Dana Blankenhorn

A Mighty Wind

Renewable energy skepticism is based on some outright falsehoods.

Solar energy dies when it gets cloudy. (False.)  Solar energy is always intermittent. (False.)

But here's the most important fallacy of all.

Renewable energy needs the grid.

It doesn't.

Most of China's abundant wind energy is not attached to the grid. Africa is being transformed by off-the-grid energy. America's military is increasingly powered by solar energy when it is “in-country.” You don't need to recharge your iPhone at the wall if you don't want to.

And thus we come to residential wind.

Serve the Market or Serve Yourself

Over at the Institute for the Future, Marina Gorbis has one of those idealistic, infuriating posts that draw me in and then repel me.

The title is Ain't Gonna Work on Arianna's Plantation No More, and it covers recent efforts to sue AOL-HuffPost on behalf of freelancers who wrote for the site free.

Gorbis compares the current situation to a feudal economy, calling writers "digital serfs" who survive on a pittance, while digital lords like Huffington grab all the cash.

Gorbis may be a nice lady, but she knows nothing about journalism.

The Magic Price is 99 cents

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 12 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Want to make a lot of money on your Internet content?

Charge 99 cents for it.

Steve Jobs was the first tech gazillionaire to prove this, with the iTunes store. Charging 99 cents per song was certainly enough for our kids. Hey, it's less than a dollar. Sales zoomed.

When music companies complained, Jobs finally offered them a new price point, $1.29. But are total revenues really higher at that higher price? Not really.

Jobs, of course, only discovered this for digital goods. Dollar stores like the one being built above in Houston have been around for many years. I remember my mother taking me to one over 30 years ago in southern California.

The price appears to be a bargain but with digital goods it doesn't have to be. Most CDs contain about 15 songs. That's $15 for a CD, more than stores charge for top-sellers today. The price is not out of line, especially when you consider the fact that there's almost no distribution cost.

But it is magic, because it is an impulse buy. You see something for 99 cents that you might not like, you may well buy it anyway because, hey, it's just 99 cents. You see the same product available for $2.99, or even $1.29, and you're going to think about it.

It's market psychology in action.

 

Admiration

When I was young I envied rich and famous writers, hoping (and maybe expecting) I might be one some day.

I'm not. I'm competent, and my Internet readers know me well. But you're a small band – perhaps a few hundred regulars in all. You're not growing. I'm not on TV, I don't write books. I realized some time ago I am what I am, a journalist working the backwaters of technology, listening to sources and parroting what they say.

But I have learned, in my maturity, to admire those who can do more, even when they started out well behind me.

Take Anthony Bourdain. He's near my age and admits to having taken just the wrong path through life. He was a druggie cook for about two decades, his lungs always filled with smoke, his late nights (by his own admission) filled with cocaine and heroin.

Then at about age 40, he got angry, he got frustrated, he decided he wanted more. He sat down and started writing, hating the fame and pretension around him, vowing to tell just the truth and to never “sell out” like “that little ewok” Emeril, the Food Network, the whole celebrity-chef gourmet scene.

The result was “Kitchen Confidential,” a classic which told the truth about American kitchen life. Brutally honest, howlingly funny, with a unique voice that (it turned out) poured right out of him, unedited, whenever you talked to him.

Confederate People

What do you do when your belief system has been rejected, after you were told for generations that those who objected to it were illegitimate? (Picture from Firedoglake.)

What do you do when people you respect say that there is nothing to be done now but take up arms to defend your rights and your lifestyle, or public officials you trust tell you to be armed and dangerous?

We saw what happens once before. War happened, in 10,000 places, a conflict that transformed us from united States to the United States.

For the generations which followed the result of final defeat was not quite so violent. Populists melted back into the Democratic Party. Progressives melted back into the Republican Party. Hippies grew up. There were a few fringe elements, a few incidents, but generally civil peace was kept, and the country moved forward.

Will that happen this time? The evidence so far:

• 5.5 million background checks on new buyers of firearms since November.
• A heavily-armed gunman in Alabama who lived with his mother killed 10 using two military assault rifles, a handgun and a shotgun.
• A man in North Carolina shot up a nursing home where his estranged wife worked, leaving 7 dead.
• 14 died in Binghampton, New York when a right-wing fanatic opened fire on an immigration center. His parents had been immigrants. 
• Three cops were killed by a heavily-armed right-wing fanatic in Pittsburgh, their bodies bled out because he also had body armor.

Maybe the words of the leaders are just talk. Maybe these are just isolated incidents.

Or maybe it's the start of something larger.

A Different Kind of Publisher Wanted

During the bottom of the last recession, I self-published a book on Moore's Law (right).

The idea was to examine how technology had changed the world in my lifetime, to look at the past, present and future of Moore's Law, its antecedents, and its relations.

