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Externalities - JJ

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China “preparing for the worst” to handle record levels of demand | Industrial Fuels and Power. End of the Energy Subsidy Gravy Train | Oil Price.com. The drama that raised the national debt ceiling without increasing taxes is sending warning shots across the bow for many industries. The message for energy subsidies, including the tax credits and treasury tax grants for wind and solar, as well as tax credits for oil and gas companies, could not be clearer. The gravy train is ending because the Government cannot afford it, and political realities won’t tolerate it much longer. The debt deal did not cut renewable energy subsidies. But it set up a super committee of Congress that must produce $1.3 trillion in spending cuts by Thanksgiving. Select the reports you are interested in:NO-SPAM: Under no circumstances will we EVER rent, sell or give away your email Mothers and grandmothers will be sacrificed by the lobbyists on K Street to keep their subsidies.

EIA Study of Energy Subsidies In November 2010, several members of Congress asked U.S. This pick-me-not-grandma choice is not the place energy subsidy advocates want to be. The New Dynamic. Anarchy and Austerity: Why London Won't Be the Last City to Burn - Derek Thompson - Business. The Great Recession gave birth to a lost generation across the world, where youth unemployment rates stretch into the 20s, 30s and even 40s. Those millions have responded with violence. The riots and fires consuming London are a story about senseless violence and crime. They are also a story about urban politics, race relations, education inequality, and British culture and society. But underneath all of that, they are part of an economic story that is universal. For the last year, Great Britain has embraced austerity to a degree that would make some American conservatives blush.

For 100 years, across the world, more cuts have led to more crime. The scourge of young restlessness growing in this noxious petri dish is potent enough to have a nickname. The theft and violence and street crime and lawlessness in London is shocking. Their conclusion: Austerity breeds anarchy. What about us? And yet, somewhat miraculously, crime has fallen in the U.S. through the Great Recession. Charts: History Of Human Progress. Elevator Speech #2--Continuous geometric growth in a finite biosphere is impossible. Continuous geometric growth in a finite biosphere is impossible There is nothing quite as seductive as extrapolation. I remember when I was in junior high study hall, we budding gearheads would sit around making "calculations" such as "if you can get a car to go 80 mph with 150 horsepower, you should be able to go 320 mph with 600 horsepower.

" And while this childish foolishness was wrong for dozens of sound reason, it was certainly no worse than the typical budget, growth, or profit calculations one finds in daily newspapers or teevee newscasts. Geometric extrapolation is even worse. It is probably the most commonly practiced form of utter insanity. Michael Hudson on the humans who knew better Hudson says that – in every country and throughout history – debt always grows exponentially, while the economy always grows as an S-curve. For example, Hudson noted in 2004: Mesopotamian economic thought c. 2000 BC rested on a more realistic mathematical foundation than does today’s orthodoxy.

How Not to Play the Game. It’s been more than a year now since the theme of “green wizardry” became central to the posts here on The Archdruid Report, and I’ve pretty much covered the first two of the three themes I mean to discuss before it becomes time to shift the conversation elsewhere. We’ve discussed organic gardening and its associated arts, and we’ve discussed homescale energy production and conservation. At this point, before we go on to the third leg of the tripod, which used to be called “recycling” thirty years ago and deserves a more robust name now, I’d like to step back for a moment and talk a bit about strategy.

Yes, there’s a strategy underlying the selection of projects and possibilities I’ve been discussing here. The fast version of the take on the future I want to discuss divides it up into four overlapping phases or periods, labeled according to the basic modes of economic production that predominate during each one. Not, it’s probably worth noting, into revolution. Latest Updates - DocumentCloud. Over the past two years, we have released much of our toolset as open-source code: Backbone.js , Underscore.js , Jammit , CloudCrowd , and others . Today, we’re launching another piece of DocumentCloud — both on DocumentCloud.org and as a component you can integrate into your own projects. VisualSearch.js is a rich search box for real data.

It enhances ordinary search boxes with the ability to autocomplete facets and values for sophisticated searches. For example, here’s a query that filters The New York Times’ copies of Sarah Palin’s recently-released emails. You can use VisualSearch.js on your site by including the necessary JavaScript, CSS, images, and dependencies. We are excited to not only see what clever uses developers come up with for VisualSearch, but also what additions you write that can be merged back into the main repository.

