Oct 31 Halloween October 31, 2008
Posted by frewon9 in General notes.add a comment
Halloween time wile I was searching my website’s stats and unexpectedly discovered some thing strange , suprisingly we just made a roadkill. this site unexpectedly sucks the bandwidth out of this site.
victim’s website
and believe to because by failopages
i’ve just created a little monster
Market Failure October 30, 2008
Posted by frewon9 in News.Tags: fail, market
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A voice overhead in the Washington, D.C., metro system warns “customers” not to try to hold open the doors of a subway car as they are closing. The announcement is made every stop or two. You hear it at least a couple of times during each trip. Yet I am always taken aback. A spirit of usage crankiness kicks in — my inner Edwin Newman — to insist on the difference between being a passenger and a customer. The words aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but why not use the one that applies to the concrete, particular circumstance of being in the mass transit system?
Not that complaining would do any good. The language will get mangled, irregardless. Besides, this is a case of usage reflecting an established, nearly ubiquitous attitude. Everything is a market, and everyone is now (in all ways and at all times) a consumer. Someone who pays taxes for public transportation is not so much a citizen as a customer, in exactly the same sense as folks in line at McDonald’s. Likewise with the student in a university classroom — who, having paid good money, expects both a passing grade and a certain level of entertainment, and may not be shy about expressing these demands.
Perhaps it’s a cultural residue of the past few decades of “market utopianism,” to borrow an expression used by Lawrence D. Brown and Lawrence R. Jacobs in The Private Abuse of the Public Interest: Market Myths and Policy Muddles, just published by the University of Chicago Press. The authors are serious wonks (Brown is professor of health care policy and management at Columbia University, while Jacobs directs the Center for the Study of Politics and Government at the University of Minnesota) rather than testy guys muttering about the Zeitgeist while riding the subway. But their book, which is compact and jargon-free, is intended for ordinary readers trying to understand the limitations of free-market fundamentalism – including its clear tendency to backfire.
The book’s timing is remarkable. At this point, not even Business Week is completely faithful to the doctrine that “markets are smart, government is dumb,” as former Republican House Majority Leader and onetime econ prof Richard Armey once put it. A recent cover of the magazine announced: “Washington’s new role in banking is just the beginning of the ‘public-private’ world to come.” The phrase “public-private” is printed in red, which one might interpret in a couple of ways — either as a sign of creeping socialism, or because the global economy is swimming in that color of ink.
Dogmatic advocates of “the magic of market forces” suffer, according to Brown and Jacobs, from not having understood Adam Smith very well. “Far from offering an unqualified celebration of unrestrained self-aggrandizement,” they write, “Smith struggled to balance individual self-interest against the social need for institutions that harnessed self-regard to the service of society.” The discipline of the market is not enough to achieve that balance. The state must provide certain public goods. Market forces alone aren’t sufficient to meet the common need for national defense, rule of law, public education, and the maintenance of infrastructure for transportation.
Such services are “for the benefit of the whole society,” according to Adam Smith, and must be “defrayed by the general contribution of the whole society.” Which means taxes. (It seems a matter of time before Sarah Palin releases an attack ad regarding all the crypto-Marxism in The Wealth of Nations.)
Brown and Jacobs laud what they call Smith’s “pragmatic realism,” including his recognition of the need for state regulation of banking. But somewhere along the way, Smith’s notion of a balance between the play of private interest and the role of the state was turned into a zero-sum game — a fervent antistatism, for which market competition was the ideal prescription for what ails us. For just about all our problems — according to the “marketist” doctrine, anyway — come from government programs or regulations.
Minimizing the role of the state clears the way for such market-induced virtues as “responsiveness to consumer preferences, competitive equilibration of supply and demand, and so on.” Plus smaller government means lower taxes — which, in turn, reinforces smaller government.
It all sounds so perfect. And no one can say it has not been attempted. “States that attempted to unleash the magic of competition ended up costing consumers $292 billion in higher electricity prices between 2000 and 2007,” note Brown and Jacobs, including “$48 billion more than consumers paid in states that maintained traditional rate regulation from May 2006 and May 2007.” Bush-era initiatives for “managed competition” in education and health care had the perverse effect of increasing federal power over local school systems while adding “burgeoning regulatory clarifications and correctives as far as the eye can see” to Medicare.
Deregulation of the airlines reduced the price, and increased the convenience, of travel — at least for a while. But now overbooking of planes, constant rescheduling, and the congestion of routes during peak hours point to the limits of competition.
