The Gulf (of Mexico) oil spill continues, about a month on with no certainty of a solution on the horizon. At press time (ha!) they were about to try to jam it full of high-pressure mud to stop it, with a probability of success in the 60-70% range. I am certainly no expert, but when they can't get the job done, perhaps something a bit more extreme could do the job.
I say, it's a mile underwater, drop a small nuke on the leak. It's a 1950's style solution from back when they though you could do all sorts of engineering with A-bombs. It was in many ways a more forward-looking time than our own, at least for the tech stuff. I still don't have my flying car, but for that all of us should be thankful; on the scale of general calamity I will argue that millions of flying cars is more of a threat to life and limb than a bit of fission excavation would be.
Case against: "It's a NUKE, for chissakes, the fish will all glow and Godzilla will come and finish off The Big Easy!" I'm sure there might be some more nuance, but the general tone and level of "science" would be in this league I suspect.
Case for: It's in over 5000' of seawater, and a bomb of the size that might seal that leak (10kT? Smallish tac nuke anyway) will do a lot less environmental damage than all of that oil coming out will.
In any event, it's a sign of the times that this isn't even suggested. We are far more afraid of anything nuclear than we are of, well, pretty much anything else. The Yanks probably still have a few ASROC kicking around, although I suspect a bit more payload is in order. You could bundle this in with a nuclear test to validate your computer sims and solve two problems at once. Even without the testing of a new design, you'd still get a "twofer" by writing off an old bomb you had to dismantle for the new treaty anyway.
The bottom line here is: Stupidity gets us into things, why can't it get us out? Even more basic than that, I'd REALLY like someone to convince me that my proposal couldn't have settled this problem a lot faster and cleaner than whatever finally does. There's the gauntlet...
Tuesday 25 May 2010
Wednesday 19 May 2010
For Want of a Nail?
If I was really organized here, I'd file these posts by topic as well to see how my take on things changes (or not) with time. Who knows; if it's relatively simple I may yet do it. In the meantime I shall muddle through with more inexpert musings on our economic system.
Here is a place that being completely unversed in "the dismal science" is a boon, as I am not tempted to try to explain the intricacies of how we do things. The trigger for this post was an account on Counterterrorism Blog of the likely cause of the 6 May 2010 Wall Street Market crash. It has been know since the word "go" that it was a computer glitch, and I've read enough sci-fi to know what happens when too much of your day-to-day life is run by computers. Specifically, it runs fine until something big goes wrong, and then all bets are off.
It is surprising the mundane nature of the errors which take things down, hence the title of this post. In the case of the latest Wall St crash, apparently the automated "buy" side got hung up, so the "sell" side went crazy. Being a computer, that means it tried it's damndest to do what it had been programmed to do even though the conditions that those parameters had been set for were not present. The effect of this was the "sell" algorithm pushing the prices lower and lower looking for a buyer.
People generally won't do that. A lack of people in the loop made it inevitable, and it happens too fast to stop once it has started. Where this treads on AotF's turf is the threat that this poses to our collective well-being. For good or ill (more "ill" recently) the stock markets are both an indicator and driver of economic health. I recently suggested that the slavish business devotion to increasing stockholder value is hamstringing economic growth and employment, and this doesn't make me change my mind. You could see what happened to stockholder value in mere minutes on 6 May 2010, and in many other panic selling situations in the past. If it's wiped out and remade that easily, it's obvious that it doesn't really exist. Why then is this a weapon to be used against us?
I will argue (right here, btw) that protecting the systems that run the exchanges from cyber attacks is important, but CRITICAL is protecting the systems that run our infrastructure. This was graphically (though implausibly) shown in Live Free or Die Hard, and there is concern that the Chinese (primarily but not exclusively) have contingency plans to do just that. The terrorist threat to major info systems is limited and local at worst, unless they have some major State support.
This opens the can of worms about how much damage your garden-variety terrorist attack (suicide or car bomb) can do. The biggest thing that a terrorist cell can put together is a truck bomb, a la Oklahoma City, 1995 . While tactically devastating, strategically it is a pinprick. Enough of them, powerful and hitting dozens of critical targets simultaneously, could have a physically (as opposed to psychological) paralyzing effect on government and society and give that strategic effect, but nothing that big and sophisticated could slip completely past intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.
The short version? No conceivable (conventional) terrorist attack, cyber or violent, could disable us provided we have any sort of decent and competent leadership. Hurt us certainly, but when deciding where to prioritize resources we must separate the real from the fanciful. We won't get into leadership here, just assume they are up to it when push comes to shove.
