Detienen a integrantes de FLAMUR. Angélica Mora

Fotos de archivo

Un grupo de 6 opositores fueron detenidos por la policía política por las gestiones que la Federación Latinoamerica de Mujeres Rurales, Flamur, realiza en la campaña "Con la Misma Moneda".

Entre los arrestados están las damas de Blanco Yelena Garcés Nápoles (Delegada de la FLAMUR en Santiago de Cuba) y Aimeé Garcés Leyva (Vicepresidenta de la FLAMUR en Cuba)

Should the Rich Be Condemned? Walter Williams

Thomas Edison invented the incandescent bulb, the phonograph, the DC motor and other items in everyday use and became wealthy by doing so. Thomas Watson founded IBM and became rich through his company's contribution to the computation revolution. Lloyd Conover, while in the employ of Pfizer, created the antibiotic tetracycline. Though Edison, Watson, Conover and Pfizer became wealthy, whatever wealth they received pales in comparison with the extraordinary benefits received by ordinary people. Billions of people benefited from safe and efficient lighting. Billions more were the ultimate beneficiaries of the computer, and untold billions benefited from healthier lives gained from access to tetracycline.


President Barack Obama, in stoking up class warfare, said, "I do think at a certain point you've made enough money." This is lunacy. Andrew Carnegie's steel empire produced the raw materials that built the physical infrastructure of the United States. Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft and produced software products that aided the computer revolution. But Carnegie had amassed quite a fortune long before he built Carnegie Steel Co., and Gates had quite a fortune by 1990. Had they the mind of our president, we would have lost much of their contributions, because they had already "made enough money."


Class warfare thrives on ignorance about the sources of income. Listening to some of the talk about income differences, one would think that there's a pile of money meant to be shared equally among Americans. Rich people got to the pile first and greedily took an unfair share. Justice requires that they "give back." Or, some people talk about unequal income distribution as if there were a dealer of dollars. The reason some people have millions or billions of dollars while others have very few is the dollar dealer is a racist, sexist, a multinationalist or just plain mean. Economic justice requires a re-dealing of the dollars, income redistribution or spreading the wealth, where the ill-gotten gains of the few are returned to their rightful owners.


In a free society, for the most part, people with high incomes have demonstrated extraordinary ability to produce valuable services for -- and therefore please -- their fellow man. People voluntarily took money out of their pockets to purchase the products of Gates, Pfizer or IBM. High incomes reflect the democracy of the marketplace. The reason Gates is very wealthy is millions upon millions of people voluntarily reached into their pockets and handed over $300 or $400 for a Microsoft product. Those who think he has too much money are really registering disagreement with decisions made by millions of their fellow men.


In a free society, in a significant way income inequality reflects differences in productive capacity, namely one's ability to please his fellow man. For example, I can play basketball and so can LeBron James, but would the Miami Heat pay me anything close to the $43 million they pay him? If not, why not? I think it has to do with the discriminating tastes of basketball fans who pay $100 or more to watch the game. If the Miami Heat hired me, they would have to pay fans to watch.


Stubborn ignorance sees capitalism as benefiting only the rich, but the evidence refutes that. The rich have always been able to afford entertainment; it was the development and marketing of radio and television that made entertainment accessible to the common man. The rich have never had the drudgery of washing and ironing clothing, beating out carpets or waxing floors. The mass production of washing machines, wash-and-wear clothing, vacuum cleaners and no-wax floors spared the common man this drudgery. At one time, only the rich could afford automobiles, telephones and computers. Now all but a small percentage of Americans enjoy these goods.


The prospects are dim for a society that makes mascots out of the unproductive and condemns the productive.


Source: Mark Perry.

Confusing the Satisfaction of Some Consumers’ Preferences for Market Failure. Donald Boudreaux

Only by implicitly assuming that consumers are automata who mindlessly flood into retail stores the moment doors open for business can Robert Frank conclude – as he did earlier this week in the New York Times - that pre-dawn holiday retail-store openings are the result of a competitive struggle that ultimately harms everyone.  But consumers are not the passive fools that Frank presumes them to be.  They have preferences, on which they can act, regarding the hours at which they shop.  If enough consumers want to sleep in without losing ready access to all of This Season’s Must-Have Holiday Gifts, one or more retailers will have incentive and ability to cater to these consumers.

