A fixed resource base is a bit of a fallacy, but people like to commit it. Over the past 100,000 years, we have always been coming up with "new" resources, usually quite different from the "old" resources. If not, we would be extinct. This is kind of an existential counter-argument, as well as emperical. It is true at at any given tech level, resources are finite. And it is also true that the sun is a finite resource at current and immediately foreseeable tech levels.
troll on/ What is it with greenies and such. The above argument is not particularly sophisticated and I stole some of it from previous posts from others above. So why the endless claptrap about in effect god-given finite resources? I think,fundamentally, they do not distinguish between man and beast. Well, these days a lot scientists do not either. Incidentally, I consider myself a bit of an environmentalist. I would like to see some big environmental projects. For instance, biology did not finish its job on earth. I would like to see the Sahara irrigated and converted into something useful for man. I think terraforming mars is a fine idea. But I suspect these ideas would make a greenie howl.
We need to have a new mental disease classification just for greenies. They would easily fit under the usual commitment statues. Maybe we could let them leave the hospital on a day pass and go to a park. The rest of the time, we could immerse them in Renaissance art. troll off/
I do not have a problem with a capitalist getting rich doing useful things with new tech, particularly if he has funded some R&D. But for the free marketers out there, both RIAA and the old Bell Labs are capitalist, and we note casinos also. Face it, there are capitalists and then are capitalists. And not paying recent attention to the difference is how we got in our current mess. Anyway, slashdotters like disruptive tech.
As far as unlimited energy is concerned, I think the universe does not much like abiotic singularities. On the other hand, as you increase energy density, you get interesting phenomena. But I think you were saying relatively unlimited energy. I am not sure what the right logical word is, but suppose we had 1000x more energy. The world standard of living would be appreciably higher and if we were sensible, there would be a higher cultural level, and that would translate into new tech, which would enable more energy production. Oh, and if we had 1000x more energy, the effective price of energy, as part of the cost of living, would go down, so in a proper sense it is cheaper, ignoring any increased efficiency in energy production. But you cannot ignore that.
There is however an implicit assumption that physics is infinite.
APEC Summit in Singapore: Four Powers Agenda Brought to the Table By Russia and China
November 15, 2009 (LPAC)—The heads of 21 Asia-Pacific nations, including China, Russia and the United States, are in Singapore this weekend for the annual APEC forum. And while speeches by Russian President Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao have affirmed the new cooperation between those two anchor nations of the Four Powers alliance, much of the concrete statecraft has been taking place on the sidelines, in a series of bilateral meetings. President Obama arrived late Saturday night from his first Asia stopover in Tokyo, and will go on to China and South Korea after the APEC gathering ends.
He will meet separately with Presidents Medvedev and Hu Jintao during the weekend.
While the formal heads of state summit is to take place Sunday, both the Russian and Chinese presidents addressed a gathering of business leaders on Saturday, and both speeches reflected the strategic shift in orientation of the two governments. President Medvedev, according to Itar-Tass, emphasized that the global financial crisis has forced a structural overhaul of the national economy. "He believes that Russia should become a country whose prosperity will depend not so much on raw materials as on intellectual resources, high technologies, innovative products, etc." President Medvedev expanded on those points, in an article he published in The Economist, on the eve of the APEC summit, focusing on Russian expanded investment in research and development in the field of nuclear power, outer space, and medicine.
Presidents Medvedev and Hu Jintao met in Singapore, and in comments to reporters, both leaders stressed the recent agreements to build up the regions of the Russian Far East and China. "I have already given instructions on the fulfillment of the agreements," Medvedev told his Chinese counterpart." Hu Jintao noted that the Russian president is coming to China next year, and emphasized that this will be an "important event in the development of bilateral relations."
Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi met on Saturday with U.S. Secretary of States Hillary Clinton, and invited her to visit China next year—which she accepted. She will be accompanying President Obama next week on a four day visit to China, with stopovers in Shanghai and Beijing.
And in another indication of dramatic changes in the political relations in the Far East, Chinese President Hu Jintao also met, in his capacity as General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, with Lien Chan, honorary chairman of the Koumintang (KMT), who was formerly vice president of Taiwan. At the meeting, Hu declared, "We should continue to follow the approaches of putting aside difficult issues, and making economic issues priority in advancing cross-Strait consultation, and strive to launch the consultation process for a cross-Strait economic cooperation framework agreement within this year."
My impression is that the Chinese can pretty well say what they want, as long as it does not threaten the one-party rule.
As far as child labor is concerned, I was not so sure, so I googled a bit. It appears that the national government is down on child labor (under 16), but local governments often turn a blind eye.
As various sources within the Chinese media have pointed out, documenting occupational health and safety problems among child labourers is inherently difficult because Chinese labour law bans child labour. One newly passed regulation makes the hiring of a minor punishable by a fine of 5000 Yuan per worker (cumulative per month of employ) and suspension of the employer's operating license. Other laws criminalize the placing of underage workers in potentially hazardous situations and forced bonding of a child for the purpose of labour (3). The problem lies not so much with regulation but lack of enforcement. Indeed, despite stiffer penalties, the problem of child labour has only become more serious in recent years. A growing economy coupled with a growing economic disparity provides a fertile ground for exploitation of societies most vulnerable members. Local governments, in a headlong rush to woo manufacturers into their districts are often reticent to enforce regulations against child labour, which might act as an impediment to local economic growth.
The problem of juvenile labour in China is far too multifaceted to be summarized in black and white terms. To address these complexities, we suggest that further and deeper studies into the root causes of the problem be carried out. We see these root causes as being a growing economic disparity in China, a rapidly changing social structure, and a failure of the Chinese educational system to provide adequate and affordable education to all children. Until these issues are addressed, it is our belief that the problem of child labour in China will continue to grow, and as it does incidents involving the injury and death of juvenile workers will continue. (4)
Not a good situation, but I think the statement no freedom of worship goes too far. But the Chinese government has rules, and we do too (for instance, tax exempt status requirements), The difference is that the IRS does not kill you. Perhaps from the wikipedia article, I note that the official complaint about the Roman Catholic church is not different than one that was popular in the US. Then, again, you may be too young to remember the JFK election campaign. Still, it would seem that the real issue is the role of the Roman Catholic church in the events leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union.
middle class: I guess the Chinese now have more millionaires than the US. I suspect the middle class is developing nicely too.