A marketing "expert" suggested I call the finished book  The Blankenhorn Effect and I did -- to my shame.

Not that I don't like me. I do, very much. Not that I don't like being associated with change. It's my beat. But in retrospect that title was over-the-top. Change isn't about me. I'm just an observer of change.

In the end the book sold only a very few copies. I didn't push it very hard. But it's still available at Google Books, and I still get a regular stream of checks from an online publisher.

These checks inspired me to work up an update, which I have now begun. And I would really like a publisher, although it will have a new title.

Moore's Law 2010: Better and Better, Faster and Faster

I'm rocking right along. I've actually edited half the old draft. I'm planning on adding a few chapters so it's not really halfway done. But the work itself is going amazingly well.

Now for the really important bit.

Ending the Zero Sum Game

Perhaps the grossest myth of the last American generation is the Zero Sum Myth.

This myth was very much on display yesterday during the Iraq testimony. This is why it seemed at times that Gen. David Petraeus and the Democrats questioning him were speaking different languages, living on different planets.

To Petraeus, as to John McCain and the great majority of Republicans, there can only be two outcomes in Iraq. You win, you lose. The idea of some different, muddier, more real outcome is entirely foreign to them. Listen to any of them closely, listen to them tolerantly, and this comes through. You don't have to argue with it. It's simply their reality.

The point was brought home by Barack Obama's questioning (above). Is there an outcome other than a fully democratic (well Republican) Iraq, under American control, with no Al Qaeda and no influence from Iran, which you might define as victory, he asked? Petraeus reacted as though Obama were speaking his father's native Luo language. It was, to him, inconceivable.

This is in the nature of the Nixon Thesis of Conflict. It's at the heart of it, really. Life is a zero sum game. You either win or you lose. Peaceful coexistence is impossible. There can be no meeting of the minds, no agreeing to disagree. 

Rice Science Thursday: Big Buckyball

One interesting thing about C-60 carbon fullerene molecules, or "Buckyballs," as Rice people have been calling them ever since they found the things in 1985, is that they don't have to be that size.

Or that shape.

In fact the most useful structures based on this form of carbon are Buckytubes, which the rest of the world (which has no sense of humor) knows as carbon nanotubes.

Imagine the basic structure of a soccer ball, with carbon atoms in each corner of each pentagon, then instead of wrapping it around itself as tight as possible open the sides until they head into infinity. And beyond.

Well you don't have to make the ball tiny either, even though that's the first type of Buckyball Drs. Smalley, Curl and Kroto actually found. You can extend the structure as you would with a nanotube and make it really big.

Fine, Mr. Smarty Riceypants, but what can you do with them? Well, you put stuff in 'em. Like hydrogen. And here's the thing, as the kids at Dr. Boris Yacobson's lab (back at the mothership) have just figured out with their cool computer models. They can hold hydrogen as tightly as the gravity found in the center of Jupiter.

By Jove indeed.

The End of Impunity

One thing which has marked the last two decades, and it's as true for ordinary people as for our leaders, has been a sense of impunity.

Democrats complain often of how the Bush Administration displays impunity. The rules don't apply to them. They make up their own reality. The President cannot break the law.

We talk a lot less about our personal impunity. We can buy what we want. We can walk away from our debts. We don't have to make hard choices.

Democrats most fear talking about the impunity inherent in their own positions. We'll get out of Iraq on our own schedule, and stay in Afghanistan "to win," they say. We'll give ordinary people tax cuts and raise spending on health care and education.

The end of all this impunity is a big theme in our current crisis and all of us -- Democrats, Republicans, consumers, businesses -- remain in the denial stage of the process.

Last week's biggest story may have been Joseph Stiglitz' (above) estimate of the Iraq war's cost -- $3-5 trillion. (It's all here in his book.) The figure seems unimaginable so let me put it into perspective.

It's going to cost the U.S. its autonomy. It's going to cost our currency. It's going to cost you your life savings, and me mine. It's going to end the era of American impunity.

How to Really Succeed in Business

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 5 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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As a door prize for covering a software conference this week, Rick Chapman of SoftLetter gave me a copy of his book.

In Search of Stupidity was, for me, a ton of fun. It tells the history of the PC business, that part of the business I lived through and covered. Sort of a memoir of my time. And it's well-written -- funny, breezy, and conversational. While most business books are dry tomes filled with charts and buzzwords, Rick's book is a bedtime chuckle filled with stories and anecdotes.

His theme is that you can succeed in business if you just avoid being stupid. Most companies fail due to easily foreseen, really stupid mistakes, he writes, and he cites endless examples, many of which I personally covered or lived through.

In a way it's much like this newsletter.  Since launching A-Clue.Com in 1997 I focused on finding those who had a Clue, who seemed to know what was coming, and those whom I deemed Clueless.  Smart and stupid, clued-in and clueless. It's pretty similar.

But there's more to it than that.