If I were president

Slashdot is running a comments thread, asking contributors what they would do if they were president. It's a common thing for people to do. In fact, author Tom Clancey indulged in this idea when he wrote Executive Orders (I was half-way through the book when I suddenly realised that Clancy was being Jack Ryan and was essentially promulgating his political philosophy through that character).

So, anyway, this is what I would do:

1. Get the secret service to cover up the fact that I am not American.

2. Announce that all troops will leave Iraq within 3 months.

3. Convince the UN to send peacekeeping forces to Iraq.

4. Raise taxes on higher income earners in order to run a fiscal surplus and pay back government debt.

5. Introduce universal health care (and raise taxes to pay for it).

6. Convince the Federal Reserve Bank to have a strict inflation targeting guideline. Obviously I would want zero inflation but, realistically, I would argue that the Fed should aim to keep inflation below 2% continually.

7. Get the Air Force to meet with the Navy Air Wing and the Marine Air Wing and state that they have to use the same planes.

8. Ban the sale of new gasoline-powered automobiles by 2016. This will give the auto industry 8 years to develop and sell zero-emission cars.

9. Ban the operation of all power stations that directly emit CO2 by 2020. This will give the power industry 12 years to set up enough solar and wind generators to replace them.

10. Ban oil, coal and gas production by 2020.

11. Close Guantanamo Bay and give it back to Cuba.

12. Pay all women aged between 18 and 40 $3000 per year to have a reversible Tubal ligation if they want to. This will prevent many women from conceiving and will lower abortion rates drastically. If the woman wants to have children, she can have the process reversed.

13. Give Puerto Rico the choice of either becoming a state of America or becoming a sovereign nation - which is better than what the current situation is.

14. Get all government departments to use Linux and other open-source software rather than proprietary software.

15. Create a "Department of Information" which would then employ thousands of writers full time to work on Wikipedia.

16. Provide the Wikimedia foundation with enough money to keep it running for 50 years.

17. Remove all farm subsidies and tell the farmers that the government isn't going to pay them to grow crops anymore. They will have the freedom to grow whatever they want.

18. Create a national water grid to drought-proof the nation. This would involve the creation of desal plants on the coast pumping irrigation-quality water inland. A market for this water would also be created, ensuring that water is both available and priced accordingly.

19. Allow prescription Heroin and Cocaine for addicts.

20. Pay $1 Billion each to the members of Ride for them to reform.

General Motors admits Peak Oil

From the department of better-late-than-never:

The world's biggest car maker, General Motors, believes global oil supply has peaked and a switch to electric cars is inevitable.

In a stunning announcement at the opening of the Detroit motor show, Rick Wagoner, GM's chairman and chief executive, also said ethanol was an "important interim solution" to the world's demand for oil, until battery technology improved to give electric cars the same driving range as petrol-powered cars.

GM is working on an electric car, called the Volt, which is due in showrooms in 2010, but delays in suitable battery technology have slowed the project.

This photoshopped image has been shamelessly stolen from Something Awful.

Bob Dylan

As played by Cate Blanchett.

Australia's tallest mountain

Australia's tallest mountain is an unimpressive mound named Mount Kosciuszko. In years gone by, people could drive their cars up to the summit, it is that unsteep.

Australia's second tallest mountain is Mount Townsend. Both of these mountains have an unusual joint history.

Back in I don't know when - perhaps in the early 1920s or 1930s - someone did a precise measurement of the two peaks and discovered, to their horror, that Townsend was actually the taller peak.

So what happened? Why is Kosciuszko still touted as the tallest mountain? Well, it is because the NSW Lands Department, in their infinite wisdom, decided to simply swap the two names around. Thus the original Mount Townsend became Mount Kosciuszko, and the original Kosciuszko became Mount Townsend.

But, then again, as any anally retentive know-it-all will tell you, Australia's tallest mountain is actually Mawson Peak on Heard Island.

This photoshopped image has been shamelessly stolen from Something Awful.

This photoshopped image has been shamelessly stolen from Something Awful.

A Nightmare on Main Street

The US Economic slowdown is hitting people hard - especially those who have been fiscally irresponsible:

In Lancaster County, S.C., laid-off textile worker Johnny Brown, 57, has parked his beloved Ford truck outside his double-wide. He's been driving it for 25 years; he rebuilt the V-8 engine himself. But it runs only on premium gas and he can't afford that, so when he has to drive, he uses his wife's sedan.

In Atlanta, Bernadette Smith, 31, has watched her credit-card debt climb to nearly $40,000. That's more than her annual take-home pay, though she works 13 hours a day at two jobs. Once obsessed with the latest style of designer jeans, Smith now shops for clothes only at Wal-Mart, or maybe Target. She has come to consider a dinner at Ruby Tuesday a splurge.

The faltering economy costs Leslie Garza, 18, nearly an hour of sleep each morning; her mom won't spend the gas money to drive her to downtown Los Angeles for her job scooping ice cream. So she sets the alarm early and takes the bus. Garza recently canceled her cellphone service to stretch her $450-a-week paycheck.

