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In the Good News department: A new "forward osmosis" desalination filter promises that "The cost will be low enough to make aqueduct and dam projects look expensive in comparison"
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I'm not sure why I didn't find this last year: The Man Nobody Wanted to Hear: Global Banking Economist Warned of Coming Crisis

Apparently the 'Head of the Monetary and Economic Department' of the Bank for International Settlements (i.e. the chief economist of the HQ for international bankers) had been warning the leaders of these banks for several years that this debacle was going to happen. Oops?

I found the whole article interesting (though of course I would, since I like this stuff), but it came off slightly one-sidedly flattering toward the guy. In some ways he deserves the vindication, in a "ha ha, he told you so" sense, but on the other hand I'd like to read some counterpoints.

The bottom line that scares me here is that he was ignored because he didn't provide a model that competes with the existing neo-Keynesian model (that got us into this wreck). And we still don't have such a replacement model, so it seems that all of the world's banks are going to keep trying to make the broken model work until they can't anymore.

Not reassuring!

[psiga]

I could have sworn I read about that Portuguese drug decriminalization thing earlier... Ah yes: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-drug-decriminalization

It's very great news. I'm just wondering what it will take to get American political ideologues to back down about it. If it's architected as a cost cutting path as we trundle witlessly into inevitable economic austerity, that could work.
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I'm a smidge confused about this randomly resurfacing story about a documentary alleging that some French spec ops had Bin Laden "in their sights" two separate times in the early part of the decade. What's confusing me is not the claim, but that when I looked at one story, the source URL at Reuters is dead, and when I tried googling the story and found a forum discussion about it their Yahoo! News AFP link is also dead. Why?

I know the official word is that the reports are hearsay and incorrect, but is it normal for Associated Press/Reuters to retract whole stories based on that sort of thing? A smidge confused.
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Oh goodie goodness. Now that it's clear that net neutrality does not apply to wireless carriers, one is already starting to implement selective charges for specific services.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2070797

I'm not going to over-sweat it, since this comment later down rings true enough to me: "It will almost certainly be possible for technical folks like us to bypass their filters but that will still exclude about 99% of their customers. That 99% will probably grudgingly pay the few dollars more and complain about phone companies screwing them again."

Supposedly Adblock Plus is only used by about one or two percent of the internetting populace, so that sounds about right.

Either way: It begins.
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I heard that figure in a hackernews comment, so indeed it's just hearsay. I'll look into it a bit right now...

ABP's site says that as of some time in '08 they have about 13 million downloads but only 3 million active daily users: http://adblockplus.org/blog/statistics-statistics-statistics

That's not the only ad blocking service out there -- I used to use privoxy for a couple of years but switched to ABP last year -- though really I doubt that other services would have numbers much larger.

So yeah, numbers much smaller than "one or two percent." Maybe one or two percent of people who actively visit sites like hacker news; who knows what the guy meant.
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Oh, hurrr, when I tried clicking on the outbound link from that blog, it timed out on me and I didn't notice / forgot it immediately. After refreshing later, I see there are live usage statistics here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/statistics/addon/1865

100 million downloads, 12 million active users. That's just for firefox alone, though.

According to NetMarketshare Firefox is used by about 15% of internetters, and according to Internet World Stats there are just shy of 2 billion people connected to the web in some capacity. If these sources are valid, there are approximately 300 million people viewing the internet through Firefox.

300 / 3 = 100, and 12 / 3 = 4, so about 4% of Firefox users are using AdBlock Plus every day.


I am going to boldly presume that the nearly 80% of internet users who are on IE are not as sharp on average as a Fox or even Chrome user, but we may never know for sure. In the end, it looks like the 1 or 2% figure has some possible merit but cannot be confirmed.
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Nobody knows. International banking is so heavily networked today that we can't anticipate what effect one megabank failure will have on another megabank, or a nation's central bank that they are a part of. Hence the Too Big To Fail mantra.

What will happen if this case is put on appeal? What happens if hinky favors are pulled and the case on appeal is overturned? How long will it take for another lawsuit to get this far? What if underwriting laws are retroactively changed? How will Bernanke react, considering he has already created about 3 trillion dollars out of the aether, mostly under cover? How long would it take for individual lawsuits to damage a bank enough to force it into insolvency? How long will it take for mainstream news to cover this? How many news outlets will spin it as no big deal? How long will it take for the stock market to get skittish? All of that is up in the air.

Edit: Unless this story does get picked up big in the news over the next few days, I can't see how the web bot would make this connection. Stupid mystery bot. But even if it's just a coincidence that this pivotal ruling with global economic implications was made on this precise date, it's still just exactly what I've been waiting to see. Spooky.
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Meanwhile in happy news: Researchers in China claim to have discovered how to get 60 times more life out of nuclear fuel.