Computer systems, as powerful as they are today, are nowhere near as seamless as they appear in movies and TV. 24 is the baseline of preposterousness in terms of integration of computer systems; having access to every CCTV camera in a city, etc. is nowhere near realistic, and certainly not instantly on-demand as shown here and elsewhere. Likewise terrorists could not shut down the markets and utilities at will to cripple our society.
The best defence against "systemic shock" is essentially what we already have: decentralization. One Big Computer is the worst possible idea, and fortunately both human nature (territorial) and technical limitations will do most of the work of keeping the lights on. Hardening those nodes will be haphazard, but I am confident that under our current level of computer dependency any cyber attack losses will be local and/or transitory. In this case time will tell if I'm right; history isn't much help as a guide for computerized systems...
Here is a place that being completely unversed in "the dismal science" is a boon, as I am not tempted to try to explain the intricacies of how we do things. The trigger for this post was an account on Counterterrorism Blog of the likely cause of the 6 May 2010 Wall Street Market crash. It has been know since the word "go" that it was a computer glitch, and I've read enough sci-fi to know what happens when too much of your day-to-day life is run by computers. Specifically, it runs fine until something big goes wrong, and then all bets are off.
It is surprising the mundane nature of the errors which take things down, hence the title of this post. In the case of the latest Wall St crash, apparently the automated "buy" side got hung up, so the "sell" side went crazy. Being a computer, that means it tried it's damndest to do what it had been programmed to do even though the conditions that those parameters had been set for were not present. The effect of this was the "sell" algorithm pushing the prices lower and lower looking for a buyer.
People generally won't do that. A lack of people in the loop made it inevitable, and it happens too fast to stop once it has started. Where this treads on AotF's turf is the threat that this poses to our collective well-being. For good or ill (more "ill" recently) the stock markets are both an indicator and driver of economic health. I recently suggested that the slavish business devotion to increasing stockholder value is hamstringing economic growth and employment, and this doesn't make me change my mind. You could see what happened to stockholder value in mere minutes on 6 May 2010, and in many other panic selling situations in the past. If it's wiped out and remade that easily, it's obvious that it doesn't really exist. Why then is this a weapon to be used against us?
I will argue (right here, btw) that protecting the systems that run the exchanges from cyber attacks is important, but CRITICAL is protecting the systems that run our infrastructure. This was graphically (though implausibly) shown in Live Free or Die Hard, and there is concern that the Chinese (primarily but not exclusively) have contingency plans to do just that. The terrorist threat to major info systems is limited and local at worst, unless they have some major State support.
This opens the can of worms about how much damage your garden-variety terrorist attack (suicide or car bomb) can do. The biggest thing that a terrorist cell can put together is a truck bomb, a la Oklahoma City, 1995 . While tactically devastating, strategically it is a pinprick. Enough of them, powerful and hitting dozens of critical targets simultaneously, could have a physically (as opposed to psychological) paralyzing effect on government and society and give that strategic effect, but nothing that big and sophisticated could slip completely past intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.
The short version? No conceivable (conventional) terrorist attack, cyber or violent, could disable us provided we have any sort of decent and competent leadership. Hurt us certainly, but when deciding where to prioritize resources we must separate the real from the fanciful. We won't get into leadership here, just assume they are up to it when push comes to shove.
Computer systems, as powerful as they are today, are nowhere near as seamless as they appear in movies and TV. 24 is the baseline of preposterousness in terms of integration of computer systems; having access to every CCTV camera in a city, etc. is nowhere near realistic, and certainly not instantly on-demand as shown here and elsewhere. Likewise terrorists could not shut down the markets and utilities at will to cripple our society.
The best defence against "systemic shock" is essentially what we already have: decentralization. One Big Computer is the worst possible idea, and fortunately both human nature (territorial) and technical limitations will do most of the work of keeping the lights on. Hardening those nodes will be haphazard, but I am confident that under our current level of computer dependency any cyber attack losses will be local and/or transitory. In this case time will tell if I'm right; history isn't much help as a guide for computerized systems...
Saturday 8 May 2010
Expendables and Ponzi Schemes
From the Wall St Journal:
'The betting is that the Labor Department's Friday snapshot of the job market will show that employers added workers in April, perhaps even that the unemployment rate fell.
