A Book I Must Own

Less than two months before invading Iraq, George W. Bush fretted that his war plans could be disrupted if United Nations weapons inspectors succeeded in gaining Saddam Hussein’s full cooperation, possibly leaving Bush “looking weak,” according to notes written by a secretary to British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The notes, taken by Blair’s personal secretary Matthew Rycroft, were included in a new edition of Lawless World, a book by University College professor Philippe Sands. The notes on the Jan. 30, 2003, phone call between Bush and Blair were reviewed by the New York Times, which said they were marked secret and personal. [NYT, Oct. 14, 2005]

At the time, Blair wanted Bush to seek a second resolution from the U.N. Security Council that would have judged Iraq to be in violation of U.N. disarmament demands and would have authorized military action. According to the notes, Bush agreed that “it made sense to try for a second resolution, which he would love to have.”

But Bush’s deeper worry was that chief U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix would conclude that Hussein’s government was cooperating in the search for weapons of mass destruction, thus delaying or blocking U.S.-led military action. Bush’s “biggest concern was looking weak,” the British document said.

As it turns out, I was fortunate enough to have a lecture today from one of the last inspectors to leave Iraq before the war started. A Canadian man, he described a very moving last evening in Baghdad where, between shredding documents and an (early) birthday party for himself, they spent most of the evening crying because the hotel workers they'd gotten to know were very possibly going to be killed, or have their loved ones killed.

When the floor was opened up for questions, a rightist tried to ask if maybe he thought the weapons were still hidden, they just hadn't managed to find them yet. The former inspector, using all the exaggerated politeness you'd use to respond to someone who'd just shit in your living room, said that if a) the UN hadn't found them, b) the US hadn't found them, and c) there was good reason to believe they didn't exist in the first place, then maybe, just maybe, they weren't there.

And now we get confirmation of what was obvious by the time the war started: Bush wasn't afraid that the war would start - he was afraid it wouldn't. He was more concerned that he would "look weak" than that thousands of people would die because of his orders. This, to put it bluntly, is psychopathic. I've written before - faced with the choice of success without war, or success with war, it's a no-brainer. Only someone truly bent on mass killing would choose war. Only a truly demented mind would choose war over their own self-image.

George Bush is an evil man.

Good News?

OTTAWA (CP) - The federal government will name a former energy industry executive from Alberta to manage its $1-billion Clean Fund, the biggest single element in its Kyoto implementation strategy, The Canadian Press has learned.

Allan Amey has worked in the oil, gas and electric sector for more than 20 years, and currently heads Climate Change Central, an agency created by Alberta Premier Ralph Klein, a long-time foe of the Kyoto accord.

The purpose of the Clean Fund is, in the government's words, "to stimulate cost-effective action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Canada."

I suppose it was too much to ask that someone whose expertise was in the environment might be asked to lead this. Still, I suppose that it's a good sign that the government is finally moving.

Great Story

About the last decent president:

One of Reiner's writer heroes is Mark Twain, so one of the proudest moments in his life was when President Clinton presented him with the Mark Twain Prize.

There was a big awards ceremony for television, but Clinton asked Reiner to come to the White House the next day so he could pin the medal on him personally.

The whole Reiner family was invited and showed up. Reiner's wife, children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews, and Reiner's brother Charlie, who was losing a long battle with cancer but was going down swinging. Charlie insisted on showing up even though he had to come in a wheelchair.

Some friends of Reiner's were there too. Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Martin, all of them gathered around a table in a meeting room off the Oval Office.

Clinton comes in, presents Reiner with his medal, and then shakes hands with everybody there.

Clinton never just shakes hands. Shaking hands with Bill Clinton means you talk with Bill Clinton. Secret Service hates this, of course. So do his advance people. He's late for everything because of it. Clinton once came to Syracuse. Took him two hours to get out of the airport. So Clinton has little chats with all of Reiner's family and friends. Last person he comes to is Reiner's brother Charlie.

Reiner makes the introductions, and then, because Clinton had recently been to Normandy for the 50th Anniversary of D-Day, Reiner tells the President that Charlie had been in 11 major battles in World War II, including the invasion of Normandy.

"D-Day, Omaha Beach?" Clinton asks.

"No," says Charlie, "Utah Beach, D-Day plus four." And tells the President he was with the 27th Infantry, Ninth Division, First Army.

Clinton says, "Your outfit took Ste Marie l'Eglise and St Malo?"

Charlie's amazed. "How did you know that?"

Clinton grins. "I read a lot."

For the next 15 minutes the two of them talk. Charlie's in his wheelchair, of course, so Clinton sits down on the edge of the table to get closer to his level. They talk about the war and about the ceremony at Normandy and some of the things Clinton heard from the veterans that day. Fifteen minutes. At one point an aide comes in to tell the President his helicopter's waiting to take him somewhere. Clinton waves him off. "Tell 'em I'll be there in a minute." And he and Charlie talk some more.

Keep in mind who else is in that room. Besides Carl Reiner, there's Rob Reiner, Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Martin, Dick Van Dyke, and Mary Tyler Moore. Mary Tyler Moore's right there. Sure, she's older, but you've seen her, she looks great, and, come on, it's Bill Clinton. But he's not talking to her. He's not talking to the celebrities.

All of his attention is focused on a dying old man in a wheelchair.

Where it ought to be.

Sweet Jesus. I've read a lot about World War II, but SWEET JESUS. I've never dreamed of having that kind of memory. Holy hell. I have to go feel inadequate in a corner somewhere...

Somebody Call Queen...

Because another one bites the dust. Another standard right-wing myth, that is.

I'm talking about "the greatest crime of the 20th century." What would you pick? The Holocaust? The Japanese War in China? Stalin's purges? The Great Leap Forward?

Nope. The right would have you believe that the greatest crime in the 20th century (and, one could therefore argue in all of history) was the banning of DDT. Alleged to have "killed" 50 million people, the banning of DDT is said to have led to the "resurgence" of the nearly defeated Malaria. If the 50 million number were to be believed, that could conceivably mean that banning DDT killed more people than the European conquest of the Americas. (This is of course difficult to say, given that we have no solid number for the pre-invasion population of the Americas. Some scholars have suggested an American population as high as 100 million, 90% of whom died.)

Now, you might guess from my judicious use of scare quotes that I'm skeptical of these claims. There's a number of very simple reasons for this. The first and most important reason is that, when heavily used, all pesticides become less effective, not more so. While it seems intuitive that less use of DDT led to higher rates of Malaria deaths, the reverse is in fact true. Countries that had the highest rates of DDT spraying developed DDT-resistant forms of mosquitoes which carry Malaria. The cases of India and Sri Lanka are instructive - Sri Lanka initially had nearly eliminated Malaria within its borders, and therefore stopped spraying DDT - not because of environmental concerns, but because they figured they won the war.

Think again. Malaria came back with a vengeance, because this time the mosquitoes were DDT-proof. It's pretty simple - insects have such high birth rates and such short generational cycles that even if your insecticide kills 99% of a given population (100% is impossible) the survivors can rebound extremely quickly. India had a similar experience, where spraying increased dramatically throughout the 1970s, but Malaria incidence stayed put.

I think I've written about this before, but Tim Lambert provides an excellent recap of the DDT story.

One of the earliest posts on this blog asked a simple question, and attempted an answer:

why do conservatives love nuclear power? This is an industry that only exists because of the heavy hand of government. No private market exists for nuclear power - plants are comissioned by government, insured by government, and, when the inevitable bankruptcies occur, it is government that bails out nuclear plants. Of course, nuclear power would never have been harnessed without the Manhattan Project, a government program that dwarfs every other government spending program in history. Yet not a week goes by where I don't read or hear some conservative claiming we need to build new nuclear plants. Shouldn't they be decrying this intrusion on the free market? My guess is that conservatives have defined themselves in opposition to environmentalists, so if Greenpeace hates nuclear, then it must be good.

I think a similar dynamic is at work here, too. Despite the evidence of a) evidence or b) rational thought, right-wingers feel the need to accuse environmentalists of something monstrous. I mean really: Equating Rachel Carson with Hitler or Mao?

Which leads me to my final point: When will we see a mature right develop on the Internet? I mean honest Conservatives. Not the Powerline crew, not RedState, not any of the seemingly-infinite pseudo-libertarian "conservatives" whose "principles" amount to a juvenile desire to escape any obligation to society or consequence to their actions. If we had honest, mature conservatives, this "worst crime" talking point wouldn't be as widespread as it is, and the idiot who thought it up would be ridiculed in to exile or ritual suicide - by other conservatives.

Long Cold Winter, cont.

The Energy Information Administration (US) has released some new estimates of the costs of home heating this winter. Scary stuff:

But there's something that confuses me. I've long read that Natural Gas is the cheapest, most efficient way to heat your home. But looking at this graph, it seems that even the most pessimistic estimate of electricity costs is going to be much lower than the cheapest fossil fuel costs.

Now, I've been writing since late in the summer that natural gas prices were going up. But I wonder when the crossover point was - at what point did electricity become the economical option? Given that the gap between electricity and Natural Gas is still small, it's likely that the turnover was just this year.

