I am a callous person

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yowza

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

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

I'm just spitballin' here.

Tab-clearing

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

A Little Less catholic Every Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McGuinty to Toronto: Drop Dead.

That's basically what this amounts to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No you can't

Funny:

Erm, the hell?

John McCain:

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

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

1) The Senate passing a bill.

2) The House passing said bill.

3) ???

4) POISON.

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

Some things you never shake

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

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

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

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

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

I think this is an underestimate

26

Maybe later then

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

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

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

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

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

Diversions

Tyler Cowen asks/is asked:

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

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

Nothing here, move along

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

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

Man, I called that one

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

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

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

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

Hey, look:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did my property values just increase?

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

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

The good old days

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Woof

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

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

Things I can endorse

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

Burning the walls for heat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Michael Ignatieff

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

There goes the TV tax

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

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

Tab-clearing

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

There are right ways and wrong ways

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fascinating

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

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

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

The zero-cost military

This is a bit old, but it made the rounds a bit earlier this week and it merits discussion:

Indeed, total spending (actual and planned) after 2001 appears much above the average for the preceding five decades. The Obama administration is contributing substantially to this trend. It plans to spend more on defense in real (inflation-adjusted) terms than did any administration since 1948 – a period encompassing the entire Cold War, including two large-scale, protracted regional wars: Korea and Vietnam.

This chart sums it up nicely.



There's something interesting here about the fact that, until recently, the US was willing to spend about the same real amount on war-fighting over a pretty long period of time: roughly 550-600 billion 2010 dollars, give or take. What's even more interesting is to consider the devaluation of what that money can buy. In 1953, it bought a stalemate with the People's Republic. In Vietnam, it bought a pretty miserable quagmire where the only way to end it was to leave. In the 1980s, the actual effect foreign policy-wise was pretty much zero except that Bush the Elder was able to fight and win the Gulf War with Reagan's leftovers.

Indeed, America's major successes during the entire post-WWII period are almost entirely political, and not military -- the creation of NATO and the UN, the negotiation of an alliance with Japan and South Korea, etc. That's not to say that a high level of military spending wouldn't have been necessary for those successes as well: there's a lot of evidence to suggest that the immediate demobilization after WWII helped convince the Soviets and DPRK that the US wouldn't or couldn't intervene in their attempt to unify the peninsula.

Nevertheless, those charts suggest to me that the point of diminishing returns on 20th century global hegemony is somewhere around $350 billion US 2010. Spending that much gets you a pretty uncontested playing field, while spending more just gets you in to a point where you're chasing good money with bad. And we're now looking at a future where the sustained spending is something like $600-700 billion, even as the US winds down one and maybe two wars.

Or, to put it another way, the difference between America's usual "resting rate" military spending and the planned future spending will be double what the Congressional health care proposals will cost even if the savings estimated by groups like the CBO never materialize. That's the most pessimistic assumption possible: that the $100 billion or so per year that the Congressional plan budgets isn't offset in any way by the projected savings.

And this is all basically uncontroversial, even though it's a sum that would be madness for any other country to spend. Meanwhile, spending a small fraction as much for the moral cause of helping the sick and poor is tantamount to eating babies.

Compare and Contrast

This:

With this:

There's your new-economy old-economy divide right there. One treats the opposite sex as something to be pursued out of a desire to have our own lives fulfilled, the other wants to sell you an identity based on resentment.

Six degrees of this is old now

Joe Stiglitz, Zhang Ziyi, and myself all share a birthday.  That day is today.

We're not actually all the same age.  And I haven't yet won a Nobel prize or starred in a film outside of a grainy cellphone cam from a back alley behind a bar.[1]  So there's really nothing connecting us except the peculiarities of the Gregorian calendar.

[1]  Get your mind out of the gutter, perv.

UPDATE: John Walker Lindh and I have the exact same birthday.

Troubles in Europe. Gee, that's never caused problems before.

I have nothing serious to add to the commentary of Simon Johnson on the problems of sovereign default in Europe, but I will say if the Eurozone breaks up because of this there will be no end of crowing on the American right, who love to see Europe fail at anything because shut up that's why.

Clearing tabs

• Cellphone-driving bans may be ineffective, possibly because they mostly don't ban using your cellphone while driving.  All they do (in all the jurisdictions I've seen) is ban using your cellphone with your hands, which does nothing to address the problem of an inattentive driver.  Kind of like banning driving drunk, unless you're loaded on scotch.
• Big Dog Goes to War!
• The Supreme Court is always and everywhere a political institution.  Cope.
• If America actually lets its foreign policy with the rest of the world be determined by their interactions with Iran, it really is going to keep doing stupid things.

