UPINGTON, South Africa — South Africa's plan to build what could become the world's biggest solar project has drawn keen interest from investors even though it is still in its infancy, an official said Friday.
More than 400 investors and solar industry insiders from around the world converged on the town of Upington in South Africa's arid Northern Cape province this week for a two-day conference aimed at generating investor interest in plans for a 5,000-Megawatt solar park at the edge of the Kalahari Desert.
The park, whose estimated price tag is 150 billion rands (21.3 billion dollars, 15.4 billion euros), would provide one-eighth of South Africa's current generation capacity, helping end the country's reliance on coal and the power shortages that pummelled its economy in 2008. - source
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“Today the entire American innovation engine is slowly grinding to halt, public and private,” Kasparov said, speaking at an event on Monday night at Palantir Technologies, a company that creates analytics software for government and financial organizations. In his remarks, Kasparov called the U.S. a “culture of optimization.”
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He thinks the problem is that we’ve replaced the drive to innovate by focusing on making incremental changes to existing technologies. Kasparov drew from his own experiences facing off against more and more powerful chess-playing computers, until finally experiencing defeat at the hands (algorithms) of IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997. That was an unfortunate loss, not only for him, but for science as well because progress on building a smarter chess computer effectively ended after that, he said.- source
So, which of the two parties is talking seriously about innovation? Which has a genuine vision for the future? What political party will help us to overcome "today’s risk-averse environment", so that we can go bounding into the future with something to hand humanity besides poisons, bombs, and bullets?
The answer is neither political party is talking about substantive "change", They can't - because they are interlocked with huge corporations and huge corporations don't do change - they can't, because they can not innovate fast enough. It's an inevitable consequence of bigness.
We've settled "on making incremental changes to existing technologies", and we've also settled for incremental and largely insignificant changes to our crumbling political apparatus. It's far easier than making qualitative, innovative change.