but that's a subject for another post.

Instead, here is a great TED talk on what we don't know; it's a bit sprawling, but amusing and thought-provoking:

Protection Racket

The Allocation of Social and Financial Risk

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 ~ What they don't tell you about capitalism (as currently practiced):

Gore Vidal, the recently demised American writer, once famously quipped that the US economic system is "free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich".

Since the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2008, not only has the US lived up to Vidal's caricature but the whole of the rich capitalist world has become more "American". The poor are increasingly exposed to market forces, with tougher conditions on the diminishing state protection they get, while the rich have unprecedented levels of protection from the state, with virtually no strings attached.

Vidal had it right, but it is more pernicious, since the rich don't just get to socialize their losses, they are actively protected from the corrective market forces that make capitalism theoretically efficient. As one wag put it:

Free-market capitalism is for the poor. Job creators prefer market-free capitalism.

Liberté, Égalité, Gratuité

Free Public Transit Works

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 ~ Atlantic Cities reports on a mid-size French town that has had free public transit for more than a decade. Châteauroux has seen its ridership double. Meanwhile in only 3 years a metro area west of Paris has seen use go up 170% even as private vehicle traffic volumes fell 10%.

Like many transit systems, the fare box makes up only a small percentage of system revenue. Eliminating the infrastructure and logistics of fare collection, with minor adjustments to other funding sources, can allow transit systems to be profitable as well as more usable.

The motivations for making a transit system free are obvious. Increased ridership can relieve traffic, improve the environment, boost the system’s efficiency, give residents more spending money, help the poor, and rejuvenate central business districts.

Shared transportation is a public good and a desirable and necessary part of civic infrastructure. Like sidewalks, parks, trails and other similar public space amenities, it should be free, easy to use and widely available. Most cities in the US still have quite a ways to go.

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Also posted to the Fare-Free Northwest blog.

Come to the Nightmare

Only 5 Nights Left

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 ~ The Puget Sound's premier haunted attraction, The Nightmare at Beaver Lake runs through Halloween night. Bring your fiends.

It's less scary than the elections, but much more fun.

More. Yet more.

A Broader Tax Base

The Camel's Nose Under the Tent

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 ~ Do we really want to broaden the tax base? Will it solve our fiscal problems?

The concept of a broader tax base is quite simple—it means getting more people to pay taxes who are not paying them today. In the case of income taxes (to which this term is almost exclusively applied) it means to change the tax code to make the 47% who currently pay nothing to start paying something.

Many, including Mitt Romney, are trying to have it both ways on this, suggesting that the broadening of the base would both solve the deficit and not result in any tax increases. This is not plausible arithmetic; the 47% will have their taxes raised—period. If you carve out some kinds of floors or exemptions to prevent that then you arrive back where you started—a byzantine tax code without any broader a base.

But there's more to this.

Where's It Wednesday—CIV

Where in Seattle is this?

Answer next week.

Details on the weekly Where's It Wednesday puzzle here.
Other weeks' puzzles here.
Answer to last week's puzzle, after the jump.

Amazing Endeavour

The Last Mission

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 ~ The retired space shuttle traveled across Los Angeles on its way to the California Science Center. The 12-mile journey took 3 days, and enchanted a community.

A stop-motion video (2:41) of its journey, well-worth watching, is here.

Silence of the Lambs

(D)riven by Embarrassment

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 ~ The hover text:

There are so many well-meaning conservatives around here who just assume global warming is only presented as a moral issue for political reasons.

In the unlikely case that climate change arises in tonight's presidential debate, expect embarrassment from every quarter. It will be even more embarrassing for us as a country, however, should it not arise at all.

With Friends Like These...

A Messy Relationship

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 ~ At the Alberta Tar Sands, how committed are they really?

A spokesman for government department Natural Resources Canada said: "The oil sands are an important strategic resource that we are committed to developing in a socially and environmentally friendly manner." [Emphasis added]

Beyond Gizmos

Building a Broader Ecosystem

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 ~ What would happen if entrepreneurs only built companies that satisfied idle desires of the rich?

Nathan Mhyrvold decried this tendency during his keynote at SIFP, urging more focus on inventions that really make a difference.

It’s great you can kill aliens with Xbox at a faster rate than ever before, but ... there are people that do need their lives changed.

There's ample irony in one of the nation's leading patent trolls preaching more democratized innovation. As he cheers less well-heeled strategies, his company makes considerable income from squeezing scrappy startups on often-ostensible infringement of one of their arsenal of patents.

But he's also right. There's an app for that, no matter how silly.

A Renewable Saudi Arabia

Beyond Petroleum?

