Dymaxion World

An interlude

2011-02-15T16:44:00.003-05:00

Just a reminder that the people who brought us to war in Iraq are absolute monsters.

The defector who convinced the White House that Iraq had a secret biological weapons programme has admitted for the first time that he lied about his story, then watched in shock as it was used to justify the war....

"Believe me, there was no other way to bring about freedom to Iraq. There were no other possibilities."

I do so hope that interview was conducted after Friday morning's announcement from Cairo.

China's changing frontier?

2010-11-30T16:07:00.002-05:00

(Holy hell, new content on the blog! What's it been, like a decade?)

Two data points from the last week or so. First, this long article in Tehelka about China's military moves along India's northern frontiers (basically, on either side of Nepal and Bhutan.) The Chinese have massively strengthened their forces along the border, presumably (the article argues) to force a change in the status of the line of control -- changing de facto borders with India in to de jure ones. Also, the article argues that China might try to actually take new territory to secure Tibet once and for all.

Secondly, the news today that China may be singalling to the US and other regional allies that it's about had it with this North Korean bullshit. From the Guardian:

"Citing private conversations during previous sessions of the six-party talks , Chun claimed [the two high-level officials] believed Korea should be unified under ROK [South Korea] control," Stephens reported.

"The two officials, Chun said, were ready to 'face the new reality' that the DPRK [North Korea] now had little value to China as a buffer state – a view that, since North Korea's first nuclear test in 2006, had reportedly gained traction among senior PRC [People's Republic of China] leaders. Chun argued that in the event of a North Korean collapse, China would clearly 'not welcome' any US military presence north of the DMZ [demilitarised zone]. Again citing his conversations with [the officials], Chun said the PRC would be comfortable with a reunified Korea controlled by Seoul and anchored to the US in a 'benign alliance' – as long as Korea was not hostile towards China.

Now, this is all effectively third-hand information: what a South Korean envoy told a US diplomat he'd heard from two Chinese envoys. Still, it's plausible and actually makes sense: at this point, China would probably profit substantially from even a semi-open relationship with a united Korea, as opposed to the status quo.

But what interests me is the strategic shift both pieces seem to indicate. North Korea is really the last major source of headaches for that part of China's world, and really the only one in the near future where "Americans in a shooting war" is at all a likely possibility. A united Korea would eliminate an ongoing political headache, a security headache, and open up an economic opportunity for the Chinese. This is all part of modestly successful history of China calming down relations with Japan and even Taiwan--there's not a lot left to fight over in the North Pacific.

Meanwhile, if the Tehelka article is to be believed, Beijing is basically preparing for a future of outright competition, if not hostility, with India. It's a relatively straightforward strategic shift from China worrying about it's eastern borders and conflict with the US and its allies, to worrying about India.

Of course, the idea of a major power war between the two countries is terrifying so this isn't just academic interest. The idea that China and India are going to replay the Franco-German relationship of the early half of the 20th century feels a bit more plausible every year...

Let's not get ahead of ourselves here!

2010-11-08T21:03:00.002-05:00

The title of an academic paper: “Financial Economists, Financial Interests and Dark Corners of the Meltdown: It’s Time to set Ethical Standards for the Economics Profession”

Yes, after almost 250 years since Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" and 140 years since "Das Kapital", it might just be time to set some ethical standards for economics. Or maybe that might have been a century ago, it's so hard to tell.

E-voting without worrying

2010-11-03T23:04:00.003-04:00

There are some TED talks that are simply impossible to not finish once you start them, where the speaker is so engrossing that when the video ends you feel like your first girlfriend just dumped you. This is not one of those. In fact, it's pretty dull.

But it's important! And interesting, despite the terrible speaker! So watch!

It's 2010, your future is here (sorta)

2010-11-03T19:11:00.002-04:00

Bionic implants give sight to the blind. No, really.
Know what's good to look at with bionic eyes? Holographic displays.
Not techy, but definitely a sign of the times: China has by far the strongest army in Central Asia (though perhaps not including NATO for the moment) while the UK is basically putting the final nail in the coffin of an overseas military.
Somebody printed out an autobody.

Daily dose of US Supreme Court humour

2010-11-03T18:47:00.002-04:00

So the state of California is defending an asinine law before the US Supreme court that would allow the state to ban violent videogames. Via Geekology, it appears the deliberations are not going well for the state. Some excerpts from the transcript:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: I don't think; is that answering Justice Kagan's question? One of the studies, the Anderson study, says that the effect of violence is the same for a Bugs Bunny episode as it is for a violent video. So can the legislature now, because it has that study, say we can outlaw Bugs Bunny?...

MR. MORAZZINI: Justice Sotomayor, cartoons do not depart from the established norms to a level of violence to which children have been historically exposed to. We believe the level of violence in these video games-

JUSTICE SCALIA: That same argument could have been made when movies first came out. They could have said, oh, we've had violence in Grimm's fairy tales, but we've never had it live on the screen. I mean, every time there's a new technology, you can make that argument.

Bonus sensibility from Justice Scalia (there's a sentence I don't use often):

JUSTICE SCALIA: I'm not concerned about the jury judging. I'm concerned about the producer of the games who has to know what he has to do in order to comply with the law. And you are telling me, well a jury can -- of course a jury can make up its mind, I'm sure. But a law that has criminal penalties has to be clear. And how is the manufacturer to know whether a particular violent game is covered or not?

Does he convene his own jury and try it before -- you know, I really wouldn't know what to do as a manufacturer.

Of course, the same basic principle applies to the ever-expanding field of copyrights, but that's another topic...

And my history of prognostication continues to be somewhat less than 30% accurate

2010-10-25T23:55:00.002-04:00

But hey, when you're wrong 70% of the time you're right 30% of the time, right?

Jesus, this is going to be a long four years.

Also, what Chet said.

Okay, drinking now.

Tab-clearing, Oct 18 2010

2010-10-18T22:55:00.002-04:00

Boy, Europe and America's inability to make nice with Turkey is world-historical stupid.
“China must tax carbon”. Of course, once China does that we'll find another reason to do nothing.
I have, on occasion, spouted off about parents who seem to be terrified about the world outside their doors. Chalk this up to that.
Speaking of China, looks like the regime continues to rotate in new talent in an orderly manner.
Saudis tentatively modernizing gender roles.
Genes are left wing. (Basically, heredity explains close to nothing about real world outcomes. Environment explains much, much more.)
West Virginia coal country has enormous geothermal potential.

Will Robots take our jobs? Probably

2010-10-18T21:43:00.003-04:00

A decent short piece in Good Magazine makes the argument that the middle class is basically doomed from a combination of automation and offshoring, with automation (and personal robotics in particular) posing a growing threat to the service jobs we've tried to insulate from offshoring:

Here’s the thing, though: The erosion of the middle class is a phenomenon that’s bigger than the Great Recession. Middle-range jobs have been getting scarcer since the late 1970s, and wages for the ones that are still around have remained stagnant.

In his report, Autor says that a leading explanation for the disappearance of the middle class is “ongoing automation and off-shoring of middle-skilled ‘routine’ tasks that were formerly performed primarily by workers with moderate education (a high school diploma but less than a four-year college degree).” Routine tasks, he explains, are ones that “can be carried out successfully by either a computer executing a program or, alternatively, by a comparatively less-educated worker in a developing country.”

The culprit, in other words, is technology. The hard truth—and you don’t see it addressed in news reports—is that the middle class is disappearing in large part because technology is rendering middle-class skills obsolete....

On the low end of the spectrum, we have physical jobs that we can’t automate yet (yard work, for example). On the high end of the spectrum, we have creative and cognitive jobs that we can’t automate yet (law and management, for example). But as technology advances, and it certainly will, more people are going to be elbowed out of the workforce.

We may be heading toward a future with plentiful high-end jobs and plentiful low-end jobs, and not much in the middle. What if only doctors, lawyers, engineers, and managers can live a decent life, buy a house or apartment, and pay for their children to get specialized degrees?

Early Warning had a good point about the recent news that Google has working robot cars: Google has (presumably accidentally) put 3.6 million jobs at risk. (A lot of people employed driving people or things from one place to another.)

Now, robot cars are pretty awesome and I sure hope I can afford a robot butler/chef/babysitter someday. But we're well past the point where glib assurances that technology would create more jobs than it destroyed will suffice.

At a certain point, we need to rethink the bargain we've made in society, and need to make sure there's enough middle-wage jobs out there. This presumes we need a wage policy, where instead of trying to stream high school students in to careers we think (maybe) will be income-stable for a decade or two, we instead adopt a more general, economy-wide principle that tries to push wages up (gasp!) even if bankers freak out about mild inflation at first.

As it turns out, my first and only car was a Ford

2010-10-14T22:08:00.002-04:00

This will probably be the only thing I write about Toronto's municipal elections in this space. We in this city are currently contemplating a race in which we've got the choice between Rob Ford, a right-wing hard conservative who would fit in nicely with the old Mike Harris crew; George Smitherman, a centre-rightist who worked in the McGuinty government; and Joe Pantalone, a long-time left-wing councillor who has more than paid his dues with the city's left.

Now, I have said over and over in this space that I don't really like strategic voting, for a variety of reasons--most fundamentally, because our votes belong to us as individuals and we have the right to do with them as we please without being made to feel shitty about it later.

That said, here's something I wrote about Democrats in the US who were feeling hurt by Clinton's defeat in 2008 and threatening to vote McCain:

There's a particular kind of American progressive that drives me nuts. They are, to put it bluntly, Nader voters from the year 2000. Or today, unrelenting Clinton supporters from the year 2008. People convinced that, if only their preferred candidate were in a position of power, things would be better. And, as a corrollary, that pointing out the reality of the American duopoly of party politics amounts to saying "you have to vote for Barack Obama."

Well, of course you don't have to. But Democrats -- especially Democrats! -- who spent the last 8 years blaming Ralph Nader and his vanity-quest/Republican-care-package for all that has come since have no reason doing anything at this point other than supporting Barack Obama, if they're at all interested in the consequences of more GOP governance....

If Obama and McCain are both likely to wage a war against some poor country in the middle of nowhere (historically, most postwar Presidents have) I want the one who's not going to go nuclear. If I can get the least-crazy person and they want national healthcare, then goody for us all. Supporting the least-bad option isn't a sacrifice, you whiny children, it's a moral imperative.

Mayor David Miller--who I'm a big fan of--has endorsed Pantalone, and Pantalone is currently polling in the 15% range. I will not be voting for him.

This won't be the first time I've voted for someone other than the NDP candidate in an election, and I suspect it won't be the last. But Miller and Pantalone both know that government matters, and Miller at least has proven that point with 7 years of governance that have changed Toronto for the better.

However the corollary to Miller's success, indeed to his career in politics, is that bad governance matters too. And sometimes elections don't give us the easy choice between good and bad candidates. In those cases, as I argued above, choosing the least bad option becomes the thing to do. And, to anticipate one common argument, I don't think it's enough to say the left on city council will stop Ford from passing his agenda, so it's safe to vote your conscience. That is precisely what the Hillary '08 voters said about Congress and Obama, and as disappointing as the last two years have been for some I don't think anyone wants to replay them with Vice-President Palin in office.

More than that, it devalues the real political power the Mayor has, and implicitly says that someone like Miller hasn't really mattered at all, something I don't think lefties actually believe.

Now, this is not a post saying "shut up and vote for Smitherman." If you simply can't fathom it, if Smitherman is simply repellent to you, then I can't in good conscience write that people need to vote for him.

That said, Pantalone isn't going to win. Period. This isn't guesswork or opinion, and it isn't that difficult. At this point he needs to triple his vote in 10 days against two substantially more well-known and frankly more likeable candidates. Throughout this campaign I've been struck at how nasty Pantalone has been. For weeks he's been unable to contain his clear frustration at not being competitive in this race. So he ends up looking less likeable than Rob Ford or George Smitherman, something that boggles the mind as in public debates they both look like they're trying really hard not to punch each other.

The mayoral race is the closest thing Canadian politics has to a presidential one--unlike Parliamentary politics, it's not the case that we can say "I voted for the MP who could win my riding" and leave it at that. The mayor's post gives us a simple binary choice: the guy who wins and everyone else. A vote for Pantalone is not going to do anything after election day except make the lefty voter feel good about themselves. But lefty, NDP-voting types really ought to understand that politics isn't about how we feel, it's about what we do.

Will I be happy with Mayor Smitherman? Probably not. In fact, I expect to disagree strongly with much of his choices. But he's not a terrible politician on the face of it: just about the only thing the McGuinty government has done that I remain enthusiastic about is the Green Energy and Economy Act, which is Smitherman's baby if it's anyones. Smitherman saved the Province from throwing more money down the nuclear rathole as Energy Minister, and he has my gratitude for that even if the McGuinty government seems to be heading back to it. (Smitherman continues to be dogged by the E-Health scandal while he was Health Minister, but it seems fair to say the nuclear decision saved the people of Ontario vastly more than E-Health ever cost them.)

So yeah, I'll be voting for the lesser evil candidate for mayor on the 25th, and voting far more enthusiastically for my councillor who's up against some real nutters. If you can bear it and live in Toronto, I'd encourage you to as well.

As a small postscript, I will say that I don't plan on voting for the Liberal Party of Canada as long as Michael Ignatieff is the leader, for the same reasons that this isn't a "shut up and vote for Smitherman" post. I simply can't stomach the thought of rewarding a man who supported the Iraq War with my vote. This has been true since he came back to Canada, and will remain true as long as he's the leader of the Liberal Party. (Don't worry Liberals, you'll probably win my riding anyway.)

Thanksgiving reading

2010-10-11T22:01:00.002-04:00

Hope you're all stuffed with Turkey and whatnot. I had a lovely weekend with friends, family and all. Then I sat down to read an article (via Yglesias, of course) about Israel. There are so many things to say about "Why Israelis Don't Care About Peace with Palestinians" by Karl Vick, but this part in particular was deeply troubling, and familiar:

"There was a time when people felt guilty about the Tel Aviv bubble," says Shavit. "Then it turned out the bubble was pretty strong. The bubble was resilient." Indeed, there are times when you can think most of the nation is within it. Polls are clear on the point. In a 2007 survey, 95% of Israeli Jews described themselves as happy, and a third said they were "very happy." The rich are happier than the poor, and the religious are happiest of all. But the broad thrust, so incongruous to people who know Israel only from headlines, suits a country whose quality of life is high and getting better.

But wait. Deep down (you can almost hear the outside world ask), don't Israelis know that finding peace with the Palestinians is the only way to guarantee their happiness and prosperity? Well, not exactly. Asked in a March poll to name the "most urgent problem" facing Israel, just 8% of Israeli Jews cited the conflict with Palestinians, putting it fifth behind education, crime, national security and poverty. Israeli Arabs placed peace first, but among Jews here, the issue that President Obama calls "critical for the world" just doesn't seem — critical.

Frankly, I don't see a lot of room for Canadians to scold the Israelis on their "bubble". The Middle East peace process, at least, is unlikely to lead to (for example) a global food shortage and massive famines.

Canada's bubble--and the lack of urgency towards global climate change and shutting down the tar sands--is far more damning, frankly.