That would, uh, significantly trump a thorium reactor's 3x extension.

No further information is available at this time. Is it financially viable? Is it even legit? Russia used to spin some epic yarns about scientific discoveries, but I don't recall ever seeing that with China. Styrofoam bridges and puppies jacked up on heroin, sure, but not lies regarding scientific breakthroughs. I guess we'll hear more as time goes on.
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So some researchers have figured out how to make a laser-like beam smaller than a wavelength of light.

"Spasers are considered a critical component for future technologies based on nanophotonics -- technologies that could lead to radical innovations in medicine and science, such as a sensor and microscope 10 times more powerful than anything used today. A Spaser-based microscope might be so sensitive that it could see genetic base pairs in DNA.

It could also lead to computers and electronics that operate at speeds 100 times greater than today's devices, using light instead of electrons to communicate and compute."

I'm excited about the implications for studying quantum scale things; it's always nice when our sensors get another order of magnitude of definition, cycle rate, and sensitivity.
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Addendum:

[psiga]

Hahaha, Taco Bell is being hit with a class action lawsuit for its meat paste. http://www.wtol.com/Global/story.asp?S=13885025

"The complaint alleges that what Taco Bell calls "beef" doesn't meet the minimum requirements set by the USDA to be called "beef" or "seasoned ground beef" or anything of the kind."
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Interesting perhaps. Group in the UK claims to have a type of hydrogen fuel pellet that is backward compatible with existing vehicles. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/01/uk-cella-energy-develops-hydrogen-based.html I'll believe it when I see it, but fascinating to think that it's possible.

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Oh good. Egypt shuts down Al Jazeera. http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/01/201113085252994161.html

Ain't no need for freedom of the press up in here. Surest sign of a healthy democracy: thirty year presidency of a guy who is now 82 and has shut down the internet, cellular messaging, and any TV source that is not already compromised by government actors.

Gon'get worse before she gets better.

Edit: Shut down but not quite shut off; they are still broadcasting even though they've been kicked out of their office, had their license revoked, and so on. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2158136
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Ah, this makes sense. When Saddam was close to being ousted, he freed various criminals to make things inconvenient for everybody; now it looks as though protectors of the Mubarak regime have strategically released criminals to commit acts of false flag terrorism: http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2011/01/is-egyptian-government-using-agents.html

Egyptian citizens are currently forming human walls around the Cairo Museum, to prevent a repeat of what happened in Iraq. Lessons are being learned! There's hope for us yet.
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Just popping in, here. Ongoing goings-on:

Cadre of politicians and big businesses continue their one-sided effort to tame our wild, wild west:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/bittorrent-is-to-movies-what-bolt-cutters-are-to-stealing-bicycles.ars

"The bill would give the government legal tools to blacklist a "rogue" website from the Internet's Domain Name System, ban credit card companies from processing US payments to the site, and forbid US-based online ad networks from working with the site. It even directs the government to keep a list of suspect sites, even though no evidence has been presented against them in court"

Big brother says "OOPS, MY BAD. SORRY I CALLED U A PEDOPHILE IN FRONT OF EVERYONE LOL":
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2226152

"U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’" ... "it's not just that they shut them down, but the US government put a big label on all the sites for all the users to see which basically says it was a child porn site, even though it wasn't"

Fun(?) interview with Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings after a supercomputer beat up our best meatbags:
http://live.washingtonpost.com/jeopardy-ken-jennings.html?hpid=talkbox1

"This was definitely an away game for humanity."

Sorry, those are just the intimidating bits of news. Meanwhile, allow me to clear out some exciting Next Big Future stories:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/01/10-billion-bits-of-entanglement.html
"Scientists from Oxford University have made a significant step towards an ultrafast quantum computer by successfully generating 10 billion bits of quantum entanglement in silicon"

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/01/fractal-metasurface-metamaterial-can.html
"It is now possible, although not yet practical, to transfer heat in a way analogous to how we transfer electric current on a wire, without the delays inherent to heat capacities and cooling rates ... It is also totally passive, requiring no power."

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/02/development-of-novel-transistor-with.html
"the development of a novel transistor, the “atom transistor,” which performs both logic and memory functions while reducing power consumption by one million times that of the conventional devices."