Further speculation: How much slack would we create in the oil market if we got all houses off of heating oil ASAP? I'm going to have to look in to this further. My initial research shows about 7% of oil goes towards heating buildings. Freeing that up would be one way of bringing the price of oil down, and it would be a money-saver for the homeowner to boot.

This points to a new policy objective for Canada, by the way - one I've been advocating for a while: getting all Canadian homes wired for electric heating. (They said I was mad. Mad, I tell you!) Part of this would necessitate a national electrical exchange. Canada actually produces a large surplus of electricity, which is exported to the US (no surprise there.) Unlike fossil fuels, Canada has huge untapped potential for electrical generating capacity. We need a way to make sure that provinces can (and do) sell their electricity to each other at fair rates - and yes, this may very well mean that Ontario's hydro costs would go up. This might, incidentally, abrogate NAFTA. Oh well.

Oh, China

Astronauts Nie Haisheng, celebrating a birthday on Thursday, and Fei Junlong, carried out experiments on the craft's stability, state media said.

It was an unusual 41st birthday for Mr Nie, whose daughter sang Happy Birthday to him late on Wednesday.

His wife, Wang Jie, said: "May you carry out the task entrusted to you by the motherland and return smoothly." Xinhua said that "at these words, Nie Haisheng was in tears".

Mr. Nie's wife then blinked "Help, they've got our children" in morse code to the cameras.

I really shouldn't joke about that - I'm sure the astronaut's wife is very sincere, and was just given some mild coaching. Probably nothing worse than what the Bush administration puts together when the polls go below 40%...

Bwahahaha

Via August Pollak, a new poll shows only 2% of African Americans approve of George Bush's presidency.

The punch line? The poll has a margin of error of 3%. It's theoretically possible that George W. Bush's approval among black Americans is -1%.

There is a God.

Overused Words Are Sometimes Relevant

And, despite my distaste for the words "paradigm shift", I think it might even be useful now. With Apple Computer's latest announcement. No, not the video iPod thing, this:

For as little as $1.99 a show, television junkies will be able to download new and old episodes of some of the more popular shows on ABC and the Disney Channel. In a bold move, the latest installments will be made available to iTunes users the very next day. That may find TiVo(Nasdaq: TIVO) and bellyaching advertisers together at the same short end of the stick for the first time. Meanwhile, televised content purveyors may be on to a new revenue stream worth paddling if this takes off.

I wonder: would my television bill actually be lower if I downloaded the shows I watched? Cable TV costs me about $40 a month, or about $480 a year. But of course, I only get about 22 episodes of new television a year - so each series would be worth about $44. Given that I can get all my news over the Internet as well, and I only try to watch about a half-dozen television series anyway, this could be a major savings.

The other interesting thing to note is that this puts Apple in competition with DVD vendors. Indeed, $44 is much less than a new box set costs. However, the new iTunes won't ship with the ability to back up your downloaded movies, so you won't be able to burn a DVD and put it on your shelf. That said, I'm sure it will be hacked soon. As Cory Doctorow has noted, iTunes-only music tracks usually appear on the pirate P2P networks within minutes of being released.

I think the video iPod is actually more underwhelming - it's a neat added feature, but frankly I can't see a lot of people using the video function very frequently. Maybe for long car rides, but overall I think the iPod will continue to be a music player, not a video player.

Why use the words pardigm shift? Mainly because this is the first real move by the major networks (who still, despite their decline, control 50% of the audience) to embrace the potential of the Internet as a new distribution channel. It will be very interesting to see how subscriptions change the nature of network programming. Taken to the extreme, we could see the major networks become more like HBO, whose dependence on subscriptions has actually liberated them to be more creative and less fearful of the omnipresent Nielsen ratings.

Update: Whoops, spoke to soon. The video function of the iPod depletes the battery in 2 hours. So not even a long car trip. This is a major technical hurdle for portable video players of all kinds - the battery size needed to operate a video screen is much larger than for simple sound. Anything significantly smaller than a laptop is bound to have a pretty short lifespan.

Why It Even Matters

Grr. Just lost this post once before. Damn Blogger.

Anywho, some of my friends might be wondering who this person is who's been writing all these posts so friendly to the oil and gasoline industry. Obviously, my blog has been hijacked by someone from the Fraser Institute, and the real John is tied up in a basement somewhere.

But no, it's still me. So why defend the high price of gasoline? (I don't think that's what I'm doing, but whatever.) Because quite simply, the ranting about high prices - whether it's righties screaming about taxes, or lefties screeching about corporate predation - is a form of denial. Not to say that these explanations aren't true, because they almost certainly are to a limited extent.

But the reality is that oil prices have doubled in the last five years. There is already speculation that light sweet crude (the feedstock for most north american refineries) has already peaked, and is now in global decline. If true (and the linked post concedes it's hardly conclusive) this is HUGE. Light sweet crude makes up most of North America's oil consumption, so most of our refineries would need major refits to take different grades of oil. If light sweet is in decline, we're looking at higher prices for gasoline, even if we find new sources of heavy and sour sources of oil. Even if this turns out to be wrong, we're obviously in a time when gas prices are going to be both higher than we like, and far more volatile.

I think the Mackenzie piece that Mike pointed out is actually a perfect example of this - even if we accept Mackenzie's assertions, he concedes at the end of the article that gasoline should still cost about $0.90/litre. While I continue to support some investigation in to the matter, I don't think that parliament or any other authority is going to find anything new in the oil industry.

This is important, because we really can't afford to take our eyes off the ball. What we should be focusing on his how to get people out of gasoline-burning cars, quickly. Talking about taxes or gouging diverts us from what we should be talking about, and that is conservation, period.

This Made Me Laugh

Apropos of nothing, this line made me chuckle. From Pandagon:

The Texas State Board of Education? No offense to the many fine Texans I know, but that's sort of like the Genghis Khan Institute For The Advancement Of Peace And Diplomacy.

Amen.

Thanks For Nothing

Just finished watching the CBC's special on rising gas and oil prices, and what it means for consumers. While it wasn't the most useless piece of journalism I've seen on oil/energy/gas issues, it sure came close. No mention of that fact that natural gas has peaked in North America, and nary a mention - even in passing - of Peak Oil.

The CBC did spend some time talking about the widespread effects oil prices have - paying attention to plastic prices (up 30%), for example. But all in all, I'd get more information in 30 seconds on the Internet.

Which brings me back to the question of gas prices. Before I go on, I'd like to reiterate that I don't at all want to be seen as defending the oil companies. Exxon = evil. Let's be clear. But I do think that there are alternative hypotheses to "greedy oil companies" that should be eliminated before we warm up some jail cells for oil executives. More broadly, we should ask whether the oil industry is doing anything that it hasn't done previously. That was the point of my previous posts - it's possible the gasoline industry is doing what it's always done, it's just that the magnitude is so much larger than in years past, because of structural (supply and refinery) constraints.

On that note, Mike responds to my previous comments:

What the slate article says an what you state seem to be true for places like Suny's and McEwan's and other "independants". But it falls apart when you consider that most gas stations are actually owned by the oil companies themselves.

There is no real competition, since the franchisee must purchase oil from their company and NOT on a free and fair market. This oligopoly behaviour means that when one oil company raises its price for oil and gas, it happens at all of its gas stations nearly simultaneously. Other oil company stations quickly follow suit. When most gas stations are in fact owned by the oil companies then, you position about the local owners carries a lot less wieght.

In other words, the oil comapny is making money at both ends - on the oil and again on the gas. Which means that there is still room for collusion and gouging.

This is a valid point - the gasoline market isn't competitive in that sense. But the large companies still compete against each other, and the margins for gasoline have (until recently) been so small that the only way for gasoline retailers to increase profits realistically has been to increase their customers - presumably by cutting prices. Obviously, this is a hypothesis. There's plenty of historical evidence for collusion between the oil majors. Again, you should all read Linda McQuaig's It's The Crude, Dude.

I guess my real question is this: Is the oil industry doing anything new? That is, are high prices the result of some new change in their policies, prices, etc? Or is it simply that the oil companies are doing what they've always done, or been allowed to do - only that oil is now at $60?

As for the piece at the CCPA that Mike mentions it, I'm not terribly impressed. A sample:

Of course, when we’re asked to accept high crude oil prices as a given, we’re supposed to ignore the fact that the gas we’re pumping into our tanks doesn’t cost one cent more to produce today than it did five years ago, when the pump price was less than 60 cents per litre — a fact that provides the oil industry with a windfall of $1.7 million every day for every dollar the price of crude goes up....

What should the price be? What would it be if we weren’t being gouged by the oil industry? Let’s figure it out. Crude oil at $68 (U.S.) a barrel translates to 50 cents per litre (Cdn) at the pump. Normal refining and marketing margins add 14 cents per litre. Provincial taxes (Ontario) add 14.7 cents. The federal gasoline tax adds 10 cents per litre, for a total of 88.7 cents per litre. Add 6.3 cents for the GST, and that gives us 95 cents — which is what we should be paying.

