Oh, I absolutely agree a one-world government would be stable. In fact, that's one of the main reasons I oppose such a thing! As you say, it takes considerable driving force for people to "vote with their feet" and migrate away from an oppressive evil government. It takes much, much more driving force for them to get out the pitchforks and muskets and rebel. Imagine if the "peaceful" way of forcing change in your government -- threatening it with a "loss of customers" by emigrating -- is no longer available, because there's no place to go. An evil world government could only be altered by bloody revolution. So, yes, it will be stable, even if it is utterly wicked. That's a "feature" I do not like at all.
Consider government/economics to be the "operating system" of the world, with people as the "hardware." Is it a great idea to wish for the One True Operating System to take over? I don't think so. We do better, as consumers, if there is a healthy competition for our loyalty. Please note that this "competition" between nations doesn't have to be bloody. The US competes with a large number of First World nations from Japan to Brazil in a bloodless if entirely serious way.
Perhaps we can reach a middle ground by my saying that I entirely agree with you that bloody and violent competition between nations is to be abhorred, and I hope it will go away someday. I think a peaceful competition between political and economics systems, where people can freely choose their loyalty, and express thereby their approval or disapproval of their local system, will be an excellent route to maximum general satisfaction with one's political situation. And it will make governments maximally responsible in practise and not just in theory to the actual needs and wants of their people.
Perhaps you would be willing to agree that this is a desirable situation, and one that you can see being the route by which the ultimate one-world government comes about? That is, perhaps you can see a peaceful competition ultimately petering out as all the various competitors hit, sooner or later, one by one, on the One True Best Government?
In that case, our disagreement will be minor, because what you see as the penultimate step I think will actually be the ultimate, just because conditions will always keep changing (if for no other reason than because technology does), so people will keep slightly changing their minds about their government. Plus, people just like to fiddle with it. In the U.S. we've had a stable form of government for 220 years, but we still fiddle about with it on minor points all the time. New SCOTUS rulings, an amendment here, an initiative there, yadda yadda. Congress passes no fewer laws yearly in 2005 than it did in 1805. Gives us something to talk about, I suppose.
You are correct that most people do not migrate from the place of their birth. But I think the conclusions we can draw from that are limited. The most important reason is that people are fairly likely to have attitudes broadly similar to their parents and their neighbors. Hence the probability that in each and every generation the majority of people must move to be satisfied is low. For example, if I find that Argentina suits me better than the U.S., and I move there, it's not that likely that my children will, willy nilly, prefer to be back in the U.S., while my grandchildren prefer Argentina again, and so forth.
What we'd need to examine, then, is the pattern of migrations over multiple generations. If we rephrase your question to ask: how likely is it that some ancestor in the past four or five generations of each person has moved from one country to another -- why, then we find large chunks of the world population has moved when it could. The United States, for example, is almost entirely made up of people who moved here or whose ancestors did so less than 3 or 4 generations ago. In the United States -- indeed, almost throughout the First World -- migration now tends to be playing as big a role if not a bigger role in population changes than native births and deaths.
The second reason is that the ability to move is still often restricted, either politically (as in the remaining Communist nations) or economically (as in, say, sub-Saharan Africa). The fact that the demand for personal yachts is small does not tell us how many people would like personal yachts, since they are quite expensive. Similarly, for many nations of the world, we do not as yet know what fraction of their population would move if they could.
Hence I think your conclusion that free migration would be an unimportant perturbation on world population is not likely to be correct. I also think your conclusion that people largely don't migrate because they're happy enough (if not perfectly happy) where they are is not correct. You're probably right as far as the United States goes, but this is a country with massive and continuing immigration. Thousands risk their lives daily to get here. That is, evidence suggests that this is the currently most attractive system under which to live. That means we can hardly draw conclusions about the rest of the world's happiness with their system from the happiness of people under the U.S. system.
Finally, your idea that the ultimate one-world system would just naturally be a good and decent system strikes me as historically unlikely. There have been multiple bloody revolutions, civil wars, et cetera across the globe in the last four centuries, massive strife involving millions, as people struggle over what will be their political and economic system. That is, the historical evidence -- not to mention simple things like the present "Blue State/Red State" divide in the US, or the debates over the EU Constitution in Europe -- strongly suggests there is in fact no broad agreement on the best political and economic system, and that there are huge numbers of adherents of at least several systems that are in such violent contrast to each other that their supporters regard each other as more or less deadly enemies.
Nor, I think, is there even the suggestion that a consensus is slowly evolving. I don't see any evidence that political struggles over the correct form and scope of government, or of the correct economic system are becoming fewer and fewer over the years. The debates on such topics here on/. seem no less passionate than the debates in the salons of France in 1848, or in the alehouses of New England in 1776.
but this is likely to be very energy-intensive also.
Um, yes. The first source I came across suggests a bulk price of $30/kg for the pure metal.
Also, whether you need one or two or twelve real tanks was not my point so much as you need a second conceptual tank to carry your exhaust with you. That is a wholly novel concept from the point of view of combustion engines. And, as I said, if you're willing to pay the (large) penalties of carrying all your exhaust with you and having it recycled centrally, instead of just dumping it into the atmosphere -- why not consider the same with existing gasoline technology?
The point of an H2 engine is to use O2 from the atmosphere (so you don't have to carry your oxidizer) and generate gaseous products (so you don't have to carry your exhaust), and generate an exhaust which, unlike that from hydrocarbon combustion, is neither a pollutant nor a greenhouse gas. There really isn't any other point. If you're going to carry your own oxidizer and give up gaseous exhaust, and just have a closed cycle, there's no particular reason I can see to consider H2 as a fuel at all.
Yes, thank you, I knew that. I was referring to bulk Al, not the powder. It would be a bit tricky to transport freshly-finely-divided Al powder to fueling stations, yes?
