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| http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 343.0/June 6,
2008
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HEADLINES:
- The Week / Telecosm 2008: You should have been there!
- Friday Feature / "I'm a denier/Al Gore's a liar"
- Friday
Blogger Bonus / How Fast is the
Net Growing?
- Readings /
The Week / Telecosm 2008: You should have been there!
George Gilder, Gilder Telecosm Forum (6/03/08): 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.
To read more of George Gilder’s thoughts on Telecosm 2008,
visit http://www.gildertech.com/ and become a
Forum member today.
RELATED READING
Rich Karlgaard, Forbes.com, Digital Rules blog (5/29/08):
I spent Tuesday
night and Wednesday pondering the economy's big issues and even bigger
conundrums at the Gilder Telecosm conference at the Sagamore Hotel on Lake
George, an hour north of Albany, N.Y.
Lawrence Solomon kicked it off with a talk debunking global warming. Solomon, a
greenie since the Carter administration, said Earth has been cooling
since 1998. This year's frigid winter was a harbinger, not an outlier. The
period from 2014 to 2050 could be a mini Ice Age, as were the 1600s.
Steve Forbes keynoted Wednesday morning. Steve, as most readers know, has
warned of a cheap dollar and its distorting effects for the last three years.
Oil prices are a cheap dollar phenomenon, he said. Don't believe it? Consider
this: The global economy hit the brakes in August 2007. Since then, the rate of
global growth has been cut in half (at least), from 5% to 2.5% or less. Yet
during this period, oil prices have gone from $70 to $130. Slowing global
demand for oil can't explain the spike.
Andy Kessler gave a funny and illuminating talk called "Who Killed Bear
Stearns?" The culprit is technology, which has smashed trading fees to
near zero. In search of other big easy scores, investment banks became hedge
funds wielding leverage. The rest, as they say, is history.
John Rutledge gave a terrific talk on the global economy. Throw out everything
you thought you knew about economics, said Rutledge. It's all about
thermodynamics. Capital surpluses pour out like heat to high-potential
opportunities untouched by capital--e.g., the developing world. Labor surpluses
pour into markets with scarce labor--e.g., the U.S. and Europe. Protectionism
can't really plug up fiber-optic pipes, although politicians will try.
Is China free? Rutledge is a China bull and believes China is moving toward
freedom, however imperfectly. I hope he's right.
Read on:
http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules/2008/05/dollar-strength.html
|
The Gilder Telecosm Forum To
learn how to join this powerful network of talented, tech-savvy investors and
thinkers online daily to debate, discuss, and decode new and emerging
technologies and share valuable and actionable investment advice, visit www.Gildertech.com today. |
Friday Feature / "I'm a denier/Al Gore's a liar"
Tom Evslin, Fractals of
Change blog, “Contrary Views at Telecosm 2008--Part 1” (5/28/08): "I'm a denier/Al Gore's a liar" were the
lyrics of the song written and sung by Jeff Stambovsky, a "25 year Wall
Street veteran turned songwriter and musician" and master of ceremonies at
the 12th Annual Telecosm Conference put on by George Gilder and Steve Forbes.
With that song, Jeff introduced Lawrence Solomon, author of The Deniers.
Political
correctness is what you don't get at Telecosm.
The
point of Solomon's talk and of his book, which I've just started to read, is
that there is no "scientific consensus" on global warming no matter
what Al Gore and most of the press say. Solomon's background is as a
journalist, author, and environmentalist and he's a fierce opponent of
expanding nuclear power.
First,
he says, there were not 2500 "eminent scientists" who endorsed the UN
report on global warming (he tried to find and interview them). There were 2500
scientists who peer-reviewed all the papers that were input to the UN report;
not all of these scientists agreed with what they reviewed; few of them were
reviewers or endorsers of the whole report.