I am not sure how to classify the Chinese economy, but I suspect a lot of the problems come from the process of accumulation. Communist, socialist, or capitialist accumulation has not been pretty. It does not have to be that way, IMO, but the emperically the historical record is pretty clear.
Hah, I did not think of that. Perhaps they could put them in their retail stores and sell them to the tourists as souveniers. But it sort of illustrates the problem. If you view wealth as related to something having to do with actual production, they are worthless in a modern economy. Sure they might be collectors items, maybe high priced items, but having a lot of money does not guarantee you are rich. The last banknote Weimar printed was a 100 trillion mark banknote. And if you are a gold bug, Spain was such a successful merchantilist that they had so much gold, that domestically gold was not worth much. Inflation.
Anyway, the buggy whips are on my books at what I paid for them, so my balance sheet still looks good. I figure they have a long depreciation schedule so they are not hurting my income statement. My books look so good, maybe I can get a bank loan and expand.
I was a little puzzled about your post. Particularly by the url. I found the url a little offensive.
So I looked at your journal, and concluded you had the right idea. But this particular post I first viewed as somewhat ideological in form. So what is the real deal? I think you make here essentially a moral argument by assertion. But the person who responded to you below compared misery and happiness and that is also a moral argument and I happen to accept both moral positions and find no necessary contradiction in them. And I am not particularly sure that the responder is say a ZPGer, Since this is slashdot, I have to say something nice about Bill Gates. He was a ZPGer until Melinda talked him out of it, Now he finds it cost-effective to save lives. You might have some complaints about some of the details of his efforts, for instance, perhaps he should be nicer to WHO, but consider the overall thrust. And I agree that cost-effectiveness is a poor reason. Sort of reminds me of Obama.
An assumption of more tech, of a fundamental kind, means more resources. Indeed, it makes useless things into new resources.
Maybe you are of the rare breed, a libertarian environmentalist, Some of these types even very much like space development, perhaps so we can put the dirty stuff off planet.
Except for the limited resources nonsense, I would guess you are somewhat sane, certainally as compared to some of your brethern. You might realize that at a given level of tech, humans are always overpopulated. If the resource are in fact finite, you eventually use them all up. And bad things happen.
Here are some considerations about population, beyond resources.
A good approach to population is to maximize potential population density. Now what actual population do you need? Scientifically you can put an upper and lower bound, but in between, it basically a society's choice. Note that you need an improving cultural level to get and deal with the new tech you need, but this takes wealth, and you could chose to put the wealth into new capital goods instead of increased cultural level and with the variable of actual population. All this changes the mix of options at the next cycle. So while we need to maximize potential population density, it seems to be scientifically intractable to figure out what the right mix of actual population, cultural level, and capital goods should be, as long as you stay away from the boundary conditions. At that point, the question of nice places for camping become relevant.
Now how you get new fundamental tech? Emperically, from the discovery of fire onward, it comes from higher energy densities. Seems to be how the universe works. So you also want to maximize the energy density per square unit. In detail, you really interested in the energy density in productive processes. Interestingly, these two paragraphs are part of what some Russian Orthodox types called the first new theoxology in fifty years. Perhaps it might eventually change the Roman Catholics position on contraception.:-) Anyway, this is one reason to not like solar power, unless it is right up against the sun.
As far as socialism issues are concerned, it does not really matter. The biggest issue is the definition of wealth. You can not have financial capitialist running things, because they will run amok and speculate, and as in the present case, you might end up with 1.5 quadrillion dollars of derivatives. What we used to call industrial capitalists sometimes do okay, but their accounting has a fallicy. Still, look at Hamilton, Lincoln, and FDR. Fine economic policy for capitalism. Communist could do it, but Lenin thought it made sense to keep the living standard way low, and look what happened. Socialism does not much count at the moment, because the EU nations do not have enough sovereignty left to implement non-monetarist economic policy. Personally, I think after we do it awhile, it will be something we have not seen before. After all, economic and social systems are kind of a tech. Since this is slashdot, I will wonder what an economy would like if the capital cost of manufacturing was low, but the design costs high.
So what is the current deal. Well, human population is above the carrying capacity, given the speculative waste and the level of tech. I personally expect that at this point, we will have some die off, even if we get the financial capitialists under sane control and do everything right. If we do not do better, maybe 5 billion will die off in the next 50-100 years. Some people like the idea,. Basically, we have not been doing the right things, and so we have been in a mathusian process for maybe 50 years and now we are in the acute stage. It does not have much to do with population policy,
Regarding nut-cases doing mass murder, and somewhat ignoring the die off and its causes, you look at the press and you are properly concerned. But a little perspective is needed. I figure the US physical economy went past the
you implicitly assume a zero sum game, tech advances change the sum
I do not favor solar power, except maybe right next to the sun, but this is clearly a science driver. People complain it cannot be done with current tech, but that is the whole point of a science driver. I suspect there is something subtle here. It is likely that a spss is not the main purpose. Given Japan's population fear of things nuclear, it makes some sense, but is the population afraid of fusion? I do not know what the population thinks about fusion, but I suspect the deal is that a spss is easy to sell politically.
Consider china. Desperate straits because the US is collapsing. Naturally they have overproduction as a result, but they are not backing off. Something about helping the world economy. They have figured out the world financial system is collapsing, so they have no standard options. They are stuck with maybe 1.5 trillion of useless us paper, so they make it non-useless by doing economic development projects in Russia. Russia is talking economic development corridors. China and Russia start out signing 15 deals in the past few weeks with perhaps 20 more on the table. India has just signed a number of deals with China, but I do not yet know the content. None of the countries have had good relationships. Oh India is going to withdraw a lot of troops from Kasmir. And now we have a science driver out of Japan.
