jebmo’s posthaven

Every generation expands its definition of equality…

Now it’s time for our generation to define a new social contract. We should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics like GDP but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas.

-Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO

Here we go. Get ready for the media to start hammering the basic income meme.

Why is someone worth $62 billion complaining about inequality? Why is the world’s 6th richest man lecturing the public on the wealth gap, and floating ideas like the government spreading OUR wealth around while hoarding his own?

In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg claimed he would give his entire fortune away to charity in his lifetime, and promptly formed an LLC for that purpose… as opposed to, you know, a charity. This means that instead of using his own money to help people, he can spend that money on lobbying politicians in Washington to use YOUR money to help people.

See how generous these rich philanthropists are with everyone else’s money?

No, I guess true charity is the responsibility of the rest of us.

Mark Zuckerberg could give away hundreds of thousands of free expensive college educations without his net worth dropping 2%. He could provide a $12,000 grant to 1.7 million people if he actually cares about giving them a chance to “try new ideas”, and still have $42 billion left for a rainy day.

If he is so concerned about people having a cushion to fall back on, why not start a charity that gives free room and board to anyone who wants to come and explore their options for meaningful employment, like an internship?

That’s what I would do, literally open the doors to anyone who feels that they have no other options, provide them that safety net, and train them in the meantime based on their desires and pursuits. He could do this. He could empower people with his wealth.

But he doesn’t.

Instead, Zuckerberg appeals to a victim mentality:

Today, we have a level of wealth inequality that hurts everyone…

When you don’t have the freedom to take your idea and turn it into a historic enterprize we all lose and today our society is way over indexed on rewarding people when they are successful and we don’t do nearly enough to make sure people can take lots of different shots.

Facebook profits $4 billion per year. Why doesn’t Facebook hand out 200,000 $20,000 grants per year to promising young entrepreneurs who could then solely focus on their business venture, giving them the same opportunity Zuckerberg had to create (or steal) Facebook?

Facebook knows its users well–too well you might say. Facebook knows its users so well in fact that the company could provide a free quality online education to every one of its users based on their interests, skills, and desires.

But Mark Zuckerberg has other motives.

I have empathy for the poor, for those who truly don’t have an opportunity, and I would sleep easier seeing everyone with a more robust safety net. But what I can’t stand is being lectured by somebody who actually could do something about it, acting helpless without government intervention.

The government has the money to solve poverty. In this quick video, I run through the numbers which make it obvious that the government is the wrong organization to provide that cushion that Zuckerberg talks about.

Ignore Zuckerberg. Take a Page from 50 Cent

You know who didn’t have a safety net? 50 Cent. I recently read The 50th Law of Power by Robert Green, who details how 50 Cent, orphaned at the age of eight, built himself from literally nothing.

Do you think a basic income would have been conducive to his drive when it was the very fact that he had to make it that forced him to be successful? That would have allowed 50 Cent to settle, to fall back on the cushion instead of pushing through to realize his dreams and build a business empire.

Most people are so placated and dumbed down by TV and the media that they would find endless distractions to keep them from doing something meaningful. The ones who have drive find a way, despite their circumstances.

As Robert Green points out, the masses are far from the helpless peasants of the past. Today, we need only reach out and grab our freedom, our equality, and our wealth. Zuckerberg’s view of America is one based on fear.

In fact, the reality of 21st century America is something more like the following:

Our physical environment is safer and more secure than any other moment in our history….

In the Past, only white males could play the power game. Now, millions upon millions of minorities and women have been given entrance to the arena forever altering the dynamic…

Advances in technology have opened up all kinds of new opportunities. Old business models are dissolving leaving the field wide open for innovation. It is a time of sweeping change and revolution.

We face certain challenges as well. The world has become more competitive. The economy has undeniable vulnerabilities and is in need of reinvention. As in all situations, the determining factor will be our attitudes, how we choose to look at this reality.

