Month: August 2008

Hitchhiking in the future:

For those of us standing on the side of the road waiting for a ride, what we lack is a means of connecting us to a driver who doesn’t know we need them. But the technological solution to this problem is already close at hand – it is simply a matter of integrating three common functions:

A mobile (cell) phone to inform the world of our current location and where we want to go.
GPS units to work out where we are standing and which drivers are coming our way.
A means of paying the driver a small fee for the ride.

Let’s call this new device the ‘iHitch’ – a phone, GPS and payment system all in one – a simple challenge for the likes of Nokia, Apple or Garmin. The next step is equipping a critical mass of passengers and vehicles for it to be a practical option. And finally we will need some software which, when told where the drivers are going and where the passengers want to be, can make the optimum connections between the two.

Mexico City, Mexico, 5 pm.

In absorbing the dizzying series of foreign policy challenges facing this president and the next, one factor obviously stands out. Oil – the damage it does and the tyrants it enables – is the great enemy, from Georgia to Iraq. Finding a way to get ourselves off this stuff is the most urgent national security need we have. Which is why this progress on solar power is so encouraging:

At 800 megawatts total, the new plants will greatly exceed the scale of previous solar installations. The largest photovoltaic installation in the United States, 14 megawatts, is at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, using SunPower panels.

Spain has a 23-megawatt plant, and Germany is building one of 40 megawatts. A recently built plant that uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight, called Nevada Solar One, can produce 64 megawatts of power.

Alex Tabarrok writes about those prosecuted for practicing interior design without a license.

A scorcher. But, as with much that King writes, dead-on.

"The pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism, has induced a condition of dependence on imported goods, on imported oil, and on credit. The chief desire of the American people is that nothing should disrupt their access to these goods, that oil, and that credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in part of through the distribution of largesse here at home, and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad," – Andrew Bacevich, in his new book, "The Limits Of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism."

His interview with Bill Moyers is here. Bacevich’s voice is an indispensable one in trying to figure out the thicket we are in.

$51 million is very serious cash. It’s double McCain’s haul. That rope-a-dope theory may have some legs.

A telling paragraph from Isaiah Berlin’s 1949 profile of Churchill:

Mr. Churchill is one of the diminishing number of those who genuinely believe in a specific world order: the desire to give it life and strength is the most powerful single influence upon everything which he thinks and imagines, does and is. When biographers and historians come to describe and analyze his views on Europe or America, on the British Empire or Russia, on India or Palestine, or even on social or economic policy, they will find that his opinions on all these topics are set in fixed patterns, set early in life and later only reinforced.

Thus he has always believed in great states and civilizations in an almost hierarchical order, and has never, for instance, hated Germany as such: Germany is a great, historically hallowed state; the Germans are a great historic race and as such occupy a proportionate amount of space in Mr. Churchill’s world picture. He denounced the Prussians in the First World War and the Nazis in the Second; the Germans, scarcely at all. He has always entertained a glowing vision of France and her culture, and has unalterably advocated the necessity of Anglo-French collaboration. He has always looked on the Russians as a formless, quasi-Asiatic mass beyond the walls of European civilization. His belief in and predilection for the American democracy are too well known to need comment—they are the foundation of his political outlook.

Oddly captivating work by Branislav Kropilak:

More here.