Wherein I side with the glibertarians

2010-10-04T22:22:00.003-04:00

Okay, based on my entirely-scientific and not at all shoddy survey of each and every one of the Internets, I am the only one who read this story and thought the homeowner was a fucking goof:

OBION COUNTY, Tenn. - Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won't respond, then watches it burn. That's exactly what happened to a local family tonight.

A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground.

The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn't do anything to stop his house from burning.

Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay.

Ahem. $75 a year amounts to $6.25 a month. If you're super-curious, it's about 21 cents a day. It is, if you're a homeowner, an entirely reasonable sum of money--one could almost say trivial.

Except it's not trivial, this is about your house not burning down you moron. By the quotes elsewhere in the story, it's clear Gene Cranick knew the rules--pay the subscription and be served, or don't pay and don't. He gambled, and lost.

There are a ton of interesting arguments to be made about whether a service like this should be fee-based to begin with--and I side with Chet in thinking that mass privatization of public services is basically a case of political amnesia.

But that doesn't seem to be what's actually going on here. Thanks to Kevin Drum, I suspect the only real lesson to draw from this story is something far more banal--the Cranicks were trying to enjoy a low-tax lifestyle with the security of a high-service city nearby, and it bit them right in the ass.

This is an ongoing problem in Obion County, Tennessee, and the people who live in the rural areas around South Fulton know very well what they're doing. From a PDF that Drum links to, the important points of this scenario are:

1) There is no county-wide fire service in Obion County.

2) There are city fire departments throughout Obion that, while funded by city taxpayers, will respond to calls for help outside the city lines.

3) All of these services charge a fee. There is no legal way for the fire services to force you to pay. So more than half of the fine, upstanding rural citizens of Obion County--after having their homes and loved ones saved by urban tax dollars incarnated as a firefighter and a hose--cheat. Or, if you prefer, steal a vital public service.

4) In response, the majority of city fire services charge rural homeowners an ongoing subscription fee to be served. This nicely avoids a number of problems having to do with handing individuals wads of cash or blank cheques in an emergency situation.

5) Some stupid motherfuckers still refuse to pay, believing--contrary to the explicit policies of the cities they rely on--that they'll get away with it.

So I'm sorry, on any number of levels I just can't be sympathetic to this guy. Obion County should have a public, county-wide fire service--but it doesn't now, and if you live in Obion County, you know this. You know this because the city of South Fulton calls rural residents at the end of July to make sure they know they're in arrears, something the city did in this case and this family ignored. Rural homeowners who don't pay the service are tax cheats, pure and simple, trying to get the benefit of living close to a city without paying the taxes for it.

Now, a bit of Googling that I'm not going to retread here (investigation vs. privacy--where's the line?) reveals that Gene Cranick is the owner of a not particularly prosperous farm, though substantially more prosperous than the surrounding county. Maybe the Cranicks just fell on hard times--not uncommon in the US these days--and they couldn't pay the bill, though my bet is that's not what we're looking at here.

Sadly for Gene Cranick, his son Tim went and cold-cocked the South Fulton Fire Chief and is now in prison awaiting a plea hearing. Now the family is not only out of their home and life posessions, but they're looking at how to pay the legal bills on a felony assault charge.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. We can also say, apparently, that paying your taxes upfront is a lot cheaper than the alternative.

UPDATE: Yup, I'm on the same side as the brain trust at the National Review.

Every country has its own version of the Bush Administration

2010-09-29T15:45:00.002-04:00

...and some days I want to expand that and say every jurisdiction does. But lets talk China for a moment. Apparently, the Americans are suddenly concerned that China, having gone hot and cold in regional politics, is going cold again:

Hu and Obama met Thursday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, amid increasing regional angst at what the Obama administration and several East Asian countries see as China's increasingly aggressive and arrogant foreign policy.

Of course, it's just possible the Chinese have actual reasons for what they're doing:

There are currently two factions shaping the internal Chinese debate. One could be described as a “status quo” faction that does not seek major changes in the relationship with the United States. It sees the U.S. as a benign power supporting an international system that is conducive to continued Chinese economic, scientific, and cultural development – despite longstanding contentious, but manageable, disagreements on Taiwan, trade, and human rights.

The other faction, which is less cohesive but more bellicose, believes the United States feels threatened by China’s rapid development and that the U.S. is seeking to contain and constrain it in a variety of ways, including aggravating disputes between China and its neighbors and limiting Chinese access to resources, markets, and technology. These diffuse but potentially volatile anxieties are being employed by a variety of anti-status quo political personalities in the broader internal struggle over China’s future - and the future of the Chinese Communist Party - that is animating the upcoming transition to a new Chinese administration.

The split between these factions within the Committee has led to deadlock. Until the Committee comes to a decision, Chinese officials do not have a policy to guide engagement with the United States. So they are in a holding pattern that is reflected in their interactions with their U.S. counterparts.

U.S. officials should not be surprised by the feelings of distrust toward the United States. Over the past several decades the United States pursued policies that some members of the Chinese leadership found threatening.

What's really rich is hearing US policy makers describe China's foreign policy as "aggressive and arrogant". Until China invades an oil-rich state on the pretense of finding weapons of mass destruction, kills more than a million people in the process, and then never finds a single shred of evidence to justify its crimes, I think the US should really STFU about China's foreign policy.

A few lessons

2010-09-27T10:21:00.002-04:00

As long as Axelrod was helping Obama capture the White House, it was easy to assume both men subscribed to the same worldview...

The development shattered the tentative understanding between Axelrod and the wonks. Geithner believed that you cease to be an advanced economy once the government starts dissolving contracts. Axelrod and other senior political aides, like Gibbs, felt the administration had to respond to the country’s legitimate outrage. They began to worry that Geithner’s principled caution, while noble, could bring the administration down. The president was exasperated but ultimately sided with Geithner on the letter of the law.

Politically, it didn’t work. “If you were going to pick a moment when the whole thing turned on Obama,” says a longtime Democratic consultant, “it was the moment the administration saved the AIG bonuses.”

There's so much that could be said about that quote, from Noam Scheiber's TNR article on David Axelrod. But two points that I'd really like to focus on:

1) Note what you can and can't do in an "advanced" economy: the UAW saw their contracts and pension agreements torn up like confetti to save GM and Chrysler, but banker contracts are sacrosanct. This, fundamentally, is Obama's worldview. (The GM-AIG comparison is entirely fair, because both companies were on government life support at the time.) The difference between how workers of different collars, and colours, were treated is a pretty good indication of the ruling ideology in the west these days.

2) There's been an argument since, oh, before he was even inaugurated about people being disillusioned with Obama. I've chimed in on this more than once, but re-read that first line I quoted again. David Axelrod is probably closer to Barack Obama than all but one or two men not directly related to the President. They spoke several times daily during the campaign, Axelrod knows Obama's politics better than almost anyone alive.

And even he has faced the same problems of reconciling his expectation of candidate Obama with the reality of President Obama.

That seems worth noting, to me.

Yowch

2010-09-24T10:09:00.002-04:00

Jesus, two weeks without a single post. That's a new level of suck for me, I think.

Apologies. Real life has intervened in a most obtrusive way. Meanwhile, I laughed quite heartily at this. If you've been to any university in the last 20 years or so, I'd wager the dialogue between Abbas and Fyvush sounds awfully familiar.

Also funny: A capella Inception trailer:

I challenge you to not be walking around all weekend and not occasionally let loose with a loud BRAAAAAWM.

Peak oil getting taken seriously?

2010-09-10T21:57:00.002-04:00

Here's some news from the UK, from a while back:

But documents obtained under the FoI Act seen by the Observer show that a "peak oil workshop" brought together staff from the DECC, the Bank of England and Ministry of Defence among others to discuss the issue.

A ministry note of that summit warned that "[Government] public lines on peak oil are 'not quite right'. They need to take account of climate change and put more emphasis on reducing demand and also the fact that peak oil may increase volatility in the market."

And here's something more recent from Germany:

The study is a product of the Future Analysis department of the Bundeswehr Transformation Center, a think tank tasked with fixing a direction for the German military. The team of authors, led by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Will, uses sometimes-dramatic language to depict the consequences of an irreversible depletion of raw materials. It warns of shifts in the global balance of power, of the formation of new relationships based on interdependency, of a decline in importance of the western industrial nations, of the "total collapse of the markets" and of serious political and economic crises.

The study, whose authenticity was confirmed to SPIEGEL ONLINE by sources in government circles, was not meant for publication. The document is said to be in draft stage and to consist solely of scientific opinion, which has not yet been edited by the Defense Ministry and other government bodies.

Ah yes, something that consists "solely" of scientific opinion, without being filtered through the Ministry first. How terrible. The actual conclusions of the report aren't terribly surprising, and indeed are the kind of thing we've been expecting for years. For example:

Politics in place of the market: The Bundeswehr Transformation Center expects that a supply crisis would roll back the liberalization of the energy market. "The proportion of oil traded on the global, freely accessible oil market will diminish as more oil is traded through bi-national contracts," the study states. In the long run, the study goes on, the global oil market, will only be able to follow the laws of the free market in a restricted way. "Bilateral, conditioned supply agreements and privileged partnerships, such as those seen prior to the oil crises of the 1970s, will once again come to the fore."

Market failures: The authors paint a bleak picture of the consequences resulting from a shortage of petroleum. As the transportation of goods depends on crude oil, international trade could be subject to colossal tax hikes. "Shortages in the supply of vital goods could arise" as a result, for example in food supplies. Oil is used directly or indirectly in the production of 95 percent of all industrial goods. Price shocks could therefore be seen in almost any industry and throughout all stages of the industrial supply chain. "In the medium term the global economic system and every market-oriented national economy would collapse."

Relapse into planned economy: Since virtually all economic sectors rely heavily on oil, peak oil could lead to a "partial or complete failure of markets," says the study. "A conceivable alternative would be government rationing and the allocation of important goods or the setting of production schedules and other short-term coercive measures to replace market-based mechanisms in times of crisis."

The return to pre-eminence of politics, as opposed to the domination of market mechanisms, is something I've written about before.

Of course, this presumes that you think of oil as a "market" good to start with, which is questionable given that America's fought at least two wars to keep the flow of oil uninterrupted.

Interesting that both stories give the impression that governments are discussing this all quite seriously, but don't want to go public with it because it would freak the norms.

While we're discussing it, what if peak coal arrives synchronous with peak oil? Are totally effed?

Boy, if that turns out to be true a whole lot of Ontario Progressive Conservatives are going to owe Dalton McGuinty an apology over the caterwauling that put us through when he started migrating away from coal.

Purdy

2010-08-30T16:46:00.002-04:00

This is a very impressive movie:

Note especially the change starting in the very late 1990s. It's like somebody suddenly turned on a light somewhere between the orbit of Mars and Jupiter (Jove is the outermost planet on the margins.)

Turns out Bjorn Lomborg is Danish for "Richard Cohen"

2010-08-30T16:33:00.002-04:00

Ugh. Watch as another entirely discredited voice gets free press for belatedly coming to grips with the facts that were in front of his face the entire time.

The world's most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today" and "a challenge humanity must confront", in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.

Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled "sceptical environmentalist" once compared to Adolf Hitler by the UN's climate chief, is famous for attacking climate scientists, campaigners, the media and others for exaggerating the rate of global warming and its effects on humans, and the costly waste of policies to stop the problem.

But in a new book to be published next month, Lomborg will call for tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change. "Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century," the book concludes.

So Lomborg is only about twelve years late to the party. This makes him twelve years less credible than, say, Jim Hansen or Joe Romm. He is also a direct analog to the voices who came out against the Iraq War, circa 2006-2007.

Interesting side note: In Canadian English, "Bjorn Lomborg" is properly pronounced "Michael Ignatieff".

10 Years ago

2010-08-29T22:34:00.009-04:00

10 years ago today, me and a girl went out on a date. Everything else in my life has followed from that day in my life as surely as night follows day.

When Vicki and I started dating, I was what polite company would call "between opportunities" and what impolite company called a high school dropout. One year later, I had finally completed high school. One year after that, I was entering university with a substantial scholarship. Four years after that, I had graduated with highest honours and was moving in with Vicki. Two years after that, she agreed to marry me, despite the fact that I was in the middle of finishing a second degree. One year after that we bought a house. And three months ago yesterday we were made man and wife by the powers vested in our officiant by the Province of Ontario and the Castle Grayskull.

Yes, we had the officiant say that. If you've got a problem, get your own wedding. Were there Imperial Storm Troopers at our wedding? Why yes, yes there were.

Not too bad for a relationship that started with dinner at a restaurant that no longer exists and a viewing of The Cell.

I could go on, of course. I could talk about the good times, the bad times, how happy we make each other, and how every once in a while we want to kill each other with whatever blunt object is handy. But frankly, none of that is as startling to me as the massive changes in my life since we met.

The thing I remember about the days before Vicki was how angry I was. I still get angry, and maybe too often, but back then I was angry the way I'm a mammal--angry at my failures in school, angry at my parents (hey, I was 19) angry about nearly everything. I look back and simply cannot understand why. Since meeting Vicki, it just seemed so much easier to be happy.

I always assumed that boys learned to be men from the men around them, and that's true--we can learn the how and whats of manhood from out fathers, uncles, and friends. What I didn't learn until I met Vicki was the why. Without her, I probably would have muddled through my life in one way or another--I like to think I have some innate abilities--but there's no doubt in my mind my life would be poorer and I wouldn't have accomplished what I have without her. Her love for me gave me clarity and focus, and to this day when I'm confused, lost, or unable to choose a path forward, I know that she's there to help me make the right choice or love me if I make the wrong one.

Vicki, I love you more than spaghetti and more than Babylon 5. I hope you're okay with the last 10 years, because I'm a non-smoker and probably have another four or five decades ahead of me. If you'll have them, they're all yours.

Never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity

2010-08-23T16:49:00.002-04:00

Yglesias:

I fear that historical evidence of poor economic performance in the wake of asset price bubbles bursting is creating a mood of dangerous complacency. You can read that as evidence that we’re destined to experience an extended period of poor growth, but you can also read it as evidence that what normally happens after a bust is that policymakers implement an ineffective response. And as Posen argues, accepting the view that slow growth is inevitable is a major cause of ineffective policy and becomes self-fulfilling. Japan started growing once it got some policymakers who believed it was possible for Japan to grow, and thus that they would try pro-growth things and try them on a large scale.

Meanwhile, in Greece:

This dire prognosis comes even despite Athens' massive efforts to sort out the country's finances. The government's draconian austerity measures have managed to reduce the country's budget deficit by an almost unbelievable 39.7 percent, after previous governments had squandered tax money and falsified statistics for years. The measures have reduced government spending by a total of 10 percent, 4.5 percent more than the EU and International Monetary Fund (IMF) had required.

The problem is that the austerity measures have in the meantime affected every aspect of the country's economy. Purchasing power is dropping, consumption is taking a nosedive and the number of bankruptcies and unemployed are on the rise. The country's gross domestic product shrank by 1.5 percent in the second quarter of this year. Tax revenue, desperately needed in order to consolidate the national finances, has dropped off. A mixture of fear, hopelessness and anger is brewing in Greek society.

And back in the US, the one signature Obama program on easing the economic crisis was a deliberately cruel hoax:

Was HAMP a bait-and-switch? Did Treasury know all along that it was likely to fail in its stated aim, but go ahead with it anyway because of its second-order effects? That seems to be the message they’re sending — that HAMP was a way of encouraging owners to apply for loan modifications, not because they were likely to get those modifications, but just because the sheer fact of applying for the modifications would help out homeowners generally, by reducing the rate of foreclosures, and banks too.