Meanwhile, pro-market rhetoric never reduces the appetite for pork. “The growth of government is not mainly the work of profligate ‘tax and spend’ Democrats,” the authors point out. “Solidly among the spenders and promoters of government activism were the antistatists who controlled Washington in the early twenty-first century and, indeed, dominated policy debates and held the levers of power in Congress and the White House for three decades.”
The issue here is not philosophical inconsistency. The problem, as Brown and Jacobs understand it, is built into the tendency to frame the relationship between state and market forces as “either/or” instead of “both/and.” They trace a recurrent cycle in public policy over recent decades in which reforms are enacted to increase the role for markets and decrease government regulation. Then follow unintended consequences (higher prices, threats to public safety, breakdown of institutions) — leading to calls for renewed regulation by state agencies.
But the public sector often proves overextended and underfunded. “All too often government disappoints expectations,” write Brown and Jacobs, “which fuels the rhetorical attacks of the state bashers and deepens the democratic disconnect.”
It leads to a situation the authors call “management by objection” in which “headlines scream, heads roll, band-aids adhere, and the cycle resumes….” Public policy consists of damage control. And that is always too little, too late. Thus it is that “the era’s reigning non sequitur —– if government is so bad, markets must be better — begins to look axiomatic.”
“Pragmatic” appears to be the authors’ favorite word, with “realist” being a close second. “When politics is premised on a principled denial of the obvious,” they write, “government grows without vision, purpose, or a due concern for its capacities to serve the public.” The result is inefficiency and incoherence — at best.
The panacea of deregulation leaves “political leaders and civil servants in obscure agencies scrambling to forestall market failures, repair the breakdown of services that the public expects, and respond to the complaints of concerned constituents,” according to Brown and Jacobs — who presumably wrote this well before things started getting really bad. “Institutional realism should be introduced earlier and more prominently in discussions of policy reform.”
Well, okay — that all seems fair enough, given the spirit of managerial centrism that pervades this book. But just where is the “institutional realism” supposed to come from?
The authors note that “the development of specialized, well-trained managers and officials equipped with thoughtfully articulated operating procedures and advanced information technologies” has lagged. Meanwhile, when things go wrong, “the public wants government to respond fast and well as is outraged if it dithers.” It does not sound like a promising alignment of circumstances.
The Private Abuse of the Public Interest closes with an expression of hope that recent events may “clear a new space for pragmatism in public policy.” So they might. But things will probably get worse before they get better.
Finding Joy in God through Suffering October 26, 2008
Posted by frewon9 in Inspirational.Tags: fail, failure, joy, Suffering
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Lessons from the Bible
As I read the Bible, especially Psalms and Job, I find people who are very real with God about their emotions. I feel that many people today who go through rough times, feel a certain guilt about it, perhaps because they don’t feel the joy they think they should have, or perhaps because Christians simply shouldn’t go through these kinds of difficulties. But I find that no one in the Bible ever experiences this kind of guilt. If they are happy they express happiness, if they are sad they express sadness, if they are angry they express anger, if they are depressed they express depression.
If we read Philippians, we get a sense that Paul has found some source of irrepressible joy. We know that we should have this joy, but how do we find it?
My approach, from Ecclesiastes 7:3, that sorrow is better than laughter because a sad face leads to a happy heart, is not theory. This is my personal experience. Not only for myself, but when I meet a person who is experiencing great, ongoing hardship, and share with them from Job 14:18-19
But as a mountain erodes and crumbles
and as a rock is moved from its place,
as water wears away stones
and torrents wash away the soil,
so you [God] destroy man’s hope.
that far from pushing these people further into despair, that actually these words bring great freedom and release. As if to say – yes, there is someone else who knows what I am experiencing. There is someone else, even a righteous man, who knows the deep despair and hopelessness that fills my heart.
There is yet more hope in Job. While he is in this place of great pain, he has three comforters who speak to him about how he should handle his problems. Their advice sounds so correct, just like all the good sounding advice that our own friends are giving us. But in the end we discover that God is mighty displeased with these comforters.
We all know the beginning of the book of Job, and we all know the end. In particular, we see that after meeting with God, that Job confesses that his words were unwise, and he covers his mouth. So does this mean that we don’t need to read the forty chapters in between? And if it does, why did the Holy Spirit bother to write it for posterity?
Before Paul was saved, he knew the Old Testament back to front, inside and outside. I speculate that he must have found a great deal of it mysterious. For example, what was he to make of the totally depressing Psalm 44? Then he had his amazing experience of truly meeting with God, and as the years followed, so much of the Old Testament must have fallen into place. He quotes this psalm in Romans 8:35-37
35. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?
