I sort of buried this point in one of my long, super-boring net neutrality posts, but I’ve been going back and forth with Brooke about it on Twitter today, and consequently feel like emphasizing it: neutrality opponents would do themselves a favor by dropping the critiques that essentially say, “Well, if you want to make your ISP more like the DMV, be my guest!”

I mean, I get it: everyone hates the DMV, and the Post Office, and the IRS.  Why, their eternal inefficiency is recorded in the formulaic sitcom scripts of our youth; for culture-free postmodern nostalgists, that’s practically holy writ.

And actually, it is sort of true. I did find myself waiting at the Post Office for about 40 minutes earlier this year because they couldn’t find a package that I’d gotten a delivery slip for (turns out it was already out for re-delivery, but they had no record of this).  I’ve been bored at the DMV like everyone else.

But last week I spent 30 minutes on hold with Verizon before getting hung up on.  This came after a visit to their store where the clerk gave me information that I know is incorrect, which came after a visit when the clerk just gave me some pamphlets (and more incorrect information) when he learned I already had an iPhone under contract.   It took Comcast  two appointments to get my Tivo set up when they could have just mailed me the goddamn CableCard. WTTG used to drop out during the 9 o’clock hour for some reason. Verizon once sent a collection agency after me for charges during a trial period that a clerk had assured me I wouldn’t owe.  And Emily paid for DSL for at least four months, during which time it worked maybe twice — this despite both of us making repeated calls to tech support, and a couple of failed service calls.  Hell, when my family first got DSL our troubleshooting file became so long that I had to wait about ten minutes every time I called in just so the tech could read it.

From everything I’ve seen, these experiences are not at all atypical.  The point being: people might hate government inefficiency, but they really, really hate their ISPs.  Maybe it’s my own inclinations coloring my perceptions; maybe it’s hopelessness in the face of bureaucracy versus fury at not getting what you paid for; but from my vantage point it’s not even close: the home broadband duopoly has delivered a level of service significantly inferior to the one people expect from the public sector.

This is not to say that there are no good arguments to be mustered against government regulation of ISPs.  But if you could make Comcast behave more like the water utility, most of their customers would immediately envelop you in a tearful, joyous embrace.  The “not the post office!” free market trope is not only tired, but particularly ill-suited to this debate.

TO CLARIFY: I don’t think that the ISPs’ awfulness is an affirmative argument for regulation.  I just don’t think that their wonderfulness is much of an argument against regulation.  I’ve tried to make this distinction over at Tim’s place, too.  The broadband market is weird, and screwed up, and regulation might help or hurt or not matter much.  But I don’t know any consumers who are particularly in love with the status quo.

I need to resist the urge to drone on and on about this, but having failed to heed Matt’s encouragement to weigh in on the vital “worst bar in DC” debate, I feel obliged to pick this one up: why is CNAS’s post about lithium dumb?

First, some caveats: other than a brief tour through the world of materials science as an undergrad, several years’ worth of pestering ChemE PhD friends about related issues, and time spent watching resource-shock warnings fail to materialize, I have no credentials to offer on this score.  Defer to official-looking PDFs!

Onward. The first and most galling part is this:

Lithium is the lightest metal in nature and an excellent conductor of electricity, and these two properties make it especially useful for batteries.

This is just completely wrong. Lithium is useful for batteries because of its pronounced electrode potential.  Its lightness is a welcome attribute too, of course.  But the person who wrote that sentence simply doesn’t know much about batteries.

The other problem with the article is its wishy-washy buy-in of the peak lithium frame (the idea has been more forcefully expressed elsewhere).  Most of the world’s production of lithium ore comes from just a few places, and while CNAS acknowledges that they’re politically stable, Bolivia is on the docket as also having a lot of lithium, and what if they become the key source?!

Anyone who looks for them will see these resource-scare stories pop up on sites like Slashdot every once in a while.  It’s frustrating, and all too easy to fall for, but the dire scenarios they foretell never seem to come to pass.  I remember a professor with grave concerns about the unreliability of Kazakhstan’s chromium barons; yet a decade later, I have more stainless steel-clad consumer crap than ever.  And he was an expert!

