^{Democracy & Technology Blog} Telecosm recap

You should have been there! Telecosm was thrilling. I will list the ways, in chronological order in two or three posts over the next few days. (Below is Part 1.)
1) Lawrence Solomon, author of The Deniers, demonstrated, beyond cavil,
that nearly all the relevant scientists, outside of the government
echo-chambers, completely repudiate the climate panic. He concluded by
pointing to evidence for a cooling trend ahead.
2) After I presented the statistics showing that most of the global
economy is driven by innovation in the Telecosm–teleputers, datacenters,
optical fiber, fiberspeed electronics–Steve Forbes gave a magisterial
tour of the world economy. Relevant to the debates on the Gilder Telecosm
Forum subscriber message board was his assertion that the Fed had been too
loose in the face of a collapse in the demand for dollars caused by the
muddled cheap dollar leadership from the administration. Later in the
conference, in an incandescent speech mostly about the amazing expansion
of freedom and supply side economics in China, John Rutledge maintained
that the Fed had been too tight, measured by the flat monetary base. But
then, as far as I could grasp, Rutledge contradicted himself by showing a
dramatic surge of bank lending to small and midsized businesses. If it was
caused by the collapse of other lending sources, he did not give any
evidence.
3) Nicholas Carr gave a suave and lucid presentation of the themes of his
The Big Switch book, comparing the emergence of cloud computing to the
rise of the centralized power grid. Raising an issue that recurred
throughout the conference, our regnant expert on the power grid, Carver
Mead, dismissed the analogy as simplistic, since one-way power delivery
and two-way information transfer are radically different processes. Bill
Tucker, author of the forthcoming Terrestrial Energy, pointed out in a
compelling speech that Moore’s Law is about miniaturization of bits while
the energy industry is better described by a Law of More–more power and
more efficiency. He explained that all the energy in the atom is in the
nucleus and pointed to the immense heat caused by nuclear fission and
fusion within the earth. Then he impugned the venture capitalists’
compulsion to waste arable land and space twiddling with electrons and
photons and presented much evidence that solar energy in all its forms
would never provide adequate power for an ever growing economy. Physicist
Howard Hayden of Energy Advocate enthusiastically confirmed this view.
4) Andy Kessler followed with an uproarious investigation of Who Killed
Bear Stearns?. His answer pointed not to the usual culprits (though he did
politely finger front row auditors me and Bob Metcalfe) but to Bear
Stearns’ itself. After preparing a feculent feast of sub-prime pork (“they
knew better than anyone else what was in it”), then packaging it all into
putatively succulent AAA delicacies, they totally lost it and ate their
own sausages.
5) The Exaflood Panel presented Andrew Odlyzko’s dour but learned analysis
of Internet traffic, which concluded that the real danger is not too much
traffic but not enough to sustain all the businesses in the sector. Joe
Weinman, a brilliant strategist from ATT, however, confirmed the Exaflood
thesis, and Johna Till Johnson of Nemertes offered compelling evidence
that the best way to examine the issue is from the supply side. If you
don’t build it, they definitely will not come. Traffic in the core is
dependent on access from the edge, which still lags in the US, as even
Odlyzko showed rates of usage in Korea and Hong Kong six times US usage
rates. Lane Patterson of Equinix confirmed aggressive estimates of traffic
growth and still more ambitious growth of Equinix datacenters, but said
that patterns of traffic confirm that the core is being starved by
inadequate access on the edge.