Oh, China just did a 10 billion low interest loan to Africa. Something about "financials", maybe banking? Are they setting up Hamiltonian style credit banking systems there? I do not know, and I do not quite think so, but that would be close to a whole package.
Re:Philosophy should have never been....
on
The Big Questions
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the usual answer is beauty, fairly common
and I know of one guy who sometimes evaluates ideas on moral criteria. (this is not old testament stuff)
On objective truth, I may be full of shit, but I cannot quite pin it down. I mistrust my reification to context-sensitive.
Since we were talking about axiomatic philosophic systems, I googled goodel Wittgenstein. Lots of stuff. Somewhat randomly, I read the following, which might be of interest to you,
Re:Philosophy should have never been....
on
The Big Questions
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As I recall Republic had the cave metaphor. Seems to me to be a real problem for sense-certainity interpretations.
As far as truth is concerned, I have real issues with axiomatic systems, and would cite godel. If you are unfamiliar with him, he demonstrated that axiomatic systems of any interest are either inconsistent or incomplete. I am sure there is lot on the net about him. More generally, there are in effect a lot of axiomatic systems out there. For instance the thermodynamics cult basically functions that way. But over time, with new science, they have to update the axioms. At that point, during the update, it is not an axiomatic system. And just at that point, they are dealing with something true.
About truth more generally, for most people, including particularly reductionists, truth is a hard little ball of shit. Instead, reifying it a bit, truth is context sensitive. So objective truth is kind of a nonsense phrase.
Well, you said probable. But I paid top dollar for a bunch of buggy whips. Know any buyers?
The point here is that new tech devalues old tech.
Anyway, on past (distance past) interactions in the market, I should be to find a buyer. If nothing else, I should be able to rely on the bigger fool theory like eveyone else. Then again, that has not worked out so well lately. But there is always the government to bail me out.
A central model is not the problem. This result has a bit of generality. Or emergent intelligence of the market, if such a thing exists. But you might want to criticize equilibrium assumptions or even axiom based systems.
Re:Philosophy should have never been....
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The Big Questions
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Funny, I do not recall that Plato had much use for sense-certainity. And that I think is basically what you mean about objective.
The easy way to look at most no free will arguments is as an effect of reductionism. Interestingly, a good reductionist will deny that creativity exists, or try to redefine it, much like the AI people tend to try to redefine intelligence. Yet it seem to me the continued existence of the human species shows creativity exists. Exactly how creativity happens to exist is a fine big question. In most contexts, it is convenience to call it a property of the soul, but that just begs the question. Looking at it closely, you end up wondering if abiotic processes are creative. For the species, it is an existential question. Fortunately, we know some ways to encourage creativity.
Maybe a definition is appropriate. Creativity is the discovery of new principles of the universe that allow the changing of nature for man. This is too narrow, but it is based on a nicely emperical phenomena,
More a blog about mortgage lenders, but somewhat more. Looking around a bit, they have a wealth of detail, and do a pretty reasonable job of deriving real numbers from the official numbers. They seem to be gold bugs, but their argument for gold at least hits some true points. Probably the best a monetarist could be expected to do.
So I have what I call a landline phone in the house. But the telco has fiber to the house. The telco no longer much likes copper. So the install requires power to run the fiber interconnect. I guess not very much. I talked to guy and I guess it was maybe 2.5 milliamp.
Here is something sort of interesting. To deal with legal requirements they need enough battery backup to run 4 hours. This telco puts in power backup for maybe a week. They put in two power units. Rual area, lot of elderly. But I once had it actually exceed that time and go out because of power issues in the house.
Anyway, look at a traditional copper wire based phone. The CO has big batteries! That is why your phone does not seem to require batteries.
I live in a rural area serviced by a telephone coop. I am about 1.8 miles from the phone company. I have fiber to the house. My download is 20mps, my upload is 5mps. Last I checked my download was actually 23 mps. So what do I pay? $80/month. This does not seem to me to vastly more expensive than $50/month. If I have an issue, in my experience, they come out the same day, even Sunday. I guess they put their first fiber in 20 years ago, to a neighboring telco. 18 years ago they started conduiting their copper. Four years ago they started doing fiber to the home. Now this is not one big massive rollout, Maybe what comcast would do if they had to do it was do a massive rollout. The coop just keeps working on it as they can.
Everyone here knows that new tech devalues old tech. This is true whether it is your cell phone or an income producing capital item. But as long as the capital item produces the necessary revenue stream, monetarist economic policy supports maintaining the devalued capital asset on the balance sheet at the original value. Sure, accounting depreciation reduces the original value over time, but there is some room there for error. For instance, maybe the depreciation period is unreasonably long for reality. Setting it long helps your income statement. I guess Bell Telephone used to have a depreciation period set at maybe 50 years and look at all the new tech you got from them.
Now if there is competition, real competition, your competitor may be able to eat your lunch with new tech. So the old tech capitalist tends to upgrade the tech, at least if the banks are making loans for such things. And government economic policy can have a big effect on the decision. And some capitalists for whatever reason do the right thing anyway. Some of these people can get very rich, which is certainly a motivation.
So is it really the right thing. I know most of the readers like new tech, but is it really important? I think it is very clear that is important. Look at it this way. Humans have always been overpopulated, from the very beginning. For instance, the mastadons ran out. Resource are always finite, given a fixed level of tech. New tech in the productive process creates new resources. This is how we have traditionally avoided malthusian processes for the most part. But we have screwed up. The human population now exceeds the carrying power of the planet, given our tech level. A good way to look at the problem is as caused by monetarist economic policy. I guess some people are already floating the idea of solving the problem by killing 5 billion people. This is not just some sort of abstract third-world problem. They are talking about you also.
Huh, I did not know that Hawk was that redundant. I estimate the batteries were fully up maybe 70% of the time. I had a van full of discrete transistor computer to simulate an attack, and with an operational battery, it took a lot of extra tweaking of the battery to get the battery to function with the simulator.