36. As it is written: For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.
37. No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
We all know verses 35 and 37. But how does verse 36 fit in? Are we more than conquerors because we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered? Is it possible that his “facing death all day long” is part of what caused his overwhelming joy that is expressed in Philippians?
What I can say is that I have found a deep meaning in Job’s suffering. It all fits together, what Paul says about joy in suffering, and the deep anguish expressed by Job. I cannot understand one without the other.
Short Circuiting Grief and Anger
At the end of the book, we see Job repenting of his words. There are similar sentiments in Psalm 73. At its beginning, we see a David who is very frustrated because he sees so much wickedness in the world, and the wicked seem to just get away with it (see also Job 21). David says, “Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure and washed my hands in innocence,” (see also Job 35:3). David presents his case to God, and suddenly sees the answers – “when my heart was embittered and I was pierced within, then I was senseless and ignorant; I was like a beast before You.”
What do we make of David’s and Job’s response? Should we refrain from speaking to God about the pain and suffering we experience, because then we will only later be covering our mouth with shame, and realizing that we were acting like a brute animal? Should we consider Job’s and David’s responses as lessons in what not to do?
When we experience grief, anger, unforgiveness, depression, or other negative emotions, we want these emotions to end, right now. When we teach about how to react to pain and anguish, we give the impression that to wallow in them is wrong. This sense of hurry (or possibly guilt laid upon us by our well meaning friends) leads us to try to short circuit the whole process, start at Job 1, and go straight to Job 42.
So we might come to church, feeling like Job, or feeling like David in one of his worse days, and when we get there we sing songs like “I feel so full of joy that I just cannot help dancing, even though I know its silly.” Its great if you really feel like this, but I don’t think that Job himself would have got a lot out of that worship song. Indeed our worship songs come from the Psalms, but somehow we seem to miss part of them out? What songs are based upon Psalm 137, or upon Psalm 139:19-22, or upon the middle forty chapters of Job? It is as if we ignore the words of Paul in 2 Timothy 3:16 “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.” Do we only select those scriptures that we understand, make us feel comfortable or fit in with our theological preconceptions?
How then should we deal with grief and anger?
The joy Paul has at the end of his life, that is expressed in Philippians, is not joy he found because he sought joy. It is joy that he found because he sought God. So it is with Job – when he experiences great pain in his life, he might question God’s wisdom and integrity, and ask the question “why,” but he never abandons God. Similarly with David – he might feel depressed, angry, lacking forgiveness, or other negative emotions, but he knows to whom to take his complaints.
We say that Paul’s emotions do not depend upon his circumstances. But that is not true. Certainly his emotions do not depend upon the outward circumstances. But he cannot find true joy unless God himself actually turns up and comforts him. He is not engaged in some kind of self help mind exercise. If God had not met Job at the end, Job would have remained depressed and sad. I doubt that even the words of the “fourth comforter,” Elihu, could have brought him comfort, true as they were. In Philippians, Paul is full of joy, not because he had convinced himself that his sufferings are for some good cause, but rather because God himself had told Paul these truths.
In Philippians 4:6-7 Paul says, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” This I can tell you – if you do truly present all your requests to God, then this peace really does come, and this peace is genuinely beyond comprehension. This peace cannot be gained by any intellectual speculation, or by working it up within yourself – this incomprehensible peace can only come from God himself.
In the end, I believe that God allowed Satan to torture Job, not because he wished to test Job, nor as some kind of punishment. Ultimately, it was because he loved Job. He showed his love to Job by bringing him great sufferings, because God knew that this was the best and most beautiful way to find real truth and joy. Paul also knew this lesson. Perhaps he received it in part from the book of Job, or perhaps from Lamentations (not just Lamentations 3:22ff, but also the rest of it, which we moderns don’t like to read), and certainly he knew this from experience.
If we are going through a season of joy, enjoy it and thank God for it. But if we are going through a season of suffering, thank God for these days as well. For these difficulties will, in time, yield great fruit. But do not deny the pain and anguish, rather experience it to its fullness, and bring it to God. For in Psalm 126:5 we are promised that “Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.”
Background
I have always had a tendency towards depression since my early childhood. Not only did I have a melancholy disposition, and given to thinking about everything a lot (what some people call “over analyzing”), I was also drawn to sad stories and sad music. Any activity that expressed exuberant joy felt to me like vinegar on an open wound – very painful.