One in six men in their prime working lives will be permanently unemployed under this scenario. I've read enough sci-fi to have seen the hypothetical outcome of advanced tech and post-industrial development, and the fact is that we've a surplus of people for our productive needs. With the shift to public sector jobs, women have taken the bulk of them, so the burden of unemployment falls on the segment of the population least psychologically suited to bearing it.
Men need to work, whether they like it or not. Unemployed males are also unappealing as prospective mates, so we're looking at c. 17% of men being both unemployable and having dismal marriage prospects. No good can come from this.
Fixing that of course is difficult, as employment is a zero-sum game and to give them jobs would mean taking jobs from women. I will state bluntly that the I believe that the results of that for the stability of society would be positive; it's not gangs of housewives that turn to crime, and there are only two more (partial) solutions to this that I can think of.
War works, especially one with conscription and a high death rate. Historically these have been good for our economy too, but it's a different story when they're fought on your territory. Finding a war like this that would involve us, ramp up slowly enough to draft and train that 17% and then kill enough of them that they're off the employment books is exceptionally unlikely, and in any event miserable and tragic.
The other option which doesn't depend so much on the public teat is to reduce efficiency and give to a big middle finger to the "stockholders". And no, I have not suddenly turned into a Marxist. The practical result of globalizing free trade is that capital moves to where it can be most profitably employed. That is, stuff gets made where it's cheapest to make it. Some of this has to do with tax and regulatory regimes, but mostly it comes down to who will work for the least money.
You will occasionally hear of business owners who hang onto the the old facilities and employees, accepting some societal responsibility toward the community. This is the exception of course, as most people with the drive to get a business off of the ground are more interested in the bottom line, and once they go public it's largely out of their hands as the interests of the stockholders take over.
Private industry is not a charitable institution, but the role government can play here is to make employing more people less of a burden, thus making it a viable choice for more ethical Capitalists. This can be done through changes to business taxes and regulations as well as tariffs. Bringing back apprenticeships, reducing credentialism, all of these things can make business and labour more partners than antagonists, and do it without coercive regulation. Open up possibilities rather than attempt to engineer outcomes, and you avoid the entitlement ponzi trap that Greece is currently reaping the results of.
It takes taxes for governments to pay for anything, and if there is more going out than coming in, you can only kite the cheques for so long. Less people on the dole (or Public Service) is critical to the long-term health of a society. In the end our economic system is all in our heads but the longer we can put off the day of collective realization that it's all a house of cards, the longer we'll have to adjust to the economic and demographic changes we're facing. In the meantime, there are still all of those unemployed guys...
'The betting is that the Labor Department's Friday snapshot of the job market will show that employers added workers in April, perhaps even that the unemployment rate fell.
That would be good news, but not good enough. It's hard to exaggerate how bad the job market is. Here's one arresting fact: One of every five men 25 to 54 isn't working.'
These numbers are from the US of course (things aren't quite so dark here), but the real kicker comes a couple of sentences later:
'Even more alarming, the jobs that many of these men, or those like them, once had in construction, factories and offices aren't coming back. "A good guess…is that when the economy recovers five years from now, one in six men who are 25 to 54 will not be working," Lawrence Summers, the president's economic adviser, said the other day.'One in six men in their prime working lives will be permanently unemployed under this scenario. I've read enough sci-fi to have seen the hypothetical outcome of advanced tech and post-industrial development, and the fact is that we've a surplus of people for our productive needs. With the shift to public sector jobs, women have taken the bulk of them, so the burden of unemployment falls on the segment of the population least psychologically suited to bearing it.
Men need to work, whether they like it or not. Unemployed males are also unappealing as prospective mates, so we're looking at c. 17% of men being both unemployable and having dismal marriage prospects. No good can come from this.
Fixing that of course is difficult, as employment is a zero-sum game and to give them jobs would mean taking jobs from women. I will state bluntly that the I believe that the results of that for the stability of society would be positive; it's not gangs of housewives that turn to crime, and there are only two more (partial) solutions to this that I can think of.
War works, especially one with conscription and a high death rate. Historically these have been good for our economy too, but it's a different story when they're fought on your territory. Finding a war like this that would involve us, ramp up slowly enough to draft and train that 17% and then kill enough of them that they're off the employment books is exceptionally unlikely, and in any event miserable and tragic.
