Cutting edge capitalism that can change the world

 by Abi Skipp

Dot Chat: From Energy Campaigners to Solar Finance Entrepreneurs
[Via Dot Earth]

An online conversation with a young energy activist turned solar entrepreneur.

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Here we have a couple of entrepreneurs who are leading new approaches to financing the needs we will have for future energy.

What is interesting is both were clean energy activists who have taken to new approaches for raising capital to fund needed cleantech projects. Instead of fighting capitalism, they are bending it to their needs.

Mosaic allows people to make microinvestments (as low as $25) into clean energy projects with perhaps 4.5% interest on their investment. The projects were funded with hours. It has invested over $2 million using about $1000 in marketing expenses.

Mosaic raises money for solar projects and as the projects generate revenue, some of that revenue accrues to the investors. Those investors are regular people.

And they are doing this with just 3 employees focussed full time on origination, underwriting and servicing of loans. No Wall Street firm could ebven look at this with just 3 employees. (Mosaic actualy has 7 people working on its IT.)

Think of that – a financial services company with over twice as many people working on IT than working on the financial services.

It does not even build its own IT infrastructure. Mosaic uses Amazon Web Services to do its work. It can expand as much as it needs by leveraging what AWS provides.

And it does it by directly brokering projects with community investors. Wall Street is not in on the process. 

 

There are other groups using these sorts of approaches but this one is even more focussed – it just does solar.

It can work because the cost for solar panels has dropped tremendously. And crowdsourcing approaches permit them to disintermediate Wall Street brokers. 

That is, ‘notes’ can be issued for projects that would not be moneymakers for Wall Street. A community project costing $100,000 would not be worthwhile to most companies because their profit would be too low. Their models require tens of million or more for it to make money for them.

Here, being able to broker many, many notes to people  can work. They make it up in quantity, along with the drop in actually doing the process.

They take a small fee for administrating the note of 1% of the total interest. So the note is actually at perhaps 5.5% and they pay out 4.5%.

Read a prospectus to understand more. As with most investments, there are risks. But the ability to directly invest in local community projects that would have a very hard time selling binds is truly amazing.

It is like a whole new way to create bonds in the days of the Information Age.

Mosaic has over 10,000 people waiting to invest in the next projects.

And things will really change when the SEC publishes the rules about crowdinvesting. That will make it easier for microinvestment in corporations, altering the way stocks are sold in the same way this is changing the way bonds are created.

The other company is taking a non-profit approach to the same thing – letting people donate money rather than invest.

Both will be hugely disruptive to Wall Street, all while making capital flow more easily for small investors.

So expect the big guys to do what they can to stop it.

And by biometrics on the iWatch, he means health data

Apple’s iWatch to come in late 2014 with focus on biometrics, analyst says
[Via AppleInsider]

Noted KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes Apple’s much-rumored iWatch will hit store shelves late next year, not in 2013 as many market watchers expect, with a 1.5- to 2-inch screen, focus on biometrics and deep integration with existing iOS devices.

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Generation of personal health data is going to explode in the next year. As I wrote yesterday, Scanadu will provide a ton of data.

With biometrics, the iWatch can better safeguard an owner from unwanted user access, while providing advanced healthcare features

What happens if we can wear the device that gets our walking data – like the FitBit does – and heart rate and who knows what else? And that data is communicated wireless to the iOS device in our pocket?

It may well be that the reason for the 2014 date is not only due to its development. It may, just as the Scanadu Scout must, have to pass some FDA approval processes if it can act as a medical device.

We shall see.

Bankruptcy follows cancer diagnosis

by aussiegall

Cancer diagnosis puts people at greater risk for bankruptcy
[Via EurekAlert! - Business and Economics]

(Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center) People diagnosed with cancer are more than two-and-a-half times more likely to declare bankruptcy than those without cancer, according to a new study from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Researchers also found that younger cancer patients had two- to five-fold higher bankruptcy rates compared to older patients, and that overall bankruptcy filings increased as time passed following diagnosis.