Anyhow it did not make much difference. I am not really sure that any US military unit anywhere ever fired a hawk in anger. And the very optimistic expectation in the European theater was that if the flag went up, the battery would survive 30-60 seconds, and get off one or maybe two missiles. As you probably know, this stuff all comes under combined forces doctrine. So the cannon cockers would protect us from artillery attack. Unfortunately, the way the cannon cockers figured it was that they might not be able to fire, but most of their units were capable of retreating.:)
The draftees did not particularly care about the mig overflights, but they would have been happy to shoot down a mig just for grins. Some of the officers were gung-ho, but they did not have the authority to fire. They had to call battalion, and battalion did not have the authority to fire. So battalion called group. But group did not have the authority to fire. Eventually, it got up to V Corp. who had the authority, but I never heard of them giving authorization to fire, and by the time the answer came all the way back, the mig was long gone.
I think if we had a pure capitalist economy we would still end up with a quadrillion dollars in derivatives and somehow we would end up with fascist economic policy.
A useful exercise is to determine whether Schauctian economic policy is fascist economic policy.
Another useful case is to consider a state that has austerity policies that require a dictatorship to enforce.
By your treatment, RIAA is fascist. After all, they do their best to support their profits through state power. But I would not call them fascist.
Emperically, it is pretty easy to conclude we have a bankers dictatorship. Perhaps you might even agree. But I would not yet call the government fascist. Still, there is lot worth viewing with alarm.
There have always been a lot of fascist tendencies in the United State. Pooh, Hitler got his Social Darwinism theories from the United States. Fascism had a lot of advocates in the united states before world war II. The Liberty League even tried a military coup. Sure all this does a lot of damage, and it should always be opposed, but it only becomes really big and important if there is a depression.
Oh, to get a somewhat stable fascist dictatorship, you pretty much need a fascist mass movement. So another exercise, what is the present core of a potential future us fascist mass movement?
Pretty good. Banks push paper, but if the paper if tied to productive assets, then the banks are fulfilling a necessary role. And complaints about value money for goods is fine, but try money for production. If we do that, the goods will be around. Looking at production oriented capitalists, they do a pretty good job of introducing new tech into the productive process, when they are not being sucked dry by the paper pushers.
Two macro things:
We have maybe a quarillion dollars in derivative debt world-wide. All that debt is on someones books as an asset. The asset requires income to maintain its value, but it has no connection to anything that is actually productive. At this point, all the money in the world will not resolve this. So the derivatives parasite on the productive economy and your living standards.
How does this happen? It is pretty much a result of monetarist economy policy. If you want to look for evil, look there. People complain abut greedy and unethical capitialist, but the theory is that money is wealth and is fungible. No ethical considerations are attached.
So what do do?
We can stop the depression in its tracks with three things:
put back in glass-steagle see volker, reich
put the commercial banks through bankruptcy reorganization and force their assets to be real. For instance, what is value of a mortgage asset on a house that burned down with no insurance/ So, what is the value of a mortgage asset on a underwater house? Let the so called investment banks die. See Reich
Wipe out as much of the not real debt, like derivatives, as you can. Not a big change. They were only legalized in 1990 and we will not miss them.
for longer term:
One of the articles talked about a lack of optimism. And we need some significant new tech to enhance the productive process. Both are easily solved and the historical example is fairly recent: the apollo project. I suggest a long term effort for a big mars colony. We cannot do it now, because we are dependent on chemical rockets and we just do not know much of anything about the biological issues. But a hundred year project would I think get a lot of international support. And there would be the money to pay for it. (The Augustine commission basically concluded we cannot do anything because there is no money.)
I thought that in the article the most useful thing was the reference to the optimism of the Apollo era. We will not get that from greenie tech, and unfortuntely, we will not get that from our current space program. The Russian's on the other hand are starting out with the right idea, with new propulsion tech. And it seems obvious to me that they have in the back of their mind a permanent manned colony on Mars, perhaps eventually a rather big one. Say 100 years out. Otherwise, on a technical basis, why not chemical rockets. So I suspect they will get the benefit of the optimism and the economic spinoffs. Maybe they will not make any zombie movies.
I had a conjecture that the Patriot missile was a Raytheon project. Not a particularly well-based speculation, but I did the RFA for confirmation. For some reason, they did not mention the manufacturer. They felt free to mention Intel and Google, but I guess the manufacturer was an advertiser.
As it happens, 40 years ago I was an end user of a Raytheon air-defense missile system called the Hawk. There was a common derogatory phrase about Raytheon. I guess we might call it a meme now. It was cute and perhaps relevant to this article, but it has been so long, I can not reproduce it.
Anyway, whoever manufactured the Patriot, I sort of doubt that the first cause was a bad programmer.
A war story. This is not all Raytheon's fault, but it makes a nice slander.
At Kassel, there was a NSA antenna farm with a hawk battery next to it. It was noteworthy, but not unusual, for Migs to buzz the antenna farm. I guess it happened every few months. Go figure.
Somewhere else I hear that about 40% of us manufacturing is shutting down because of the credit crunch.
I think free enterprise ideology is junk and I am not an adam smith free trader, but capitalists can do a good job at introducing new tech into the productive process and I regard that as the best measure of the wealth of a nation. Obviously, if you let capitalists run wild, they end up pushing paper and you get maybe a quadrillion dollars of derivatives, world-wide, and that suck the life out of both you and manufacturing. Looking locally, I hear the big bail-out banks still have a 100 trillion of derivatives. And looking still more locally, I live near a small town that has one bank. It is a part of a regional chain. The parent just got hit with a requirement to raise 300 million in new capital. I wonder if they can do that. In any case, they are not going to be easy to get credit from. Perhaps in normal times, they would have been closed down. Hah, I just cashed a $5000 check and they had difficulty coming up with the cash.
Anyway, upgrade productive processes and junk the WTO, and do bilateral trade deals. You still need a competent government and you need lots of effective creativity, from scientists down to the factory floor. So, I admit there are some issues with which to deal.
