George W. Bush will be compared to F.D.R.

by philg

George W. Bush went to Saudi Arabia yesterday and asked for the owners of the country to do him a favor by increasing oil production. King Abdullah refused him.

According to the May 5, 2008 New Yorker magazine, F.D.R. wrote to King Ibn Saud in 1943 asking for help in bringing peace to Palestine. The King responded that he “was prepared to receive anyone of any religion except (repeat except) a Jew.”

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Best wireless data network?

by philg

As someone who spends a lot of time in hotels, I’ve noticed that the quality of their wireless networks seems to be degrading. Originally each hotel got some sort of broadband connection and then a few wireless hubs and every guest surfed the Web and life was great. Now guests consume streaming video, streaming audio, and BitTorrent and the networks become unusable.

I’m thinking that it is time to move to a wireless data network such as AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon. My only experience with these services was from a couple of years ago, using Verizon. I didn’t like it because (a) it was very slow to connect after a laptop was opened, (b) the coverage was spotty, and (c) it was bursty. I’m wondering if things have improved now. This magazine test claims that the AT&T network is the fastest, but they bitch-slap you if you transfer more than 5 GB per month. It would seem that this limit precludes use by photographers and audio/video lovers. One batch of RAW files from a digital SLR could eat up most of that 5 GB. Listening to streaming audio in the background 24×7 works out to something like 40 GB per month (at 128 Kbits/second).

What are you all using and how do you like it?

[Side note: It continues to amaze me that we Americans think that we can develop economically without a comprehensive and very capable wireless Internet (free for short message; charged for video streaming and the like).]

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Spending $300 billion in taxpayer money on farm subsidies

by philg

The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial yesterday Who Wants to be a Millionaire? about the latest farm bill passed with overwhelming support by our Congress.  The article includes some fun stuff.  Wealthy and successful farmers are prevented from collecting subsidies by a $2.5 million annual income threshold.  Sugar is bought by taxpayers at 23 cents per pound and sold to ethanol producers for 3 cents per pound.  Landowners who haven’t planted anything for years will get paid subsidies based on their “historical planting average.”

Aside from simply sending checks to farmers, the bill will drive up food prices, so $10 billion is added to the food stamp program.

One wonders if our politicians have failed to notice that we are no longer a rich country…

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Can humans affect climate?

by philg

Yesterday I walked into Boston’s new Liberty Hotel, a former jail at the foot of the Longfellow Bridge. Thanks to the tireless efforts of our Federal Reserve to control inflation, parking was listed at only $39 per day. (I had ridden the T down there, up only to $2 from $1.25 six months ago.) I helped myself to a free Wall Street Journal and opened it to the Opinion page. An Op-Ed by Holman W. Jenks, Jr. attacked John McCain for succumbing to the lunatic theory that human activity could affect global climate.

It occurred to me that it would be nice to get into a time machine and go back to a meeting of the Royal Society in London circa 1800. This would be my presentation:

Gentlemen: What I propose is that we humans breed ourselves up to a population of 6.7 billion from our current 1 billion. Next we will cut down all of the forests either to grow crops or to provide cooking fuel. We are going to dig and drill down into the Earth to bring up the remains of all previous vegetation and animal life, now in the form of coal and oil. We’re going to burn all of it and release the combustion products into the atmosphere. I do not expect this to have any effect on global climate.

I wonder how it would have been received by the scientific worthies of the day.

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Labor in the U.S. now cheaper than labor in Brazil

by philg

One of the benefits of having a Third World currency is that high-tech firms looking for cheap labor come from far away to build factories.

The latest chapter in the migration of jobs to wherever labor is cheapest?  Embraer is coming up from the rural outskirts of Sao Paolo to build a factory in Florida.  Details at aero-news.net.

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