jims musings

(Bonus points if you can name the film.)

I came across this inter­est­ing info­graphic today:

(Click here for the orig­i­nal post)


Now, I have minor gripes with the assump­tions made by the author, fore­most of which is cost.

What is the cost asso­ci­ated with pro­duc­ing enough solar pan­els to cover Spain with 20% effi­cient solar pan­els?
The cost asso­ci­ated with solar pan­els varies widely– effi­ciency, mate­ri­als, trans­mis­sion and stor­age issues are all involved. Let’s assume we’ve got­ten an astound­ing deal at 2$/watt. Lets also merely look at what is needed for cur­rent energy demand.
The author quotes “500 quadrillion Btu” as cur­rent demand. Con­vert­ing this to KW/h [1 Btu = .0002931 KW/h (kilo­watt hours)] equals 146,550,000,000,000 KW/h, or 146.5 quadrillion watts. This is total annual gen­er­a­tion; daily gen­er­a­tion is some­what more than 400 tril­lion watts.

At 2$ per watt, we’re talk­ing a measly 800 tril­lion dol­lars. 2008’s total global econ­omy weighed in around $70 Tril­lion, so if we ded­i­cated 10% of the global eco­nomic out­put to buy­ing and installing solar pan­els, we’d be able to pay for those solar pan­els in around 100 years.


Yeah.


A small sug­ges­tion: let’s start think­ing about solu­tions that work.


In another vein, if this rel­a­tively tiny area is capa­ble of pow­er­ing the planet, con­sider the total energy the Earth receives from the sun each day. Do we really think that reduc­ing CO2 con­cen­tra­tions in the atmos­phere (at enor­mous cost) from 0.0384% to 0.0284% is going to have any real impact? The solar vari­ance is greater than the heat-retentive capa­bil­i­ties of CO2.

A would direct you to this fan­tas­tic arti­cle in The Atlantic. It is the best sum­ma­tion of the health care sit­u­a­tion in the United States and an appro­pri­ate primer before any seri­ous dis­cus­sion of how and what to ‘fix’ can really begin.
Again: I don’t sub­scribe to all the con­clu­sions reached by the author, but it seems silly to me to even begin think­ing about change with­out hav­ing read this arti­cle and con­sid­er­ing what is said.

The school dis­trict my chil­dren attend uses a mix­ture of phon­ics and whole word meth­ods to teach chil­dren how to read.
Hap­pily, my chil­dren were read­ing before begin­ning kinder­garten, so I have lit­tle per­sonal emo­tional involve­ment in this issue. To sum up, the Whole Word tech­nique endeav­ors to teach chil­dren to read by encour­ag­ing them to mem­o­rize entire words, their mean­ings, and how to pro­nounce them. The Phon­ics approach teaches chil­dren how to sound out words by assem­bling sounds from the let­ters in the word, and from there to deter­mine a word and its mean­ing. In sim­ple terms, they are some­what oppo­site in their approaches in teach­ing chil­dren to read.

This is a good spot for me to acknowl­edge that chil­dren are spread across a broad spec­trum of learn­ing abil­ity, and what works for one may not work for another.

Whole Word read­ing makes no sense to me. It is equiv­a­lent to teach­ing chil­dren to read hiero­glyph­ics. One of the great devel­op­ments in human his­tory, and a key advance­ment in wide­spread learn­ing, was the phonic alpha­bet. A small set of sim­ple char­ac­ters, each rep­re­sent­ing a basic sound, com­bined into word-groups to con­vey mean­ing, makes pos­si­ble cheap mov­able type. Cheap type enables cheap print­ing, and thus lots of books. A sim­ple alpha­bet also enables a flex­i­ble lex­i­con– inven­tion of new words and terms to match a growth in knowl­edge and learn­ing.
Hiero­glyph­ics leads to a small clois­tered priest­hood and a strat­i­fi­ca­tion of soci­ety between those smart enough to mem­o­rize thou­sands of unique sym­bols and those that can’t. Push­ing whole word learn­ing on chil­dren seems to be a step back­wards.
Yes, I under­stand that our brains even­tu­ally mem­o­rize thou­sands– or tens of thou­sands– of dis­crete words, which allows us to read quickly with high com­pre­hen­sion. How­ever, a phonic back­ground allows us to eas­ily man­age new words. An phonic-method abecedar­ian would get through this sen­tence with min­i­mal difficulty:

Bathykolpian women attract col­pos­in­quanon­i­acs.

A whole-word reader would be totally stumped by the new words and unable to pro­nounce them.

And yes, the ABC was intentional.

Jeep­ers, are we seri­ously think­ing of giv­ing gov­ern­ment con­trol of 15% of GDP?

Remem­ber, this is the same group that allowed Enron, invented McCain-Feingold Cam­paign Reform, brought us the Real Estate Mort­gage Melt­down, runs Amtrak and the Wash­ing­ton D.C. school sys­tem, res­cued New Ore­lans after Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina, voted over­whelm­ingly to sup­port war in Iraq, and annu­ally spends more than a tril­lion dol­lars beyond its means.

In case I’m unclear, Con­gress’ track record isn’t so good. Crys­tal Clear: they have a bad track record. Look at it this way: can you imag­ine your health in the hands of the TSA?

The national debate of the day is ‘fix­ing health care’. The Clin­tons tried this back in 1993, and failed. That attempt used a panel of experts– peo­ple who under­stood health care and were more or less qual­i­fied to weigh in on some sort of fix. Now we’re leav­ing it up to… politi­cians and lawyers. If the effects of the cur­rent pro­pos­als were weather on the hori­zon, it would prob­a­bly look like this.

Side­step­ping all the issues of social­ism, end-of-life com­mit­tees, death pan­els, increased taxes, rationing, and trillion-dollar bud­get increases, I’ve got one question:

Why isn’t health insur­ance more like auto insur­ance?

Sure, I’m prob­a­bly miss­ing some­thing here. But here are my points:

• Auto insur­ance is portable. Noth­ing changes if a get a new job– or have no job at all, for that matter.
• Many states man­date that I carry auto insurance.
• If I want more cov­er­age, or a lower deductible, I pay more.
• In many ways, auto insur­ance groups com­pete for my business.
• My rates go up if I’m acci­dent prone or have areas of risk.
• States which man­date auto insur­ance have pro­grams to assist dri­vers with poor risk profiles.

I think health insur­ance jumped the rails when employ­ers began pro­vid­ing group insur­ance cov­er­age. Back in the day, when most employ­ees worked an entire life­time for one com­pany, this may have been fine. Nowa­days, most employ­ees will have sev­eral employ­ers, and the non-portability of health insur­ance has become a problem.

If we switch to the auto insur­ance model, insur­ance com­pa­nies will com­pete for the healthy, states will assist the less healthy and needy*, and we get insur­ance that is portable and prob­a­bly cus­tomized to each indi­vid­ual or family.

Per­son­ally, I’d like cov­er­age with a fairly high deductible, but with great cov­er­age for cat­a­strophic injury or health prob­lems, more or less like I keep on my cars. Why is this so hard to do?

*We already have a prod­uct for that: Med­ic­aid. It’s been around since 1965.