Richard Branson, ever the trend spotter, has pledged $3B in green investment. In the UK, they are beating the drum for a new CO2 reduction treaty.
For this to work, it will need to be paid for x% by emitters, y% by users and 100-x-y% by countries that will benefit from abatement.
Air travel comprises 3% of emissions. Financial Times says get out of my face.
Financial Times columnist James Altucher says:
Because the cost of starting is effectively zero, not only should you start a business, but it is a sin not to start multiple businesses. The odds of success of for any one business are still similar…
Well doesn’t it cost millions to start a business? … Let us say you have an idea for an internet business. No problem. Let us walk through the steps:
Build your own site….A programmer sitting in Bangalore will cost between 1% and 10% what it costs to develop something here [UK]….
Then you need to advertise. Not only does Google level the playing field, allowing you to micro-advertise your idea across thousand of websites for pennies per click, but the competition is starting to bring prices down further.
I just started my first in 2004 and my third and fourth this month. Decisive win.
I asked some top notch people about this 6 years ago when I was CEO of First Intellectual. They said it would never fly. Forget it. Today New York Times is worried. In Pay to Obey they say:
The broken American patent system has a knack for sanctioning the ridiculous. In the latest example, businesses are receiving patents for devising ways to obey the law — the tax code, to be more specific. What’s next, a patented murder defense?
If one can patent DNA tests and Twinkies, why not the Twinky Defense?
On Transterrestrial Musings, we had a policy where people could post comments first and be bumped later if we determined them to be robots. On Decisive Win, I am holding the first comment of each commenter for moderation. Then if I determine you are not a robot, I will give blanket approval for all subsequent posts. You can call it prior restraint, discrimination against Cylons, and suboptimal. But it has kept us free of blog spam. I want to charge people $0.01 by credit card to prove they are not robots and raise the toll as needed to keep out spammers. Look for that coming in the too distant future.
Back on September 17, Paul Krugman said we are in a housing bubble. I don’t think so. Here’s what I said then. Tomorrow, Krugman says we are still in a bubble:
There’s a lot of evidence that home prices, although they’ve started to decline, are still way out of line. Spending on home construction remains abnormally high as a percentage of G.D.P., because banks are still lending freely in spite of rapidly rising foreclosure rates.
In the rest of the world, real estate commissions are only 1.5-2%. For historical reasons, we will be stuck with 3.75% commissions to 4% commissions. Why? The same reason Discovercard pays a cash back bonus instead of trying to undercut Visa and Mastercard’s rates to vendors. The retailers price so that they will make a profit with Visa and Mastercard. Visa and Mastercard require their merchants not to charge a surcharge for using Visa or Mastercard to pay. Regardless of whether it’s wise, it’s stuck. Therefore, expect that it will stay. Nevertheless, Discovercard kicks back 2% of their 2.9% merchant fee to the customer. Google is doing the same with it’s merchant charge scheme. Charge only a little less than the other gateways charge, but give it back in free ads. Nice!
The way this will play out in real estate commissions
Wirefly X Prize Cup was a lot of fun. It is my first time this year to be an attendee and an exhibitor. The event was well promoted locally. There were grass roots promotions like a mockup spaceship in the yard of one of the fraternity houses across from campus. There were radio promotions. There was good signage to get to the event and good police support. The parking was ample (albeit not so close to the event) and there were plenty of buses to keep things moving even at peak times.
The people there were amazing. The suppliers, investors, astronauts, government officials and other space notables were there in force. Holding it coincident with the symposium and summit is brilliant. The press were also present in force. One thing I did not note were customers. When I polled the Symposium about how many had bought a suborbital flight, only a couple raised their hands. Spending a billion dollars on spaceship development, spaceport development, regulation and hotels and housing to house spacers is only justified if there will be customers. The head end of the profit flow that will enable the industry is the customers. The customers need to be courted. There needs to be marketing, product placement, financing, a legal regime that promotes financing, attention to the customers’ desires and wants and a careful accounting of takeup. “Build it and they will come,” is not a mantra that will necessarily be realized for New Mexico.
I started Space Shot, Inc. to grow the head end. To create demand. Once there is a queue of winners waiting to fly with their money in escrow, the business case for suppliers closes much more easily. New Mexico and Peter Diamandis may need to start thinking about using the creativity they have used to incentivize suppliers to get the customers to put their money on the barrel.
I had a few recommendations for changes for next year’s event.
On SpaceRef, I find an article from NASA Astrobiology Magazine on radiation hazards.
Standards do not yet exist for limiting radiation exposure during travel to the moon or beyond, so Rapp used the standard now applied to astronauts in low earth orbit (onboard the International Space Station), which allows for no more than a 3 percent increase in the likelihood of fatal cancer….
[Donald] Rapp’s key advance was to utilize the worst-case analysis developed by [Frank] Cucinotta rather than the more conventional “point estimate” of radiation danger. A point estimate is a single number that estimates tolerable radiation exposure. The worst-case approach takes a broader view, which more accurately reflects the uncertainty of radiation health effects. Because health and exposure data for space exposures are scarce, and some people are more susceptible than others, caution dictates protecting against a wider range of danger. The worst-case approach (also known as the confidence-interval approach) tries to avoid any exposure falling within what statisticians call the “95 percent confidence interval,” a range that should include 95 percent of all possible dangerous exposures.
This seems a bit extreme. If they are going to die with a probability around what the shuttle had (2%), why not have a 98% chance of not dying from all causes instead of a 95% chance of not being exposed to radiation that would increase the likelihood of fatal cancer by 3%?
I encourage them to do whatever will complete the mission with the highest probability. It may be better to have redundant personnel than extra shielding. I think there will be superbly qualified volunteers at 4/5 chance of surviving and even 3/4, 2/3 or a 1/2. And that’s a one-way mission.
Carbon offsets are trading for about $5/ton in Europe. It turns out to be really cheap. What if it became really expensive like the doomsayers say like $100-$200/ton? So what. That turns out to be 7-15 cents per kWh or $1-2/gallon of gas. In Europe, it costs $130/tank to fill up. So we would have to pay an extra $1-$2/gallon in gas tax and we could sequester all the carbon we wanted. 7 cents per kWh? We generate 4 trillion kWh now at a cost of 7 cents per kWh that’s $280 billion in a $12 trillion economy or about 2% of our economy. So it would go up to 4% or 6%. So what!?