The other option which doesn't depend so much on the public teat is to reduce efficiency and give to a big middle finger to the "stockholders". And no, I have not suddenly turned into a Marxist. The practical result of globalizing free trade is that capital moves to where it can be most profitably employed. That is, stuff gets made where it's cheapest to make it. Some of this has to do with tax and regulatory regimes, but mostly it comes down to who will work for the least money.
You will occasionally hear of business owners who hang onto the the old facilities and employees, accepting some societal responsibility toward the community. This is the exception of course, as most people with the drive to get a business off of the ground are more interested in the bottom line, and once they go public it's largely out of their hands as the interests of the stockholders take over.
Private industry is not a charitable institution, but the role government can play here is to make employing more people less of a burden, thus making it a viable choice for more ethical Capitalists. This can be done through changes to business taxes and regulations as well as tariffs. Bringing back apprenticeships, reducing credentialism, all of these things can make business and labour more partners than antagonists, and do it without coercive regulation. Open up possibilities rather than attempt to engineer outcomes, and you avoid the entitlement ponzi trap that Greece is currently reaping the results of.
It takes taxes for governments to pay for anything, and if there is more going out than coming in, you can only kite the cheques for so long. Less people on the dole (or Public Service) is critical to the long-term health of a society. In the end our economic system is all in our heads but the longer we can put off the day of collective realization that it's all a house of cards, the longer we'll have to adjust to the economic and demographic changes we're facing. In the meantime, there are still all of those unemployed guys...
Wednesday 5 May 2010
Energy and car bombs and Media, oh my!
Two of my major hobbyhorses, energy and terrorism have come into focus rather sharply in the last week or so, so perhaps that's the trigger I need for another Blog post. The terrorism thing first.
Again the fundie Muslims are bent out of shape about cartoons, and this time it's South Park. I haven't watched it in years, but I remember that for good or ill they take no prisoners when they have something they want to say. Their attempts to portray Mohammed (in a bear suit) caused a paroxysm of self-censorship from Comedy Central and a tepid, scarcely noticeable debate in the media about freedom of speech. There were some vague threats from a couple of disgruntled wannabe jihadists in the US and corporations started staining their britches.
Admittedly terrorist acts are one of the things that insurance usually doesn't cover, but again we see the fear-based religious double-standard. Mock the Christians as grossly as possible (and boy, do they go there!) but the worst thing they'll do (vanishingly rare individual exceptions aside) is picket you. Usually that is reserved for abortion clinics, and almost always kept within the laws of trespass and harassment. Equally, no Buddhist fatwas will descend on you for being insufficiently enlightened, but the slightest hint that some Muslim, somewhere, might object to what you say and you're scrambling for cover? Cowardly at best, submissive at worst.
So no big surprise this past weekend that there was an inept car bomb in front of Comedy Central's parent company, Viacom, in Times Square NY. I am relieved that the perp was so incompetent (I guess his internet bomb plans weren't so great), but others in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan are not so lucky. The most recent thing I've seen is very specific to the U.S. but a good example for the contortions lefties will go through to make things conform to their pre-determined worldview. That is an entire book in it self, but the continuing see-no-jihad attitude of many of the liberal media simply put denies demonstrable reality.
Nothing really new there, so on to the oil spill. Since 20 April 2010 (two weeks ago as I write this) when the rig Deepwater Horizon exploded and later sank the well that it was drilling has been spewing out thousands of barrels of oil a day. Happening as it is in the Gulf of Mexico, there are lots of easily accessible beaches to see the damage this will eventually cause there, and of course there is major fishery action in that area, so this is a serious environmental disaster, or at least it looks like it will be. The oil is coming from over 5,000 ft down which complicates capping it, but is also causing a lot of it to not make the surface. This is something new, and no-one really knows how long it'll take to stop and what the environmental effect will be.
Of course this happens soon after Obama approved more offshore drilling, and the political reaction is pretty predictable. None of that changes the fact that we continue to need the oil, so wishing it away is not practical and won't happen. I have thrown my $0.02 into a discussion of this with some people I sort-of know, and there were proposals of things like raising the price of gas to $3/L to get people off of it. This isn't like cigarettes or booze that if it's more expensive people will simply use less. There are places to cut consumption certainly (no more Sunday drives for you) but I will continue to point out the effect on food and other things requiring transportation.
