Obama praises energy company Ener1. It goes bankrupt

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.

    Don’t overlook niche markets

    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.

      Comparing incomes: Mitt Romney and you

      Man Weighing Gold, 1515-20 Adriaen Isenbrant, Netherlandish (Metropolitan Museum)

      Slate put an “interesting” calculator up yesterday that puts things in perspective:

      Mitt Romney released his 2010 tax return on Monday. His total income for the year was listed as $21.6 million, more than one-half of which came from capital gains. How does that stack up against your income? Enter your annual income below to find out how long it would have taken Mitt Romney to earn the same amount of money.

      It also calculates how many centuries you would likely have to work to match Mr. Romney’s 2010 income.

        Why the cleantech boom went bust

        Solyndra panels

        Wired

        Due to a confluence of factors—including fluctuating silicon prices, newly cheap natural gas, the 2008 financial crisis, China’s ascendant solar industry, and certain technological realities—the clean-tech bubble has burst, leaving us with a traditional energy infrastructure still overwhelmingly reliant on fossil fuels. The fallout has hit almost every niche in the clean-tech sector—wind, biofuels, electric cars, and fuel cells—but none more dramatically than solar.

        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.

          Do you have a world-changing idea, asks Gates Foundation

          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.

            Governor Brown endorses Bay Delta Conservation Plan

            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.

            (crossposted from IVN)

              Class war coming to the US says George Soros

              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.”

              At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” he says… He doesn’t just mean it’s time to protect your assets. He means it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.” Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.

              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.

              Occupy Wall Street “is an inchoate, leaderless manifestation of protest,” but it will grow. It has “put on the agenda issues that the institutional left has failed to put on the agenda for a quarter of a century.”

              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.

              Soros draws on his past to argue that the global economic crisis is as significant, and unpredictable, as the end of communism.

              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.

                Eric Schneiderman to head new mortgage agency

                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:

                Schneiderman has been one of the most aggresssive state attorneys general in investigating the actions of financial firms and others leading up to the housing bust. Along with California Atty. Gen.Kamala D. Harris, Schneiderman and several other attorneys general have balked at the ongoing talks between state officials and large mortgage servicers to settle investigations into foreclosure process abuses.

                And here’s what the man himself said:

                “We’re undertaking a more coordinated effort to pull together all of the various strands of investigations relating to the conduct that created the mortgage-backed securities bubble and led to the market crash,” Schneiderman told reporters in Washington after an event at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

                “There have been investigations going on in various states and branches of the federal government,” he said. “We’re now making a concerted effort to pull everything together and move forward aggressively to address these issues.”

                He said the task force would go after “every aspect of the conduct that created the bubble and crash,” including the origination of mortgages and the packaging of them into securities.

                We’ll have to wait and see.

                  Sugar beets are better than corn for ethanol production

                  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 using WordPress for open source code site

                    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.)