A Hope for the Gates Clean Energy Initiative

As a long time proponent of a sea based, Tornado Turbine, approach to the production of hydrogen as a fuel mainstay, I can only hope Mr. Gates, and the leaders who make commitments with him, will consider it, along with the idea of a new, World Public Power utility.

In my opinion the two must go hand in hand, with liberal application of means based pricing, in order to get all nations across the globe plugged into a completely clean burning fuel. And as this is a considerably more integrated approach than virtually any other, it would offer a host of side benefits. Just consider:

1. The modular platform design would use a hemp composite, thus providing demand for an easy to grow cash crop for areas of the world not amenable to most other forms of agriculture.

2. The modular design would also facilitate in making more practical the building of floating cities, which we will need in very large quantities for populations displaced by rising sea levels.

3. The support requirements for hydrogen production at sea would automatically provide the key stone industry to make such floating cities economically viable.

4. The transportation requirements for liquid hydrogen delivery globally would also provide the needed impetus for a further new world, Public Transportation utility, using the hybrid dirigible blimp design I have advocated, linked together as airborne trains.

And this is only scratching the surface. New kinds of sea based space launch systems might be possible, as well as new approaches to sea floor access.

For me, as always, the primary criteria that these power brokers ought to be considering is, first and foremost, to think outside the usual constraints of where Big Money is already well entrenched. Only then will we have truly new, and globally assessable, alternatives to doing fuel as usual.

Bill Gates to Launch Multibillion-Dollar Clean Energy Initiative

Because Information is Gold

The question then becomes who pays for putting a tiny Fort Knox around every interface point, as well as every repository?

Ultimately, of course, it is us, with either higher prices, or taxes not spent on other needs that are already under funded. And, as this is both a "measures/counter measures" war, and a case of "whack a mole," we will never have the ultimate Fort Knox, or be able to put the forts where the thieves might counter measure next.

What we are really faced with here is another example of how the usual attempts to reform a broken system simply do not address the actual problem; which is the fact of information's equivalency to money in the first place.

Just as with any black market commodity benefiting from the very fact of having been made illegal, information in an electrified economic system never meant to be so energized becomes a bootlegger's wet dream;especially when you consider that we are talking about the numbers in various chips, platters, or the data pipes amassing around us faster than carbon into the atmosphere, and heating things up faster as well. Insubstantial in the first place, so easy to carry away, and just as easy to fence.

Cross purposes, contradictions, and whole super tanker loads of folks on a fool's errand of plugging holes that will always start leaking again, even if you could keep up with the increasing numbers of them. That, in a nut shell, is what electrified Capitalism is today. Make no mistake.

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See also:

How to destroy an American family

The Straters’ lives have been devastated by relentless cyberattacks. And there’s nothing they can do about it.

Medical Protection as a Commodity

As this NBCnews.com article points out, the pot has been stirred again in the arena of medical care costs, and who foots the bill. United Health Care, the nation's biggest provider in overall terms, is sending up a "we may not continue participating" balloon into the political atmosphere.

I couch this in such terms because you have to take such statements with more than a grain of salt; not only as it comes on the verge of the final leg of another campaign season (getting longer just as the number of black days for Christmas consumption expand out beyond Thanksgiving), but also because there are caveats to how much impact their pulling out may or may not have. They are big as insurers go but they don't have a huge stake in the exchange markets yet and, as the NBC piece points out, they were late in getting into the exchanges, and may not have done a very good job in preparing for their entry (other insurers, like Aetna, say that things are going as planned) .

What we need to keep in mind here, however, is this one simple fact. Health insurers are not really in the business of paying for health care. They are in the business of capital formation. They use the payment of health care bills as an incentive just as content providers use entertainment to get eyes, ears and brains in place for the reception of messages to consume. The whole point of their business model is to limit payouts, one way or another, so that capital can, in fact, be accumulated and invested in other areas. And, as these things usually play out in the world of Big Money, the more payouts they avoid the better they look to other players in the game.

As ridiculous as that may be, in terms of how best to provide a fundamental social need, it gets even worse when we also consider that the other side of the health care coin, the doctors, nurses, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, are also purveyors of a commodity. However well intended they may be (and most of those in the trenches really are), the fact remains that making money is still the primary enterprise here, with actually helping people in distress a bit of icing on the cake.