If we give into the fear, we will give disproportionate attention to the negative and manufacture the very adverse circumstances that we dread.

If we go the opposite direction, attacking everything with boldness and energy then we will create a much different dynamic.

The government is a fear machine. The government welfare, their “help,” always keeps people in poverty instead of raising them out of it. The war on drugs, the great society, the public housing ghettos: these are the reasons people like 50 Cent were born into poverty. Only a fool would trust the government to solve these problems that they created.

Mark Zuckerberg’s ideas represent the old style method of control. A universal basic income would only preserve the old power structure by keeping the masses from participating in this revolution of technology and innovation.

Zuckerberg represents this generation’s white liberal elite identified by Malcolm X who want to keep the poor dependent and helpless. Every government program, bill, and regulation that they support is sold as a help to the poor masses when in reality those championing the government control build their power on the backs of those they claim to help.

What Zuckerberg champions will not free the masses, it will exploit them for political gain. It will make them satiated pawns to do the bidding of the elite, while Zuckerberg consolidates his control over the future.

Zuckerberg’s Zombie Nation

You know what most of those people would do with their universal basic income? They would sit on Facebook all day and be advertised to by Zuckerberg, and buy the things that Zuckerberg sells them which neither free them nor cushion them.

So who would end up collecting that basic income? Who would benefit from more tax dollars being stolen from working Americans who create wealth and produce goods and services which we need to live?

That money would be transferred to those who tell the people what they want to hear, who provide entertaining manipulations to the masses. Mark Zuckerberg would collect that cash because he is the one with the data, he knows how to wrest the dollars from the people.

He feigns his commitment to allowing people to have the type of success he has enjoyed by freeing them from all pressure, from all worry, doubt, and anxiety. He claims that his success with Facebook would not have been possible without the safety net that he enjoyed.

Well, then why not put his vast fortune where his mouth is?

He should be leading by example, and his failure to do so shows his true intentions.

Don’t fall for Zuckerberg’s tricks. The people have the power unless they fall for the old free lunch.

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There were several highlights worth noting in the latest Flow Show report from BofA's Michael Hartnett, first and foremost that despite hitting daily all time highs, US equities have experienced outflows on 8 of the last 10 weeks, with $3.3 billion redeemed in the last week, while US value stocks have suffered outflows on 9 of the past 10 weeks while small cap stocks have seen outflows in 8 of the past 9 weeks. Additionally, junk bonds have similarly seen outflows in 8 of the past 12 weeks. This has been offset by inflows in European equities (9 straight weeks), tech stocks (12 straight weeks) and Emerging Markets (10 straight weeks). Also of note, total bonds have had inflows on 21 of the last 22 weeks, while Investment Grade bonds have seen inflows for 22 consecutive weeks, and a total of $541 billion in the past five years.

Another interesting observation: contrary to reports of no retail participation in the rally and "money on the sidelines", BofA finds its private client allocations to equities is approaching an all time highs, at 59.7%, while allocations to debt and cash are at, or just, shy of all time lows.

Finally, here is the breakdown of 2017's cross asset winners and losers, broken down by category...

... and finally, here is BofA's calculation of the world's most overbought and oversold assets, based on their deviation from the 200 DMA.

For total assets, most overbought are:

European Equities
UK Equities
EM Equities
US Equities
Pacific Rim ex-Japan

And most oversold:

US Dollar
Government Bonds
Gold
Investment Grade Bonds
Oil

For the various other subclasses, see the table below.

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Fiber optic cable When the Minnesota city of Monticello established a municipal fiber network in 2009, the business leaders who pushed the plan projected that it would make money. Instead, the network—dubbed FiberNet—faced acute financial woes from day one, losing millions in its first years of operation and even suspending payments to bondholders in 2012. By 2014 officials had given up on the service ever being in the black, with one councilmember telling the Monticello Times, "I don't believe, at this juncture, that FiberNet will ever be a profitable entity. Just like the Monticello Community Center, baseball, soccer fields, bike paths, parks..."