An excellent and useful summary, I think, except that you should also add that magnesium, unlike petroleum, cannot be simply dug out of the ground, but must be reduced at large energy expense from various ores. Where does that energy come from? Petroleum, currently.
So not only the hydrogen but also the magnesium is a "transitional form." Neither can be appropriately considered a fuel in this device. (The article notes that magnesium is a "common" metal, but this is disingenuous. It's "common" only in the sense that it's all over the place in crustal rocks, but it's also always chemically bonded to various other elements, so it's hardly "common" in the sense of "easy to get." You might as well say hydrogen itself is very "common" because 90% of the Solar System by mass, i.e. the Sun, is hydrogen.)
Also to point out: one of the reasons we use petroleum as a fuel is that the reaction products are all gaseous, so we can just dump them out of the car as we go. In this car one of the major exhaust products (the MgO) is solid. So you've got to carry all your exhaust around with you. That means your car needs two tanks, one for the "fuel" before it's used, and one for the "fuel" afterwards.
Geez, if you're going to go to that kind of trouble, you might as well just install scrubbers on the tailpipe of an ordinary gasoline engine and pull out all the undesirable CO2, CO, NOx and whatnot, leaving only the water I presume, and send the lithium hydroxide or whatever's inside the scrubber back to the factory to be regenerated every now and then.
Not to mention the fact that I don't really believe in this aluminum oxidation reaction. Aluminum doesn't spontaneously oxidize when you leave it out in a 21% oxygen atmosphere, does it? Why would it do it when you expose it to mere steam? Unless the steam is exceedingly hot, way hotter than is convenient to generate in an automobile.
Now magnesium I can believe. But the price of pure magnesium is a even higher than pure aluminum, I bet.
Mmm, but let us think this all the way through. If there is no more international competition, then there is no more difference between nations. That means we all live under one political system.
However....my absolute preferred top-notch hurray huzzah political system is, I dare say, not quite the same as yours. Or as other/. denizens. And perhaps even very different from what a Wyoming rancher or Bill Gates or Robert Mugabe likes. Which brings up an interesting question: which political system is the one political system under which we're all going to live? Is it going to be my preferred system? Or yours? Or Gates'? Or (shudder) Robert Mugabe's?
See, the nice thing about having lots of different countries with lots of different political systems, is that you have the chance, at least, of finding one you like and moving there to live under it.
Furthermore, if people can generally move around, it sets up a handy competition between political systems. Systems that oppress their people or which generally fail to help their citizens prosper lose population (note Soviet Russia and Communist China had a healthy emigration rate, and people will risk their lives to escape North Korea). Successful systems gain people, especially clever people who are more likely to be able to emigrate.
So, I dunno, I kind of like the fact that there's lots of political system in the world, just like I like the fact that there are lots of car companies competing for my allegiance. I just wish it was as easy for people to switch national allegiance as it is to switch which brand of car you drive. Then we might see some rapid reform among the nastier systems of government. Nothing like the prospect of being Top Leader of Nobody at All to make a dictator start rethinking his methods.
P.S. Instead of religion and nationalism as the top two leading causes of death in the world, can I nominate (1) bad hygiene and (2) stupidity? Seems to me the Black Death did in a lot more people in the late Middle Ages than the roughly contemporary wars of religion, and even in our own day far more young men died of drinking and driving between 1960 and 1973 than died in Vietnam.
I am quite annoyed that NASA would even risk $50,000 of mine and other tax payer's money on such a preposterous game.
But this is what government is for. In a republic such as ours, the presumption is that a service or commodity for which any dolt can see the need is going to be supplied by the private market. Why not? You can get rich doing so (cf. Gates, Bill). On the other hand, there are a few things that people as individuals or even large firms can't provide (such as national security) or won't provide because it isn't obvious they're going to work -- such as space elevators.
Enter the government. It's government's job to finance "preposterous flights of fancy," because private industry (very sensibly) won't. Most of that blue-sky stuff turns out to be nonsense, naturally, But some of it doesn't. Some of it, in fact, turns out to be ideas so ingenious that they seemed like pure folly to ordinary folks -- that would be you and me and nearly all other voters -- when they were originally proposed. And, of course, these are the clever ideas that will sustain our ability, a hundred years from now, to compete internationally on the basis of being smarter than anyone else, not working for less. I don't know about you, but I prefer to work in a high-wage, low-volume economy than a low-wage, high-volume economy.
Now, there's no doubt a proper amount of bread that government should cast on the waters. We could argue about that. But not in this case. I don't see how anyone who accepts the role of government in financing very basic research could figure that $50,000 out of a $1.8 trillion Federal Budget is wildly over the top.
I agree with the previous commenter who suggested advertising creeps into previously "free" services (like cable TV, or like the Web itself, if you can remember back to its pre-pop-up days) because folks can thereby delude themselves that they're still getting it for "free." (It never was free, of course -- it was only parasitizing one something else, e.g. the original Web was a parasite on government-sponsored research computing. But this is a secondary point.)
Problem is, advertising is not a permanent solution. Let us say users fall into three groups:
Interested in the product and aware of it. These will buy with or without advertising, so money spent on advertising to them is wasted. Zero return on your ad dollar!
Interested in the product but not aware of it. These will buy if you advertise -- so they provide a real return on an ad dollar. Initially these luscious targets may be plentiful, but as time goes by, the novelty of seeing ads in the new medium wears off, and ads by you and your competitors saturate the medium, they become very rare indeed, and you need larger and larger shotgun blasts of ads to hit one of these rara avis.
Not interested in the product. Unfortunately, these form the majority, and while in the beginning they may tolerate the ads, in the end they will spend time and money to avoid them (cf. TiVO, the original cable TV, pop-up blockers, et cetera).