When I was saved , I joined a charismatic church which, more or less, held that to be not super full of joy was sinful. I took on this teaching, and so when two years later I came to Christian Fellowship in Columbia, I was surprised and shocked by Joe Tosini’s preaching from the beatitudes – blessed are the poor in spirit – blessed are those who mourn. But to my great surprise, I found his lessons actually freed me. Much of my joy up until then was not true joy, but actually a feeble attempt to con myself.
At this time, the general theme of much of the preaching was of the importance of suffering, and finding God through difficult circumstances. I felt that I was not suffering at all, and wondered if this meant that I would be denied this wisdom. But when I prayed about it, I felt God tell me that my time of suffering was not yet to be. But God loved me so much, that he would not deny me this experience, yet when I did experience it, it would be a much more gentle experience than I was anticipating.
Well a few years later, suffering did indeed start to come my way. My wife showed signs of schizophrenia, I broke my neck in an accident, my daughter displayed symptoms of autism, and there was bad politics at work. Thus I decided to seek God through the book of Job.
My sense of God’s love for me is so much greater and fresher than it was before. Having experienced some of the more difficult times, I now know that God is for me, no matter what the external circumstances reveal. He is always ready and pleased to hear my heart’s innermost desires, both the praises and the complaints. In turn, God is pleased when I seek him with my whole heart, and when I desire to know what he is really like. God has truly become my friend and my father.
UK wind farm plans on brink of failure October 24, 2008
Posted by frewon9 in News.Tags: fail, failure, farm, plans, project, uk, wind
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A maintenance boat works next to the turbines of the new Burbo Bank off shore wind farm in the mouth of the River Mersey. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Last week Britain committed itself to cutting greenhouse gases by 80 per cent. This week Gordon Brown will claim the UK is now a world leader in wind power. An Observer investigation reveals his hopes could be blown wildly off course. No country has tried to switch so fast to renewable energy – but rising costs and technical problems mean that, without urgent action and cash, the targets cannot be met. John Vidal reports
A major threat to Britain’s ambitions for renewable energy will emerge this week when wind industry leaders admit that targets set for 2020 are looking increasingly unrealistic.
They will use a high-profile conference in London to warn Gordon Brown that there is little chance of achieving the government’s goal – of wind generating one third of all UK electricity within 12 years – without a huge injection of public money.
It comes as an Observer investigation reveals that planning delays, long delivery times, escalating costs, 10-year hold-ups in connection to the national grid and technical problems in building offshore windfarms all threaten to derail Brown’s ambitions. The result could be electricity shortages by 2020, failure to meet climate change and energy targets and possible hefty fines from Europe.
The developments will come as a blow to the government. Last week Ed Miliband, the new minister for climate change, said Britain would increase its target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 from 60 to 80 per cent.
Brown will tell delegates at the annual conference of the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) this week that the UK industry is now a world leader. But others will claim that there is a severe shortage of engineers and companies are reviewing their commitments to wind energy because of spiralling costs. Britain is legally committed to generating 15 per cent of all energy from renewables by 2020. This means that wind power, which presently contributes about 4 per cent of UK electricity, must expand to generate 36 per cent within 12 years.
No country has tried to switch its electricity supply so quickly on this scale, and to achieve it the industry will need to build nearly 15,000 turbines, generating 35 gigawatts (GW) of electricity, on land and at sea. Many experts say it is technically feasible to meet the targets, but there is a growing conviction that the plans were rushed through so quickly by the government that it will now take substantial new money and guarantees to work.
It is a very different story elsewhere. This week, in a vast warehouse in Berlin, blades for the world’s largest wind turbine are being handcrafted by teams of people and robots. Each is 20 metres longer than the wing of the world’s largest aeroplane, and when perched on top of 140-metre concrete towers in Belgium next year their tips will soar nearly 250 metres above the ground – higher than any building in Britain.
Ten years ago most wind turbines in Europe could barely power 200 homes, but technological advances have been so great that this single seven megawatt (MW) machine, known as the Enercon E-126, should provide nearly 20 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year – enough to power a town the size of Penzance.
There are others even bigger being planned in the US, but independent analysts say there is little chance that one of these turbines will be installed in Britain for many years. Many are deeply sceptical, saying that the government should not have put so much faith in wind power without making it easier for the industry to operate.
‘The numbers do not add up,’ said energy analyst Professor Ian Fells of Newcastle University. ‘It is physically impossible for the industry to meet its target. The most that any country has ever built offshore is 350MW in a year. But they need to install nearly 10 times that in 12 years, and most will be far offshore. It means they will have to install hundreds a week. They cannot do it.’
