Misleading Anti-Desertec Propaganda by Craig Morris

May 15 2013

Craig Morris just posted this nonsense. He really did:

Over the weekend, Deutsche Welle published a report that went almost unnoticed – the Desertec project “has been shelved.” Yet, when the project was announced, there was a lot of attention.

Of course, the Deutsche Welle article cited by Morris does not say “Desertec has been shelved”. He really should consider removing this misleading statement from his article. The article at Deutsche Welle, while trying hard to make Desertec look bad, actually reports that construction at Ourzazate has started. All the author of that piece says is that probably most of the electricity from that project will be consumed in Morocco, instead of being sold to the European Union.

If some day this kind of misleading statement was actually true, one would need to source it from Desertec or from the Desertec industrial initiative. I just checked their websites. It is a complete fabrication to assert that they have shelved the project.

Looking at the DII website, one notices that, quite on the contrary, the latest news is that the project at Ourzazate just launched construction.

Update: After some discussion on Twitter, I get the impression that Morris did not want to say “Desertec has been shelved”. He wanted to say something like “some projects in Morocco won’t deliver electricity from desert sites to Europe, but use the electricity themselves instead”. He also wrote that he actually likes power from the desert, as long as it is used for the people living there.

Still “Desertec is shelved” is rather different than “there will be no electricity transmissions from Morocco”.

As to this latter point, that will be just a question of market forces once the connections are there (there is already a small connection between Spain and Morocco, but there will be more of the same in the future). Having a larger area of the network will help stability of supply and be in the economic interest of everybody involved. There is no reason to artificially restrict access to the EU electricity market for African states.

It is much too early to say anything about how that will play out. We need to build some massive desert capacity first before we can see where it will be used.

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German Bundestag Against Software Patents

May 14 2013

As the FFII reported last month, a large majority of the parties in the German Bundestag (Parliament) want to do something about the stinking software patents. That includes the ruling CDU, CSU, and FDP, but also the opposition SPD and Green parties are on board for a draft resolution asking the government to introduce the necessary legislation. This is remarkable. Everybody in sight hates these patents.

Having written a book opposing software patents ten years ago, I am pleased with this development. It’s about time software patents got abolished completely in Germany. Nothing good has ever come from them. As the draft resolution rightly states, having software patents removes the commercial value of copyright protection for computer programs, since every copyright holder always needs to be afraid of some extortionist patent troll coming out of the woods and stopping him from marketing his program.

Now there has been an expert hearing at the Bundestag, and this short article at the Bundestag site reports on it. All the experts hate software patents, as well they should. There was only one exception. One guy representing Siemens thought they have some merit. That makes sense, since software patents help large companies like Siemens restrict the competition from more effective smaller companies. Good for Siemens, but bad for the economy and society at large.

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Book Review: The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

May 14 2013

This is a very strange book.

How come this got to be a best seller? There is nothing at all happening in the whole goddam book. The plot is boring as hell. I was always waiting that the goddam story would actually BEGIN some time. But it didn’t. It really never started. There was nothing worth writing about in the whole book. I suspect the author was deliberately screwing his readers over and trying to get over the distance without having any plot.

I hate it when these famous authors write such lousy books. I really do. They always write about their little brother’s baseball mitt or something. Boy, does that depress me. It really does. I must admit it.

Again, how could this ever find an audience?

My theory is that it became half way interesting at the time because it was a big deal if someone wrote “goddam” or “fuck”, or mentioned that there may be sex happening ever once in a while.

That said, it is actually written rather well. It needs to be. Without a plot to keep readers awake, there is nothing left except the voice of the main character and all the detail in which he is developed. Here are a couple of techniques I would like to learn as an author of fiction.

For one, I learned that you can always address the reader directly. Salinger does it all the time. He tells the reader what he isn’t going to write. He tells the reader how his main character feels. He tells the reader that the story is over (you wouldn’t know otherwise, because there is nothing happening anyway). That’s interesting, and even I can easily do that.