With the general public, the capacity for resource fearmongering is much worse.  Most people don’t understand where metal comes from (admittedly, it is sort of mysterious).  As they attempt to puzzle out this question, the facts that they have to work with tend to be A) we’re running out of oil! and B) prospecting for gold looks hard in westerns.

Neither of these are really applicable to most mining.  Oil’s primary use is as fuel — it’s energy, not a durable good, and consequently we run through a ton of it.  As a result, small price shifts can have really serious consequences across the economy.  If you had to buy a new laptop battery every time your old one ran out of juice, the prospect of increasing lithium prices would concern me much more than it does.

Gold, meanwhile, is a heavy and therefore scarce element, and its nonreactivity helps to ensure that it’s difficult to mine.  It has some valuable properties, but it’s mostly valuable because it’s so rare.  Applying lessons about the difficulty of mining gold to the mining of other substances is a mistake.

Here’s the thing: ore is just material that has a little more of the substance you want in it than regular old rocks and dirt.  It’s a slightly better starting material, and therefore a more economical one to process.  But there are lots of grades of ore.  It sounds like Bolivia’s got some good stuff!  If that doesn’t work out, though, we can probably find some not-quite-as-good stuff (look! Wikipedia says a firm has figured out how to economically extract lithium from hectorite clay!). Or we can reactivate those not-currently-economical American mines that the CNAS post alludes to. Or we can recycle more lithium.  All it takes is money and a reckless disregard for the environment.  This is one of those things that the market really will solve.

So (still-theoretical) problems with our lithium supply could be bad news for the economic viability of electric cars, but we should resist the idea that we’re going to run out of any minerals.  I think we’re a long way from needing to panic about lithium supplies the way that we need to panic about oil supplies.

(Helium, though — boy, I don’t know. My friends Jeff and Marie have got me worried about it. Seriously: we need it to cool some extremely interesting magnets, it’s only found as a byproduct of natural gas extraction — the helium is trapped underground along with the NG — and once it’s in the atmosphere it diffuses into space. Stop buying balloons, you monsters!)

Emily sent me this new video from the Swimmers, and this Everlong-loving kid thinks it’s pretty great:

But better than the video is the song.  I really liked the Swimmers’ first album, but this sounds like a real step forward from them.  Can’t wait to hear the rest of the thing.

I just got back from seeing Pains of Being Pure at Heart at the Black Cat. It was pretty good! Honestly, they offered just about everything that you could ask of a twee-pop band. They were fresh-faced and well behaved. They were so excited to be in DC (“we love Teenbeat!”). One of them had bangs! They were exactly what you would expect, and to say that is not to diminish their charm one bit.

The show didn’t quite click for me, though. I can come up with a lot of plausible reasons: they front-loaded the setlist, their songs only have a couple of tricks, or, most obviously: I’m too old for this. Honestly, though, I don’t think that’s it. I think I’m just a bit out of practice. Sommer and I were talking about this in the Red Room before the show: we need to get back in the concert-attending habit. If the two fifty+ year-olds behind me in line were any indication, it’s not over for us quite yet.

Fortunately, there’s a hell of a lot of good stuff coming to the Black Cat in the next couple of months. I’d encourage any interested parties to pester me to attend the following:

• 10/6 – Title Tracks – $8 (backstage)
• 11/6 – Thao with the Get Down Stay Down – $15
• 11/7 – Le Loup – $12
• 11/14 – Olivia Mancini & the Mates – $8 (backstage, CD release)
• 11/20 – The Wrens – $15
• 12/3 – Ted Leo Rx – $15

I guess that’s it. I could be talked into Bishop Allen, Girls, Dirty Projectors, that guy from Television, or virtually anyone else who isn’t Art Brut. And of course the Cat isn’t the only game in town. I’ve got tickets for Gaslight Anthem, but I also see Dinosaur Jr., the Raveonettes and Built to Spill coming up at 9:30. Headlights is coming to DC9 on 10/25, and I’m on record as loving them. A bit more tentatively, I could under the right circumstances head to RNR for the Spinto Band or Titus Andronicus.

In short: make me go to some shows, please. I’ll drop these into a Google calendar shortly; if you’re interested in contributing to that effort, let me know.

And to irrefutably prove that I’m serious, I’m making an impulse purchase to facilitate this resolution. If the listed technical details are to be believed, it’ll be money well spent.