You realize when you say things like a mafia run state would be a "libertarian utopia," you are no better than the people that yell about Obama "turning America socialist/communist," and you're only a step above the ones that paint Hitler mustaches on his portrait. Don't promote insipid straw men.

As soon as people who write free software can band together and field something like Microsoft's R&D division I'm sure the U of W will consider it. It wasn't just software Microsoft contributed it was the enormous freaking brains that wrote the software. Smart people can make money with their smarts. Most choose to do so. Many go to work for MS because they pay their researchers extremely well. You can blather on all you want about how evil Microsoft is (which isn't possible as corporations are amoral by definition), but you have to acknowledge the costs they absorbed in helping this project. Evil doesn't usually go with altruism. Maybe IBM or RedHat could offer the same level of support. It's not Microsoft's fault that they can't, won't, or didn't.

None of the current options are going to give you better bandwidth than simply loading up the RV with backup tapes and taking them with you...

No, it's automatically deducted by direct debit.

GPS is not a perfect solution either. I have used several different models including the Pharos GPS with Streets and Trips. They often jump temporarily to another state or place on the globe and then after a few minutes jump back. So are we going to be able to challenge the 3000 mile trip we supposedly took on our way to grocery store? I have an idea just give me a check for 150million and I'll tell them it won't work.

It sounds like they're not on vacation: they live in their RV full-time, and do their work from there.

Actually, home ownership for all is a terrible idea. Not everyone needs to be a home owner, per se. Obviously, everyone needs housing, just not to own a house. Very high rates of home ownership have been consistently shown to be correlated with high rates of unemployment. A house is a tremendous fixed cost, and one of those costs is ones mobility as a worker. If your homeowner there is a tremendous disincentive to move to find a job. When recessions hit, this disincentive pushes unemployment higher and causes the recession to deepen and last longer. Home ownership for everyone is not only unaffordable, but it is dangerous economically. A mobile and flexible labor force is important for any economy.

Now to what extent did things like the CRA actually create this crisis is a whole other story. Government pushed home ownership certainly contributed, but it went hand in hand with a basically industry wide lapse of reason when it came to assessing risk in the financial sector.

Well, ideally the Bolivian government would negotiate the best price they could for selling off the lithium to foreign firms that hold a comparative advantage in producing batteries. If foreigners had to buy lithium batteries from Bolivia that were much higher priced due to Bolivia's high cost of producing batteries en masse would depress demand for the lithium in the first place, leaving Bolivia no better off. The best thing for Bolivia to do is to negotiate the best trade deal possible and take the gain from that deal and invest it in infrastructure and education making the Bolivian economy that much more sustainable.

Have you been to West Virginia? It's dirt poor now. They have both poverty and environmental destruction. People want to act like there is a constant negative association between the two, when there is none. I wouldn't advocate a complete end to coal mining like some I know. Just from observation the whole practice could be a lot saner.

Morales has no intention of leaving the lithium on the ground. He has example after example of resource rich developing country gaining no benefit from allowing foreign firms come and extract said resources. That lithium is a Bolivian resource and Morales government has every right to negotiate the best price he can for the Bolivian people, and to keep the extraction process from causing negative externalities. Practicing sound economics does not mean giving into to corporate imperialism.

Oh no I understand your argument. Resource extraction of any kind is never sustainable on a long enough time scale. Any country, region, etc. that builds its economy entirely on resource extraction is doomed to one day be overrun by poverty. The sad thing is the decision to sacrifice the long term health of the are has already been made here for the most part. That's why I'm on board with Morales. He's one leader that has learned from history, at least in this respect.

I am actually very aware of strip mining practices. My father actually works at one, funnily enough. It was a matter of economics and not ideals which is rather disheartening, but we had mountains of debt and there aren't exactly a lot of good paying jobs to go around. Moral of the story, take care of natural resources on lands so people aren't left with tough decisions of supporting a family or soul-crushing environmental destruction like my dad was.

If you'll notice, the article specifically mentioned that the Bolivian salt flats with these lithium deposits are projected to only be a sustainable source for a few decades. We are very aware of the scarcity of the resource.

As for promoting hydrogen, I've always understood fuel cells to be just simply to inefficient. Plus, batteries are recyclable, so I'm not sure how non-renewable of a resource you can consider them.

I generally lean towards advocating market based solutions and free trade in most economic situations. Coming from rural southwestern Virginia, however, and seeing the grip the coal industry has on politics in some areas around here I know how people can really be disadvantaged by mismanagement of natural resources. I also think back to the damage done by the informal imperialism in the Middle-East at the hands of BP (formerly known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) and their like. In this case I can't help but be supportive of Morales' efforts to put these lithium reserves to work for the Bolivian campesinos. Having mineral resources has proven to be a curse just as often as it has been a blessing in modern history. Here's to hoping one Latin American government can get it right.