Even Maria McCaffery, chief executive at the BWEA, has admitted for the first time that the industry might not reach the ambitious targets. ‘It’s tough, but just about achievable,’ she said. ‘But how close we can get to the target depends on what happens in the next few years. It’s not guaranteed, but it’s too soon to be defeatist.’
Paul Cowling, head of Npower Renewables, one of the two largest wind companies in Britain, with 4.5GW of wind power planned but not yet approved, said: ‘With the right commitments from government, it’s just about do-able. But we have never had targets like this before. Everything must be joined up and a lot can go wrong.’
A senior executive in a power company, who asked not to be named, added: ‘There is absolutely no room for manoeuvre. The old nuclear power stations will be out of service, the new ones will not be on stream and big renewable projects like the proposed Severn barrage have not even been agreed, let alone built. Wind is the main plank of the government’s energy policy over the next 12 years, but if anything at all goes wrong anywhere, then the targets will be missed and we are all in trouble.’
New studies warn of looming financial and supply problems. Last week the Carbon Trust, a government agency, warned that the steep rise in the price of building offshore farms could undermine the whole project. ‘Currently the risk/return balance for offshore wind is not sufficiently attractive, and regulatory barriers would delay delivery well beyond 2020,’ it said.
Tom Delay, the Trust’s chief executive, added: ‘Industry costs have become very, very expensive, and both government and companies need to work hard to tackle this. Without urgent action, there is a risk that little additional offshore wind power will be built by 2020.’
Cambridge Energy Research Associates says that Britain should expect a 20 per cent increase in offshore wind capital costs over the next few years on top of the 50 per cent increase in the past three years.
In August, energy consultancy Sinclair Knight Merz reported that most existing wind turbine manufacturers were booked solid for the next five years. ‘The cost of offshore projects has doubled in five years,’ it said.
That is not to mention the powerful opposition on the ground. Yesterday countryside protection groups warned that resistance to wind farms would be fierce and that planning delays, public inquiries and protests were inevitable. There are likely to be outcries in Cornwall, Wales, Yorkshire and Scotland when the scale of some of the farms is seen and it is understood that they will need hundreds of miles of 60-metre pylons to criss-cross some of Britain’s most beautiful landscape.
Dr Frank Mastiaux, chief executive of the climate and renewables division of German electricity supplier E.ON, which is now building a 180MW offshore farm at Robin Rigg in the Solway Firth, said the UK targets were ‘extremely challenging’. He added: ‘Future wind farms will need to have thousands of turbines, each so big it would be like a football field turning on top of a steel mountain.’
One major problem is planning laws, which have been holding up dozens of projects for years.
Stephen Tinsdale, head of communications at Npower renewables, said: ‘It can cost up to £200,000 just to put an application in, and you can expect it to take three to four years to go through planning. Two-thirds of all applications are refused. On top of that, there are conditions from the Ministry of Defence over radar and conditions by local authorities on when we can and cannot erect them. England has very few places left where you can build large farms. There are potential delays at almost every stage.’
New laws should make planning speedier for the industry, but the Infrastructure Planning Commission, which will handle applications for all large farms and should be set up next year, has not been tested yet either in practice or in the courts.
Another problem facing companies is getting connection to the National Grid. Some companies in Scotland have been told to join a 13-year queue and are being asked for deposits of millions of pounds before the grid will agree to connect them. Currently, 115 Scottish renewable schemes, totalling 9GW of mostly wind power, are waiting to plug into the grid before they can supply electricity. Some already have planning permission but have to wait many years to connect.
‘It is plausible to meet the target, but it is very deeply challenging,’ said a spokeswoman for National Grid. ‘We have signed agreements to connect 16GW of renewable generation throughout Great Britain, but over 75 per cent of this total is stuck in the planning system.
‘Urgent reform to the UK’s planning laws and energy regulation are needed. We’re fully aware that some dates are later than some people would like. We will try to work with developers to bring the dates forward wherever possible.’
But in an unpublished paper submitted to the government, National Grid says that, while it is possible to connect new offshore farms in time, the onshore target of 14GW of wind is ‘not credible’. ‘This is an area where we are not optimistic. We believe that only 12.9GW is credible,’ says the paper.