The primary difference here, however, is that, being a monolithic, and hardly ever a competitively exposed, market they can set prices pretty much as they please. A cost increase history one need only compare to general inflation over the past few decades to see how out of proportion they have been. Only higher education (understandable as it relates to the imparting of information, our real gold now) of late compares. As with other fundamental social needs that go begging now because we can't figure out how to equitably balance who should pay and who should benefit, this is no way for any society to not only grow, but to flourish. No way for us gain our destiny in stepping off this rock and begin reaching out to the stars.

The affordable care act was a well intended reform and, for the most part, it has done surprisingly well in getting more care to those who need it; however you may disagree on the complexity it may or may not have created, or whatever cost dislocations it may or may not have also created. That it probably does fall short in one way or another only illustrates the fact that it, as well as most Liberal efforts to reform, did not really get at the primary problem; which is precisely the fact that a cost based, commodity economy, no longer makes any sense in a comprehensively electrified, information environment. You need only consider that everything to do with health care, its quality, its efficacy, and whether it is applied cost effectively, relates to the movement of information. But if information itself is a commodity, and whose movement then depends of the assumption of net gain, how can it possibly move freely enough to attain the goals just mentioned.

Fundamental change, not piecemeal reform, is the only way we are going to get real solutions to most of the pressing problems we face now. The sooner the rest of you accept that the sooner we can get to actually doing something about them all.

Will Nation's Top Health Insurer Kill Obamacare?

I was there

Yes, I was there and well involved with trying to program applications. As such I can tell you that, though Microsoft made it possible to do so, they seldom made it easy. And little of what they did was from actual in house innovation. The majority of it came from buying into, or outright bullying, anything useful or potentially competitive. As such I have never been a big fan of Mr. Gates. I do give him credit for knowing how to make money, but little else. So many opportunities missed, and mistakes made and yet they still did manage to make a lot of money.

In any case, though, it is a much better company now that Gates is no longer so intimately involved. Still flawed of course but not nearly so much as in the early days. Older now, and at least a tiny bit wiser, I can only wish the people involved their now well and hope they find it in their hearts to do more for assisting young people in getting involved with tech.

Windows turns 30: a visual history

This is what happens when ignorance, prejudice, and a lack of humanity, mix with making "the bottom line" a religion.

Make a habit of dehumanizing one group or another and you risk killing something very important on the inside, as well as on the outside.

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Where has all the Sanity Gone?

A lot of things come to mind when a supposed candidate for high office makes such statements. That this person is also a doctor whom has sworn to the idea of "first do no harm," makes it even more bizarre.

At the end of the day, though, you have to wonder what has become of a nation when men, who are willing to make such statements so casually, are taken seriously by significant numbers of our neighbors as a potential leader in our highest office. I can only fall back on George Carlin's comment on politics "Garbage in Garbage out."

There are people in a lot of places now running for their lives from unimaginable horror. Husbands, wives and children. Undoubtedly those who create this horror feel no restraint in taking whatever advantage of it that they can, of which, of course, planting a few sleeper agents is but one aspect. There is risk then in taking the real refugees in, but there is also risk in not responding to human need when it presents itself. A risk to our sense of humanity and caring for the plight of others. Ignore that too often and you risk becoming the kind of person who would utter such things as Mr. Carson has said. A man who is also simply trying to take advantage of the suffering of others.

See also:

Museum Statement on Syrian Refugees

Dumb Hicks Are America's Greatest Threat

Another Example of how Money and Information go Hand in Hand together in the Path to Power

This article from Politico is illustrative of how money and information are the same thing. It is also illustrative of how those who already have large accumulations get to know far more about everything else than we do; whether its the accumulation holders or everything else that we remain ignorant of.

Ignoring for the moment whatever difference their may be between mere information, and actual intelligence, one can I think make the observation that, with more information, one's ability to apply their message with greater strategic, as well as tactical, effectiveness, is significantly increased. Which, to my mind, further emphasizes what is behind the new "amplification" of electrified information retrieval. Add to that the ability to encompass broad swaths of media channels, as well as message saturation over time, and you have a potent argument for why an individuals freedom of speech is not equivalent to any form of incorporated speech, or where the counter accumulations involved in expressing that speech, are the result of the profits of such incorporation.

The Koch intelligence agency