Since then the government has kept FiberNet afloat by raiding funds from the city's only profitable business (a liquor store) and from the street light budget. But the service is still operating at a loss, running a $100,000 operational deficit in the last half of 2016 alone. Today the network costs $5,549 per household, or $16,875 per subscriber.

That makes it the most expensive project per capita in a new study from the University of Pennsylvania, which examined the 20 city-owned broadband networks around the country whose profitability could be gauged. (Most municipal fiber networks are run through local electrical ulitlities who only report aggregated financial data on the whole of their operations.)

Given how badly most of the networks examined in the study have failed, one can see why these utilities aren't more transparent about their costs. Eleven of the 20 are operating at a loss, and all but two will fail to pay back the costs their installation by the time the projects become obsolete.

The Taxpayer Protection Alliance Foundation has put together an interactive map of more than 200 municipal networks, color-coded for their level of indebtedness. Fourteen of these services have failed completely, while another 50 remain mired in over $1 million in debt. About half the projects on the map are colored gray, because their indebtedness levels are unclear. (In those cases, requests for public documents are in progess.)

Sometimes, as with Monticello, these networks are a wholly local initiative. But often they are spurred on by investments from the federal government. In 2009 the Obama administration established the Broadband Technology Opportunity Program, allotting $4.7 billion in grants to 277 state and local projects as part of the president's promise to bring "true broadband to every community in America."

Predictably, much of this money was squandered on needless projects, undocumented expenditures, and simple graft. A New York Times investigation found that a contractor for one of the grants ended up using federal funds to route fiber through its employees' neighborhood. $594 million of the program's funds were ultimately suspended.

Yet the dream of a city-owned broadband network won't die. In 2017, bills enabling or encouraging municipal governments to establish their own fiber networks were introduced in a several Southern states, and last year 26 communities in Colorado voted to opt out of a state-level ban on municipal broadband investment. Several of those Colorado towns are now mulling proposals for their own networks. They should take a close look at Monticello's experience before they take the plunge.

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Healthy Recipes

Looking for more simple, delicious dishes? Check out From the Heart, Nutrition Action‘s newest cookbook by Kate Sherwood, The Healthy Cook. Here’s a sample.

Spicy BBQ Tofu & Black Bean Salad

The spicy BBQ sauce in this gorgeous dish gets its kick from chipotle (smoked red jalapeño) peppers. Look for the small cans of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce in the Mexican section of the grocery store. You can freeze the leftover peppers with their sauce in a zipper plastic bag.

Time: 30 minutes

14 oz. extra-firm tofu, drained
¾ cup orange juice
1 chipotle pepper in adobo sauce, minced
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 Tbs. tomato paste
1 Tbs. brown sugar
1 avocado, chopped
1 15 oz. can no-salt-added black beans, drained and rinsed
¼ cup diced red onion
1 Tbs. lime juice
¼ tsp. kosher salt
4 cups shredded romaine
2 oz. whole-grain tortilla chips

Cut the tofu block across its width into 6 rectangular slices. Cut each rectangle in half to make 12 square slabs. Cut the square slabs diagonally into triangles. Blot with paper towels.
In a large bowl, make the spicy BBQ sauce: Mix together the juice, chipotle pepper, garlic, tomato paste, and sugar. Add the tofu and coat each piece with the sauce.
In a large non-stick pan, simmer the tofu and sauce until the sauce thickens and becomes sticky, 7-10 minutes.
Make the bean salad: In a medium bowl, combine the avocado, beans, onion, and lime juice. Season with up to ¼ tsp. of salt.
Divide the romaine onto 4 plates. Spoon the bean salad over the romaine. Serve with the tofu and chips.