It's late, so I don't have the energy to check Mackenzie's sources. He does make a good case for the "gouging" charge. It wouldn't be the first time I've been wrong in print. But I do have a number of problems with his analysis: First off, he really does ignore the fact that half of North America's refineries are shut down. This is a huge deal - we're being loaned gasoline from Europe's strategic reserves at the moment. (The EU, being more sensible than us, keeps strategic reserves of finished petroleum products as well as oil.) To expect normal behaviour from the industry at a time when it's facing the worst damage in it's history is unreasonable.

Oh, and one unpardonable sin in my book - Mackenzie is wrong about where gasoline prices were in the summer of 2000. Take a look here for prices in Ontario:

Apr 5 66.3
Apr 12 62.8
Apr 19 64.5
Apr 26 66.4
May 3 66.6
May 10 70.0
May 17 72.1
May 24 67.6
May 31 69.9
Jun 7 68.5
Jun 14 75.6
Jun 21 69.2
Jun 28 76.8
Jul 4 69.7
Jul 10 67.5
Jul 17 68.8
Jul 24 70.0
Jul 31 65.3
Aug 8 67.7
Aug 14 65.0
Aug 21 69.7
Aug 28 70.7
Sep 5 70.4
Sep 11 74.1
Sep 18 69.4
Sep 25 74.8

So nowhere during the summer of 2000 were we paying less than 60 cents at the pump. The closest we came was the week of April 12, which is still early and not really part of the summer driving season. The more reasonable point of comparison would be the last two weeks of August, where we were paying 70 cents. The price of oil was $35 Canadian per barrel. Even before Katrina, we were paying more than $70 Canadian for oil. So the price of oil doubled in the intervening years, but gasoline actually didn't double - aside from the immediate post-Katrina spike, nobody paid $1.40

I don't think the picture is as clear as Mackenzie argues it is.

None of the above, or anything I write for that matter, should be read as "defending" the oil industry in any sense of the word. I would very much like to see a Parliamentary investigation in to this matter. What I think would be disastrous is if some of the more intemperate and idiotic ideas coming from the NDP caucus were followed. China and India have tried to control gas prices, and all they've got for their trouble is massive shortages. Then we have the example of Indonesia, where the government could no longer afford to subsidize fuel, and got the inevitable result: massive rioting.

The only solution to high gas prices is a serious, long-term plan to reduce consumption. Free mass transit is the simplest and fastest thing we could do. Aside from that, working on improving the efficiency of ethanol production (a Canadian company, Iogen, is actually a world leader in this field) and not getting in the way of the market when it's working (like NOT imposing a tariff on bicycles, duh) while keeping an eye on the market when it's possibly not working is the best policy.

Blogging on the Run

Gotta go "work" for "money", so for now, enjoy the news that China has successfully launched a two-man crew in to orbit around the Earth. This is China's first launch in two years. Congratulations. I liked this line from the BBC:

In a sign of growing official confidence about the programme, the launch was announced in advance and broadcast in full on state television.

It was a common refrain during the early days of the US-USSR Space Race that, while all of NASA's failures were broadcast immediately, the Soviets never did. Nice to see the Chinese becoming more confident in their plans to turn the Moon Communist.

Sorry, wrong decade.

The Awfulness That Is Commander in Chief

Well, I wasn't terribly impressed with the show from the beginning, and yesterday's "solution" to a narcotrafficking dictator really just blew it.

To start off, though, the show's premise is so ridiculous that it strains even my generous credibility. Not the woman-as-president thing. The Republican-nominates-an-independent thing. I can only imagine the writers assumed that this somehow made it more credible, but I can't see how. It's not like there's a shortage of woman Republicans to pick from. Well, there is, but there's still enough to make a shortlist of VP candidates. In an effort to make a woman vice-president more credible, the writers have succeeded in making it totally implausible. Weird.

Last night's episode really blew away my expectations for badness, however. Faced with a Noriega-style dictator up to his eyeballs in the drug trade, the President's solution is spray the country with defoliants to eradicate the coca trade. Where to begin? First off, the idea that the US could do such a thing over a small country in a short time is silly - the only similar example is Operation Ranchhand during the Vietnam War, which gave the Vietnamese people the terrible legacy of Agent Orange they endure today. This, however, was a years-long operation, requiring 6,000 separate missions.

Secondly, even if the US could do such a thing, the episode mentioned that in this hypothetical country, coca was the entire basis for the economy. So obviously the US has to destroy it. Huh? The problem with drugs is not that people are making them, it's that people are using them - you can't, with a needle in your arm and cocaine under your nose, claim to be a victim of peasant agriculture.

Yeesh. It's like The West Wing's poor retarded cousin.

Poorly Interpreted Economists, Continued

Recently I linked to Angelica's post on Hayek. Today we see that Brad Delong has once again come out swinging in defense of Adam Smith:

This is, in fact, what Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments is about: how the feeble sparks of our "natural" tendencies to benevolence are fanned into roaring flames by our ability to reason, by our ability to imagine and put ourselves in the place of others, and by our education.

That's the entirety of Prof. Delong's commentary on the matter, but I liked it so I thought I'd pass it on.

It's worth mentioning that the Theory of Moral Sentiments (Adam Smith's other major work of philosophy) directly refutes all those who, like Hayek's acolytes in the 1980s, attempted to use Smith to justify the worst cruelties of the capitalist system.

All sane socialists have long since disavowed Mao or Stalin. Why is it capitalists have such a hard time being similarly honest about their intellectual history?

I personally think the best refutation of the myth of Adam Smith is still John Ralston Saul's The Unconscious Civilization.

Welcome Back, But...

Just watching the CBC's resurrected coverage - in this case, of the South Asian earthquake. But why oh why is the CBC talking to a U of Toronto Geographer about Kashmir - when the thrust of the story is about the earthquake's impact on international relations?

On another note - a more relevant commentator wasa Reeta Chowdhary Tremblay of Concordia University. I really like the implications of that name.

Your Wish Is My Command

In our ongoing conversation regarding gas prices, Mike writes:

I realize we were paying close to $1.00 per litre in Ottawa before Katrina and that it is now about $1.10. But that is still mis-leading. Katrina sent gas prices from 95.5 (I filled up that day) to $1.28 over night. During a good chunck of that 5 weeks, it ranged from as high as $1.38 to as low as $1.02. I would say it has been hovering around the $1.15 to $1.20 for about 3 of those 5 weeks.

My suspicion was raised by how fast the price of gas can go up, but how s-l-o-w it goes down. And how it never seems to go back to where it was.

I would love to have an explanation of that. the right usually likes to blame government taxes as the cause of high prices, for some reason.

Well, love is an awfully strong word - and I'm spoken for. But here's an explanation from a 2004 Slate article:

Convenience store owners buy gas every day or once every couple of days, and they constantly adjust their prices. But as this Energy Department report shows, it takes about 10 weeks for a change in the spot price of oil to filter fully into the retail price of gas, with about half the change working its way in within two weeks. This lag is a boon for convenience store owners when gas prices are plummeting: The price they pay to fill up their tanks falls rapidly, while the price they charge falls more slowly. But it's poison when prices are rising. Each day they pay more to fill up their tanks, but they're unable fully to pass on the hikes to their customers.

Of course, if you've had to eat a high price increase a month ago, you're going to squeeze the customer for as long as you can in the down-swing. Now, whether or not this counts as "gouging" is I think up to debate. The prices are coming down, after all. And the industry has a legitimate need to recoup costs.

Of course, as I said before, I'm not about to rule out corporate malfeasance.

(If you want a relatively clear explanation of the mechanics of the gasoline retail industry, read the whole Slate piece.)

As for why it's unlikely to come back down to where it was: Well, there had to be some reluctance on the part of the retailers to break the $1/litre mark. In some places, the signs weren't even capable of it until Katrina forced them to buy new ones. I know one Esso stop in Toronto near my house was regularly at $0.999/litre for days on end before Katrina - I think they'd probably have preferred to move the price up to $1+ before Katrina, but either didn't have the signs for it, or were worried about the sticker shock.

(10am Oct 7: Post edited to more closely resemble the english language.)

Hyperventilating, Much?

Via Slashdot, we see that nerds can write overblown headlines as well as the next CNN intern:

Google formally declares war on Microsoft

We will fight them on the breaches
By Nick Farrell: Thursday 06 October 2005, 07:05

GOOGLE HAS confirmed that it will launch free spreadsheet and word-processing software online and take on Microsoft in one of its biggest markets.

Under the deal, Google will allow web users to access Sun's OpenOffice from a toolbar.

I've used OpenOffice for all of my writing at school, and enjoyed it. Having recently acquired a copy of Word, I've used that for one or two assignments this year, but if I get a printer at Christmas (hint, hint family members) then I'd happily go back to OpenOffice. For the time being, the printers at school only run on Word, and I've occasionally lost data in conversion.

That said, if you don't use MS Office for any particular heavy lifting, I'd really encouage people to download OpenOffice and check it out. It already has features that Word is waiting for, like exporting to PDF.

About the story in specifc, I think it has the potential to be really huge. I mentioned a few days ago that most information technology spending growth has been in the government and business sectors, and not in the home. If Google's brand can help spread OpenOffice to the business world, that's a much bigger deal than if home users adopt it.

Ah, the Open Source battle spreads.

More on Oil

Mike, in Comments:

I heard this morning that the price of oil has dropped something like 10% in the last 5 weeks.