The real prize for governments looking for major increases in wind capacity is a series of giant 5-6GW farms with hundreds of the biggest turbines 10 to 20 miles offshore. The first are being planned to be built after 2014 in the Bristol Channel, the Wash and off Wales and Yorkshire. But wind companies are having increasing doubts about their financial viability. While they are technically feasible, they are already more than twice the cost of onshore farms and the price is spiralling upwards.
Signals that UK offshore farms may not be profitable came in June when Shell pulled out of the consortium planning to build Britain’s biggest offshore farm, the London Array in the Thames Estuary, in favour of developing more profitable wind projects elsewhere. Then last week the government of Abu Dhabi stepped in to help the project after Royal Dutch Shell withdrew.
Other developers are questioning whether they can justify the investment needed in Britain. Shell and BP are competing in the US to build the world’s largest wind farms. ‘Many are now recosting their plans and are attracted by other countries who are tempting them with tax breaks and a freedom to build what they want practically anywhere,’ said one analyst.
Npower’s Cowling said: ‘We are going to need different boats, a whole fleet of vessels, offshore cable installers, helicopters. We are already getting close to our hurdle rates. If things get worse, it makes it a marginal decision whether we invest in them or not. It’s all very risky. Because the UK is a difficult place to do business, the utility companies will just go elsewhere. We are not threatening to go, but if a utility finds a project which it can build quickly, it will go there. We are committed to the UK, but it is difficult.
‘Until you get absolute consent from government, people will dither and it will take longer to install farms. Industry costs have become very, very expensive, and both government and companies need to work hard to tackle this.’
Potentially more serious is growing competition from other countries both for turbines and other machinery, as well as engineers. The market for wind is very strong, with more than £40bn invested worldwide last year, demand for turbines going through the roof as countries rush to meet climate change targets, and the very few manufacturers producing turbines now looking only for large orders. Emerging Energy Research, a leading research and advisory firm analysing clean energy markets, expects the international wind power industry to increase 500 per cent over 12 years.
Vestas, the world’s biggest turbine maker, now has a £6bn order book and its turbine prices have risen 74 per cent in the past three years. China plans 100GW of wind power by 2020, a ten-fold increase from today. Texas alone plans more wind power than is expected to be installed in Britain in the next 20 years. The net result is that prices are escalating and orders for equipment taking longer and longer.
‘Everyone wants wind power. If you ordered today you could possibly get a turbine in 2011. But you would have to be a serious order,’ said an Enercon spokesman. ‘It is a very good time for wind.’
Targets
2008 Wind to generate 3GW of electricity – enough to
power several million homes
2010 Renewables to generate 10 per cent of all UK
electricity, of which wind is expected to constitute 60 per
cent. Wind to generate 36 per cent of UK electricity by 2020
2020 20 per cent of all EU energy to be produced from
renewables
2050 UK to reduce carbon emissions by 80 per cent
December 21 2012 Preparation for Ultament Epic Fail October 22, 2008
Posted by frewon9 in Fail stuff.Tags: 2012, 21, December, end, epic, fail, for, Preparation, Ultament, world
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December 21 2012 Preparation for Ultament Epic Fail Woot the Fail that could End All Fails.
http://www.december212012.com/
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guide to complete failure Graphic Designer October 20, 2008
Posted by frewon9 in Inspirational.Tags: design, fail, fail design, graphics
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Contracts are for Sissys.
Deadlines are Stupid.
Deadline, who cares about them? Not you! They are just “suggestions” anyway. If you need more time, or just want to blow off the day, then go ahead. Oh, and don’t even bother to tell the client that you are not going to have their design done when they want. Clients love surprises. They are just so honored to be working with a talented designer like yourself.
It’s OK to be Flaky.
Everyone knows that artistic and creative types are flaky. It’s actually expected. So it’s perfectly fine to not return phone calls or respond to emails in a timely manner – you’ll get to it eventually.
The DESIGNER is Always Right.
That’s right – the designer is always right. You may have thought that the customer is always right, but not when it comes to design. You’re the one that went to art school, right? When you and your clients have different views about the design of a project – you must always insist that your direction is right, and you must refuse to change your design no matter what.
Surprises are Fun, Especially on Invoices.
Get your cheap logos right here.
And cheap website, cheap flyers, cheap brochures and more!
Make sure your prices for graphic design are the lowest. Let your clients know that you’ll beat any price – no matter what. That way, you’ll be sure to have lots of work. And don’t worry that you’ll have to take on every project that comes your way and work into all hours of the night just to earn a living – sleep is for the weak!
MORE COMING SOON…..
