The Wealth... and Infrastructure... of Nations

With release of Joe Biden's new Infrastructure and Stimulus Plans, reactions have gone as predicted. Mitch McConnell and the entire Putin Party have declared their intention to block everything and allow nothing. Standard incantations are flowing -- from democrat deficits! to cutting taxes and federal spending makes jobs and capital! And then Sen. Tim Scott, in his 'rebuttal' to President Biden's Congressional speech, accused him of breaking his promise to be a 'uniter.' (More on that below.)

Okay, let's stop letting this be about 'sides.' Sure, there definitely are sides, and one of them is insane. Still, our real enemy is a meme claiming that all points of view are equivalent and not subject to factual refutation. 

It is an incantation that's clung-to desperately by the farthest left and today's entire, mad right. It implies that just repeating your own side's magical incantations will suffice. In fact, even pointing out a flaw in some small, sub-component makes you a partisan of evil.

No. At best you will only ever be 99% right. And criticism is the only known antidote to error. So...

Let's instead talk facts. Focusing on that word-of-the-month "infrastructure!"

== The two diametrically opposite ways that the US and China 'invested' $20 Trillions each, since 1995. ==

Both China and the US spent the last 25+ years pouring trillions into plans to vastly expand their productive capacity, infrastructure, skilled labor force and R&D. 

China's approach was simple: fund vast projects like high speed rail and whole new cities, while lending/investing in 'companies' that were in large part State Champions. Partly due to beneficent trade policies by the West, China's approach worked spectacularly well.

So you ask: "What was our method? And how did the American approach fare? 

Glad you asked. Our approach was called "Supply Side Economics." Summarized, it was: snuff out every method used to create the prosperous and dynamic American Pax since 1940. Virtually end taxpayer-funded investment in R&D, infrastructure, labor force training and so on, because that's "picking winners and losers." 

Instead of using the mixed-economy methods that built America from 1940 to 1995, Supply Side insists that we give many trillions in tax cuts and other direct benefits to the top 0.01%, on the theory that they would then turn and invest those massive cash infusions into... well... factories, productive capacity, competitively oriented infrastructure, R&D and the 'job creators' own, expanding work force. 

Supply Side (SS) was the most expensive national development experiment in all of human history. So how'd it go? 

Well, the results are clear. With some notable exceptions, rich people don't do that!

Adam Smith explained, way back in The Wealth of Nations, that when they get a lot richer, aristocrats and oligarchs tend to pour any wealth increase into rent-seeking ("rentier") asset bubbles and passive (slow money velocity) investments, and into capital preservation for their spoiled inheritance brats. 

And into cheating. Aristocratic cheating of the very sort that the American Founders - inspired in part by Adam Smith - rebelled against.

Let's be even clearer.

Of the half-dozen major - and hundreds of minor - experiments in Supply Side, not one of them ever approached anywhere near coming true. Every confident prediction - e.g. that budget deficits would vanish due to burgeoning economic activity - every single SS prediction failed diametrically to happen as forecast. 

That is 100%. And when you stick with an utterly disproved hypothesis, that's not science. It's a cult.

== Then there is Money Velocity... ==

Among the most powerful of all economic metrics is one that conservative mavens and "economists" absolutely hate ever to mention, because it eviscerates every cult incantation that they cling to. But it also happens to be a crucial measure of economic health.

It's money velocity. The rate at which each dollar changes hands, generating wealth and prosperity and growth, whenever it is rapid.

So let's talk money velocity, money velocity, and money velocity. 

It PLUMMETS after every tax gift to the aristocracy. 

It rises (duh?) with every Keynsian infusion into workers doing stuff. 

Useful stuff like infrastructure. 

Period. Always, and that is always.

Bet me on this. 

Oh please. 

Solid metrics, adjudged by panels of retired senior military officers. 

I will have your house.

== Then there is 'fiscal responsibility ==

And now the hypocrites screech about deficits. 

First, Democrats score better than Republicans in every metric of good governance and outcomes, including fiscal responsibility - like whether across any 4 year administration any effort is made to turn the rate-of-change of debt-gathering toward negative. In other words planting your foot on the deficit brake or the accelerator.

