Saturday, May 7, 2016
Panama Papers Source Offers Documents To Governments, Hints At More To Come
In a statement issued to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the so-called “John Doe” behind the biggest information leak in history cites the need for better whistleblower protection and has hinted at even more revelations to come.
Titled “The Revolution Will Be Digitized” the 1800-word statement gives justification for the leak, saying that “income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time” and says that government authorities need to do more to address it.
Süddeutsche Zeitung has authenticated that the statement came from the Panama Papers source. The statement in full:
The Revolution Will Be Digitized
John Doe
Income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time. It affects all of us, the world over. The debate over its sudden acceleration has raged for years, with politicians, academics and activists alike helpless to stop its steady growth despite countless speeches, statistical analyses, a few meagre protests, and the occasional documentary. Still, questions remain: why? And why now?
The Panama Papers provide a compelling answer to these questions: massive, pervasive corruption. And it’s not a coincidence that the answer comes from a law firm. More than just a cog in the machine of “wealth management,” Mossack Fonseca used its influence to write and bend laws worldwide to favour the interests of criminals over a period of decades. In the case of the island of Niue, the firm essentially ran a tax haven from start to finish. Ramón Fonseca and Jürgen Mossack would have us believe that their firm’s shell companies, sometimes called “special purpose vehicles,” are just like cars. But used car salesmen don’t write laws. And the only “special purpose” of the vehicles they produced was too often fraud, on a grand scale.
Shell companies are often associated with the crime of tax evasion, but the Panama Papers show beyond a shadow of a doubt that although shell companies are not illegal by definition, they are used to carry out a wide array of serious crimes that go beyond evading taxes. I decided to expose Mossack Fonseca because I thought its founders, employees and clients should have to answer for their roles in these crimes, only some of which have come to light thus far. It will take years, possibly decades, for the full extent of the firm’s sordid acts to become known.
In the meantime, a new global debate has started, which is encouraging. Unlike the polite rhetoric of yesteryear that carefully omitted any suggestion of wrongdoing by the elite, this debate focuses directly on what matters.
In that regard, I have a few thoughts.
For the record, I do not work for any government or intelligence agency, directly or as a contractor, and I never have. My viewpoint is entirely my own, as was my decision to share the documents with Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), not for any specific political purpose, but simply because I understood enough about their contents to realize the scale of the injustices they described.
The prevailing media narrative thus far has focused on the scandal of what is legal and allowed in this system. What is allowed is indeed scandalous and must be changed. But we must not lose sight of another important fact: the law firm, its founders, and employees actually did knowingly violate myriad laws worldwide, repeatedly. Publicly they plead ignorance, but the documents show detailed knowledge and deliberate wrongdoing. At the very least we already know that Mossack personally perjured himself before a federal court in Nevada, and we also know that his information technology staff attempted to cover up the underlying lies. They should all be prosecuted accordingly with no special treatment.
In the end, thousands of prosecutions could stem from the Panama Papers, if only law enforcement could access and evaluate the actual documents. ICIJ and its partner publications have rightly stated that they will not provide them to law enforcement agencies. I, however, would be willing to cooperate with law enforcement to the extent that I am able.
That being said, I have watched as one after another, whistleblowers and activists in the United States and Europe have had their lives destroyed by the circumstances they find themselves in after shining a light on obvious wrongdoing. Edward Snowden is stranded in Moscow, exiled due to the Obama administration’s decision to prosecute him under the Espionage Act. For his revelations about the NSA, he deserves a hero’s welcome and a substantial prize, not banishment. Bradley Birkenfeld was awarded millions for his information concerning Swiss bank UBS—and was still given a prison sentence by the Justice Department. Antoine Deltour is presently on trial for providing journalists with information about how Luxembourg granted secret “sweetheart” tax deals to multi-national corporations, effectively stealing billions in tax revenues from its neighbour countries. And there are plenty more examples.
Legitimate whistleblowers who expose unquestionable wrongdoing, whether insiders or outsiders, deserve immunity from government retribution, full stop. Until governments codify legal protections for whistleblowers into law, enforcement agencies will simply have to depend on their own resources or on-going global media coverage for documents.
In the meantime, I call on the European Commission, the British Parliament, the United States Congress, and all nations to take swift action not only to protect whistleblowers, but to put an end to the global abuse of corporate registers. In the European Union, every member state’s corporate register should be freely accessible, with detailed data plainly available on ultimate beneficial owners. The United Kingdom can be proud of its domestic initiatives thus far, but it still has a vital role to play by ending financial secrecy on its various island territories, which are unquestionably the cornerstone of institutional corruption worldwide. And the United States can clearly no longer trust its fifty states to make sound decisions about their own corporate data. It is long past time for Congress to step in and force transparency by setting standards for disclosure and public access.
And while it’s one thing to extol the virtues of government transparency at summits and in sound bites, it’s quite another to actually implement it. It is an open secret that in the United States, elected representatives spend the majority of their time fundraising. Tax evasion cannot possibly be fixed while elected officials are pleading for money from the very elites who have the strongest incentives to avoid taxes relative to any other segment of the population. These unsavoury political practices have come full circle and they are irreconcilable. Reform of America’s broken campaign finance system cannot wait.
John Doe
Income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time. It affects all of us, the world over. The debate over its sudden acceleration has raged for years, with politicians, academics and activists alike helpless to stop its steady growth despite countless speeches, statistical analyses, a few meagre protests, and the occasional documentary. Still, questions remain: why? And why now?
The Panama Papers provide a compelling answer to these questions: massive, pervasive corruption. And it’s not a coincidence that the answer comes from a law firm. More than just a cog in the machine of “wealth management,” Mossack Fonseca used its influence to write and bend laws worldwide to favour the interests of criminals over a period of decades. In the case of the island of Niue, the firm essentially ran a tax haven from start to finish. Ramón Fonseca and Jürgen Mossack would have us believe that their firm’s shell companies, sometimes called “special purpose vehicles,” are just like cars. But used car salesmen don’t write laws. And the only “special purpose” of the vehicles they produced was too often fraud, on a grand scale.
Shell companies are often associated with the crime of tax evasion, but the Panama Papers show beyond a shadow of a doubt that although shell companies are not illegal by definition, they are used to carry out a wide array of serious crimes that go beyond evading taxes. I decided to expose Mossack Fonseca because I thought its founders, employees and clients should have to answer for their roles in these crimes, only some of which have come to light thus far. It will take years, possibly decades, for the full extent of the firm’s sordid acts to become known.
In the meantime, a new global debate has started, which is encouraging. Unlike the polite rhetoric of yesteryear that carefully omitted any suggestion of wrongdoing by the elite, this debate focuses directly on what matters.
In that regard, I have a few thoughts.
For the record, I do not work for any government or intelligence agency, directly or as a contractor, and I never have. My viewpoint is entirely my own, as was my decision to share the documents with Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), not for any specific political purpose, but simply because I understood enough about their contents to realize the scale of the injustices they described.
The prevailing media narrative thus far has focused on the scandal of what is legal and allowed in this system. What is allowed is indeed scandalous and must be changed. But we must not lose sight of another important fact: the law firm, its founders, and employees actually did knowingly violate myriad laws worldwide, repeatedly. Publicly they plead ignorance, but the documents show detailed knowledge and deliberate wrongdoing. At the very least we already know that Mossack personally perjured himself before a federal court in Nevada, and we also know that his information technology staff attempted to cover up the underlying lies. They should all be prosecuted accordingly with no special treatment.
In the end, thousands of prosecutions could stem from the Panama Papers, if only law enforcement could access and evaluate the actual documents. ICIJ and its partner publications have rightly stated that they will not provide them to law enforcement agencies. I, however, would be willing to cooperate with law enforcement to the extent that I am able.
That being said, I have watched as one after another, whistleblowers and activists in the United States and Europe have had their lives destroyed by the circumstances they find themselves in after shining a light on obvious wrongdoing. Edward Snowden is stranded in Moscow, exiled due to the Obama administration’s decision to prosecute him under the Espionage Act. For his revelations about the NSA, he deserves a hero’s welcome and a substantial prize, not banishment. Bradley Birkenfeld was awarded millions for his information concerning Swiss bank UBS—and was still given a prison sentence by the Justice Department. Antoine Deltour is presently on trial for providing journalists with information about how Luxembourg granted secret “sweetheart” tax deals to multi-national corporations, effectively stealing billions in tax revenues from its neighbour countries. And there are plenty more examples.