Alas, since folks in group #2, the existence of which is required for ads to be profitable, start disappearing as soon as the ads commence, the ads rapidly become less and less profitable, and the principle that "only a few non-intrusive ads will pay the bills" becomes less and less viable. Then ad bandwidth as a fraction of content bandwidth, and intrusiveness, start creeping higher and higher. This drives off the less thick-skinned people in group #3. Since these tend to be your more intelligent and thoughtful consumers, this tends to reduce the quality of your content (cf. the television), accelerating its degeneration into mindless trash, plus some of these folks may eventually become motivated enough to abandon the medium entirely for something else, e.g. the way smart people have largely abandoned the TV for the Internet, at least for now.
I think part of the problem is the blindness of folks, enraptured by the collectivist fantasy, to the plain ugly fact that high-quality things and services cost labor and capital to provide, and in any free system the people who use those things and services will ultimately have to bear the cost of that labor and capital, one way or another.
If you refuse to fully accept this reality, and try to delude yourself that you can get someone else to pay the cost of production and delivery, through taxes or the "tax" of an advertising stream, then you just end up with a broken system in which you still pay the cost (for example by spending time and effort sifting real value from acres of trash), but in a ridiculous convoluted way that only increases your final burden.
Hence, I would reluctantly predict that unless the Wikipedians figure out some way to directly charge the users of the product for the cost of providing that product, they are dooming themselves either to extinction or a descent into a low-quality product in which increasingly rare nuggets of real value compete with an increasing sea of valueless white noise.
Note: I surely wish reality was different, just like I wish the Second Law of Thermodynamics didn't forbid perpetual motion machines so I could live forever, but I suspect it is not.
Aye, but you forgot to add unbelievable traffic and insane real estate prices. On my morning commute I routinely pass a freeway choked with traffic to 20 MPH, and it has ten lanes in each direction. That's nuts. The cheapest two bedroom condos where I live sell for half a million dollars. That's nuts, too. People buy houses out in Riverside where they're only semi-insanely priced and then get up at 4 AM to drive 70 miles to work. Ah well. As you say, each place is interesting in its own way.
Okey doke. I've mostly got no bone to pick with that.
But do let me note I didn't say they in the Midwest are tougher than others, just that they are a tough lot. I agree every place has its hardships, but the response of people who live there varies. Some are whiners and some just get on with life. When I compare my neighbors in the Midwest with my regrettable neighbors in LA, I think the former look pretty good.
I didn't think my post was entirely unrelated to the question. The point was to suggest that worrying about whether your weather is a personal message from God is rather a narcissist weenie kind of thing to do, and folks who routinely survive such weather are probably not the sort to be doing it. I hope I'm clearer now.
I was in Eastern Colorado, so I'm going to go with Midwest. People on the western slope sure didn't seem to consider us real Westerners, and having spent a smidge of traveling time in Nevada and Utah I kind of agree. On the other hand, calling coastal Californians "westerners" is plain ludicrous, so what can I say? It's probably just a state of mind.
But if your comment is meant to suggest that you suspect people often have practical and personal motives for public statements that purport to defend innocents -- why, you'll have seen from my earlier posts that I quite agree.
Well, bear in mind that the heartland of the United States has been subject to the worst weather on the planet for as far back as anyone knows. Take a look here, for example, a map of tornado hits. From the link: "The United States has the dubious distinction of having the most severe, damaging tornadoes of any country in the world."
It's also the case that the US Gulf Coast is arguably the only highly-industrialized, high-population piece of the First World to have been so regularly pummeled by hurricanes in this century. And let's not even talk about minor problems like lightning, which whacks a hundred or so people a year, and for which Florida is the worst place to be outside of central Africa and atop mountains.
I've lived in the American Midwest (Colorado and Illinois). They're a tough breed. You don't stay if you're scared of big storms, or worry that they're a personal message from God.
The Navy PR people...do this for a living. They know how to spin the story to hook people like you.
Alas, my point is that the NRDC people also "do this for a living" and also "know how to spin the story to hook people," albeit not people like me.
In fact, your argument seems more relevant to the NRDC than the Navy. The Navy mostly gets paid for driving ships around and looking fierce. Keeping up the PR image at home with respect to whales is rather a secondary mission. If they screw it up, well, they might have to get along with more restrictions on how they drive their ships around, but they're hardly in any danger of being disbanded and having to earn a living driving taxis, water taxis I guess.
On the other hand, if the NRDC doesn't convince people that the Navy (or whatever bad guy they've got in the crosshairs) isn't a threat dire enough to require you sending them a check for $20, $50, or whatever you can afford (every bit helps), then the corporation might well break up and everyone will have to get a job flipping burgers.
In other words, for the Navy proving the NRDC wrong is a matter of convenience, but for the NRDC proving the Navy wrong is a matter of survival. Which group is more motivated to, well, exaggerate things a smidge?
Well, no. They're not training "to kill humans." They're training to defend humans, if necessary with their lives. It may be some other humans get killed in the process, but that is not their purpose. And, someone who cares about people he's never met with such selfless dedication that he's willing to lay his life down for them seems like a good candidate for caring about defending innocent lives in general, including those of animals.
The reasons why someone is prepared to kill another human are very important when we ask what that preparedness means. The issue cannot be reduced, as you have, to a trivial syllogism: "If they prepare to kill, they must be callous killers."
In another/. comment thread, a parent commented that he might be prepared to hurt someone who for stupid and hateful reasons prevented him from getting medical care to his child. I think most people see that as admirable dedication to a child, an example of selfless devotion to the welfare of someone weak. But by your cramped moral calculus, we ought to have been surprised -- if he is prepared to hurt a person for any purpose, he can't really care for a child. I hope you can see how absurd that argument would be.