Now, in that same time, the price of gasoline has actually gone up something like 50%.

All those that yell "supply and demand" about the price of gas, never mention this, since, if the price of oil is going down, so should the price of gas. They shouldn't be going in drastically opposit directions.

Well, a few notes about prices:

First off, that 10% decline in the price of oil is probably including the $70+ spike that happened after Katrina. If you take a more reasonable high point ($68) the decline doesn't look nearly so big.

Secondly, the price of gasoline here in Ottawa isn't that much larger than it was before Katrina, either. We have to remember that a lot of places were dealing with $1/litre before Katrina hit. So $1.10 is worse, but it's not that much worse.

On the matter of diverging oil/gas prices: If I can put on the economist hat for a moment, I'd actually say this is exactly what you'd expect when a crucial intermediary part of the infrastructure was destroyed or disabled.

Oil obviously doesn't come from the ground in a highly useful form. It has to be refined, and then delivered in a refined form.

But what happened with Katrina and Rita? Well, a lot of oil production capacity was knocked out (some maybe permanently) but even more refining capacity was disabled (especially in Texas with Rita.)

So what happens next? Well, the stocks of refined product (gasoline) run down while the supplies of oil actually stockpile - the deliveries from the Persian Gulf continue, but there's no refining capacity to take the crude in, so it mostly sits there.

What happens to prices, in this crude model? (Pun unintended, but I'll keep it.) Exactly what's happened - prices for oil go down as stocks build back up again, but prices of gasoline go up until refineries can be brought back online.

Now, I don't have any data on this - so this shouldn't be seen as a diagnosis of the problem. Rather, I'm just trying to offer one possible explanation for it.

Or, you know, it could be that the oil companies are evil. And no, I'm not mocking Mike. If I can pimp yet another Linda McQuaig book on people, go out and buy the lamely-title It's The Crude, Dude. McQuaig ably shows just how evil the oil industry has been over the last century. I mean, I'm no fan of the oil industry, but even I was surprised at the depth of their malice. It's out in paperback - go fetch!

Money Money Money

One of the most difficult things for progressively-minded people to combat is the sense that most people seem to have that this world is the best of all possible ones - or that things are the way they are because that's the only way they could be. This is extremely frustrating for progressives and other people who advocate for social change, because it poses a serious hurdle: How do you convince someone that you even can change something for the better?

A few years ago, Linda McQuaig wrote an excellent book called All You Can Eat in which she took to task the capitalist hegemony, drawing heavily on the work of Karl Polanyi. Polanyi was a Socialist who tried to show that, contra the current doctrine of laissez faire, people weren't always motivated by self-interest. And even when they were, they often defined self-interest in ways that seem alien to us today. The capitalist system we've arrived at today is not, as Marx and Hayek would both have you believe, a result of inevitable historical actions. Rather, we've gotten here the way humans always have - by muddling through and doing things the way it seems more-or-less rational to do them at the time.

Nothing (to me) symbolizes this better than the issue of money. Outside of inflation, few people probably give any thought to the actual mechanics of the actual creation and regulation of money. But it's fascinating when you realize the number of different ways people have used, created, and valued money in history. Hell, in the 20th century alone we've gone through three major international systems to regulate the value of currencies - the Gold Standard (the late 1800s - 1920s or so), Bretton Woods (roughly 1945-1973), and the current regime of currency speculation. Money, as much as anything else, is a very flexible concept.

I happened along two pieces recently which reminded me of this. The first is from WorldChanging, about the use of "alternative currencies". An alternative currency is basically any unit of exchange that isn't the official currency - in Canada, the most famous example of an alternative currency is probably Canadian Tire money. But it also includes things like Air Miles, etc. From WC:

Generally these systems only work when trusted groups do it (like town governments, large companies, or specially-constructed high-transparency organizations), and generally it’s done to limit people’s spending in certain ways (like frequent-flier miles, which can mostly just be spent on plane fare).

The greatest success stories of complimentary currencies are in picking up ravaged communities and helping to get them on their feet. A primary example that Lietaer and Kennedy cite is the Worgl, a currency created by a small Austrian town during the great depression. The town of Worgl had high unemployment and lacked the money to pay for its normal infrastructure services, so they killed two birds with one stone by printing a local currency they could pay people to do civic work with, and which could only be used in the local area. They also made the value of the currency time-decaying (or "demurring", as it's properly called) by 12% per year, which caused people to spend it rapidly--increasing the "velocity of money", which in a sense multiplies the amount of money in the community. In about one year, Worgl dropped its unemployment rate by 25% and increased public-works investment by 220%, while the rest of Austria slid further into depression. The experiment was only stopped because the Austrian government was worried that its control over the national money system would be threatened. Today in the Brazilian favela of Palmeira, a local currency called the Palma is helping to lift the residents out of poverty; it is working much more slowly than the Worgl did, but it does not circulate as much because its value does not demur over time.

Similarly, Sam Smith of the Progressive Review dug this example from his archives:

Guernsey is an island state located among the British Channel Islands about 75 miles south of Great Britain. In 1816 its sea walls were crumbling, its roads were muddy and only 4 1/2 feet wide. Guernsey's debt was 19,000 pounds. The island's annual income was 3,000 pounds of which 2,400 had to be used to pay interest on its debt. Not surprisingly, people were leaving Guernsey and there was little employment.

Then the government created and loaned new, interest-free state notes worth 6,000 pounds. Some 4,000 pounds were used to start the repairs of the sea walls. In 1820, another 4,500 pounds was issued, again interest-free. In 1821, another 10,000; 1824, 5,000; 1826, 20,000. By 1837, 50,000 pounds had been issued interest free for the primary use of projects like sea walls, roads, the marketplace, churches, and colleges. This sum more than doubled the island's money supply during this thirteen year period, but there was no inflation.

In the year 1914, as the British restricted the expansion of their money supply due to World War I, the people of Guernsey commenced to issue another 142,000 pounds over the next four years and never looked back. By 1958, over 542,000 pounds had been issued, all without inflation.

As the author at WorldChanging notes, alternative currencies probably can't replace the good old-fashioned dollar (or Baht, or Euro, or Yuan.) But they are a perfect example of things we can do to fix our local communities. And if the worst predictions of what happens when oil production peaks come true, we'll desperately need new ideas for our local communities. Moreover, they're an important way of challenging our misperception that the world is as it should be, not simply as we've inherited it.

Irrational Exuberance

The first thing I heard when I woke up this morning was that oil prices had come down as "the energy bubble burst" when new government data revealed that consumption had "gone from guzzling to sipping."

See, this is why I shouldn't listen to the crap news that comes in over the radio since CBC went black.

Let's look at the real story from the BBC:

Oil prices have fallen further on Thursday after data from the US Energy Department said American demand was now below the level seen a year ago.

Analysts said crude was being hit by falling US consumption of petrol and heating oil in the face of high prices....

A barrel of US light crude was down 29 cents to $62.50 in Far East trading, after earlier falling as low as $62.23.

London's Brent crude was also down 29 cents at $59.83 a barrel.

So good news, right? Well, maybe. I'd be surprised if oil fell below $60 - we are still in a supply crunch, after all. If we're lucky, then trading will knock about $5 off the price of oil. Some analysts have been saying that the high price of oil has been due to speculation, and maybe that's true, in part. But I maintain that what we're seeing is the result of simple supply and demand constraints. Just look at this graph:



It's not exactly encouraging, is it? Besides, the warm weather in Ontario can't hold out forever, and then oil prices are going to go back up.

But you look around, and the market is acting like we've slain the oil dragon forever and ever. Hosanna! Let's throw piles of money in to airlines that aren't profitable! Up next: Put your life savings in to the insovent GM!

Seriously. People who think this is the beginning of a trend in oil prices really want to be careful.

The President in Exile Speaks

Al Gore:

How many of you, I wonder, have heard a friend or a family member in the last few years remark that it's almost as if America has entered "an alternate universe"?

I thought maybe it was an aberration when three-quarters of Americans said they believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11, 2001. But more than four years later, between a third and a half still believe Saddam was personally responsible for planning and supporting the attack....

Are we still routinely torturing helpless prisoners, and if so, does it feel right that we as American citizens are not outraged by the practice? And does it feel right to have no ongoing discussion of whether or not this abhorrent, medieval behavior is being carried out in the name of the American people? If the gap between rich and poor is widening steadily and economic stress is mounting for low-income families, why do we seem increasingly apathetic and lethargic in our role as citizens?...

Television first overtook newsprint to become the dominant source of information in America in 1963. But for the next two decades, the television networks mimicked the nation's leading newspapers by faithfully following the standards of the journalism profession. Indeed, men like Edward R. Murrow led the profession in raising the bar.

But all the while, television's share of the total audience for news and information continued to grow -- and its lead over newsprint continued to expand. And then one day, a smart young political consultant turned to an older elected official and succinctly described a new reality in America's public discourse: "If it's not on television, it doesn't exist."

There's a lot more. Go check it out, and mourn.

Second-Funniest Story I've Read All Week

Scientists have taught dolphins to combine both rhythm and vocalisations to produce music, resulting in an extremely high-pitched, short version of the Batman theme song.

