The Democratic Party leadership, always staking out the moral high ground, took notice and removed John Edwards from their convention’s speaker list, replacing him with Bill Clinton. The life lesson that we need to learn from this move is that you cannot get away with being unfaithful if you have a likable wife.
via Deceiver.com
Yesterday the news out of New York City was that Mayor Bloomberg wanted to put wind turbines on the tops of all the skyscrapers. Who here thought, “that’ll never work?” If you thought that, give yourself a cookie.
Now that Bloomberg’s statements have been spread around the country, he has had to fess up.
“There are aesthetic considerations,” Bloomberg said. “No. 2, I have absolutely no idea whether that makes any sense from a scientific, from a practical point of view.”
Actually, Mayor, you do have an idea, and no, they don’t make any sense.
The plants… in the middle of a sunny day will generate about 800 megawatts of power, roughly equal to the size of a large coal-burning power plant or a small nuclear plant. A megawatt is enough power to run a large Wal-Mart store.
I’ve never seen power-consumption related on a per-Wal-Mart basis. It’s like the Times is trying to say something about Wal-Mart without saying something about Wal-Mart.
Of course, skip a few paragraphs and we get to the first reality check:
Though the California installations will generate 800 megawatts at times when the sun is shining brightly, they will operate for fewer hours of the year than a coal or nuclear plant would and so will produce a third or less as much total electricity.
And then a WTF moment.
The companies said they were forbidden by contract terms to talk about price, and a spokeswoman for Pacific Gas & Electric said her company was trying to obtain the best possible deal for ratepayers by not telling other suppliers of renewable energy what it was willing to pay.
A huge utility building two big power plants and nobody is saying what the cost is? Yikes.
We all love big deals where no one has any idea what the cost will be. Although when the deal is being made to conform to a government mandate, good deals are going to be off the table anyway. So good luck with that, California. If you want to (foolishly) subsidize the development of solar power for the rest of us, then who am I to complain?
Via the OrangeCoat Blog, I followed a link to ADynammic’s post about Tom’s Shoes and their “amazing” business model.
I think Tom’s is great because they are more than just a shoe company (they aren’t even a pretty shoe company). They are a company who set out to do good, and they’ve done that. Mr. Mycoskie says the shoes sell themselves because almost everyone who buys a pair and hears the story tells someone else the story and it goes on and on. He rarely pays for any traditional advertising because the story sells it’s self. Now people like Ralph Lauren and other big designers are signing on to design special additions because they love the story as well. This is capitalism at it’s best. So check out the embedded video and maybe you’ll want to get a pair as well.
In other words, he collects a premium from gullible, probably guilt-ridden, customers, gives them a shitty pair of shoes in return (that no one even pretends are worth wearing), convinces some of them to work for him as free interns, sends a pair of shoes abroad to some poor kids, and then pockets the tidy profits.
This is not capitalism at its best. A fine case of charlatanism, perhaps. Or maybe charity at its worst.
Not that “best” capitalism is easily defined. But were I to venture a definition, Tom’s would sell shoes that were worth buying and that competed in the marketplace based on their own merits as shoes. He would also put his production plants in these poor countries (he may do so, but the video doesn’t say) so that he could provide jobs instead of handouts. But this is obviously just me being silly.
After seeing a reference to it, I ordered a very cheap, used copy of Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos. Innumeracy is a somewhat useful, easy-to-understand, relatively short, and fun to read book that is only moderately worth reading because I don’t believe it to be particularly unique (although it is more worth reading if you’ve never been exposed to something similar).
I did enjoy some of the examples and useful demonstrations of certain ideas. However I was most amused by parts of his blaming the educational system for the society’s Innumeracy problem. Paulos remarked that he became determined to be a mathematician at the age of 10. That year he had calculated the ERA of some, apparently horrible, pitchers for the old Milwaukee Braves. Ten year-old Paulos found that his ERA was 135. When he described this finding to his teacher, his teacher had him explain this to his class. His teacher then explained that little Paulos was wrong because everyone knew that ERAs couldn’t be higher than 27. The teacher of course was wrong. But this explains part of why Paulos, and I, think that math is not given its due in education: teachers are afraid of being shown up by bright 10 year olds.
[Side note: I've frequently held the belief that my success in life came despite, and not because of, the efforts of many of my primary school teachers who, no doubt, would like to be able to claim a supporting role. My secondary teachers, on the other hand, were quite fantastic.
It dawned on me this last week why I skipped class so much in college. Its because I learned how to in elementary school. I was rarely an absent student. I probably averaged 0.5 absences per year between grades k-12. However, in grades 4-6 I was in an art program which met 1 day each week and was hosted at a different school; I missed almost an entire day of school each week. To compensate I simply learned to teach myself.]
For the numerate, the book is perhaps a decent review of some types of problems of that have been long-ago learned and since forgotten. I’m optimistic that the information in the passages I highlighted will, in the future, be useful to me and my career. However, it seems like I could have gotten a similar review of material that was much shorter and more to the point.
For the innumerate, Innumeracy may serve as a decent wake up call that, ya know, math is kinda important. And if you don’t know math or aren’t good at even some of the simpler concepts, it will be used against you (in a court of law?).
Overall Innumeracy was a pleasant read. However, the 2nd half of the book left me disappointed by failing to add any value to the first half. It deserves 3 stars out of 5.
Addendum: Having read through some of the reviews on Amazon, one, which gave the book 2 stars, makes an important point. (more…)