Serves 4

Per serving (6 pieces tofu + 1 1/2 cups bean salad):

Calories: 370
Total Fat: 15 g
Sat Fat: 2 g
Carbs: 43 g
Fiber: 9 g
Protein: 19 g
Sodium: 210 mg

Enjoy this recipe? Nutrition Action’s new From the Heart cookbook delivers heart-healthy recipes that excite your taste buds and expand your palate. Nutrition Action‘s Healthy Cook, Kate Sherwood provides a collection of dishes that help you follow the top-rated DASH diet. Get healthy while enjoying Tropical Black Beans, Mediterranean Fish Stew, Turkish-Spiced Chicken, Quinoa & Winter Fruit Salad, and dozens of other scrumptious dishes.

The post New to tofu? Try this recipe and you’ll be hooked appeared first on Nutrition Action.

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Drill Description:

D1 & D2 start by sprinting up to the red line and pivoting back. F1 chips a puck behind D1. D1 pivots and recovers the puck. F1 swings through middle. F2 loops to the strongside wall. D3 sprints to the red line to set a gap. D1 passes to D2 who passes quickly to F2. F1 & F2 go down 2v1 vs D3.

For more Drills visit Hockey Share at HockeyShare.com and check out these other great drills on our Blog

The post Hockey Share Drill of the Week: Sprint Regap 2v1 appeared first on Ice Hockey Coaching Tips & Drills.

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Samuel R. Delany’s Life of Contradictions | New Republic

They married in Detroit, because it was the nearest city where state laws permitted an interracial marriage. They passed their bus trip to Michigan inventing a new language and co-writing a novella—this was the nature of their partnership. Marilyn was—and is—a talented poet. In The Motion of Light on Water, Delany presents her as the leader in their literary relationship. He quotes her poems more than anything he wrote himself in those years, and writes:

Watching this thin young woman in thick glasses write her early poems, being around her while the detritus of daily life was transmuted into lines of dizzying musicality, not to mention being the poems’ first reader, was unspeakably exciting. It made my whole adolescence and early manhood an adventure—an adventure I was thrilled and pleased to be sitting at the edge of.

The reader of In Search of Silence is surprised to find Marilyn relatively absent from Delany’s journals. Certainly she does appear, both as a character in Delany’s thinking and in her own hand—she offers witty, acerbic commentary from the margins. Delany duly records her visit from W.H. Auden; and a vivid description of her miscarriage, in the first year of their marriage, marks one of the dramatic highpoints of the journals. But the impression of Delany we receive is hardly that of a figure “at the edge” of someone else’s life.

He has the casual arrogance of someone fully committed to his own adventure.

Instead, he has the casual arrogance of someone fully committed to his own adventure. He likes to invent imaginary blurbs for his imaginary future publications. Kenneth James, the editor of the journals, includes half a dozen such blurbs from different notebooks. Perhaps the later ones were written for the dustjackets of actual books, or perhaps, like the lengthy, imagined critical essay Delany pens as if from a future critic on his own juvenilia, they simply mark stages in the author’s self-conception. He was always conscious of his talent, and in the journals he frequently compares himself to other literary child prodigies like Chatterton, Rimbaud, and Radiguet. When his career took off, occasionally he felt overwhelmed by work—he once had to spend several weeks in a hospital after a nervous breakdown—but he never seemed to doubt his abilities. Instead, he exhorts himself to relish them. “I must make sure my book does not lack the language gouged from the mouth and heaped on the subject, tongue sprung and magnificent,” he writes. “Mine—my book—can hold torrents.”

The self-conscious young genius of the journals is not the subordinate young husband of the autobiography. Does this make one or the other a truer account? I don’t think so. “‘History’,” says Delany, “is what we create by the scratching, the annoyance, the irritation of writing, with its aspirations to logic and order, on memory’s uneasy and uncertain discontinuities.” Neither version of his life is wrong because neither claims to be complete. Even in his experiments with simultaneous journaling, Delany discovered the inability of writing to fully capture reality: “Prose suffers from the illusion that it parallels, or is capable of paralleling, all of thought.” In his thinking about the representative power of language, his dyslexia speaks to the dilemma:

Since I am “orally regressed” [dyslexic] I think pictorially. In my verbal recount of an image, no matter how complete I make it, I am always aware of having left out some detail. A square inch of white porcelain has details enough to occupy the alert mind for hours. A human action is inconceivable!