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The interesting numbers here are that young people, women in particular, are much more likely to be forced into bankruptcy than the elderly. Medicare helps make sure poverty is not a result for older people.

But the combination of cancer and youth has no such safety net. It is a double whammy. Especially since student loan debt cannot be erased by declaring bankruptcy.

It is still a small percentage of people but a three-fold increase is worrisome.

Our current government cannot properly be relied on with regard to copyright protection

by Orange County Archives
*I’m assuming that the Orange County Archives has the right to publish this as the movie came out in 1920 

A Framework For Copyright Reform
[Via Techdirt]

I watched a large part of the House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property’s first hearing on copyright reform, and came away somewhat disappointed. While the panelists presented a variety of interesting viewpoints and worked hard to highlight areas of agreement, many of the Congressional Representatives were clearly confused about the law, the Constitution and the nature of the debate itself. I came away with a few key concerns, but also with some ideas for a framework that any debate on copyright should necessarily take. First up, the concerns:

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The Constitution never mentions protecting anything by using Copyright. Copyright is to be used to promote:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Too often our government sees copyright only as a right to make money, at the expense of the progress of science. At the moment, any corporate entity can have an exclusive right for 120 years.

I don’t mind money being involved and do not think everything should be free. But I do think the pendulum has gone too far and that protecting a flow of capital is more important than promoting progress.

I do not believe the original purpose of copyright is served by allowing non-creators of a work to control access for so much longer than anyone’s lifetime. Yet that is what our government is interested in – protecting the rights of corporations rather than promote progress.

The balance needs to shift back. As this article mentions, we are all content creators now. The entire arena is being disintermediated, decentralized and disrupted. Powerful monied interest threatened by this process are abusing Congress and copyright. Those that made their livelihood by marketing and distributing  the creative works of others should simply have less power to control copyright than they currently possess.

America has not seen copyrighted works enter the public domain since the 70s.  Just about anything since the early 20s is still covered by someone’s copyright. The ‘limited time’ was extended to 95  years to keep Disney happy. I expect that when Mickey Mouse comes up against this limit, Congress will just extend this ‘limited time.’

One detrimental example of the harm this does is the inability to determine what is really licensed or who holds copyright. One of my favorite documentaries – Hollywood by Brownlow – dealt with the early silent film era. Using archival material, It was a fabulous resource on a critical time in American history. None of us can legally watch it on our DVDs because it is not clear who holds copyright anymore for much of the archival material.

So many entities have come and gone over the last 100 years that it is simply impossible to know who has a legitimate copyright.

No matter how many people want to pay to watch this great documentary, copyright issues will keep it from appearing again. Only old videotapes from 20 years ago can be watched. But there are only used ones available for public sale. When they go, it will be lost to us. At least legal versions.

There are many works that people want to enjoy and will even pay for but cannot legally because no one knows who has the rights anymore. Searching out these questions has become too costly to make such publication worthwhile.

They will simply be lost to us. 

People create new versions of what is in the public domain and corporations simply claim they own it. We just saw a movie based on characters from a public domain works – Oz, the Great and Powerful – where huge amounts of money needed to be spent to fend of lawyers representing a work made decades after the original. They even haggled over the exact color of green that could be used.

Hard to see how anything but corporation coffers and lawyers pockets are being promoted here.

Perhaps in 2019 we will see some works from before 1923 lose their copyright. Or Disney and others will get it extended again. Corporations benefit but the rest of us do not. The progress of science and the useful arts are stymied when works are controlled well past the point where their authors and inventors are even alive.

Does Ted Nelson out the creater of bitcoin?

Shinichi Mochizuki is the designer of BitCoin according to Ted
[Via Dave Winer's linkblog feed]

Shinichi Mochizuki is the designer of BitCoin according to Ted Nelson.

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Ted Nelson is one of the more interesting gadflies of the current world, having given us the word hypertext.

In this video, he gives a captivating performance which, right or wrong, is fun to watch:

Shinichi Mochizuki? We shall see.