Democrats - across entire 4-year administrations - always try to slow the debt train, at least a bit, and sometimes succeed. 

Republicans never even remotely try. 

Bet me on that, too.

== Allons enfants de la patrie...==

Aside. Ruling castes throughout history have rationalized that they were inherent geniuses or better by nature - not happenstance or luck - than the 'mob' who must never be allowed to get their hands on power. We see this in the narratives justifying outrageous Republican electoral cheating to hold power when they lose almost every popular vote. We see it in appeals to racial and other divisions. We see it in the excuses made for skyrocketing wealth disparities and CEO compensation packages that are unconnected to any metric of actual company health, voted by their pals in an incestuous clade.

Making one ask: "Where do you honestly expect such insatiability to lead?" The most fundamental 'tell' that these folks vastly over-rate their own intelligence - and hire flatterers to reinforce the stories - is their stunning ignorance of actual history.

No, no. Your refuges on private Patagonian or Ural mountains, or on South Island or Vanuatu or under the sea and not safe. Safety can be found by starting now top work on your reputation as decent human beings.

Back to topic.

== Time for a Roosevelt ==

So now Joe Biden wants to invest in productive capacity, infrastructure, labor force and R&D? And AOC & co. are criticizing it for falling short of their Green New Deal?

Okay, calm down there, hoss. AOC is brilliant... maybe even 10% as much so as her fans think. (Yes that brilliant!) And she is savvy about her role. By criticizing Biden's plan, she widens the conceptual Overton Window to the left, helping Joe look 'moderate.' And that is a GOOD thing, fools. It is savvy, team politics! And it is no license for any of you to go hating on Biden, or raging at incremental progress.

On the other hand, I need to say something about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), a fashion among some on the left. MMT is stunning, incantatory bullshit and a betrayal of actual, working Keynsianism. There, I said it. The left has its shibboleths, too. They are just a lot fewer and less divorced from all objective reality or ethical behavior. But keep an eye on them, too.

As for the Biden Infrastructure/stimulus Bill... well... there may be flaws in the plan, sure. If there were sane opponents to heed, I would listen to criticism, the only known antidote to error. An era of negotiation among adults, based on factual evidence, may someday return. Only right now...

 

...right now Republicans are in no position to criticize at any level, in any way!

 

In fact, there is no greater hypocrisy than for a Republican to chide anyone about fiscal responsibility, or economics, and that especially includes their volcanically hypocritical sexual-predator finger wagging on morality! (Bet me - oh please - which party features 3x as many sexual predators among their recent and present upper ranks! Actually it's 6x! But I am a cautious wagerer.)

But on today's topic -- totally aside from their massive turpitudes and treasons, there is the simple fact of spectacular incompetence and desperation to cling to voodoo incantations. We've seen nothing like it since the 1860s! 

Except that those earlier confederates at least had one virtue--just one--that these present-day jackasses utterly lack.

Guts.

Alas, unlike those gray-clad, brave fools of the 1860s, today's Foxite-putinists will never, ever bet manly wager stakes on any of their mad assertions! 

If you try to get them to actually step up and back up their incantations, the craven cultists always rave and spew and caper and jibber and distract... and then run away. Above all, they will dodge ever escrowing (with a reputable attorney) actual wager stakes over any provable/falsifiable assertion. 

Which ultimately shows that environmentalists are right about the effects of pollution mixed with alcohol. 

Something has happened to confederate balls.

On the Transparency Front: FBI vs Apple and the prescribers of "hiding."

On the Transparency Front – A New York Times article asserts that the blurry lines between foreign intelligence gathering and domestic surveillance are starting to vanish, altogether.  “National Security Agency data will be shared with other intelligence agencies like the FBI without first applying any screens for privacy.” This article - Surprise! NSA data will be used for domestic policing that has nothing to do with terrorism - is lurid and over-wrought in tone, but of course we need to make clear that we’re interested and paying attention.  In the long run, that fact can lead to a balance that protects common citizens.  