That second one scares me - a $40,000 credit card debt, more than 100% of her annual salary.

Of course, many "experts" argue that irresponsible people can be found everywhere. However we need to remember that irresponsible people can often borrow money from lenders quite easily. So what is it with all the lenders? Aren't they lending responsibly?

Well, to put it mildly, yes.

But only "yes" in a way. They lent the money out to people like Bernadette Smith because economic conditions were helpful. Interest rates were low and house prices were rising - whenever capital growth occurs there can also occur an increase in lending. In other words, the entire marketplace supported the sort of activity that allowed Bernadette Smith to borrow more than her annual income on the credit card.

I have argued elsewhere that central banks should have much stricter inflation targeting than they do. I have been pursuing some radically different economic policies for some time now, and the examples I have mentioned above have resulted from an entirely preventable phenomenon - an inflationary asset price bubble. To me, arguing that lenders should be more strict in who they lend to and how they do it misses the point. The fact is that the marketplace already has a way of doing this - interest rates.

If interest rates in the US (and elsewhere) since 2001 had been higher than they were, I would argue that the current recession would never have happened. Of course, growth during that period would have been lower than what it was, but the ironing out of peaks and troughs is what monetary policy is attempting to do.

It is my argument that central banks should aim for an inflation target of absolute zero. It's what I call "Absolute Price Stability" (APS). Although prices of individual goods and services will go up and down according to supply and demand, the aim of APS is to have the Consumer Price Index (CPI) sit at zero, and be at zero continually.

It was inflation and low interest rates that have caused the Subprime meltdown and the recession that will inevitably hit (if it hasn't done so already). Ben Bernanke has been trying very hard to point out that he will create enough money for the recession to be fixed, but the tools that he is using - loose monetary policy - is what has caused the problem in the first place.

Giving a drug addict his drugs so that he can be free of their dangers makes no sense. At some point there needs to be cold-turkey to fix things up. Hopefully this recession will be deep and broad enough to allow the US economy to "catch its breath" and travel at a more sustainable speed.

A Blue Victory?

It seems that the next generation of DVD formats has been won by Blu-Ray, with HD-DVD failing to win this format war:

It had a green ogre and gang of huge shape-shifting robots on its side—but that was not enough to ensure victory for HD DVD, one of two rival high-definition video-disc formats fighting to become the successor to the DVD. On January 4th Warner Bros, a big Hollywood studio that had backed both HD DVD and the rival standard, Blu-ray, said it would drop its support for HD DVD from June 1st. This tips the balance decisively in favour of the Blu-ray camp (see chart). “Game over,” said one analyst; HD DVD would now “die a quick death”, predicted another. Blu-ray's triumph seems almost inevitable.

Way back in April 2006, I made a possible prediction about this format war. Entitled "Winner may lose next generation DVD battle", I put forward the idea that the owners of the losing format's patent had a "Kamikaze option" whereby they can launch an all-out final attack that would destroy both themselves and their competitors. The attack would be simple - open the patent into the public domain.

Both Sony's Blu-Ray technology and Toshiba's HD-DVD technology are patented. Every time one of these disks is manufactured, a license fee is paid to Toshiba or Sony. Thus, while any respectable media company can produce HD-DVD or Blu-Ray DVDs, part of their production cost will be paying these patent holders. If the losing format opened its patent into the public domain, then media companies will not have to pay patent fees, thus making the losing format cheaper to produce. Moreover it would also allow smaller entities the ability to produce these free patent DVDs at a lower rate as well. Eventually the losing format would gain a new foothold and dominate the industry over time.

With Toshiba's HD-DVD now on the ropes, and with Sony's Blu-Ray now looking increasingly victorious, Toshiba could launch such a Kamikaze attack (Toshiba essentially has nothing to lose). It would result in billions of dollars of lost revenue for both companies, while it would (arguably) result in billions more in savings around the world. In other words, the revenue lost by Toshiba and Sony as a result of a free HD-DVD patent will be more than made up by savings for consumers and companies world-wide who would use it.

Of course, Sony could prevent such an event occurring by granting Toshiba equal ownership of the Blu-Ray patent. This would result in both companies "winning" and more than make up for the amount of money Toshiba lost in developing HD-DVD. Granting equal ownership of the Blu-Ray patent would keep Toshiba's Kamikaze attack from happening.

Quote

(George Bush) is arguably the worst president in the history of the United States. He is unfit for the office of president of the United States. He has trouble speaking the English language and articulating a point of view. Second, he has led us into a war—in which my son, by the way, fought—on false pretenses. That is a terrible thing. Bush is personally responsible for the displacement of the Christian minority in Iraq. It was the last large Christian minority anywhere in the Middle East, and it has been destroyed. It is ironic that someone who proclaims he is a Christian president has single-handedly started a war that has undone the last Christian minority in the Middle East. Now it is wall-to-wall Islam from Tehran all the way to the Mediterranean with the exception of Israel. There is not one place outside of Syria that still has that intact Christian minority now.

Who said this?