Killing someone may be a depraved evil act, an act of murder, and preparing to do so may demonstrate that a person is a true wretch. But killing a person may also be a great and moral act as well, an act of courage and noble purpose which saves the lives of countless others. It all depends on the circumstances. You can't expect a slogan to substitute for careful thought in deciding what a preparedness to kill means.
Well, it would be more like: there's not enough problems in nature that have very sympathetic victims and clearly identifiable "bad guys." Alas, too often, the "bad guys" in environmental problems are us ourselves, and the solutions are unpopular things that involve annoying small personal sacrifice, like driving smaller cars or sorting the damn recyclables every week or a longer commute (because the highway wasn't built) or higher prices for things (because someone's got to pay for pollution control at the factory).
It's always much neater and satisfying to find some big bad guys, like the unsmiling Navy in their big steel ships with nasty bristly weapons, and fasten your rage upon them. Means your audience doesn't have to take any unpleasant hard looks in the mirror when trying to figure out why Paradise has been lost.
I think it's just as simple that the Navy doesn't want to look bad...
Of course the Navy doesn't want to look bad. But, you know, the easiest way for the Navy to not look bad is to take care not to hurt the whales. Whales are cute. People like whales. If the charge that the Navy is callously hurting whales sticks, if people believe the Navy is hurting them when it could easily not, then the Navy looks bad.
So it seems fairly plausible to me that the Navy is already doing all they reasonably can to avoid hurting the whales. If they won't go further, it's probably because the Navy thinks they can't without compromising national security. The NRDC presumably disagrees -- although they're hardly in a good position to judge national security questions -- and then the question is: does the NRDC disagree on reasonable grounds? Or do they "disagree" because not disagreeing would make it harder to justify their own salaries? I don't really know the answer. But, unlike you, I don't think it's wise to automatically attribute to the NRDC only the best characteristics of humans (altruism, kindness, honesty) and to the Navy only the worst characteristics (laziness, deception, callousness).
What struck me about this article was the Navy's response, namely that they were already doing most of what the NRDC wanted. They sounded a bit bewildered, actually.
So what's up? Well, for a really cynical explanation, consider this. According to the linked article, the peak season for getting people to donate money to nonprofits and charitable groups is just before Christmas, a time rapidly approaching, and nonprofit execs are already forseeing a reduced supply because of the previous demand from Katrina, a sort of bad-news burnout.
Now if I were fundraiser in chief at NRDC, contemplating our usual Christmas appeal for donations mailing, I'd be worried about this. I might, depending on how desperate I was, consider advising that we do something to get our name in the news, something we could describe in our fundraising letter to illustrate how dire is our need for contributions right now.
Of course, I'd recommend that we be careful to pick a cause sure to tug at the heartstrings in the Christmas season. Say, a threat to mommy and baby whales in their breeding grounds.
Not saying this is true at all. Just that it's something to consider. Just because they carry weapons doesn't mean the Navy are always uncaring brutes. Just because they have photos of adorable animals on their newsletter doesn't mean nonprofit XYZ isn't as willing as the next firm to cynically grandstand a bit for the sake of next year's salary increases.
I believe they test general circulation models by trying to "predict" past climate changes on Earth. Plenty of data there. No need to go to another planet.
I think you'd have a strong point if a Counter Earth existed, and we could go study it, but Venus is so wildly outside the range of reasonable parameters for Earth's ecosystem that it's very hard to see how studying it could be of any real use for testing models of Earth's climate.
I'd say it'd be like designing a crashworthiness test for cars, and then trying to calibrate it by seeing what it predicted would happen to Matchbox toy cars hit by.50 caliber machine-gun bullets. There's a conceptual similarity between a real highway crash and your calibration test, yes, but...
No, I'm not a climate change "denier." On the contrary, I've followed the science closely for more than 20 years, and I've gotten to know personally a few very senior climatologists. As a scientist I've done my share of public education, trying to get people to understand the basic issues. I've written my share of letters to smart-ass commentators (James Taranto comes to mind) who laughingly ask how come, if the Earth is warming New York had such a cold winter, or how can a 1 or 2 degree temperature rise cause immense storms and global havoc.
But for exactly that reason, I do not appreciate the issue being doofed up by a careless clueless BBC hack, because, as I said, it is much harder for serious researchers to get respect after a blowdried TV blowhard has made a hash out of it and half-convinced people it's all a Democratic stick with which to whack the Bush Administration, or a Eurosocialist stick with which to bash the cowboy Americans. That kind of silliness just makes decent people in the middle tune out.
Christ, and no one has sold the broadcast rights to it yet? What kind of screw-ups are running this war? Have they even lined up sponsors? Auctioned off the stuffed toy and Happy Meal(TM) tie-in rights? I'm so depressed.
Maybe the important question is: what will the 'net look like in 2009? What if downloading movies from the 'net goes legit? What if the production studios start shipping TV episodes out over the 'net? By four years from now people might be more likely to install a big LCD screen, a fast computer with a giant disk drive, and a broadband connection in their living room than a digital TV. I mean, there are already broad swathes of suburbia at least where I live (Southern California) where TV radio signals go for miles without being intercepted by so much as a single antenna, 'cause it all comes in by coax already.
Frankly, if you think about it, the idea of getting signals from one fixed location (the studio) to another (your home) over the air seems silly. That's a job for a wire. Save the airwaves for situations, like mobile communications, where you can't be dragging a wire around.
Didn't I see you on TV around about 1975, when we were all sitting in line to buy gas and watching the bad news from Vietnam, prophesizing The End before 1980?