When Jared Diamond's book Collapse came out, a lot of people focused on the first part of the argument (hey, collapse happens!) and ignored the second part of it: namely, that governments are frequently unwilling or unable to make the social changes needed to stave off calamity. Indeed, they often make the exact wrong choices that make conditions worse.

I'd say the last two years have given a lot more evidence to that argument.

In Memoriam

2010-08-16T22:21:00.002-04:00

Matthew Simmons died last week, and it's a loss to the peak oil advocacy network. It was only after his death that I started to peek around his website -- the Ocean Energy Institute -- where I noticed that he too shared a belief [PDF] that ammonia played a major role in the future of any carbon-free economy. Basically, Simmons advocated for massive construction of offshore wind on both coasts of the US and in the Great Lakes, as well as onshore wind in the midwest, all tied together with a major grid and with plug-in hybrids, and later ammonia fuel, as storage.

I first wrote about Ammonia about two years ago, and haven't seen anything to really change my mind since: if we need a liquid fuel that can be produced on a large scale and power both existing infrastructure (with modifications) and future projects, ammonia is definitely a winner. If anything, I've become more convinced of NH3's merits because the "reserve" of the key element--nitrogen--is enormous and omnipresent, while doing anything with carbon at this point other than burying it seems like madness.

Welcome to the last ditch

2010-08-16T22:12:00.002-04:00

That's the last line of one of Gwynne Dyer's latest columns:

Before the current recession, global emissions of greenhouse gases were growing at almost 3 percent per year, and they will certainly return to that level when the recession ends. To come in under +2 degrees C of warming, we need to be reducing global emissions by at least 2 percent by 2012: a total cut of around 5 percent each year, assuming that economies grow at the same rate as before.

That would be hard to do, but not impossible. However, as the years pass and the emissions continue to grow, it gets harder and harder to turn the juggernaut around in time. On the most optimistic timetable, there might be US climate legislation in 2013, and a global climate deal in 2014, and we really start reducing emissions by 2015.

By then, we would need to be cutting emissions by 5 or 6 percent a year, instead of growing them at 3 percent a year, if we still want to come in under +2 degrees C. That’s impossible. No economy can change the sources of its energy at the rate of 8 or 9 percent a year. So we are going to blow right through the point of no return.

He also points out that what we're seeing in Russia at the moment--an economically and politically weakened state casting about trying to deal with an unprecedented natural disaster--is something we ought to get used to. You could add Pakistan to the list.

Fun fact: In 2007 a new law took effect which basically gutted Russia's national forest fire corps as a gift to logging companies.

Dyer believes that geoengineering is the next step--out of necessity, not efficacy. I don't think we'll even get that much.

I have been doing this too long

2010-08-16T17:04:00.002-04:00

So I have, fitfully, found semi-regular employment where I get to write online in an informal fashion. I would normally call it blogging, except that other people keep calling it different things. Anyway, I had to explain to one of my editors what it meant when I used the phrase "shorter [other writer]", and realized that joke dates back to the early years of the blogosphere when we were all busy arguing over the impending war in Iraq.

And now I feel very, very old.

All you need to know

2010-08-16T11:19:00.003-04:00

NY Times writer Ross Douthat on the proposed City Hall mosque:

By global standards, Rauf may be the model of a “moderate Muslim.” But global standards and American standards are different.

Of course they are. I do love how the proponents of universal moral constants suddenly discover exceptions when brown-skinned people offend them.

Somedays, "war looming in the Middle East" isn't even news

2010-08-12T10:20:00.004-04:00

So Jeff Goldberg has a new article out in the Atlantic about how Israel is going to attack Iran next spring.

Except, no, that's not really what it's about. It's actually about saying Israel will attack Iran--if the US doesn't attack first. But the Israelis would clearly like the US to attack, and not them.

And some Israeli generals, like their American colleagues, questioned the very idea of an attack. “Our time would be better spent lobbying Barack Obama to do this, rather than trying this ourselves,” one general told me. “We are very good at this kind of operation, but it is a big stretch for us. The Americans can do this with a minimum of difficulty, by comparison. This is too big for us.”

Part of the point here is that Israel would only get one shot at an attack on Iran, whereas the US could sustain days, or even weeks, of bombing without serious concern. The other point is that, of course, small countries like to get big countries to do the heavy lifting here for them.

Why, exactly, western readers are supposed to view Israel as a plucky country just sticking up for itself when it won't, um, stick up for itself is a mystery left to the reader.

What really annoys me about the Atlantic piece is the sheer craven dishonesty of the author. In 2002, Goldberg believed that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and he warned specifically that the failure of Israel's raid on the Osirak reactor should be a warning to liberals who thought Iraq had been effectively disarmed. In 2010, Goldberg instead writes:

Israel has twice before successfully attacked and destroyed an enemy’s nuclear program. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting—forever, as it turned out—Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; and in 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a North Korean–built reactor in Syria. An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity.

In a way, accusations of dishonesty are beside the point: at no point does it occur to a propagandist that the two contradictory things they've put to print can't both be true. Both are true as necessary. In 2003, Osirak was a failure because Iraq simply redoubled its efforts to get a nuclear bomb. In 2010, Osirak is a success and shows the invincibilty of air power to get the job done.

So the story we've got so far is that a) certain American writers play fast and loose with the truth, and b) Israel is nervous enough about launching a raid on Iran that they're using prominent American periodicals to ask Uncle Sam to do it instead.

Meanwhile, the article does actually capture the list of potential downsides for an Israeli or US raid on Iran: basically, lighting the Middle East on fire (again) for at best a temporary reprieve. Indeed, the Osirak raid is instructive here because many Iraqis have come forward to say that the Israeli attack actually convinced the Iraqi leadership to massively accelerate their nuclear program, which they did and was only interrupted by the Iraqi defeat during the Gulf War.

So you've got an Israeli leadership that is convinced, utterly convinced that for next to zero benefit (indeed, probably making their strategic situation worse) they'll launch a raid that will have the secondary effect of almost certainly setting off a wave of terrorist attacks, at the very least. It would also dramatically strengthen the role of countries like China and Russia in Iran, and weaken America's ability to give any kind of security guarantee to Israel.

It would, in short, be a clusterfuck pursued only by the insane or the insipid. But Israelis and Americans of all stripes are convinced that Iran is run by madmen.

21st century liberals

2010-08-09T18:41:00.002-04:00

There's a common thread that runs through politicians as varied as Paul Martin, Jean Chretien, Dalton McGuinty, and yes Barack Obama. Maybe as far as liberalism is concerned, we should start the clock of the 21st century a bit early--the way historians talk about a "long 19th century" that started in 1789 and ends in 1914. That way we could integrate Bill Clinton, by far the most important liberal leader of the 21st century--both because he was the American President, and because he set the path that we seem to be following.

The common thread that runs from Clinton to Chretien to McGuinty to Obama, is basically an inverse Leninism: if the early Soviets believed that the state needed to control the "commanding heights" of the economy, your modern liberals seem to believe the commanding heights of the economy need to control the state. One implication from this is that they basically reject the idea of a serious political argument, in the original sense of the word: the idea that there are serious disputes between parties of different levels of power and autonomy is basically dismissed. Instead, there are just problems that need to be managed. The capital-c Correct solution is one in which the needs of everyone can be satisfied.

Except that, of course, no solution actually satisfies everyone, so you get some really bizarre redefinitions of "satisfaction". You end up with emergency actions to rescue bankers but a sense of resignation, and even apathy, at tens of millions of people unnecessarily out of work.

Obama may have entered the White House with the intention of assembling a Lincolnesque “team of rivals,” but Summers subverted that notion by making himself chief packager and gatekeeper for any dissenting arguments about economic policy—all, he claimed, to spare the President from meeting with “long-winded people.” Lincoln’s “team of rivals” reported directly to Lincoln, but, as one source told Alter, Summers so skewed the process in this White House that it was like “a team of rivals reporting to Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s prideful secretary of war.” Even Warren Buffett, a supporter who had spoken to Obama weekly during the fall of 2008, “found himself mysteriously out of touch with the new president” once he took office.

Obama was now imprisoned within the cozy Summers-Geithner group “and it would be increasingly difficult for him to see beyond its borders.” This “disconnection from the world,” Alter concludes, was not due to ideology or the clout of special interests but was instead “the malign consequence of the American love of expertise, which, with the help of citadels of the meritocracy, had moved from a mere culture to something approaching a cult.” For all Obama’s skepticism of cant, he was “in thrall to the idea that with enough analysis, there was a ‘right answer’ to everything. But a right answer for whom?”

Of course, you've got to love how Alter tries to reassure us that the extraordinarily wealthy people in the Obama administration mobilized truly massive amounts of capital to rescue their extraordinarily wealthy comrades--but not because of ideology, you understand.

There's a similar thing happening in Ontario right now, as the McGuinty government introduces any number of changes -- tax shifts from business to individuals, changes to post-secondary education funding, and now changes to labour law: if your boss has screwed you out of wages you're owed, you now have to prove to the government you've confronted your boss before they'll intervene on your behalf.

Leave aside the question of fairness--lord knows if I steal from my employer, the law doesn't require them to confront me before they call the police--is the law of the Province of Ontario going to say, in effect, that unless a taxpayer has tried to resolve a problem themselves, they don't want to hear about it? That the government doesn't consider it a crime to leave your workers unpaid, so long as you get around to it eventually?

It's worth noting that the Liberals in Ontario have managed to be so incompetent and malicious lately that even the Toronto Star editorial board has managed to timidly, gently tip toe towards actually criticizing the Liberals on this. But the larger problems is that basically the leftmost span of the political spectrum--leftmost acceptable span, of course--is basically still lemon socialism.

Christ almight, Paul bleedin' Krugman--a neoliberal deity, or at least a major saint--is considered the outer fringe of acceptable American leftism. Not that I don't think he's great, especially lately, but there's got to be more than this, right?

No positive social changes allowed

2010-08-07T13:07:00.002-04:00

via Dave Roberts at Grist, there's a debate that I think encapsulates a lot of our current problems. Basically, a number of conservatives at The American Scene were arguing over carbon taxes. Jim Manzi, a conservative who basically gets way too much credit from polite liberals, responded with a number of arguments against a carbon tax.

1. Europe is a huge, advanced market that has had these taxes for decades while internal combustion has remained a very stable technology, and people have continued to make choices from among broadly pre-existing technologies such as mass transit, bicycles, walking and so forth.

2. Even if other conditions mean that we can now create qualitatively different technical innovation in the near future, Europe provides a big enough market to induce this, and there is no obvious reason why the incremental market that would be provided by the U.S. would make much difference.

Argument 1 is true, but irrelevant as for all but the last six years really, fuel taxes have been in the context of a market where oil was still, by a very very far margin, the cheapest source of energy around. (With the obvious exception of the oil shocks which preceded Europe's regime of fuel taxes.)

Argument 2 is kind of funny for a conservative, because it basically casts the US as a free rider on European innovation--or, to put it another way, America is an environmental welfare bum, and Manzi doesn't mind.

Now, people responded by saying that despite Manzi, Europe has responded to higher fuel taxes in a variety of ways, largely summed up by "doing things in less fuel-intense ways". (Smaller vehicles, more transit and bike use, etc.)

Manzi's response really has to be seen to be believed:

This strikes me as, at best, a word game. I understand that innovation is not identical to invention. But this is like saying that in response to an increase in the price of peanut butter, I “innovated” by making smaller sandwiches and eating ham-and-cheese more often (while noting that I designed these new sandwiches very well, and am probably healthier anyway with less peanut butter in my diet). If by “innovation” in response to higher gas prices, we mean switching to smaller cars and taking the bus and riding bicycles more often, then I agree entirely that higher gas prices in the U.S. will induce innovation.

First of all, I think Manzi's grasp of basic nutrition is about as bad as his grasp of climate change: he thinks switching to a meat-and-cheese diet from peanut butter would be better for him?

That aside, Manzi--who, sadly, is one of the few US conservatives who doesn't dismiss climate change outright--is basically saying here that the easiest, cheapest, most reliable way of reducing carbon pollution (doing the same or more with less carbon) doesn't count as far as he's concerned. These are forms of innovation, but for a US conservative, if it doesn't involve nuclear-powered fuel cell Hummers, it's just hippie socialism.

This isn't just a doctrinaire conservative viewpoint, either. I always think of this as the "Wired fallacy"--after their truly horrible article on nuclear power a few years back. It's basically the bog standard popular US view on science and technology: don't bother changing behaviours--technology will do it for us.

Of course, we change our behaviours all the time in response to new technologies, so why we shouldn't anticipate that has always boggled me.

A discussion on the Middle Class

2010-08-07T12:19:00.003-04:00

A friend emailed me this a few days ago. It's basically a psychiatrist giving his own explanation for why the "American dream" is out of reach--he blames an infantilizing culture in parenting and academia, and I particularly liked this bit:

They're not better educated, they just have more degrees. Were you smarter at 21 post college than your Dad was at 21? And whatever the difference, was it worth the $50k-$200k he paid to get you it? No, but every parent of a high school kid I've talked to about this says the same thing: "I know, I know, but I just want her to get that piece of paper." So work this out in your head: either this parent is a solitary genius who is the sole possessor of the knowledge that the college degree is merely a brand and not a mark of knowledge; or every employer in the world already knows this. So if we all agree the degree doesn't mean anything close to what we are pretending it means, then what's the point of piling on? Isn't this technically a Ponzi scheme?

I've used the phrase "paperwork arms race" before to discuss exactly this phenomenon, but calling it a Ponzi scheme is pithier. In my field, I've taken a master's degree to get exactly where my father was with 2 bachelors degrees, and where someone in his father's generation could have been with a high school diploma. In the industry I'm discussing, one more generation back would take you to the point where high school dropouts were doing the work.

Yes, some tasks have gotten more complicated because of new technology--but the people who have problems with new technology are definitely not the young people entering the workforce, ergo much of this academic training is deadweight.

That said, I'm always wary of "cultural" explanations for things that can be explained more directly. For example, from the Financial Times:

Unsurprisingly, a growing majority of Americans have been telling pollsters that they expect their children to be worse off than they are. During the three postwar decades, which many now look back on as the golden era of the American middle class, the rising tide really did lift most boats – as John F. Kennedy put it. Incomes grew in real terms by almost 2 per cent a year – almost doubling each generation.

And although the golden years were driven by the rise of mass higher education, you did not need to have graduated from high school to make ends meet. Like her husband, Connie Freeman was raised in a “working-class” home in the Iron Range of northern Minnesota near the Canadian border. Her father, who left school aged 14 following the Great Depression of the 1930s, worked in the iron mines all his life. Towards the end of his working life he was earning $15 an hour – more than $40 in today’s prices.

Thirty years later, Connie, who is far better qualified than her father, having graduated from high school and done one year of further education, makes $17 an hour. The pace of life has also changed: “We used to sit around the dinner table every evening when I was growing up,” says Connie, who speaks with prolonged vowels of the Midwest. “Nowadays that’s sooooo rare.”