Another thing is the extreme detail in which the lead character is developed. After reading the goddam book people know more about Holden Caulfield than about themselves. Or their spouse. Or their children. That makes the lead sympathetic. So people care for what happens to him, even if there is nothing really happening.

One other thing.

Salinger published this in 1951, at age 32. That one hit was enough for him to live happily ever after from the royalties. He never needed to publish another book.

So he didn’t.

Clearly he was overcompensated for this effort. They paid him so much that he stopped being a writer, and became a person who wrote earlier, instead.

That is one of the inherent flaws in copyright law. There is nothing to stop famous authors from making so much goddam dough from one smash hit that they never need to write another word. That obviously will not help motivating them to write more.

And one last note. I actually found a typo in this book, after all these years. That’s of course not counting all the places where something is spelled wrong or the grammar doesn’t add up deliberately, so as to mimic how a teenager at the time would speak.

Here it is.

Salinger wrote: “I quick jumped up and ran over”. He really did. That must of course be “quickly”.

 

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My New Bitcoin Address

May 14 2013

I got myself a brand new shining Bitcoin address that starts with my name as the first six characters after the initial “1″. Here it is:

1KfLenzmpCEjNhdNs2Y6txuaJAFLUNzfjZ

And here is a QR code for this:

I used the great service at “Bitcoin Vanity” for finding this particular address. They charged me only 0.004 Bitcoin, which is around 50 cents now. Ordering the address and calculating the resulting private key was a very smooth process. I would also like to mention that with their setup they never get the private key for this address themselves. At least that’s what they say, and I don’t have any reason not to believe that.

This is called a “vanity” address. But I think there are very good reasons besides wanting to see your name more often for having such an address. It has a number of advantages over a random address.

For one, it is easier to remember. I can just remember the “1KfLenz” part. Then I can head over to blockchain.info and search with that, which gives me a page containing the full address as well as the transaction history of that address.

That of course means I can write down just “1KfLenz” and be done when I want to communicate that address to somebody else. This is basically the same advantage as a URL shortener gives me. I am running my own URL shortener for most pages I reference in my writings or in classroom scripts. For example, my second global warming science fiction novel “Tasneem” (FREE PDF file available!) gets “k-lenz.de/7″ as an URL, which is slightly shorter than “k.lenz.name/LB/?p=9141″, and more convenient.

Another way to think of this is as a parallel to domain names. Those are easier for people to remember, compared to IP numbers. That’s why we have them.

And there is another big advantage. Not for me, but for people using Bitcoin for larger payments.

Assume that buyer A (based in Germany) paid EUR35,000 to the Bitcoin address of seller B (based in Japan). Then, all of a sudden, B complains that the funds have not reached him. A would need to prove that he has paid in any later lawsuit. With a traditional bank transfer he would of course have the bank records to prove his payment. Under current international regulations all wire transfers come with names of both parties attached, so as to prevent money laundering.

The latest international standard requiring this is recommendation 16 in the February 2012 recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force against money laundering. As an aside, let’s just note that these don’t mention Bitcoin yet. It was able to fly under the radar at the time. Under that standard, information on the beneficiary needs to be kept with all wire transfers.

The EU is not yet requiring keeping records on payees. Right now Regulation (EC) No 1781/2006 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 November 2006 on information on the payer accompanying transfer of funds requires records only on the identity of the payer. But this is supposed to change, the Commission has proposed changing the rules to require also records on the payee.

Anyway, with a bank wire transfer, usually A will be able to just point to the bank transaction records. He doesn’t need to insist on a receipt, which may be difficult to get with B sitting at the other side of the World.

But with a Bitcoin address? How exactly does A prove that the address he sent his Bitcoins to actually belongs to B?

That becomes much easier if the address in question identifies B as the payee in its first characters, and B has published it in different ways he can’t change later. For example, if you tweet some address, you can’t edit that later. For example, if B has registered that address with some third party which does not change anything later on request, that would do the trick as well.