Slashdot Mirror
A fixed resource base is a bit of a fallacy, but people like to commit it. Over the past 100,000 years, we have always been coming up with "new" resources, usually quite different from the "old" resources. If not, we would be extinct. This is kind of an existential counter-argument, as well as emperical. It is true at at any given tech level, resources are finite. And it is also true that the sun is a finite resource at current and immediately foreseeable tech levels.
troll on/
What is it with greenies and such. The above argument is not particularly sophisticated and I stole some of it from previous posts from others above. So why the endless claptrap about in effect god-given finite resources? I think,fundamentally, they do not distinguish between man and beast. Well, these days a lot scientists do not either. Incidentally, I consider myself a bit of an environmentalist. I would like to see some big environmental projects. For instance, biology did not finish its job on earth. I would like to see the Sahara irrigated and converted into something useful for man. I think terraforming mars is a fine idea. But I suspect these ideas would make a greenie howl.
We need to have a new mental disease classification just for greenies. They would easily fit under the usual commitment statues. Maybe we could let them leave the hospital on a day pass and go to a park. The rest of the time, we could immerse them in Renaissance art.
troll off/
I do not have a problem with a capitalist getting rich doing useful things with new tech, particularly if he has funded some R&D. But for the free marketers out there, both RIAA and the old Bell Labs are capitalist, and we note casinos also. Face it, there are capitalists and then are capitalists. And not paying recent attention to the difference is how we got in our current mess. Anyway, slashdotters like disruptive tech.
As far as unlimited energy is concerned, I think the universe does not much like abiotic singularities. On the other hand, as you increase energy density, you get interesting phenomena. But I think you were saying relatively unlimited energy. I am not sure what the right logical word is, but suppose we had 1000x more energy. The world standard of living would be appreciably higher and if we were sensible, there would be a higher cultural level, and that would translate into new tech, which would enable more energy production. Oh, and if we had 1000x more energy, the effective price of energy, as part of the cost of living, would go down, so in a proper sense it is cheaper, ignoring any increased efficiency in energy production. But you cannot ignore that.
There is however an implicit assumption that physics is infinite.
APEC Summit in
Singapore: Four Powers Agenda Brought to the Table By Russia and China
November 15,
2009 (LPAC)—The heads of 21 Asia-Pacific nations, including China, Russia
and the United States, are in Singapore this weekend for the annual APEC
forum. And while speeches by Russian President Medvedev and Chinese
President Hu Jintao have affirmed the new cooperation between those two
anchor nations of the Four Powers alliance, much of the concrete statecraft
has been taking place on the sidelines, in a series of bilateral meetings.
President Obama arrived late Saturday night from his first Asia stopover in
Tokyo, and will go on to China and South Korea after the APEC gathering ends.
He will meet separately with Presidents Medvedev and Hu Jintao during the
weekend.
While the formal heads of state summit is to take place Sunday, both the
Russian and Chinese presidents addressed a gathering of business leaders on
Saturday, and both speeches reflected the strategic shift in orientation of
the two governments. President Medvedev, according to Itar-Tass, emphasized
that the global financial crisis has forced a structural overhaul of the
national economy. "He believes that Russia should become a country whose
prosperity will depend not so much on raw materials as on intellectual
resources, high technologies, innovative products, etc." President Medvedev
expanded on those points, in an article he published in The
Economist, on the eve of the APEC summit, focusing on Russian expanded
investment in research and development in the field of nuclear power, outer
space, and medicine.
Presidents Medvedev and Hu Jintao met in Singapore, and in comments to
reporters, both leaders stressed the recent agreements to build up the
regions of the Russian Far East and China. "I have already given
instructions on the fulfillment of the agreements," Medvedev told his Chinese
counterpart." Hu Jintao noted that the Russian president is coming to China
next year, and emphasized that this will be an "important event in the
development of bilateral relations."
Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi met on Saturday with U.S. Secretary
of States Hillary Clinton, and invited her to visit China next year—which
she accepted. She will be accompanying President Obama next week on a four
day visit to China, with stopovers in Shanghai and Beijing.
And in another indication of dramatic changes in the political relations
in the Far East, Chinese President Hu Jintao also met, in his capacity as
General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, with
Lien Chan, honorary chairman of the Koumintang (KMT), who was formerly vice
president of Taiwan. At the meeting, Hu declared, "We should continue to
follow the approaches of putting aside difficult issues, and making economic
issues priority in advancing cross-Strait consultation, and strive to launch
the consultation process for a cross-Strait economic cooperation framework
agreement within this year."
limited to no freedom of speech:
My impression is that the Chinese can pretty well say what they want, as long as it does not threaten the one-party rule.
As far as child labor is concerned, I was not so sure, so I googled a bit. It appears that the national government is down on child labor (under 16), but local governments often turn a blind eye.
Here is my reference:
http://www.china-labour.org.hk/en/node/15889
As various sources within the Chinese media have pointed out, documenting occupational health and safety problems among child labourers is inherently difficult because Chinese labour law bans child labour. One newly passed regulation makes the hiring of a minor punishable by a fine of 5000 Yuan per worker (cumulative per month of employ) and suspension of the employer's operating license. Other laws criminalize the placing of underage workers in potentially hazardous situations and forced bonding of a child for the purpose of labour (3). The problem lies not so much with regulation but lack of enforcement. Indeed, despite stiffer penalties, the problem of child labour has only become more serious in recent years. A growing economy coupled with a growing economic disparity provides a fertile ground for exploitation of societies most vulnerable members. Local governments, in a headlong rush to woo manufacturers into their districts are often reticent to enforce regulations against child labour, which might act as an impediment to local economic growth.
The problem of juvenile labour in China is far too multifaceted to be summarized in black and white terms. To address these complexities, we suggest that further and deeper studies into the root causes of the problem be carried out. We see these root causes as being a growing economic disparity in China, a rapidly changing social structure, and a failure of the Chinese educational system to provide adequate and affordable education to all children. Until these issues are addressed, it is our belief that the problem of child labour in China will continue to grow, and as it does incidents involving the injury and death of juvenile workers will continue. (4)
freedom of religion: I googled that. Here is an interesting article: http://www.religiousfreedom.com/wrpt/Chinarpt.htm
Not a good situation, but I think the statement no freedom of worship goes too far. But the Chinese government has rules, and we do too (for instance, tax exempt status requirements), The difference is that the IRS does not kill you. Perhaps from the wikipedia article, I note that the official complaint about the Roman Catholic church is not different than one that was popular in the US. Then, again, you may be too young to remember the JFK election campaign. Still, it would seem that the real issue is the role of the Roman Catholic church in the events leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union.
middle class: I guess the Chinese now have more millionaires than the US. I suspect the middle class is developing nicely too.