Legitimate whistleblowers who expose unquestionable wrongdoing, whether insiders or outsiders, deserve immunity from government retribution, full stop. Until governments codify legal protections for whistleblowers into law, enforcement agencies will simply have to depend on their own resources or on-going global media coverage for documents.
In the meantime, I call on the European Commission, the British Parliament, the United States Congress, and all nations to take swift action not only to protect whistleblowers, but to put an end to the global abuse of corporate registers. In the European Union, every member state’s corporate register should be freely accessible, with detailed data plainly available on ultimate beneficial owners. The United Kingdom can be proud of its domestic initiatives thus far, but it still has a vital role to play by ending financial secrecy on its various island territories, which are unquestionably the cornerstone of institutional corruption worldwide. And the United States can clearly no longer trust its fifty states to make sound decisions about their own corporate data. It is long past time for Congress to step in and force transparency by setting standards for disclosure and public access.
And while it’s one thing to extol the virtues of government transparency at summits and in sound bites, it’s quite another to actually implement it. It is an open secret that in the United States, elected representatives spend the majority of their time fundraising. Tax evasion cannot possibly be fixed while elected officials are pleading for money from the very elites who have the strongest incentives to avoid taxes relative to any other segment of the population. These unsavoury political practices have come full circle and they are irreconcilable. Reform of America’s broken campaign finance system cannot wait.
by John Doe, ICIJ | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Sine Cosine Tangent
He was a man shaped by money. He’d made an early reputation by analyzing the profit impact of natural disasters. He liked to talk to me about money. My mother said, What about sex? That’s what he needs to know. The language of money was complicated. He defined terms, drew diagrams, seemed to be living in a state of emergency, planted in the office most days for ten to twelve hours, or rushing to airports, or preparing for conferences. At home, he stood before a full-length mirror reciting from memory speeches he was working on about risk appetites and offshore jurisdictions, refining his gestures and facial expressions. He had an affair with an office temp. He ran in the Boston Marathon.
What did I do? I mumbled, I shuffled, I shaved a strip of hair along the middle of my head, front to back—I was his personal Antichrist.
He left when I was thirteen. I was doing my trigonometry homework when he told me. He sat across the small desk, where my ever-sharpened pencils jutted from an old marmalade jar. I kept doing my homework while he spoke. I examined the formulas on the page and wrote in my notebook, over and over, “sine cosine tangent.”
Why did my father leave my mother? Neither ever said.
Years later, I lived in a room-and-a-half rental in Upper Manhattan. One evening, there was my father on TV, an obscure channel, poor reception, Ross Lockhart in Geneva, sort of double-imaged, speaking French. Did I know that my father spoke French? Was I sure that this man was my father? There was a reference, in the subtitles, to the ecology of unemployment. I watched standing up. (...)
Once, when they were still married, my father called my mother a fishwife. This may have been a joke, but it sent me to the dictionary to look up the word. “Coarse woman, a shrew.” I had to look up “shrew.” “A scold, a nag, from Old English for shrewmouse.” I had to look up “shrewmouse.” The book sent me back to “shrew, sense 1.” A small insectivorous mammal. I had to look up “insectivorous.” The book said that it meant feeding on insects, from the Latin insectum, for “insect,” plus the Latin vorus, for “vorous.” I had to look up “vorous.”
Three or four years later, I was trying to read a lengthy and intense European novel, written in the nineteen-thirties, and translated from the German, and I came across the word “fishwife.” It swept me back into the marriage. But when I tried to imagine their life together, mother and father minus me, I came up with nothing. I knew nothing. Ross and Madeline alone, what did they say, what were they like, who were they? All I felt was a shattered space where my father used to be. And here was my mother, sitting across a room, a thin woman in trousers and a gray shirt. When she asked me about the book, I made a gesture of helplessness. The book was a challenge, a secondhand paperback crammed with huge and violent emotions in small, crowded type on waterlogged pages. She told me to put it down and pick it up again in three years. But I wanted to read it now, I needed it now, even if I knew I’d never finish. I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books. I liked sitting on our tiny concrete balcony, reading, with a fractional view of the ring of glass and steel where my father worked, amid Lower Manhattan’s bridges and towers. (...)
Ross dragging me along to the Morgan Library to read the spines of fifteenth-century books. He stood gazing at the jewelled cover of the Lindau Gospels in a display case. He arranged access to the second and third tiers, the balconies, after hours, up the hidden staircase, the two of us crouching and whispering along the inlaid walnut bookshelves. A Gutenberg Bible, then another, century after century, elegant grillwork crisscrossing the shelves.
That was my father. Who was my mother?
She was Madeline Siebert, originally from a small town in southern Arizona. A cactus on a postage stamp, she called it. She drapes her coat on a hanger whose hooked upper part she twists so that it fits over the top of the open closet door. Then she runs the roller over the back of the coat. It’s satisfying for me to watch this, maybe because I can imagine Madeline taking commonplace pleasure in the simple act of draping her coat on a hanger, strategically arranging the coat on a closet door, and then removing the accumulated lint with a roller.
Define “lint,” I tell myself. Define “hanger.” Then I try to do it. These occasions stick and hold, among other bent relics of adolescence.
I returned to the library a few times, regular hours, main floor, tapestry over the mantelpiece, but did not tell my father.
When I was fourteen, I developed a limp. I didn’t care if it looked fake. I practiced at home, walking haltingly room to room, tried not to revert to normal stride after I rose from a chair or got out of bed. It was a limp set between quotation marks, and I wasn’t sure whether it was intended to make me visible to others or just to myself.
I used to look at an old photograph of my mother, Madeline in a pleated dress, age fifteen, and I’d feel sad. But she wasn’t ill, she hadn’t died.
When she was at work, I’d take a phone message for her and write down the information, making certain to tell her when she came home. Then I waited for her to return the call. Actively watched and waited. I reminded her once and then again that the lady from the dry cleaner had called, and she looked at me with a certain expression, the one that said, I am looking at you this way because there is no point wasting words when you can recognize the look and know that it says what should not need to be said. It made me nervous, not the look but the phone call waiting to be returned. Why isn’t she calling back? What is she doing that’s so important that she can’t call back? Time is passing, the sun is setting, the person is waiting, I am waiting.
I wanted to be bookish and failed. I wanted to steep myself in European literature. There I was, in our modest garden apartment in a nondescript part of Queens, steeping myself in European literature. The word “steep” was the whole point. Once I had decided to steep myself, there was no need to read the work. I tried at times, made an effort, but failed. I was technically unsteeped but also ever-intentioned, seeing myself in the chair reading a book even as I sat in the chair watching a movie on TV with French or German subtitles. Later, living elsewhere, I visited Madeline fairly often and began to notice that when we ate a meal together she used paper napkins instead of cloth, because, understandably, it was only her, just another solitary meal, or only her and me, which came to the same thing, except that after she set out a plate, a fork, and a knife next to the paper napkin she avoided using the napkin, paper or not, using a facial tissue sticking out of a nearby box, Kleenex Ultra Soft, ultra doux, to wipe her mouth or fingers, or walking over to the roll of paper towels in the rack above the kitchen sink and tearing off a segment of a single towel and wiping her mouth on it and then folding the segment over the smudged part and bringing it to the table to use again, leaving the paper napkin untouched.
The limp was my faith, my version of flexing muscles or jumping hurdles. After the early days of its development, the limp began to feel natural. At school, the kids mainly smirked or mimicked. A girl threw a snowball at me, but I interpreted this as a playful gesture and responded accordingly, clutching my groin and wagging my tongue. The limp was something to cling to, a circular way to recognize myself, step by step, as the person who was doing this. Define “person,” I told myself. Define “human,” define “animal.”
What did I do? I mumbled, I shuffled, I shaved a strip of hair along the middle of my head, front to back—I was his personal Antichrist.He left when I was thirteen. I was doing my trigonometry homework when he told me. He sat across the small desk, where my ever-sharpened pencils jutted from an old marmalade jar. I kept doing my homework while he spoke. I examined the formulas on the page and wrote in my notebook, over and over, “sine cosine tangent.”
Why did my father leave my mother? Neither ever said.