One may also note that this adds some security, especially if the address in question is longer.

Anyone can find another address with “1KfLenz” as the first seven digits. But searching for “1KfLenzmPC” (only three digits more) would already cost over 700 Bitcoin, or over $70,000 at the excellent service provider “BitcoinVanity” I bought my address from. Searching for “1KfLenzmpCE” (four digits more) is too difficult for them to even quote a price. The difficulty goes up very fast with only a couple of added digits.

So if some large company you may have heard of gets “1CocaCoLa777″ (11 digits) for its address, anybody trying to direct a payment to another address starting the same way would need to invest substantial funds to find it. That would deter most people from even trying.

 

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400 ppM CO2 Irrelevant

May 11 2013

There are multiple people on my Twitter timeline mentioning the fact that CO2 levels have passed 400 ppM for the first time. Let’s just point to this well informed and interesting explanation by Peter Gleick on Scienceblogs, titled “The Last Time Atmospheric CO2 was at 400 parts per Million Humans Didn’t Exist“.

As Gleick explains, 400 ppM means an ice-free Arctic, average temperatures up between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius, and over 10 degrees at the poles, sea levels between 5 and 40 meters higher.

So why do I think this is irrelevant?

The answer is easy.

Anyone paying attention knew a long time ago that we will reach 400 and blow right past it. The fine people at 350.org want humanity to keep CO2 levels under 350. That is not likely to happen any time soon.

To explain this with a little comparison to Bitcoin, it didn’t matter much if the price was at $2 or at $5 some time in 2011. It was always sure to go way up anyway (it is around $110  now).

The one thing that matters most is if humanity somehow will be able to avoid the positive feedback spiral leading to Venus syndrome. This question has only two possible answers.

In contrast, assuming stabilizing at some level or other of global warming, that is a question of degree. While much would change, there would still be at least some life left on the planet, possibly even human life.

For all of that, blasting through 400 ppM is not ever so important. The real fight will come in the next couple of decades.

 

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Living One Week On Bitcoin Final Party Youtube Video

May 11 2013

Forbes journalist Kashmir Hill has tried the experiment to live one week paying for everything only with Bitcoin. The first blog post of this series is here, and it has links to the remaining posts (one for each day of the experiment). I have enjoyed reading this and recommend it.

Now she has posted a Youtube video on a final party, with some interviews of people involved in Bitcoin:

Actually, in the process of publishing this series, she got around 10 Bitcoin in tips from readers. That is more than $1000. I asked how often other blog articles she wrote netted her over $1000 from readers in a couple of days. The answer was “0″, not unexpectedly.

She decided to give these Bitcoins right back to the community by paying dinner for a Bitcoin meetup.

The most interesting thing I learned from her interviews was that Bitcoin is superior to cash for merchants. If you take cash, you need to count it, move it, and secure it. All that comes with costs. With Bitcoin, the counting and moving goes away, and the security issues can be handled easier than with cash. You could run a whole restaurant with no one on site knowing the private key of the Bitcoin address used for payments, so that anybody trying to get that information from staff by threatening them with a gun will be unable to do so.

I was aware of the fact that Bitcoin beats credit cards in cost and convenience. It also seems to beat cash.

 

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Print More Money For Renewable Energy

May 10 2013

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post “Print Money for Renewable Energy”, which discussed Adnan Al-Daini’s proposal to use “quantitative easing” as a source of finance for renewable energy.

I neglected to mention Al-Daini’s newer article on the question, which was published with the title “Climate Change: Governments Must Act To Reduce CO2 Emissions” at Huffington Post on May 6.

There he addresses two potential problems with this idea.

For one, people might object because this causes inflation. Al-Daini counters that the risk of inflation is minor compared to the risk of global warming. He says that inflation may not happen, since the GDP will be boosted as well as the money supply. And he says that without printing money, he expects that nothing will happen.

The other objection would be that this kind of government action is undesirable. Things should be left for the markets to figure out.