Ah, but can they master the dulcet tones to "The Brady Bunch"?

By 2010, maybe we can have Orangutans playing "The Beverly Hillbillies."

Attention-Grabbing

The Chairman and CEO of the US’ largest chain of car dealerships is calling for ongoing increases in the federal tax on gasoline in an effort to encourage conservation and alter buying patterns.

Mike Jackson, CEO of the $19-billion auto retailer AutoNation, is proposing an annual, open-ended increase of $0.10 per gallon.

Interesting proposal. I'm still unconvinced that a gasoline tax is doable or likely to be effective. For each $0.10 the government taxed on gasoline, it would raise approximately $14 billion annually. Meanwhile, a $1 tax on each barrel of oil drilled or imported would raise about $30 billion annually in the US, would barely be noticed in gasoline prices, and would be borne more equally throughout the economy, unlike a highly regressive gasoline tax. On top of that, the Apollo Alliance estimates that the US could be weaned off of oil for about $300 billion over ten years. Gee. Is anyone else having an idea?

Even if the Apollo Alliance is off by a factor of 2 or 3, a $2 or $3 tax on a barrel of oil would hardly be noticed when the barrel costs $65-70.

War. Huh. Yeah. What is it good for?

(Most overused lyric ever, I know.)

Matthew Yglesias, writing about war:

On the other hand, I more-and-more think that the mythologizing of World War II has been exerting a pernicious influence on American political culture. That it was a "good war" there can be no doubting. But it's worth recalling that it was also a bloody, savage mess not a splendid little victory. One would hope that a greater consciousness of what was actually involved in fighting and winning the war, thereby laying the preconditions for the reconstruction of Germany and Japan and the creation of the post-war order, would do a little something to ameliorate the militarism which seems to have gripped our society. War is not a pleasant undertaking, and inflicting it on a foreign population is not a nice thing to do. At times, it's preferable to the alternative, but the hair-trigger mentality we developed post-1991 is not serving the world well.

Praise jeebus. I've been saying this here on this blog for almost a year now, and I've been waiting for someone else to. Wars are awful, bloody messes - and that's when they go well. Armies are not meant to police or liberate: they're designed to destroy with great speed, efficiency, and accuracy - in that order. The largely American myth of the new "clean" war with smart bombs that, as John Le Carre put it, can kill the bad guy without breaking the crockery, is one of the worst ideas to have gripped modern thinking. Going to war to prevent war down the road is idiotic, if you follow this line of reasoning. You should do every non-military thing possible to avoid combat, because the alternative is always worse. Neville Chamberlain wasn't wrongly motivated, he just guessed wrong on Hitler's intentions. Notably, Bush and company manifestly failed to do everything possible to avoid combat. Or let's consult people much smarter than I in the arena of international affairs:

"...preventive war is suicide from fear of death." - Otto Bismarck

"To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war." - Winston Churchill

"War for peace is like fucking for virginity." - Anonymous poster seen at anti-war protest.

You might think that last one a bit immature. I disagree. I think it's fundamentally far more mature than the foreign policy of the Bush administration.

Earlier in the same post, Matt makes a great point about WWII:

...however horrible Allied attacks on Germany were at times, the Germans had choices. Not only did Germany choose the war, while its adversaries had it forced upon them, but at any time the Germans could have surrendered. When they did, eventually, surrender they were treated extremely kindly by at least the western Allies.... It's easy to forget that for all the evil Hitler did, the true evil lay in what he would have done had he won.... It would have been an endless, infinite darkness. Under the circumstances, giving up was not an option. For the Germans it was. The guilt for Dresden has to be apportioned at least equally between its Allied perpetrators and the Germans who preferred enduring it to seeing Nazi dreams dashed.

As always, Churchill said it better:

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."

Funniest Story I've Read All Week

Last week the Daily Nebraskan reported on the growing trend of putting breathalyzers in bars.

Bars in some cities such as Boulder, Colo., have breathalyzers by the door. The idea is that people leaving can test their blood-alcohol level before getting behind the wheel.

While a noble attempt to curb a disturbingly large national problem, it seems to take only one step forward and two back. Although it may convince a few people now and again to flag a cab or give the keys to a friend, it presents an even more disturbing issue: drinking for sport.

These machines quantify how plastered bar patrons are. There’s a high likelihood these breathalyzers, in a place like O Street, would tempt some drinkers to try to get a high score by shooting air into a plastic tube instead of shooting darts at a plastic board.

(Link)

Wow. Drinking for sport. But here's the problem - a 90lb girl could get really drunk quickly with little effort. Meanwhile, a larger man would have to drink (and spend!) more to get less drunk. So what we really need are drinking leagues, and weight classes.

Of course, drinking will eventually need it's very own drunk Jackie Robinson, to dismantle the scourge of drinking segregation.

Free at lasht, God almight free at lasht.

It's very likely that I'm going to hell.

The Death of the SUV?

Tom Toles has a funny cartoon today:

Here's hoping.

Oh, By The Way

Happy 48th Anniversary, Sputnik I.

In my first year of University, I had an assignment where I had to research the reaction in the western press to one of many possible events during the Cold War. Being a card-carrying space nerd, I chose the launching of Sputnik. It was amusing how bad most of the science writing was - journalists seemed to have no idea what space travel involved. Seeing as space travel had really just been invented, I suppose that's understanding.

One of the most fascinating things was a piece in the Times of London which quoted an anonymous White House source which - only days after Sputnik was launched - predicted that the US government would need to engage in an expensive, Manhattan Project-style program to land a man on the moon.

That was predicted in 1957. Given that some of Eisenhower's advisors were kept on when Kennedy took over - especially the science advisors - I've suspected since I read that piece that Apollo was basically the brainchild of one anonymous guy in the White House.

I really like that thought.

Why Don't Bad Ideas Die?

A few days ago Mike mentioned in comments that:

Apparently [Celluci] admits that only the NDP called it right when we said BMD would mean the weaponization of space. Everyone knew it, but was denying it (including the Libs).

I was reminded of this when reading this review of a book on the geopolitics of space. The author apparently argues that:

the US should “first declare that it is withdrawing from the current space regime [by which he mostly means the Outer Space Treaty of 1967] and announce that it is establishing a principal of free market sovereignty in space… Second, by using current and near term capacities, the United States should endeavor to seize military control of Low Earth Orbit… Third, a national space coordination agency should be established to define, separate, and coordinate the efforts of commercial, civilian and military space projects.”

Okay. Let's state this clearly: In the modern world, not only is the militarization of space a bad, bad idea, it's also fundamentally impossible - at least in the sense that this author seems to mean it. Low Earth Orbit cannot be "seized" in the same sense that say, the Panama Canal could be. This is one of the problems of thinking in terrestrial terms in space - low earth orbit isn't a "place", but rather a huge volume of space - most of which isn't above the United States. The problem is therefore more analagous to airspace control than seizing territory. The US would need to orbit several dozens, if not hundreds, of large satellites which would need to be armed with sufficient weaponry to fire on unauthorized launches. This might not necessarily entail a Reaganesque SDI, but it'd be damn close.

But all the old arguments against space weaponry still apply. The US cannot launch large satellites more quickly than about a dozen a year. While the US was building this incomplete system, enemy nations would be able to fire upon the satellites from the safety of their own countries. An anti-satellite weapon is simplicity itself - simply launching a bucket of nails on a fast orbit would be sufficient. You don't even need particularly strong rockets to destroy low-orbiting satellites - the difference between reaching high altitude and reaching orbital velocity is considerable. You don't need to orbit an anti-satellite weapon, you just need to get it close on the first try. Then boom.

Russia and the US already have anti-satellite weapons. But their simplicity means that countries like Pakistan, Iran, India, China, Japan, and maybe even (in the medium term) countries like Brazil or Nigeria might be able to develop one.

If you want to avoid the rocketry route, high-powered lasers could do the same job. The point is, satellites are by definition vulnerable to attack.

So how do you defend them? The short version is you don't. Rather, the US would almost certainly declare that an attack on it's satellites would be identical to an attack on American soil - even if said satellites were above enemy soil at the time. Push the logic a bit further, and you say that an attack on US satellites would require a nuclear response. So the dawn of the 21st century is still seized with the same fears that we've had since the middle of the 20th. Rather than some bold new form of power, the foundation of this approach would still essentially rely on Mutual Assured Destruction.

One wonders why the US would even want to do this. The reviewer suggests the recent collaboration of China and the EU over an alternative to the US-owned GPS system. Militarizing ("seizing") space seems a huge overreaction to Chinese geocaching. But - and I say this as a SciFi fan - this passage is more SF fantasy, and less serious policy advice.

This means that a space arms race is probably inevitable. Indeed, it has already begun. Over the next couple of decades the US will not only have to be ready to use space-based weapons to knock out incoming enemy missiles, warheads and satellites, but it will have to be ready to cope with asymmetric space weapons such as psuedo-debris, swarming mini ASATs, and proximity beam weapons, among others.

Really? No other power is preparing to militarize space - certainly not the EU or China, the reviewers main enemies. China can't afford it, and the EU wouldn't allow it. Moreover, most of the specific weaponry the reviewer mentions don't even exist yet. Some might be developing it, but they'd be a lot more likely to stop if the US would stop using words like "seizing" space.