Second,
many eminent scientists disagree altogether or in part with the methodology and
or the conclusions of the report. Some even believe that, based on sunspot
cycles, we are on the cusp of fifty years of cooling after which the longer
term non-anthropogenic trend of one degree centigrade of warming per century
will reassert itself. That hypothesis, at least, will be tested very soon….
Read on. Check out Tom’s blog:
http://blog.tomevslin.com/2008/05/contrary-views.html
RELATED READING
Scientists Continue to Sign Petition Opposed to Global Warming
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/june022008/global_warming_6-2-08.php
|
FRIDAY LETTER BOOK OF THE MONTH Covering the range of global warming
claims, from the famed "hockey stick graph" to a predicted rise of
mosquito borne diseases, the book is fascinating and even profound on the
flaws of computer modeling, the irrelevance of consensus to science, the
crippling effects of excessive specialization, and the mounting evidence of a
coming cooling trend. It ends with a cogent explanation of how carbon taxes
and offsets devastate the environment. --
George
Gilder ORDER
YOUR COPY TODAY: |
Friday Blogger Bonus / How Fast is
the Net Growing?
AT&T’s Joe Weinman, The Network Effect blog (5/31/08): Just returned from participating
on a panel called "The Exaflood: Managing the coming digital deluge"
at the always outstanding Gilder / Forbes Telecosm. The theme this year was
"The Exaflood," i.e., the rapidly growing flood of digital
information on the Internet and enterprise data networks.
The panel was moderated by Bret Swanson, a Senior Fellow at the Discovery
Institute and Director of the Center of Global Innovation at the Progress and
Freedom Foundation. It comprised Andrew Odlyzko, Professor at and Director of
the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota; Bob Metcalfe,
Ethernet inventor and author, now at Polaris Venture Partners; Johna Till
Johnson, President of Nemertes Research; Tom Evslin, founder and former CEO of
ITXC and "Fractals of Change" blogger; Lane Patterson, Chief
Technologist at Equinix, Walt Ordway, former CTO of the Digital Cinema
Initiative, and myself.
There was a diversity of opinion regarding the growth of demand and how to
measure it, both recently and over the next few years. Andrew Odlyzko began
with a fairly modest estimate of growth rates, pointing out that correctly
forecasting growth rates is key for the service provider and equipment vendor
industry, since if they are unexpectedly high, congestion and service outages
will follow, but if they are unexpectedly low, then overcapacity and poor ROIs
will occur. Then, Bret Swanson, who moderated the panel and is a Senior Fellow
at the Discovery Institute, recapped a recent study he conducted with George
Gilder, excerpted in the Wall Street Journal, projecting a 50-fold growth rate
in Internet traffic through 2015, which translates to a 54% CAGR. Johna Johnson
then discussed the difficulty of acquiring good data, since core network
traffic data is likely to differ from edge data that doesn't traverse service
provider cores. She quoted Nemertes projections of 100% growth. Johna also
pointed out that it can be difficult to determine unserved demand.
Who's right?
Read on:
http://thenetworkeffect.blogspot.com/2008/05/how-fast-is-internet-growing.html
RELATED READING
Andrew Schmitt: Internet Traffic Growth Does Not Matter
http://seekingalpha.com/article/80017-internet-traffic-growth-does-not-matter?source=news_sitemap
__________________________________________
Readings /
Bob Metcalfe on
Energy (Scott Lemon reporting from Telecosm 2008)
http://the.inevitable.org/anism/2008/05/29/3809/
Telecosm 2008 (Broadband Hub)
http://blog.internetinnovation.org/2008/05/telecosum-2008/
Next Inning Technology Updates Outlooks for Qualcomm, Cavium Networks,
LanOptics, and NetLogic Microsystems
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/next-inning-technology-updates-outlooks,421826.shtml
What Gilder Sees in LanOptics
http://www.globes.co.il/serveEN/globes/docView.asp?did=1000346289&fid=1176
__________________________________________
Friday Letter Editor: Mary Collins George / mcollins@gilder.com
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