White House To Announce IT-Powered Smart Grid 320
FizzaNawaz writes "On Monday, the Obama administration is preparing announce the next steps that the US will take to build its 21st century electric grid, and IT is expected to play a big part in the plans. The White House is hosting a 90-minute media event called 'Building the 21st Century Electric Grid' and is releasing a new report on what it will take for lawmakers and the private sector to come together to solve this aspect of the energy challenge."
Please Stop... (Score:5, Insightful)
... And actually put some thought and investment into a secure infrastructure, this time? The existing implementations are horribly reliant on auxilliary security controls, such as firewalls, to protect systems that rely on plaintext passwords and access controls to protect them from buffer overflows and other rudimentary vulnerabilities. These systems, and the NERC CIPS policies that act as a paper armor against scrutiny, present a real danger to our infrastructure, and pouring more money into procurement is really going to make things worse.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, God forbid our country actually do something with its wealth. We should all just sit around on our asses, living off the work of our grandfathers, while complaining that nothing ever gets done.
We decided to leave high-speed internet deployment to the private sector. How's that working out? Oh, look, $50 a month for speeds that would make Europeans laugh, and the ISPs are already looking into bandwidth caps on top because they don't want to bear the expense of laying more fiber.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yea (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, I have to ask this as a (more than likely) ignorant European who probably just doesn't "get" it - but what's with the obsession with "commies"? Who exactly are you referring to? I know that "Back in the day" of the cold war when Russia was seen as the big mortal enemy of the US, most people referred to them simply as the commies, or "communist Russia", but it has been like 2 decades since the USSR fell, who's left? Is it China? Is that who the "commies" are? If so, what has China got to do with the Obama administration?
I genuinely do not know - why are Americans obsessed with communism? Why is it that, for example, a national health service is a bit "communist"? And why does that inherently make it bad? I'm not saying +1 for communism, more along the lines of "Even if it is a tad communist, how can free health care for all actually be a bad thing?". In the same way that Hitler was supposedly a vegetarian (I know he actually wasn't and it's just a myth, but anyway), why does that mean that being a vegetarian is a bad thing? Charles Darwin was supposedly a womanising prick, but that doesn't mean his theory on Natural Selection is any less valid. Not that I think that a free health service IS communist or anything, but I digress.
Anyway, the sum total of what I'm asking is basically -
* Who are the "commies"?
* Why do people care about the "commies"?
* Are people afraid of the "commies" for some reason? Are they thinking that if a new electric grid is built, suddenly Russia will revert back to the USSR or something?
* Is Slashdot communist?
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a side note.... its a rant if you just complain... its an opinion when you lay out the facts... and its a wise man who offers a solution.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
We have plenty of wealth. This idea that we're broke is a right-wing lie to excuse robbing the poor and giving to the rich. If we repeal the Bush tax cuts and cut our military down to a reasonable size (say... not bigger than every other county in the world put together), we'll be back in the black in no time. Instead, we get demands to end Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and Food Stamps, and use that money to give a record-breakingly large tax cut to the top 2%.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Infrastructure investments like this are long term. The private sector has trouble thinking past the next quarterly report. The OP might not have meant that the private sector isn't as forward seeing as the government but I'll say it.
Time and time again the private sector has shown that they will only do the bare minimum required to wring every dollar out of the general public with the least amount of effort and if it requires lying through their teeth then so be it.
Need an example? How about the global economic crisis we're currently digging ourselves out of. By the way, the scum sucking leaches in the private sector that caused this meltdown seem to be the first ones that recovered. Funny that? Personally I think these parasites should be buried under so much regulation and bureaucracy that they'd never see the light of day.
So yeah, the private sector can't be trusted to do the right thing unless it's at the end of a very big government stick.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right - we should leave networking the grid into efficiency among its many monopolies all to Enron. A private corp will do it right. And quickly, too - none of this waiting around for the government to get around to taking the risks no one else has. Enron will never abuse the market it hosts. It will spend its profits reinvesting in innovation and efficiencies. Keep your government paws off my Enron!
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't find one provable assertion in that entire post - the gov't collects about $2.6T/year and spends about $4.3T/year, a $1.7T deficit each year (excluding the exceptional TARP, Stimulus, and other one-off spending events). The Bush Tax Cuts "cost" $470BN/year ($400BN/year for the "middle-class tax cuts" everyone was so keen on maintaining, and $70BN/year for the top 1-2% that we simply couldn't afford), and last year our entire military expenditures came to about $660BN/year [wikipedia.org], for all operations, including our "overseas contingency exercises" - that leaves you about $500BN/year short of being "in the black"...
Medicare [cms.gov] & Social Security [cbo.gov] will implode in a few years, something needs to be done - your acceptance of the lie that Republicans want to "end" medicare is exactly why the Democrats have taken their "Thelma & Lousie" approach to simply over-promise benefits and gun it for the cliff...