But... protects them… from being surveilled? Oh stop. Please. The dumbitudinousness of that ongoing fantasy is plumb wearying. 

Not one of the silly jeremiads that have demanded government blindness has ever – and I mean ever, once – proposed any plausible way that can reliably happen, over an extended period.  Across the history of our species, show me one time when a society’s elites were denied sight consistently or for very long. 

There is a way to stay free and empowered citizens, even if we are surveilled. Yes, it can be so, despite the inevitability of elites getting to see.  It happens to be the very same trick that got us our current, anomalous levels of safety, privacy and freedom, three things I refuse to give up or “tradeoff” against each other. There is a method. But it takes more work than whining.

== The FBI vs Apple ==

Ah, the ongoing drama. The following riff, written a month ago, is already obsolete... or is it? I'll comment on the latest. But first --

“The FBI says Apple has the ‘exclusive technical means’ to unlock the phone,” Edward Snowden says in this recent interview. “Respectfully, that’s bullshit.” And while I am not a cracking expert (nor do I always agree with Snowden) my own instincts coincide with his on this point - that there is an awful lot of theater in all of this. The FBI is requesting that Apple create custom iOS software that disables the safety features in the iPhone of San Bernardino, California, shooter Syed Rizwan Farook, but Apple CEO Tim Cook has resisted such demands so far.

Apple needs a public image that they will defend their customers, come hell or high water. Also, if they make it easy for the FBI to gain access, then other governments like China will be able to demand the same - (though in fact, Apple is very cooperative with the Chinese government).

At the same time, the public has mixed feelings and Apple will lose sympathy if it seems that some major terror act was made easier by encryption.  

In The Transparent Society I speak of the 'ratchet effect." Civil libertarians who rely on notions of preventing elites from seeing will do fine... until some day when the citizenry is scared by some traumatic event.  At which point all the carefully erected "do not look" protections will topple away. This is why I do not put any faith in "do not look" rules, as any kind of long term safeguard.

Earlier, I offered this wager: "there's a good chance that the current iPhone imbroglio is all one big Potemkin act, a stage show put on to let Apple look tough as a defender of customer rights."

The latest? First, exactly as I predicted, the FBI eventually proclaimed: "Never mind! We managed to crack the iPhone without your help."

Second... A proposed bill in Congress, the “Compliancewith Court Orders Act of 2016,” authored by offices of Senators Diane Feinstein and Richard Burr, would require people to comply with any authorized court order for data—and if that data is “unintelligible,” the legislation would demand that it be rendered “intelligible.” According to Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “It’s effectively the most anti-crypto bill of all anti-crypto bills.” Indeed, recently, some of the world’s top cryptographers warned of the dangers of weakening encryption on behalf of law enforcement… that any backdoor created to give law enforcement access to encrypted communications would inevitably be used by sophisticated hackers and foreign cyberspies. 

To be clear, the bill seems to have no chance of passing, as-is. But next time something bad and panic-worthy happens? Remember the Ratchet Effect?  Again... (and again and again)... if you base your defense of freedom upon public appearances and assurances that elites cannot see, then you are spectacularly delusional.

We are better defended by the other approach, fierce application of supervision powers, allowing us to look back at the elites who are going to look at us, anyway.

== We must look back ==

Windows 10 covertly sends your disk encryption keys to Microsoft: Here's a disturbing article by Cory Doctorow, though I can’t verify: “Windows 10 has many unprecedented anti-user features: a remote kill switch that lets it disable your hardware; key-logging and browser-history logging that, by default, sends it all to Microsoft, and a deceptive "privacy mode" that continues to exfiltrate your data, even when you turn it on.”  

To which I reply… sure it’s disturbing. And you expect elites to behave any differently than this? Ever?  

Doctorow's vague-general "Danger Will Robinson!" cries are typical among the millions who are right to sniff the aroma of looming Big Brother… but utterly wrongheaded to recommend the solution of “let’s hide!”

