Today saw the death of “comprehensive” immigration legislation on the US Senate floor. The proclaimed victors like Jim DeMint should stop crowing about victory — lobbyists for service sector businesses like hotels and fast food, as well as labor-intense agriculture and construction were the winners. And the crafters of the bill need to recall the [...]
Archive for June, 2007
A modest proposal
Posted in Economics, Environment, Finland, Immigration policy, United States, immigration, politics, population on June 29, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Flatland
Posted in Economics, Environment desk, Green Politics, Law, democracy, oil, politics on June 18, 2007 | 1 Comment »
An issue arises when some fact is in dispute. Despite claims we may live in a 10,11, or even 26 dimension universe, it appears media discussion has a binary compulsion even when there may be less than two or more than two sides to an issue.
Take oil, for instance. The global economy burns about a [...]
Scalability
Posted in Economics, Finland, architecture, engineering, nuclear power, physics, scaling on June 12, 2007 | 1 Comment »
A friend was talking to me yesterday about the challenges of scaling technology. His example was the wind turbine, a fairly environmentally friendly means of generating electrical power. How much electricity would you get if you broke that wind power machine down into 10,000 machines instead? If it was perfectly scalable you would get the [...]
Glyphians declare moratorium on Bush-bashing
Posted in Finland, George W. Bush, Law, Paris Hilton, United States, corporate welfare, democracy, politics on June 9, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
The latest polls are now putting Bush’s approval south of 30%, not far from the level at which things around Nixon collapsed. Further erosion of support at these levels must inevitably reflect “buyer’s remorse” among those who actually voted for or at least tolerated Bush rather than his natural detractors who hate his guts. Despite Karl Rove’s best [...]
America’s fall from grace
Posted in United States, democracy on June 8, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Here’s to expand on the article in The New York Review of Books, Jonathan Freedland (see Brzezinski gives Bush an F). He quotes Chalmers Johnson’s Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic:
Necessarily, it is Johnson, who has diagnosed a more radical problem, who has to come up with a more radical solution. He cannot [...]
Prisoner George
Posted in Climate Change, Economics, Environment desk, Finland, George W. Bush, Global warming, United States, politics on June 8, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
In the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma of game theory, the police can only make misdemeanor cases against two persons they have caught unless one prisoner betrays the other. If the police break one, the betrayer walks free while the other is punished with a felony. The optimal solution for both players (as any mafioso knows) is to [...]
Brzezinski gives Bush an F
Posted in Foreign policy, Iraq War, Presidential elections, United States, War on Terror on June 7, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former security adviser to Jimmy Carter, gives a report card to George W Bush, Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. In an interesting article in The New York Review of Books, Jonhathan Freedland writes a review about three books written about the Bush administration. One of these is by Brzezinski, Second [...]
Nuke Iran?
Posted in Foreign policy, Presidential elections, United States, War on Terror, politics on June 6, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
I was shocked to read that all except one of the Republican candidates vying for the White House in 2008 wouldn’t rule out nuking Iran. The only who spoke against such an attack was Rep. Ron Paul of Texas.
If one looks at the damage that this administration has caused on US institutions and the country’s reputation [...]
How much nuke generating capacity does Finland need?
Posted in Economics, Green Politics, nuclear power on June 6, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
The creation of Fennovoima, a new consortium comprising of E.ON, Katternö, Outokumpu and Rauma Energia, aims to build within ten years a 1-1.8GW nuclear plant that would produce cheap power. Being a hydrocarbons poor country, it’s understandable that Finland wants to lessen as much dependence as possible on foreign energy imports from countries like Russia.
Finland [...]
The near-perfect republic
Posted in Economics, Finland, Helsinki, Immigration policy on June 6, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
If there ever existed a near-perfect republic, what would it be like?
Would its economy be one of the most competitive in the world? Would technological innovation be king within its borders? Would its education system be at the top of the world class? Would it be one of the least corrupt countries around?
Some studies that [...]