Years later, I lived in a room-and-a-half rental in Upper Manhattan. One evening, there was my father on TV, an obscure channel, poor reception, Ross Lockhart in Geneva, sort of double-imaged, speaking French. Did I know that my father spoke French? Was I sure that this man was my father? There was a reference, in the subtitles, to the ecology of unemployment. I watched standing up. (...)
Once, when they were still married, my father called my mother a fishwife. This may have been a joke, but it sent me to the dictionary to look up the word. “Coarse woman, a shrew.” I had to look up “shrew.” “A scold, a nag, from Old English for shrewmouse.” I had to look up “shrewmouse.” The book sent me back to “shrew, sense 1.” A small insectivorous mammal. I had to look up “insectivorous.” The book said that it meant feeding on insects, from the Latin insectum, for “insect,” plus the Latin vorus, for “vorous.” I had to look up “vorous.”
Three or four years later, I was trying to read a lengthy and intense European novel, written in the nineteen-thirties, and translated from the German, and I came across the word “fishwife.” It swept me back into the marriage. But when I tried to imagine their life together, mother and father minus me, I came up with nothing. I knew nothing. Ross and Madeline alone, what did they say, what were they like, who were they? All I felt was a shattered space where my father used to be. And here was my mother, sitting across a room, a thin woman in trousers and a gray shirt. When she asked me about the book, I made a gesture of helplessness. The book was a challenge, a secondhand paperback crammed with huge and violent emotions in small, crowded type on waterlogged pages. She told me to put it down and pick it up again in three years. But I wanted to read it now, I needed it now, even if I knew I’d never finish. I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books. I liked sitting on our tiny concrete balcony, reading, with a fractional view of the ring of glass and steel where my father worked, amid Lower Manhattan’s bridges and towers. (...)
Ross dragging me along to the Morgan Library to read the spines of fifteenth-century books. He stood gazing at the jewelled cover of the Lindau Gospels in a display case. He arranged access to the second and third tiers, the balconies, after hours, up the hidden staircase, the two of us crouching and whispering along the inlaid walnut bookshelves. A Gutenberg Bible, then another, century after century, elegant grillwork crisscrossing the shelves.
That was my father. Who was my mother?
She was Madeline Siebert, originally from a small town in southern Arizona. A cactus on a postage stamp, she called it. She drapes her coat on a hanger whose hooked upper part she twists so that it fits over the top of the open closet door. Then she runs the roller over the back of the coat. It’s satisfying for me to watch this, maybe because I can imagine Madeline taking commonplace pleasure in the simple act of draping her coat on a hanger, strategically arranging the coat on a closet door, and then removing the accumulated lint with a roller.
Define “lint,” I tell myself. Define “hanger.” Then I try to do it. These occasions stick and hold, among other bent relics of adolescence.
I returned to the library a few times, regular hours, main floor, tapestry over the mantelpiece, but did not tell my father.
When I was fourteen, I developed a limp. I didn’t care if it looked fake. I practiced at home, walking haltingly room to room, tried not to revert to normal stride after I rose from a chair or got out of bed. It was a limp set between quotation marks, and I wasn’t sure whether it was intended to make me visible to others or just to myself.
I used to look at an old photograph of my mother, Madeline in a pleated dress, age fifteen, and I’d feel sad. But she wasn’t ill, she hadn’t died.
When she was at work, I’d take a phone message for her and write down the information, making certain to tell her when she came home. Then I waited for her to return the call. Actively watched and waited. I reminded her once and then again that the lady from the dry cleaner had called, and she looked at me with a certain expression, the one that said, I am looking at you this way because there is no point wasting words when you can recognize the look and know that it says what should not need to be said. It made me nervous, not the look but the phone call waiting to be returned. Why isn’t she calling back? What is she doing that’s so important that she can’t call back? Time is passing, the sun is setting, the person is waiting, I am waiting.
I wanted to be bookish and failed. I wanted to steep myself in European literature. There I was, in our modest garden apartment in a nondescript part of Queens, steeping myself in European literature. The word “steep” was the whole point. Once I had decided to steep myself, there was no need to read the work. I tried at times, made an effort, but failed. I was technically unsteeped but also ever-intentioned, seeing myself in the chair reading a book even as I sat in the chair watching a movie on TV with French or German subtitles. Later, living elsewhere, I visited Madeline fairly often and began to notice that when we ate a meal together she used paper napkins instead of cloth, because, understandably, it was only her, just another solitary meal, or only her and me, which came to the same thing, except that after she set out a plate, a fork, and a knife next to the paper napkin she avoided using the napkin, paper or not, using a facial tissue sticking out of a nearby box, Kleenex Ultra Soft, ultra doux, to wipe her mouth or fingers, or walking over to the roll of paper towels in the rack above the kitchen sink and tearing off a segment of a single towel and wiping her mouth on it and then folding the segment over the smudged part and bringing it to the table to use again, leaving the paper napkin untouched.
The limp was my faith, my version of flexing muscles or jumping hurdles. After the early days of its development, the limp began to feel natural. At school, the kids mainly smirked or mimicked. A girl threw a snowball at me, but I interpreted this as a playful gesture and responded accordingly, clutching my groin and wagging my tongue. The limp was something to cling to, a circular way to recognize myself, step by step, as the person who was doing this. Define “person,” I told myself. Define “human,” define “animal.”
by Don DeLillo, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Abbott Miller
Scallops With Lemon Caper Sauce Over Pasta
3 tablespoons olive oil1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
Grated zest of one lemon
1 tablespoon capers, chopped
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 lb. fusille or penne
1 lb. bay scallops or halved sea scallops
2 tablespoons butter
1. In a medium bowl, combine 2 tablespoons olive oil, lemon juice, lemon zest, capers, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Blend well and set lemon caper sauce aside.
2. In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook fusille until tender but still firm, 10 to 12 minutes. Drain well.
3. Meanwhile, in a large bowl, toss scallops with remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil and 1/4 teaspoo each of salt and pepper. In a large skillet, melt butter over medium heat. Add scallops and cook, turnng once, until lightly browned, 2 to 3 minutes. (Do not overcrowd pan. Cook in two batches if necessary, adding additional butter if needed.)
4. Turn pasta into large warmed bowl. Pour lemon caper sauce over pasta, add scallops, and toss. Serve at once. (Or chill for later serving).
via: 365 Ways to Cook Fish and Shellfish, by Charles Pierce
Image: [ed. The dish doesn't really look like this, but close enough. via:]
Why Wind Turbines Have Three Blades
… You know throughout the years in business I found something which was I’d always ask why you do things and the answer you invariably get is oh that’s just the way it’s done. Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks about things very deeply in business. That’s what I found…
The quote above from just over 17 minutes into Steve Jobs — The Lost Interview is for me the greatest insight and the biggest idea in the whole movie. I find myself applying it to many things. You can, too. Just ask why?
In this column I’ll try applying the principle to one example of renewable energy — wind power. Why, when it comes to windmills, wind turbines, wind generators — whatever you want to call them — why are things done the way they are? The answers may surprise you.
I had a friend named Paul Lipps who died suddenly a few years ago, taking from the world a true genius when it came to many things but especially propellers and anti-propellers, which is what wind turbines are because rather than accelerate air they slow it down, taking power from the wind. At the time of his death I was trying to interest Paul in revolutionizing the wind turbine industry based entirely on asking why? We never got to do it, but we did answer some of the most important questions.
Paul Lipps designed propellers that looked unlike any others because he didn’t care how they looked, just how they functioned. His greatest success was in the Sport Biplane class at the Reno National Air Races, where one year the race plane for which he’d designed a propeller increased its top speed by 51 miles-per-hour with no change beyond the propeller. Nothing else was different from the year before. That race plane hasn’t lost a race… ever.
When we sat down to invent a new type of wind turbine it all began with a single question why: why do large wind turbines invariably have three blades?
In the case of this question the answer wasn’t “because that’s the way it has always been done.” The answer was, instead, “because we have a mathematical proof that three turbine blades extract the most energy from the wind stream.”
“The most energy,” in this case refers to the maximal efficiency of any wind turbine as calculated in 1919 by Albert Betz of Germany. According to Betz’s Law, no turbine can capture more than 16/27ths or 59.3 percent of the wind energy passing through the turbine disk. So 59.3 percent is the best you can hope for… or is it? In practical terms the best commercial wind turbines reach 75-80 percent of the Betz limit or no more than 48 percent total efficiency.
Yes, but why three blades?