Could locked-down tablets be good for us?

Argh, I promised I'd stop writing about the iPad, so consider this a more generic question about an entirely-hypothetical tablet computer with more limitations than power users are used to, made by an entirely-hypothetical company. Whose name rhymes with "Snapple".

Here's my thinking: with devices like iPhones, etc. there's a benefit to the user for a lot of functions that might happen through a browser on a desktop (gmail, youtube, google maps) to become their own apps: less intensive resource use, and faster results for the user. Even if the picking and choosing of apps is open and transparent (i.e., not "Snapple") the fact that the UI is app-based naturally predisposes the user to choosing apps instead of the theoretically less constrained Web.

The result, if I'm right, is that the Web becomes something more like TV: a limited (though still very large) number of channels instead of a limitless field to wander in. (If the web was ever really like that in the first place.) Furthermore, browsing the web from something like a dedicated browser becomes, in the scenario where mobile tablets become the norm, something akin to using your computer through a command-line interface: sure, you can do it -- but why?

So why would this be good for us? Simply put, we may be running out of neurons for the firehouse of information that is being sprayed at us. W. Russel Neuman et al (PDF):

Our key conclusion is drawn from Figure 10. Indeed, it represents another growth curve, in this case the simple ratio of media supply to media demand. Such a curve follows, naturally enough, from the disjuncture of a nearly exponential growth in supply paired with a linear growth in consumption. But it is worthwhile to pause briefly to consider the actual metrics we have been at some pains to calculate. Take the ratio of supply to demand in 1960. It is 98. That represents the number of media minutes available in the typical American household in 1960 divided by number of minutes of actual consumption. It represents the fundamental a metric of choice. And it is a human scale choice. ... But if we take the ratio of supply to demand in 2005, we find a very different metric. The ratio is 20,943 – over 20,000 minutes of mediated content available for every minute to be consumed. In our view that is not a human-scale cognitive challenge; it is one in which humans will inevitably turn to the increasingly intelligent digital technologies that created the abundance in the first place for help in sorting it out – search engines, TiVo’s recommendation systems, collaborative filters. We see this as a historical variant of Beniger’s widely cited “crisis of control” in the 19th century (1986a, 1986b). Briefly, Beniger argued that the growth of automated intelligent control systems in transportation and manufacturing were not just a technical artifact but a necessary development as mechanized process speeds and complexity challenged the capacity of individual humans to control them. He cites frequent train crashes in the late 19th century resulting from human error as a particularly dramatic exemplar. We may not be confronting equivalent dramaturgy in the realm of media flows, but it represents nonetheless a critical shift in how individuals will negotiate the mediated world.

Neuman et al don't explicitly mention iPhone-like interfaces, but it seems to me this is very much part of the evolution of the web: using it in a way that narrow down the options to something humane.

Today in "No, that severed horse's head was always there" news

Keith Urban, having been visited by the lawyers of his employer, issues grovelling reversal of his previous "I don't care if you download my music" statement.

These little moments amuse me. This, however, will be the one and only time I blog about Keith Urban, unless of course it intersects with my passion for stealing from poor, benighted artists with the limitless power of my capped 5Mps DSL line.

No, really, they're actually monsters

Ever think the rich and powerful might -- gasp! -- hold different standards for proper conduct in others than they themselves follow?

Once we become socially isolated, we stop simulating the feelings of other people.* As a result, our inner Machiavelli takes over, and our sense of sympathy is squashed by selfishness. The UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner has found that, in many social situations, people with power act just like patients with severe brain damage. "The experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and socially-appropriate behavior," he writes. "You become very impulsive and insensitive, which is a bad combination."

Of course, we live in an age when our most powerful people - they tend to also have lots of money - are also the most isolated. They live in gated communities with private drivers. They eat at different restaurants and stay at different resorts. They wear different clothes and skip the security lines at airports, before sitting at the front of the plane. We shouldn't be surprised that they're also assholes.

Still got it

Bill Watterson gives his first interview in 20 years:

How soon after the U.S. Postal Service issues the Calvin stamp will you send a letter with one on the envelope?

Immediately. I'm going to get in my horse and buggy and snail-mail a check for my newspaper subscription.

Thanks, Bill. I'd forgotten what it was like to snort tea out my nose.

A sick joke, right?

The CBC would like us (apparently everyone, including lowly bloggers) to pay to "license" content we (in Canada) already paid for?

There are a variety of reactions I have to this, but they all involve profanity and anatomically questionable imprecations.

Oh man

I just cried a little.

So, what do I like about the iPad?

...I'm going to shut up about this, but I feel like I should point out that I'm not exclusively a hater.