The Last Psychiatrist spent much of his post spanking a relatively privileged kids who was offered a starting salary of $40k a year, and said no because he thought he deserved something better, recession notwithstanding. So yeah, we can all laugh at him (anyone want to pay me 40K? I'll take it!) but we could laugh at the stupidity of the privileged, melanin-deficient classes till the cows come home--it wouldn't change the fact that for the much larger number of people, the middle-class dream is actually, objectively out of reach.

Asking everyone to take 3 years of school after high school before they can even expect to start making a liveable wage--much less a comfortable one--is actually an imposition, especially when there's so little evidence it's necessary. Yes, the wage premium for a post-secondary education has increased dramatically in the last 30 years, but for what? So the middle class can work at 1/3 of the wages their lesser-educated parents did?

What we've seen in North America is not an expansion of middle-wage jobs that one can secure with, say, a 3-year post-secondary program. Instead, we've seen a vast expansion of low-wage jobs and a smaller expansion of high-skill, high-wage jobs--the middle class dream is disappearing because there are less middle-class jobs. Talking about "culture" and "infantilized adults" can illuminate some thing--indeed, I do think I am probably less "adult" than my father (and I'm sure he didn't think he was ready at all for 3 kids by 31! But that's only two years away for me.) But I think the objective facts of the economy are far more powerful.

Indeed, when there are fewer middle-class jobs that one can get with a realistic skill set coming out of high school, you would expect people to take longer to "grow up", if we define growing up as job, marriage, house, etc. Nothing matures you like actually having to do something.

Sometimes, humans do stupid things: FILM AT 11

2010-07-28T18:04:00.004-04:00

Matthew Yglesias notes that driving a car is very likely to kill your child. Yes, you--you in the back, dangling your remote starter, waiting for the lecture to be over. This is actually a really important point: owning a car is basically the leading cause of death for children.

Don't believe me? Here's the Center for Disease Control's statistics for causes of death in 2007 (I assume 2007 is the latest year for which complete data is available.)

So, "unintentional injury" is the leading cause of death, ahead of homicide by a country mile. Note for a moment that "only" 2,285 children died of homicides that year. What, exactly, makes up "unintentional injury"?

More than twice as many children are killed in traffic accidents as are murdered. The reasons for this are pretty simple: children don't die of heart disease or cancers (mostly) because they're not smokers or sedentary overeaters. (Yet.) So motor vehicle fatalities are the biggest remaining cause. And yet, people regularly choose to drive their children to school for fear of some trauma befalling their children on the way there. Because people don't regularly research childhood death statistics (and really, who would want to?) people don't realize that by unnecessarily putting their kids in a car, they're putting them in more danger, not less.

What's your most hated legacy policy?

2010-07-27T22:30:00.003-04:00

Scott Adams offers an interesting idea:

One of the biggest problems with the world is that we're bound by so many legacy systems. For example, it's hard to deal with global warming because there are so many entrenched interests. It's problematic to get power from where it can best be generated to where people live. The tax system is a mess. Banking is a hodgepodge of regulations and products glued together. I could go on. The point is that anything that has been around for awhile is a complicated and inconvenient mess compared to what its ideal form could be.

My idea for today is that established nations could launch startup countries within their own borders, free of all the legacy restrictions in the parent country.

Okay, so what legacy systems would we reform/kill?

Um, criminal justice in a big way. Between the number of offenses that make no sense in law, or the conditions in which we jail people, I really wonder if redeploying all of our efforts at incarceration towards simply putting more police on the streets to prevent crime would be more worthwhile, even if you assume that everyone who wasn't deterred got away with it. And that doesn't even get into issues of discrimination...

Telecommunications. AM, FM, Television, telephones, cell phones, all are increasingly irrelevant, or would be in a world where incumbent powers didn't own the best parts of the radio spectrum and the wired grid.

Here's one: end of life care in medicine. The inability to have a mature discussion about the end of our lives--between patients, doctors, and families--is absolutely a holdover from a different age (when medicine was usually powerless before a rapid death) and has serious real-world consequences for the survivors. Families are left heartbroken as their last months are spent with pale shadows of their former loved ones, and -- there's no way to put this that doesn't sound grisly -- their fellow citizens bear the costs, either directly or indirectly, of massively expensive treatments that all too frequently don't work, or add days to a person's life at the expense of weeks of painful treatments. See this Atul Gawande article for a truly depressing exploration.

Intellectual property: boy is this not working at all. A 20-year copyright would allow even the most avariciously successful artists to extract 99% of the value of the current system: only the longest of the long-tail successes would be hurt, but even then not by much. Paul Simon would no longer be getting cheques for his LPs with Art Garfunkel, but he would have continued to get beer money from Graceland until 2006. U2 would still be getting money for Achtung Baby until next year. A 50-year copyright would be almost indefensible in my view, but I'd still take it in a hot second as an alternative to what we have now, provided that we chiselled that bastard in stone.

And yes, then it too would become a hated legacy policy someone would be out to destroy.

Anyway, Adams' thought experiment has a lot in common with the philosophy behind the Seasteading Institute, who want to start ocean-borne colonies with the explicit purpose of escaping the legal and political restrictions on land. Though they're basically a bunch of glibertarian Galtists, there's part of the vision that really interests me.

Also, I'd sign up with the North Pacific Kibbutz and wait for the Galtists to collapse under their own ego. At which point we'd kindly offer to help them out, provided they learn the lyrics to the Internationale.

linkdump

2010-07-27T22:05:00.003-04:00

Solar power now cheaper than nuclear, according to Marxists at the NY Times.
Hey, the government killed an investigation in to pollution in the tar sands. Ho hum.
CYBORG ARM. CYBORG ARM!
Christ did not die on a cross?
A professor contemplates how, and why, he punished a student he caught plagiarizing.
And yes, let's please be careful about this whole shale gas bonanza.

From the mailbag

2010-07-20T22:37:00.002-04:00

Catelli writes:

"A common theme for defenders of the Afghanistan mission is that we have to stay to impose Western (or "Universal Human") values on an ignorant population.

Has any society successfully occupied another and imposed its values without a revolt or reversion after the occupiers leave? If so, how long did it take?"

Hm. It would be best to answer this question when I haven't spent the evening drinking with friends on a glorious summer night. But what fun would that be?

The quick answer would be no, I can't think of a single example of a country imposing its own values on a country without a revolt or reversion post-occupation. But the terms "values", "country", and "occupation" are all difficult to define. Japan, for example, very much made a pro-American transformation after the end of WWII, but frankly picking a date for the end of the occupation is at best arguable considering that Japan still operates under an unmolested constitution written by the staff of one Douglas MacArthur and, by the way, Japanese Prime Ministers are still regularly humiliated by the necessities of American foreign policy.

To go waaaaaay back, there's the Hellenistic age, where victorious Greeks spread their values throughout the known world and were dominant for a couple of centuries. Whether their values ever actually spread downwards from the elite strata is very, very doubtful. (Cleopatra was the first of the Hellenistic rulers of Egypt to ever bother learning the local language.)

There is, of course, the option of unrestricted killing, which has been remarkably successful in forcing European values on to the American landmass and which shows no sign of diminishing its powers here. That said, smallpox-infected blankets are a bit out of style these days.

None of these examples (with the possible exception of Alexander the Great) have a terrible amount of relevance to the example of Afghanistan. The one arguable success (Japan) had a number of preconditions that simply aren't being recreated: a previously-industrialized society that bought in to "western" norms of governance and politics, a postwar leadership that recognized the Americans as a lesser evil, and an American government that wasn't looking for an exit from the Pacific theatre.

So based on the examples I've given I'd say that if imposing our values is the reason we're in Afghanistan then boy howdy are we out of luck. That said, I don't actually think that's why NATO is there. America is, mostly, looking for an exit from Afghanistan and Iraq but can't fathom an endgame where they don't "win". The problem is that nobody has an agreed-upon definition of the verb "to win", as far as it applies to Afghanistan.

Atrios used to write that as far as George W. Bush understood it, leaving Iraq meant losing, so staying forever meant winning. The same basically applies to Afghanistan, given that the original victory condition (bin Laden's head on a pike) seems to have eluded us.

Obama has already demonstrated that, where the small stuff counts, he's able to face down the military. The big test will come when it comes time to admit that a) Afghanistan has been a failure and a waste, and b) we're leaving anyway.

happy dance

2010-07-19T23:13:00.002-04:00

Hey, nobody told me Chet was back! And I'd like to entirely endorse his argument here: Harper is trashing the long-form census because facts have a well-known liberal bias. No, I'm not kidding--look at the conservative reaction to the Statscan report 2 years ago which showed that income inequality continued its 30-year trend of getting worse in Canada. The hissy fit the right threw over the census data back then was bad enough--imagine what it would have shown as the Canadian economy went through a recession?

Well, that's all you'll be able to do--imagine. Because the Tories want it that way.

Two graphs

2010-07-19T22:41:00.005-04:00

Here's the first.

Here's the second.

Now, these are two graphs that concentrate a lot of complicated variables into very simple graphics. The first is the Keeling Curve, basically a measure of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. It has ticked upwards basically as long as we've been measuring it. When Charles David Keeling started in 1958, CO2 was at 315 ppm in the atmosphere. Now it's at 392 as of June 2010--a nearly 25% increase in 50 years.

The heat-trapping properties of CO2 have been understood for more than a century, and nothing has changed the basic scientific understanding that "more CO2 = more heat in the atmosphere". Yet, of course, as science becomes more precise the particular details of what "more heat" actually means are refined. But the same warning that the Charney Report gave 30 years ago remains fundamentally true: the effects are going to be major, negative, and unpredictable. Waiting to find out will mean waiting too late.

So that's Keeling.

The second graph is two variables instead of one: oil discoveries and oil consumption. There's continual argument about what and whether oil production will peak and decline in the imminent future--if I have any regular readers left, they'll know I am in the imminent camp--but the key argument can be distilled in much the same way climate change can be:

Before oil can be used, it needs to be discovered.

That's the big secret, and all the argument over when oil production peaks needs to be prefaced by that basic fact. Look again at the second graph. Oil discoveries peaked in the 1960s, have been on a long decline since then, and since the 1980s we've been using more oil every year than we've discovered. (There are some arguments about data sources, but the basic facts aren't really in contention.)

Of course, like climate change, there are lots of details that need to be sorted out--and they're crucially dependent on choices made in the real world, like whether Americans all decide to spend 10 years driving SUVs for no reason other than hastening the apocalypse.

Anybody who wants to argue against anthroprogenic climate change needs to argue that a) CO2 isn't rising (verifiably false) or b) the well-understood properties of CO2 are wrong (laughable.) Anyone who wants to argue against oil production peaking at all--and this is still a surprisingly prevalent opinion--needs to show where all the new oil is going to come from, and where Saudi-style volumes are being hidden. They should also try to explain how super-large reservoirs have stayed so well-hidden for so long.

This is all basic reasoning informed by a little bit of science. I mention it--repeating myself a little bit, I know--only because when you've got, say, climate scientists on the wrong end of death threats and oil companies demanding the unlimited right to destroy the planet in search of the last barrel of oil, it's worth going back to first principles.

He's really a vanilla kind of callous [Updated]

2010-07-08T12:51:00.005-04:00

Dalton McGuinty, Premier of Ontario:

“He told us, ‘Just remember, the same guy who gave us the Charter also gave us the War Measures Act,’” said one startled MPP, noting the premier also refuted calls from several members to strike a public inquiry into the G20 debacle.

McGuinty’s contrasting of Trudeau’s 1982 entrenchment of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Constitution to the former prime minister’s use of the War Measures Act during the 1970 October Crisis in Quebec was “bizarre,” said another member.

“Then things got even weirder—he said: ‘Don’t forget about the silent majority.’”

So many interesting things here. One, McGuinty's government is not known for its leaks from caucus--not saying they don't happen, just that it's not notorious the way other governments and parties have been. (See Dion, Stephane) So the fact that we're hearing this at all is, as Scott Tribe notes, itself noteworthy.

Two: if we're hearing about this now, it's because there's a lot more than just this grumbling in the Liberal caucus. I have exactly zero recent insider information about the politics of Queen's Park, but here's some supposition.

Many observers--including people in his own party--came away from the 2007 election victory convinced that McGuinty was not going to run again: he would serve out the rest of his term and then go on his way. This would make room for others who wanted to run (note what former Deputy Premier George Smitherman is doing instead this summer.) This was not just idle speculation: statements from McGuinty himself led many to believe this.

But, well, these jobs aren't often given up willingly. By anyone. Premier of Ontario is a pretty unimpressive title by the standards of international politics, but it's a damn sight better than "blogger sitting out the heatwave in his underpants", to pick an example entirely at random.

So McGuinty wanted to stay and get one more kick at the can. He must have rationalized it any number of ways -- "Ontario's not ready for a gay premier (Smitherman)", "only I've beaten Eves and Tory--who else is gonna beat Hudak", etc. But the long and short of it is if he leaves this job it's gonna be involuntary. Part of me believes, in fact, that the HST is basically McGuinty's insurance policy: even if there was a credible challenge to his leadership (and there really isn't now) they sure as hell don't want to wear the HST in the next election. So let the Old Man have his chance. Hey, there's always an election in 2015, and how much trouble could the Tories do in 4 years?

So you've got a bunch of people in his caucus who wake up every morning thinking they could be Premier if only... Add in a lot of anxiety over the HST, a new eco-fee the province hasn't really told anyone about, and the unpleasantness over the G20. The fact that we're seeing caucus leaks spill out on to the pages of the Star is about all of this and none of it.

What it's really about is Liberals wishing McGuinty had done the honorable thing and taken an early bow. They'd like to go in to the next election with a Premier who the public hasn't seen every day for 8 years, who isn't saddled with questions about basic honesty to the voters, who can say more than just "Remember Mike Harris? I'm not him!" [1]

Liberals would like to say all of that, but they won't be able to unless they lose the next election.

[1] Liberals really, really like to forget that Mike Harris won this province twice--besting McGuinty to do it the 2nd time. For a lot of people, saying "I'm not Mike Harris" is a con, not a pro.

UPDATE: An actually-informed source draws my attention to two things about this story. One, it's unclear how many anonymous sources this story is drawing on, but it's at least two and as many as four, though one of these is from outside caucus. A careful reading suggests there's less to this story than meets the eye, at least as far as grumbling within caucus goes. Two grumbling MPPs does not a caucus revolt make.

But two, and this is something I should have caught on the first reading, take the Nixonian element out of the "silent majority" quote. This should actually be setting off alarm bells in the party for a different reason: the use of the phrase "silent majority" is a dead giveaway for a government that is losing (or lost) touch with the electorate.

Those two things are my better-informed interlocutor talking, but to expand on this a bit: we actually have pretty good ways of measuring public opinion, and have for most of the last century. Governments rely on these measures daily, so when a leader says he's relying on "the silent majority", that's a different way of saying he's listening to the voices in his head.

Just as a for example, Ernie Eves and Stephen Harper were proud to address a pro-Iraq War rally in April 2003 that called on the "silent majority of Canadians" to back the US. Harper said the same thing to CTV.

Of course, there is not and never has been a "silent majority" of Canadians clamoring to board that particular train. A poll in March 2003 showed nearly three-quarters of Canadians opposed and it was just as unpopular a year later, if not more so. Ernie Eves would learn what the actual majority of Ontarians wanted later that year when he lost to the current Premier.