Index manipulation: Who coulda knowed?

 by AMagill

Trading in oil: Libor in a barrel | 
[Via The Economist]

IT IS a lesson of the past five years that benchmarks in unregulated markets can fall victim to the incentives they create. Subprime mortgages bundled into securities often won high scores from ratings agencies that stood to profit in a busy market. The London Interbank Offered Rate, LIBOR, was sometimes underestimated by banks which were cast in a healthier light by lower interest rates. Has something similar been going on in energy?

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So, the same financial whizzes who gave us Enron, the mortgage crisis, credit default swaps, the LIBOR scandal have apparently also done the same with oil price indices.

Why are these guys still allowed to run totally unregulated markets whose prices affect the entire society, with little to no oversight? Why are they not in jail?

The best explanation is that they have the money so they can extorted, corrupt and just pay-off all the legislative/judicial pressure they will face.

We are so screwed unless we all fight back against these guys, no matter how hard they pull out shiny objects to distract us.

Retirement is being disrupted also

by pedrosimoes7

Retirement – Another Industrial Idea whose day has come?
[Via Robert Paterson's Weblog]

You can retire from a job. But can you retire from life? Is the idea of retirement part of the idea of the job?

If this is correct, then as fewer and fewer of us have jobs, then the idea of spending the age of 65 – 85 playing golf has to go away. As does the idea of us old folks living separate lives.

With low relative wages over the last 20 years, the saving base is not here anyway. 75% of American nearing retirement age in 2010 have less than $30,000 in savings. Most have no pensions in the old way of a predictable annual flow of money either. And even these, mainly in government, are under threat as many are underfunded. Many pensions have lost a lot of ground in the last 10 years as well. With very low interest rates, even people who have savings are earning next to no income. Government bonds pay less that 1.5%. This will force savers into capital.

This thoughtful piece got me thinking more about this today.

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It is becoming less and less possible for anyone to accrue enough capital to retire at 70, much less 65, especially with another 20 years or more to live.

So people have to keep working, but, as the elderly also have more infirmities, the types of work they can do will change. Making a 70 year old compete with a 25 year old in a manual labor job can be inhuman. But that 70 year old is going to have a point of view, have insights and a lifetime of learning that can be very valuable.

Luckily, the barriers to entry for almost everything have dropped so far – and will continue to drop – that many of those 65 or older will be able to leverage their knowledge and skills to provide an income.

Part of what we as a society need to think about is how to facilitate this so that those who have ‘retired’ can survive. Retraining will help. As will better community processes to help them use their skills in ways to help the community. 

We will have to reconnect many of the community ties that Industrial Age approaches broke apart. Happily, this should not be too hard to accomplish, as Information Age incentives make community creation and support almost mandatory for survival.

But the sooner and faster we recognize hits and create paths for everyone to use their skills for the betterment of the community, and for the betterment of ‘retirees’, the better we will all be.

We may get a George Jetson lifestyle someday soon.

One reason passwords are a nightmare – everys site has different requirements

by AMagill

Why your password can’t have symbols—or be longer than 16 characters
[Via Ars Technica]

The password creation process on different websites can be a bit like visiting foreign countries with unfamiliar social customs. This one requires eight characters; that one lets you have up to 64. This one allows letters and numbers only; that one allows hyphens. This one allows underscores; that one allows @#$&%, but not ^*()[]!—and heaven forbid you try to put a period in there. Sometimes passwords must have a number and at least one capital letter, but no, don’t start the password with the number—what do you think this is, Lord of the Flies?

You can’t get very far on any site today without making a password-protected account for it. Using the same password for everything is bad practice, so new emphasis has emerged on passwords that are easy to remember. Sentences or phrases of even very simple words have surfaced as a practical approach to this problem. As Thomas Baekdal wrote back in 2007, a password that’s just a series of words can be “both highly secure and user-friendly.” But this scheme, as well as other password design tropes like using symbols for complexity, does not pass muster at many sites that specify an upper limit for password length.

