I went to CES (the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas) last week. As usual there were way to many enormous TVs and not much substance. The coolest thing I saw last week was in the tiny section reserved for “green” products where a handful of companies showed off solar gadgets (mostly useless) or some very innovative stuff.
Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies really impressed me. These guys are doing exactly what I thought we should be doing when I first learned about PEM fuel cells in the early 90s. I rode in a fuel-cell powered hydrogen car with metal hydride storage at the 1991 Willits Solar Expo and Rally and I have been waiting for good quality commercially available fuel cells and credible hydrogen storage ever since.
Horizon has PEM fuel cells from 12w to 5kw. They have tiny 10 and 20 liter hydrogen storage containers for small applications and they talked to me about custom much larger storage they had done for their jet project and for a car-sized vehicle. Finally they have a sodium hydroxide based storage system with integrated fuel cell called HydroPak that they use as a portable power system.
They are doing interesting stuff in so many areas. I thought the hydrogen powered e-bike with a 300km range was another nice touch.
Finally the guy I spoke with mentioned a vehicle they were working on with another company that had all the elements I would have put in my spec sheet: carbon fiber body panels, PEM fuel cell, 3-phase inverter, in-hub electric motors, regenerative braking, etc.
Also nice to see was the flexible solar panel folks PowerFilm Solar that Google helped fund making commercial progress.
For a long time I thought the solution is not to legislate marriage but to remove marriage from the domain of the state. Likewise, household rights and things like taxes are hopelessly entwined with parentage laws. I think this is also a mistake. I would like to see no mention of marriage in any law.
Instead I want a civil union (”civil pact” sounds even better) which deals with household property rights, taxation, immigration, and who is authorized to make decisions on behalf of a sick or unconscious person. My proposed restrictions are very simple. Each person must be legally an adult by federal standards (18 years old) or an emancipated minor; and neither person can be in a civil pact with anyone else. Civil pacts or the closest legal equivalent from other countries are likewise recognized for temporary immigration and medical decision purposes. Note that this means that when married persons from other countries become become permanent residents of the US, they would need to establish a civil pact to have the rights of a civil pact. One side effect of this (good or bad) is that polygamous civil pacts would not exist and that polygamous marriages could not be considered justification for immigration the the US.
As for parentage rights, I do not want these rights in any way related to the existence or non-existence of a civil pact. Anyone who is biologically a parent or who carried a fetus to the age of viability has the right to be aware of their parentage and to participate in parenting of the resulting child(ren) unless they are unfit to do so (a danger to children or themselves) or expressly waive their rights of contact (as is often the case for sperm donors, egg donors, and surrogate mothers). Up to two legal adults can legally represent that they are the primary caretakers of a child. Neither of these adults need to have a biological connection with the child.
Veering back to reality for the moment though, the reason for all the hubbub about Proposition 8 is that the California Supreme Court ruled that a) California currently has a definition of “marriage” and bestows certain rights on individuals who are “married”, and b) the state cannot bestow that right on one individual and restrict that right from another. Since it is very difficult to take rights away (the right of marriage), the solution for equality advocates is to expressly legalize gay marriage.
While I do not think that gay marriage advocates should stop what they are doing, I think they should try to get the government out of our intimate relationships as a parallel effort.
Marriage and parentage laws have created a lot of misery for both straight and gay people. One of my cousins has lived with her boyfriend for over 20 years. They own a house together and they have raised their two teenage sons together. They have a small mountain of legal paperwork they have to deal with to get most of the rights of married couples. My friends L and K were married by a minister in Santa Cruz and have two boys with the help of a sperm donor. While they have most of the rights of a “legally” married couple in California, they don’t have all of these rights. In K’s native Kentucky they would have even fewer of those rights. Finally I got caught in a legal loophole where I was not allowed to get the address of my son because I had no established parental rights, even though I was named as his father on the birth certificate and lived continuously with him for the first 7 months.
Let’s get these laws fixed properly please.
About once every three months I go through medical bills and figure out who did what wrong. Often the insurance company screws something up and even more often the provider does not dot an “i” or cross a “t” and the claim gets denied. Even more often, the provider forgets to adjust down their price to the insurance company negotiated price. So I decided to keep track of how much I was overbilled this cycle.
Since August, I accumulated bills for which I owed $483.26 after my insurance company paid, and I was over-billed by an additional $172.79. That’s a 36% overage. It took me about 2 hours with all the information in front of me to slog through these bills and write little notes to each provider. This is an enormous waste of time and money.
