Who needs Black Friday!

Cyber Monday is the only holiday that makes sense to me any more. It is by far the most logical holiday. It combines all the fun of shopping with all the fun of sitting. Go shopping on Black Friday, and you will get pepper sprayed or beaten. I wish I were joking. The worst that will happen is an unwanted pop-up ad. If it were possible never to show up anywhere again, we’d all be tempted. Even on Black Friday, some of us opted to do our shopping online. Everything we need is online, or if it isn’t, it will be soon. We can “hang out” with our “friends.” We can date, and we can download our favorite movie!

Monday analysis of cyber monday found that Amazon was the top visited, followed by Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target and Apple. Amazon had over 50 percent more visitors than any other retailer. The company announced Monday that it had sold four times as many Kindles this year as it had last year, and saw strong sales for its new Kindle Fire tablet. Estimates say that Cyber Monday generated around $1.2 billion in sales! ComScore reported that e-commerce spending was up 26 percent online for the days following Thanksgiving. An estimate from IBM research found that online shopping was up 20 percent.

Life seems designed to discourage us from showing up. On the Internet, we can have whatever we desire, be anyone we want to be. The cyberworld indulges us. If we want someone to paint us a portrait of Lady Gaga riding a unicorn, we can arrange it!

Dispute about renewable energy opens up between the U.S. and China

The U.S. solar industry is divided over a petition by a handful of companies aimed at pressuring the Obama administration to impose duties on Chinese solar imports.One of the companies alleges that China is flooding the U.S. market with under priced solar panels and subsidizing its solar industry in violation of World Trade Organization rules. China’s efforts, the company says, are burdening U.S. solar manufacturers and are partly responsible for seven U.S. companies going out of business or downsizing in the last year.

Unfortunately these complaining companies can't compete. So as their last "hurrah", they are trying to go the route of protectionism. They don't care about the thousands of jobs in the service end of the business installing these cheap Chinese panels. Nor do they care that the biggest problem of solar is price, and getting cheaper panels allows for wider adoption of the technology.

The Chinese are serious about solar energy, at the moment, the USA is not. We need to get on board and support the sector with a feed in tariff ASAP, not try to pick winners