03.27.06
Posted in General at 9:18 pm by Clay
From the March 27th, 2006 edition of US News & World Report:
California Condi Has a Nice Ring
She doesn’t want to run the country, she says, but Condoleezza Rice is the hottest thing in politics right now. Pollster Frank Luntz did a straw poll at the recent California Republican convention. Guess who won? Stanford University’s provost before joining the Bush administration, Rice was first with 29 percent, followed by Virginia Sen. George Allen at 26 percent and former New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani at 16 percent. What’s it mean? With Rice on the 2008 ticket, even as veep, California could go Republican.
29 percent of the elite-Republican vote in a heavily Democratic state? Just think — If she keeps this kind of progress up, she’ll win the two-person race for the presidency in 2016 with 33 percent of the vote!
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03.25.06
Posted in General at 4:30 pm by Clay
The Christian Science Monitor had an article on coal-powered ethanol plants that questioned how good of an idea it is for the ethanol industry to be touting the fact that ethanol is a cleaner burning fuel, and then give up much(or all) of that advantage by using coal. to quote:
If all 190 plants on Mr. McIlvaine’s list were built and used coal, motorists would not reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to an in-depth analysis of the subject to date by scientists at University of California at Berkeley, published in Science magazine in January.
That said, there are ethanol plants out there that have better fuel sources:
a new ethanol plant in Nebraska strategically located by a feed lot, using methane from cattle waste to fire ethanol boilers. Another new plant in Minnesota uses biomass gasification, using plant material as its fuel.
My problem with ethanol, though, is that the research I’ve seen hasn’t given terribly definitive proof that more energy comes out of making ethanol than goes in.
So, I’ll believe that ethanol is the fuel of the future when ethanol-fueled tractors bring in corn to ethanol-powered factories, and more ethanol comes out at the end.
If that’s not reasonable or possible, then I’m going to have to conclude that ethanol just isn’t terribly efficient, and mostly is something to do with the excess corn that’s out there because of farm subsidies.
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03.13.06
Posted in General at 11:37 pm by Clay
From the end of an article in the Monday, March 13th, 2006 edition of the Wall Street Journal about how newspapers had a hard year in 2005:
One section of [The Project for Excellence in Journalism's] report closely examined one news day last year, May 11, 2005. In print, online and on network television, the top stories that day were violence in Iraq, an unidentified Cessna plane flying near the White House and protests in Afghanistan. On cable news programs and morning shows, the testimony of Macaulay Culkin at Michael Jackson’s molestation trial and an ex-convict’s murder of his eight-year-old daughter in Illinois got bigger play, according to the report.
The tagline in your head is funnier than anything I can come up with.
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03.08.06
Posted in Wall Street Journal Opinion at 3:48 pm by Clay
The Wall Street Journal nicely hit the nail on the thumb with this part of their opinion article on Tuesday, March 7th, 2006:
Still, consumer groups are likely to push for other anti-competitive concessions like net neutrality, which would prevent AT&T/BellSouth from providing faster Internet connections for certain premium services to people willing to pay for it. We don’t know if providing these so-called “fast lanes” on the Web is a viable business model, but that’s for the market to decide, not the regulators.
First off, it’s not “people” willing to pay for it, it’s “corporations”; the people are already paying their monthly fees. And the problem isn’t just about money buying an uneven playing surface, it’s the fact that, without network neutrality, AT&T can decide that it wants to have its own voice over IP(VOIP) service, give it preference in all network traffic, and degrade Vonage’s service so much that choosing Vonage is no longer an option.
This would also make it extremely difficult for any random new technology to knock old technology off the summit — after all, without network neutrality, AT&T could decide that they’d rather not help the new service cut into its profit margin.
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