Something interesting is happening in California. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have grasped the essential truth that no nation - not even the United States - can be managed successfully from the center once it reaches a certain scale. Moreover, the bold proposals that Mr. Schwarzenegger is now making for everything from universal health care to global warming point to the kind of decentralization of power which, once started, could easily shake up America’s fundamental political structure. Governor Schwarzenegger is quite clear that California is not simply another state. ‘We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta,’ he recently declared. ‘We have the economic strength, we have the population and the technological force of a nation-state.’ In his inaugural address, Mr. Schwarzenegger proclaimed, ‘We are a good and global commonwealth.’ Political rhetoric? Maybe. But California’s governor has also put his finger on a little discussed flaw in America’s constitutional formula. The United States is almost certainly too big to be a meaningful democracy. What does ‘participatory democracy’ mean in a continent? Sooner or later, a profound, probably regional, decentralization of the federal system may be all but inevitable. A recent study by […]
WASHINGTON — They weren’t ready to hug each other, but when the president of the nation’s largest union and the chief executive of the world’s biggest retailer joined together to talk about the need for a new American health-care system, people took notice. ‘What business and labor seem to be agreeing on more and more is that everyone needs to be covered and it can’t be done with a system designed in the 1940s if America is to be competitive in a 21st century global economy,’ said Sen. Ron Wyden, and Oregon Democrat who has introduced legislation that would sever the link between employers and health insurance, requiring all Americans to buy health policies directly from insurers. The issue is also becoming an important theme of the 2008 presidential election, with Sen. Barack Obama calling for universal health care as he launched his candidacy on Saturday. Beyond the high-profile pairing of Scott and Stern, health policy experts have been impressed by an ever-growing coalition of strange bedfellows who are beating the drum for universal health care coverage — a potential sea change on an issue that proved to be dangerous political dynamite for Bill Clinton’s presidency […]
The growth in video downloads could create an internet traffic jam that threatens the net’s development, according to Google. Services such as YouTube, which is owned by the Californian giant, are proving tricky for internet providers to deal with and new developments could create even more problems, senior internet executives were told yesterday. ‘The web infrastructure – and even Google’s – doesn’t scale,’ said Vincent Dureau, Google’s head of TV technology. ‘It’s not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect.’ Surfers around the world already use sites such as YouTube to watch videos online, but video filesharing services are increasing pressure on the internet’s capacity. One of the unwitting culprits is BitTorrent, a technology already used by millions of people to obtain high-quality video over the net. Many people use it to download episodes of US TV series such as Lost, which have yet to be shown in the UK, or to see concert footage. But BitTorrent has proved controversial with Hollywood because many people also use it to download movies illegally. Later this month the system’s creators are expected to launch a legitimate movie download site in conjunction with some major studios. […]
The world’s largest building project is a revolutionary eco-city of electric cars and zero emissions near Shanghai. Wang Enming pauses as he emerges from the subway in Dongtan to listen to the sound of flocks of birds settling on the wetlands near the metro station, undisturbed by man as they prepare for a winter migration. Cycling the remaining three minutes home to his apartment, he marvels again at the fresh breeze coming off the mighty Yangtze river, which is never cleaner than at this point at the world’s first eco-city near Shanghai. The power that opens the door to his apartment comes from a solar cell on the roof, while the water he uses for his evening shower is recycled, as is all waste in this city of half a million residents. His dinner of boiled rice, spinach and spicy chicken has all been locally produced using organic methods. Later, he’ll stroll down to the car club and rent a battery-powered sports car and whizz through the tunnel back to Shanghai to cruise the Bund. This is one possible vision of China in 25 years’ time, low carbon-footprint living in the eco-city of the future. Grim apocalyptic […]
An Arctic ‘doomsday vault’ aimed at providing mankind with food in case of a global catastrophe will be designed to sustain the effects of climate change, the project’s builders said as they unveiled the architectural plans. The top-security repository, carved into the permafrost of a mountain in the remote Svalbard archipelago near the North Pole, will preserve some three million batches of seeds from all known varieties of the planet’s crops. The hope is that the vault will make it possible to re-establish crops obliterated by major disasters. ‘We have taken into consideration the (outside) temperature rising and have located the facility so far inside the rock that it will be in permafrost and won’t be affected’ by the outside temperature, Magnus Bredeli Tveiten, project manager at Norway’s Directorate of Public Construction and Property, told AFP. Construction on the seed bank, also dubbed the ‘Noah’s Ark of food’, will begin in March. The seed samples, such as wheat and potatoes, will be stored in two chambers located deep inside a mountain, accessed by a 120-meter (395-foot) tunnel. The tunnel and vaults will be excavated by boring and blasting techniques and the rock walls sprayed with […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