It appears Dalton McGuinty now needs to learn the lessons that Eves did in 2003. And it's terribly sad to have to write that sentence.

Nine years to make a dustier Beirut

2010-06-27T22:54:00.003-04:00

That's all I can think when I read this:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan is exploiting the troubled United States military effort in Afghanistan to drive home a political settlement with Afghanistan that would give Pakistan important influence there but is likely to undermine United States interests, Pakistani and American officials said....

Pakistan is presenting itself as the new viable partner for Afghanistan to President Hamid Karzai, who has soured on the Americans. Pakistani officials say they can deliver the network of Sirajuddin Haqqani, an ally of Al Qaeda who runs a major part of the insurgency in Afghanistan, into a power-sharing arrangement.

In addition, Afghan officials say, the Pakistanis are pushing various other proxies, with General Kayani personally offering to broker a deal with the Taliban leadership.

Boy, nothing screams stability and prosperity like "tri-partite power sharing between heavily armed factions in a narco-state".

No, wait, that doesn't sound right at all.

So, if this comes through the endgame will be more or less what people predicted years ago: the Taliban win, in that they survive and return to some kind of operation power. (I continue to believe that Karzai's position within any power-sharing arrangement will be brief, and possibly end on a lightpost.) Pakistan maintains its strategic depth in Afghanistan, and India gets a little more boxed in.

Sure makes the last few dozen dead Canadians worth it, doesn't it?

China's role in Middle Earth

2010-06-24T13:53:00.003-04:00

Middle Earth here meaning, roughly, "places that aren't rich & white, or Japan." Three data points.

1) Sometime in 2002-2003, African GDP started going rapidly upwards in a way it had not for some time. This is easily attributable to the commodity boom sparked by the Chinese economy. Whether this is an accurate attribution is another thing, but I think most leaders would perceive it that way.

2) China played a little-noticed, but vital, role in ending Sri Lanka's civil war on behalf of the Sinhalese. See especially this line:

Suddenly, thanks to China's diplomacy, the hectoring of the US and Europe didn't matter any more. After nearly 500 years under the thumb of the West, the immensely strategic little island in the Indian Ocean had a new sugar daddy...

Now, though this is far less direct, see the reports of Turkey becoming increasingly more independent of US wishes.

Turkey is seen increasingly in Washington as “running around the region doing things that are at cross-purposes to what the big powers in the region want,” said Steven A. Cook, a scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations. The question being asked, he said, is “How do we keep the Turks in their lane?”

One quote does not a foreign policy make, but the NYT quoting the CFR is really as close to a formal statement of policy as you need.

The point isn't that China is pulling strings in Ankara -- hell, the Chinese have a warmer relationship with Jerusalem. The point is that China's mere existence -- even outside of areas where it's acting directly -- creates space for other smaller powers to act independent of the US's wishes.

The example of Sri Lanka is interesting to me because it happened in the context of a decade of US efforts to improve relations with India -- the one bright spot in Dubya's foreign policy. What does that do? Does India value a calmer southern coast? Or are they more concerned about the possibility of a Chinese naval presence in "their" waters?

I don't know.

Link-clearing

2010-06-24T13:03:00.002-04:00

Jesus, I'm a lazy blogger.

Pseudo-science deployed against wind power is crap.
You know how I knew that the National Post's Lawrence Solomon wrote a crappy hit piece that dishonestly portrayed a legit science article? Because it was written by the Post's Lawrence Solomon.
The Republican Party faces a whole bunch of structural problems.
Given the news that the BP well cap failed and had to be replaced today, it's worth saying that it might be entirely unfixable.
Hey, genetic engineering fungus to help rice yields. I am ambivalent on GM foods as a concept, but always on the lookout for specific examples that look promising.
I am cautiously optimistic about the capacity of aquaculture to feed people in the future, and entirely, hopelessly pessimistic about its capacity to save wild fish. In any case, here's a NYT article about the soon-to-be-extinct tuna, and here's the MP3 link to a Quirks and Quarks piece about fish farming.

Probably like arugula

2010-06-17T11:41:00.001-04:00

John Cole makes life worth living:

Uttering anything more complicated than “Drill, baby, drill” makes you an elitist. Apparently Obama should have grabbed his balls and said “Don’t worry, ‘Murica. We’re gittin ‘er done!”

Context here.

Ooh, more data on the merger idea

2010-06-10T12:39:00.003-04:00

..but before I get to that, I'd like to take a purposeful digression to Dan Arnold's Mark piece about rebuilding the Liberals out west:

But there’s no reason the Liberal party can’t compete in large- and mid-sized cities in the four western provinces. The same types of people who vote Liberal elsewhere – older women, immigrants, well-educated Canadians – all live there.

And if you think westerners are just more conservative in nature, try telling that to the recent NDP governments in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and B.C. Hell, Edmonton is nicknamed “Redmonton” by Albertans.

I respect anyone who's willing to grapple with the fact that, yes, the Liberals are substantively unpopular in many parts of the country and this is not solely due to NDP intransigence.

That said, Arnold makes a little crack at the merger hubbub at his blog:

I foolishly overlooked the idea of blowing up the party as a solution, suggesting instead that the Liberals need to expand their support base outside of the GTA.

I noticed this only because there's yet another poll out about an NDP/Liberal merger, coalition, or cooperation of some kind. Harris-Decima has a poll (PDF) showing that:

14% of Canadians support a post-election coalition between the parties
13% support a merger before the next election, and
28% support an electoral non-compete agreement.

I kind of feel like an electoral pact is sort of like a gateway drug to an eventual party merger: get your voters used to the idea of one slate of candidates, even if they technically have different party names.

More intriguingly, throughout the west there seems to be a correlation between support for merger and support for an electoral pact: in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, the numbers are pretty close with the caveat that Alberta's higher Conservative numbers bring the "no cooperation at all" numbers higher than elsewhere. British Columbia looks a lot closer to Ontario, perhaps because the two provinces aren't quite the electoral wasteland for the Liberals as the stretch between Thunder Bay and the Rockies.

Arnold may have only been making a joke, but I'd bet he's actually very correct: the stark choice is either rebuild Liberal numbers in AB/SK/MB or see some kind of merging of the parties.

re: mergers and acquisitions

2010-06-10T10:28:00.003-04:00

1) While I still think the idea is basically a non-starter, the idea of a Liberal-NDP merger just keeps getting kicked around. Especially funny is the idea that the Liberals, in courting the NDP, would demand that it renounce socialism and embrace the mixed economy and accept Michael Ignatieff as leader. Sooo... if the NDP were willing to do all that, why wouldn't they have simply all signed Liberal membership cards?

2) Something to ask yourself when considering political mergers: in what year did Harper's Conservatives actually exceed the 2000 combined national vote for the old Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties?

Answer: a trick question--Harper still hasn't exceeded the combined political appeals of those electoral leviathans, Joe Clark and Stockwell Day.

1993, PC & Reform: 34.73%
1997, PC & Reform: 38.19%
2000, PC & CA total: 37.68%
2004, Conservative: 29.63%
2006: 36.27%
2008: 37.65%

The numbers are pretty clear: even with Sheila Fraser's help, the immediate impact of the merger between right and righter was for Harper to underperform the combined vote of Kim Campbell and Preston Manning. (!!!) People remember old Tories like Joe Clark heading for the doors, right?

A similar dynamic would undoubtedly play out in any NDP merger, especially with the existence of the Greens today.

There's some argument to be made for trying to unite the left, but the Liberal conditions that have been mentioned are ridiculous on their face, and a party that was actually capable of any kind of critical inquiry in to its circumstances would realize that.

One poll isn't conclusive, but it's all the data we've got so far so take a look at the Angus Reid poll from two weeks ago: In every merger scenario, the Tories gain -- but they gain the most if Michael Ignatieff is the leader of a merged party, and gain the least is Jack Layton is the leader. The Layton Hypothetical is the closest the merged party comes to actually keeping 100% of the separate party vote.

Now, this is not because Layton is a political genius, but because of something much more basic: Canadian politics has already been half-sorted. There are no more significant electoral gains for the Liberals on the centre-right. Old Joe Clark Tories have, more or less, been convinced that the new Conservatives are not gonna burn the place down, and have made their peace. That's why, in these hypotheticals, the Conservatives gain so little from exiled blue Liberals: there simply aren't that many left in Canada. (There are a shit-ton left in the Liberal Party, of course, and they're incredibly influential, but that's a separate issue.)

If there's going to be a single opposition to the Canadian Conservative party, the votes are going to have to be won on the left, not the right or even the centre. This has been the case for, oh, at least four years. Whether the Liberals are ready to learn this lesson or would instead prefer to lose another election and then blame the rest of us for not jumping on the Ignatieff bandwagon, is a question I leave for you.

Thoughts on one of my wedding gifts, and mortality

2010-06-08T23:31:00.002-04:00

1) The existence of the Playstation 3 makes me resent the fuck out of young people today. If I had the kind of free time today I did when I was 13...

2) Speaking of, I've now reached the age where putting aside enough time to finish even one level of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 feels like a real victory for leisure over the rest of my life.

3) At some point in the future, I will yell at a child of mine to turn off that damn video game. Shortly thereafter, I will have to begin planning my father's funeral, because he will actually die of unending, pitiless laughter.

Oh, and by the way

2010-06-06T22:52:00.002-04:00

Was radio silent because I got married on May 29th. There were Stormtroopers. And the officiant used the words "by the power of Grayskull", as previously agreed.

Aside from that, I can't really remember much.

My wife is already well on the way to winning the marriage, with the following quote: "Look: I'm married now, so I'm gonna get fat. I'm gonna be a fat motherfucker. I'm gonna wash myself with a rag on a stick."

I swear I wasn't even saying anything about her weight.

A rather important point

2010-05-21T14:07:00.003-04:00

In the libertarian universe[1], it's a terrible affront to liberty to force a businessman to accept black customers. It is entirely acceptable to send a black man to jail for trespassing if he should try and force the matter.[2]

[1] I know there are lefty small-government types. To avoid confusion, I tend to call them anarchists in the Emma Goldman variety. Rand, and the white, wealthy conservatives who are uber-concerned about the Civil Rights Act, are libertarians.

[2] This is especially relevant in an age--like the 1950s, and increasingly today--where public services were/are delivered by private means. For example, Rosa Parks was riding a privately-owned bus (delivering a public service in contract to a city government) when she refused to give up her seat.

There's nothing hard about justifying your own privilege

2010-05-20T13:34:00.002-04:00

....asshole.

PAUL: You had to ask me the "but." I don't like the idea of telling private business owners -- I abhor racism. I think it's a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant -- but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership. But I absolutely think there should be no discrimination in anything that gets any public funding, and that's most of what I think the Civil Rights Act was about in my mind.

"[T]his," Paul said, "is the hard part about believing in freedom."

Yes, of course there's nothing braver in life than arguing against laws that would restrain your ability to reinforce white power over blacks. Can't think of a thing.

Am I the only one who finds the whole schtick, primarily by conservatives these days, of feigning bravery by telling white conservative men exactly what they want to hear repulsive?

Oh. My. God.

2010-05-20T12:52:00.002-04:00

I suppose it's not like its a disqualifying lapse, but it truly is bizarre how a US Senator could be totally ignorant of certain staples of modern living. It certainly doesn't give me any confidence that these guys and a few ladies know how to properly regulate derivatives or photovoltaic solar panels.

So, how likely are we to make the planet uninhabitable?

2010-05-19T15:35:00.002-04:00

If the status quo persists, about 5%. Or, to rephrase,

The bottom line conclusion is that there is a small - of order 5% - risk of global warming creating a situation in which a large fraction of the planet was uninhabitable (in the sense that if you were outside for an extended period during the hottest days of the year, even in the shade with wet clothing, you would die). To give you a feeling for the likely uninhabitable regions... it includes most of the eastern US, much of inland Brazil and Latin America, tropical Africa, pretty much all of India, portions of northern China, and most of Australia. Plenty to qualify as a "Risk to Global Civilization", I think.

We are, it's clear, currently in a "do nothing serious about climate change" mode. If this continues, we're looking at CO2 concentrations going up, close to quadrupling pre-industrial levels, and putting us very much in the apocalypse. 1000 ppm would certainly ruin the oceans from acidification alone. This paper just demonstrates that some of the most densely populated parts of the planet would also die.

This is all conceivable by 2100, 2150 tops. That's the status quo.

Jeffrey Simpson is correct about something

2010-05-18T14:59:00.002-04:00

The annual dance about cod fishing in the east is basically a joke. What's more, any serious observer of the collapse of the cod fishery needs to grapple with what this means for stuff like climate change: even after a world-historical economic calamity, the forces pushing to hammer the last nail in to the ecology are stronger than the forces of conservation.

To put it another way, if we can't get cod right, what makes anyone think we will get oil and coal right?

Somebody, wrong on the Internets

2010-05-17T16:35:00.002-04:00

I think this is possibly the funniest thing I've seen in a while. The CBC writes a story about how Ottawa's bikelanes -- you know, parts of the road explicitly reserved for cyclists -- have actually contributed to cyclists getting hit because they are poorly designed and poorly signed. One of the comments starts off with this gem:

Bike's [sic] shouldn't be on the road, they should stay on sidewalks.

This is, in a nutshell, what kills me about the car's war on cyclists, pedestrians, basically everyone who uses their feet for something other than working the gas and brakes: the mentality that the roads built by all of us, for all of us, belong exclusively to cars. It doesn't seem to occur to this commenter that it is, in fact, illegal for most cyclists to ride on the sidewalk. They just want all non-car traffic out of the way.

Well, nuts to that with a big side of fuck you. I helped pay for the roads just as much as anyone else, and unlike most of Toronto's commuters anyway, I actually live here. So yes, I'll continue to ride on roads whether there's a bike lane or not, because riding a bike ought to be as easy and convenient as driving a car.

Just keep saying the words "energy superpower", Canadians

2010-05-17T12:54:00.002-04:00

What Canada could do about green energy if it was serious:

Canada could technically meet all its electricity needs and dramatically lower greenhouse-gas emissions if it moved aggressively to develop enhanced geothermal power projects, according to the first comprehensive assessment of the country’s deep geothermal resources.

The study, published online in the Journal of Geophysics and Geoengineering, reports on the potential of using enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) to tap hot temperatures kilometres below the earth’s surface as a way of generating clean electricity.

It found that the most promising Canadian sites are located in parts of British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan at depths ranging from 3.5 to 6.5 kilometres. Drill deeper, however, and the potential extends right across the country – including parts of Ontario.

What we're actually doing instead:

The successful development of Canada's tar sands has triggered a rush by Shell and other oil companies to set up similar operations in Russia, Congo and even Madagascar, a new report reveals.

Soaring crude prices and an growing shortage of drilling sites have encouraged the energy industry to look at a series of "unconventional" hydrocarbon deposits threatening vulnerable environment and communities in places such as Jordan, Morocco as well as the US, Friends of the Earth says in a review called Tar sands – fuelling the energy crisis.

So nice to be a testing ground for one of the most destructive forms of energy extraction in history, all so we can make the lives of people around the world miserable.

That's why we voted for him

2010-05-13T13:30:00.002-04:00

...his dickish sense of humour. The Daily Show, awesome.