The conventional answer to this question is that three blades minimizes the shadow effect that each leading blade has on the blade that follows. You want more blades to reduce the starting torque required to get your turbine spinning (this is analogous to having more cylinders in an engine making it run smoother) but if you have too many blades the shadow effect hurts efficiency and drops the total yield. Three blades peak at about 48 percent efficient, which isn’t 59.3 percent but is near enough and happens to be the practical output I mentioned two paragraphs ago. So it must be right, right?
Put another way, Rotor power = 2π M n is proportional to the torque M acting on the shaft and the rotation frequency n. The tip speed ratio λ = vu / v1 from the ratio of tip speed vu of the rotor and the wind speed v1. Optimal tip speed ratio is 7-8 for the three-bladed rotors where they achieve a cp value of 48 percent. Four blade turbines have higher torque but lower tip speed ratios. Turbines with two blades have even higher tip speed ratios but lower torque. In the end, three-blade turbines command the sweet spot and so that’s what are built.
It all sounds good but everything is dependent on total belief in Betz’s Law and in the concept of blade shadows. Only Paul Lipps didn’t believe in blade shadows. The more blades the better in Lipps’s view because the turbine blades are in a moving column of air. And even Betz’s Law is incorrectly applied in these examples because what matters isn’t power efficiency per turbine so much as power production per acre of wind farm.
If you are building a wind farm, what counts above all else is how many kilowatt- or megawatt-hours per year can your wind farm produce and that’s a function that goes far beyond Betz and three blades.
Conventional wisdom says wind farms should have their turbines placed in such a way that they don’t interfere with each other, the fear being that placing one turbine too closely in the shadow of another will reduce the efficiency of the showed turbine. The rule of thumb, then, is that turbines be placed no closer than seven diameters apart. Keep that number in mind.
Now a word about computational fluid dynamics (CFD), super computers, and how wind fields are designed. You’d think it would be all about CFD but it isn’t. Turbines are designed with three blades and those blades should be as long as practically possible with the turbines mounted on towers that are as tall as possible to get out of ground effect and into faster-moving air. Oh, and turbines are placed seven diameters apart. That’s it, no CFD. This is because past experiments in CFD modeling wind farms haven’t gone very well. “It just doesn’t work,” we were told over and over again.
Shouldn’t that be a clue there’s something wrong with the popular methodology?
One other point to ponder is why, when you drive past a wind farm, very often the turbines aren’t turning at all? This is because they use alternators that consumer electrical power to energize their windings so there is no point in turning-on the alternator (energizing those windings) until there’s enough wind to generate a net positive amount of electricity. You can get around this by using permanent magnet generators instead of alternators, but those are more expensive, requiring rare earth magnets.
If you happen to drive past a wind farm in the middle of a storm you’ll further notice that the turbines are stopped then, too, to avoid damage from high winds and too-fast rotational speeds. The result of all this not starting and then stopping is that throughout the year an average workload of 23 percent is reached by inland wind farms, 28 percent for coastal farms and 43 for off-shore. Even offshore wind farms have their turbines actually generating electricity less than half of the time.
by Robert X. Cringely, I, Cingely | Read more:
Image: via:
The quote above from just over 17 minutes into Steve Jobs — The Lost Interview is for me the greatest insight and the biggest idea in the whole movie. I find myself applying it to many things. You can, too. Just ask why?
In this column I’ll try applying the principle to one example of renewable energy — wind power. Why, when it comes to windmills, wind turbines, wind generators — whatever you want to call them — why are things done the way they are? The answers may surprise you.
I had a friend named Paul Lipps who died suddenly a few years ago, taking from the world a true genius when it came to many things but especially propellers and anti-propellers, which is what wind turbines are because rather than accelerate air they slow it down, taking power from the wind. At the time of his death I was trying to interest Paul in revolutionizing the wind turbine industry based entirely on asking why? We never got to do it, but we did answer some of the most important questions.Paul Lipps designed propellers that looked unlike any others because he didn’t care how they looked, just how they functioned. His greatest success was in the Sport Biplane class at the Reno National Air Races, where one year the race plane for which he’d designed a propeller increased its top speed by 51 miles-per-hour with no change beyond the propeller. Nothing else was different from the year before. That race plane hasn’t lost a race… ever.
When we sat down to invent a new type of wind turbine it all began with a single question why: why do large wind turbines invariably have three blades?
In the case of this question the answer wasn’t “because that’s the way it has always been done.” The answer was, instead, “because we have a mathematical proof that three turbine blades extract the most energy from the wind stream.”
“The most energy,” in this case refers to the maximal efficiency of any wind turbine as calculated in 1919 by Albert Betz of Germany. According to Betz’s Law, no turbine can capture more than 16/27ths or 59.3 percent of the wind energy passing through the turbine disk. So 59.3 percent is the best you can hope for… or is it? In practical terms the best commercial wind turbines reach 75-80 percent of the Betz limit or no more than 48 percent total efficiency.
Yes, but why three blades?
The conventional answer to this question is that three blades minimizes the shadow effect that each leading blade has on the blade that follows. You want more blades to reduce the starting torque required to get your turbine spinning (this is analogous to having more cylinders in an engine making it run smoother) but if you have too many blades the shadow effect hurts efficiency and drops the total yield. Three blades peak at about 48 percent efficient, which isn’t 59.3 percent but is near enough and happens to be the practical output I mentioned two paragraphs ago. So it must be right, right?
Put another way, Rotor power = 2π M n is proportional to the torque M acting on the shaft and the rotation frequency n. The tip speed ratio λ = vu / v1 from the ratio of tip speed vu of the rotor and the wind speed v1. Optimal tip speed ratio is 7-8 for the three-bladed rotors where they achieve a cp value of 48 percent. Four blade turbines have higher torque but lower tip speed ratios. Turbines with two blades have even higher tip speed ratios but lower torque. In the end, three-blade turbines command the sweet spot and so that’s what are built.
It all sounds good but everything is dependent on total belief in Betz’s Law and in the concept of blade shadows. Only Paul Lipps didn’t believe in blade shadows. The more blades the better in Lipps’s view because the turbine blades are in a moving column of air. And even Betz’s Law is incorrectly applied in these examples because what matters isn’t power efficiency per turbine so much as power production per acre of wind farm.
If you are building a wind farm, what counts above all else is how many kilowatt- or megawatt-hours per year can your wind farm produce and that’s a function that goes far beyond Betz and three blades.
Conventional wisdom says wind farms should have their turbines placed in such a way that they don’t interfere with each other, the fear being that placing one turbine too closely in the shadow of another will reduce the efficiency of the showed turbine. The rule of thumb, then, is that turbines be placed no closer than seven diameters apart. Keep that number in mind.
Now a word about computational fluid dynamics (CFD), super computers, and how wind fields are designed. You’d think it would be all about CFD but it isn’t. Turbines are designed with three blades and those blades should be as long as practically possible with the turbines mounted on towers that are as tall as possible to get out of ground effect and into faster-moving air. Oh, and turbines are placed seven diameters apart. That’s it, no CFD. This is because past experiments in CFD modeling wind farms haven’t gone very well. “It just doesn’t work,” we were told over and over again.
Shouldn’t that be a clue there’s something wrong with the popular methodology?
One other point to ponder is why, when you drive past a wind farm, very often the turbines aren’t turning at all? This is because they use alternators that consumer electrical power to energize their windings so there is no point in turning-on the alternator (energizing those windings) until there’s enough wind to generate a net positive amount of electricity. You can get around this by using permanent magnet generators instead of alternators, but those are more expensive, requiring rare earth magnets.
If you happen to drive past a wind farm in the middle of a storm you’ll further notice that the turbines are stopped then, too, to avoid damage from high winds and too-fast rotational speeds. The result of all this not starting and then stopping is that throughout the year an average workload of 23 percent is reached by inland wind farms, 28 percent for coastal farms and 43 for off-shore. Even offshore wind farms have their turbines actually generating electricity less than half of the time.
by Robert X. Cringely, I, Cingely | Read more:
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Friday, May 6, 2016
Kelly Slater's 'Perfect' Artificial Wave
The wave curls, whip-fast and flawless; it goes on, and on, and on. Inside it, surfing in the barrel of the wave – the feeling, the high, that surfers yearn for – is Nat Young, an American pro-surfer, ranked ninth in the world.
