If today’s candidates for President have a broadband strategy for rural America, it amounts to little more than bringing the inadequate and over priced broadband offered up to urban residents to their country cousins. This is hardly a path towards recapturing global communications leadership for America. More of the same old same […]

The recent FCC decision concerning the upcoming spectrum auction clearly shows that the FCC creates policy that best suits the business plans of the companies that spend the most on lobbying. Clearly, this FCC policy is NOT based on what is best for the future of nation. This FCC shows no leadership.
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After I wrote my blog piece, The Innovation Invitation, Jock Gill called me up and we had an interesting talk about it. He pointed out that the invitation to innovate should not be restricted new technology changing the way we communicate on campaigns. We need innovative ideas that transcend campaigning and go beyond […]

I watched the 1982 film “Gandhi” the other night. The viewing experience in 2007 is extremely timely, given the current US involvement in the Middle East. I recommend investing 3 hours and 10 minutes in a viewing of this film. It swept the 1983 Academy Awards. Could it even be made […]

Let’s do the math on the corn ethanol hoax.

For every unit of energy I put into making grass biofuel pellets, I get 14 out = 14:1 net energy.

With corn ethanol the net energy is just 1.67:1

14/1.67 = 8.383 better return on the investment made in grass pellets.

Now consider how the two fuels will be used.

Pellets will be burned at 80% efficiency. Lets say 70%.

Ethanol will be burned in an internal combustion engine at just 30% efficiency.

.7/.3 = 2.333

So the systems advantage of grass pelllets over ethanol is: 8.383 X 2.333 = 19.56X

Solid biofuel in the form of grass pellets, gives us 19X more return on our investments, 19X more energy independence. And 19X more national security than corn ethanol.

So why is it that all of the subsidies etc go the the biofuel with 1/19 the benefit?

Isn’t it amazing, the out right stupidity of corn ethanol? It is just a mechanism to transfer and redistribute wealth to ADM and Cargill. It just another example of corporate looting of the public treasury. It also depends utterly on fertilizers made from fossil fuels. Not to mention the virgin water degraded by the corn ethanol process: gallons of water degraded for each gallon of corn ethanol made.

Can we say that there is a pathological condition in this market and its supporting politics?

Your thoughts?

Here is another example of how we have allowed “The Market” to subvert Humanity into working for it, rather than “The Market” working for Humanity.

“Thanks to market distortions, public subsidies and tax avoidance, corporate oligopoly power in the food system actually results in a massive transfer of resources from farmers, workers, and consumers into the coffers of an ever-smaller number of transnational companies.” — Vern Grubinger

Sounds about like the energy system too!

Bright Future for Farming: Vermont Can Lead the Way

By: Vern Grubinger

The commerce of food, and therefore farming, is dominated by oligopolies. At every level—from sales of agricultural inputs, to purchasing of raw commodities, to processing of food into branded products, to retailing of food to consumers—a handful of enormous corporations control a majority of the transactions.

For example, major suppliers of chemicals and seeds for farmers are Bayer, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta. Purchases of raw products produced from farmers are dominated by Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, ConAgra, Smithfield, and Tyson/IBP. Food manufacturing giants that create most of the branded products on store shelves are Coca-Cola, Mars, Nestlé, Pepsico, Philip Morris, and Unilever. And finally, a huge share of these products are sold to consumers at stores owned by Ahold (Stop and Shop, Giant, Tops), Albertsons (Hannafords, Shaws, Star Market), Carrefour, Kroger, Wal-Mart, and a few others.

The clout of the top food retailers in the world staggers the imagination. Wal-Mart has 5,760 stores in 13 countries with $285 billion in sales. Carrefour has 11,080 stores in 37 countries with $90 billion in sales. Ahold has 7,078 stores in 15 countries with $65 billion in sales. Kroger operates 4,169 stores in the U.S. with $56 billion in retail sales. By comparison, the 120 food co-ops in the national cooperative grocers association have annual retail sales of $625 million.

The situation is not unique to farming and food; a similar scenario exists in banking, books, hardware, movies, music…you name it, even beer. A handful of multinational corporations dominate in many specific market categories where new companies rarely succeed; those that do are purchased or run out of business.

Some people say that it is precisely this economic system that brings us abundant and cheap food. But the problem, according to the Agribusiness Accountability Initiative, is that “far too few consumers realize that they actually pay for their ‘cheap food’ three times: at the check-out counter, again through their tax bill, and finally by assuming the long-term social and environmental costs of unsustainable production methods. Thanks to market distortions, public subsidies and tax avoidance, corporate oligopoly power in the food system actually results in a massive transfer of resources from farmers, workers, and consumers into the coffers of an ever-smaller number of transnational companies.”

Read the entire essay here.

Wireless Civic and Economic Development
for our New Internet Economy

As more and more cities, towns and counties initiate projects to provide a dynamic, wireless, communications platform for forward looking civic and economic development, it is also important to reflect on the question below:

Who is the intended beneficiary of an un-metered wireless communications commons? The people or the corporations? The answer is that robust development benefits both, just as public education, public highways and public safety do.

Thus the people should expect the best possible un-metered communications commons for economic development, education, health, public safety and government services that their government can provide them. This is, after all, the proper and reasonable role of a democratic government for, of, and by we, the people.

“New Orleans is a metaphor for the difference between Democrats and Republicans.” This is what Mayor DeStefano said as he launched into his talk with the Democracy for America group in Fairfield County last night. I don’t like the politicizing of Hurricane Katrina, but I think Mayor DeStefano was hitting an extremely important point.

It’s the applications enabled by the connection’s quality

Not everything can be photographed in natural light. In photography, you can set up a camera in a very dark room and leave the lens wide open for ever and get zero exposure on the negative if the number of photons falling on the film per unit of time is below some threshold. This has a fancy name: Reciprocity Failure - which describes certain non-linear aspects of film’s response to light levels.

Well wireless bits are just electromagnetic photons. So, by analogy, if not enough bits are available per unit of time, some things are simply impossible. The “exposure” is never realized and is meaningless.

Consider, if you will, the situation in the Pacific island Kingdom of Tonga. On Tonga it costs a local ISP about $13K per month for a link that provides 2 Mbps down and 1 mbps up - with the increased latency of a geosynchronous satellite connection as opposed to a terrestrial connection. An islander will pay about $2,500 per month US for 512 Kbps down/128 Kbps up. With this very limited capacity, how realistic is it to expect that people living on Tonga will find it “normal” to work with applications that use large files, such as the Democracy Now files mentioned below? The flow of bits as electromagnetic photons, combined with their substantial latency, is such that it prevents the islanders from benefiting from modern applications running on high capacity, high quality connections.

The 70th anniversary of Social Security is fast upon us. I recommend that you go to the link below to NPR’s On Point radio show for a very interesting segment on the origins of Social Security. Click on “Closing Segment” Then scroll down to the Closing Segment to listen to Francis Perkins, the first woman Cabinet member, in a 1935 talk on the need for cooperation and mutuality to protect all of us from the unknown vagaries of the market.

The history, the context, of her achievement is fascinating.

Today’s political leaders appear to be leading the forces that reject cooperation and mutuality as an organic part of American culture [Social Security, Social safety nets, etc].