For a long time I thought that the insurance companies negotiating a lower price than private pay customers is exactly backwards. The insurance companies require the providers to spend a ridiculous amount of time doing things they don’t get paid for. AFAIK, a private pay person who pays as they leave should pay less than someone paying with insurance, because there is less overhead.
Monday in Acroyoga we tried the 3-Headed Dragon. Fortunately somebody had a camera.
Today I rented a bike. On my way somewhere else, I was riding by the Intercontinental Phoenician Hotel (the most expensive hotel in Beirut which is also home to parliament members and other big wigs that don’t want to get shot) and decided it would be fun to ride the bike in and have a look around. I went in the main entrance for cars. After explaining that I really was going into the hotel rather than around it, the guard cheerfully scanned my bike for explosives, then I waited for the crash barrier to retract, then I pulled up at the front door and the front door staff got the giggles. They all thought it was fantastic that I rode a bike to the Intercontinental and immediately offered me complimentary “valet parking”.
Next I went into the hotel, put my backpack through the x-ray machine and walked through the metal detector. Once inside I headed for the pool balcony to check out the view. The view is a bit surreal. There a bunch of very handsome new buildings intermixed with buildings which were obviously bombed, shelled, and shot to hell. Behind the Intercontinental and still visible from the pool is the husk of the Holiday Inn. In front are a few less famous buildings shot to hell, plus to a very exclusive yacht club in perfect shape.
I don’t know if this is the same yacht club, but the very popular former prime minister Rafiq Hariri and several of his aides and bodyguards were assassinated in front of the St George yacht club with a massive car bomb in February 2005, widely suspected to be the work of the Syrian government. A month later a million Lebanese protested in the main square (Martyr’s Square) demanding that Syrian troops leave Lebanon.
Holiday Inn with holes, Intercontinental in pink
View from the pool at the Intercontinental
Rafiq Hariri and other staff killed the same day
A million Lebanese marched a month later demanding Syria to pull its soldiers out of Lebanon
When you discover that something has gone badly wrong I think it is nice to see if you can easily prevent the same thing from happening again. I noticed that all the banks in Lebanon are flourishing now. Come to find out that they had a rather more minor financial crisis a few years back and the government banned derivatives. Consequently, their banks are rock solid and turning a profit. Digging a little deeper past the knee-jerk reaction “just ban derivatives”, I ask why did banks get in such trouble with derivatives? Because they didn’t know what they were really worth. There is no standardized accounting method for the derivatives that got all these banks into trouble. Banks get a bunch of special privileges and are regulated at minimum because ordinary deposits in banks are usually government insured. As a trade-off for the special benefit of receiving deposit insurance from the government I think it would be fair to say that banks cannot own or trade in any form of security for which there is a not an industry-wide accounting practice. You could even go so far as to restrict banks trading in securities which have an accounting method approved by a neutral-ish government agency like the very well-respected Government Accountability Office (GAO) in the US.
I am personally very curious what the balance sheet of every US bank would look like if the government just declared that the value of all “toxic securities” was officially zero until further notice and nobody was allowed to trade in them. Would any of the banks look OK if they didn’t have the liability of some of these derivatives? Would some banks look even worse? If there is nominal value still in these securities, the government could declare their ownership illegal, make loans based on the nominal value, and then forgive part of the repayment of these loans in exchange for the nominal value of the seized assets.
I want to shift gears and talk briefly about bankruptcy. The idea of bankruptcy is that it protects someone from their creditors. However this means that if those creditors traded fairly, they get screwed. Perhaps a useful place for the government to step in and offer money is to offer *creditors* of bankrupt companies a grant or loan (free insurance perhaps) to cover their costs. My idea is that when the economy goes in the crapper, we should reward companies that were still in business doing something useful first. They should not be penalized for selling something to a deadbeat company. I would much rather see my taxpayer dollars go to this kind of creditor payment insurance than to a big bank that did something really dumb, or a big dumb reinsurance company….
I heard today that AIG executives were caught on camera having their second luxury retreat since after they received taxpayer bailout money to the tune of $150 Billion. The previous retreat, just days after the bailout and estimated to cost about half a million, was reported by NPR and ABC among others. Note that AIG currently has a market capitalization under $10 billion, but it needs a $85 billion bailout.
The Fed also said today that they would not use any of the $700 Billion bailout money approved by Congress to buy illiquid derivatives, “toxic” securities allegedly poisoning the financial system (which was the original motivation given for requesting the money). Not a single dollar of this money has been spent buying these “toxic securities”.
Since this brilliant bailout plan is working so well, I am not keen on bailing out US auto makers either. I would love to make sure that the employees still have a good job, but I don’t think these companies are going to do anything with the money other than throw good money after bad.