Now, the hope of militarizing space actually becomes more realistic if there's an industrial base already in place. As just one example, John Lewis has proposed mining an iron-rich asteroid to armor the US's early-warning satellites. Putting a foot of iron around a satellite would make it essentially impervious to attack, but would be prohibitively expensive using conventional launches. It's probably that something like this can only be done if the US has a large space industry in place - which, in case you'd missed it, the US doesn't.

So to sum up: Militarizing space would be wrong, a bad idea, and impossible, unless it wasn't impossible, in which case it would still be wrong and a bad idea.

US Increasingly Unwelcome in the former Khan Empire

Yes, the plucky new governments of Central Asia are apparently learning that they can use Russia and China to push against the US:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will visit Central Asia next week to try to wrest influence from Russia and China over an unstable region increasingly cool to Washington.

Rice will make her first trip as secretary of state to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan -- former Soviet states and neighbors of China which have joined Moscow and Beijing to press Washington to withdraw troops from the area....

Pointedly, Rice will not visit nearby Uzbekistan, which has deteriorating ties with the United States after stonewalling U.S. calls for an investigation into a massacre by troops in May and ordering American forces out of an air base....

Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan joined Russia and China in a declaration earlier this year from a regional grouping, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, asking when Washington would withdraw its troops from the region.

China wants good relations with the three bordering nations which could help meet the energy demands of its growing population, while Russia views all former Soviet states as part of its sphere of influence....

But suspicion has spread in Central Asia that the Bush administration is encouraging people-power revolts after it backed the ouster of governments in Kyrgyzstan and other ex-Soviet states Georgia and Ukraine in recent years....

Kimberly Marten, a political science professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, said the countries preferred to align themselves with China and Russia because those powers did not press them to enhance democracy and economic transparency.

Now, before the right begins crowing about this incredible success of the Bush doctrine, we should consider what's really happening here. Zero to little actual democracy has been spread in Central Asia. We're not talking about Georgia and Ukraine, we're talking about the "Russian 'Stans". While the leader of Kyrgyzstan was sent in to Russian exile last April in the Tulip Revolution, there's been a long period of unrest following that. New elections are currently scheduled for November or December. And no serious analyst thinks that the Bush doctrine had anything to do with the Tulip revolution, even if Presidents Putin and Hu are happy to embrace that fiction to scare the small, unloved governments of Central Asia.

Moreover, the reality is that this is a huge - huge - strategic failure for the US. If US interests get pushed out of the oil industry's "final frontier" (as some have referred to Central Asia) because of Bush's delusions of relevance, that will be a massive blow to US power. Especially if the Chinese manage to fill the vacuum.

None of this is to say that I would oppose the democratization of these countries - far from it. (Turkmenistan, anyone?) But the realpolitik of the situation is simple.

Surely This Is Unconstitutional

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - An interim legislative committee is considering a bill that would prohibit gays, lesbians and single people in Indiana from using medical science to assist them in having a child.

Sen. Patricia Miller (R-Indianapolis) said state law does not have regulations on assisted reproduction and should have similar requirements to adoption in Indiana.

"If were going to try to put Indiana on the map, I wouldn't go this route," said Betty Cockrum, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Indiana. "It feels pretty chilling. It is governmental intrusion into a very private part of our lives."...

The bill defines assisted reproduction as causing pregnancy by means other than sexual intercourse, including intrauterine insemination, donation of an egg, donation of an embryo, in vitro fertilization and transfer of an embryo, and sperm injection.

It then requires "intended parents" to be married to each other and says an unmarried person may not be an intended parent.

And because gays can't get married, you get this. What's even more creepifying in my eyes is the fact that apparently Idianans are already cool with these kinds of restrictions on adoption.

I wonder what Indiana does with all of it's abandoned children? (I'm guessing that the state doesn't have progressive abortion laws, either.)

Every day that passes, I'm glad I live where I do.

Screw the RIAA, Continued

Screwing the RIAA isn't just about getting free music - though it is that. It's also about helping construct a new business model that allows artists to distribute their music without the middle man that is the major studios. Presenting Clap Your Hands Say Yeah:

Clap - based in Brooklyn and Philadelphia - have already sold nearly 17,000 copies of their self-released debut, all thanks to word-of-mouth. And while major-label artists make only about a buck a record, the Clap guys are making a whopping eight dollars per disc - putting their take so far at more than $130,000. Not too shabby for an album recorded for less than ten grand and distributed by the band itself via countless trips to the post office.

Apparently you can read more about them in this months Rolling Stone.

So: Screw the RIAA - take a free listen to Clap's music, and then see if you'd like to buy the rest. The whole disc costs $15 US, and of that the artists keep $8 - a hell of a good percentage, considering the industry standard.

It's Time Again For "Screw the RIAA"

My favourite game. Or one of them, at least.

Harvey Danger has released it's first album in five years, and they're giving it away for free over the Internet. Woo-hoo.

The album itself is pretty good (to my ears, at any rate) and I'd reccomend giving it a try. Risk-free, after all. That said, there's a wrinkle to all media industries that we don't often think of - time. How much media people consume is basically a static pie at this point. Unlike with something like food or cars, the market for media (broadly speaking) is essentially saturated, in that there is no significant amounts of time in the western world that aren't a) free (as in non-work or sleep) and b) not already used consuming television, radio, etc.

The implications for this are really important. Every second you spend listening to music that the RIAA isn't collecting a nickel for, you're undermining their basic business model.

There's a second pie to consider in the media business, and that's personal expenditures. Given the massive proliferation of media technologies in the last thirty years or so, you'd think that we'd have spent a commensurately larger share of our income on new media. Except this hasn't happened, or at least not to the degree you might think. Individual spending on media has grown very little, if at all. Where there's been an enormous increase in spending is in business and government. Easily 80% of spending on new technology comes from these two groups, and not from individuals.

This is referred to the "law of constant proportional media expenditures".

So we've got one pie which is static - time. And another pie that grows slowly, if at all - money. By listening to free (legal) music, you're attacking the media industry at both ends. Keep it up! Put the Vivendis and Viacoms of the world out of business.

Interestingly, one of my papers this term is going to be on how Apple Computer is reshaping the media industry. One of the interesting things to note: Apple now makes more money from it's iPods and the iTunes music store than it does from any single line of its computers. (Overall computers still make up about 4-5 times as much revenue as iPods.) Meanwhile, iPod's revenue growth (from last year) is 280%, and the "other music products" section (which contains iTunes) has increased by over 600%.

In another few years, it's possible that Apple will go from being a computer store that sells music, to a music store that used to sell computers.

EU Opens the Door, A Crack

Good news for the Turks:

Turkey has officially begun membership talks with the European Union.

Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul arrived in Luxembourg during the night for the opening ceremony, after Ankara agreed to the EU's terms for the talks.

The move follows more than 24 hours of fraught discussions among EU nations, which ended with a last-minute deal on the terms.

Austria withdrew a demand that Turkey should be offered an option short of full membership.

Turkey had flatly rejected such an option.

This isn't much, thus far, but it's good that Austria's belligerence didn't manage to sabotage things. So now we've agreed what to talk about. Maybe the actual talks can begin?

Canada's Worst Son* Speaks

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum says the following, apparently blissfully unaware of it's implications:

The record shows I fear that the president's judgment has always been at its worst on personnel matters.

For once, former Bush speechwriter David Frum and I agree on something.

*Okay, it's possible Canada's Worst Son is, in fact, Ben Mulroney. But I wouldn't put money on it.

I Want This, Too

Ah, the Internet. Excellent tool for making me aware of what I want but don't have. Exibit #3 (today) - the $100 laptop.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--A low-cost computer for the masses moved one step closer to reality on Wednesday.

Nicholas Negroponte, the co-founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, detailed specifications for a $100 windup-powered laptop targeted at children in developing nations.

Negroponte, who laid out his original proposal at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, said MIT and his nonprofit group, called One Laptop Per Child, is in discussions with five countries--Brazil, China, Thailand, Egypt and South Africa--to distribute up to 15 million test systems to children....

While the initial goal of the project is to work with governments, Negroponte said MIT is considering licensing the design or giving it to a third-party company to build commercial versions of the PC. "Those might be available for $200, and $20 or $30 will come back to us to make the kids' laptops. We're still working on that," he said.

That's a pretty sweet deal - $200 for a cheap laptop that also works as an e-book reader. Considering what people are shelling out for palm computers, this might be a really big thing. Given that it's shipping with wi-fi, this should take off nicely among university campuses. Considering that in some of my classes, half of the students already have laptops, this might be an excellent way of reaching the remaining market. I also like the idea of paying a premium to help get the computers to the truly needy - if people pay a premium for fair trade coffee at Starbucks, God knows they can pay a 15-30% premium to help poor kids get access to the world.

Ah, but is getting some poor Malawian child access to porn that important? Well, for that we turn to Yahoo and the Internet Archive, which today announce that:

An unusual alliance of corporations, nonprofit groups and universities plans to announce today an ambitious plan to digitize hundreds of thousands of books over the next several years and put them on the Internet, with the full text accessible to anyone.