Delany’s journals and his autobiography are both inevitably inadequate to the task of reproducing a life. Like the double-sided notebooks of his youth, displacing reality from its margins, they are two halves of an empty picture frame, outlining an absence. “These journals,” he observes, “are not to remember the things I record, but for all the things that pass unwritten, and forgotten.” They leave us not with satisfying answers as to who Delany was, but with greater appreciation for the depth of the question.

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The argument for single-payer health care is primarily moral. It’s just wrong to make anyone’s ability to get the health care they need dependent on their ability to pay.

Still, even when we win the moral argument, we still have to figure out how to get the system up and running – and how to fund it. It’s a sign of just how quickly the politics are moving on this in California, as the single-payer debate is increasingly about “how” and not “whether.” As will be shown below, the first analysis out of the state legislature suggests that single-payer would cost Californians just a third of what they currently spend on health care – and likely even less.

To that end, the Senate Appropriations Committee published today their fiscal analysis of Sen. Ricardo Lara’s SB 562. The headline that the media has run with is that the total cost would be $400 billion per year, and the state would need to cover about $200 billion of that cost (the other half comes from existing health care spending). Due to other savings, they conclude that “total new spending required under the bill would be between $50 and $100 billion per year.”

The analysis doesn’t make clear exactly how that sum was reached. But $400 billion is 16% of California’s overall GDP of about $2.5 trillion. That is in line with the current percentage of GDP that the United States as a whole spends on its inefficient, privatized health care system in which many people don’t get the health care that they need.

As the Senate Appropriations analysis notes, however, that $400 billion sum is about twice the amount spent in other industrialized nations. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published an analysis using 2013 numbers that showed the average percentage of GDP for health care spending in an industrialized nation is half the sum of the United States – about 8.9 percent.

Canada is a useful point of comparison, as a fellow North American economy with a population similar to that of California (36 million in Canada, 40 million in California). The OECD reports they spend about 10% of GDP on health care. In 2016, Canada’s actual sum spent was $228 billion.

So it stands to reason that a California single-payer system would be cheaper than the Senate Appropriations analysis assumes, and their figure should be considered as conservative.

But let’s say they’re right and the cost is closer to $400 billion overall, and that $100 billion in new revenues is needed (the high end of their $50b-$100b scale). That would pencil out to a monthly cost to each Californian of $208. ($100 billion / 40 million = $2500, which is the annual sum; divide that by 12 and you’re at $208.)

The average monthly premium for a Californian, as of 2016, was just under $600. For a household, it’s just above $1600.

In other words, even assuming the fiscally conservative analysis of the Senate Appropriations Committee and spreading the cost evenly across every Californian, single-payer would cost a third of what it currently costs Californians – just for health insurance alone. And unlike the present system, this would mean Californians don’t have to pay anything else beyond that $208/mo. No copays. No co-insurance. No out of pocket costs (at least within the Golden State). The ultimate savings would therefore be even greater. Californians could wind up paying just a quarter of what they pay now, if not less.

Of course, you wouldn’t actually pay for single-payer by levying just a flat fee across the state. A low-income family would pay far less in taxes than a wealthy family. The Senate Appropriations committee assumes using a 15% payroll tax to pay for single-payer, but there’s no reason we have to actually do it that way. A mixture of corporate and income taxes, especially geared toward the higher end of the scale, could bring down the cost to the median-income household even more.

Finally, the analysis notes that this would require voter approval because of the idiotic Gann Limit adopted in 1979 in the wake of the passage of Prop 13. If this does go to voters, I’d love it to be in the form of a constitutional amendment that, among other things, eliminates the Gann Limit for good.

