Dana Blankenhorn

Old Hippies of the GOP

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 21 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

The hippies of the early 1970s were, by and large, good people. Good-hearted and idealistic.

But they were completely out of touch with the political zeitgeist of their time, as we now know. Anyone even remotely associated with their idealism was pushed out of the political mainstream starting with Nixon. Watergate and the Carter election fooled some into thinking this wasn't the case, but normal service was resumed by 1980. After that, the ideological knees jerked whenever the strings were pulled for a generation.

This is the main result of a crisis election, a change in the political zeitgeist, so that the rising generation's assumptions about life and politics become dominant. Opposition to them must then be couched as “yes, but,” accepting the premises but leaning into them. That's what Bill Clinton did, and what Dwight Eisenhower, Woodrow Wilson, and Grover Cleveland did before him.

Before “yeah but” can be a viable strategy, of course, the old playbook must be re-run one more time. The McClellan Democrats, the Bryan Democrats, the Landon Republicans, the McGovern Democrats. They need to be led by avatars of the old order, but what the rising tide will focus on will be its bleeding edge, those “hippies” whom no one should listen to, now or ever again.

Who are the “hippies” of 2012?

The Eternal Struggle of Creditor and Debtor

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 20 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

The eternal struggle in any capitalist system is between creditors and debtors.

For creditors it seems sisyphean. You make loans, you make money, but then debtors can take you out for a pittance through bankruptcy. That's the risk. You loan too aggressively and, just when you think you're about to take the pot, it's snatched away from you. Game over, start again.

What we need to understand is that countries and, in fact, the whole world, plays this game, and that not only does it not end but that it never should. Which means there has to be a way to re-start the game when the debtor cries uncle.

There has to be a method for national bankruptcy that re-starts growth.

Solar Has Its MITS Moment

The MITS Altair looks like a box with switches, but in 1975 it was the coolest thing evah and remains an important historical milestone.

That's because it was the first actual computer you, an individual, could buy and actually do calculations with.

It's true in retrospect that MITS didn't understand the vocabulary of personal computing, that we needed a familiar input (a keyboard), and a familiar output (a TV) to make this more than an engineering toy. But still...there's a reason Bill Gates visited founder Ed Roberts on his deathbed. 

Well, solar power is now having its MITS moment, and the Ed Roberts of our time may turn out to be Arthur Chew.

Chew runs a little outfit called Spinray Energy, in North Scituate, a town in western Rhode Island midway between Providence and the Connecticut border. And his MITS Altair, called the PowerDeck, is an $1,100 do-it-yourself solar system, which you can just plug into your house. No contract, no engineer, no nothing, just 200 watts of pure solar power. UL-listed. 

Chew is modest about what he's done, noting that it's not a replacement for rooftop solar arrays costing tens of thousands of dollars, more of a “stepping stone” for those who want to “experiment” with the idea.

All Chew has done is create a kit around simple panels and microinverters, then put it on Amazon.com. Amazon, in turn, is now offering the kit for 10% off, $999 if you act now. They're saying shipments take one to three weeks.

I'm being careful when I call this a MITS system. I don't want you to think that all the problems of DIY solar are solved. But the way is now clear to build on this and actually create the solar equivalent of the Apple II, years ahead of schedule.

It's an important moment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Publishers Screw Google News, and Google News Screws You

Over the last few years I have come to rely on Google News. It provides the most links to every news story, and scanning the main page gives me a one-minute view of the headlines, not just globally but in my areas of interest.

But lately publishers have been screwing Google News with new policies, and Google News has in turn been screwing its readers.

The reason: paywalls. Publishers think you should pay for reading their stuff. Fine, I won't read my stuff.

But Google doesn't want to piss them off, and still links to it. Worse, it now links without identifying the paywall. This is sometimes because it has made deals with publishers for “publicity” purposes, giving those who link to stories through Google News some access to the actual stuff. (Although if you try to leave that particular page you quickly find you're out of luck.)

It's for this reason that I avoid The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. I can find out what's going on without them, thank you very much. They are not as essential as they think. And if we're forced to pay separately for each newspaper we look at online, how many papers are we going to look at? Exactly.

The purpose of these paywalls isn't so much to make money as to eliminate competition. Make a successful paywall a requirement for competing and there will be a whole lot less competition. 

Worse is what Google is allowing The Financial Times to do. They offer a story on Google News, but if you click on it you don't go to the story. Instead you go to the paper's main page. This is a strategy right out of Murdoch, circa 1998, and it's stupid. I have sometimes found Google adding a preliminary page to this hosing, saying that you're going to some long URL (which savvy readers can identify as the home page, although it includes all sorts of cookie data in it) and you should click here to give permission for the move.

Not good enough.

The old policy made sense. Identify when there's a paywall, or a forced subscription wall. Let me make the choice whether to click or not.

Better yet. Don't offer a link to something you're not letting people link to. (Or charge for the link as you would for an ad, and identify it as such.)

Fossil Fuel Gloating Premature

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 19 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

These are tough times for the renewable energy business. But it's always darkest before the dawn.

People are writing about a “green tech crash” but that's after the fact. Most U.S.-based green tech companies are flat on their backs and the few that continue to trade, like First Solar (FSLR), are down so far it looks like up.

What the green bears are fearing is an end to federal subsidies of the space between now and 2014. They assume that, since the space was subsidized in 2009, and needed to be subsidized, it must always need to be subsidized, that it lives on subsidy and can't exist without it, that it will disappear without subsidy.

I know the Koch Brothers and their minions across the political world wish that were the case.  But that's not the case.

What If Wall Street Is Wrong on Hollande?

Wall Street is banging the drums as hard as it possibly can, warning against a victory by French Socialist Francois Hollande in this weekend's election and of dire consequences should he win.

But what if they're wrong?

Hard as it may be to believe, sometimes business is wrong about what is good for business. Business wants what it wants, but you're going to find sometimes you just might find you get what you need.

That was certainly true during the 1930s. The first Roosevelt Administration saw China-like growth numbers, despite the Liberty League calling FDR a “traitor to his class.” The stock market has long outperformed under Democratic Presidents, compared with Republicans. 

Personally, I think the reason goes back to FDR's time, and his argument with Austrian economics. 

The problem with the Austrians  lies in their long history. Something changed in the 20^th century.

Mass production happened.

Makers Define the Next Boom

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 18 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

One striking aspect of all recoveries I have witnessed is how you never know where you're going when you start the journey.

Instead, analysts look for the next boom in the embers of the last one, much as at present everyone talks about the housing market.

Forget housing – that was the last boom. (Picture from LiveScience.)

Similarly, early in the last decade, I don't recall many people talking about housing or deficit finance as being the keys to growth. Everyone was stirring the embers of the tech bubble, hoping for a rebirth. Google's IPO was celebrated in part because everyone saw it as organic growth, rather than as a replacement for many, larger, more unfocused efforts that had failed.

Same thing in the 1990s. We spent three years talking about multimedia when the Internet was on our doorstep. And the 1980s – everyone talked about the PC rather than the secular change in enterprise computing, toward client server, that was the real economic driver.

Point is we should not be surprised at the current mistakes. But we shouldn't be fooled by them either.

The next boom has begun, but it's not about housing, nor is it about the Internet.

It's about making stuff.