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/02/new-method-for-making-nanosheets-from.html
"Our new method offers low-costs, a very high yield and a very large throughput: within a couple of hours, and with just 1 mg of material, billions and billions of one-atom-thick nanosheets can be made at the same time from a wide variety of exotic layered materials"

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/01/embl-software-runs-microscopy.html
"In a mere four nights of unattended microscope operation, Micropilot detected 232 cells in two particular stages of cell division and performed a complex imaging experiment on them, whereas an experienced microscopist would have to work full-time for at least a month"

The ever-fascinating march of progress.
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Islam is a religion of peace.*


Some peaceful protesters in Bahrain are being sent to heaven early (nsfw, if the preview image wasn't obvious enough):

(Less to-the-point full length video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9p6GQ7S51A )
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What point? I really was just being snarky and obtuse; call it a dark humor coping mechanism, call it intentionally poor form, you'd be right either way. I trust you guys to develop your own opinions of what's presented in those videos.
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It's all up in the air. We're already in a place where the people running government and finance are bending and breaking rules with impunity, taking no responsibility at any point, plotting to make things go away for a while longer, a while longer, a while longer. They're convincing themselves, eachother, and the rest of us that that everything is working fine.

To the extent of my knowledge, we have no real plan.

I am weirdly at peace about it, though I have no idea how this is going to play out.
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Deputy attorney general for state of Indiana encourages use of live ammunition against peaceful protesters in Wisconsin.
http://www.dylanratigan.com/2011/02/23/indiana-official-use-live-ammunition-against-wisconsin-protesters/
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Yeah, I was just about to post that now.

Good that it was quick.

My my.
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In the good news department, an airline in Thailand has hired four transgendered neogirls to be stewardesses. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8316553/Thai-airline-hires-ladyboys-as-flight-attendants.html

Hooray for equality in that regard. Though I feel a bit bad for any other given tg person who might not live up to the standards of beauty on show there. Always a bit awkward to see the conversion not work out very well.
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Daring, but I suppose timely. Salūs.
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Pros:
* 'Meltdown' for this reactor design just means that the cores will melt in the capsules, and it'll "merely" be an expensive cleanup, rather than a large scale disaster.
* All tests so far indicate that the capsules have maintained full integrity.
* Those reactors were, ironically, going to be retired soon, thus it's alright that they'll never be brought back online again.
* The hydrogen leaks/explosions thus far are nothing much for civilians to be concerned about.
* Evac and stay-indoors warnings have been on the 'better safe than sorry' side of things.
* The "specialist" saying that ~the cores might all melt together and explode and oh god oh god the jet stream oh god~ was introduced to the world by our buddies at Fox News, so I have a hard time taking him seriously.

Cons:
* The reactors are actually older than Chernobyl.
* Practically every failsafe backup plan has indeed failed.
* Can't say I trust the Japanese bureaucracy to tell me the truth any more than any other developed bureaucracy.

As for BOOM concerns: the Chernobyl reactor was built shoddily on a Communist budget, mismanaged by a non-specialist chief operator who was granted his position by communist work orders, and when the time came to shut the reactor down, he was so clueless and panicked that he did the exact opposite of the right thing to do. Japan, on the other hand, builds their shit with quakes and tsunamis in mind from the outset, has well trained staff, and they have all calmly followed protocol up to this point.

I'm disappointed that the decades-old failsafe measures didn't work, but otherwise presently unconcerned. Even if some Fox News nightmare scenario comes to pass, the greatest tragedy would be that the public will even more loudly oppose future expansion of nuclear power. They won't care about thorium being safer; they won't care about forty years worth of development in structural engineering and material science.
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It's that bad even without any civilian casualties; I'm just dreading what might happen if it gets bad enough to hurt regular folk.

Looks like the site has been evacuated fully at this point. [edit: They were apparently allowed back on-site an hour later.] Not the greatest sign. Radiation in the surrounding region is not enough to hurt anyone, as far as I can tell, but some of the workers on site have probably had enough to cause some slight bodily harm.

Turns out that Wikipedia is being a good and basically unbiased source of updates for this situation, by the way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Fukushima_nuclear_accidents

I'd like this sort of thing to happen for more news events.
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Hey Mech, have you watched The One Percent and The American Ruling Class? They're both available in their entirety through various internet channels. I found them interesting enough to recommend. (The latter has some cheeseball musical moments which I skipped, but otherwise it was informative.)

It kind-of gives you the view from the other side of the fence. There's still some sense of 'you can grow up to be anything that you want to be' among the upper class kids, with a sort of caveat of 'just don't lose sight of the fortune that gave you this opportunity', in the same way that other societies might say to never lose sight of the god, government, or country that gave them their opportunities. Or, for that matter, the liberty that folks like us cherish -- and feel threatened about when certain minorities rewrite the rules mid-game in their favor, and/or amass unfair amounts of the fiat that we might otherwise use to maintain our liberty.


I'm really not sure how much to say, where to start, and so on. The American Dream meant something completely different during The Great Compression, when wealth distribution was more even, and Americans were coming out of decades of austerity. The post-war boom was quite amazing, with a huge middle class, and a liberty to spend that wasn't available previously.