China, er, swims up

2010-04-30T12:30:00.000-04:00

Wired has an interesting post about how the Chinese Navy (The People's Liberation Army Navy) has been stepping up its game in the last year:

The South China Morning Post recently reported that destroyers, frigates, and auxiliary ships from the North Sea Fleet (based in Qingdao) passed through the Bashi Strait between the Philippines and Taiwan to conduct a major “confrontation exercise” in the South China Sea. A few days later, Sovremenny guided missile destroyers, frigates, and submarines from the East Sea Fleet (based in Ningbo) passed through Japan’s Miyako Strait without warning Tokyo and conducted anti-submarine warfare exercises in the Pacific waters southeast of Japan. There have also been reports of naval aviators from several bases in the Nanjing and Guangzhou military regions conducting long-range exercises that incorporated radar jamming, night flying, mid-air refueling, and simulated bombing runs in the South China Sea.

I don't really see the case for alarmism here. Not asking Japan's permission may be the international equivalent of a dick move, but it's hardly "aggressive". Both passages are several hundred miles across open waters, and while I understand Taipei probably doesn't like the idea of the Chinese fleet going flanking the island on both sides, you could literally write the above paragraph if the Chinese Navy had sailed in any direction: China has a ton of contested water borders around it.

Considering the US maintains that it doesn't have to ask Canada's permission to send warships through the Arctic archipelago, they're hardly in a position to complain about China doing something that is, frankly, far less obnoxious.

Still, worth noting and very interesting to see Chinese naval competence growing in leaps and bounds.

Well said

2010-04-30T10:17:00.000-04:00

Daniel Davies:

In related news, note that the main issue the ratings agencies have is the Greek pension liability, and the main component of the austerity measures will end up being a reform of the pension system. The sovereign bond market is a curious place, where 'He's willing to cheat his own grandmother, that one', can be a mark of the utmost probity.

That was fun

2010-04-27T16:49:00.000-04:00

Watching Miliken dismantle the government's arguments against disclosing torture documents was really, really, really satisfying. I mean, that was relentless. Government cites A? Here's the same A, from two pages later. There was a barely repressed "I can't believe I have to fucking tell you people this" quality which was really nice to see.

I liked Paul Wells' reaction, from Twitter:

The government can have as many Cheney fans as it likes. Canada remains a parliamentary system. That's not a direct quote.

I suspect we're now only about 72 hours from an election call. Because that's how this PM rolls. In the meantime, Miliken's proposed 14 days deadline for the parties to find some amicable way to move forward seems quaint -- the solution has been obvious for months, but Miliken thinks Harper is going to blink now?

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding things. Miliken's offer puts Harper's petulance in a pretty bad light, if he chooses to go to the polls now. So maybe it's more like this.

Miliken to Harper: Am I not merciful?

In which I call Stephen Hawking dumb

2010-04-27T11:52:00.002-04:00

I suspect this is incorrect.

(AP) -- British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking says aliens are out there, but it could be too dangerous for humans to interact with extraterrestrial life.

Hawking claims in a new documentary that intelligent alien lifeforms almost certainly exist, but warns that communicating with them could be "too risky."

The 68-year-old scientist says a visit by extraterrestrials to Earth would be like Christopher Columbus arriving in the Americas, "which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans."

He speculates most extraterrestrial life will be similar to microbes, or small animals - but adds advanced lifeforms may be "nomads, looking to conquer and colonize."

The most convincing counter-argument to this, I think, is Gerard K O'Neill's argument from 2084:

1) Destroying a non-spacefaring civilization would be pitifully easy for a society of even modest star-crossing abilities.

2) We have not been destroyed.

Therefore, either

A) Aliens do not exist.

B) They exist, but are unable to harm us.

C) They exist, but are unwilling/not inclined to do so.

This isn't terribly hard thinking. I don't know how the Conquistador analogy is even supposed to work, really. There's literally nothing on Earth that would be worth the effort of taking that you couldn't get from the asteroid belt or outer solar system.

This is awesome, I'm stupid

2010-04-26T15:27:00.000-04:00

via Lifehacker, this app for Android phones is pretty cool.

While watching the video, I actually thought to myself, "boy, detailed star maps like that would make navigation a breeze..." thinking of course of old-timey stellar navigation.

Took me a few seconds to remember the app only works with GPS.

A case of self-parody

2010-04-22T12:02:00.002-04:00

Now, nobody goes to read the Corner for the broad intellectual debate. But this is a little funny. Mark Levin, a man who manages to make Jonah Goldberg look like an honest broker of knowledge, wrote a crappy book with an especially crappy chapter on climate change. Jim Manzi, a conservative who nevertheless takes some interest in the facts of anthropogenic climate change, responds.

I’m not expert on many topics the book addresses, so I flipped to its treatment of a subject that I’ve spent some time studying — global warming — in order to see how it treated a controversy in which I’m at least familiar with the various viewpoints and some of the technical detail.

It was awful. It was so bad that it was like the proverbial clock that chimes 13 times — not only is it obviously wrong, but it is so wrong that it leads you to question every other piece of information it has ever provided.

Levin argues that human-caused global warming is nothing to worry about, and merely an excuse for the Enviro-Statists (capitalization in the original) to seize more power. It reads like a bunch of pasted-together quotes and stories based on some quick Google searches by somebody who knows very little about the topic, and can’t be bothered to learn.

Oh man, I love that line about a clock that chimes 13 times. Manzi was doing this all in the spirit of intellectual honesty among ideological colleagues: legitimate self-criticism is a key part of a vibrant movement, right?

Wrong. The reaction to Manzi's post has been blunt, to say the least. Let's just say Manzi will be joining Frum in the outcasts.

Let's make it a nerdier day than usual

2010-04-21T12:38:00.002-04:00

Just in case the ladies in the crowd weren't swayed by a short post about Dune and Kim Stanley Robinson, let's talk about the new space policies that Obama announced last week.

1) More money for science, which makes the first time a new launch vehicle has been proposed for NASA without a "slaughter of the innocents" that happened during the Shuttle development and, yes, had begun during the Bush Mars plans. This is a very good thing.

2) Speaking of: the Ares plan is being junked, and most of the Constellation architecture with it -- this is probably a good thing. The rocket derived from the Shuttle SRBs was already behind schedule and over budget, and there were serious questions about its ability to do any serious job. In the mean time, the US will rely on commercial operators and (GASP!) the Russkies if necessary.

Important to point out that it might not be necessary: SpaceX and their Falcon 9/Dragon system will be able to put 7 people in orbit when they're operational. Of course, they need money fast if they're going to have all systems go in the next year or two. You know what would probably bring investors in? The US government comitting to buy access to the ISS through a private corporation after the Shuttle is retired.

3) The really good stuff: Manned missions to a near-Earth asteroid, and Mars by the 2030s. I'd obviously love a more ambitious timeline, but the Moon is out and for good reason. The Moon has basically no relevance to training people to live on Mars (Antarctica is more similar!) and what you really need is long-duration tests of crew and equipment in real-world scenarious, like what a long mission to an Asteroid can provide. (Here I disagree with Phil Plait, who wishes the Moon were back on the menu.)

This puts NASA back where it belongs, on the frontier. Having NASA -- or the state, broadly -- operating something like a space truck seems like a poor choice, especially when the truck in question (the Shuttle) was such a mongrel machine. The private sector, after a bunch of fits and starts in the late 1990s, actually looks ready to take over the role of routine access to low Earth orbit.

Christ. Re-reading that sentence just made me smile. The future's late, but it's coming.

A future for the wilderness

2010-04-21T12:17:00.002-04:00

Interesting article in the LA Times about the 45th anniversary of Dune's publication. I liked this bit about how it inspired one of my favourite authors, Kim Stanley Robinson.

Many consider Robinson's trilogy about the terra-forming of Mars the best-realized exercise in the form since Herbert's. Robinson calls "Dune" a big influence: The book showed him, he says, that "you could talk about the future of the wilderness. It gave me courage. I knew that people were willing to read at great length and that the world could be a character."

But Herbert's future vision of a galaxy with numerous populated worlds seems out of step with the deflated present. "The future," says Robinson, "doesn't look to be off-planet in any near-future time frame."

That the world could be a character. When I tell people that I came to my environmentalism via science fiction, that's what I mean. Sure, a lot of SF is explicitly anti-green. But some of it is capable of giving us a sense of place, an a meaningful one, that we can take back to the real world when we're done.

Yeah, but what does he know

2010-04-19T11:26:00.002-04:00

Legendary energy investor says the shale gas cornucopia is basically all misplaced optimism:

Because, he contends, shale gas – the previously unattainable source of vast gas supplies that has been unlocked by new high-tech horizontal drilling advancements – is not the holy grail it's been cracked up to be. Not even close.

“Everyone thinks [shale gas] is going to solve all of our problems. There are very optimistic estimates about the economically recoverable volumes of gas from this new resource,” he said in an interview last week in the Toronto offices of boutique fund manager Middlefield Capital Corp., where he's a long-time consultant and is special adviser to the nine-month-old Middlefield Groppe Tactical Energy mutual fund.

“That's dominating everyone's views about the gas supply picture – that we're going to be flooded with gas.”

The reality, he argues, is that shale gas deposits are a tiny part of the North American production pool – and they are already depleting fast.

Mr. Groppe says that while the average depletion rate in conventional gas wells is about 25 per cent (in other words, if you didn't drill at all for new wells, production would decline by a quarter each year), shale gas shows even more rapid depletion – output tumbles, on average, 45 per cent in the first year for shale wells.

So, we're looking at heading back to natural gas scarcity in the near future, at the same time as oil scarcity gets worse. Wheee.

Camera test

2010-04-18T21:38:00.002-04:00

Testing, testing, testing...

Unamused cat is unamused.

Wild

2010-04-18T21:28:00.002-04:00

As always, I bring you last week's news -- today!

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Hewlett-Packard scientists on Thursday are to report advances in the design of a new class of diminutive switches capable of replacing transistors as computer chips shrink closer to the atomic scale.

The devices, known as memristors, or memory resistors, were conceived in 1971 by Leon O. Chua, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, but they were not put into effect until 2008 at the H.P. lab here.

They are simpler than today’s semiconducting transistors, can store information even in the absence of an electrical current and, according to a report in Nature, can be used for both data processing and storage applications.

The researchers previously reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had devised a new method for storing and retrieving information from a vast three-dimensional array of memristors. The scheme could potentially free designers to stack thousands of switches in a high-rise fashion, permitting a new class of ultradense computing devices even after two-dimensional scaling reaches fundamental limits.

They also have a plan to build an electronic brain with as many artificial neurons as a cat's brain.

Because as any cat owner will tell you, there's absolutely no possible way that building an artificial cat brain could go wrong. I know! Let's hook it up to the nuclear launch forces!

The dirty little secret behind the Terminator franchise: Skynet only wanted tuna.

How to Train Your Dragon

2010-04-17T22:29:00.001-04:00

This is a very, very good movie. Lots of fun, excellent animation, and really good writing. Shockingly, the hero's choices don't just all resolve themselves -- even in victory, there are lasting, believable consequences for him. About the only quibble is that the Vikings have Scottish accents. Part of me is choosing to believe they converted to Vikingism for the chicks.

Also, if you've never dreamt about riding a dragon I don't even wanna know you.

Who we, white man?

2010-04-16T09:29:00.002-04:00

So, who do our former Prime Ministers hang out with these days? Let's check out the Globe and Mail:

Between German felons and the Saudis, I wonder what's next for dear Brian.

Tab clearing, April 15 2010 edition

2010-04-15T12:03:00.001-04:00

It's rather important to note that badly designed communities are required by law throughout the world.
Also important to note: Meteorologists are not climatologists, any more than reporters are historians.
Yup, 1m sea level rise by 2100 is the new normal.
The lengths to which the media will go to ignore race in US politics is really astounding.
Hydrogen-boron fusion may be easier than previously theorized.

Gimme that old time religion

2010-04-14T12:12:00.000-04:00

The Catholic Church's sensitivity training really pays off.

Last week, retired Bishop Giacomo Babini of the Italian town of Grosseto told the Catholic Pontifex website that the Catholic pedophile scandal is being orchestrated by the “eternal enemies of Catholicism, namely the freemasons and the Jews, whose mutual entanglements are not always easy to see through. … I think that it is primarily a Zionist attack, in view of its power and refinement. They do not want the church, they are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God-killers.”

For when I get my spaceship

2010-04-14T11:43:00.000-04:00

Watery, rocky planets may be common in the Milky Way. That is all.

White dwarf stars are the endpoint of stellar evolution for the vast majority (>90%) of all stars in the Milky Way, including our Sun. Because they should have essentially pure hydrogen or pure helium atmospheres, if heavier elements are found then these must be external pollutants.

Instead, rocky planetary debris is almost certainly the culprit in most or all cases.

The new work indicates that at least 3% and perhaps as much as 20% of all white dwarfs are contaminated in this way, with the debris most likely in the form of rocky minor planets with a total mass of about that of a 140 km diameter asteroid.

Bunch a hippies, I tells ya

2010-04-14T11:35:00.001-04:00

The US Joint Forces Command sounds like a bunch a treehuggers.

"By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day," says the report, which has a foreword by a senior commander, General James N Mattis.

It adds: "While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India."

Actually, the whole document (PDF) is kinda wild, because it reads like the military has been subscribing to TheOilDrum for a few years now.

No, it won't be easy at all

2010-04-13T11:42:00.000-04:00

One of the reactions to Paul Krugman's eco-econ piece last weekend that I've liked the most is from Stuart Staniford (via Kevin Drum.)

US trend economic growth in recent decades is about 3% a year. ... Now, if the economy is going to be a bit more than three times larger, but we are only going to emit 17% of the current level of carbon emissions, then the carbon intensity of the economy - that is the ratio of carbon emitted per dollar of goods and services created, is going to have to be only 5% of the current value.

That's his response to the idea that we'll be able to wring the carbon out of our economy easily by 2050. Needless to say, while I believe that a) this is probably doable and b) it's damn important that we try, I think Staniford does a service by pointing out how difficult it will in fact be.

Basically, we'd need to have efficiency grow twice as fast as it's ever done in American history, consistently, for decades, and the fastest growth in energy efficiency came during a series of recessions known as the 1970s. To say that this is going to be easily accomplished is stretching things, to say the least.

The other point I'd make is that the enormity of the task really makes a mockery of the standard policy prescriptions. If you think that the magical market fairy will make the kinds of dramatic carbon cuts that the situation requires so long as we put a carbon tax in, well, best of luck to you. It might have been sufficient 20 years ago, if then. These days anything short of some serious national efforts (including nationalizing certain industries, massive subsidies, and draconian rationing of things like cars) will probably fail.

That said, Kevin Drum's response to Staniford is a good one to keep in mind:

Well, look: three degrees of temperature increase is still better then five degrees. Six inches of sea rise is better than 12 inches. A hundred million dead is better than a billion dead. This stuff is worth doing even if it's not perfect. After all, what is?

This actually constitutes rapid response for the Church

2010-04-12T10:08:00.000-04:00

VATICAN CITY—The Vatican has finally made peace with the Beatles.

The Vatican newspaper says the members’ “dissolute” lives and John Lennon’s boastful claim that the band was more popular than Jesus are in the past, while their music lives on.