The effort is being led by Yahoo, which appears to be taking direct aim at a similar project announced by its archrival, Google, whose own program to create searchable digital copies of entire collections at leading research libraries has run into a series of challenges since it was announced nine months ago.

The new project, called the Open Content Alliance, has the wide-ranging goal of digitizing historical works of fiction along with specialized technical papers. In addition to Yahoo, its members include the Internet Archive, the University of California, and the University of Toronto, as well as the National Archive in England and others.

First off, Go U of T!!! Woot!

Secondly (ahem) this shows the real power of the Internet and these computers - making the sum of human knowledge available to everyone. Or at least, as much as copyright law allows. So good luck to Nick Negroponte, who is doing more for the good of the species in the last year alone than his brother has done in his entire life.

(In case you missed it, his brother is the despicable Bush appointee John Negroponte.)

Interesting

A few days ago, Antonia Zerbisias put this up:

Blood on the floor at Rogers' 92.5 Jack FM today.

Morning man Rob Christie, afternoon drive guy Scot Turner, weekend jock Richard Charles, along with Larry Silver and all their producers have been shuffled off the premises....

Said program director Patrick Cardinal to me in an email

"They are all excellent broadcasters, but we've made a decision to differentiate ourselves by having no deejays. Toronto has over 20 radio stations available to listeners and the rest of them have deejays if that's what someone wants. JACK will be nothing but music.

I say this is interesting, because I thought the whole point of the Jack format was to get people - that is, live human talent - out of the radio business. So I was surprised when I turned on Bob FM (the local Jack variant) here in Ottawa and had to listen to idiotic prattling in the morning. With luck, that won't last long. Now, it would be even better if they'd make an MP3-playing alarm clock. But maybe that's too much to hope for.

In other broadcasting news, the CBC is apparently coming back soon. The guild and management have signed an agreement in principle, or something, and it looks like management caved. So the good guys win, kind of, and the guild members get a $1,000 signing bonus for coming back. Nice work! Now I can stop listening to crap radio again.

And when does the good television start again?

Electric Broadband, At Last!

TOKYO - The common electric socket will serve as your home's connection to broadband with a new chip developed by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. — doing away with all the Ethernet cables or the hassle of hooking up to a wireless network device.

Products are still being developed, but gadgets embedded with the chip from the Japanese manufacturer of Panasonic products can hook up to a broadband network by plugging into the common electrical outlet, company officials said Thursday....

The technology has been around for some time — including in the United States — but Matsushita's system is unique in that it delivers fast-speed broadband information at up to 170 megabits per second, which is faster than Ethernet.

I'll take that, too.

Maybe we shouldn't be getting ready for the wireless world yet.

Meet George Jetson

I want one. Now:

CHICAGO (Reuters) - If that Hummer is draining your cash at the gas pump, Neiman Marcus Group Inc. has the perfect holiday gift: A fuel-efficient, $3.5 million "Skycar" that flies 350 miles per hour and burns environmentally friendly alcohol....

The M400 Skycar prototype is a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that gets 21 miles per gallon and is designed to be "as safe, affordable and easy to use as an automobile.

"A limited number of M400s is expected to be available within the next three years, but you can purchase the actual prototype for yourself or your favorite commuter now," Neiman Marcus said in the catalog.

Delivery is not included.

First off, a car that gets 21 mpg isn't "fuel-efficient", no matter what the fuel is or whether it flies. Still - I'd take it.

Read more about the Moller Skycar here.

Malthus Lives

You remember Thomas Malthus, don't you? You don't? Well, here's a primer:

In An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, Malthus predicted population would outrun food supply, leading to a decrease in food per person. This prediction was based on the idea that population if unchecked increases at a geometric rate (i.e. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc.) whereas the food supply grows at an arithmetic rate (i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc.) (See Malthusian catastrophe for more information.) Only misery, moral restraint and vice (which for Malthus included contraception) could check excessive population growth. Malthus favoured "moral restraint" (including late marriage and sexual abstinence) as a check on population growth. However, it is worth noting that Malthus proposed this only for the working and poor classes. Thus, the lower social classes took a great deal of responsibility for societal ills, according to his theory. Essentially what this resulted in was the promotion of legislation which degenerated the conditions of the poor in England.

Now, Malthus was writing in 1798, long before the American midwest or Canadian prairies were stolen and repurposed for agricultural exports. So it's not like it was unreasonable for him to think that the UK was overcrowded.

That said, we can say that Malthus really was wrong on a number of counts. Most importantly, the poor are not the drain on society's resources that Malthus believed. In fact, it is the wealthy who consume most (unsurprisingly) and therefore contribute disproportionately to resource scarcity. Someone who drives a Civic isn't contributing to high oil prices in the same way that someone who drives a Suburban. However, it's not like we can expect privileged English nobility to understand this.

But it has a lot of relevance today. Because of Malthus' focus on absolute numbers - and therefore his support for stringent laws persecuting the poor - he missed the larger point about individual consumption. It isn't numbers alone, but numbers and the rate of consumption which dictates resource scarcity or abundance. I got to thinking about all this reading this article last night, about the failure of space activsts to sell space through scare-scenarios:

The average American of 2005 is not living in one of those dystopias that the MIT professors or the California SciFi writers predicted thirty years ago. He is twice as rich as his counterpart in 1975, uses about half the energy per unit of GNP, breathes cleaner air, drinks cleaner water, has wider educational and career opportunities, and a bigger house in a greener suburb with less crime. You aren't going to convince this average voter that civilization is declining on Earth. Your claim is contradicted by every feature of his daily life....

The Space Greens ignore the birthrate statistics that show world population plunging by 2050, or the raw material prices which are lower than ever. The Space Libertarians ignore the Thatcher/Reagan Revolution, the collapse of Communism, the resurgence of regional languages like Gaelic, Hawaiian and Catalan, and the hundreds of micro-cultures on the Internet.

Okay, I'd like to state at the outset that I actually agree with the main thesis of the article - we who hope to die on Mars someday aren't going to achieve it by scaring the bejeezus out of people.

But there's a number of simply false statements in the paragraphs quoted above. First, most people are no better off than they were in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. Between inflation, wage stagnation, and the deindustrialization of the economy, most households take home about what they took home in 1975 - albeit on two incomes rather than one. This has been demonstrated over and over, recently by the work of James K. Galbraith at the University of Texas. While the GDP in the west has about doubled, the percentage that went to wages has barely kept up with inflation. So most people are as rich or as poor as they were in 1975-1980.

The second falsehood follows from the first one - income dictates to a large degree the opportunities people have for education. This is especially the case when, as in Canada and the US, right-wing governments have cut the support for education and deregulated prices, meaning that effectively only a small portion of the population has access to higher education.

Thirdly, no statistics show global population "plunging" after 2050. Instead, the UNFPA projects that the global population will reach 9 billion by 2050, and may level off. It might just as soon increase further. You can read the (large PDF) here.

This is important, because it's possible we can't support the six billion we've got now. Which brings me to the fourth falsehood, that raw material prices are lower than ever. This simply isn't true. While some prices have stayed stable, the price of commodities in the last three years has increased substantially. The IMF reports regularly on commodity prices. According to their latest report:

• The price of rice has increased 47%
• The price of soybeans is up 30%.
• The price of olive oil is up 90%.

Now, I've highlighted the foods with some rather dramatic price increases - not all have increased, and a few have even declined, it's true. But look what happens when we take a look at metals. The IMF report lists 8 metals - Copper, Aluminum, Iron Ore, Tin, Nickel, Zinc, Lead and Uranium. The price increases are as follows:

Copper: +140%
Aluminum: +40%
Iron Ore: +125%
Tin: +80% (with a spike last year at 125%!)
Nickel: +120%
Zinc: +67%
Lead: +96%
Uranium: +200%

These price increases are all relative to the 2002 averages. So in less than three years, we've seen doublings and triplings of the price of major metals. And this isn't the worst of it - the price of molybdenum (as strategic metal used in steel production) has increased almost four-fold over the last two years. So along with high energy prices, Asian industrialization has brought us rapdily growing material prices. I'm not saying poverty is preferable - certainly not! - but we have to face the reality that our economies might not actually be able to sustain 6 billion middle-class people, certainly not at current levels of consumption.

Which brings me to my point. It's possible the Earth could have sustained 9 billion low-impact poor people. It's also possible the Earth could sustain 9 billion wealthy, eco-friendly Danes. Unfortunately, neither of those options seems likely at the moment. What seems likely is a planet with approximately 3 or 4 billion modestly wealthy, inefficient, polluting pseudo-Americans. The status quo means simply this - economic hardship followed quickly by ecological calamity. Even if we avoid economic hardship - say, we discover large new deposits of everything we need - the ecological calamity that awaits us becomes more certain, not less: the mining industry isn't exactly world-renowned for it's green credentials.

Malthus lives.

The optimistic corrollary to this, however, is that the nation which makes the new status quo - one based on radical efficiency, low consumption, and ecological sustainability - may very well run the world. Or at the very least, they might survive.

Wow. How'd He Manage That?

So new Supreme Court Justice John Roberts has been elevated to his position, despite having only two years' experience as a judge. So the question immediately becomes: can George W. Bush find someone even less qualified?