I partly agree with that objection. The Phaseout Profit Theory I am preaching all the time on this blog says that the global warming problem will be solved easily and quickly once the fossil fuel companies (and the climate activists) understand that reducing the supply of fossil fuel increases fossil fuel companies’ profits. High prices for fossil fuel would solve the problem.

But on the other hand, there is no such thing as a free market for energy. Most of it is decided by regulation. And subsidies. The idea that energy policy is decided mainly  by free markets is not based in reality.

Anyway, I don’t agree with these objections. And here are a couple of other thoughts to support the original proposal (print money to pay for renewable energy).

For one, Central Banks can print money. They can’t print Arctic ice, once it is gone.

Anyone understanding the scale of the damage expected from global warming should agree that we need to do whatever is possible. If this is one simple way to find a couple of trillion dollars a year for speeding up the transition to renewable energy, anyone objecting is making climate change worse. There is no need to make it worse. It will be a disaster anyway.

Another point: In the long run, transition to renewable energy faster will always be cheaper. Printing the money now and getting rid of fossil fuel a couple of decades earlier will save a fortune in fuel costs down the road. And it will of course reduce the damages from global warming.

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Print Money for Renewable Energy

May 09 2013

Germany has been very successful with its feed-in tariff. It has deployed a lot of solar. And brought down prices for everybody in the process.

Now Adnan Al-Daini proposes a different way to finance renewable energy. In this article published at Huffington Post in February he calls for printing money and investing it in renewable energy. The number he mentions is GBP 375 billion, which is what the Bank of England has spent on “quantitative easing” (buying government bonds on the secondary market with newly printed money).

GBP 375 billion government spending for renewable energy would be a considerable sum. It would be more than half of last year’s United Kingdom budget, which had expenditure of GBP 682 billion.

I am all for it. As long as there are feed-in tariffs as well, there is nothing wrong with the government investing massively in renewable energy. That is especially true for military spending.

I recall that in the United States the Pentagon is a large investor in renewable energy. They spent around $680 billion in 2011 (the whole budget, not the spending on renewable, which is only projected to reach a measly $10 billion by 2030). The main purpose of that spending is to feed the large military contractor industry. The secondary purpose of that spending is to provide security.

Since global warming is the most serious threat to the security of any country, a large part of military budgets should be spent for renewable energy, on top of current (largely useless) spending for weapons. Sell some “renewable bonds” to get the money. And then have your central bank print money and buy those bonds.

Once the military contractors understand that they can get the Pentagon budget to a trillion dollars a year this way, I expect them to support this kind of idea in their lobbying efforts.

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Bitcoin Kanji Draft

May 05 2013

Okay, here is a very rough draft for a new Kanji with the meaning Bitcoin:

The left part is of course the radical for gold, which should be the obvious starting point for anyone designing this.

The right part are just the numbers one and zero.

There is a slight problem with the fact that Kanji normally don’t use circles. But never mind. This is easy to understand and fast to write. It may do as a first draft until someone comes up with a better idea.

 


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Book Review: Forty Signs of Rain, by Kim Stanley Robinson

May 02 2013

I found “Forty Signs of Rain” by Kim Stanley Robinson over the list “Climate Change Fiction” I recently started at Goodreads. Please consider adding to that list if you know of some fiction book with a global warming theme not yet on the list.

There is not much happening for most of the novel. Most of it is just everyday life. I think this is more “scientist fiction” than “science fiction”, since it largely deals with what scientists think and feel when doing their jobs.

The book doesn’t tell the reader when things are supposed to be happening, what year it is. Therefore it is very difficult to say how realistic the developments on climate change are.

Clearly the author had a crystal ball, since he named the large storm at the end of the book “Sandy”. Or maybe Kim Stanley Robinson actually came back in a time machine to write this.

This was written well, with no obvious holes in the plot. Even if there is not much happening, it was still interesting and pleasant to read.

I am looking ahead to reading the other two books in this series.

Link to my own global warming science fiction novel Tasneem (free PDF file).

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