I am not sure how to classify the Chinese economy, but I suspect a lot of the problems come from the process of accumulation. Communist, socialist, or capitialist accumulation has not been pretty. It does not have to be that way, IMO, but the emperically the historical record is pretty clear.
Hah, I did not think of that. Perhaps they could put them in their retail stores and sell them to the tourists as souveniers. But it sort of illustrates the problem. If you view wealth as related to something having to do with actual production, they are worthless in a modern economy. Sure they might be collectors items, maybe high priced items, but having a lot of money does not guarantee you are rich. The last banknote Weimar printed was a 100 trillion mark banknote. And if you are a gold bug, Spain was such a successful merchantilist that they had so much gold, that domestically gold was not worth much. Inflation.
Anyway, the buggy whips are on my books at what I paid for them, so my balance sheet still looks good. I figure they have a long depreciation schedule so they are not hurting my income statement. My books look so good, maybe I can get a bank loan and expand.
I was a little puzzled about your post. Particularly by the url. I found the url a little offensive.
So I looked at your journal, and concluded you had the right idea. But this particular post I first viewed as somewhat ideological in form. So what is the real deal? I think you make here essentially a moral argument by assertion. But the person who responded to you below compared misery and happiness and that is also a moral argument and I happen to accept both moral positions and find no necessary contradiction in them. And I am not particularly sure that the responder is say a ZPGer, Since this is slashdot, I have to say something nice about Bill Gates. He was a ZPGer until Melinda talked him out of it, Now he finds it cost-effective to save lives. You might have some complaints about some of the details of his efforts, for instance, perhaps he should be nicer to WHO, but consider the overall thrust. And I agree that cost-effectiveness is a poor reason. Sort of reminds me of Obama.
Anyway, what is with the URL?.
An assumption of more tech, of a fundamental kind, means more resources. Indeed, it makes useless things into new resources.
Maybe you are of the rare breed, a libertarian environmentalist, Some of these types even very much like space development, perhaps so we can put the dirty stuff off planet.
Except for the limited resources nonsense, I would guess you are somewhat sane, certainally as compared to some of your brethern. You might realize that at a given level of tech, humans are always overpopulated. If the resource are in fact finite, you eventually use them all up. And bad things happen.
Here are some considerations about population, beyond resources.
A good approach to population is to maximize potential population density. Now what actual population do you need? Scientifically you can put an upper and lower bound, but in between, it basically a society's choice. Note that you need an improving cultural level to get and deal with the new tech you need, but this takes wealth, and you could chose to put the wealth into new capital goods instead of increased cultural level and with the variable of actual population. All this changes the mix of options at the next cycle. So while we need to maximize potential population density, it seems to be scientifically intractable to figure out what the right mix of actual population, cultural level, and capital goods should be, as long as you stay away from the boundary conditions. At that point, the question of nice places for camping become relevant.
Now how you get new fundamental tech? Emperically, from the discovery of fire onward, it comes from higher energy densities. Seems to be how the universe works. So you also want to maximize the energy density per square unit. In detail, you really interested in the energy density in productive processes. Interestingly, these two paragraphs are part of what some Russian Orthodox types called the first new theoxology in fifty years. Perhaps it might eventually change the Roman Catholics position on contraception. :-) Anyway, this is one reason to not like solar power, unless it is right up against the sun.
As far as socialism issues are concerned, it does not really matter. The biggest issue is the definition of wealth. You can not have financial capitialist running things, because they will run amok and speculate, and as in the present case, you might end up with 1.5 quadrillion dollars of derivatives. What we used to call industrial capitalists sometimes do okay, but their accounting has a fallicy. Still, look at Hamilton, Lincoln, and FDR. Fine economic policy for capitalism. Communist could do it, but Lenin thought it made sense to keep the living standard way low, and look what happened. Socialism does not much count at the moment, because the EU nations do not have enough sovereignty left to implement non-monetarist economic policy. Personally, I think after we do it awhile, it will be something we have not seen before. After all, economic and social systems are kind of a tech. Since this is slashdot, I will wonder what an economy would like if the capital cost of manufacturing was low, but the design costs high.
So what is the current deal. Well, human population is above the carrying capacity, given the speculative waste and the level of tech. I personally expect that at this point, we will have some die off, even if we get the financial capitialists under sane control and do everything right. If we do not do better, maybe 5 billion will die off in the next 50-100 years. Some people like the idea,. Basically, we have not been doing the right things, and so we have been in a mathusian process for maybe 50 years and now we are in the acute stage. It does not have much to do with population policy,
Regarding nut-cases doing mass murder, and somewhat ignoring the die off and its causes, you look at the press and you are properly concerned. But a little perspective is needed. I figure the US physical economy went past the
you implicitly assume a zero sum game, tech advances change the sum
I do not favor solar power, except maybe right next to the sun, but this is clearly a science driver. People complain it cannot be done with current tech, but that is the whole point of a science driver. I suspect there is something subtle here. It is likely that a spss is not the main purpose. Given Japan's population fear of things nuclear, it makes some sense, but is the population afraid of fusion? I do not know what the population thinks about fusion, but I suspect the deal is that a spss is easy to sell politically.
Consider china. Desperate straits because the US is collapsing. Naturally they have overproduction as a result, but they are not backing off. Something about helping the world economy. They have figured out the world financial system is collapsing, so they have no standard options. They are stuck with maybe 1.5 trillion of useless us paper, so they make it non-useless by doing economic development projects in Russia. Russia is talking economic development corridors. China and Russia start out signing 15 deals in the past few weeks with perhaps 20 more on the table. India has just signed a number of deals with China, but I do not yet know the content. None of the countries have had good relationships. Oh India is going to withdraw a lot of troops from Kasmir. And now we have a science driver out of Japan.