Friday Funny

2010-04-09T16:29:00.000-04:00

WASHINGTON—Citing a mutually shared vision of health care in America, congressional Republicans and the deadly bone-marrow cancer leukemia announced a joint effort Wednesday to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the historic new bill that extends health benefits to 32 million Americans nationwide....

"Leukemia has always been a disease that veers to the right," said Newsweek columnist Ezra Klein, adding that Republicans have also sought out the support of high-profile illnesses such as sickle-cell anemia, type 1 diabetes, and sepsis. "And at the end of the day, you can't ignore the fact that this deadly blood disorder has a lot to lose if the bill succeeds."

To think, I knew Ezra back when...

The Shirky Principle

2010-04-09T16:00:00.000-04:00

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." -- Clay Shirky

An insight for complex times in which simplicity is the order of the day.

Spoke too soon

2010-04-09T13:50:00.003-04:00

The peril of blogging: you can be wrong.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has accepted the resignation of Helena Guergis from cabinet and asked her to sit outside the Conservative caucus while the RCMP and ethics and conflict of interest commissioners investigate "serious" allegations over her conduct.

Hey, if the RCMP and commissioners think this is a serious breach worth investigating, I'm happy to retract my previous statement about Jaffer.

What every other green is talking about

2010-04-09T11:04:00.000-04:00

Paul Krugman's piece this weekend about environmental economics, and he basically comes down for cap & trade + strong regulation (ban?) on coal plants. The implication being that cap and trade alone might/will be insufficient on its own to get the worst climate pollution out of the system.

(If I were Gar Lipow, I'd take this as a partial vindication of his argument that the best parts of the House climate bill have nothing to do with cap and trade.)

This little bit caught my eye, though. Krugman is discussing the difference between advocates of a carbon price that starts low and rises gently and a price that starts high and gets quite a bit higher (policy-ramp vs. big-bang):

The policy-ramp advocates argue that the damage done by an additional ton of carbon in the atmosphere is fairly low at current concentrations; the cost will not get really large until there is a lot more carbon dioxide in the air, and that won’t happen until late this century. And they argue that costs that far in the future should not have a large influence on policy today. They point to market rates of return, which indicate that investors place only a small weight on the gains or losses they expect in the distant future, and argue that public policies, including climate policies, should do the same.

The big-bang advocates argue that government should take a much longer view than private investors. Stern, in particular, argues that policy makers should give the same weight to future generations’ welfare as we give to those now living. Moreover, the proponents of fast action hold that the damage from emissions may be much larger than the policy-ramp analyses suggest, either because global temperatures are more sensitive to greenhouse-gas emissions than previously thought or because the economic damage from a large rise in temperatures is much greater than the guesstimates in the climate-ramp models.

As a professional economist, I find this debate painful. There are smart, well-intentioned people on both sides — some of them, as it happens, old friends and mentors of mine — and each side has scored some major points. Unfortunately, we can’t just declare it an honorable draw, because there’s a decision to be made.

Personally, I lean toward the big-bang view.

The old "friend and mentor" that Krugman is most likely referring to is Bill Nordhaus, who IIRC taught Krugman during his undergraduate degree. Nordhaus is a character who interests me because he plays essentially a sort of late Aristotelian role as far as I can tell: desperately trying to show how the system doesn't need any real changes, just tinkering at the edges.

He's been doing this for decades: he was one of the early savage critics of The Limits to Growth, and his current DICE model implies ridiculously low prices on carbon.

But here is a student of his, basically calling him out in the pages of the NYT Magazine, who by the way won a Nobel Prize and by the way Bill where's yours?

There's not a lot new in the Krugman piece for anyone who's been following this debate, though Krugman is pretty respectful of Jim Hansen's argument against cap-and-trade:

What Hansen draws attention to is the fact that in a cap-and-trade world, acts of individual virtue do not contribute to social goals. If you choose to drive a hybrid car or buy a house with a small carbon footprint, all you are doing is freeing up emissions permits for someone else, which means that you have done nothing to reduce the threat of climate change. He has a point. But altruism cannot effectively deal with climate change. Any serious solution must rely mainly on creating a system that gives everyone a self-interested reason to produce fewer emissions.

That's fairer to Hansen's point than I'd be, actually. Either a tax (Hansen prefers tax-and-dividend) or the overall number of carbon allowances will be set centrally, so the gross economic impact will be largely detached from individual action. If people (especially wealthy consumers) see a low tax as permission to emit rather than a fine for doing so, then you're basically right back where you started: there's a certain amount of bad behaviour washing out the good.

Part of me wonders if an individual tradeable ration, like that proposed by Carbon Equity, would satisfy both sides: acts of virtue are directly rewarded, instead of simply punishing vice.

Politically impossible in the US or Canada, I'm sure, but worth thinking about.

Actually, I agree

2010-04-09T10:09:00.001-04:00

Jaffer's alleged boast about access 'absurd'

The Prime Minister's Office has dismissed a disgraced former MP's alleged boasts to his business contacts about access to Stephen Harper's inner circle as "false" and "absurd."

The Toronto Star published an article Thursday alleging Rahim Jaffer, husband of junior cabinet minister Helena Guergis, dined and drank with several prospective clients and prostitutes Sept. 10 — the night of his arrest on charges of drunk driving and cocaine possession.

There are, of course, reasons to investigate this story further. But to all appearances, Jaffer is basically one notch above "drooling simpleton" on the malfeasance scale. So if one con was out to con another, I don't think it necessarily implicates the government in this case.

(Waiting for someone to accuse me of raving Tory sympathies.)

I am a callous person

2010-04-06T09:27:00.001-04:00

CHICAGO — The lives of nearly 900 babies would be saved each year, along with billions of dollars, if 90 percent of U.S. women fed their babies breast milk only for the first six months of life, a cost analysis says.

Those startling results, published online Monday in the journal Pediatrics, are only an estimate. But several experts who reviewed the analysis said the methods and conclusions seem sound....

The $13 billion in estimated losses due to the low breast-feeding rate includes an economists' calculation partly based on lost potential lifetime wages — $10.56 million per death.

Okay. Assuming that these estimates are all correct -- and why not? -- there's a rather important point here: you could eliminate 900 deaths a year, and add $13 billion to the US economy, and nobody save the grieving parents would ever notice.

For example: even in a low-growth post-recessionary period, when the US GDP increases say, 1% a year, that still amounts to $140 billion a year, or ten times the estimated benefits of universal breastfeeding.

During "normal" times, when the economy grows at 4-5%, well, you do the math.

I'm not a pediatrician by any means, but the benefits of breastfeeding are pretty hotly contested. If the best estimate says that a country of 300 million might save as many as 900 lives every year by universal breastfeeding, I kind of wonder what's the point. You could save more lives by enforcing drunk driving laws more rigorously.

Yowza

2010-04-02T22:58:00.001-04:00

ROME — A senior Vatican priest, speaking before Pope Benedict XVI at a Good Friday service, compared the world’s outrage at sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church to the persecution of the Jews, prompting angry responses from victims’ advocates and consternation from Jewish groups.

Um. 21st century Jewry might have some pretty specific views about conspiracies of silence meant to absolve people in power from responsibility for massive violations of rights. There's some rather nasty stuff in still-living memory about people claiming "we didn't know" and "we weren't responsible, it was those other ones" that might, just maybe, trigger a less than sympathetic response from Jews.

I'm just spitballin' here.

Tab-clearing

2010-03-30T10:44:00.001-04:00

Not sure what I think about this.
Hillary and Barack: all is forgiven!
While I'm linking to pictures, Michelle Obama continues to be teh hawtness.
Creating algae blooms to suck up CO2 could poison the ocean. We should totally keep emitting CO2, because geoengineering will be both cheap and consequence-free.
An article about the new Scramble for Africa that doesn't portray China as the sole villain. Amazing!
This would ideally deserve a longer post, but in brief: No, Ross Douthat, I don't particularly think clerical celibacy has much to do with the pattern of child abuse in the Church. I do, however, think the church's culture of impunity and unaccountability might have something to do with it. So stop blaming "The permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the ’70s", you fucking douchebag tool.

A Little Less catholic Every Day

2010-03-28T23:18:00.001-04:00

So I was riding the subway early this afternoon, and noted with the part of my brain that can still recite the Lord's prayer the number, and variety, of people holding palms after apparently leaving church this morning.

That's the reality of urban Catholicism in the 21st century: not just man and woman, but every color and hue getting ready for Easter. The church is still, in an important form, catholic as well as Catholic: universal, at least in its potential. It's been a long time since I felt the urge to join them in the pews, but this afternoon was a little moment of happiness for me. It's like watching a joyous family in the other booth at a restaurant: you're not part of the group, but you can still recognize the happiness other people have on a nice occasion.

The Pope, it seems, had a different revelation on Palm Sunday, and decided to share it in his sermon:

Pope Benedict today risked inflaming opinion as he appeared to round on critics of the Catholic church over the widening sexual abuse scandal, saying he would not "be intimidated by ... petty gossip".

The 82-year-old pontiff led tens of thousands of people in a Palm Sunday service in St Peter's square. He did not mention the scandal engulfing the church directly, but parts of his sermon alluded to it.

The pope said that faith in God helped lead one "towards the courage of not allowing oneself to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion".

He also spoke of how man can sometimes "fall to the lowest, vulgar levels" and "sink into the swamp of sin and dishonesty".

This is all of a piece with the general response of the hierarchy in the last weeks, which has basically amounted to a) Other people molest kids, not just priests, so b) shut up, that's why.

Amazing that the disciples of Christ, inheritors to the throne of St. Peter, and a bunch of dudes who literally claim to have the clipboard at the velvet rope of heaven, are reduced to pointing out that they're no better than any other large institution. That they don't see how this undercuts every possible claim to authority -- scriptural, moral, and everything else -- says quite a bit about them.

McGuinty to Toronto: Drop Dead.

2010-03-25T23:40:00.001-04:00

That's basically what this amounts to:

Premier Dalton McGuinty’s government is asking its Metrolinx regional transit agency to find a way to save $4 billion over five years by delaying some of the $9.3 billion worth of transit projects previously announced.

Projects likely to proceed include the Union-Pearson/Georgetown GO Transit link, the Sheppard light rail transit line and the York University line, government officials said.

But the austerity moves could affect five planned projects: rapid transit lines for Finch Ave. W., Sheppard Ave. E. and the Scarborough RT, along with the Eglinton Ave. cross-town line and an expansion of York region’s Viva service.

This is a nice endnote to McGuinty's utter refusal to give Toronto the tools it needs to fix its own problems: managing to screw the city just a little bit more by promising money that, of course, will never be delivered. Amazingly, the Province managed to find money to shovel north, to help an industry that was novel and dynamic back when Canada's main concern was beating the Kaiser:

Yet the government hopes development of the recent discovery of a massive deposit of chromite in the Ring of Fire area, 500 kms northeast of Thunder Bay, will help drive down the $21.3 billion deficit.

“For the 21st century, the discovery of chromite in the Ring of Fire could be as big as the discovery of nickel was in Sudbury in the 19th century,” Finance Minister Dwight Duncan said in his budget speech.

I especially like how the thinking seems to be that creating a few thousand jobs in Thunder Bay is going to pay down the deficit, but helping ease traffic congestion, and potentially giving back millions of lost work-hours (currently swallowed up in traffic) is a non-starter.

Now the only thing that is needed is for Rocco Rossi to win the next Mayor's election, and we can start tearing up our bike lanes too. Then Toronto can be totally, truly, unbelievably doomed, all thanks to centre-right Liberals.

No you can't

2010-03-24T11:43:00.001-04:00

Funny:

Erm, the hell?

2010-03-22T15:37:00.001-04:00

John McCain:

“There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year,” McCain said during an interview Monday on an Arizona radio affiliate. “They have poisoned the well in what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.”

So, according to McCain, "poisoning the well" is equal to:

1) The Senate passing a bill.

2) The House passing said bill.

3) ???

4) POISON.

One side accused the other of wanting to kill grandma and institute Gulag Archipelago 2: Electric Boogaloo. But yeah, the Democrats "poisoned the well."

Some things you never shake

2010-03-18T10:16:00.001-04:00

I come to my environmentalism in a roundabout way -- via reading tons of science fiction as a boy. They're not always easy fits, as a lot of SF authors have a very technophilic view that cannot possibly imagine a problem with which newer and better technology cannot cope. Obviously, there are exceptions, but the authors I read when I was younger all definitely fell in to this category.

Which is all a long way of saying when there's news about EMC2 Fusion (the brainchild of the late Robert Bussard) I still squee up like a schoolgirl gazing longingly at a Robert Pattinson poster. There's nothing quite like the promise of fusion power to make me dream of maglev trains, undersea colonies, and crewed missions to Jupiter.

There's not much to say yet, but apparently EMC2 has now passed the point where they left off when Dr. Bussard died, and are now moving on to the construction of a larger model to test the possibility of getting net power from the device. This, if I'm reading it right, is the last step before building a prototype full-power 100 megawatt plant.

EMC2 has run pretty quietly, which frankly adds to my confidence. Their results are also being monitored by the US Government, who are footing the bill, so that too makes me a bit more confident. Not that the US Govt. doesn't have a history of backing whackadoo claims without merit, but this doesn't *seem* to be that.

Before he died, Bussard wrote about what fusion power could do for applications in space, and the short answer is basically 1000x better performance than all of the current best technologies.

I think this is an underestimate

2010-03-15T15:53:00.001-04:00

Maybe later then

2010-03-15T15:14:00.001-04:00

So I thought I'd give Tom Hanks' new series The Pacific a try. And I will, when I can get over the opening narration. But being told that Pearl Harbor was America's "greatest military disaster" and that Japan's successes in 1942 won it "one of the largest empires in history" made me shoot milk out my nose.

First off, Pearl Harbor? I'm not going to bother checking this too thoroughly, but I'll guarantee you that any objective measure would put America's biggest military disaster in the Civil War, especially in the first two years as the Union spent tens of thousands of lives and failed to capture Richmond, Virginia. I'd also point out the obvious point that the Civil War was a threat to the territorial integrity of the United States, which World War II only was in the most fantastical sense.

Secondly, 1942 Japan as one of the largest empires in history? Okay, in terms of surface area maybe. But land area? Turns out, controlling 10 million hectares of salt water is relatively useless, especially when the US can drive aircraft carriers through it. This Wiki page has Japan's land area in 1942 as 7.4m km2, substantially behind the British and, oh-ho, the United States at 9.8m km2.

And unlike the United States, very little of that conquered territory was economically and politically integrated in to the imperial core, meaning that most of it was a net cost, not a net benefit to the economy. Hell, by 1942 the Japanese had been fighting in China for 5 or 11 years (depending on who you ask) and still failed to win the war on the front that was always more important to them.

There's a number of ways in which the US actually did start the war from behind, and a number of ways in which the first year of the American war in the Pacific was really dicey. But there's a historical illiteracy at work here that bugs the crap outta me.

Diversions

2010-03-11T21:51:00.001-05:00

Tyler Cowen asks/is asked:

If you were offered a true statistic about an alien civilization, but only one, what would it be?

My response would be simple: per capita energy use, but you have to show your work. I want estimates of population, energy use by income quintiles at least, sources of primary energy and conversion efficiencies, not to mention a decent summary of the market. I think we'd get a very good idea of what kind of people/insects/mobile rocks we're dealing with.