Dig this and finally dig it well. You will not stop elites from looking, by whining and complaining. You will not stop them by encrypting and tech noodling.  You will not blind elites by passing laws that restrict what they are allowed to see. You will not stop the descendants of monkeys from looking at stuff!  Especially when they are sitting on the highest branch.

What we can do is remain free and left-alone by looking back.  By dropping the sick-stupid and cowardly obsession with hiding… 

...and instead concentrating our efforts on supervision, on sousveillance and looking back at power.  On applying accountability.  On seeing.  

That may not blind them, but it will put severe restraints on what they can do with any info about us.  What they can do to us.

This is what they fear us doing. And it is why they subsidize the current wave of handwringing moans and articles crying out “stop looking at me!”

== Hacking Transparency == 

A cogent run-down on reasons why it is so hard to cope with cyber-attacks, to determine who is responsible, or even be sure that one has happened at all.  

A nightmare scenario, brought into real life... when hackers fooled some Ukrainian civil servants into revealing information that then let the hackers take down part of the Ukrainian power grid.  A scenario right out of the pages of Ted Koppel’s new book, Lights Out: A CyberAttack, a Nation Unprepared; Surviving the Aftermath. 

The Orwellians are out there, preparing.  North Korea’s “Red Star” computer operating system – based on a Linux/Redhat distro – has rigid firewalls, prevents user tinkering, and watermarks all media: “reportedly tags every bit of media it comes into contact with, whether it is on a drive connected to the computer or on the computer itself, including files that aren't even accessed. Once tagged, the media files can then be traced back to whomever has them and, presumably, the source of them.”  

A very interesting article about a speech by an NSA official on the processes involved in hacking into a corporate or national network.  

Hackers invaded a shipping company’s systems to download cargo manifests, allowing Somali pirates to board a vessel, ignore the fortified crew, and use barcode scanners to find valuable cargo to carry off.  

Back in 2012, Youtube added a new feature that allows you to automatically blur all faces in a video. Today, it's going a step further: you can now draw a rectangle around any object in a video and YouTube will then blur it and automatically follow it.  Self-controlled editing gives responsible folks a chance to do the right thing before posting.  

Stay alert. The world needs lerts.

  

Wait for the Ryan Express

It appears that the Republican Party establishment  is coalescing around a White Knight who might save them from multiple, self-inflicted disasters, in 2016. The scenario is a surprising one -- and yet eerily familiar.  But first...

Newly selected House Speaker Paul Ryan is crowing about a spectacular accomplishment… getting his GOP majority to allow debate and then passage of a bipartisan transportation & infrastructure bill.... the first in ten years. As noted in one of my earlier postings, Republicans have strenuously blocked any substantial sums being used on infrastructure repair for one simple reason....

 .....such funds stimulate jobs with high-velocity money, instantly spent by lower middle class workers, as opposed to super-low-velocity cash transfers to aristocracy, in vain hope they'll invest it in productive “supply side” industry. (They don't.) I'll talk more about the Infrastructure Bill, below.  

Also my weird scenario for how Paul Ryan might yet become the Republicans’ 2016 presidential nominee. Sound far-fetched? Preparations are being made, as we speak, due to the Donald Trump Effect. 

"Republican officials and leading figures in the party’s establishment are now preparing for the possibility of a brokered convention as businessman Donald J. Trump continues sit atop the polls and the presidential race. (With almost-equally unacceptable Ted Cruz and Ben Carson picking up most of the rest of support from the GOP base.) More than 20 of (GOP power brokers) convened Monday for a dinner held by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus...the party’s establishment must lay the groundwork for a floor fight, in which the GOP’s mainstream wing could coalesce around an alternative...."

To be clear, Mr. Ryan, who as speaker will also serve as chairman of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this summer, said he would strongly support any Republican nominee. Yet he said "he believed that congressional Republicans must set a policy agenda that offered a clear contrast to the angry insurgent refrain blasting into the winter primaries." 

In other words, seizing the till-now vacant niche in Republican politics, that of being the adult-in-the-room.  So, let's start with Ryan's opening moves.

== Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. ==

Upon taking up the gavel as Speaker, Paul Ryan’s first act was removing a portrait of Dennis Hastert from the Speaker's lobby outside the House floor. Hastert, who served in the same position - second in line to the presidency - from 1999-2007, pleaded guilty in a $3.5 million hush money case last week.  

“Two sources with knowledge of the federal investigation told CNN in June that Hastert was paying a former student to stay quiet about allegations of sexual abuse from when he was a wrestling coach and teacher in Yorkville, Illinois.” The plea bargain means that no details will come out in open trial.

You’re kidding, right?  The same Dennis Hastert who called the Clintons the “most-corrupt” politicians of our lifetime? (When not one Clintonite wound up even indicted for malfeasance of office, the first time after a two term presidency.) The Dennis Hastert who screeched at Bill Clinton’s immorality for consensual-adult, hetero-rubbing in a hallway? Who denounced previous speaker Newt Gingrich for the twin sins of divorce and actually negotiating (shudder) with democrats to pass legislation for the good of the nation? 

The Dennis Hastert whose “Hastert Rule” (punish any republican who works on compromise with a democrat) did more than even Fox News to destroy politics as a problem solving methodology in the U.S.?  Thus wreaking more harm on the republic than anyone since Josef Stalin? In other words, Dennis Hastert the deliberate traitor… and now exposed as perjurer, briber, pervert and hypocrite?

Oh… this could not have happened to a more apropos guy. And making that contrast plain by disowning Hastert from the start proves Ryan's ability to grasp the obvious.

Now let's add another factor Ryan must contend with. On the near horizon is a possible limit on electoral cheating. For example, blue Maryland (with a red governor) seems poised to finally end gerrymandering.  Once a cheat performed equally by both parties’ political castes, the practice is now being dumped by ever-more voters in democratic-leaning states.  Republicans are rubbing their hands because not one red state has followed suit.  But that glee is shortsighted.  Yearly, the foul practice is becoming more and more identified as a republican crime, lined up along with rigged voting machines and voter suppression.

And now it looks as if reddish-turning-purple Virginia may do the same. If democrats win, in 2016, there may be a full-court press against these cheats.  And if cheating goes away, then the GOP's demographic problems, failing popularity and starkly horrific governance Outcomes Metrics could add up to disaster for them.

== Presidential politics: The Paul Ryan Gambit? ==

Okay, so the table is set. On to the main topic. I don’t believe in prediction. But I do think folks should offer wagers!  If you think something has a substantial – say 20% -- chance of happening, then offer 1:4 odds!

Here’s one of mine: There is only one ‘mainstream’ Republican office-holder of stature to whom the secret masters of the GOP can turn, if they want to keep ahold of the reins. That’s Paul Ryan.  The new Speaker of the House has gravitas and is growing a Lincolnesque beard… and in the classic GOP pattern, it’s his “turn” as the most-recent Republican Party vice presidential nominee. (Recall I made this point a year ago.)

Oh, sure, it’s too late for Ryan plausibly to enter the debates and primaries.  But that didn’t stop Ryan from recently delivering a major stump speech that one observer said “amounted to a delayed inaugural address.” 

As columnist E. J. Dionne put it: “the most striking aspect of Ryan’s speech is that for all its emphasis on progressives relying on old ideas (they “are stuck in the past,” he said) and conservatives supposedly being more in tune with changing times, his arguments were rooted in the nostrums Washington Republicans have been offering for decades. The angry Republican working class rallying to Trump to express its disillusionment with the status quo will find little in Ryan’s homily to make it reconsider.”   

Having delivered absolutely nothing for working class whites who make up the core of Trump support, you can bet the Cheneyite-Murdochian-Saudi owners of the party are already lighting candles in hope of a brokered convention.  If Donald Trump can be kept below 40% in the delegate count, then it will be a Sumo Match. Those deal-makers versus the big casino deal-maker, with both blocs sifting for swing delegates, and boy will the bribe offers flow! (Hint to all GOP delegates in Ohio, this summer; take recording devices! You’ll get bigger deals!) 

Oh sure, Trump might still prevail! But never underestimate Dick Cheney in a knife-fight. And the Saudis have lots more bribe money than even Donald could come up with.