Most sites seem to have their own particular password bugaboos, but it’s rarely, if ever, clear why we can’t create passwords as long or short or as varied or simple as we want. (Well, the argument against short and simple is concrete, but the others are not immediately clear). Regardless of the password generation scheme, there can be a problem with it: a multi-word passphrase is too long and has no symbols; a gibberish password is too short, and what’s the % doing in there?

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Imagine a house where every door required a different key, some used retinal scans, some used simple latches, some were made of metal and some were made of wood.

Now how would you feel if the door that led to your safe was made of wood with a small padlock on it? That is kind of what Schwab is – more than 6 and less than 8 characters. I was shocked.

It is frustrating to have to use so many different passwords at so many different sites because of the stupid, not sensical decisions. One site is fine with @ and the next one is not. One requires a number but no special characters.

One has to be longer than 8 but less than 16.

Maybe one day we ill have a more standard approach.

The value of a guestworker visa to a corporation? Between $10,000 and $1 million

by GraceFamily

Two H-1B’s walk into a bar: more on the visa scam
[Via I, Cringely]

There’s an old joke in which a man asks a woman if she’ll spend the night with him for $1 million? She will. Then he asks if she’ll spend the night with him for $10?

“Do you think I’m a prostitute?” she asks.

“We’ve already established that,” he replied. “This is just a price negotiation.”

Not a great joke, but it came to mind recently when a reader pointed me to a panel discussion last September at the Brookings Institution ironically about STEM education and the shortage of qualified IT workers. Watch the video if you can, especially the part where Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith offers to pay the government $10,000 each for up to 6,000 H-1B visas.

In the joke, this is analogous to the $10 offer. There’s a $1 million offer, too, which is another U.S. visa — the EB-5 so-called immigrant investor visa, 15,000 of which are available each year and most go unclaimed. Why?

The EB-5 visa is better in many respects than the H-1B. The EB-5, for one thing, is a true immigrant visa leading to U.S. citizenship, where the H-1B — despite misleading arguments to the contrary — is by law a non-immigrant visa good for three or six years after which the worker has to go back to their native country. But the EB-5 requires the immigrant bring with him or her $1 million to be invested locally in an active business.

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I’m sure Microsoft would start with a lowball offer, so $10,000 must be the floor. And since they are not ‘using’ the EB-5 visa, which could require a $1 million cost to the company, we know what the ceiling is.

So what is the added value of a new employee to a high tech company?

And, I’m wondering how many Americans would be interested in the job if Microsoft added $10,000 to the offer? Are the corporations happy with H-1B visas because they know it is temporary, that they control the ability of the worker to stay in the US and that the worker has little choice or future?

I would not be surprised to see that bean counters in companies have worked this out and find that American workers in high tech cost the company X dollars. And that guestworkers cost X-Y, where Y is greater than $10,000 but less than $1 million.

I would also not be surprised to see that these calculations do not take everything into account.

Funny changes in Apple share while the rest of us were asleep

Chart: Apple’s wild weekend
[Via Brainstorm Tech: Technology blogs, news and analysis from Fortune Magazine » Apple 2.0]

Some strange doings in Apple’s share price while the markets were asleep.

FORTUNE — Can anybody explain what happened to Apple (AAPL) between the close of trading Friday and Monday’s opening bell?

I can almost wrap my mind around the 4.55 million shares traded at exactly 4:00 p.m. Friday and the temporary $3.08 drop one clock tick later. A bunch of Apple weekly options had just expired, and the market had a ton of trades to unwind.

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Here is the graph:

The telling peak is at 4 am on Monday when over a million shares changed hands and the stock spiked to $429, virtually the same price the stock reached by noon today. Could someone have known because they knew the stock was going to reach that point soon? Someone was going to manipulate the stock to that point?

The stock is now at about $431.