Above him, a drone films his run – 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds. It was the longest barrel of his life. Young had never surfed a wave like this before. Yet this was 110 miles from the ocean, in California farm country in a specially constructed, exquisitely engineered freshwater pool. And it was perfect. “It’s an awesome feeling,” Young told the Guardian.
The pool was built by 11-time World Surf League champion Kelly Slater, who for 10 years had been focused on an idea that many thought was impossible – building a machine which could reproduce the ideal wave, and create it on command.
Few people thought it was possible. But in December, after two years of construction in near perfect secrecy, Slater released an extraordinary video of his machine in action. The excitement the video caused in the surfing community is hard to overstate. “That thing basically broke the internet,” said Craig Brokensha, surf forecaster for surfing news site Swellnet.
In that video, the wave curls over silently, dark and mysterious in the early morning light. The water from which it rises is glass-flat; the wave’s curling edge is smooth, sharp, almost sculptural. “It is,” Brokensha said, “almost too perfect.” (...)
Young said the narrowness of the pool – 700 yards long, but only 40 or so yards wide – struck him when he saw it in person. “My first impression, when I saw the first wave come through, was disbelief,” he said. “It’s a flat pond, and then, all of a sudden, you’re watching a perfect wave.”
Slater’s machine is powered entirely with solar energy, and the wave itself is created with a specially shaped foil or plough, which is pulled along mechanically beneath the surface, shaping the wave and pushing it forward.
by Nicky Woolf, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Vimeo
Does the ‘Like’ Mean Anything Anymore?
[ed. What a world.]
But in the past year or so, she’s found herself putting less effort into bolstering ‘likes,’ after seeing a major shift in what she calls the “‘like’ exchange rate.” Many users, especially younger fans of hers, scroll through their feeds liking nearly every post. With many people handing out likes indiscriminately, or in hopes of receiving likes back, she has seen more engagement but it doesn’t feel genuine. “The value of a ‘like’ is definitely decreasing — there is less thought involved,” she said. “Nowadays, a ‘like’ says more ‘information received’ or ‘I saw this’ than ‘I like this.’ I’ve been getting more likes on Instagram, but it just seems like the pool of people is larger and they are liking posts more, not that they actually like me or mywork.”For years, the “like” (or, in some places, the “fav”) has been the basic unit of currency on social media: the easy, universal measure of a post or poster’s quality, popularity, and power. But its dominant position atop the default methods of engagement in social media is increasingly challenged, as Facebook expands its array of reactions and the market becomes flooded with spammers and scammers. The like doesn’t mean what it used to — not just to people looking for easy validation, but to brands and companies looking for popular, high-engagement accounts.
Look no further than the comments on the Instagram account of any member of the Kardashian clan, particularly the Jenner sisters, to witness rampant like inflation in action. There, hundreds of thousands of users — mostly teens — take part in a fast-paced trade system meant to increase the number of likes on their photos and videos. Countless “lb” (like back), “first,” and “row for row” comments outpace genuine feedback on the photos, marking social media contracts promising to like a user’s photo or first row of photos in exchange for likes on posts of their own. (...)
And if brands can no longer count on likes as indicators of true engagement, you can bet the metric has long fallen out of favor with the true arbiters of What Is Cool on the internet: teens. As a recent episode of This American Life chronicling the labyrinthian social norms of teen girls on Instagram showed, many young Instagram users mindlessly ‘like’ every post in their feed, giving no thought to whether they actually like it. With this in mind, according to my sister, a Very Cool Teen, teens are coming up with their own ways to determine what matters on Instagram.
“Likes aren’t dead yet, but it’s more about ratios now,” she told me. “The like-to-minute ratio is a big thing, like, if you posted a picture five minutes ago and you already have 60 likes people will comment ‘whoa, that ratio!’ Like-to-follower ratio is also huge. If you have 600 likes and only 1,000 followers it shows how many real followers you have.”
by Kari Paul, Select/All | Read more:
Image: uncredited
In Proof We Trust
[ed. Wow, now I understand. Best explanation of blockchain technology I've read so far. Be sure to read the entire article; it's not just about money but more about authentication, with wide-ranging, revolutionary implications.]
The impact of record-keeping on the course of history cannot be overstated. For example, the act of preserving Judaism and Christianity in written form enabled both to outlive the plethora of other contemporary religions, which were preserved only orally. William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, was still being used to settle land disputes as late as the 1960s. Today there is a new system of digital record-keeping. Its impact could be equally large. It is called the blockchain.
Imagine an enormous digital record. Anyone with internet access can look at the information within: it is open for all to see. Nobody is in charge of this record. It is not maintained by a person, a company or a government department, but by 8,000-9,000 computers at different locations around the world in a distributed network. Participation is quite voluntary. The computers’ owners choose to add their machines to the network because, in exchange for their computer’s services, they sometimes receive payment. You can add your computer to the network, if you so wish.
All the information in the record is permanent – it cannot be changed – and each of the computers keeps a copy of the record to ensure this. If you wanted to hack the system, you would have to hack every computer on the network – and this has so far proved impossible, despite many trying, including the US National Security Agency’s finest. The collective power of all these computers is greater than the world’s top 500 supercomputers combined.
New information is added to the record every few minutes, but it can be added only when all the computers signal their approval, which they do as soon as they have satisfactory proof that the information to be added is correct. Everybody knows how the system works, but nobody can change how it works. It is fully automated. Human decision-making or behaviour doesn’t enter into it.
If a company or a government department were in charge of the record, it would be vulnerable – if the company went bust or the government department shut down, for example. But with a distributed record there is no single point of vulnerability. It is decentralised. At times, some computers might go awry, but that doesn’t matter. The copies on all the other computers and their unanimous approval for new information to be added will mean the record itself is safe.
This is possibly the most significant and detailed record in all history, an open-source structure of permanent memory, which grows organically. It is known as the blockchain. It is the breakthrough tech behind the digital cash system, Bitcoin, but its impact will soon be far wider than just alternative money.
Many struggle to understand what is so special about Bitcoin. We all have accounts online with pounds, dollars, euros or some other national currency. That money is completely digital, it doesn’t exist in the real world – it is just numbers in a digital ledger somewhere. Only about 3 per cent of national currency actually exists in physical form; the rest is digital. I have supermarket rewards points and air miles as well. These don’t exist physically either, but they are still tokens to be exchanged for some kind of good or service, albeit with a limited scope; so they’re money too. Why has the world got so excited about Bitcoin?
To understand this, it is important to distinguish between money and cash.
If I’m standing in a shop and I give the shopkeeper 50 pence for a bar of chocolate, that is a cash transaction. The money passes straight from me to him and it involves nobody else: it is direct and frictionless. But if I buy that bar of chocolate with a credit card, the transaction involves a payment processor of some kind (often more than one). There is, in other words, a middle man.
The same goes for those pounds, dollars or euros I have in the accounts online. I have to go through a middle man if I want to spend them – perhaps a bank, PayPal or a credit-card company. If I want to spend those supermarket rewards points or those airmiles, there is the supermarket or airline to go through.
Since the early 1980s, computer coders had been trying to find a way of digitally replicating the cash transaction – that direct, frictionless, A-to-B transaction – but nobody could find a way. The problem was known as the problem of ‘double-spending’. If I send you an email, a photo or a video – any form of computer code – you can, if you want, copy and paste that code and send it to one or a hundred or a million different people. But if you can do that with money, the money quickly becomes useless. Nobody could find a way around it without using a middle man of some kind to verify and process transactions, at which point it is no longer cash. By the mid 2000s, coders had all but given up on the idea. It was deemed unsolvable. Then, in late 2008, quietly announced on an out-of-the-way mailing list, along came Bitcoin.
By late 2009, coders were waking up to the fact that its inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, had cracked the problem of double spending. The solution was the blockchain, the automated record with nobody in charge. It replaces the middle man. Rather than a bank process a transaction, transactions are processed by those 8,000-9,000 computers distributed across the Bitcoin network in the collective tradition of open-source collaboration. When those computers have their cryptographic and mathematical proof (a process that takes very little time), they approve the transaction and it is then complete. The payment information – the time, the amount, the wallet addresses – is added to the database; or, to use correct terminology, another block of data is added to the chain of information – hence the name blockchain. It is, simply, a chain of information blocks.