The media will crow about the cost of single-payer. They should be emphasizing the savings. And we as activists should bring it back to the moral argument. If you can guarantee health care to every person in California as a right of being alive, and do it so for no more than a third of what people spend right now, why the hell would you say no?

It’s an odd moment for ad-tech and mar-tech companies, both public and private. The agencies often represented in this industry are both “creative” and “services” at their core, regardless how deep they dive into the world of data and analytics. The platforms in our space have also become used to the aggregation of spend, inefficiency, and largesse of these agencies. These agencies have big budgets to spend on behalf of the brands they represent, they have and easy-to-understand goals: viewability, measurement, ROAS, CTR, CCR, view through conversions, engagement, brand lift, audience reach, AVOC, etc. There are a few buzzwords that nearly all of the agencies rely on, and as long as you can tailor your reporting and product to hit these metrics, the spigot of agency spend continues to flow.

Traditional advertising agencies are in a tough spot

Now, the dirty truth of it is, we all know many of these metrics are just a proxy for quality and performance. In the wake of the Moat acquisition, I’ll use viewability as an example. Viewability is often a “must-have” for an agency. But the definitions the industry has come to rely on for viewability are arbitrary, and the way viewability is measured means that some channels and platforms won’t be “viewable” at all, even though logic dictates otherwise. Nor does the current MRC definition of viewable mean very much at all, unless the audience has cat-like eyes and Einstein levels of comprehension.

Reliance on this dogma is par for the course when it comes to working with some agencies. They have goals to hit, and those goals don’t necessarily act as proxies for success. They just act as proxies for vague demands of the brands they represent.

This is a natural clash for a lot of mar-tech and ad-tech providers, and it’s the reason so many of us have a fraught relationship with traditional agencies. Mar-tech and ad-tech platforms would like to believe we’re providing grand solutions that don’t worry about myopic, easy to collect, seemingly arbitrary measurements. Mar-tech and ad-tech providers are trying to push ambitious solutions via technology that have eluded the industry: harnessing AI for decision-making and bringing the intimacy of marketing to the wide-open expanses of advertising, for example.

Of course, the agencies tasked with spending the budget would counter that they have been given very strict guardrails by their clients, and that none of them can understand the nerd vomit that technology platforms emit during pitch meetings. Fair on both points.

What matters to the consultancies

Of course, this judgment about traditional agencies is a broad generalization. Some agencies like Hearts & Science have become renowned for leveraging first-party data on behalf of their clients. Still, the consultancies have a different pedigree. Companies like Accenture aren’t known, first and foremost, for their work in developing creative. They are seen as more closely aligned to the long-term business outcome of their brands rather than the ephemeral advertising campaign. That’s a different approach.

How consultancies will upend the platform market

This period will see a separation of the wheat from the chaff. Platforms that check the agency boxes of old but weren’t actually advocating for solutions that were core to their brands’ businesses will lose dominance.

The biggest frustration for platforms working with traditional agencies was feeling like you were just scratching the surface. There was a sneaking suspicion that the gatekeeper agency wasn’t interested in the bolder vision. They were more focused on presenting innovative tactics and techniques that did not necessarily create more powerful outcomes or drive long-term results. Our industry sits at the intersection of connecting ad-tech to mar-tech. We sit at the intersection of connecting people to intent. We sit at the intersection of identity and all the different places our online personas live and breathe. But those bold aims have historically only interested brands, not agencies. With standard advertising agencies, you have to pull punches.

Pitches for sophisticated solutions that bolstered more than individual campaigns fell on deaf ears because agencies were incentivized to put on blinders and hit their metrics, arbitrary as they may be. Employees of ad agencies are also easily swayed by the influence of Google and Facebook despite the continued public fumbles with measurement and metrics. Agencies became convinced that the metrics Google and Facebook are known for were the only ambitions that mattered. That was the direct result of the sheer power of Facebook and Google’s charm offensives (read: expense account) against agency employees, and it worked

However, it’s hard to believe the employees of Accenture and their peers will be so moved by these same tactics. Consultancies are famous for seeing around the corner, and their advocacy for brands will likely have an entirely different flavor. They won’t be so driven by dogmatic thinking and the goalposts of “viewable”, etc. will likely change.