Study indicates that there is no shortage of STEM labor

 by Marcin Wichary

Guestworkers in the high-skill U.S. labor market: An analysis of supply, employment, and wage trends | 
[Via Economic Policy Institute]

This paper reviews and analyzes the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) labor market and workforce and the supply of high-skill temporary foreign workers, who serve as “guestworkers.” It addresses three central issues in the ongoing discussion about the need for high-skill guestworkers in the United States:

• Is there a problem producing enough STEM-educated students at sufficient performance levels to supply the labor market?
• How large is the flow of guestworkers into the STEM workforce and into the information technology (IT) workforce in particular? And what are the characteristics of these workers?
• What are the dynamics of the STEM labor market, and what are the employment and wage trends in the IT labor market?

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Some interesting numbers here. For every two students that graduate with STEM degrees from American colleges, only one is hired into a STEM job. Computer science majors who do not get an IT job say it is because there are no IT jobs (30%) or they can make more money elsewhere (53%). Almost half of all new IT employees are foreign guestworkers.

Salaries have remained flat, even while technology has greater and greater impacts on out economy.

One of their main conclusions:  ”Immigration policies that facilitate large flows of guestworkers will supply labor at wages that are too low to induce significant increases in supply from the domestic workforce.”

They look at STEM education in the US and what the prospects are. It turns out that only 4% of High school graduates get a STEM college degree. This sounds very small but because the US produces so many High School graduates compared to many other countries, it also produces a huge supply of the world’s high performing students.  A third of the best test scores in science come from the US, twice the  number of the next closest country.

In 2011, over 372,000 guestworker visas were given. We graduated about 250,000 college students with STEM degrees. And half could not find a job. I wonder why?

About 80,000 got degrees in computer science. Yet over 160,000 guestworker visas were given in 2011 for IT jobs. No wonder over one-third of these American graduates were not working in their field after graduation.

If there was a shortage of STEM workers, we would expect to see salaries rise. Yet the average salary nationally  in the IT industry has not changed at all since 2001. There is no shortage because of immigrant visas.

By using immigrants, the industries have been able to access a supply that permits them to keep salaries low. Yet we still keep producing more American graduates than we now need.

So, instead of raising salaries in order to attract more of these American graduates, the STEM industries want to import more talent and pay them lower wages. The jobs that can’t be outsourced any more are being in-sourced, leaving more and more Americans working in fields they were not trained in..

We need to stop telling those being trained in STEM that there is a shortage that they need to fill. We produce more than enough graduates to fill any shortage if that was all that was needed by corporations. What is needed by corporations are large number of cheap employees. There is no shortage there as long as corporations can tap the foreign market and keep salaries down.

Nothing particularly wrong with that but stop stating that there is a shortage and there are not enough Americans to fill it. There are – they just want more money.  If we care about jobs for Americans, we would reduce the visa allotments. If we care about corporate profits, we would increase them.

It is all about money, not about jobs.  So stop saying it is about jobs.

Sad to see Mendeley becoming part of Elsevier.

Elsevier acquires Mendeley + all the data about what you read, share, and highlight
[Via Joho the Blog]

I liked the Mendeley guys. Their product is terrific — read your scientific articles, annotate them, be guided by the reading behaviors of millions of other people. I’d met with them several times over the years about whether our LibraryCloud project (still very active but undergoing revisions) could get access to the incredibly rich metadata Mendeley gathers. I also appreciated Mendeley’s internal conflict about the urge to openness and the need to run a business. They were making reasonable decisions, I thought. At they very least they felt bad about the tension :)

Thus I was deeply disappointed by their acquisition by Elsevier. We could have a fun contest to come up with the company we would least trust with detailed data about what we’re reading and what we’re attending to in what we’re reading, and maybe Elsevier wouldn’t win. But Elsevier would be up there. The idea of my reading behaviors adding economic value to a company making huge profits by locking scholarship behind increasingly expensive paywalls is, in a word, repugnant.

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Elsevier is my least favorite scientific publisher. High-priced and hard to access.

Now they will be able to mine the data of what researchers read and how they connect. they have to expect to make quite a profit from access to this data.

