Posts by BenWilson
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Figuring that The Calculator Centre in Lorne Street would have every kind of calculator he tried there,
My God, I'd completely forgotten about that place, and my very first portable computer, the Casio PB100, which I had to save up for 2 months worth of paper deliveries (the Herald! Imagine!) to buy at $100. I wrote lots of lovely programs in BASIC, saved to tapes, then tragically it was stolen while I was playing Gauntlet after school one day. :-(.
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we currently need petroleum to produce the material goods that will eventually replace our reliance on petroleum
I'd agree with you if you replaced the word "need" for "use" in that sentence. We use petroleum as power to produce stuff now, but we don't need to. It's just the cheapest way. As it gets dearer, the other sources become more attractive, and petroleum becomes only useful in those places that must have it, like aircraft.
As a raw material in, say, plastics, it will continue to be useful, but it is not required in anywhere near such quantities for that, and in the long run we could quite possibly supply the entire need sustainably through biological sources.
I guess I differ from you in a perception of the urgency of the problem. Just about the entire industrial base of the whole world can be replaced (and is replaced, bit by bit) over 10-20 years. Yes, we're geared to petroleum, but the shift can come incredibly rapidly, if we put our minds to it, if any real signs of petroleum shortage reared their ugly heads, rather than what we currently have, a very gradual rise in price. At some point that price rise will cap out when sustainable sources are the same. Then, most likely, energy prices will only drop, as we get better and better at exploiting sustainables, and our industry is geared more and more towards them.
That's how I see it playing out, anyway. The idea that we're flying headlong towards a disaster seems unduly alarmist, considering the truly enormous reserves of oil we have, the even more stupendous amounts of untapped coal, lots of gas, lots of uranium. Yes, I'd love it if sustainable sources were being developed faster, but I think the slow speed is mostly caused by the still enormous quantities of unsustainables we have. Our shift to sustainability is gradual, ongoing, and just as inexorable in the long run as our depletion of unsustainables is.
My biggest worry still remains: What about all that carbon in the atmosphere?
<rant>Regarding solar panels, why do people always think that they're the be-all and end-all of solar power? They're not even what's used in the world's largest solar power plants. They're not what is used in solar water heating. They're not how kinetic energy is created in our dams, NZ's main source of power, ultimately from the sun. They're not how the sun warms our houses every day. They're not the technology which causes plants to grow. Solar power is a much bigger picture than solar panels. But they're still a really cool idea.</rant>
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Horansome,
Our unsustainable power sources will surely wind down, that is inevitable, although I think it's also likely to take an awfully long time, we still have so much oil, coal, uranium, natural gas, etc. But our ability to generate sustainable power is constantly rising at the same time, and at some point it will most likely tip to becoming the predominant method, with the unsustainables being used only where they must. This by simple economics. The planet of the future will look very different, lots more dams, windmills, solar farms, solar choices in building design, electric mass-transit, crops for biofuel (probably genetically engineered as an absolute imperative at some point), geothermal power stations, etc. I'm pretty much expecting electric vehicles to continue their steady rise too, but more likely will be a trend away from autos just by urban design. This will take place gradually, over decades, even centuries.
Storage of electric power is really not that much of an issue. Most of it comes down to the timing of the usage. The highest usage is during the day, when solar power production is at its highest anyway, and at night there is stored solar power in the form of water in dams. This is just today's solution to the problem, many others are possible.
I don't fret about running out of power. My main concern wrt fossil fuel usage is global warming. For that, only global cooperation can possibly help, and might not be sufficient even then.
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Is the earth a finite environment? Technically, yes.
Technically the entire universe is finite. But please note it's also fucking enormous. So is the sun, which provides most of the energy on the earth, it's good for billions of years. I'm not really that worried about peak oil.
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Damian, my solution to the same dilemma was to move the CRT to the bedroom, freeing up the lounge for the plasma. If we get an even bigger TV one day, the shuffle will continue - plasma in bedroom, CRT in office, 200 inches of pure man-toy in the lounge. Or maybe a kitchen TV. I draw the line at ones in the kids' bedrooms though.
I actually already had a working CRT in my bedroom, a bit smaller. Wasn't sure what to do with it, as it had no remote so wasn't appropriate in the office, so I asked my neighbor if he wanted it, and it was gone in 5 minutes. So I feel good about recycling.
I'm loathe to destroy working devices too. I have a 15 year old machine as one of my servers, and it just chugs away. I still use my 1998 mp3 CD player in one of my cars - people ask why not get a 40GB iPod and I point out there's over 100GB worth of data in the various CDs in the car, and no one will be tempted to break in to nick an old CD player, and it's free, as opposed to hundreds of dollars, countless hours dicking around with iTunes, paying for stuff off their store, etc. Also, it plays CDs, which an iPod can't do.
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Come on, guys. These devices which last a decade don't exactly help much with economic growth, do they?
Tricky point, sir. What does happen to the world when everything just works, and there's no need to upgrade? I can see disaster.
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You see, I am not an economist, and we seem to have all kinds of arcane rules about how economies work, and I don't really understand why one rule is perfectly acceptable and another rule makes everyone go all 'pffft! that's ridiculous!'
I'm not an economist either. And it's a perfectly doable idea to cap margins according to some set of rules, just as freezing wages and prices was doable (without actually being a good idea). You'd probably need to be more specific about exactly what you had in mind to be taken more seriously.
One of the most serious difficulties I see in the idea is simply the accounting of what a margin actually is. If a company is in the business of innovation, like Apple is, then they have a whole portfolio of things they are working on, and the overall profitability of the company rides on the collective worth of those things, not how one particular one pans out. So while it may well be that the unit cost of making iPads is way less than the price, you have to take into account that the company has a whole lot of things on the boil, and the iPad could be paying for all of them. That makes the margin seem a whole lot less all of a sudden. It could even be that the company is losing money whilst still profiting handsomely from the iPad, because of 3 simultaneous flops, and some highly speculative thing that they're still working on.
I can see that capping might make sense in some totally uninnovative business, like, for example, loaning money, which is done in much the same way it was done thousands of years ago. Indeed it seems to me that most of the innovations that have been come up with there are for the bad, because the industry itself does not produce, so if it's taking huge profits it's basically draining the rest of the economy. Gambling would be another clear choice for capping and already is capped.
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I gave up on our TV news when they interrupted Barack Obama's victory speech for a live cross to some New Zealander standing outside the White House clumsily attempting to summarize the situation.
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Personally, I'm bored with tinkering with my computers and Macs offer a tinker-free experience.
I'm pretty bored with that too, I must say. That said, haven't had to do so much tinkering when I buy my PCs with OS already installed. My netbook was a turn-it-on-and-just-start-using-it affair.
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I'd personally like more of the money to go to the people who do the work, as opposed to the people who already have money.
Sure, but that's quite a different proposition to saying that shareholders must have their profits capped on some particular product, by some arbitrary accounting measure. That just wouldn't work.
I got no problem with a minimum wage. Nor, of course, with any number of better worker compensation models. But margins are a whole different issue. The workers themselves could be shareholders and they'd be royally pissed if their profits were screwed over because the law said it wasn't allowed.
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