It's a popular Green position (not always baldly stated) that there are too many of us. Personally I agree; I have no idea what the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet is, but what I do know is that the higher our technology, the larger that number will be. Sufficiently high technology will give us essentially unlimited electricity which will eliminate most if not all pollution from power generation and reduce our per-capita footprint. Regardless of this, you don't get something for nothing in this universe, and the tech for this does not yet exist. There is an environmental cost/impact to anything that we have to build, and a lot of the "green' alternatives are causing more real problems than a nuclear power plant, the only viable non
carbon-generating source that is proven to be scalable to replace our reliance on fossil fuels.
Wind turbines are a blight on the landscape and they slaughter flying things by the thousands. Small individual ones to provide more juice at the household level (as conditions permit!) are a good idea, and that's the sort of thing that should be supported; if there's already a house there, putting a small wind turbine on it has negligible additional environmental impact, even multiplied by the number of them there would then be. Likewise solar panels installed on your roof. Big fields of them take up agricultural or nature space with undeniable environmental
impact and I'll throw it out there (for you to check!) that it takes c.30 years for a solar panel to generate the amount of energy it took to produce it. I have no proof for that as yet, but smarter people than I also think that it sounds plausible.
An argument I have used in the past was to compare the environmental "footprint" of a hydro project versus a nuclear power plant. Everyone gets their shorts in a bunch about disposing of the waste, but even a pessimistic storage forecast writes off MUCH less land than flooding hundreds of km2 with a reservoir. I personally have a real hate for wind farms, and I also consider them a scam. It is one of the least effective ways to generate industrial levels of electricity, and it is not (and won't be under any conditions I can see in my lifetime) cost-effective. I'd rather back onto a nuclear power plant than a wind farm, and that's because I understand both of them. The "wop-wop-wop" of the blades would drive me insane long before I would die of old age, which is the only health risk of living next to a properly engineered and run nuclear plant. See my previous post about the worst-case scenario of any First-World nuclear plant (ok, it was Three Mile Island, and it didn't even make anyone sick despite mostly melting down).
What is common to both of these things? The media of course. "They tell you your opinions, and they're very good indeed"; verily, a pox upon it. That's not the way the media is supposed to be of course. It should represent a plethora of diverse views, but the major media outlets are all owned by a handful of conglomerates so diversity of views is restricted. This is where the internet (the parts not invented by Al Gore at least) comes in. Instead of pamphleteers toiling over expensive and relatively rare presses in their basements and workshops, we now have millions of people all capable of putting what they think out there. Most of it is poorly researched (if at all) but increasingly that isn't much of a distinction from the "Mainstream Media". Fact-checking is more and more left to the blogosphere, with predictably uneven results and dissemination thereof.
Unlike the days when Walter Cronkite could end each news broadcast with "and that's the way it is" there are a load of sources for whatever you want to know. Iranians used cell phone cameras to show the world what their government is doing to them, and there is more and more like this each year. It's a bitch to filter and prone to exploitation or blockage, but the truth is indeed out there if you care to look. Competition is a good thing for our media, economy, and by extension for our environment and security. You don't have to "fight the power" all the time, but you certainly should fact-check it. Hell, fact-check me; I'm pretty sloppy here, but I'm up front about that as I am with my agenda, at least as much as I know what it is myself...
Again the fundie Muslims are bent out of shape about cartoons, and this time it's South Park. I haven't watched it in years, but I remember that for good or ill they take no prisoners when they have something they want to say. Their attempts to portray Mohammed (in a bear suit) caused a paroxysm of self-censorship from Comedy Central and a tepid, scarcely noticeable debate in the media about freedom of speech. There were some vague threats from a couple of disgruntled wannabe jihadists in the US and corporations started staining their britches.
Admittedly terrorist acts are one of the things that insurance usually doesn't cover, but again we see the fear-based religious double-standard. Mock the Christians as grossly as possible (and boy, do they go there!) but the worst thing they'll do (vanishingly rare individual exceptions aside) is picket you. Usually that is reserved for abortion clinics, and almost always kept within the laws of trespass and harassment. Equally, no Buddhist fatwas will descend on you for being insufficiently enlightened, but the slightest hint that some Muslim, somewhere, might object to what you say and you're scrambling for cover? Cowardly at best, submissive at worst.
So no big surprise this past weekend that there was an inept car bomb in front of Comedy Central's parent company, Viacom, in Times Square NY. I am relieved that the perp was so incompetent (I guess his internet bomb plans weren't so great), but others in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan are not so lucky. The most recent thing I've seen is very specific to the U.S. but a good example for the contortions lefties will go through to make things conform to their pre-determined worldview. That is an entire book in it self, but the continuing see-no-jihad attitude of many of the liberal media simply put denies demonstrable reality.