== The Great Ryan Hope ==

Okay, let’s go with this. Suppose the SMORPs (Secret Masters of the Republican Party) hold the line. They get the 60% non-Trumps to stand fast and throw the convention into a fifth ballot, when it all shifts to horse-trading. And let’s suppose Ryan is the obvious, go-to compromise nominee, unsullied from the previous year of awful gaffes, mud-slinging and hate toxins spewed by the debate participants. Then what?

If by then the fundie-teaparty wing has coalesced around Ted Cruz, then odds are Cruz would get Ryan’s nod to be the ticket’s running mate. 

That would, after all, be in keeping with the GOP’s other grand tradition – of almost never choosing a VP candidate who is remotely qualified to be president. Almost always they choose an unqualified caricature, to pander to the crazy wing and to make the main nominee look sage, by comparison.  That is, after all, how we got Richard Nixon.  All right, except Romney chose Ryan. That jury is still out.

(Democrats have a different tradition.  Their VP nominees are always extremely well qualified and moderate... and stunningly boring.)

Yes, some are asserting that Ted Cruz's growing punch among fundie-tea-partiers and his big war chest make him a strong contender for the #1 spot. I disagree, offering 1:3 odds that Cruz -- despite the fact that most GOP politicians loathe him intensely -- will be the VP pick of any GOP nominee. Moreover I reckon that has been his goal, all along. In that case - win or lose in November 2016 - he becomes the presumptive heir.

Which leaves the Donald. What will he do,if the SMORPS pull the nomination out from under him?   

Under those conditions, he’d naturally teeter toward an angry, third party run! (Oh, please?) The bluster and anger will be volcanic! 

And yet… my guess is the fix will be in. Under the table. Only to calm down Trump will require - literally - billions.

Again, I give this whole scenario 20%.  Which is huge, given how many dice are in the air, right now.  Less than likely? Sure. But you can bet there are moguls on golf courses discussing exactly this.

== Do you think it actually matters? ==

Dig this well.  Choosing among the whole bestiary, from Rubio and Cruz to Carson and Jeb, any Republican president - except maybe Donald Trump - will enter office accompanied by the entire panoply of Cheney-Bush factotums.  Period.  Their cabinet and sub-cabinet functionaries -- and bill-writing lobbyists -- will be drawn from the same well. Almost all of them either crooked or else compliantly banal, and determined to use the citizen-taxpayers as cattle.

You aren’t voting just for the top guy — (though any Bush is automatically a cadet member of the Saudi Royal House) — you are voting for their whole community. At least 10,000 of them, the same stunningly corrupt and incompetent ‘brain trust’ that sent steeply downward every single unambiguously attributable metric of US national health, across both Bush administrations.

== Oh… about the Infrastructure Bill… ==

… the legislation that Paul Ryan is so proud of?  So why has the GOP-dominated House finally passed an infrastructure bill?  Two reasons.  Delay any longer and bridges will start collapsing, and people will know whom to blame.  Also, they now realize it is too late to sabotage the economy anymore.  They managed to slow recovery for 7 years, hoping to pin it on Obama.  Now the rate of improvement is so high they might as well give up and turn to other tactics.

But don’t worry, they are still true to form, as when the GOP passed Medicare Part D, the only entitlement without provision how to pay for it. On this occasion, rather than raise the 22 year old gas tax — which has always paid for roads — they “funded” the transportation bill by raiding Peter to pay Paul:

“Transportation traditionally has been funded by the federal gas excise tax, on the sound reasoning that people who drive on highways should help build and maintain them. Yet this tax, stuck at 18.4 ­cents per gallon since 1993, no longer raises sufficient revenue. And for political reasons the House leadership ruled out an increase — blocking Democrats from even bringing the issue to a vote on the new, more open House floor. Instead, the six-year bill cobbles together financing from expedients: one-time strategic petroleum sales; ostensibly improved tax compliance; and, most dubiously, a raid on the Federal Reserve’s capital.”

Selling our petroleum reserve? When oil prices are low? Say what? 