What does this mean for mar-tech and ad-tech platforms? We may see a reversal of fortunes. Those who succeeded in a world of ad agencies were built for a system of selling short-term gains. In an era dominated by the business outcomes and metrics-infused culture of consultancies, the ad-tech and mar-tech platforms that are likely to succeed are more likely to support a brand’s core business (developing lifetime customers and owning the relationship with them) than a short-term sales cycle (using up the budget).

There is no question that, in this new era, there will be winners from both the traditional agencies and from the consultancy world. But what the winners from both worlds will share is an ability to help their clients market to people. Facebook and Google have proven the importance of identity-driven, people-based marketing. That’s not an easy concept, but the winners of the future will be those agencies and consultancies that can understand that and deploy it.

With the upstart consulting agencies on the scene, we’re already hearing about how established ad agencies feel: Some are nervous, some aren’t. But no one has asked how ad-tech and mar-tech platforms feel. I would bet there’s a direct correlation between how nervous you are and how much of your business is dependent on traditional ad agencies. Expect a shift from three-martini lunches to three pages of spreadsheets when it comes to your next pitch.

Dave Helmreich is COO of LiveIntent.

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Budget plan calls for elimination of ARPA-E, major cuts to renewables research.

Funding of renewable energy research was targeted in President Donald Trump’s fiscal year 2018 budget request for the Department of Energy. CREDIT: AP Photo/Matt Young

President Donald Trump’s 2018 budget would make huge cuts in renewable energy research and eliminate agencies within the Department of Energy that promote energy efficiency.

In its official FY18 budget, released Tuesday, the Trump administration proposed the termination of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a bipartisan initiative that funds research into cutting-edge energy technology. The decision to eliminate ARPA-E was “in line with administration policies,” according to the budget request.

Clean energy research took another major hit with the administration’s proposal to reduce the budget of the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) to $636 million, about $1.4 billion, or 70 percent, below the FY16 enacted level for the office.

“The budget for DOE demonstrates the administration’s commitment to reasserting the proper role of what has become a sprawling federal government and reducing deficit spending,” the administration said in the budget request. “It reflects an increased reliance on the private sector to fund later-stage research, development, and commercialization of energy technologies and focuses resources toward early-stage research and development.”

Democrats warn Trump’s Energy Department against ‘unlawful’ withholding of funds

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, criticized Trump for his proposed cuts in clean energy research. “His budget proposes a staggering seventy percent cut to renewables and energy efficiency initiatives,” Cantwell said in a Tuesday statement responding to the budget proposal. “This would devastate an emerging sector of our economy by killing thousands of clean-energy jobs all over the country — all in a misguided effort to hold onto the past at the expense of our future.”

DOE has “a long proud history of acting as an incubator for innovation with bipartisan support and that tradition won’t end now” with the release of Trump’s FY18 budget proposal, she added.

Under the administration’s plan, EERE will focus its limited resources on early-stage research and development, “where the federal role is critically important,” the budget proposal said. The cuts also reflect an increased reliance on the private sector to fund later-stage research, development, and commercialization of energy technologies, according to the proposal.

The Trump administration also wants to eliminate the Title XVII clean energy projects loan program. DOE was authorized to provide the loan guarantees, which are used to accelerate the deployment of clean energy technology, under Title XVII of the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

The administration’s budget request also calls for the elimination of the Energy Star program, which is jointly housed at the Environmental Protection Agency and DOE. Energy Star, widely viewed as a successful federally run program, enjoys nearly 90 percent brand awareness and has helped lower energy bills across the United States.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Jon Elswick

More than a thousand business owners wrote a letter to members of Congress last month urging the lawmakers to strengthen Energy Star “to ensure it continues providing these important benefits to the public while helping us meet our energy and environmental goals.”