Commons - JJ

Food - JJ. Risk - JJ. Muddling. Games. Martin Nowak and the mathematics of cooperation. Posted by Ethan on Jun 10th, 2011 in Berkman, hyperpublic | 3 comments Mathematical biologist Martin Nowak talks to us about the evolution of cooperation. Cooperation is a puzzle for biologists because it doesn’t make obvious evolutionary sense. In cooperation, the donor pays a cost and the recipient gets a benefit, as measured in terms of reproductive success. That reproduction can be either cultural or biological and the challenge to explain remains. It may be simplest to consider this in mathematical terms. In game theory, the prisoner’s dilemma makes the problem clear to us. Given a set of outcomes where we’re individually better off defecting, it’s incredibly hard to understand how we get to a cooperative state, where we both benefit more.

There are five major mechanisms that biologists have proposed to explain the evolution of cooperation: - kin selection - direct reciprocity - indirect reciprocity - spatial selection - group selection At first, cooperate. Schumpeterian tablet competition. Lynne Kiesling If you want good examples of Schumpeterian competition, it doesn’t get much better than this: Amazon to take on Apple this summer with a Samsung-built tablet?

The Engadget folks make … a very reasoned argument that paints Amazon, not Samsung or the rest of the traditional consumer electronics industry, as Apple’s chief competition in the near-term tablet space. An idea that’ll be tough to argue against if Amazon — with its combined music (downloadable and streaming), video, book, and app ecosystem — can actually launch a dirt-cheap, highly-customized, 7-inch Android tablet this summer as Pete predicts. This evolution is Schumpeterian in several ways, the most obvious of which is the process of creative destruction that disrupts equilibration by entrepreneurs creating a new product that will make some old products less valuable and ultimately obsolete.

Note, interestingly, that one of the products likely to be made obsolete is Amazon’s own Kindle. Like this: Like Loading... Complexity Economics. Thomas P.M. Barnett's Globlogization - Thomas P.M. Barnett's Globlogization - Grand Strategy Competition Update. As head judge of Wikistrat’s International Grand Strategy Competition, I wanted to highlight some of the takeaways that we’ve already gathered in the first week of the contest. As you may already know, the competition brings together more than 30 teams comprised of PhD and masters students from elite international schools and world-renowned think tanks. Those teams, evenly distributed over a dozen or so countries (so as to encourage intra-country as well as inter-country competition), are being challenged to come up with long-term grand strategies in relation to five issues: global energy security, global economic “rebalancing,” Jihadist terrorism, the Sino-American relationship and nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.

Across the four-week competition, each team of 5-10 graduate political science students and interns will collaborate on the Wikistrat model to: As head judge, I assign points to teams based on their activity throughout the week. The tyranny of interests. How to make systems thinking sexy. When Elizabeth Thompson, executive director of the BFC, asked me, "is the Challenge too niche? " my reply was: Damn right it's niche - and a good thing, too. No other public design competition that I know comes even close to being this demanding for applicants, nor so thoroughly managed. The Challenge is a long way from the business as usual of mainstream design and its frothy competitions. By "business as usual" I mean the kind of business that is bewitched by what Dr Chris Seeley calls, in The Fool and the Great Turning "the three impossible fantasies": the fantasy of limitless growth; the fantasy that actions can be taken that don't have consequences; and the fantasy that human beings are separate from, and above, the natural world.

These fantasies are not unique to design. They describe the state-of-mind of the industrial growth economy as a whole - the economy which Adbusters has so memorably described as a “doomsday machine”. Don't get me wrong. All this is welcome, and impressive. Us claims all .com and .net websites are in its jurisdiction. THE US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) wants to take down web sites that use the .com and .net top level domains (TLD) regardless of whether their servers are based in the US. Erik Barnett, assistant deputy director of ICE said told the Guardian that the agency will actively target web sites that are breaking US copyright laws even if their servers are not based in the US.

According to Barnett, all web sites that use the .com and .net TLDs are fair game and that, since the Domain Name Service (DNS) indexes for those web sites are routed through the US-based registry Versign, ICE believes it has enough to "seek a US prosecution". According to the Guardian, ICE is not focusing its efforts just on web sites that stream dodgy content but those that link to them, something the newspaper claims has "considerable doubt as to whether this is even illegal in Britain". It points out that the only such case to have been heard by a judge in the UK was dismissed. Big data in real time is no fantasy — Cloud Computing News. More on The Spirit Level. There are quite a few interesting comments on my earlier post on The Spirit Level on Economist's View. I can't respond in detail to all of them, but here are a few additional thoughts.