Nothing here, move along

2010-03-11T09:23:00.001-05:00

Amazing. The spouse of a cabinet minister is pulled over speeding while drunk with blow in his car, gets a $500 fine, and the reaction of one of the Globe and Mail's most prominent bloggers is to say that he doesn't owe anyone so much as an explanation for why he and not other dark-skinned males pulled over with controlled substances get such luxurious treatment.

This isn't a little question: cocaine possession is punishable by up to 7 years in prison, under Canadian law. Frankly, if Jaffer had been a black man from Scarborough, he'd be eating at least some of those years, I'm sure.

Man, I called that one

2010-03-08T21:45:00.001-05:00

In another forum about this time last year, I wrote a blog post to which I can no longer link. But the text of the post is still on my hard drive and I was rummaging through it and the last paragraph was this:

I think it's clear now that the election of 2008, having begun in 2006 sometime, will probably continue until 2010 or so.

Well, it's 2010 and the media still can't stop covering President McCain and Vice President Palin. So I think I win.

It's been a while since I've put some terrible news up on this thing

2010-03-04T23:08:00.001-05:00

Hey, look:

Climate scientists have long warned that global warming could unlock vast stores of the greenhouse gas methane that are frozen into the Arctic permafrost, setting off potentially significant increases in global warming.

Now researchers at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and elsewhere say this change is under way in a little-studied area under the sea, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, west of the Bering Strait.

Natalia Shakhova, a scientist at the university and a leader of the study, said it was too soon to say whether the findings suggest that a dangerous release of methane looms. In a telephone news conference, she said researchers were only beginning to track the movement of this methane into the atmosphere as the undersea permafrost that traps it degrades.

The story of the last week that's probably gotten the most play in energy circles was the unveiling of Bloom Energy, allegedly manufacturers of a solid-oxide fuel cell stack with impressive economics and a hellagood marketing firm on their dime.

Advances like these are nice little feel-good moments, but I increasingly feel like they're irrelevant, like German engineers congratulating themselves on the V-2 while the heart of the Wehrmacht gets destroyed in Russia. Impressive, but vastly too little and too late.

Not that I don't think there are practical solutions to the climate crisis. It's just that the obstacles to proper deployment are so vast that arguing about how we'll we're doing misses the point. If you were a German general and you defined victory as "destruction of the Red Army", well you were out of luck -- the outcome of the war was decided once the Russian lines began to hold. Put another way, there was no way to win the war in the way that the German leadership had framed it.

Similarly, if we define solving the climate crisis as "finding some cheap, plug-in solution that allows us to continue our meat-eating, automotive-obsessed lives in our 3000 square foot homes", well, we're out of luck. If you define that as the victory condition, then defeat is inevitable.

The only way to win is to change the victory conditions. The good news is that, unlike the implacable Red Army, the Earth actually doesn't give a damn about us one way or the other. There's plenty of reason to believe that if we can change our preferences, we'll find the room we need.

Did my property values just increase?

2010-03-02T13:22:00.001-05:00

Vicki and I bought a house in the east end of Toronto last year, and one of the points that sold me on the house was its proximity to the ravine system of parks that are a real gem in this city. So the idea that the city is moving to lock-in the Don and Humber parks as part of the provincial green belt makes me very, very happy.

It probably won't change much in real terms, but it's nice to see.

The good old days

2010-03-02T10:50:00.001-05:00

So we're in the run-up to a municipal election here in Toronto, and so far most of the headlines (if not most of the polls) have been dominated by a clown named Rocco Rossi. Specifically, Rossi has grabbed the spotlight by slamming bike lanes, claiming that the creation of the Jarvis bike lane (removing a redundant 5th car lane from a major arterial road and turning in to bikeways) was "undemocratic" despite having been approved in a full council vote.

Rossi ran John Tory's losing campaign for mayor of Toronto in 2003, and seems to largely be trying to get a do-over: pile the outer boroughs of Toronto against the city core to eke out a win. This plan is dubious enough mathematically (the core of the city make a large plurality of voters, who vote more enthusiastically than their outer-borough brothers and sisters) and politically the reasons it probably won't work can be summed up by saying John Tory is a better politician than Rocco Rossi and lost trying to do exactly this.

The larger question is of course whether Toronto has learned anything from the last fifty years or so. The Miller years have been some of the best for cyclists, transit users, and pedestrians in this city for a long time. Car drivers have face some new, relatively trivial obstructions, but the real problem for drivers is simply that there are too many to reasonably fit in to the city core -- there's no car-based solution to the problems for car drivers anymore.

Nevertheless, Rossi and his not-inconsiderable followers are happy to play on the resentment of the not-quite-privileged-enough: the wealthier, whiter residents of the outer boroughs who, disdaining the city they work in so much they would never live there, choose to spend hours in the hermetically sealed cultural environments of their cars.

Christopher Hume, one of the best city writers for the Toronto Star, put it rather succinctly.

Despite all this, Rossi's desire to eliminate change rather than promote it amounts to little more than a vain attempt to turn back the clock. It's easy to understand the lure of nostalgia, of the good old days, but they are finished, over, caput. And never should it be mistaken for public policy. That would be disastrous.

Needless to say, Torontonians know better than this. Support for transit as well as the Jarvis remake is overwhelming. That's why Rossi will lose.

As long as there have been politicians, they have appealed to our most selfish instincts. Rossi's pitch is just more blatant and unashamed than we're used to in Toronto.

Though it's early days still, already it's clear that if Rossi wins, the city loses.

I know they say there's no such thing as bas publicity, but youch.

Woof

2010-03-01T19:51:00.001-05:00

Moving day -- not mine, a friend's. Really glad that I don't plan to move again for the next, um, generation or so.

At one point, I thought: "Geez, this wasn't this hard when I was younger." Then I remembered: "Oh hell, I wasn't the one moving bookshelves and couches when I was little." Then I felt vaguely sorry for my father's spine.

Things I can endorse

2010-02-25T23:02:00.001-05:00

The novel The Lovely Bones. Apparently the movie is basically unwatchable, which is a shame. But the book is excellent, and one of the few non-SF novels I've read in this.... lifetime.
This recipe for bread from the NYT's Mark Bittman. So delicious, even when it doesn't go as well as you'd hoped. But that's what second attempts are for.
The film The Most Dangerous Man in America, about and narrated by Daniel Ellsberg. Includes interviews with some of the leading lights of both the left and right in American politics in the early 1970s. Funniest moment: The late Howard Zinn saying, "So Noam Chomsky, Dan and I went to go see a movie..." I could only think of this.

Burning the walls for heat

2010-02-23T15:43:00.001-05:00

Tom Philpott has a pair of excellent articles in an excellent series of them about... um, synthetic nitrogen. Wait! This is actually good! The first article is about how America is increasingly reliant on imported nitrogen fertilizer. If you liked wild price swings in the price of oil, just wait for the coming wild swings in the price of food.

The other article is both more substantial and more worrying: basically, soil chemists have shown that the application of artificial fertilizers degrade the soils ability to hang on to both carbon and nitrogen, which have the added effect of impairing the soils ability to hang on to water. (This isn't really news to the organic food community.) If this research is borne out, it basically means that chemical fertilizer represents a full-spectrum assault on soil.

This is yet another in our series of examples of things western industry does that look efficient but turn out not to be. Pick your other favourite example, but synthetic nitrogen fertilizer -- responsible for feeding billions today -- may not have been worth the effort.

The advocates of conventional agriculture like to say that organic food can't feed the world. This may be true (I think it isn't) but in any case it's a nice way of eluding two facts: one, um, you may have noticed a ton of hungry people on the planet today even with your conventional food system, and two, there's no evidence that organic agriculture undermines the ability of future generations to feed themselves. You can't say the same thing for conventional agriculture.

So yeah, chemical agriculture "feeds the world", if you mean "feeds mostly corn and cattle, and then ignores the bottom billion people alive today, and totally ignores anyone with the misfortune to be alive 50 years from now." If that's what you mean, we're doing just fine.

"It’s not an orgy... but it is socially vigorous."

2010-02-19T10:39:00.001-05:00

I'm shocked, shocked that young, fit, and frankly beautiful people are getting laid like rabbits on speed:

At the Albertville winter Olympics, condom machines in the athletes’ village had to be refilled every two hours. And in Sydney the organisers’ original order of 70,000 condoms went so fast that they had to order 20,000 more. Even with the replenishment, the supply was exhausted three days before the end of the competition schedule. (For the record, athletes who were in Sydney report that the Cuban delegation was the first to use up its allocation.) Salt Lake City in 2002 went even bigger: 250,000 condoms were handed out, despite the objections of the city’s Mormon leadership.

The Salt Lake City Olympics were a bit of an absurd spectacle to my eyes, with everyone politely forgetting the massive international corruption scandal that brought the games to Utah in the first place. But ooh, Canada won Gold in Hockey! On the other hand, if the non-stop lubed-up entertainment discomfited the LDS Church as much as I imagine it must have, I'm really turning around on the whole thing.

Dear Michael Ignatieff

2010-02-19T10:22:00.001-05:00

Dude, I'm trying not to keep hating on you. But quoting Spiro Agnew to dismiss criticism of the Vancouver Olympcis? Really?

There goes the TV tax

2010-02-18T10:28:00.001-05:00

So Shaw is buying Canwest (everything except the newspapers.) The likely result of this is that 2 of the three private networks in english Canada will be owned by cable companies, with the third private network left alone with the CBC to beg for money. Not an enviable position to be in if you want a strong showing before the government.

Except that, as it turns out, you don't need to be Canadian to extort money from cable providers. Fox just did that to Time-Warner at the point of a metaphorical gun (the blacking out of weekend football.) What's notable is how much smaller the amounts in the US are -- a dollar per subscriber or less.

Tab-clearing

2010-02-18T09:48:00.001-05:00

Hell, V might get cancelled? I've got bread older than that show. It's a shame that television networks are unwilling to give series the time they need to find their legs.
Our brains adapt quickly to controlling computers. Up next: computers adapt quickly... TO CONTROLLING US!
One of the more interesting developments of the last few years has been desktop manufacturing. We've mainly seen machines capable of 3d-printing plastic and metal, with some I've heard of doing paper and wood as well. Now, it looks like clay is a possibility as well. But hey, it's not like humans use a lot of ceramics ever...
Globalization doesn't care about black people.
A pretty harrowing profile on Roger Ebert. If you don't know already, Ebert had to have major surgery and hasn't had anything to eat, drink, or say for the last 4 years.

There are right ways and wrong ways

2010-02-16T16:33:00.001-05:00

Problem #1 about the Internet, as far as newspapers are concerned, is that nobody but nobody pays the same amount of money for something on the Internet that they do in print. That readers don't pay the same price is basically irrelevant -- readers have never, ever paid anything close to the full cost of production for the daily paper. What is far more damaging for papers, what is the real core fault with the Internet as far as they're concerned, is that advertisers won't pay the same amount of money for online ads that they do in print -- or, as newspapermen still call it, "the real world".

I don't deny this is a real problem -- hey, we're all mercenaries in our own way -- and reporters want to be paid as much as anyone. But there are right ways and wrong ways to go about these things. And insisting on charging users as much for your new fancy iPad-enabled paper as you do for the print version when you know that advertisers still won't pony up similarly is a way of calling your readers stupider than the advertisers they're supposed to be shepherded towards.

Stupid, as in "sure you could just read this thing through your iPad's web browser, but you've apparently got more money than brains so we expect you to do this instead". Or, stupid as in "sure the advertisers who are our real customers don't give a shit about online readership numbers. But we expect you to cough up some dough to pretend that they do."

Or maybe just "hey, you're not buying the iPad because of what it does, you're buying it because you want to be seen using it while you drink your decaf soy latte at the local Starbucks. So ante up douchebag, and read the Sunday times like your peers expect you to." [1]

Okay, so maybe that's a little smart after all.

[1] Having been a guy who served lattes from behind the espresso bar, I don't really have anything against latte-drinkers. Hell, I drink lattes! But lets be clear about the social positioning and signalling going on here.

Fascinating

2010-02-15T00:52:00.001-05:00

Can't remember where I read it, but a former MSFT insider wrote recently that a simple way to judge the kind of company that Microsoft is and what kind of company its competitors are is to look at how old its revenue streams are. For example, Microsoft makes essentially all of its profits from Windows and Office, a line of products that are, conservatively, each 20 years old. Hell, we're now 15 years out from Windows 95, right?

Meanwhile, Apple now makes more money from selling iPhones than it does selling computers [PDF] -- the iPhone being a grand total of 3 years old. Even excluding the iPhone, "iPod and music services" (presumably iTunes Music Store, only 7 years old) account for more revenue than desktops and portable computers. Result: Apple could lose the entire personal computing market and, while there'd no doubt be a few lean dinners at Cupertino, they'd actually be doing just fine.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's revenue stream rests basically on the presumption that an extortionate monopoly can be maintained in perpetuity. What happens if tomorrow the US government announces they're shifting to OpenOffice? Just asking.

Dymaxion World

An interlude

China's changing frontier?

Let's not get ahead of ourselves here!

E-voting without worrying

It's 2010, your future is here (sorta)

Daily dose of US Supreme Court humour

And my history of prognostication continues to be somewhat less than 30% accurate

Tab-clearing, Oct 18 2010

Will Robots take our jobs? Probably

As it turns out, my first and only car was a Ford

Thanksgiving reading

Wherein I side with the glibertarians

Every country has its own version of the Bush Administration

A few lessons

Yowch

Peak oil getting taken seriously?

Purdy

Turns out Bjorn Lomborg is Danish for "Richard Cohen"

10 Years ago

Never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity

In Memoriam

Welcome to the last ditch

I have been doing this too long

All you need to know

Somedays, "war looming in the Middle East" isn't even news

21st century liberals

No positive social changes allowed

A discussion on the Middle Class

Sometimes, humans do stupid things: FILM AT 11

What's your most hated legacy policy?

linkdump

From the mailbag

*happy dance*

Two graphs

He's really a vanilla kind of callous [Updated]

Nine years to make a dustier Beirut

China's role in Middle Earth

Link-clearing

Probably like arugula

Ooh, more data on the merger idea

re: mergers and acquisitions

Thoughts on one of my wedding gifts, and mortality

Oh, and by the way

A rather important point

There's nothing hard about justifying your own privilege

Oh. My. God.

So, how likely are we to make the planet uninhabitable?

Jeffrey Simpson is correct about something

Somebody, wrong on the Internets

Just keep saying the words "energy superpower", Canadians

That's why we voted for him

China, er, swims up

Well said

That was fun

In which I call Stephen Hawking dumb

This is awesome, I'm stupid

A case of self-parody

Let's make it a nerdier day than usual

A future for the wilderness

Yeah, but what does he know

Camera test

Wild

How to Train Your Dragon

Who we, white man?

Tab clearing, April 15 2010 edition

Gimme that old time religion

For when I get my spaceship

Bunch a hippies, I tells ya

No, it won't be easy at all

This actually constitutes rapid response for the Church

Friday Funny

The Shirky Principle

Spoke too soon

What every other green is talking about

Actually, I agree

I am a callous person

Yowza

Tab-clearing

A Little Less catholic Every Day

happy dance