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 ~ A key member of the Saudi royal family says that the kingdom aims to be powered 100% on renewable and "low-carbon forms" of energy. Maybe in his lifetime (but maybe not, because he is already 67.)

Prince Turki Al Faisal Al Saud said at a conference in Brazil:

Oil is more precious for us underground than as a fuel source. If we can get to the point where we can replace fossil fuels and use oil to produce other products that are useful, that would be very good for the world.

Some are skeptical, but the Saudis have said this before, and recognize, unlike here in the US, that oil production is not a very effective driver of economic prosperity.

Friends of Tax Reform...

...May Not Be Friends of Big Oil

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 ~ Both presidential candidates share a stated desire to lower tax rates and simplify the tax code by eliminating deductions and credits. (And also those hardy but elusive scapegoats, fraud, waste and abuse.) Not everyone is fond of this idea, especially Big Oil:

“Tax reform will be a complicated process,” said Comstock, API’s manager for tax policy. “I think our members are wary of how that process will take place.

Unfortunately, tax reform by simplification entails eliminating "loopholes"—but only yours, not mine. Big Oil doesn't receive much public esteem, and their essentially indefensible billions in annual subsidies are under growing scrutiny. Even powerful House Republican and pro-fossil pol Frank Upton is talking about eliminating all energy subsidies, including for oil and gas.

Where's It Wednesday—CIII

Where in Seattle is this?

Answer next week.

Details on the weekly Where's It Wednesday puzzle here.
Other weeks' puzzles here.
Answer to last week's puzzle, after the jump.

World Food Day

The Challenge of Feeding the World

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 ~ October 16 is World Food Day, established to raise global awareness of wide-spread hunger all over the world. Many organizations are today calling attention to this most basic human right—to have enough to eat.

The Institute of Food Technologists, for example, is highlighting the importance of industrial innovation in providing solutions to global hunger:

Just as society has evolved over time, our food system has also evolved over centuries into a global system of immense size and complexity. The commitment of food science and technology professionals to advancing the science of food, ensuring a safe and abundant food supply, and contributing to healthier people everywhere is integral to that evolution. Food scientists and technologists are versatile, interdisciplinary, and collaborative practitioners in a profession at the crossroads of scientific and technological developments.

The innovative scientists and researchers at Phytelligence are part of that global solution that will provide more food, of better quality, faster, to more people.

Income Tax

Just in Time, Again

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 ~ As usual, I got an extension on my tax return and went to the post office in the last hour it was open of the last day to file timely.

I did a lot last year, and worked very hard on a lot of companies and for a lot of clients and organizations. Still part of the 47% and I still paid plenty of other taxes.

An Economic Alternative

Recovery in Iceland

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 ~ Under President Obama none of the banksters that nearly destroyed the world economy have been charged with breaking the law. None, even though examples of criminal activity are rife.

Iceland did it differently:

So Iceland decided not to follow the rest of the world by bailing out the bankers. Instead, they chose to arrest them. Now their economy is recovering faster than the EU and the United States...

At the start of the world wide 2008 economic collapse, Iceland was in worse shape than almost any other country in the world. Now they are one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

Imagine what America would be like today if we bailed out the victims of poor banking practices, while punishing the bankers who were responsible?

Who Sets Energy Policy?

Probably Not Anyone You Trust

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 ~ The Gallup poll of a few months back gauged the public's views on various institutions and industry sectors.

Those with the worst public image? The federal government was almost at the bottom, just above the oil and gas industry.

Those are precisely the two who are dictating our current energy policy. Little wonder we have permanent subsidies for fossil energy and such halting progress on transitioning to a clean and sustainable energy future.

Are Norwegians Nuts?

Norway To Double Their Carbon Tax

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 ~ Big Oil and its apologists inveigh endlessly against a carbon tax and its twinned alternate, a cap-and-trade (or cap-and-dividend) system. Why? Because it will destroy the economy of course!

Burdening oil and other forms of carbon energy with fully pricing their currently externalized costs would dramatically boost the cost of energy, impoverishing consumers and stunting business investment! Economic growth with slow, stop, or even reverse! So we are told.

However, in our northern provincial neighbor, BC, the economy seems to be doing just fine despite several years of an innovative application of just such a measure.

None of the dire predictions of economic catastrophe have come to pass, and there is no longer political opposition to having such a tax. There is a simple and straightforward object lesson here about the hysterical voices in the US Congress shrilling shrieking shibboleths of doom and devastation: they're wrong.

Now Norway is set to do something even more ambitious—more than doubling their existing carbon tax on their (thriving) oil industry. Can they really do that?