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I have a solution to illegal downloading.

See, the problem with DVDs is they’re just too small. 4gb or so, once you image the disc. This means that at an average downloading speed of 100kb/s, it’s just a few hours before you can have downloaded the image and burned the image to your own DVDR. Include uploading to keep your ratios cool, and it’s about a day in total, most of which is unattended and non-labour-intensive.

So you need to plan ahead; so what? You just download more movies and games than you could ever watch or play and you’ve done your planning ahead until you inevitably watch and play more than you thought you could. (I am, of course, speaking hypothetically; I don’t actually do any of these things.)

The disc’s capacity is too small. What you need is a disc whose content is more in the range of 20-30gb. Couple that with the glacier-like expansion of bandwidth in the US, and Bob’s your uncle.

Then, when bandwidth catches up, you simply release a disc with ten times as much content. Make the sound so crystal clear, make the picture so very high-definition that the human eye can no longer tell the difference for any practical purpose. The beautiful thing is you, the content-producing company, get to make two kinds of money: people won’t pirate the full discs of your film because it’s prohibitively bandwidth-intensive, and because of your clever planned obsolescence, everyone will have to buy their content all over again.

This is, of course, much better than viable alternatives, like allowing your customers to download films at a reasonable price and burn them to disc as they choose, because instead of costing next to nothing (you could, after all, get your customers to use their own bandwidth for this, as they already do that), it costs billions in switch-over costs. Which is good, because if there wasn’t some pointless change-over in disc types and the associated format wars that come with them, what in the world would I blog about?

On of the reasons that US is producing ethanol from corn is the huge install base (if you’ll pardon the comp lingo). Another reason is the awesome power of the agricultural lobby, what with their massive subsidies and whatnot. And though the install base of corn is awesomely huge, the amount of ethanol needed is also awesomely huge, leading to exactly what the agricultural lobby wants: higher prices for corn.

This is all fine and good, except that corn is in absolutely everything these days, what with the pervasive use of high fructose corn syrup in the place of good old cane sugar.

Why don’t they use cane sugar, you ask? Why do they use corn? The answer is, again, the agricultural lobby. There are huge tariffs on cane sugar, tariffs originally designed (iirc) to protect what is now a minuscule but still powerful US sugar cane industry.

Now, with all the shooting of feet that’s going on here, I have a way to solve the ethanol problem, lower the prices on corn (which is good for the economy), and keep the price of cane sugar high.

You people simply drop the tariffs on cane sugar and use that cane sugar to produce ethanol, something Brazil has already shown to be radically more effective than making it from corn, which happens to be one of the worst possible crops to produce ethanol from.

The rise in demand for cane sugar would keep the price of cane sugar high, the nation would keep feeding its insane addiction to HFCS, corn prices would stabilise, and pretty much everyone would win, including those sugar cane producers in marginally poor countries (and if you believe in trickle-down economics (a giant crock of shit, imho) this makes sense, right?).

So, using my genius and applied game theory, we advance the game (US corn production, sugar cane prices, the economy, the environment) from negative-sum (right now, everybody is losing) to positive-sum (they could be winning!). Not a win according to the expectations of the US agricultural lobby, certainly, but let’s not be selfish.