Nothing really new there, so on to the oil spill. Since 20 April 2010 (two weeks ago as I write this) when the rig Deepwater Horizon exploded and later sank the well that it was drilling has been spewing out thousands of barrels of oil a day. Happening as it is in the Gulf of Mexico, there are lots of easily accessible beaches to see the damage this will eventually cause there, and of course there is major fishery action in that area, so this is a serious environmental disaster, or at least it looks like it will be. The oil is coming from over 5,000 ft down which complicates capping it, but is also causing a lot of it to not make the surface. This is something new, and no-one really knows how long it'll take to stop and what the environmental effect will be.
Of course this happens soon after Obama approved more offshore drilling, and the political reaction is pretty predictable. None of that changes the fact that we continue to need the oil, so wishing it away is not practical and won't happen. I have thrown my $0.02 into a discussion of this with some people I sort-of know, and there were proposals of things like raising the price of gas to $3/L to get people off of it. This isn't like cigarettes or booze that if it's more expensive people will simply use less. There are places to cut consumption certainly (no more Sunday drives for you) but I will continue to point out the effect on food and other things requiring transportation.
It's a popular Green position (not always baldly stated) that there are too many of us. Personally I agree; I have no idea what the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet is, but what I do know is that the higher our technology, the larger that number will be. Sufficiently high technology will give us essentially unlimited electricity which will eliminate most if not all pollution from power generation and reduce our per-capita footprint. Regardless of this, you don't get something for nothing in this universe, and the tech for this does not yet exist. There is an environmental cost/impact to anything that we have to build, and a lot of the "green' alternatives are causing more real problems than a nuclear power plant, the only viable non
carbon-generating source that is proven to be scalable to replace our reliance on fossil fuels.
Wind turbines are a blight on the landscape and they slaughter flying things by the thousands. Small individual ones to provide more juice at the household level (as conditions permit!) are a good idea, and that's the sort of thing that should be supported; if there's already a house there, putting a small wind turbine on it has negligible additional environmental impact, even multiplied by the number of them there would then be. Likewise solar panels installed on your roof. Big fields of them take up agricultural or nature space with undeniable environmental
impact and I'll throw it out there (for you to check!) that it takes c.30 years for a solar panel to generate the amount of energy it took to produce it. I have no proof for that as yet, but smarter people than I also think that it sounds plausible.
An argument I have used in the past was to compare the environmental "footprint" of a hydro project versus a nuclear power plant. Everyone gets their shorts in a bunch about disposing of the waste, but even a pessimistic storage forecast writes off MUCH less land than flooding hundreds of km2 with a reservoir. I personally have a real hate for wind farms, and I also consider them a scam. It is one of the least effective ways to generate industrial levels of electricity, and it is not (and won't be under any conditions I can see in my lifetime) cost-effective. I'd rather back onto a nuclear power plant than a wind farm, and that's because I understand both of them. The "wop-wop-wop" of the blades would drive me insane long before I would die of old age, which is the only health risk of living next to a properly engineered and run nuclear plant. See my previous post about the worst-case scenario of any First-World nuclear plant (ok, it was Three Mile Island, and it didn't even make anyone sick despite mostly melting down).
What is common to both of these things? The media of course. "They tell you your opinions, and they're very good indeed"; verily, a pox upon it. That's not the way the media is supposed to be of course. It should represent a plethora of diverse views, but the major media outlets are all owned by a handful of conglomerates so diversity of views is restricted. This is where the internet (the parts not invented by Al Gore at least) comes in. Instead of pamphleteers toiling over expensive and relatively rare presses in their basements and workshops, we now have millions of people all capable of putting what they think out there. Most of it is poorly researched (if at all) but increasingly that isn't much of a distinction from the "Mainstream Media". Fact-checking is more and more left to the blogosphere, with predictably uneven results and dissemination thereof.
Unlike the days when Walter Cronkite could end each news broadcast with "and that's the way it is" there are a load of sources for whatever you want to know. Iranians used cell phone cameras to show the world what their government is doing to them, and there is more and more like this each year. It's a bitch to filter and prone to exploitation or blockage, but the truth is indeed out there if you care to look. Competition is a good thing for our media, economy, and by extension for our environment and security. You don't have to "fight the power" all the time, but you certainly should fact-check it. Hell, fact-check me; I'm pretty sloppy here, but I'm up front about that as I am with my agenda, at least as much as I know what it is myself...
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