Archive for November 2004

Criminalizing the Fast Forward Button



Harvard MBA Indicator for Wall Street










Choose Again.

Certainly true with careers.

Carnival of the Capitalists

Yes, Marxists run and hide, the Capitalists are back in town at Lachlan Gemmell.  Look around the site, its pretty interesting - he's posting a diary of his day to day experience bringing a new software product to market, and letting his readers comment on key decisions.

Should We Take Another Shot at Nuclear Power?

An article I saw on a new process for creating hydrogen via nuclear power (courtesy of the Commons) got me to thinking about what a screw-up our first (and really only) generation of nuclear power plant building was.  Learning curve problems with a new technology, combined with an insane regulatory regime and uninformed panicky public response to nuclear power issues led to a shut down in the construction of nuclear power plants, and made the last ones built into memorable financial disasters

Coming from the aerospace industry, I am used to a strong regime of government safety regulation.  The differences in how aircraft construction and nuclear power construction are regulated are very informative, so I want to focus on them in this post.

First, however, its instructive to list some of the reasons why nuclear power is attractive:

  • Excepting the radioactive waste issue, which we will discuss below, nuclear power is essentially emissions free, and is totally devoid of any greenhouse gas emissions that may contribute to global warming.  There are also no particulate emissions or sulfur dioxide emissions, which are blamed for various woes.
  • Nuclear fuel, ie uranium and potentially thorium, is incredibly abundant and currently inexpensive.  Also, much of the world's reserves are located in free democracies rather than Islamic dictatorships

Nuclear Plant Regulation

Nuclear plants in the U.S. were mainly designed as one-offs.  In other words, each one was a relatively unique design.  Each design therefore required regulatory review and approval in depth, processes that could take years.  Since the process took so long, changes in personnel or public attitudes often resulted in revisiting certain already approved design decisions, sometimes even after that part of the plant was built, resulting in expensive modifications.

In addition, uninformed public hysteria was allowed to take precedence in the permitting process ahead of fact-based scientific analysis. That is not to say that there are not potential dangers - Chernobyl proved that, but one can pretty easily argue that Chernobyl was more consistent with Soviet era mega-industrial disasters that occurred in many industries than the general experience with nuclear power. 

In most cases, the public has no real idea of the risks of nuclear plants, especially vs. other risks they might face.  People who might never live in the vicinity of a nuclear plant live downwind of plants using hydrogen cyanide or hydrogen sulfide as process gasses; or near plants with the potential for runaway exothermic reactions, leading to explosions and/or toxic gas releases (Bhopal anyone?)  Far more people were killed by the explosion of a shipful of fertilizer in Texas City than have been injured by nuclear power in the United States.

Aircraft Regulation

If aircraft construction was regulated like nuclear power plants, there would be no aviation industry.  In the aircraft industry, aircraft makers go through an extensive approval and testing process to get a basic design (e.g. the 737-300) approved by the government as safe.  Then, as long as they keep producing to this design, they can keep making copies with minimal additional design scrutiny.  Instead, the manufacturing process is carefully checked to make sure that it is reliably producing aircraft to the design already deemed safe.  If aircraft makers want to make a change to the aircraft, that change must be approved with a fairly in-depth process.

Beyond the reduction in design cost for the 2nd airplane of a series (and 3rd, etc.), this approach also yields strong regulatory benefits.  For example, if the in a particular aircraft, then the government can issue a bulletin to require a new approved design be retrofitted in all other aircraft of this series.  This happens all the time in commercial aviation.

One can see how this might make nuclear power plant construction viable again.  Urging major construction companies to come up with a design that could be reused would greatly reduce the cost of design and construction of plants.  There might still be several designs, since competing companies would likely have their own designs, but this same is true in aerospace with Boeing, Airbus and smaller jet manufacturers Embraer and Bombardier.

Nuclear Waste

The nuclear waste disposal problem is still not fully solved, but technology is making inroads, as in here and here and here.

I would argue that the issue of nuclear waste is a red herring anyway -- waste from nuclear power is not necesarily worse than from other processes, its just more visible and scary sounding.  Current power plants generate millions of tons of waste a year.  However, since they spread this waste evenly throughout the atmosphere, it doesn't always call attention to itself.  Radioactive waste, though small in volume, tends to be concentrated and admittedly tricky to handle.  It can't be just dumped in the air or in the water and forgotten about - it has to be actively tended for years.

Other Reading

Increasingly, many environmentalists are starting to revisit their opposition to nuclear power as the environmental costs are better understood (even technologies formally much-loved by environmentalists are coming under scrutiny for their costs -- do we really want all of our wilderness to look like this and this?)  Such articles include this and this.  Other roundups about the benefits of revisiting nuclear power are here and here.


My gut feel is that nuclear power, if intelligently regulated, could be economically competitive with many other energy sources today, but I don't know for sure.  Jerry Taylor and Co. at Cato think otherwise, and they have certainly put a lot more research into it than I have.  I am certainly loathe to start US energy policy, complete with massive subsidies, down yet another uneconomic blind alley.

Fixing the Libertarian Party


Holiday Pork

Via Scrappleface, here is an AP report of some of the special interest spending items in the most recent budget.  Ughh.

"”Alabama: $4 million for the International Fertilizer Development Center in Muscle Shoals.

"”Alaska: $443,000 to develop salmon-fortified baby food.

Oh, just read them all.  Not sure any branch of government needs to do most of these things, but certainly if they need to be done, they should be funded by local taxpayers who get the benefit, not the rest of us.

Good Stuff at Scrappleface

First, Scrappleface reports:






Go read it all.



