Carried Away

Warren Buffett Gives Away His Billions

Warren Buffett, the 2nd richest man in the world, is giving away his fortune, most -- $30 billion -- to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  As many of you know, Buffett is a disciple of the Benjamin Graham, a hero of mine and a mid-20th century professor of investing at Columbia University.

I am happy that most of his money will be going to the Gates Foundation rather than the Susan Buffett Foundation, which focuses more on pro-choice issues and gives lots of money to institutions like Planned Parenthood.  The Gateses seem to care about population growth, but are attempting to solve it by alleviating poverty and disease -- a much more progressive approarch.

Charlie Rose had a good hour-long interview last evening with the Gateses and Buffett.  It is available on Google Video for $0.99.  There's lots of substance in the interview, including the reasons why he's giving the money away rather than giving it to his children.

More Discussion About Ethanol

For those of you who have broadband, Google Video has a presentation by Vinod Khosla, a successful venture capitalist, about ethanol.  He suggests (Powerpoint, 7.3 MB) that ethanol is competitive with oil at $35 - $40/bbl and that cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass has many desirable features.  He goes on to say that switchgrass adds nutrients to the soil.  In order to catalyze the uptake in use of ethanol, Khosla proposes a set of government initiatives, such as mandating that E85 (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline) pumps be offered at certain gas stations.

One of the dispiriting aspects of Khosla's talk is that he relies on the government to do the spadework on ethanol rather than entrepreneurs and the market.  For instance, in addition to the E85 pump mandates mentioned above, he wants to collect $35 million to promote a California ballot initiative that would tax gasoline to the tune of $380 million a year.  For another, he proposes taxing oil when it falls below $40/bbl, such that OPEC can't lower its prices to run ethanol out of business.  I think Khosla's instincts are poor in this regard.  Politics is fickle.  The money would be better spent on more durable gains, such as researching new technologies that make ethanol a more favorable economic proposition.  As people become invested in ethanol, the politics will follow.  Besides, for my tastes, we already have too much economic coercion going on in our society.

A couple of months ago, I had a discussion with my mom and dad, where they argued that using ethanol would mean essentially burning our topsoil, no matter that the ethanol feedstock was switchgrass rather than corn.  However, Khosla says that switchgrass enriches the soil, even though he doesn't present any backup.  I always have been sympathetic to my mom and dad's view with regard to ethanol from corn, but I would like to see some facts on how the soil is impacted by growth of switchgrass on a mass scale.

In any event, Khosla also mentions an aspect of ethanol that surprised me:  It takes only $40 per vehicle to convert a gasoline-only vehicle to a Flex-Fuel Vehicle (FFV) that can burn E85 or regular gasoline.  The car companies probably can justify this expense on positive PR grounds alone.

What Have They Done with the Real Google?

Google Blogoscoped shows a simple test to demonstrate how evil the new google.censored service is.  Here's an images.google.com query for "tiananmen" and here's an images.google.censored version of the same query.

This whole issue sticks in my craw badly.  I'll have much more to say about this some other time.

(Hat tip to Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch.)

Google Video Is Very Beta

The Google Video store launched yesterday, and I've been playing around with it a little.  The content is getting better every day.  For instance, it appears that The Charlie Rose Show is addding a couple hundred previously-broadcast hourly interviews a day.  I use my Digital Video Recorder (DVR) to record current shows, but, when complete, the store will contain more than a decade of the interviews on demand -- thousands of hours of video -- at a reasonable price of $1 per hour.   However, besides having a large amount of content and a well thought-out concept of keeping content-owners happy (variable pricing, easy uploading, free bandwidth, etc.), the store and video player -- what Google's customers are to use -- are disappointingly "beta."

In the store, you can't sort the videos by original broadcast date and therefore can't find the latest shows.  The video player is very basic.  If you are used to a full-featured media player, such as Zoom Player Professional, likely you will wonder why Google discarded years of thoughtful work by the A/V community.  Perhaps Google has already implemented all of these options as an automatic thing rather than an explicit option, but there is no indication of this.

I have not had a chance to test fully the quality of the video, but what I have seen is low quality.  HDNet has a couple of free clips on Google Video that Google has down-rez'd from beautiful high definition to what looks like ugly 480i.  This is disappointing, considering that you already can download some programs in high definition from the HDNet web site through a small peer-to-peer applet (3.8 megabits per second consistent downloads).  There do not appear to be options for a trade-off between available bandwidth, resolution, and how long the viewer is willing to wait for the program to download.  For instance, I have a 8 megabit/second broadband connection, and I would like high definition video when available, so would be willing to wait a while for the program to download.

Overall, this appears to be the first Google "me-too" product.  In short, so far, it's uninspired.