That is the diametric opposite of how governments are supposed to behave.  Ask any Pharaoh or Caesar.  They knew — you stockpile the warehouses when grain or other resources are cheap — both building a reserve and boosting producer prices when farmers etc are in pain.  Then you sell when prices are high, both lessening scarcity and re filling the Treasury to do it over again. But for twenty years, the GOP has made a concerted effort to do the diametric opposite, selling not only from the petroleum reserve precisely at market-bottom, but nearly all of our strategic reserve of helium and other resources in sweetheart deals, at dirt-cheap prices.  

The helium thing was so egregious that people should have gone to prison.

Next Technologies!

To conclude my recent spate of science and technology roundups, I'll do one a final sweep of S&T news...

Let's start with a fascinating rumination on future Infrastructure… major projects -- such as Tube Transportation networks and atmospheric water harvesters -- that might consume (and be well-worth) hundreds of billions of dollars of investment, and returning far, far more in benefits. Take a look at this article 2050 and the Future of Infrastructure by futurist Thomas Frey...though he left out half a dozen that I mention in EARTH, alone!  

An article - The Trouble with High-Speed Trains - covers the challenges facing high-velocity maglevs -- as well as Elon Musk's Hyperloop.

Looking ahead: Five “next” technologies. For example: DARPA researchers have fabricated a prototype with three gyroscopes, three accelerometers and a highly accurate master clock on a chip that fits easily on the face of a penny.

Now, a new catalytic system for converting carbon dioxide (CO2) to methanol — a key commodity used to create a wide range of industrial chemicals and fuels. You still need a source of hydrogen, so energy must be put in, upstream, by splitting water… another area of developing research. Along those same lines, researchers at Brown University use copper foam to turn CO2 into useful chemicals -- including chemicals currently made from fossil fuels.

A new transparent sheet can harvest solar energy -- mounted on windows -- without blocking the view.

Researchers at NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, and Pennsylvania State University have developed a 3D printing process that transitions from one metal or alloy to another in a single object.

Now here is a cool innovation… literally! A doorless refrigerator that saves energy and reduces food spoilage.

== Ah… more singularity stuff ==

An excellent background article on Programmable Matter, this piece nevertheless commits the typical flaw of ignoring the role that excellent hard science fiction has played in enhancing, exploring and drawing attention to a potentially groundbreaking field.

In this case, I highly recommend the works of my colleague Wil McCarthy, such as Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages and the Infinite Weightlessness of Programmable Atoms.

Google Glass hack allows brain wave control. An EEG headset can be used to measure when certain parts of the brain show a greater level of activity. Within Google Glass's "screen" - a small window that appears in the corner of the wearer's right eye - a white horizontal line is shown. As a user concentrates, the white line rises up the screen. Once it reaches the top, a picture is taken using Glass's inbuilt camera. So much for the claim that people will always be warned by: "OK Glass, take a picture" - or by seeing the user tapping and swiping on the side of the device. But seriously, you expected that to last? This is the future.

Can we create Dyson spheres?

A tech forecast of mine from 20 years ago is coming true today at MIT… a needle table that responds to the user’s motions and emulates him/her in moving objects around.  We aren’t yet at the exercise floor I portrayed in my short story, “NatuLife.” But clearly it is coming.

Smart roofs to help NYC Cops fight crime, via ShotSpotter sensors. Now keep the cops professional by watching them.

Microsoft Research introduced “Project Adam” AI machine-learning object recognition software at its 2014 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit. The goal of Project Adam is to enable software to visually recognize any object .

A California startup is developing flexible, rechargeable batteries that can be printed cheaply on commonly used industrial screen printers.

== Programming and SciFi ==

Regarding a longstanding complaint over a lack of reliable-easy access to entry-level (and universal) programming languages… from my famous “Why Can't Johnny Code?” essay… the makers of Scratch have now come up with Scratch Jr, aiming it squarely at kids in the 5-7 year old range. Interesting.

And finally… here are Ten Sci Fi Novels that will make you more passionate about science! Glad to be included -- with my novel, The Practice Effect.

Pessimists are fools.