In response to the budget’s release, the renewable energy sector expressed concern with the administration’s priorities. “We were disappointed to see the administration’s proposal to slash programs that promote American-made clean energy,” Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in response to the budget proposal. “Clean energy research programs have been priorities of both Republican and Democratic administrations and Congresses and the investments have paid off many times over.”

It’s unclear whether Trump’s proposed spending cuts will find widespread support in Congress. “We look forward to working with Congress as it drafts a budget that supports important clean energy programs that create American jobs, advance innovation and stimulate billions of dollars in private investment,” Ross Hopper said.

In recent weeks, Republican lawmakers have also called on the administration to resist major cuts to certain DOE programs. A group of six prominent GOP senators wrote a letter to Trump last week urging him to continue investing in several DOE programs, including ARPA-E and EERE.

Overall, Trump requested $28 billion for DOE, a $1.7 billion, or 5.6 percent, decrease from the 2017 annualized continuing resolution level. The administration drew attention to a $1.4 billion, or 11 percent, increase above the 2017 annualized level for the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous agency within DOE responsible for enhancing national security through the military application of nuclear science.

Under the plan to cut EERE spending, DOE will reduce the office’s full-time employees by about 30 percent from the FY16 level. “Remaining staff will ensure continuity of the essential oversight activities for EERE’s project portfolio and maintaining proper stewardship of taxpayer dollars,” the administration said.

The shift away from later-stage development and deployment activities and the increased focus on early-stage R&D at EERE “provides an opportunity to reorganize and move toward a more efficient organizational structure,” it said.

The FY18 budget request provides $1.9 billion for energy R&D activities — $2.3 billion below the FY16 enacted level. Even the budget for fossil energy research and development was targeted in Trump’s proposal. Fossil R&D would total $280 million, a $352 million drop from the FY16 enacted level. Despite the proposed cuts, the Trump administration said the fossil R&D budget will allow the federal government to help advance clean coal technologies.

Republican senator criticizes energy secretary’s grid reliability study

The budget request proposes to eliminate ARPA-E, with operations winding down in 2018 and the office shutting down in FY19, at which point remaining monitoring and contract closeout activities would be transferred elsewhere within DOE.

The administration’s FY18 budget requests an appropriation of $20 million to fund the winding down of operations. Before Trump’s FY18 budget was released Tuesday, several dozen House Democrats questioned Energy Secretary Rick Perry about a delay in the disbursement of ARPA-E funds to project teams that were already selected for awards. Funding for these ARPA-E awards was approved in previous budgets, for fiscal years 2016 and 2017.

“The budget assumes that a plan will be developed in FY 2018 to ensure that prudent monitoring and management of ARPA-E contracts and responsible stewardship of taxpayer funds continues after the ARPA-E office closes,” the administration said.

Trump’s clean energy budget cuts would ‘devastate’ an emerging economic sector was originally published in ThinkProgress on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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		Ask HN: How do I switch from being a passive consumer to an active producer?
		12 points by humaninstrument 39 minutes ago \| hide \| past \| web \| 7 comments \| favorite

		Lately I've realized that I consume way too much. Be it Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, HackerNews, Youtube, etc. Even though I have a job and I deliver value to society on a dialy basis, I feel like I could contribute more. Another thing that is holding me back I think is the fear of commitement. I have a partially ready youtube channel, with two videos, not listed. I tell myself that I'll open the videos to the public and then start realising videos on a weekly schedule but the commitement seems like a such a burden on me that I don't think I'll be able to keep up. I also would like to contribute to open source software projects, or write more for my blog, but I just can't force myself to do it. This is kinda a mix of fear (of what?!) and procrastination habits. Am I pressuring myself too much to make the switch? How did you do it?

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Ask HN: How do I switch from being a passive consumer to an active producer?