Epic Win of Fail October 18, 2008
Posted by frewon9 in Fail stuff.Tags: epic, fail, failure
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When Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson testified before the Senate banking committee last month about Paulson’s proposed bailout bill, a demonstrator in the audience held up an 8.5-by-11 piece of paper with one word scrawled on it in block letters: “FAIL.” Earlier in September, Sarah Palin’s interview with Charlie Gibson was dubbed by some bloggers an “epic fail.” Grist magazine invoked the phrase when John McCain told a Maine TV reporter that Sarah Palin “knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States.” And just last week on the Atlantic’s Web site, Ta-Nehisi Coates found the theory that Bill Ayers ghost-wrote Barack Obama’s memoir so “desperate” he called it an “Epic Fail.”
A demonstrator holds a "fail" sign at a Senate hearing on the financial crisis
What’s with all the failing lately? Why fail instead of failure? Why FAIL instead of fail? And why, for that matter, does it have to be “epic”?
It’s nearly impossible to pinpoint the first reference, given how common the verb fail is, but online commenters suggest it started with a 1998 Neo Geo arcade game called Blazing Star. (References to the fail meme go as far back as 2003.) Of all the game’s obvious draws—among them fast-paced action, disco music, and anime-style cut scenes—its staying power comes from its wonderfully terrible Japanese-to-English translations. If you beat a level, the screen flashes with the words: “You beat it! Your skill is great!” If you lose, you are mocked: “You fail it! Your skill is not enough! See you next time! Bye bye!”
Normally, this sort of game would vanish into the cultural ether. But in the lulz-obsessed echo chamber of online message boards—lulz being the questionable pleasure of hurting someone’s feelings on the Web—”You fail it” became the shorthand way to gloat about any humiliation, major or minor. “It” could be anything, from getting a joke to executing a basic mental task. For example, if you told me, “Hey, I liked your article in Salon today,” I could say, “You fail it.” Convention dictates that I could also add, in parentheses, “(it being reading the titles of publications).” The phrase was soon shortened to fail—or, thanks to the caps-is-always-funnier school of Web writing, FAIL. People started pasting the word in block letters over photos of shameful screw-ups, and a meme was born.
The fail meme hit the big time this year with the May launch of Failblog, an assiduous chronicler of humiliation and a guide to the taxonomy of fail. The most basic fails—a truck getting sideswiped by an oncoming train, say, or a National Anthem singer falling down on the ice—are usually the most boring, as obvious as a clip from America’s Funniest Home Videos. Another easy laugh is the translation fail, such as the unfortunately named “Universidad de Moron.” This is the same genre of fail that spawned Engrish, an entire site devoted to poor English translations of Asian languages, not to mention the fail meme itself. A notch above those are unintentional-contradiction fails, like “seedless” sunflower seeds or a door with two signs on it: “Welcome” and “Keep Out.” Architectural fails have the added misfortune of being semipermanent, such as the handicapped ramp that leads the disabled to a set of stairs or the second-story door that opens out onto nothing. Even more embarrassing are simple information fails, like the brochure that invites students to “Study Spanish in Mexico” with photos of the Egyptian pyramids. These fails often expose deep ignorance: One woman thinks her sprinkler makes a rainbow because of toxins in the water and air.
The highest form of fail—the epic fail—involves not just catastrophic failure but hubris as well. Not just coming in second in a bike race but doing so because you fell off your bike after prematurely raising your arms in victory. Totaling your pickup not because the brakes failed but because you were trying to ride on the windshield. Not just destroying your fish tank but doing it while trying to film yourself lifting weights.
Why has fail become so popular? It may simply be that people are thrilled to finally have a way to express their schadenfreude out loud. Schadenfreude, after all, is what you feel when someone else executes a fail. But the fail meme also changes our experience of schadenfreude. What was once a quiet pleasure-taking is now a public—and competitive—sport.
It’s no wonder, then, that the fail meme gained wider currency with the advent of the financial crisis. Some observers relished watching wealthier-than-God investment bankers get their comeuppance. It helped that the two events occurred at the same time—Google searches for fail surged in early 2008, around the same time the mortgage crisis started to pick up steam. And the ubiquity of phrases like “failed mortgages” and “bank failures” seemed to echo the popular meme, which may have helped usher the term out of 4chan boards and onto blogs. It’s rare that an Internet fad finds such a suitable mainstream vehicle for its dissemination. It’s as if LOLcats coincided with a global outbreak of some feline adorability virus. The financial crisis also fits neatly into the Internet’s tendency toward overstatement. (Worst. Subprime mortgage crisis. Ever.) Only this time, it’s not an exaggeration.
