As many others have pointed out, photovoltaics (what Pablo means by "solar panels") is just one technology in the group of technologies that's generally referred to by the catch-all "solar panels".

But apart from that Pablo is generally correct about the size of the resources and land-use problems that super-sized photovoltaic arrays would pose...

...except that he discounts the fact that photovoltaics (PV) is a maturing technology. Even efficiency figures from as recent as 2005 are obsolete, as a very large amount of funding is going into reducing the materials cost, and increasing the efficiency of PV.

And he also discounts that any move from "on demand" energy generation (nuclear, gas, coal) to "stored" energy generation (wind, solar, etc.) would require massive changes in how we use energy (lighting, domestic recapture of mechanical energy, glazing technologies, etc. etc. etc.)

So, a good article as far as it goes, but it raises FAR more questions than it answers.

Here's a DHL DC-8:

http://tinyurl.com/54o29k

Which if I read the story correctly, is Patrick's "Monster".

Great writing, great column. Up there with the best parts of your book, Patrick!

Apparently, Tom Kean now works here:

http://www.quadventures.com/a2_team.php

There are phone numbers and addresses on the website.

If I were chasing this down, I'd try the obvious email address, with the obvious variations.

"Taxes are not there to "Play Robin Hood" they are there to pay the bills and improve what your country has."

Exactly. I'm agreeing with you.

But that old Robin Hood line kinda tells me you didn't exactly _read_ what I'd written. What's up with that?

1% of the population with 20% of the wealth?!

Sounds like a job for Taxation Man!

Or does it?

The problem with those numbers is that while they make good headlines, they're almost irrelevant in the larger debate.

Imagine if you effectively taxed that richest one percent, and took away half their money. So far so good! You've freed up 10% of the nation's wealth. Then, when you try to redistribute that wealth, you discover than an extra 10% really doesn't keep very many of the other 99% out of trouble.

For someone earning $5.00 an hour, $5.50 is not a "get out of wage-slave jail free" card. $9.00 might be, but you don't get there by confiscating 50% (or even 100%) of the income of the nation's richest. The maths just doesn't add up. But let me just make it clear that I'm not advocating voodoo economics, either.

The "real killas" in economy terms, and certainly in income redistribution terms, are the middle classes. Policies that enable them to rack up huge household debt (which Andrew mentions), to believe that their long-term financial interests are served by highly leveraged purchase of 2nd and 3rd properties, to easily lose health insurance and thus slam straight to the bottom of the asset tree --- those are the problems.

Not the richest 1%. That's just the go-nowhere politics of envy.

Convincing the middle classes to invest wisely and vote for safety nets, though, is really, really tough. Getting them to vote in their own interests is tough enough -- getting them to act in their own interests may well be the very definition of a Sisyphean task.

Zacharek nails why the screening I saw of this was -- in the quiet moments -- filled with the unmistakable sounds of "restless audience".

You _want_ to care, you want to feel like you're watching something _important_ but somehow it's just not there.

And sitting in the dark with 300+ others feeling the same way is really, really awful.

The reason card-playing movies never work (with the one notable exception actually not being about the card-playing) is that they are based on a visual lie, and everyone in the audience knows it.

All show the time spend bellied up to the gaming table to be fun, exhilarating, glamorous. When in fact playing cards for money (as distinct to playing for "fun") is a long horrible grind, where the name of the game is to get in as many "hands" per hour to make your minuscule statistical advantage (obtained through "counting") "pay off".

Of course that's stupefyingly boring, and therefore practically unfilmable, and thus the bright lights, laughs-and-excitement fake version that is put to film never ever rings "true" -- and so card-playing movies never ever feel right, and never ever work.

Given a perfect opportunity to show this truth, and focus "21" on the real meat of the story -- the back room tensions and interactions with casinos who clearly don't like to lose -- the director went (again, predictably) with the "grinding is fun!" visuals, and so right at its heart "21" contains the untruth that, in the end, makes it feel unreal and therefore fail as a film.