Davos Newbies

I know it’s wrong to generalize from the computer-savvy world of the East Bay, but my children’s soccer league provides RSS feeds. I can now keep up with the Relampagos and Avatars schedules from the comfort of my aggregator. The only hitch is it doesn’t provide full feeds.

Martin Varsavsky: “If present trends continue computing and computing use and interconnection will soon make up 20% of all our electricity needs up from a current 7%. The person who brought this to my attention was Larry Page. During a session at CGI I asked Larry what he thought were Google’s limit to growth. His surprising reply was: electricity. Google he explained to me is by now the world’s largest owner of computers and therefore the internet’s biggest electricity user. This Larry said was of great concern to him and he was looking of ways to make Google carbon neutral.”

I didn’t think I’d ever write the title above. Even when it was just Time Life – before Time Warner, before AOL Time Warner, before the reincarnation as Time Warner – I always viewed the company as the General Motors of media: big, of course, but boring and not innovative.

But Rebecca MacKinnon reports that there is at least one wise head at the top of the corporation. She quotes a Bloomberg report that CEO Richard Parsons decided to pull AOL out of a business opportunity in China becase he didn’t want the company involved in Internet censorship.

From the Bloomberg item:

The “straw that broke the camel’s back” was the government’s insistence that it had the right to monitor all traffic on the service, Richard Parsons, chief executive of Time Warner Inc., said at the media forum.

“You’re given lists of words that you have to block through your service, like democracy,” he said. “We bailed out.”

Time Warner thought about “what we would look like here in the U.S. if we agreed to a governmentally imposed regime where words like democracy had to be blocked,” Parsons said. “We made a judgment that it wasn’t a market that we wanted to enter in this way at this time.”

As MacKinnon writes, “Companies do have a choice.”

Barry Ritholtz:

My personal theory for a lot of what has gone wrong over the past few years is that ideology (i.e., Neo-Con) and faith-based belief systems (insert your choice here) have replaced elbow grease, deep thought, and long term strategizing as the methodology of implementing policy.

Its apparent in the anti-intellectual bend of much of the White House. Is it a surprise that pseudo-science is challenging Science? Not if you have been paying any attention.

The bottom line is that this distasteful, difficult stuff — planning, strategizing, executing — matters. It matters to the nation, its population and ultimately, to their safety from all manners of ordinary, natural and extra-ordinary man-made disasters.

This is one of the few times I get to admonish the public and exhort members of both political parties with words such as these:

Figure it out — or die.