Money requires trust – trust in central banks, commercial banks, other large institutions, trust in the paper itself. On a dollar bill you will see the words: ‘In God we trust.’ Bitcoin aficionados are fond of saying: ‘In proof we trust.’ The blockchain, which works transparently by automation and mathematical and cryptographic proof, has removed the need for that trust. It has enabled people to pay digital cash directly from one person to another, as easily as you might send a text or an email, with no need for a middle man.
So the best way to understand Bitcoin is, simply: cash for the internet. It is not going to replace the US dollar or anything like that, as some of the diehard advocates will tell you, but it does have many uses. And, on a practical level, it works.
Testament to this is the rise of the online black market. Perhaps £1 million-worth of illegal goods and services are traded through dark marketplaces every day and the means of payment is Bitcoin. Bitcoin has facilitated this rapid rise. (I should stress that even though every Bitcoin transaction, no matter how small, is recorded on the blockchain, the identity of the person making that transaction can be hidden if desired – hence its appeal). In the financial grand scheme of things, £1 million a day is not very much, but the fact that ordinary people on the black market are using Bitcoin on a practical, day-to-day basis as a way of paying for goods and services demonstrates that the tech works. I’m not endorsing black markets, but it’s worth noting that they are often the first to embrace a new tech. They were the first to turn the internet to profit, for example. Without deep pools of debt or venture capital to fall back on, black markets have to make new tech work quickly and practically.
But Bitcoin’s potential use goes far beyond dark markets. Consider why we might want to use cash in the physical world. You use it for small payments – a bar of chocolate or a newspaper from your corner shop, for example. There is the same need online. I might want to read an article in The Times. I don’t want to take out an annual subscription – but I do want to read that article. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a system where I could make a micropayment to read that article? It is not worth a payment processor’s time to process a payment that small, but with internet cash, you don’t need a processor. You can pay cash and it costs nothing to process – it is direct. This potential use could usher in a new era of paid content. No longer will online content-providers have to be so squeezed, and give out so much material for nothing in the hope of somehow recouping later, now that the tech is there to make and receive payment for small amounts in exchange for content.
We also use cash for quick payments, direct payments and tipping. You are walking past a busker, for example, and you throw him a coin. Soon you will able to tip an online content-provider for his or her YouTube video, song or blog entry, again as easily and quickly as you click ‘like’ on the screen. Even if I pay my restaurant bill with a card, I’ll often tip the waiter in cash. That way I know the waiter will receive the money rather than some unscrupulous employer. I like to pay cash in markets, where a lot of small businesses start out because a cash payment goes directly to the business owner without middle men shaving off their percentages. The same principle of quick, cheap, direct payment will apply online. Cheap processing costs are essential for low-margin businesses. Internet cash will have a use there, too. It also has potential use in the remittance business, which is currently dominated by the likes of Western Union. For those working oversees who want to send money home, remittance and foreign exchange charges can often amount to as much as 20 per cent of the amount transferred. With Bitcoin that cost can be removed. (...)
Just as the blockchain records where a bitcoin is at any given moment, and thus who owns it, so can blockchain be used to record the ownership of any asset and then to trade ownership of that asset. This has huge implications for the way stocks, bonds and futures, indeed all financial assets, are registered and traded. Registrars, stock markets, investment banks – disruption lies ahead for all of them. Their monopolies are all under threat from blockchain technology.
Land and property ownership can also be recorded and traded on a blockchain.(...) The ownership of vehicles, tickets, diamonds, gold – just about anything – can be recorded and traded using blockchain technology – even the contents of your music and film libraries (though copyright law may inhibit that). Blockchain tokens will be as good as any deed of ownership – and will be significantly cheaper to provide.
Whether it is the initial agreement, the arbitration of a dispute or its execution, every stage of a contract has, historically, been evaluated and acted on by people. A smart contract automates the rules, checks the conditions and then acts on them, minimising human involvement – and thus cost. Even complicated business arrangements can be coded and packaged as a smart contract for a fraction of the cost of drafting, disputing or executing a traditional contract.
One of the criticisms of the current legal system is that only the very rich or those on legal aid can afford it: everyone else is excluded. Smart contracts have the potential to disrupt the legal profession and make it affordable to all, just as the internet has done with both music and publishing.
This all has enormous implications for the way we do business. It is possible that blockchain tech will do the work of bankers, lawyers, administrators and registrars to a much higher standard for a fraction of the price.
by Dominic Frisby, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Getty
The impact of record-keeping on the course of history cannot be overstated. For example, the act of preserving Judaism and Christianity in written form enabled both to outlive the plethora of other contemporary religions, which were preserved only orally. William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, was still being used to settle land disputes as late as the 1960s. Today there is a new system of digital record-keeping. Its impact could be equally large. It is called the blockchain.
Imagine an enormous digital record. Anyone with internet access can look at the information within: it is open for all to see. Nobody is in charge of this record. It is not maintained by a person, a company or a government department, but by 8,000-9,000 computers at different locations around the world in a distributed network. Participation is quite voluntary. The computers’ owners choose to add their machines to the network because, in exchange for their computer’s services, they sometimes receive payment. You can add your computer to the network, if you so wish.All the information in the record is permanent – it cannot be changed – and each of the computers keeps a copy of the record to ensure this. If you wanted to hack the system, you would have to hack every computer on the network – and this has so far proved impossible, despite many trying, including the US National Security Agency’s finest. The collective power of all these computers is greater than the world’s top 500 supercomputers combined.
New information is added to the record every few minutes, but it can be added only when all the computers signal their approval, which they do as soon as they have satisfactory proof that the information to be added is correct. Everybody knows how the system works, but nobody can change how it works. It is fully automated. Human decision-making or behaviour doesn’t enter into it.
If a company or a government department were in charge of the record, it would be vulnerable – if the company went bust or the government department shut down, for example. But with a distributed record there is no single point of vulnerability. It is decentralised. At times, some computers might go awry, but that doesn’t matter. The copies on all the other computers and their unanimous approval for new information to be added will mean the record itself is safe.
This is possibly the most significant and detailed record in all history, an open-source structure of permanent memory, which grows organically. It is known as the blockchain. It is the breakthrough tech behind the digital cash system, Bitcoin, but its impact will soon be far wider than just alternative money.
Many struggle to understand what is so special about Bitcoin. We all have accounts online with pounds, dollars, euros or some other national currency. That money is completely digital, it doesn’t exist in the real world – it is just numbers in a digital ledger somewhere. Only about 3 per cent of national currency actually exists in physical form; the rest is digital. I have supermarket rewards points and air miles as well. These don’t exist physically either, but they are still tokens to be exchanged for some kind of good or service, albeit with a limited scope; so they’re money too. Why has the world got so excited about Bitcoin?
To understand this, it is important to distinguish between money and cash.
If I’m standing in a shop and I give the shopkeeper 50 pence for a bar of chocolate, that is a cash transaction. The money passes straight from me to him and it involves nobody else: it is direct and frictionless. But if I buy that bar of chocolate with a credit card, the transaction involves a payment processor of some kind (often more than one). There is, in other words, a middle man.
The same goes for those pounds, dollars or euros I have in the accounts online. I have to go through a middle man if I want to spend them – perhaps a bank, PayPal or a credit-card company. If I want to spend those supermarket rewards points or those airmiles, there is the supermarket or airline to go through.
Since the early 1980s, computer coders had been trying to find a way of digitally replicating the cash transaction – that direct, frictionless, A-to-B transaction – but nobody could find a way. The problem was known as the problem of ‘double-spending’. If I send you an email, a photo or a video – any form of computer code – you can, if you want, copy and paste that code and send it to one or a hundred or a million different people. But if you can do that with money, the money quickly becomes useless. Nobody could find a way around it without using a middle man of some kind to verify and process transactions, at which point it is no longer cash. By the mid 2000s, coders had all but given up on the idea. It was deemed unsolvable. Then, in late 2008, quietly announced on an out-of-the-way mailing list, along came Bitcoin.
By late 2009, coders were waking up to the fact that its inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, had cracked the problem of double spending. The solution was the blockchain, the automated record with nobody in charge. It replaces the middle man. Rather than a bank process a transaction, transactions are processed by those 8,000-9,000 computers distributed across the Bitcoin network in the collective tradition of open-source collaboration. When those computers have their cryptographic and mathematical proof (a process that takes very little time), they approve the transaction and it is then complete. The payment information – the time, the amount, the wallet addresses – is added to the database; or, to use correct terminology, another block of data is added to the chain of information – hence the name blockchain. It is, simply, a chain of information blocks.
