Quotulatiousness

June 11, 2011

Redefining “high speed” as 45 mph

Filed under: Economics, Government, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:12

This is very amusing, unless you’re a taxpayer:

The latest in lunacy in high-speed rail lunacy: at Joel Kotkin’s newgeography.com Wendell Cox reports that the U.S. Transportation Department is dangling money before the government of Iowa seeking matching funds from the state for a high-speed rail line from Iowa City to Chicago. The “high-speed” trains would average 45 miles per hour and take five hours to reach Chicago from Iowa City. One might wonder how big the market for this service is, since Iowa City and Johnson County have only 130,882 people; add in adjoining Linn County (Cedar Rapids) and you’re only up to 342,108 — not really enough, one would think, to supply enough riders to cover operating costs much less construction costs.

The federal government must be getting desperate to find some state willing to take this deal . . .

PTerry plans his own end, in his own time

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:02

Short of a miracle cure for Alzheimer’s, Terry Pratchett outlines how he plans to commit suicide:

Terry Pratchett, a 62-year-old British writer of comic fantasy novels who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2007, says he intends to commit suicide, sitting in a lawn chair outside his country home, listening to the classical church music of Thomas Tallis on his iPod, with a glass of brandy in one hand and a potion of life-ending pills in the other.

“Perhaps, a second brandy, if there is time,” the euthanasia and assisted-suicide advocate quips.

“And since this is England, I had better add, ‘If wet, in the library.’ ”

On Monday, Mr. Pratchett will play host to a real-life suicide when BBC2 television airs a controversial documentary in which he helps a 71-year-old man with motor neurone disease kill himself in Switzerland.

QotD: OPEC’s 50-year fishing trip

The petroleum-exporting countries have kept America as a gigantic fish on a steel line for nearly 50 years, reeling it in slowly, and letting it out (relaxing oil prices), when the United States made purposeful noises about raising domestic production, cutting consumption, and going to alternate sources. As soon as OPEC fine-tuned the fishing reel, the great fish went with the docility of the addicted consumer back to its default position mainlining on foreign oil at steadily increasing prices and in ever larger quantities. Every president starting with Richard Nixon warned of the danger in this addiction, but none has done anything useful about it. There must be an emphasis on cheap and plentiful natural gas, more nuclear (with maximum safety standards), more off-shore drilling (with maximum environmental-protection arrangements), and higher gasoline taxes to raise revenues and restrain use. All of this will bring down the international price and reduce the amount of money available for the Iranians, Saudis, Venezuelans, and others to finance terrorism around the world, and will ultimately reduce U.S. defense costs. None of this has been done, though the need for it has been obvious for decades.

Conrad Black, “Why America is suffering”, National Post, 2011-06-11

They “buried the ban in the 300-plus pages of the 2007 energy bill, and very few talked about it in public”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Law, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:28

Virginia Postrel talks about the looming ban-that-isn’t-a-ban on incandescent lightbulbs:

One serious technophile, University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, spent much of 2007 flogging compact fluorescents on his popular Instapundit blog, eventually persuading more than 1,900 readers to swap 19,871 incandescent bulbs for CFLs. To this day, the Instapundit group is by far the largest participant at OneBillionBulbs.com, a bulb-switching campaign organized by the consulting firm Symmetric Technologies. But Reynolds himself has changed his mind.

“I’m deeply, deeply disappointed with CFL bulbs,” he wrote last month on his blog. “I replaced pretty much every regular bulb in the house with CFLs, but they’ve been failing at about the same rate as ordinary long-life bulbs, despite the promises of multiyear service. And I can’t tell any difference in my electric bill. Plus, the Insta-Wife hates the light.”

That was our experience with the early CFL bulbs, too: they didn’t come close to achieving the longevity we were supposedly paying all the extra money for. And, as I’ve posted before, they’re not as easy to clean up after breakage as the older bulbs.

So the activists offended by the public’s presumed wastefulness took a more direct approach. They joined forces with the big bulb producers, who had an interest in replacing low-margin commodities with high-margin specialty wares, and, with help from Congress and President George W. Bush, banned the bulbs people prefer.

It was an inside job. Neither ordinary consumers nor even organized interior designers had a say. Lawmakers buried the ban in the 300-plus pages of the 2007 energy bill, and very few talked about it in public. It was crony capitalism with a touch of green.

Crony capitalism is what the general public is coming to think is the only kind of capitalism, because they have seen so much of it during the last few presidencies. Your business can be plagued with petty regulators enforcing nitpicking rules, while Congress showers money and special privileges on big businesses and banks.

But, as she points out, it’s not technically a true ban:

Now, I realize that by complaining about the bulb ban — indeed, by calling it a ban — I am declaring myself an unsophisticated rube, the sort of person who supposedly takes marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. In a New York Times article last month, Penelope Green set people like me straight. The law, she patiently explained, “simply requires that companies make some of their incandescent bulbs work a bit better, meeting a series of rolling deadlines between 2012 and 2014.”

True, the law doesn’t affect all bulbs — just the vast majority. (It exempts certain special types, like the one in your refrigerator.) The domed halogen bulbs meet the new standards yet are technically incandescents; judging from my personal experiments, they produce light similar to that of old- fashioned bulbs. They do, however, cost twice as much as traditional bulbs and, if the packages are to be believed, don’t last as long.

I keep hoping that LED lights will be able to produce the kind of long-life that we used to be able to depend upon from incandescents, as CFLs and halogen bulbs have not come close to living up to the promises. However, LEDs have not yet managed that trick in commercial applications.