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Oh, I absolutely agree a one-world government would be stable. In fact, that's one of the main reasons I oppose such a thing! As you say, it takes considerable driving force for people to "vote with their feet" and migrate away from an oppressive evil government. It takes much, much more driving force for them to get out the pitchforks and muskets and rebel. Imagine if the "peaceful" way of forcing change in your government -- threatening it with a "loss of customers" by emigrating -- is no longer available, because there's no place to go. An evil world government could only be altered by bloody revolution. So, yes, it will be stable, even if it is utterly wicked. That's a "feature" I do not like at all.
Consider government/economics to be the "operating system" of the world, with people as the "hardware." Is it a great idea to wish for the One True Operating System to take over? I don't think so. We do better, as consumers, if there is a healthy competition for our loyalty. Please note that this "competition" between nations doesn't have to be bloody. The US competes with a large number of First World nations from Japan to Brazil in a bloodless if entirely serious way.
Perhaps we can reach a middle ground by my saying that I entirely agree with you that bloody and violent competition between nations is to be abhorred, and I hope it will go away someday. I think a peaceful competition between political and economics systems, where people can freely choose their loyalty, and express thereby their approval or disapproval of their local system, will be an excellent route to maximum general satisfaction with one's political situation. And it will make governments maximally responsible in practise and not just in theory to the actual needs and wants of their people.
Perhaps you would be willing to agree that this is a desirable situation, and one that you can see being the route by which the ultimate one-world government comes about? That is, perhaps you can see a peaceful competition ultimately petering out as all the various competitors hit, sooner or later, one by one, on the One True Best Government?
In that case, our disagreement will be minor, because what you see as the penultimate step I think will actually be the ultimate, just because conditions will always keep changing (if for no other reason than because technology does), so people will keep slightly changing their minds about their government. Plus, people just like to fiddle with it. In the U.S. we've had a stable form of government for 220 years, but we still fiddle about with it on minor points all the time. New SCOTUS rulings, an amendment here, an initiative there, yadda yadda. Congress passes no fewer laws yearly in 2005 than it did in 1805. Gives us something to talk about, I suppose.
You are correct that most people do not migrate from the place of their birth. But I think the conclusions we can draw from that are limited. The most important reason is that people are fairly likely to have attitudes broadly similar to their parents and their neighbors. Hence the probability that in each and every generation the majority of people must move to be satisfied is low. For example, if I find that Argentina suits me better than the U.S., and I move there, it's not that likely that my children will, willy nilly, prefer to be back in the U.S., while my grandchildren prefer Argentina again, and so forth.
/. seem no less passionate than the debates in the salons of France in 1848, or in the alehouses of New England in 1776.
What we'd need to examine, then, is the pattern of migrations over multiple generations. If we rephrase your question to ask: how likely is it that some ancestor in the past four or five generations of each person has moved from one country to another -- why, then we find large chunks of the world population has moved when it could. The United States, for example, is almost entirely made up of people who moved here or whose ancestors did so less than 3 or 4 generations ago. In the United States -- indeed, almost throughout the First World -- migration now tends to be playing as big a role if not a bigger role in population changes than native births and deaths.
The second reason is that the ability to move is still often restricted, either politically (as in the remaining Communist nations) or economically (as in, say, sub-Saharan Africa). The fact that the demand for personal yachts is small does not tell us how many people would like personal yachts, since they are quite expensive. Similarly, for many nations of the world, we do not as yet know what fraction of their population would move if they could.
Hence I think your conclusion that free migration would be an unimportant perturbation on world population is not likely to be correct. I also think your conclusion that people largely don't migrate because they're happy enough (if not perfectly happy) where they are is not correct. You're probably right as far as the United States goes, but this is a country with massive and continuing immigration. Thousands risk their lives daily to get here. That is, evidence suggests that this is the currently most attractive system under which to live. That means we can hardly draw conclusions about the rest of the world's happiness with their system from the happiness of people under the U.S. system.
Finally, your idea that the ultimate one-world system would just naturally be a good and decent system strikes me as historically unlikely. There have been multiple bloody revolutions, civil wars, et cetera across the globe in the last four centuries, massive strife involving millions, as people struggle over what will be their political and economic system. That is, the historical evidence -- not to mention simple things like the present "Blue State/Red State" divide in the US, or the debates over the EU Constitution in Europe -- strongly suggests there is in fact no broad agreement on the best political and economic system, and that there are huge numbers of adherents of at least several systems that are in such violent contrast to each other that their supporters regard each other as more or less deadly enemies.
Nor, I think, is there even the suggestion that a consensus is slowly evolving. I don't see any evidence that political struggles over the correct form and scope of government, or of the correct economic system are becoming fewer and fewer over the years. The debates on such topics here on
but this is likely to be very energy-intensive also.
Um, yes. The first source I came across suggests a bulk price of $30/kg for the pure metal.
Also, whether you need one or two or twelve real tanks was not my point so much as you need a second conceptual tank to carry your exhaust with you. That is a wholly novel concept from the point of view of combustion engines. And, as I said, if you're willing to pay the (large) penalties of carrying all your exhaust with you and having it recycled centrally, instead of just dumping it into the atmosphere -- why not consider the same with existing gasoline technology?
The point of an H2 engine is to use O2 from the atmosphere (so you don't have to carry your oxidizer) and generate gaseous products (so you don't have to carry your exhaust), and generate an exhaust which, unlike that from hydrocarbon combustion, is neither a pollutant nor a greenhouse gas. There really isn't any other point. If you're going to carry your own oxidizer and give up gaseous exhaust, and just have a closed cycle, there's no particular reason I can see to consider H2 as a fuel at all.
A fair amount of oxygen and lithium, yes. But together as an oxide? At 5500 kelvins? Surely you jest.
Yes, thank you, I knew that. I was referring to bulk Al, not the powder. It would be a bit tricky to transport freshly-finely-divided Al powder to fueling stations, yes?