Incredibles and Atlas Shrugged



Democracy Bloc at the UN



Help Choose Dan Rather's Replacement!








Leave your own ideas in the comments section!







Wizbang's 2004 Weblog Awards

Wizbang's 2004 Weblog Awards are accepting nominees.  We have been nominated in the "best of the rest" category, so come back and vote when the polls open!

The Free Market and Surgery

When was the last time you paid attention to the cost of any medical procedure (not your copay or share - but the actual cost)?  When was the last time you balanced whether to have an incremental medical procedure, such as an extra test, based on cost vs. benefits?  If you are like most Americans, the answer is "not lately" because our health care system does not give the end consumer any of the normal incentives to "shop" that they would when, say, buying a TV.

Marginal Revolution has a great post on laser eye surgery, probably one of the most popular medical procedures not covered by traditional insurance (I would normally guess "most" popular surgery, but having lived in Dallas and Scottsdale, I am all-too-aware of the popularity of breast implant surgery as well).  Guess what - it is one of the few medical procedures with high satisfaction and falling prices.

Building Capitalism in Iraq

The Knowledge Problem makes a good point:



Reverse Auctions - and why Priceline REALLY succeeded


One thing BusinessPundit mentions is that the new site will have a

















Florida Attraction Recommendation





New Carnival of the Vanities

Just in time for your Thanksgiving holiday reading, find the new Carnival at Interested Participant.

Employee Privacy







Carnival of the Capitalists is Up

Find the link here at Social Twister.

ACME Featured Product XI

This series explained here. We get many of our featured products here.  You can find all of our past featured products here.

Our ACME product this week was chosen to help me walk all over Disney World chasing my two kids.


PR and the Web

A comment I got on one of my posts on Friday got me to thinking about corporate PR departments and whether they are really keeping up with the web.  In this post I mentioned that I would be heading for Disney World for our traditional family reunion, but that growing crowds on Thanksgiving week would probably force us to try a different week next time.  I got a comment from someone who sounded like a Disney employee, recommending a better week.

Now, I don't know if they were an employee, or whether they found the post by accident or through an active search program.  But it got me to thinking.  Are corporate PR departments keeping up with the web?

Back when I worked for a large corporation, we had PR people, either in or out of house, who would provide us with weekly news summaries of where the corporation was in the press.  This was particularly helpful to those of us in marketing, who wanted to make sure we saw all the reviews of our product (so we could use the good ones and refute the bad ones).

In the world of the Internet, this approach seems hopelessly dated.  Every day employees may be talking about the company in a chat room, customers may be commenting on the company in some place like, blogs may be posting on the company, and authorized or unauthorized vendors may have set up shop to sell the company's products online.

How does  a company keep up with all this?  If I was a large company, I would be actively searching the web for key words associated with my company, looking for new posts or entries or even whole websites.   Employees spilling secrets in a chat room?  Need to tell legal.  New web site selling our product? Send it to marketing to make sure they are authorized.  Blogs posting on us?  We might want to add our own comment to the post.

So I got to thinking - was that Disney that found my site?  If so, is this what they are doing to manage their online PR?  And if not, why aren't they doing it?  You wouldn't even have to build your own search engine - just take a full snapshot of the Google results one day and compare those results to a search the next week, and look for changes.

Or, why doesn't Google provide this service to corporate accounts itself?  They need something to justify their sky-high PE ratio, maybe this would help.  Wouldn't Exxon pay $50,000 a year for this service?  Heck I pay D&B several hundred dollars a year for a credit watch service on my credit rating, I would certainly pay some hundreds a year for a PR watch.


See comments below - the original commenter apparently not a Disney employee.  Never-the-less, the idea still excites me.  A company like Disney rests almost completely on its reputation - why isn't someone out on the web every day monitoring what is happening vis a vis their company?

New American Nomads











A Close Brush with Death

I won't bore you by being overly dramatic, but my family came within a hair of dying on US27 between Orlando and Ft. Meyers.  A car that had slowed to about 10 miles an hour in the left had turn lane changed their mind and pulled back, still going 10 miles an hour, into the main traffic lane.  Right in front of my car.  While I was going 60.  At night.  I jammed the breaks on my unfamiliar rent car and managed to slow just enough to have time to slide into the other lane, just ticking the back bumper.  Fortunately, there was no one in the right lane, because I was sure as hell going over there whether it was occupied or not. 

So we live, and I had the shakes for a while.  My daughter, who had already gone for the bad-traveler trifecta, barfing twice on the plane and once in the car, didn't even stir.  My son never really realized how close things were. Good.

Pretty sure my life did not pass before my eyes, and I didn't really reach any lifetime epiphanies or anything so dramatic.  Maybe I am just shallow, or maybe I am so optimistic I cannot in my heart accept the closeness of death.  Anyway, I had an unbelievably relaxed day today.  The one lasting effect of the near-mishap was that 4 or 5 things that were bothering me and stressing me a bit were quickly flushed down the mental drain as trivial.

So much for shortcuts.  Tomorrow, we take the longer way back to Orlando on the Interstate.

Headed for Florida





Slimy Mollusk Higher than a Crusty Crustacean?

Over the couple of months I have been blogging, I have been moving steadily up the TTLB Ecosystem.  Today, when I looked at the site, I thought that I had surely fallen a notch.  Yesterday I was a crusty crustacean, but today I am a slimy mollusc.  That felt like a drop, but, as it turns out, I actually moved up.  I guess squids are pretty cool, but my anti-mollusk bias probably comes from living in Seattle for a while and finding my patio covered in giant banana slugs.  Ugghh.


Now I am a lowly insect.  This is progress?