Most Internet memes have the lifespan of fruit flies. But there’s evidence to suggest fail is here to stay. For one thing, it’s easier to say than failure. (Need for brevity might explain why, in Webspeak, the opposite of fail is not success but win.) And there’s a proud tradition in English of chopping off the endings of words for convenience. Between Old and Middle English, many nouns stopped being declined, says Anatoly Liberman, an etymologist at the University of Minnesota. Likewise, while Romance languages still conjugate their verbs, English keeps it relatively simple: I speak, you speak, we speak, etc. It’s also common for verbs to become nouns, Liberman points out. You can lock a door, but it also has a lock. You can bike, but you can also own a bike. There was great fuss a century ago among readers of the British magazine Notes and Queries when it used the word meet to refer to a sporting event. It’s not surprising that failure would eventually spawn fail.
It wouldn’t be the first word to owe its ascendance to the Internet. The exclamation w00t—an interjection expressing joy—gained mainstream recognition when Merriam-Webster crowned it Word of the Year in 2007. The phrase pwned, a perversion of owned used by online gamers, made it into an episode of South Park—not quite the OED but still authoritative—and enjoys broad ironic usage. And of course, Google is no longer just a noun.
Unlike those words, though, fail has the luxury of pre-existing forms. It already exists as a noun in the phrase “without fail.” It’s therefore likely to gain quicker entry into most people’s lexicon than, say, a word that includes digits.
In other words, fail will win.
sources http://www.slate.com/id/2202262/?fail
Citizen Journalism Just Failed October 17, 2008
Posted by frewon9 in News.Tags: Citizen, Failed, Journalism, Just, report
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Steve Jobs Had No Heart Attack…And Citizen Journalism Just Failed
What could possibly be bigger news than the supposed heart attack suffered by Apple CEO Steve Jobs? The fact that it’s simply not true. The rumor which spread like wildfire across the internet this morning was based on a report from CNN’s citizen journalism site, iReport. digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/apple/Steve_Jobs_Had_No_Heart_Attack_Journalism_Just_Failed’;digg_bgcolor = ‘#ffffff’;digg_skin = ‘normal’;According to citizen reporter, Johntw: “Steve Jobs was rushed to the ER just a few hours ago after suffering a major heart attack.” Apple quickly squashed the story, claiming it to be untrue. Did citizen journalism just fail us? You bet it did
The “Story”
The report about Steve Jobs appeared on CNN’s citizen journalism site, iReport this morning. It read as follows:
Steve Jobs was rushed to the ER just a few hours ago after suffering a major heart attack. I have an insider who tells me that paramedics were called after Steve claimed to be suffering from severe chest pains and shortness of breath. My source has opted to remain anonymous, but he is quite reliable. I haven’t seen anything about this anywhere else yet, and as of right now, I have no further information, so I thought this would be a good place to start. If anyone else has more information, please share it.
Silicon Alley Insider then proceeded to follow up, making phone calls to Apple. They were able to reach Katie Cotton, Vice President of Worldwide Communications, who replied saying “It is not true.”
This Is Trouble
The question was then raised: do false reports like this damage CNN’s credibility? The answer is yes, absolutely. This particular report may even lead to an SEC investigation where CNN will be asked to provide an IP address for the user who posted the story.
The problem here stems from the fact that because CNN has obviously decided not to police or edit the iReport section of their web site, the section is left wide open to “reporters” who want to wreak a little havoc.
But who are these citizen journalists? And how easy is it to become one?
Apparently, it’s as easy to become a citizen journalist on CNN as it is to sign up for a new web app from an internet startup, if not easier. The process involves nothing more than filling out a name, screen name, and email address. Adding a phone number is optional and only necessary if you want the story to be considered by CNN. There’s a CAPTCHA to prevent bots and an email confirmation link, but thanks to disposable email addresses, those are practically a waste of time these days.
by Sarah Perez
Fail0Pages Notes October 17, 2008
Posted by frewon9 in General notes.add a comment
ever since I started this blog (September 2008) Ive been getting responds some legit while some just spams but any way I want to thank you for the legit responds .
let me know what improvements can we add to the site,until then keep the comments coming.
send me a link in the comment box too add your links of fails as of now my secondary server is still offline for uploading.
What if the economy crashed? October 15, 2008
Posted by frewon9 in News.Tags: crash, economy, market, recession
1 comment so far
what if the economy crashed?
that is the question indicated in this clip.
survival guide