An excellent and useful summary, I think, except that you should also add that magnesium, unlike petroleum, cannot be simply dug out of the ground, but must be reduced at large energy expense from various ores. Where does that energy come from? Petroleum, currently.
So not only the hydrogen but also the magnesium is a "transitional form." Neither can be appropriately considered a fuel in this device. (The article notes that magnesium is a "common" metal, but this is disingenuous. It's "common" only in the sense that it's all over the place in crustal rocks, but it's also always chemically bonded to various other elements, so it's hardly "common" in the sense of "easy to get." You might as well say hydrogen itself is very "common" because 90% of the Solar System by mass, i.e. the Sun, is hydrogen.)
Also to point out: one of the reasons we use petroleum as a fuel is that the reaction products are all gaseous, so we can just dump them out of the car as we go. In this car one of the major exhaust products (the MgO) is solid. So you've got to carry all your exhaust around with you. That means your car needs two tanks, one for the "fuel" before it's used, and one for the "fuel" afterwards.
Geez, if you're going to go to that kind of trouble, you might as well just install scrubbers on the tailpipe of an ordinary gasoline engine and pull out all the undesirable CO2, CO, NOx and whatnot, leaving only the water I presume, and send the lithium hydroxide or whatever's inside the scrubber back to the factory to be regenerated every now and then.
The entire freaking Sun is filled with metal oxide.
It is? Which metal oxide?
Not to mention the fact that I don't really believe in this aluminum oxidation reaction. Aluminum doesn't spontaneously oxidize when you leave it out in a 21% oxygen atmosphere, does it? Why would it do it when you expose it to mere steam? Unless the steam is exceedingly hot, way hotter than is convenient to generate in an automobile.
Now magnesium I can believe. But the price of pure magnesium is a even higher than pure aluminum, I bet.
Mmm, but let us think this all the way through. If there is no more international competition, then there is no more difference between nations. That means we all live under one political system.
/. denizens. And perhaps even very different from what a Wyoming rancher or Bill Gates or Robert Mugabe likes. Which brings up an interesting question: which political system is the one political system under which we're all going to live? Is it going to be my preferred system? Or yours? Or Gates'? Or (shudder) Robert Mugabe's?
However....my absolute preferred top-notch hurray huzzah political system is, I dare say, not quite the same as yours. Or as other
See, the nice thing about having lots of different countries with lots of different political systems, is that you have the chance, at least, of finding one you like and moving there to live under it.
Furthermore, if people can generally move around, it sets up a handy competition between political systems. Systems that oppress their people or which generally fail to help their citizens prosper lose population (note Soviet Russia and Communist China had a healthy emigration rate, and people will risk their lives to escape North Korea). Successful systems gain people, especially clever people who are more likely to be able to emigrate.
So, I dunno, I kind of like the fact that there's lots of political system in the world, just like I like the fact that there are lots of car companies competing for my allegiance. I just wish it was as easy for people to switch national allegiance as it is to switch which brand of car you drive. Then we might see some rapid reform among the nastier systems of government. Nothing like the prospect of being Top Leader of Nobody at All to make a dictator start rethinking his methods.
P.S. Instead of religion and nationalism as the top two leading causes of death in the world, can I nominate (1) bad hygiene and (2) stupidity? Seems to me the Black Death did in a lot more people in the late Middle Ages than the roughly contemporary wars of religion, and even in our own day far more young men died of drinking and driving between 1960 and 1973 than died in Vietnam.
I am quite annoyed that NASA would even risk $50,000 of mine and other tax payer's money on such a preposterous game.
But this is what government is for. In a republic such as ours, the presumption is that a service or commodity for which any dolt can see the need is going to be supplied by the private market. Why not? You can get rich doing so (cf. Gates, Bill). On the other hand, there are a few things that people as individuals or even large firms can't provide (such as national security) or won't provide because it isn't obvious they're going to work -- such as space elevators.
Enter the government. It's government's job to finance "preposterous flights of fancy," because private industry (very sensibly) won't. Most of that blue-sky stuff turns out to be nonsense, naturally, But some of it doesn't. Some of it, in fact, turns out to be ideas so ingenious that they seemed like pure folly to ordinary folks -- that would be you and me and nearly all other voters -- when they were originally proposed. And, of course, these are the clever ideas that will sustain our ability, a hundred years from now, to compete internationally on the basis of being smarter than anyone else, not working for less. I don't know about you, but I prefer to work in a high-wage, low-volume economy than a low-wage, high-volume economy.
Now, there's no doubt a proper amount of bread that government should cast on the waters. We could argue about that. But not in this case. I don't see how anyone who accepts the role of government in financing very basic research could figure that $50,000 out of a $1.8 trillion Federal Budget is wildly over the top.
I agree with the previous commenter who suggested advertising creeps into previously "free" services (like cable TV, or like the Web itself, if you can remember back to its pre-pop-up days) because folks can thereby delude themselves that they're still getting it for "free." (It never was free, of course -- it was only parasitizing one something else, e.g. the original Web was a parasite on government-sponsored research computing. But this is a secondary point.)
Problem is, advertising is not a permanent solution. Let us say users fall into three groups:
- Interested in the product and aware of it. These will buy with or without advertising, so money spent on advertising to them is wasted. Zero return on your ad dollar!
- Interested in the product but not aware of it. These will buy if you advertise -- so they provide a real return on an ad dollar. Initially these luscious targets may be plentiful, but as time goes by, the novelty of seeing ads in the new medium wears off, and ads by you and your competitors saturate the medium, they become very rare indeed, and you need larger and larger shotgun blasts of ads to hit one of these rara avis.
- Not interested in the product. Unfortunately, these form the majority, and while in the beginning they may tolerate the ads, in the end they will spend time and money to avoid them (cf. TiVO, the original cable TV, pop-up blockers, et cetera).