A few commentators seem to think I'm unsympathetic to the book, which isn't accurate. So let me be more direct in my assessment of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger . I find the empirical data presented to be highly suggestive and interesting. In my view, a good causal explanation requires an analysis of the mechanisms that bring about the relation between cause and effect. The variety of causal mechanisms that seem pertinent to me in consideration of their data include several different kinds. Second, there are structural influences on a population’s health outcomes that do not derive from the degree of income inequalities that exist in a society but are nonetheless highly influential on health status of the population. Salvaging Energy. The peak oil blogosphere this year seems to have decided that the Fourth of July needed a Grinch of its own to compete with Christmas, and a fair number of blogs duly went up denouncing the day and its entertainments.

I can’t say that these added much to the peak oil dialogue or, really, to much of anything. It’s hardly a secret, for instance, that intellectuals on the two coasts like to belittle working class people who live in between, nor that it’s still quite fashionable on both ends of the political spectrum to characterize our system of government in terms that would get those who do so dragged away by a death squad if their rhetoric had any relationship to reality. Me, I enjoyed the Fourth; I usually do. The theme of this week’s post isn’t primarily about the future, glorious or otherwise. That topic is the return of electric cars to American roads. The answer is unfortunately no. This isn’t something you’ll see discussed very often in e-car websites and sales flyers. Rural Women & Agricultural Land Conversions in China. China’s unprecedented economic growth and rapid urbanization have created a massive demand for arable land to be converted to real estate or industrial development.

In parallel, local government officials and Village Collective cadres typically favor conversions because local public expenditures tend to greatly surpass local taxes and land use fees have become an important source of fiscal revenue. While the law establishes that land can only be expropriated for the public good, that farmers need to be notified in advance, and that those affected should be compensated for the land lost – for the cost of resettling and for the value of the structures and standing crops – the picture that has emerged in practice is worrisome. Land expropriations have been rampant and a high number of farmers have been rendered landless. Women may be in a particularly vulnerable position. Results and analysis of our survey of women’s land rights in rural China will be available soon. Ms. The Pull of Narrative – In Search of Persistent Context. We live in a world of ever more change and choice, a world where we have far more opportunity than ever to achieve our potential.

That kind of world is enormously exciting, and full of options. But it is also highly disorienting, threatening to overwhelm us with sensory and mental overload. In that kind of world, the ability to provide persistent context becomes paradoxically ever more valuable. Persistent context helps to orient us and connect us in ways that can accelerate our efforts to achieve our potential.

Content versus context In our digital world, content providers progressively chunk up their offerings to provide more choice and easier access. As this occurs, value moves from content to context. We have already seen a growing emphasis on experience as an important element of context. The context trajectory – from experiences to stories to narratives What is the context trajectory here?

Stories and narratives are often used interchangeably, as synonyms. Examples of narratives. 2021: the tipping point for peer to peer banking and government taxation. If you thought the wars over knowledge and culture were intense, I believe we’ll see much more interesting events unfold in the coming decade. The decentralized, uncontrollable economy where one lifetime employment is no longer central to every human being is something I’ve called the swarm economy, and I predict it will redefine society to an immensely larger extent than the ability to get rap music for free.

Thought-provoking prediction by Rick Falkvinge of the Pirate Party in Sweden, about the coming disintermediation of banking through anonymous cash, now used by advanced hackers only, and the problems this will cause for government taxation: “It took ten years for music sharing to become easy enough to wildfire, courtesy of Napster. It took video sharing ten years to become easy enough to wildfire. Here’s what’s on my radar: banking. Just as BitTorrent made the copyright industry obsolete in the blink of an eye, these stand to make banks obsolete. Michael Klare, The Energy Landscape of 2041. Hierarchies and networks in a corporate context. Week 315. Post green revolution, time for the ‘brown’ and ‘blue’ revolutions. The Most Important Management Trends of the (Still Young) Twenty-First Century. Floods, Droughts And Heat Waves.