Yes, yes he can. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Harriet Miers, with exactly zero experience as a judge.

Now, there have been non-judge appointments to The Court before, so this isn't exactly groundbreaking. But you would think that, while the GOP leadership is in the middle of several corruption scandals, that Bush would have the sense to not appoint someone who's sole qualification is that she thinks Bush is the the most brilliant man she ever met. But I guess this is Bush's competitive streak showing itself again - if there's going to be scandals over political cronyism, then Bush wants to be at the top of that, too!

The funny thing is, the right is already out for blood. You can imagine them spitting up their half-chewed kittens and baby livers with the news this morning that Bush was not, in fact, going to appoint a new Scalia or Thomas. Ezra Klein has a great rundown of the wingnut reaction here.

Now, it's almost too good. Two corruption scandals, and criminal investigation and a potentially failed Court nomination? It's like Christmas come early - I'm waiting for a partridge in a pear tree. So I'm suspicious. It could be that Miers is meant to fail, allowing an easier passage for someone with more experience, but also a harder-edged conservative. I wonder if these guys are actually that smart. But Miers is certainly the type to fall on her sword for Bush, by all accounts.

Unfolding, as they say.

Liberals Oppose Planet, Intelligence, Puppies, Ice Cream

This is just so astoundingly stupid I don't know what to say. The only government we've got - beset by scandalously high fuel costs - is apparently distressed about the possibility that Canadians might get cheap, oil-free transportation - bicycles:

The federal government is spinning its wheels over a trade dispute over cheap foreign bicycles.

Consumers, retailers, and now some Liberal MPs are expressing doubts about a federal trade watchdog's recommendation last month -- that Ottawa slap hefty taxes on foreign bicycles to protect Canadian manufacturers.

What are you saying, John? That you're some Canada-hating anarchist who loves Communist China and all their bicycles more than you love bikes made in the good ol' land of the Maple Leaf?

No. Next paragraph, please:

Out of every 10 bikes sold in Canada, seven are built abroad, mostly in China. And the flood of cheap imports is threatening to put Canadian bike makers out of business and kill about 500 jobs.

Are you kidding me? 500 jobs, and they want to cost Canadian consumers hard-earned money? Meanwhile, the bike market is exploding thanks to high gas prices:

WASHINGTON (AFP) - More bicycles than cars have been sold in the United States over the past 12 months, with rising gas prices prompting commuters to opt for two wheels instead of four.

Not since the oil crisis of 1973 have bicycles sold in such big numbers, according to Tim Blumenthal, executive director of Bikes Belong, an industry association.

"Bicycle sales are near an all-time high with 19 million sold last year -- close to the 20 million sold during the oil embargo in the early 1970s," said Blumenthal, whose association is based in Boulder in the western state of Colorado.

So here we have a problem: high gas prices. No problem, because people are already embracing the solution: cycling when possible. New problem: Idiotic, short-sighted, petty national governments worried about 500 Quebecers losing their jobs.

I know the Liberals are worried about losing Quebec, but jesus - cheap bikes are a good thing.

People might consider writing their MPs over this kind of thing. I already have. Now if Mr. Broadbent replies, I'll let you know.

Serenity

Saw it last night. Worth the price of admission. In fact, worth the price of two admissions, if you're paying for a date.

As much as I love the show (yes, I own the box set) I've come away from the movie with a few mild complaints. First off, the problem with the movie is that it really was meant to be a television show. So as well written as it was, I think it would have worked much better as a dozen television episodes, instead of two hours of film. The movie was fast-paced, but it felt a bit too compressed, if you ask me.

(Of course, I'd just recently seen Wong Kar-Wai's 2046, whose pacing - while beautiful - could best be described as somewhere between "geologic" or "glacial". So maybe my beat is off.)

There's another problem in terms of the writing, but I'd have to spoil it for some people, which I don't want to do. It's a pretty fanboy kind of gripe to begin with, so I'll just say that I wasn't entirely satisfied with one of the big changes near the end.

Now, these are the only two problems I had in two hours of what was otherwise excellent writing and a fun action movie, with standard-excellent visual effects. I see that Ebert and Roeper gave it two thumbs up, and I'd really, really recommend it to all and sundry. As for non-nerd perspective, my father saw it yesterday based on the previews, and enjoyed it as well.

I'd say a fair consensus among the people I've talked to is: good, go see it. Not mind-blowing, but good.

I'd also encourage people to go see a good movie that has exactly zero big stars. Hollywood needs to encourage new talent, and the only way to do that is to go see movies with new talent. Believe it or not, they do try and respond to the market. (By the way, I was amazed to see that Wedding Crashers and 40-Year Old Virgin were still playing.)

So, short version: Go see Serenity.

Shhh

Don't use the word Civil War. We prefer "unscheduled constitutional renegotiation/demographic restitution."

KIRKUK, Iraq - Iraq's Kurdish president called on the country's Shiite prime minister to step down, the spokesman for the president's party said Sunday, escalating a political split between the two factions that make up the government.

Sunni Arab leaders, meanwhile, were angered after the Shiite-dominated parliament passed a new ruling on a key Oct. 15 that makes it more difficult for Sunnis to defeat the draft constitution that they oppose.

The political wrangling deepened the splits between Iraq's three main communities amid a constitutional process that was aimed at bringing them together to build a democratic nation. Kurds complained that Shiites were monopolizing the government, while Sunnis — who have made up the backbone of the violent insurgency — accused Shiites of stacking the deck against them in the political process.

So we've got a split between the well-armed Kurds, the majority Shia, and the insurgent Sunnis. And this is within the political arena - you know, the "success story." Meanwhile, Billmon quotes a US representative on the Catch-22 the Iraqis have been put in:

Officials say that if the constitution is defeated, insurgents will most likely believe that they have won a significant victory and be encouraged to fight on. Conversely, it is said, the insurgency will grow stronger if the voters approve the constitution, because that will anger Sunnis who opposed it and empower Sunni insurgents who can claim that their views were ignored.

So we're screwed. Good to know.

Honestly - where's the good news here? The constitution is either a) a dead letter, or b) will pass, but simply highten the bloodshed. Nobody honestly seems to expect the killing to stop. At most, the constitution will pass and give the Bush administration ass-cover to pull out and let things fall apart in Iraq. The worse, and a fear more likely possibility, is that the US doesn't leave, and stays on to back the Shia against the Sunnis, or something like that. As others have pointed out, this might temporarily solve problems in Iraq, but would make things much worse worldwide - the vast majority of Muslims outside of Iran and Iraq are Sunni, so having Shias killing Sunnis with US training and weaponry is just incredibly bad PR, aside from anything else. Maybe not as bad as Israeli F-15s, but you get my point.

Mild Winter?

A few days ago, Atrios posted this:

Natural Gas Prices Set Record, Pointing to Costly Winter
By JAD MOUAWAD

Natural gas prices set a new record today, presaging higher heating bills for a majority of Americans this winter as well as soaring costs for industrial manufacturers of such products as plastics and chemicals.

Since the beginning of the summer, the price of natural gas has doubled. But unlike crude oil or gasoline, whose recent gains have been widely felt by most Americans, the surge in natural gas prices, the most popular form of energy for home heating, has so far gone largely unnoticed.

That is about to change as colder weather sets in. A hot summer, which pushed up natural gas consumption by electricity companies and depleted winter stocks, is expected to give way to a cold winter, which will push up residential consumption. Meanwhile, the Gulf Coast, the nation's largest energy hub, has suffered devastating punches from two severe hurricanes.

Hopefully, that will be (slightly) ameliorated by this:

(CP) - Canadians in the East and West can look forward to unseasonably mild weather in the months ahead but most of Ontario and Quebec will likely have to deal with a normal Canadian diet of cold and snow, says Environment Canada.

So a normal winter for the largest chunk of Canada' people, but a milder winter for the west and east. Problem is, most of the natural gas is still being used by the centre.

I'm still not being dissuaded from my concerns. This winter is going to suck for a lot of people.

Insert Hitler Joke Here

You do remember that Hitler was Austrian, right? Well, the Austrians are crapping all over the latest talks to bring Turkey in to the EU:

LUXEMBOURG (Reuters) - European Union foreign ministers failed to agree on Sunday on a mandate for opening entry talks with Turkey after Austria insisted on an alternative to full membership, but will try again on Monday.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who chaired five hours of tough wrangling, said the planned start time for Turkey's long-awaited negotiations on Monday afternoon could slip.

"It is a frustrating situation that I hope and pray that we may be able to reach agreement," Straw told a news conference. EU president Britain postponed a planned review of Croatia's progress toward starting membership talks -- close to Austria's heart -- until the mandate for Turkey was sorted out.

For the record, Turkey's ties to the European Community go back to the 1960s. Croatia didn't even exist until 1991. For Austria to tie Croatia's membership to Turkey's is incredibly unfair to the Turks. Especially given that, unlike Croatia, Turkey is not currently in defiance of a War Crimes Tribunal.

There's an additional wrinkle that makes it even more depressing - German and Austrian support for Croatian Catholics took a particularly nasty form during WWII, when Croats turned over Serbs to be killed as part of the Holocaust. When Austria backs Croatian membership, one wonders how it looks to Serbia.