They would not spend more that $45 million if they did not make a large profit.

High Touch Engagement – an idea whose time is coming

by easylocum

They just feel threatened by a change agent
[Via Unqualified Offerings]

By Thoreau

Yesterday, while talking to a colleague who’s more enthusiastic about online classes than I am, I promoted High Touch Engagement by noting that I just had a research article accepted with three undergraduate co-authors, describing a project they did with me.  I noted that this sort of thing cannot be scaled into the traditional factory model of the online class.  This person’s very defensive, reactionary reply was “There’s more that you can do with a MOOC than just lecture.”  Silly traditionalist, clinging to last year’s buzzword.  It’s not about online lectures vs. online interactive activities or whatever.  That is an outdated paradigm.  The traditional MOOC model is a factory that focuses on massive dissemination of known ideas, while High Touch Engagement is about the creation of new knowledge through research projects mentored in small, supportive groups with expert role models.  This is a transformational new concept, and any institution that doesn’t want to be left in the dust will have to embrace High Touch Engagement.  How else we can move more people into the STEM pipeline without intensive mentoring on research projects?

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I’m already working on this but with a different name. And it will not be housed inside traditional academic walls but will exist in a public space open to all. It will remove barriers that separate science from society.

I hope to have more coming in the next few months.

Only four of twenty attend Committee meeting on unemployment – our Congress at work

Just Four Lawmakers Show Up To Congressional Hearing On Long-Term Unemployment
[Via ThinkProgress]

The nearly-empty committee room (via Niraj Chokshi)

With the nation’s unemployment rate at 7.6 percent, members of Congress are fond of saying that they are focused on nothing but jobs. And yet, when Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D) scheduled a Joint Economic Committee hearing on one of the biggest jobs-related crises facing the United States, just four of the committee’s 20 members bothered to show up.

When Klobuchar’s hearing on long-term unemployment began at 10:30 Wednesday morning, she was the only member in attendance. She was later joined by three other members, though not a single one of the committee’s 10 Republican members managed to attend, as National Journal’s Niraj Chokshi reports:

The Joint Economic Commitee is one of a handful of committees whose members come from both parties and both houses of Congress. Klobuchar was eventually joined by three colleagues (in order of their appearance): Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, Maryland Rep. John Delaney and Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings. All four are Democrats.

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I’ve generally tried to stay away from politics but this story hits both parties in both Houses. Yeah, 10 Republicans did not attend but so did 6 Democrats.

Jobs should be the number one things these guys are focussing on, not how to help Wall Street hedge fund managers pay less  in taxes. Obama should be shouting “Jobs” every time he leaves the White House instead of  talking about his dance moves. Pelosi and Boehner should be focussed on jobs, not austerity or chained-CPI or immigration.

Almost 40% of all unemployed Americans have been out of work for 6 months or more. And this does not count people who have simply given up looking for any work at all.

And businesses seldom hire anyone who has been out of work for 6 months or more. You’d think Congress would be interested in making sure people have jobs. Almost all the budget problems would be taken care of if people had jobs.

I guess getting out of town for a long weekend is more important.

What Samsung Securities says about Apple

Unbiased Source, Right There
[Via Daring Fireball]

Third paragraph from Jungah Lee’s report for Bloomberg, “LG Display Profit Misses Estimates on Stalling Apple Sales”:

“Apple is losing dominance and will likely delay launching a successor to the iPhone 5 until at least September,” Harrison Cho, an analyst for Seoul-based Samsung Securities Co., said before the earnings release. “LG Display might have to wait until the third quarter to see strong profits as Apple’s new devices are mostly expected to be out in the second half.”

Samsung Securities. That Samsung. Jiminy christ.

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So Samsung does have a financial arm that ‘covers’ its rival. This really adds to the conspiracy, especially with it writing about its rival losing dominance.  Ad that it won;t launch a new phone until September.

Nice way for it to spread FUD around. Does the SEC care about this sort of thing?