Three Irishmen, Paddy, Sean and Seamus, were stumbling home from the pub late one night and found themselves on the road which led past the old graveyard.
"Come have a look over here," says Paddy, "It's Michael O'Grady's grave, God bless his soul. He lived to the ripe old age of 87."
"That's nothing", says Sean, "here's one named Patrick O'Toole, it says here that he was 95 when he died."
Just then, Seamus yells out, "Good God, here's a fella that got to be 145!"
"What was his name?" asks Paddy.
Seamus stumbles around a bit, awkwardly lights a match to see what else is written on the stone marker, and exclaims, "Miles, from Dublin."

Apparently there is a huge, no tremendous discovery in the domain of solar cell happening. SiOnyx is reportedly working on a ground breaking technology serendipitiously found by Harvard scientist Dr Mazur in late nineties. Apparently this black silicon (black, as in absorb all light) could absorb the visible light and the infrared and release much more energy when striked by a photon. Reportedly it would be 100 to 500 times more efficient than current solar cells.

More here:

http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2007/10/29/story10-Investor-millions-to-turn-black-to-light.html

http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2008/10/12/sionyx-brings-black-silicon-into-the-light-material-could-upend-solar-imaging-industries/

Sample story from Not Always Right.

Personally I am a firm believer of electric car. Some people are more hydrogen believer. But really it all boils down to how much energy you can store. Both hydrogen and electricity storage were a big issue. But a few years ago there was a few big breakthrough in electricity storage / Li ion battery and since then talk of electric car have mushroomed. Now I just read about a huge breakthrough in hydrogen storage!

Who knows what the future will hold?

Anyway here is the link to the blog which talk about that (another of those blog to blog link ), and the content has been inline below as well.

On my preceding blog post (here) I have a few links to Paul Grignon’s video about the banking system (here, here and ici).

OK I’m not on economist and didn’t read much on the topic, but I did ask a few friends around and read some tidbits here and there and I have the feeling that these videos, while accurate, only show one side of the story. There are other thing to consider and I will share below a quick summary of my thoughts on the topic.

1. Paul Grignon is right, Money is ultimately created out of nothing (and this is a good thing), but I think it could be that in the modern system it is not the private bank who are allowed to do that, but the central banks. The private bank should borrow from the central bank. My Dad often complain that the European Central Bank is a private organism, I don’t know if this is true, but I will indeed find it vexing if such was the case.
2. In these videos you see the bankers asking for an interest, which slowly takes money out of the economy in their pocket if it was not for growing productivity and debt (other lending). This forget a few important things.
3. An important forgotten thing is that the value of money is fluctuating, you’ve got inflation / deflation. If the banks gets enormously rich and everyone poor, all price will gets down that is deflation. Which will make the banker more enormously rich and everyone as before (granted through some painful transition).
4. Also, because of inflation / deflation happen as the number of goods increase (or decrease), the money available needs to increase as the productivity increase. Ideally the amount of money should be such that there is no inflation / deflation (less trouble for everyone). The banking system answer this problem. The central banks set “the interest rate”, the interest that other banks should pay on the money they have borrowed and lent. This will impact on the lending system which, quite indirectly, will impact on how much new money will be created (or destroyed). Indeed the main role of the central banks is to insure there is no inflation or deflation, i.e. that the average value of money remain constant.
5. Also this video shows that the lender (the ultimate lenders being the central banks) will get all the money back in the end if the productivity and debt stop increasing. That forgot the fact that the modern central bank are not for profit public organization (I mean so they should be, my Dad say that it is not true for the European central bank, I don’t know), they are infrastructure whose main role is to insure constant value of money. To this end they could even do something you would not expect: use a negative interest rate, i.e. you have to pay back less that you borrowed! Indeed The Japanese Central Bank did just that in some past crisis.

My dad is very fond of conspiracy theory and the likes. Today he sent me a link which is, unsurprisingly, (slightly) tainted with such revolutionary views.

However it also brings some valid information on a seldom talked about, yet important topic. That is: Money and how it is created.

From what I gathered with past discussion on the topic, all of this is quite valid. Maybe it’s even a “conspiracy”, I guess it all hinges on what is a “conspiracy”. Nothing is secret in this document, it’s just not as talked about as it strongly deserve!

So… enough talking here are the links:

Money as Debt, by Paul Grignon

A short text summary of the video
The video in English, on Google
La vidéo en Français

To add some personal view, while I don’t feel inspired to participate in a great national upheaval just yet (maybe I’m too apathic?) I do agree that things can’t go on like that forever. Although I think they might still go (smoothly) like that for a fair while.

And I also do wonder, why is it that banks are private? I mean if banks are public they might be less “agile” as we like to criticize the governments, yet they would be more amenable to public will if (when?) we would go through this “monetary reform”.

The optimist in me like to think that this monetary reform which might be needed in some distant future if we want to see our quality or life improving further won’t be necessary for at least a 100 years. By then I think it possible that banks will slowly (and without blood!) become nationalized. I hold this belief that life has never been so good and that it is only the start. We ain’t see nothing yet, as they say!

BTW, I added some comments on that in this later blog post here.

On another topic,

The Millennium Development Goals

You probably heard about Bill Gates, now full time philanthropist he hold this talk in the UN about he Millennium Development Goals.
http://beta.gatesfoundation.org/speeches-commentary/Pages/bill-gates-united-nations-2008.aspx

Hey, I never heard about those before!
From quick Googling they seems to be: “End Hunger”, “Universal Education”, “Gender Equity”, “Child Health”, “Maternal Health”, “Combat … diseases…”, Environmental Sustainability”, and “Global Partnership”.

Well good luck with that, you got all my wholehearted support!