Alas, since folks in group #2, the existence of which is required for ads to be profitable, start disappearing as soon as the ads commence, the ads rapidly become less and less profitable, and the principle that "only a few non-intrusive ads will pay the bills" becomes less and less viable. Then ad bandwidth as a fraction of content bandwidth, and intrusiveness, start creeping higher and higher. This drives off the less thick-skinned people in group #3. Since these tend to be your more intelligent and thoughtful consumers, this tends to reduce the quality of your content (cf. the television), accelerating its degeneration into mindless trash, plus some of these folks may eventually become motivated enough to abandon the medium entirely for something else, e.g. the way smart people have largely abandoned the TV for the Internet, at least for now.I think part of the problem is the blindness of folks, enraptured by the collectivist fantasy, to the plain ugly fact that high-quality things and services cost labor and capital to provide, and in any free system the people who use those things and services will ultimately have to bear the cost of that labor and capital, one way or another.
If you refuse to fully accept this reality, and try to delude yourself that you can get someone else to pay the cost of production and delivery, through taxes or the "tax" of an advertising stream, then you just end up with a broken system in which you still pay the cost (for example by spending time and effort sifting real value from acres of trash), but in a ridiculous convoluted way that only increases your final burden.
Hence, I would reluctantly predict that unless the Wikipedians figure out some way to directly charge the users of the product for the cost of providing that product, they are dooming themselves either to extinction or a descent into a low-quality product in which increasingly rare nuggets of real value compete with an increasing sea of valueless white noise.
Note: I surely wish reality was different, just like I wish the Second Law of Thermodynamics didn't forbid perpetual motion machines so I could live forever, but I suspect it is not.
LA is an interesting contrast....
Aye, but you forgot to add unbelievable traffic and insane real estate prices. On my morning commute I routinely pass a freeway choked with traffic to 20 MPH, and it has ten lanes in each direction. That's nuts. The cheapest two bedroom condos where I live sell for half a million dollars. That's nuts, too. People buy houses out in Riverside where they're only semi-insanely priced and then get up at 4 AM to drive 70 miles to work. Ah well. As you say, each place is interesting in its own way.
You are right. Thanks for the correction!
Okey doke. I've mostly got no bone to pick with that.
But do let me note I didn't say they in the Midwest are tougher than others, just that they are a tough lot. I agree every place has its hardships, but the response of people who live there varies. Some are whiners and some just get on with life. When I compare my neighbors in the Midwest with my regrettable neighbors in LA, I think the former look pretty good.
I didn't think my post was entirely unrelated to the question. The point was to suggest that worrying about whether your weather is a personal message from God is rather a narcissist weenie kind of thing to do, and folks who routinely survive such weather are probably not the sort to be doing it. I hope I'm clearer now.
I was in Eastern Colorado, so I'm going to go with Midwest. People on the western slope sure didn't seem to consider us real Westerners, and having spent a smidge of traveling time in Nevada and Utah I kind of agree. On the other hand, calling coastal Californians "westerners" is plain ludicrous, so what can I say? It's probably just a state of mind.
Are you in the navy?
Nope.
But if your comment is meant to suggest that you suspect people often have practical and personal motives for public statements that purport to defend innocents -- why, you'll have seen from my earlier posts that I quite agree.
Well, bear in mind that the heartland of the United States has been subject to the worst weather on the planet for as far back as anyone knows. Take a look here, for example, a map of tornado hits. From the link: "The United States has the dubious distinction of having the most severe, damaging tornadoes of any country in the world."
It's also the case that the US Gulf Coast is arguably the only highly-industrialized, high-population piece of the First World to have been so regularly pummeled by hurricanes in this century. And let's not even talk about minor problems like lightning, which whacks a hundred or so people a year, and for which Florida is the worst place to be outside of central Africa and atop mountains.
I've lived in the American Midwest (Colorado and Illinois). They're a tough breed. You don't stay if you're scared of big storms, or worry that they're a personal message from God.
The Navy PR people...do this for a living. They know how to spin the story to hook people like you.
Alas, my point is that the NRDC people also "do this for a living" and also "know how to spin the story to hook people," albeit not people like me.
In fact, your argument seems more relevant to the NRDC than the Navy. The Navy mostly gets paid for driving ships around and looking fierce. Keeping up the PR image at home with respect to whales is rather a secondary mission. If they screw it up, well, they might have to get along with more restrictions on how they drive their ships around, but they're hardly in any danger of being disbanded and having to earn a living driving taxis, water taxis I guess.
On the other hand, if the NRDC doesn't convince people that the Navy (or whatever bad guy they've got in the crosshairs) isn't a threat dire enough to require you sending them a check for $20, $50, or whatever you can afford (every bit helps), then the corporation might well break up and everyone will have to get a job flipping burgers.
In other words, for the Navy proving the NRDC wrong is a matter of convenience, but for the NRDC proving the Navy wrong is a matter of survival. Which group is more motivated to, well, exaggerate things a smidge?
Well, no. They're not training "to kill humans." They're training to defend humans, if necessary with their lives. It may be some other humans get killed in the process, but that is not their purpose. And, someone who cares about people he's never met with such selfless dedication that he's willing to lay his life down for them seems like a good candidate for caring about defending innocent lives in general, including those of animals.
/. comment thread, a parent commented that he might be prepared to hurt someone who for stupid and hateful reasons prevented him from getting medical care to his child. I think most people see that as admirable dedication to a child, an example of selfless devotion to the welfare of someone weak. But by your cramped moral calculus, we ought to have been surprised -- if he is prepared to hurt a person for any purpose, he can't really care for a child. I hope you can see how absurd that argument would be.