Money requires trust – trust in central banks, commercial banks, other large institutions, trust in the paper itself. On a dollar bill you will see the words: ‘In God we trust.’ Bitcoin aficionados are fond of saying: ‘In proof we trust.’ The blockchain, which works transparently by automation and mathematical and cryptographic proof, has removed the need for that trust. It has enabled people to pay digital cash directly from one person to another, as easily as you might send a text or an email, with no need for a middle man.
So the best way to understand Bitcoin is, simply: cash for the internet. It is not going to replace the US dollar or anything like that, as some of the diehard advocates will tell you, but it does have many uses. And, on a practical level, it works.
Testament to this is the rise of the online black market. Perhaps £1 million-worth of illegal goods and services are traded through dark marketplaces every day and the means of payment is Bitcoin. Bitcoin has facilitated this rapid rise. (I should stress that even though every Bitcoin transaction, no matter how small, is recorded on the blockchain, the identity of the person making that transaction can be hidden if desired – hence its appeal). In the financial grand scheme of things, £1 million a day is not very much, but the fact that ordinary people on the black market are using Bitcoin on a practical, day-to-day basis as a way of paying for goods and services demonstrates that the tech works. I’m not endorsing black markets, but it’s worth noting that they are often the first to embrace a new tech. They were the first to turn the internet to profit, for example. Without deep pools of debt or venture capital to fall back on, black markets have to make new tech work quickly and practically.
But Bitcoin’s potential use goes far beyond dark markets. Consider why we might want to use cash in the physical world. You use it for small payments – a bar of chocolate or a newspaper from your corner shop, for example. There is the same need online. I might want to read an article in The Times. I don’t want to take out an annual subscription – but I do want to read that article. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a system where I could make a micropayment to read that article? It is not worth a payment processor’s time to process a payment that small, but with internet cash, you don’t need a processor. You can pay cash and it costs nothing to process – it is direct. This potential use could usher in a new era of paid content. No longer will online content-providers have to be so squeezed, and give out so much material for nothing in the hope of somehow recouping later, now that the tech is there to make and receive payment for small amounts in exchange for content.
We also use cash for quick payments, direct payments and tipping. You are walking past a busker, for example, and you throw him a coin. Soon you will able to tip an online content-provider for his or her YouTube video, song or blog entry, again as easily and quickly as you click ‘like’ on the screen. Even if I pay my restaurant bill with a card, I’ll often tip the waiter in cash. That way I know the waiter will receive the money rather than some unscrupulous employer. I like to pay cash in markets, where a lot of small businesses start out because a cash payment goes directly to the business owner without middle men shaving off their percentages. The same principle of quick, cheap, direct payment will apply online. Cheap processing costs are essential for low-margin businesses. Internet cash will have a use there, too. It also has potential use in the remittance business, which is currently dominated by the likes of Western Union. For those working oversees who want to send money home, remittance and foreign exchange charges can often amount to as much as 20 per cent of the amount transferred. With Bitcoin that cost can be removed. (...)
Just as the blockchain records where a bitcoin is at any given moment, and thus who owns it, so can blockchain be used to record the ownership of any asset and then to trade ownership of that asset. This has huge implications for the way stocks, bonds and futures, indeed all financial assets, are registered and traded. Registrars, stock markets, investment banks – disruption lies ahead for all of them. Their monopolies are all under threat from blockchain technology.
Land and property ownership can also be recorded and traded on a blockchain.(...) The ownership of vehicles, tickets, diamonds, gold – just about anything – can be recorded and traded using blockchain technology – even the contents of your music and film libraries (though copyright law may inhibit that). Blockchain tokens will be as good as any deed of ownership – and will be significantly cheaper to provide.
Whether it is the initial agreement, the arbitration of a dispute or its execution, every stage of a contract has, historically, been evaluated and acted on by people. A smart contract automates the rules, checks the conditions and then acts on them, minimising human involvement – and thus cost. Even complicated business arrangements can be coded and packaged as a smart contract for a fraction of the cost of drafting, disputing or executing a traditional contract.
One of the criticisms of the current legal system is that only the very rich or those on legal aid can afford it: everyone else is excluded. Smart contracts have the potential to disrupt the legal profession and make it affordable to all, just as the internet has done with both music and publishing.
This all has enormous implications for the way we do business. It is possible that blockchain tech will do the work of bankers, lawyers, administrators and registrars to a much higher standard for a fraction of the price.
by Dominic Frisby, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Getty
Thursday, May 5, 2016
'Space Invaders' Among 6 Inducted Into Video Game Hall of Fame
The Police Officer ‘Nextdoor’
It was the ideal proof-of-concept and a PR coup: a New York Times article that described how the Seattle Police Department used Nextdoor, a community-based social-networking site—a mini-Facebook just for your neighborhood—to find the owner of a stolen camera that officers had recovered. One officer posted a photo of the camera on Nextdoor, and a local user realized it was the same one in a Craigslist lost-and-found post he’d recently clicked on. Soon, the camera and its owner, a photographer from Louisiana, were reunited.
Sean Whitcomb, the department’s public-affairs director, says the camera’s owner sent the department a king cake—the traditional Mardi Gras delicacy from New Orleans—as a thank you.
Launched in 2011, Nextdoor allows neighborhood residents to connect with one another online, sharing classified ads, notices about nearby events, and observations and warnings about crime trends. The platform has the potential to bring out the best and worst in communities—it brings neighbors closer together, but can amplify their worst fears—and its focus on neighborhoods makes it a particularly valuable tool for law-enforcement agencies that want to understand the concerns of particular areas in a city.
The Seattle Police Department’s foray into Nextdoor is a product of its broader attempt to reconnect with the community it serves after being placed under a Justice Department consent decree in 2012. A federal investigation the year before had uncovered a pattern of excessive violence among officers, and the resulting report expressed “serious concerns about biased policing.”
To be more transparent, the department took to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to push out information about crimes, events, and the agency itself. Twitter is the department’s primary communication tool, Whitcomb says—and indeed, its account has a disproportionate number of followers for Seattle’s relatively small population, trailing only Boston’s and New York City’s much bigger police departments.
But Nextdoor is more private and decentralized than Facebook or Twitter, and so when Nextdoor approached Seattle Police in 2014, the department saw an opportunity to engage with Seattleites in a different way. The department waited until there was a critical mass of Seattle residents on the platform—about 20,000—before diving in. “It’s not our place to promote platforms,” Whitcomb says. “It’s our place to go where people are having conversations.”
Public-agency accounts like the Seattle Police Department’s work a little differently than individual Nextdoor user accounts: Public employees can post to community pages, see replies to their posts, and message privately with individuals—but they can’t see the rest of the chatter on a community page, or read private messages that users have sent to one another. Seattle Police is one of the larger of the 1,400 public agencies—mostly police departments—on Nextdoor.
Seattle’s department encourages precinct officers to maintain a presence on the community pages for the neighborhoods they serve. The initiative is an example of what the department calls “micro-community policing”: an attempt to use hyper-local data to customize its approach to law enforcement. Officers can alert residents to crime trends, ask for feedback on policing initiatives, or simply introduce themselves and encourage neighbors to say hi to patrolling officers.
After a honeymoon period, however, Seattle’s relationship with Nextdoor hit a few bumps in the road.
This February, Nextdoor hosted Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole for the first-ever online “town hall” on the platform: Residents asked the police chief questions and had a chance to hear directly from her. But when local journalist Erica Barnett reported on the event, Nextdoor booted her from the site for violating its terms of service for publicly posting users’ questions. It wasn’t until after she wrote about the incident on her website that her account was reinstated.
Barnett’s reporting was fiercely critical of the echo-chamber effect of the local, private community pages, many of which have hyperactive “crime and safety” sections. Indeed, in a recent interview with Barnett, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray derided an atmosphere of “paranoid hysteria” he’d witnessed on the message boards of some of Seattle’s more upscale neighborhoods.
Sean Whitcomb, the department’s public-affairs director, says the camera’s owner sent the department a king cake—the traditional Mardi Gras delicacy from New Orleans—as a thank you.
