Obama touted high-tech battery manufacturer Ener1 in the SOTU speech. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy two days later, taking $55 million in federal funds with it. Oopsie.
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Sure, we’d all like to be the next Google. However, there are plenty of business opportunities and profits to be made by finding niche markets and filling them. This is especially true if the niche doesn’t have much competition and you are an expert in it. I do a number of things but have steadily paid the bills for ten years by converting dinosaur DOS-based database programs to Windows. There are still zillions such programs out there, often doing mission-critical tasks. Two conversions I’m working on now have been running multi-million dollar companies since 1991 in DOS. There are plenty of niches in software, tech, blogging, and business in general. Find one, then fill it by providing great products and service. You’ll probably prosper.  Man Weighing Gold, 1515-20 Adriaen Isenbrant, Netherlandish (Metropolitan Museum) Slate put an “interesting” calculator up yesterday that puts things in perspective:
It also calculates how many centuries you would likely have to work to match Mr. Romney’s 2010 income.  Solyndra panels
And Solyndra was the most public. They bet on cutting edge solar technology and that the price of silicon would stay high. But the price of silicon fell, making their alternative less attractive. But the killer was the plummeting price of natural gas. Cleantech was assuming the price of fossil fuels would continue going up. But natural gas has done the opposite, making cleantech much more expensive by comparison. Bill Gates previews his fourth annual letter and invites students around the world to submit their own letters addressing what they think is the world’s most pressing issue. Students can submit their letters to annualletter@gatesfoundation.org through February 2nd, 2012. The Gates Foundation is spending billions finding a cure for malaria, improving sanitation in the third world, and boosting agriculture yields. I’m impressed.  aquafornia.com Gov. Brown strongly endorsed and supported the Bay Delta Conservation Plan in his State of the State address. He says it will ensure water for 25 million Californians and agriculture as well as protecting the Delta ecosystem and its abundant fish and wildlife. These often are contradictory goals. If water stays in the Delta then it doesn’t get sent to famers or to that thirsty 800 lb. gorilla called southern California. But if too much water is sent then the Delta, with its commercial and recreational fishing, hugely fertile farmland, bird watching, boating, and hiking, and ability to control floods would suffer. In endorsing the plan, Gov. Brown appeared to be favoring a peripheral canal, surely one of the most contentious proposals for water in California. It’s been that way for decades, ever since the idea was first floated. A peripheral canal would shunt water from the Sacramento River around or through the Delta. It would either be a canal or a tunnel. Currently fresh water is fed through the Delta, which has changed the mix of the water from fluctuating-salinity to freshwater, confusing species and changing the ecosystem. Depending on which of the multitude of sides you are on, a peripheral canal is either a wondrously smart plan or the spawn of Beelzebub. It has rightfully been called – along with Prop 13 – a third rail of California politics. For those who may not know, a third rail refers to the middle rail on subway tracks like in New York City where the electricity that powers the train comes from. It you step on it, you’re dead. Politicians tend to step cautiously around discussion of a peripheral canal. Those with business or recreational interests in and around the Delta vociferously oppose plans to divert water from it to elsewhere. San Francisco, Central Valley agriculture, and the gorilla to the south of course favor it. Delta activist Dan Bacher points out how complex these issues are. A canal would cause collapse in the populations of salmon, steelhead, sturgeon, and other fish. The entire ecosystem would change, perhaps irreversibly if more water is exported. Further, fertile farmland in the area would be removed from production “in order to irrigate bad land on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, land that should have never been irrigated, is hardly ‘mending’ California!” Doubtless Central Valley agribusiness sees things differently, seeing their role as a major food producer to the nation as crucial. And the always thirsty gorilla needs water for the also essential southern California economy. You’ll probably not be startled to learn that projected costs for a peripheral canal skitter all over the place, from a low of just a trifling few billion to $50 billion and more. It all depends on what is built and how it is done. However, as witness the tripling of high speed rail projected costs, initial estimates for a canal could go much higher. In a truly befuddling move, Gov. Brown says the water bond issue that is on the November ballot should be taken off. This is probably because it doesn’t stand much chance of passage, especially when his measures to raise taxes will also be on the ballot. As always, California debates furiously what should be done with the Delta while not much actually happens. Billionaire speculator George Soros survived Nazism and Communism and says our current “situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career.”
One way or another, when thugs rule financial markets and nations, they end up being removed from power. I’m skeptical that a massive crackdown on civil liberties would even work in the US, especially in the American West, where many people are pissed at what’s going on and where there’s a long tradition of mistrust of the federal government.
The institutional left has indeed failed to do anything coherent about the ongoing crisis of capitalism they say they waited for decades to happen. The Marxist Left is almost completely AWOL, sitting out the current collapse of capitalism or (as always) writing ponderous academic analyses about how someone (them) needs to lead the poor befuddled working class.
He sees hope in the Arab Spring and other democracy movements. Indeed, they are showing us how to do it, facing far more savagery and repression than here, and doing so with courage. As the header image for this blog says “They only call it class war when we fight back.” Communism was a failure. Now even Soros says capitalism has failed. No one knows what comes next. “May you live in interesting times” is reputedly an ancient Chinese curse. Our times are far more tumultuous than just being “interesting.” We didn’t start the class war. Bankster thugs and their corrupted errand boys in DC did. But there’s so many more of us than them.
 The Battle About Money, after 1570. Pieter van der Heyden, Netherlandish (Metropolitan Museum) Here’s what the LA Times has to say about Mr. Schneiderman:
And here’s what the man himself said:
We’ll have to wait and see.  wikipedia.org Sugar beets use less land and water than corn, can be grown in colder climates and on poorer soil, plus virtually all of it can be used to create ethanol or fertilizer. So it could be a potential source for ethanol. However ethanol created from the waste of agricultural, wood, processing, and meatpacking byproducts is probably still a better way to go.
NASA will use the Twitter bootstrap framework for the theme. They looked at several CMS and decided on WordPress for their open source code repository. They will being using Super Cache to speed things up. (Polizeros uses the more powerful W3 Total Cache which it is also seriously geeky and requires more time to study and set up.) |
Articles on California and Arizona renewable energy, budget crisis, border issues.   Performance Optimization W3 Total Cache | ||||
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