It took some time for Capitalism to do its thing, and re-concentrate the wealth. That's the side-effect of Capitalism, and we all get the concept. But what should we do instead? Yeah, you mentioned old Socialist movements a hundred years ago -- yet, we have plenty of government subsidy in sectors of health, retirement, agriculture, diplomacy, education, and whatever else. If we actually ran balanced budgets, and had a tax rate to match our spending, we'd easily be on par with fully socialist nations.

And I'm not interested in forgetting that some (not all!) unions have been bent out of shape rather seriously, such as teachers' unions preventing bad teachers from being removed, and cramming down bizarre situations such as granting tenure after only a year of employment. Unions have their own propaganda folk and lobbyists too, you know.

There are so many simultaneous problems that refuse to cave, here. How do we let unions manipulate wages and job security in their favor if they don't return commensurate gains? How do we afford to pay moderately-skilled production workers American salaries when American consumers are only interested in buying cheap-and-good-enough products that are the result of international wage arbitrage? How do we get the politicians and the Becks of the world to have a level-headed talk with the people of America, sans-rhetoric, even though people actively seek and support such rhetoric? I don't even know where to begin. I don't think anyone does.


The wealthy elites currently believe in the virtues of trickle-down economics, and so have little desire to relinquish their earning potential. Is that evil, or just misinformed? Remember the first big Hans Rosling lecture at TED a number of years ago, where he opened by talking about preconceived notions and misperceptions in a changing world? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHhdNEKwN50#t=43s Part of our challenge is that the wealthy, experienced, educated, and successful among us believe that they're doing the right thing, as evidenced by the fact that they are wealthy, experienced, educated, and successful.

And how mistaken is the existing system, anyhow? Can we quantify it, and effectively debate it? If and when we have the opportunity to make our contributions to the world, what do we endeavor to augment or replace our current system with? Can we acknowledge that there probably will never be a perfect solution, yet still demonstrate that our idea is better than what we currently do? How will we know that our own views are not mistaken? How will we know when it's time to egress from an old way that we may have spent decades fighting for, into a new way that is foreign to us?

The Socialists, Capitalists, and Communists of the early days of those doctrines all had to be confronted with similar questions.


Until the economy can tick along in some purely scientific fashion -- even then imperfect -- we will have to rely on existing tomes of pseudoscience to justify our abstract barter-based price finding schemes. Sure, it's a confidence game; sure, it blows up sometimes; sure, it's used by governments and gamed by plutocrats as a tool to stay in power. . . And sure, I can't point to any existent system which has ever worked better, even with every crisis of faith and horrifying mathematical certainty.

Kick open a door to the past, any given generation ago, and ask me if I'd like to step in. I wouldn't.


As for the executive-tyrant model, I would say that it has existed so amazingly far before the age of humanity, let alone agriculture: evolution favors packs that have alphas. (Although speaking of alphas and misconceptions...)


Half tempted to keep on blathering, but I'll just shut up now; I should get other things done.
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Hm. I'm catching up with the NUKULAR situation today. Kinda displeased that they're trying so hard to cool the broken reactors rather than just scram the stupid things. If they have really good reasons, I'd love to hear them.

At the rate it's moving, the process may take months -- which is a problem considering the levels that were reasonably safe to the public initially are going to build up, and build up some more as this continues. The 20km evac area has been extended to 30km, though that extra 10 is "voluntary."

Drainage pipes around the plant are emitting radioactive water ranging about 30 to 130 times the legal limit, including from the 5th and 6th reactors which are officially said to be undamaged and secure. Oops? (Source, here, though I'm not familiar enough with kyodonews to know how dependable their reportage is.)

But have no fear, TEPCO have hired only the finest specialists, who follow only the most prudent of protocols. Or, uh..... "The two men were not wearing rubber boots as they stood in water that contained radioactive materials 10,000 times the normal level, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said. ... Electrical engineering firm Kandenko Co., which employs the two, said its workers were not required to wear rubber boots as its safety manuals did not assume a scenario in which its employees would carry out work standing in water at a nuclear power plant."

For what it's worth, though -- and no snark at all, here -- I haven't seen any stories of people reporting symptoms of radiation poisoning, even from those who were directly exposed to radioactive water. Unless there is some bizarre whitewash situation up ins, it seems that everyone is safe so far.


In other news, a Radio Shack in Montana is offering new Dish Network satellite customers either a $50 gift certificate at Pizza Hut, or a free gun.
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Karl Denninger is pissed about the Wachovia thing.

"The Market Ticker did cover this story in detail - nearly a year ago. The real question is why this wasn't picked up by everyone last year, why it wasn't run into the ground, and why only now, when the deferred prosecution agreement expired, are people talking about it. That's right - now the media will cover it, including The Guardian!"
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2494771

So indeed it's worse than it looks.
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Any articles about how organized sports affect people's ability to develop empathy and sympathy for groups outside of their own group/team/tribe/party/whatever?

Blah blah etc.
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