Such retailers can advertise “We stock a huge inventory of all the holiday gifts you want and we never open earlier than 10am!”  Problem solved.  Late-sleeping shoppers will then be assured they can awaken at a respectable hour before trundling down to shop at such retailers.

Want evidence?  Consider the fact that the vast majority of retailers, even during the holidays, in fact do not open before sunrise.

Frank has long been consumed by his vision of market competition as a negative-sum game.  He here carelessly allows his bias to be confirmed by evidence of nothing more than some retailers’ successfully catering to some consumers’ preferences for the excitement of pre-dawn holiday shopping.

UPDATE: The New York Times‘s great science writer, John Tierney, offers the following thought to me in a private e-mail:

I would guess that the retailers are doing this at least in part for the free publicity — the shots of people camping outside the Best Buy sign — so they’re offering low prices as a way of paying the performers in their publicity campaign.

Yep.  A very good point.

Gas o carbón. Antón Uriarte

El gas natural suele estar compuesto entre un 70 % y un 90 % de metano, CH4. Antes de quemarlo, no es difícil separarlo de otros componentes que pueden estar presentes en apreciables proporciones en el gas extraído del subsuelo, como dióxido de carbono, etano o sulfuro de hidrógeno.

Quemar metano, es decir, oxigenar su carbono, se representa con una ecuación sencilla

CH4 +2 O2 = CO2 + 2H2O + energía

El carbón es más complicado. Es una mezcla de muchos compuestos difíciles de separar y además en proporciones variables. Una fórmula aproximada del carbón es C135H96O9NS.

Lo que interesa del carbón son sus átomos de carbono, que pueden representar el 85 % de su masa. Interesan, porque al igual que pasa con el carbono del metano, combinándolos con el oxígeno, producen energía ( C+O2 = CO2 +energía). Pero en la combustión del carbón, los otros elementos que lo integran, difíciles de separar antes de la quema, pueden formar compuestos nocivos. Por eso se califica al carbón de "sucio", sin explicar que en las modernas centrales térmicas se minimizan las emisiones de estos compuestos hasta hacerlas bajísimas (como en la japonesa de Isogo, en la foto de arriba).

Cuando se quema carbón se emite aproximadamente el doble de CO2 que cuando se quema metano, unos 800 gramos de CO2 por kWh en el carbón, frente a 400 gramos por kWh en el gas natural. Esto, que es una ventaja para los detractores del CO2 (entre los que no me incluyo), sirvió y sirve para promocionar las centrales de gas frente a las más tradicionales de carbón. Además, su fórmula de combustión sencilla sirvió y sirve para calificarlo de "limpio".

Un incoveniente, sin embargo, para los que creen que es incoveniente el efecto invernadero (entre los que tampoco me incluyo) es que hay metano, CH4, que se escapa sin ser quemado, tanto en los pozos como en los gasoductos, y molécula por molécula, una de metano tiene un potencial de calentamiento entre 20 y 100 veces superior a una de dióxido de carbono. Por eso quizás, en cuanto al efecto invernadero, la sustitución del carbón por gas en centrales térmicas no lo disminuye nada (co2: Repunte de metano).

NaturalGas.org

Real Clean Coal: Japan’s Unit #2 Isogo Plant — MasterResource

Man-made earthquakes. Matt Ridley

Whatever the rights and wrongs of dam building, induced seismicity is part of a trend affecting human culpability in general. Gradually, over the years, people have taken on more responsibility for what goes wrong in the world. Acts of God have become acts of man. Five hundred years ago, even with unlimited money and power, there would have been little a ruler could do to prevent plague, famine, flood or misery. Now almost every death from infectious disease, hunger or weather, wherever it happens in the world, is in theory preventable.

With knowledge comes responsibility. The destruction of a city by an asteroid that we fail to divert, or the death of a child in Africa to whom we fail to get a dose of oral-rehydration therapy, is on our conscience now as never before. If even some earthquakes might be our fault, it is responsibility we should welcome, because it is better to have rows about who caused or failed to prevent a disaster than to live in a world where disasters are inevitable.


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