* Rod Adams offers thoughts on the limits of traditional wind generation as a strategy for reducing carbon emissions.

* Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine help us wade through confusion over the compensation of federal workers:

Federal workers are right to protest simplistic public/private pay comparisons. USA Today recently reported that average federal pay is double that of the private sector. But federal workers have greater education and work experience, for which they deserve higher pay.
But not that much higher. Even after controlling for a large set of variables related to individual productivity, federal workers still appear overpaid. Our analysis finds that federal employees received salaries 12 percent higher than private sector workers with the same age, education, experience, race, gender, and other personal characteristics.

Biggs and Richwine go on to explain why their findings are different from those of the President’s Pay Agent:

For instance, a senior accountant in government might qualify only as a junior accountant in the private sector. This senior accountant would be “underpaid” compared to private sector employees only because he is under-qualified by private sector standards.

* Tim O’Reilly offers an intriguing interpretation of the current technology landscape:

In my blog post State of the Internet Operating System a few months ago (and the followupHandicapping the Internet Platform Wars), I used the analogy of “the Great Game” played out between England and Russia in the late Victorian era for control of access to India through what is now Afghanistan. In our planning for this year’s Web 2.0 Summit, John Battelle and I have expanded on this metaphor, exploring the many ways that Internet companies at all levels of the stack are looking for points of control that will give them competitive advantage in the years to come.

* Gary Schmitt and Cheryl Miller respond to critics of their proposal to expand the ROTC program into underserved regions.

* Ken Rogoff has written a terrific, appropriately humble piece on how to revive the U.S. economy:

Given the massive deleveraging of public- and private-sector debt that lies ahead, and my continuing cynicism about the US political and legal system’s capacity to facilitate workouts, two or three years of slightly elevated inflation strikes me as the best of many very bad options, and far preferable to deflation. While the Fed is still reluctant to compromise its long-term independence, I suspect that before this is over it will use most, if not all, of the tools outlined by Bernanke.
The bottom line is that Americans will have to be patient for many years as the financial sector regains its health and the economy climbs slowly out of its hole. The government can certainly help, but beware of pied pipers touting quick fixes.

This sounds both refreshingly sane and profoundly frustrating.