Oh, China just did a 10 billion low interest loan to Africa. Something about "financials", maybe banking? Are they setting up Hamiltonian style credit banking systems there? I do not know, and I do not quite think so, but that would be close to a whole package.
the usual answer is beauty, fairly common
and I know of one guy who sometimes evaluates ideas on moral criteria. (this is not old testament stuff)
On objective truth, I may be full of shit, but I cannot quite pin it down. I mistrust my reification to context-sensitive.
Since we were talking about axiomatic philosophic systems, I googled goodel Wittgenstein. Lots of stuff. Somewhat randomly, I read the following, which might be of interest to you,
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/goldstein05/goldstein05_index.html
As I recall Republic had the cave metaphor. Seems to me to be a real problem for sense-certainity interpretations.
As far as truth is concerned, I have real issues with axiomatic systems, and would cite godel. If you are unfamiliar with him, he demonstrated that axiomatic systems of any interest are either inconsistent or incomplete. I am sure there is lot on the net about him. More generally, there are in effect a lot of axiomatic systems out there. For instance the thermodynamics cult basically functions that way. But over time, with new science, they have to update the axioms. At that point, during the update, it is not an axiomatic system. And just at that point, they are dealing with something true.
About truth more generally, for most people, including particularly reductionists, truth is a hard little ball of shit. Instead, reifying it a bit, truth is context sensitive. So objective truth is kind of a nonsense phrase.
Well, you said probable. But I paid top dollar for a bunch of buggy whips. Know any buyers?
The point here is that new tech devalues old tech.
Anyway, on past (distance past) interactions in the market, I should be to find a buyer. If nothing else, I should be able to rely on the bigger fool theory like eveyone else. Then again, that has not worked out so well lately. But there is always the government to bail me out.
A central model is not the problem. This result has a bit of generality. Or emergent intelligence of the market, if such a thing exists. But you might want to criticize equilibrium assumptions or even axiom based systems.
Funny, I do not recall that Plato had much use for sense-certainity. And that I think is basically what you mean about objective.
The easy way to look at most no free will arguments is as an effect of reductionism. Interestingly, a good reductionist will deny that creativity exists, or try to redefine it, much like the AI people tend to try to redefine intelligence. Yet it seem to me the continued existence of the human species shows creativity exists. Exactly how creativity happens to exist is a fine big question. In most contexts, it is convenience to call it a property of the soul, but that just begs the question. Looking at it closely, you end up wondering if abiotic processes are creative. For the species, it is an existential question. Fortunately, we know some ways to encourage creativity.
Maybe a definition is appropriate. Creativity is the discovery of new principles of the universe that allow the changing of nature for man. This is too narrow, but it is based on a nicely emperical phenomena,
More a blog about mortgage lenders, but somewhat more. Looking around a bit, they have a wealth of detail, and do a pretty reasonable job of deriving real numbers from the official numbers. They seem to be gold bugs, but their argument for gold at least hits some true points. Probably the best a monetarist could be expected to do.
hmm, no chance that it is something useful, like maybe a more efficient way to produce positrons?
So I have what I call a landline phone in the house. But the telco has fiber to the house. The telco no longer much likes copper. So the install requires power to run the fiber interconnect. I guess not very much. I talked to guy and I guess it was maybe 2.5 milliamp.
Here is something sort of interesting. To deal with legal requirements they need enough battery backup to run 4 hours. This telco puts in power backup for maybe a week. They put in two power units. Rual area, lot of elderly. But I once had it actually exceed that time and go out because of power issues in the house.
Anyway, look at a traditional copper wire based phone. The CO has big batteries! That is why your phone does not seem to require batteries.
I live in a rural area serviced by a telephone coop. I am about 1.8 miles from the phone company. I have fiber to the house. My download is 20mps, my upload is 5mps. Last I checked my download was actually 23 mps. So what do I pay? $80/month. This does not seem to me to vastly more expensive than $50/month. If I have an issue, in my experience, they come out the same day, even Sunday. I guess they put their first fiber in 20 years ago, to a neighboring telco. 18 years ago they started conduiting their copper. Four years ago they started doing fiber to the home. Now this is not one big massive rollout, Maybe what comcast would do if they had to do it was do a massive rollout. The coop just keeps working on it as they can.
Everyone here knows that new tech devalues old tech. This is true whether it is your cell phone or an income producing capital item. But as long as the capital item produces the necessary revenue stream, monetarist economic policy supports maintaining the devalued capital asset on the balance sheet at the original value. Sure, accounting depreciation reduces the original value over time, but there is some room there for error. For instance, maybe the depreciation period is unreasonably long for reality. Setting it long helps your income statement. I guess Bell Telephone used to have a depreciation period set at maybe 50 years and look at all the new tech you got from them.
Now if there is competition, real competition, your competitor may be able to eat your lunch with new tech. So the old tech capitalist tends to upgrade the tech, at least if the banks are making loans for such things. And government economic policy can have a big effect on the decision. And some capitalists for whatever reason do the right thing anyway. Some of these people can get very rich, which is certainly a motivation.
So is it really the right thing. I know most of the readers like new tech, but is it really important? I think it is very clear that is important. Look at it this way. Humans have always been overpopulated, from the very beginning. For instance, the mastadons ran out. Resource are always finite, given a fixed level of tech. New tech in the productive process creates new resources. This is how we have traditionally avoided malthusian processes for the most part. But we have screwed up. The human population now exceeds the carrying power of the planet, given our tech level. A good way to look at the problem is as caused by monetarist economic policy. I guess some people are already floating the idea of solving the problem by killing 5 billion people. This is not just some sort of abstract third-world problem. They are talking about you also.
Huh, I did not know that Hawk was that redundant. I estimate the batteries were fully up maybe 70% of the time. I had a van full of discrete transistor computer to simulate an attack, and with an operational battery, it took a lot of extra tweaking of the battery to get the battery to function with the simulator.