MSNBC will be glad to know you're reflexively parroting their talking points without question.
Re:Also a pony and a flying car for everyone. (Score:4, Insightful)
You have no idea what you're talking about. Apart from many ways already to store energy generated during low demand at more efficient plants, there's all kinds of ways to conserve electricity with no noticeable decrease in work done by it. In fact the "smart" techniques tend to upgrade the electrical system for better control that improves the value of the work done by it, even as it conserves waste. And then there's the really smart techniques that "turn people's stuff off" only when they want (or don't care about) it.
Just because you don't have the imagination (or research, or hipness to daily news) to realize that smart grids improve the electrical value to its users precisely as it's cutting its consumption, doesn't mean it's not already available. Find out what's beyond your own ability to do yourself before you earn the privilege of dispensing sarcasm about it.
Re:What this is really about (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sigh (Score:0, Insightful)
Wow, you managed to claim the republican plan wasn't a naked attempt to destroy Medicare. You can replace Medicare with a $15K voucher that won't cover half the cost of medical insurance for most seniors and call *that* Medicare, just as you can replace a cop with a pizza and call it a policeman, but it really isn't.
Instead of rationally determining how to distribute a finite resource, as do most of the western democracies, you want to put the decisions about rationing health care in the hands of rapacious for-profit companies. I attended managers' meetings with the most senior managers at WellPoint insurance, and I can tell you, those people are scum-sucking monsters.
You really don't understand what you're saying, or you're just a terrible person.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sigh (Score:2, Insightful)
First of all, Clinton's defense cuts were hardly "huge." The military budget was what was huge.
Secondly, if you think more defense spending would have prevented 9/11, I'd like to know what planet you're from because it's not earth.
Clinton, for his faults, actually was pretty proactive in trying to fight terrorism in general and Bin Laden in particular. Only one thing would have prevented 9/11, and that's better intelligence and communication between agencies.
Bush bumped up the military spending and it did nothing to reduce terrorism - which actually increased on his watch.
The biggest domestic terrorist attack in the Clinton years was the Oklahoma City. Do you think more military spending would have prevented that?
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
I think many are missing the point here, and their ignorance is astounding. We will never have zero debt. There will never be, nor should there, an effort to pay the debt off completely, as having zero debt is dangerous for our government/country. Our founding fathers were smart enough to plan things this way. If our country owes people, businesses, and other countries money, then those creditors have a vested interest in the continued success, and survival, of our country. The whole point is for our country to have debt. Now the discussion to be had, among those with this basic understanding, is how much debt we should have; mainly as a percentage in relation to our GDP.
I am really tempted to leave my post like this, and let people come out of the woodwork telling me how wrong/crazy I am, but I suppose I need to give full disclosure as I cannot take credit for this idea; it belongs to Alexander Hamilton. I think he had something to do with the creation of our treasury, or something like that....
Re:Sigh (Score:2, Insightful)
Where do you buy your Kool-Aid?
Re:Sigh (Score:3, Insightful)
Infrastructure investments like this are long term. The private sector has trouble thinking past the next quarterly report. The OP might not have meant that the private sector isn't as forward seeing as the government but I'll say it.
As opposed to the government, which built tens of thousands of bridges, roads, levees, dams, etc over the last century and then utterly failed to maintain them, diverting the tax money generated specifically for that maintenance to other projects, leaving us with crumbling infrastructure that will cost trillions of dollars to repair? That's to say nothing of the even larger miscalculations in the cost estimates of various entitlement programs prior to their enactment and the subsequent decision to drain them to cover other government debts since their creation...
Or, take my old high school... a local wealthy businesman donated a new field house and a bunch of amenities to the football team. That "free" gift costs as much as two teachers a year just to maintain and because the other sports teams were "neglected" by the donation, the parents of those players insisted the school spend additional millions renovating the other fields likewise, again, costing the salary of a few teachers to maintain all of them, use lights for night games, etc. The school district got a major budget cut from the state this year and opted to close a school and cut several more teachers to make up the shortfall. Such a wise investment that government made, always looking at the long term and never considering the short term costs, much less the long term effects of those costs... but, hey, several administrators got their names on buildings they created with our money, ultimately resulting in tax funded monuments to themselves at the cost of a pesky dozen or so teachers just this year...
Government is just as fallible as private enterprise... the fact that every government eventually topples should be evidence of that, yet for some reason, statists always believe that government is visionary, omniscient and has all the right answers.
BTW - those scum sucking leaches that caused the meltdown and quickly recovered... how did they do it? Oh yeah, by the government taking from you and generations yet to come and giving it to them. Your precious government is no more noble than they are.
Re:Let's start with arithmetic (Score:2, Insightful)
Amazing notion, given that for the period of our nation's greatest economic growth (post WWII to the 1970s), the top tax bracket was never below 70%, and was at times over 90%.