Launched in 2011, Nextdoor allows neighborhood residents to connect with one another online, sharing classified ads, notices about nearby events, and observations and warnings about crime trends. The platform has the potential to bring out the best and worst in communities—it brings neighbors closer together, but can amplify their worst fears—and its focus on neighborhoods makes it a particularly valuable tool for law-enforcement agencies that want to understand the concerns of particular areas in a city.The Seattle Police Department’s foray into Nextdoor is a product of its broader attempt to reconnect with the community it serves after being placed under a Justice Department consent decree in 2012. A federal investigation the year before had uncovered a pattern of excessive violence among officers, and the resulting report expressed “serious concerns about biased policing.”
To be more transparent, the department took to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to push out information about crimes, events, and the agency itself. Twitter is the department’s primary communication tool, Whitcomb says—and indeed, its account has a disproportionate number of followers for Seattle’s relatively small population, trailing only Boston’s and New York City’s much bigger police departments.
But Nextdoor is more private and decentralized than Facebook or Twitter, and so when Nextdoor approached Seattle Police in 2014, the department saw an opportunity to engage with Seattleites in a different way. The department waited until there was a critical mass of Seattle residents on the platform—about 20,000—before diving in. “It’s not our place to promote platforms,” Whitcomb says. “It’s our place to go where people are having conversations.”
Public-agency accounts like the Seattle Police Department’s work a little differently than individual Nextdoor user accounts: Public employees can post to community pages, see replies to their posts, and message privately with individuals—but they can’t see the rest of the chatter on a community page, or read private messages that users have sent to one another. Seattle Police is one of the larger of the 1,400 public agencies—mostly police departments—on Nextdoor.
Seattle’s department encourages precinct officers to maintain a presence on the community pages for the neighborhoods they serve. The initiative is an example of what the department calls “micro-community policing”: an attempt to use hyper-local data to customize its approach to law enforcement. Officers can alert residents to crime trends, ask for feedback on policing initiatives, or simply introduce themselves and encourage neighbors to say hi to patrolling officers.
After a honeymoon period, however, Seattle’s relationship with Nextdoor hit a few bumps in the road.
This February, Nextdoor hosted Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole for the first-ever online “town hall” on the platform: Residents asked the police chief questions and had a chance to hear directly from her. But when local journalist Erica Barnett reported on the event, Nextdoor booted her from the site for violating its terms of service for publicly posting users’ questions. It wasn’t until after she wrote about the incident on her website that her account was reinstated.
Barnett’s reporting was fiercely critical of the echo-chamber effect of the local, private community pages, many of which have hyperactive “crime and safety” sections. Indeed, in a recent interview with Barnett, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray derided an atmosphere of “paranoid hysteria” he’d witnessed on the message boards of some of Seattle’s more upscale neighborhoods.
by Kaveh Waddell, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Ted S. Warren / AP
Gas Delivery Startups Want to Change the World – But Will They Blow It Up First?
It is hard to imagine a less hospitable niche for a startup to enter than gasoline – a combustible commodity that is (one hopes) being innovated into obsolescence.
And yet, over the past 18 months, at least six startups have launched some variation on the theme of “Uber for gas” – your car’s tank gets refilled while it is parked somewhere.
The gas delivery startup founders all share similar stories of discovering the wannabe entrepreneur’s holy grail: a point of friction that can be translated into an app.
“David, one of the co-founders, basically said, ‘I hate going to the gas station’,” said Nick Alexander, the other co-founder of Yoshi, of their company’s origins. “I think he had run out of gas recently, so he said, ‘What about an idea where someone comes and fills your car up?’”
For Ale Donzis, co-founder of WeFuel, the moment came when he was trying to get gas in the middle of winter in upstate New York and realized he had forgotten his gloves. For Frank Mycroft, founder and CEO of Booster Fuels, it was during his wife’s pregnancy when he started refueling her car as well as his own.
“It wore on me,” Mycroft said. “I didn’t like doing it.”
The tales of gas station woe are the kind of first-world problems that have inspired a thousand parodies of startup culture. (A customer testimonial on the website of Purple, another gas delivery service, reads: “I live across the street from a gas station, but I don’t always have time to make the stop.”)
But delivering large quantities of a toxic and flammable liquid is significantly more complicated – and regulated – than delivering sandwiches. The companies generally source their gasoline from the same distributors that supply 10,000-gallon tankers to retail gas stations. But the app companies put the fuel into the back of pickup trucks or specially designed mini-tankers. Booster Fuels only services cars in open air, corporate parking lots on private property, but other companies offer to refill your car wherever it’s parked.
And while ignoring outdated regulations is practically a virtue in this age of disruptive innovation, there are good reasons for the careful control of gasoline.
“Some of the [companies] are using 1,000-gallon tanks,” warned Greg Andersen, division chief of the California office of the state fire marshall. “If they’re going into the basement parking lot of a high rise, that actually is a large concern.”
Several of the startups treat their regulatory compliance as a selling point.
“You’re supposed to have a fire extinguisher,” said Chris Aubuchon, co-founder of Filld. “We have two.”
Yoshi’s Alexander said, “We’re using DOT-certified equipment. … We’ve had our trucks inspected by multiple parties, including the highway patrol.”
But it’s not clear that Filld and Yoshi actually are in compliance with the law.
And yet, over the past 18 months, at least six startups have launched some variation on the theme of “Uber for gas” – your car’s tank gets refilled while it is parked somewhere.
The gas delivery startup founders all share similar stories of discovering the wannabe entrepreneur’s holy grail: a point of friction that can be translated into an app.“David, one of the co-founders, basically said, ‘I hate going to the gas station’,” said Nick Alexander, the other co-founder of Yoshi, of their company’s origins. “I think he had run out of gas recently, so he said, ‘What about an idea where someone comes and fills your car up?’”
For Ale Donzis, co-founder of WeFuel, the moment came when he was trying to get gas in the middle of winter in upstate New York and realized he had forgotten his gloves. For Frank Mycroft, founder and CEO of Booster Fuels, it was during his wife’s pregnancy when he started refueling her car as well as his own.
“It wore on me,” Mycroft said. “I didn’t like doing it.”
The tales of gas station woe are the kind of first-world problems that have inspired a thousand parodies of startup culture. (A customer testimonial on the website of Purple, another gas delivery service, reads: “I live across the street from a gas station, but I don’t always have time to make the stop.”)
But delivering large quantities of a toxic and flammable liquid is significantly more complicated – and regulated – than delivering sandwiches. The companies generally source their gasoline from the same distributors that supply 10,000-gallon tankers to retail gas stations. But the app companies put the fuel into the back of pickup trucks or specially designed mini-tankers. Booster Fuels only services cars in open air, corporate parking lots on private property, but other companies offer to refill your car wherever it’s parked.
And while ignoring outdated regulations is practically a virtue in this age of disruptive innovation, there are good reasons for the careful control of gasoline.
“Some of the [companies] are using 1,000-gallon tanks,” warned Greg Andersen, division chief of the California office of the state fire marshall. “If they’re going into the basement parking lot of a high rise, that actually is a large concern.”
Several of the startups treat their regulatory compliance as a selling point.
“You’re supposed to have a fire extinguisher,” said Chris Aubuchon, co-founder of Filld. “We have two.”
Yoshi’s Alexander said, “We’re using DOT-certified equipment. … We’ve had our trucks inspected by multiple parties, including the highway patrol.”
But it’s not clear that Filld and Yoshi actually are in compliance with the law.
by Julia Carrie Wong, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Stephan Savoia/AP
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
George Carlin: The American Dream
[ed. I miss him.]
You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land.
They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
You know what they want? Obedient workers people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.
And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.
This country is finished.
Video: YouTube
The Startup Zeitgeist
Twice per year — once in the winter and once in the spring — thousands of men and women apply to Y Combinator. Each of these bright minds has his or her own vision of the future of technology. They pitch ideas related to Bitcoin, drones, new drugs, virtual reality, and nearly every other topic you could imagine.
Since 2008, we’ve received tens of thousands of these applications. Collectively, they provide insights into the ideas smart people are working on and how it’s changed over time. We’ve never talked about these publicly before.
But recently, we commissioned Priceonomics (YC W12) and their data studio to analyze eight years’ worth of our anonymized application data. After breaking the applications down into keywords, they calculated the percentage of applicants that mentioned any given term..
So let’s review the data, starting with a simple example.
There’s a question on the Y Combinator application “Who are your competitors? Who are you most afraid of?”. Looking at the answers to this question, we can see what companies founders have on their minds.
by Jared Friedman,Y Combinator | Read more:
Image: Pricenomics
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