The reasons why someone is prepared to kill another human are very important when we ask what that preparedness means. The issue cannot be reduced, as you have, to a trivial syllogism: "If they prepare to kill, they must be callous killers."
In another
Killing someone may be a depraved evil act, an act of murder, and preparing to do so may demonstrate that a person is a true wretch. But killing a person may also be a great and moral act as well, an act of courage and noble purpose which saves the lives of countless others. It all depends on the circumstances. You can't expect a slogan to substitute for careful thought in deciding what a preparedness to kill means.
Well, it would be more like: there's not enough problems in nature that have very sympathetic victims and clearly identifiable "bad guys." Alas, too often, the "bad guys" in environmental problems are us ourselves, and the solutions are unpopular things that involve annoying small personal sacrifice, like driving smaller cars or sorting the damn recyclables every week or a longer commute (because the highway wasn't built) or higher prices for things (because someone's got to pay for pollution control at the factory).
It's always much neater and satisfying to find some big bad guys, like the unsmiling Navy in their big steel ships with nasty bristly weapons, and fasten your rage upon them. Means your audience doesn't have to take any unpleasant hard looks in the mirror when trying to figure out why Paradise has been lost.
I think it's just as simple that the Navy doesn't want to look bad...
Of course the Navy doesn't want to look bad. But, you know, the easiest way for the Navy to not look bad is to take care not to hurt the whales. Whales are cute. People like whales. If the charge that the Navy is callously hurting whales sticks, if people believe the Navy is hurting them when it could easily not, then the Navy looks bad.
So it seems fairly plausible to me that the Navy is already doing all they reasonably can to avoid hurting the whales. If they won't go further, it's probably because the Navy thinks they can't without compromising national security. The NRDC presumably disagrees -- although they're hardly in a good position to judge national security questions -- and then the question is: does the NRDC disagree on reasonable grounds? Or do they "disagree" because not disagreeing would make it harder to justify their own salaries? I don't really know the answer. But, unlike you, I don't think it's wise to automatically attribute to the NRDC only the best characteristics of humans (altruism, kindness, honesty) and to the Navy only the worst characteristics (laziness, deception, callousness).
What struck me about this article was the Navy's response, namely that they were already doing most of what the NRDC wanted. They sounded a bit bewildered, actually.
So what's up? Well, for a really cynical explanation, consider this. According to the linked article, the peak season for getting people to donate money to nonprofits and charitable groups is just before Christmas, a time rapidly approaching, and nonprofit execs are already forseeing a reduced supply because of the previous demand from Katrina, a sort of bad-news burnout.
Now if I were fundraiser in chief at NRDC, contemplating our usual Christmas appeal for donations mailing, I'd be worried about this. I might, depending on how desperate I was, consider advising that we do something to get our name in the news, something we could describe in our fundraising letter to illustrate how dire is our need for contributions right now.
Of course, I'd recommend that we be careful to pick a cause sure to tug at the heartstrings in the Christmas season. Say, a threat to mommy and baby whales in their breeding grounds.
Not saying this is true at all. Just that it's something to consider. Just because they carry weapons doesn't mean the Navy are always uncaring brutes. Just because they have photos of adorable animals on their newsletter doesn't mean nonprofit XYZ isn't as willing as the next firm to cynically grandstand a bit for the sake of next year's salary increases.
Wait, you're saying I'd sound more 'Strine if I communicated with people more?
I believe they test general circulation models by trying to "predict" past climate changes on Earth. Plenty of data there. No need to go to another planet.
.50 caliber machine-gun bullets. There's a conceptual similarity between a real highway crash and your calibration test, yes, but...
I think you'd have a strong point if a Counter Earth existed, and we could go study it, but Venus is so wildly outside the range of reasonable parameters for Earth's ecosystem that it's very hard to see how studying it could be of any real use for testing models of Earth's climate.
I'd say it'd be like designing a crashworthiness test for cars, and then trying to calibrate it by seeing what it predicted would happen to Matchbox toy cars hit by
No, I'm not a climate change "denier." On the contrary, I've followed the science closely for more than 20 years, and I've gotten to know personally a few very senior climatologists. As a scientist I've done my share of public education, trying to get people to understand the basic issues. I've written my share of letters to smart-ass commentators (James Taranto comes to mind) who laughingly ask how come, if the Earth is warming New York had such a cold winter, or how can a 1 or 2 degree temperature rise cause immense storms and global havoc.
But for exactly that reason, I do not appreciate the issue being doofed up by a careless clueless BBC hack, because, as I said, it is much harder for serious researchers to get respect after a blowdried TV blowhard has made a hash out of it and half-convinced people it's all a Democratic stick with which to whack the Bush Administration, or a Eurosocialist stick with which to bash the cowboy Americans. That kind of silliness just makes decent people in the middle tune out.
Christ, and no one has sold the broadcast rights to it yet? What kind of screw-ups are running this war? Have they even lined up sponsors? Auctioned off the stuffed toy and Happy Meal(TM) tie-in rights? I'm so depressed.
Maybe the important question is: what will the 'net look like in 2009? What if downloading movies from the 'net goes legit? What if the production studios start shipping TV episodes out over the 'net? By four years from now people might be more likely to install a big LCD screen, a fast computer with a giant disk drive, and a broadband connection in their living room than a digital TV. I mean, there are already broad swathes of suburbia at least where I live (Southern California) where TV radio signals go for miles without being intercepted by so much as a single antenna, 'cause it all comes in by coax already.
Frankly, if you think about it, the idea of getting signals from one fixed location (the studio) to another (your home) over the air seems silly. That's a job for a wire. Save the airwaves for situations, like mobile communications, where you can't be dragging a wire around.
Didn't I see you on TV around about 1975, when we were all sitting in line to buy gas and watching the bad news from Vietnam, prophesizing The End before 1980?