The "economic" thinking subsumed under the heading Anglo Disease WILL kill us because Anglo areas WILL go ahead and build some more damn coal-fired power plants, etc. etc.  They will talk about their environmental concerns until the rest of us are sick to death, but they will offer no solutions that are not hopelessly primitive and unworkable.

You may think the differences are trivial but I think they are literally a matter of life and death.  And coming from the world of sophisticated production, I am damn pissed off at the fools who make it impossible to make the good stuff.  The difference you cannot even see are differences I believe justify guillotines and revolutions.

I have no idea how our perceptions became so radically different, but I would suggest you might want to read the development economists.  Human development is easily the most interesting story I can imagine.  But if you don't know answer to the question, "Why can the Japanese build a Lexus and I cannot?" this is a place to start.  The other route is to build something medium-difficult like perhaps an airplane.  By the time you get done with such a project, you will have gained enormous respect for the problems of production.  I mean, there you would sit looking at this beautiful airplane you built with your own two hands and realize you could not BEGIN to make the tires--much less the satellite navigation system.

It is at THAT moment you would understand that sophisticated production requires an incredible social system that is being destroyed by pirates posing as hedge-fund directors.  And the Brits who destroyed their own industrial potential now export the ideas that make it impossible to build environmentally sane technologies.  Those backward fools actually think it is useful to educate their upper classes to believe that technology is dirty and evil--and hence ripe for exploitation to the point of destruction.  And if there are environmental problems, so they tell us, they will be solved if we think like hippies.  How hard can green technology be? they reason.  After all, technology is something we educated folks don't have time to think about.  We are educated--we can barely drive and we are proud of the fact.

"Remember the I35W bridge--who needs terrorists when there are Republicans"

Techno argued that ET should be about challenging the popular consensus and giving policymakers the tools to make alternate decisions - and that going to demos shouting save mother earth etc. shouldn't be the height of our ambitions, or even the core of what we are about.  An alternative think tank, if you will, although I hate that term.

I started trying to articulate one such core idea when I wrote my blog on the The Negotiation Process but it didn't seem to resonate here, so I am developing that theme for another forum.  I'm sure others have core themes/ideas which they would like to articulate and which might be taken up by the ET community as a joint project. I would find it useful if we did have a "project list" of working topics which might come to define/encapsulate a lot of what ET is about for an external audience.

I appreciate that is partly what you have been trying to do with your occasional series and it is also something we could build into the design of ET 2.0 by allowing tagging and categorisation of blogs - a bit like Booman has a regional sub-menu - we could have a thematic one.

PS speaking of ET 2.0 - any chance of including commonly used code sequences like "<...a href="http://www.eurotrib.com">The European Tribune</a...>" along with the allowed HTML at the bottom of the "post comment page"?  I always end up having to do a copy and paste job from the new user guide section.

"It's a mystery to me - the game commences, For the usual fee - plus expenses, Confidential information - it's in my diary..."