Yearly Archives: 2005

Ethanol: More Trouble Than It’s Worth?

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Mark Johnson:

Farmers, businesses and state officials are investing millions of dollars in ethanol and biofuel plants as renewable energy sources, but a new study says the alternative fuels burn more energy than they produce.
Supporters of ethanol and other biofuels contend they burn cleaner than fossil fuels, reduce U.S. dependence on oil and give farmers another market to sell their produce.
But researchers at Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley say it takes 29 percent more fossil energy to turn corn into ethanol than the amount of fuel the process produces. For switch grass, a warm weather perennial grass found in the Great Plains and eastern North America United States, it takes 45 percent more energy and for wood, 57 percent.

Slashdot discussion

Fossett Crosses the Atlantic in a Vickers Vimy

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Financier and adventurer Steve Fossett flew a replica of the first airplane to travel nonstop across the Atlantic recently. Aviation Week:

Pilot Steve Fossett and navigator Mark Rebholz took off from St. John’s, Newfoundland, on July 2 at about 7 p.m. in fog, heavy cloud cover and strong winds. They had a good tailwind until midway and made most of the trip under cloud cover, not seeing the Sun until about the last 5 hr.

Fossett and Rebholz expected the crossing to be completed by 4-5 p.m. the next day and, in fact, landed at 5:05 p.m. Irish time, setting down safely at the eighth hole of Connemara golf course. That was a slightly better result than the original June 14-15, 1919, crossing by Royal Flying Corps pilot Capt. John Alcock and navigator Lt. Arthur Whitten Brown. They ended up nose-down on soft ground after a 16-hr. crossing that included an ice storm.

More on Fossett

Lessons in The Art of Travel

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Tim Moore:

I always go straight to the nearest supermarket, to find out what the locals actually eat and drink, rather than what the guidebooks say they do. Essential for making informed restaurant decisions later, and a dependable entertainment in itself: there’s always some arresting indigenous twist on a theme, such as lobster-flavoured Walkers crisps, and you can usually count on spotting the likes of Frische Dickmilche or Fockink Anis on the shelves.

Fast Growing Companies Prefer a Flat Tax

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Matthew Phan discusses the obvious benefits of a simplified tax system. We waste hours and hours on our current tax morass:

Of the 341 executives interviewed, 48% preferred a flat corporate rate over the current tax system for businesses like their own, compared to 16% who supported the current system. 13% preferred a value-added consumption tax and 23% indicated that they were uncertain which was better.
The complexity of the current system could be one reason owners prefer a flat tax, at least from the CEOs that Inc. interviewed separately. “The simpler the tax structure and the more visibility you give it, the better,” said David Steinberg, founder and CEO of InPhonix, the No. 1 company on the Inc. 500 list in 2004. “The more complex a system, the more accountants you need to hire.”

Madison’s Advertising Climate

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Sandy Cullen takes an interesting look at local government, and perhaps public education’s willingness to support advertising. Advertising is everywhere and will be more so in the future. One of the reasons for this is the ongoing fragmentation of media. The internet provides many, many options for local, regional, national and international news, weather, sports and arts information.

Advertising is simply following eyeballs.

I have some other candidates for advertising:

  • Kenton Peters’ Blue Federal Courthouse and the WARF building – advertising can only help these eyesores
  • Camp Randall and the Kohl Center’s exteriors. I think we have enough grey, certainly during our winter months
  • The City/County Building, East Berlin architecture, circa 1960’s at its best.

Cullen interviewed a number of local advertising firms, but not the largest – her own publisher, Capital Newspapers. Capital (SEC 10-Q) reported six months revenue (through March 31, 2005) of $60,225K and operating income of 14,081K (23%!)

The Long Emergency

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James Howard Kunstler:

It has been very hard for Americans — lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring — to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming time the Long Emergency.

Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life — not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense — you name it.

The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don’t have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.

I wonder if we will see oil prices crater, like it has after previous spikes?

Sprawl & Tax Base

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Flying around recently, a fellow traveller seated next to me mentioned that he had been in Madison quite often over the past five years and was amazed at the ongoing sprawl. I recalled this conversation while reading Mike Ivey’s recent column: “One Sprawl Project Begets Another“. I was further reminded of this discussion when I read Spencer Hsu and Dana Hedgpeth’s article on the tens of millions of dollars Washington, DC stands to gain from a proposed land transfer from the federal government to the City.
The intersection of an inexorable desire for tax base growth and the implications for our community are rather interesting and could use more attention.