So, aside from allowing lobbyists to flex their muscles, what is the ban attempting to achieve? That’s not quite clear-cut:

Though anti-populist in the extreme, the bulb ban in fact evinces none of the polished wonkery you’d expect from sophisticated technocrats. For starters, it’s not clear what the point is. Why should the government try to make consumers use less electricity? There’s no foreign policy reason. Electricity comes mostly from coal, natural gas and nuclear plants, all domestic sources. So presumably the reason has something to do with air pollution or carbon-dioxide emissions.

But banning light bulbs is one of the least efficient ways imaginable to attack those problems. A lamp using power from a clean source is treated the same as a lamp using power from a dirty source. A ban gives electricity producers no incentive to reduce emissions.

China finally admits to (some) problems at the Three Gorges megadam

Filed under: China, Environment, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:47

It’s been “officially” a wonderful thing with absolutely no negative attributes for so long that it’s almost refreshing that the Chinese government is finally admitting it’s not all good news around the massive Three Gorges dam and reservoir:

In private, officials have worried about the project for some time and occasionally their doubts have surfaced in the official media. But the government itself has refused to acknowledge them. When the project was approved by the rubber-stamp parliament in 1992, debate was stifled by the oppressive political atmosphere of the time, following the Tiananmen Square massacre three years earlier. Last July, with the dam facing its biggest flood crest since completion in 2006, officials hinted that they might have overstated its ability to control flooding. On May 18th, with the dam again in the spotlight because of the drought, a cabinet meeting chaired by the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, went further in acknowledging drawbacks.

Having called the dam “hugely beneficial overall”, the cabinet’s statement said there were problems relating to the resettlement of 1.4m people, to the environment and to the “prevention of geological disasters” that urgently needed addressing. The dam, it said, had had “a certain impact” on navigation, irrigation and water-supply downstream. Some of these problems had been forecast at the design stage or spotted during construction. But they had been “difficult to resolve effectively because of limitations imposed by conditions at the time.” It did not elaborate.

This week in Guild Wars 2 news

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community.

Part 1: Discussion of previous news

  • If you listen to podcasts, you might want to subscribe to the Guildcast weekly podcast
  • Reminder: the official Guild Wars 2 wiki is still growing, so it’s worth checking it out now and again for new information.
  • Not really Guild Wars/Guild Wars 2-related, but interesting anyway: “The report, entitled 2011 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry (and can be downloaded in pdf form here) has revealed some new numbers about female gamers, including their growing presence in the gaming audience. As of 2010, 42 percent of the gaming audience is female, up from 40 percent the previous year. And interestingly enough, turning the whole “video games are for teenage boys” stereotype on its head, women 18 and older make up more of the gaming audience than boys 17 and younger.”

Part 2: Guild Wars news

  • Reminder: If you’d like to keep track of the upcoming Winds of Change and other Guild Wars Beyond material, keep this page bookmarked.
  • Flameseeker Chronicles: A method to the madness. “The June 2nd update is the talk of the Guild Wars playerbase this week — especially on the PvP side of the community. It was certainly enough to pique my interest, even though my PvP project fell victim to a complete lack of free time this month. What really interested me about this update, however, is that it feels like such a response to feedback and the current vibe of the player community. Not that ArenaNet doesn’t pay attention as a rule, but so many of the huge updates are focused on the Hall of Monuments and Guild Wars: Beyond in preparation for Guild Wars 2 that it’s nice to see one that is all about Guild Wars 1 — not to mention one that is a pure response to the state of the current game.”

Part 3: Guild Wars 2 news

  • Check out a neat fan-made “New Krytan Translator” website.
  • Arenanet is sponsoring a symphony performance of music from Guild Wars. “The Seattle Symphony and Chorus will perform music from a wide range of video game titles old and new, accompanied by hi-def graphics from the games on large screens above the orchestra. We’ve cut together a new video of cinematic footage from Guild Wars 2 specifically for the event. We’re sure that the incredible visuals paired with Jeremy Soule’s stirring Guild Wars music will be the highlight of the performance.”
  • Gamer Zines interview with Eric Flannum, part 1. “We do guide our players through their story with markers (which resemble a green star burst) and these markers will sometimes appear over an NPC’s head. The important difference in this case is that a player will only ever have one step in their story, one thing that they are trying to accomplish, not a journal full of 20 tasks that by their very nature and quantity start to seem unimportant. The things that the player is asked to do while on their personal story are often long and involved and they should always feel like they flow organically from the narrative that the player is experiencing. In short, the player should never be asked to kill X monsters by someone who they’ve never met before. Think of the personal story in Guild Wars 2 as you would the “main” storyline of a great single player RPG.”
  • Tap Repeatedly‘s interview with Jonathan Sharp and Jon Peters. “The warriors strength is mainly focused on its melee attacks but knowing where to be on the battlefield, at a high level, is probably the most difficult thing. To get to a very acceptable, competent level with the warrior, yes, it’s probably the easiest one to get there. But only 1 in a million people have reached the level of a warrior that really sets them apart. If you’ve seen any Guild Wars 1 we had The Last Pride, a Korean guild, and they had a warrior called Last of Master and there is no one I have seen who is even close to him. He takes positioning — things that makes a warrior — to a level no one else does. There is more room to improve on the warrior than any other profession, though a lot of people would argue that with me, but to me that subtlety of positioning is something almost no one ever understands.”

Powered by WordPress