Startup Snake Oil | Green Business | Reuters

...This reasoning rarely changes among the startup snake-oil salesmen. And while it's true that collaboration between the Silicon Valley and Detroit ways could get results, that kind of cooperation has built-in limits we need to acknowledge.

First off, there's only so far you can take the whole matter of being smarter than everyone else when you're dealing with industrial enterprises. The uncritical startup boosters—whose ranks include Thomas Friedman and Jeff Jarvis, sworn enemies of the Detroit model—are preoccupied with a shibboleth of the knowledge economy: the idea. Take Transonic Combustion. The company is working on an engineering problem. It seems to have a smart solution, which gives them a solid business model. But because it's a small and youthful firm, the assumption is that there's more to it than that: Transonic must be a new kind of parts supplier. Eureka! It's therefore providing the auto business with a new kind of entrepreneurial energy, one that isn't beholden to the old, dumb, slow command-and-control model of building cars.

The startup worshippers then take this even further. They work backward from the idea—car firms could be like computer companies—to imagine a new generation of vehicles that these startups will produce. Which will reinvigorate the U.S. auto industry, making the labor of carmaking sexier and less sweaty. They will fight global warming and promote "disruptive innovation" (the periodic upheavals that remake whole industries, like digital photography displacing film). In short, the startup salesmen deploy a host of vaguely elitist memes they know will appeal to their knowledge-economy audience. They're not interested in a world in which relatively stable industrial production leads to high-quality products and broad prosperity. No, what really gets them going is that business-world high of furious reinvention and its attendant insecurity, where only the fastest and smartest (people sort of like them!) survive.

CEOs of Bailed-Out Banks Flew to Resorts on Firms' Jets - WSJ.com

Flight records show numerous occasions when banks receiving federal money have flown their planes to destinations near resorts or executives' vacation homes, including spots in Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, south Florida and Aspen, Colo. In some cases, it's clear that bank executives were traveling for personal reasons; for other flights, many of which were over weekends or holidays, the passengers and purpose couldn't be established.

More on NOAA’s FUBAR Honolulu “record highs” ASOS debacle, PLUS finding a long lost GISS station « Watts Up With That?

A simple lack of interagency reporting caused a whole cascade down the line, and a climate station that was once “lost” has now been “found”. It wasn’t quite as simple as Warren Meyer’s phone call, but if a citizen outside of the governmental loop can figure this out in a couple of hours, why can’t agencies like NCDC and GISS? Especially when knowing this sort of thing is is their job? Are there no flags that go up anywhere when data suddenly disappears?
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So I plotted the two high/low datasets side by side to get an idea of just how much bias there was between the two stations. Fortunately, the stations were only 3.9 miles apart, and about the same distance inland from the beach, though the airport station ocean exposure suffers a bit from the extra runway that was apparently added as ocean fill at some point. Geographically the stations seem reasonably compatible in their placement on the south coast of Oahu.

The data from the two stations, when plotted side by side, was telling.
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Six degrees difference in the Tmax for at least 5 days. Many other days of record were 4 or 5 degrees difference. One day was 9 degrees difference.

I wonder if people near the "warm" station get a lot more kidney stones than people near the "cool" station.