Anyhow it did not make much difference. I am not really sure that any US military unit anywhere ever fired a hawk in anger. And the very optimistic expectation in the European theater was that if the flag went up, the battery would survive 30-60 seconds, and get off one or maybe two missiles. As you probably know, this stuff all comes under combined forces doctrine. So the cannon cockers would protect us from artillery attack. Unfortunately, the way the cannon cockers figured it was that they might not be able to fire, but most of their units were capable of retreating. :)
The draftees did not particularly care about the mig overflights, but they would have been happy to shoot down a mig just for grins. Some of the officers were gung-ho, but they did not have the authority to fire. They had to call battalion, and battalion did not have the authority to fire. So battalion called group. But group did not have the authority to fire. Eventually, it got up to V Corp. who had the authority, but I never heard of them giving authorization to fire, and by the time the answer came all the way back, the mig was long gone.
Oh well, two wasted years.
I think if we had a pure capitalist economy we would still end up with a quadrillion dollars in derivatives and somehow we would end up with fascist economic policy.
A useful exercise is to determine whether Schauctian economic policy is fascist economic policy.
Another useful case is to consider a state that has austerity policies that require a dictatorship to enforce.
By your treatment, RIAA is fascist. After all, they do their best to support their profits through state power. But I would not call them fascist.
Emperically, it is pretty easy to conclude we have a bankers dictatorship. Perhaps you might even agree. But I would not yet call the government fascist. Still, there is lot worth viewing with alarm.
There have always been a lot of fascist tendencies in the United State. Pooh, Hitler got his Social Darwinism theories from the United States. Fascism had a lot of advocates in the united states before world war II. The Liberty League even tried a military coup. Sure all this does a lot of damage, and it should always be opposed, but it only becomes really big and important if there is a depression.
Oh, to get a somewhat stable fascist dictatorship, you pretty much need a fascist mass movement. So another exercise, what is the present core of a potential future us fascist mass movement?
Pretty good. Banks push paper, but if the paper if tied to productive assets, then the banks are fulfilling a necessary role. And complaints about value money for goods is fine, but try money for production. If we do that, the goods will be around. Looking at production oriented capitalists, they do a pretty good job of introducing new tech into the productive process, when they are not being sucked dry by the paper pushers.
Two macro things:
We have maybe a quarillion dollars in derivative debt world-wide. All that debt is on someones books as an asset. The asset requires income to maintain its value, but it has no connection to anything that is actually productive. At this point, all the money in the world will not resolve this. So the derivatives parasite on the productive economy and your living standards.
How does this happen? It is pretty much a result of monetarist economy policy. If you want to look for evil, look there. People complain abut greedy and unethical capitialist, but the theory is that money is wealth and is fungible. No ethical considerations are attached.
So what do do?
We can stop the depression in its tracks with three things:
put back in glass-steagle
see volker, reich
put the commercial banks through bankruptcy reorganization and force their assets to be real.
For instance, what is value of a mortgage asset on a house that burned down with no insurance/ So, what is the value of a mortgage asset on a underwater house? Let the so called investment banks die. See Reich
Wipe out as much of the not real debt, like derivatives, as you can. Not a big change. They were only legalized in 1990 and we will not miss them.
for longer term:
One of the articles talked about a lack of optimism. And we need some significant new tech to enhance the productive process. Both are easily solved and the historical example is fairly recent: the apollo project. I suggest a long term effort for a big mars colony. We cannot do it now, because we are dependent on chemical rockets and we just do not know much of anything about the biological issues. But a hundred year project would I think get a lot of international support. And there would be the money to pay for it. (The Augustine commission basically concluded we cannot do anything because there is no money.)
I thought that in the article the most useful thing was the reference to the optimism of the Apollo era. We will not get that from greenie tech, and unfortuntely, we will not get that from our current space program. The Russian's on the other hand are starting out with the right idea, with new propulsion tech. And it seems obvious to me that they have in the back of their mind a permanent manned colony on Mars, perhaps eventually a rather big one. Say 100 years out. Otherwise, on a technical basis, why not chemical rockets. So I suspect they will get the benefit of the optimism and the economic spinoffs. Maybe they will not make any zombie movies.
Disclosure: I am a programmer.
I had a conjecture that the Patriot missile was a Raytheon project. Not a particularly well-based speculation, but I did the RFA for confirmation. For some reason, they did not mention the manufacturer. They felt free to mention Intel and Google, but I guess the manufacturer was an advertiser.
As it happens, 40 years ago I was an end user of a Raytheon air-defense missile system called the Hawk. There was a common derogatory phrase about Raytheon. I guess we might call it a meme now.
It was cute and perhaps relevant to this article, but it has been so long, I can not reproduce it.
Anyway, whoever manufactured the Patriot, I sort of doubt that the first cause was a bad programmer.
A war story. This is not all Raytheon's fault, but it makes a nice slander.
At Kassel, there was a NSA antenna farm with a hawk battery next to it. It was noteworthy, but not unusual, for Migs to buzz the antenna farm. I guess it happened every few months. Go figure.
so, you did not get many replies:)
I will give a try. Here is a slightly relevant url:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a8gkj6sgD6dw#
Somewhere else I hear that about 40% of us manufacturing is shutting down because of the credit crunch.
I think free enterprise ideology is junk and I am not an adam smith free trader, but capitalists can do a good job at introducing new tech into the productive process and I regard that as the best measure of the wealth of a nation. Obviously, if you let capitalists run wild, they end up pushing paper and you get maybe a quadrillion dollars of derivatives, world-wide, and that suck the life out of both you and manufacturing. Looking locally, I hear the big bail-out banks still have a 100 trillion of derivatives. And looking still more locally, I live near a small town that has one bank. It is a part of a regional chain. The parent just got hit with a requirement to raise 300 million in new capital. I wonder if they can do that. In any case, they are not going to be easy to get credit from. Perhaps in normal times, they would have been closed down. Hah, I just cashed a $5000 check and they had difficulty coming up with the cash.
Anyway, upgrade productive processes and junk the WTO, and do bilateral trade deals. You still need a competent government and you need lots of effective creativity, from scientists down to the factory floor. So, I admit there are some issues with which to deal.
thanks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_gravity