1) The design really is slick. If it were possible for me to make a baby with this thing, I'd be all over it like a fat kid on a smartie.

2) The dock-keyboard combination is more difficult than it needs be, but is otherwise a good solution to the whole problem of IDing what, exactly, this device does: a little bit of everything, and it can be a desktop if you need it too.

3) People are complaining about the screen size, but it wasn't that long ago that I thought widescreen monitors looked weird, and it works for reading pages, so I say yay to that.

4) Highest kudos to Apple for not reinventing the wheel with the ebook format. Seriously, I complain about Apple selling locked down crippled toys for the rich, but going with ePub is a really good move. Good to see the ebook industry starting to seriously consolidate around a format for text, finally.

About books: here's the deal. I'll buy a high-end e-reader when someone offers me the following service. I box up and mail to you all of my old paper books, and you mail me a DVD-ROM with all of them in unlocked, DRM-free ebook files. I'll buy two ereaders if that's what it takes. But the attachment I have not just to books, but to a library I can lend out to friends, is pretty substantial.

Anyone think we'll see anything like that?

Further thoughts on the iPad

1) I felt momentarily bad when, after hearing the word "iPad" I immediately thought of feminine hygiene products. It turns out the entire Internet thought the same thing. Relief.

2) Jobs took a swing at netbooks in his speech yesterday, but seems to have not considered that the reason the market for a device between a laptop and a smartphone is so small is because the niche itself is so small. If I were in the market for a new laptop, I'd at least take a look at a netbook. If I were in the market for a new cell phone, I'd look at an iPhone or Droid. If I were looking at a tablet PC, I'd have to be looking for a tablet PC, and thus far I can't see why I'd prefer something as disabled as the iPad to a laptop.

3) I've been hearing about the death of the desktop OS for, oh, 15 years or so. I'm not yet 29. Draw your own conclusions.

4) Games are a nice value-add, but I'd bet not even a "casual gamer" is going to buy this for the games. They've already got Popcap and the Wii, for much less money.

5) I can't say how this will play with the general consumer, but Lord Almighty could Apple not have opted for simplicity, just once? The "dock" for something like this need not be anything more than a 4-port USB hub. But no, we've gotta have twee little connectors for everything.

iPass

So Tablet Jesus descended from the heavens today, and it seems like kind of a damp squib.

I keep waiting for someone to make a tablet that will work well, but it won't be Microsoft, and
Apple annoys me by making a tablet that's far more locked down than anything Gates would dare ship. There's a lot that I almost like about the iPad, but I can't get past the deliberate, malicious crippling.

In about 6-9 months, there'll be a passel of Android-powered devices of similar price and capability. We'll see how they run, and if they're any less hegemonic.

God knows I'm not a representative sample. Maybe 18 months from now we'll all be running the damn things.

Byzantine

Definition:

a. Of or relating to the ancient city of Byzantium.
b. Of or relating to the Byzantine Empire.
c. Highly complicated; intricate and involved.

The way I was taught the history of the Fall of Rome in high school could be summed up in two sentences: Rome (the Western Empire) fell in 472 when the Goths came over the hills. Constantinople (the Eastern, or Byzantine Empire) lasted another 1000 years, until the Turks took it in 1453. The real picture, fittingly, is much more complicated, intricate, and involved than that.

I wrote last week that there was some merit to thinking about a "Byzantine scenario" where parts of the global economy collapse, while other parts do relatively well. Just in time, I finished reading The Coldest Winter, David Halberstam's book on the Korean War, and picked up The Inheritance of Rome where I'd left it -- the beginning of Chris Wickham's chapters on the Eastern Empire. What's clear, even from Wickham's survey account of Byzantine history, is that there's actually little solace to take: it turns out it's actually quite difficult to maintain the functions of your state while the international order is collapsing. But let me get to that in a minute.

What caused the Fall of Rome in the West? Well, if you're an anthropologist like Joseph Tainter you can argue a number of historical structural trends converging in the late 5th century make the complexity of Roman society unsustainable. If you're Richard Nixon, you blame the gays. Wickham argues that, at the beginning of the 400s, there was actually little reason to believe that Rome was approaching the end of days: the Crises of the 300s were behind it, the state was functioning moderately well, and an observer without the privilege of knowing how it all turned out could be forgiven for not guessing what was coming. (Remember Namantianus!) Wickham's entire book is devoted to avoiding the trap of seeing the events of the past as prologue for the present: these things happened for their own reasons, with actors involved pursuing their own interests, and not because they were fated to or because there was something better waiting to happen in the future.

Wickham argues that what really caused the collapse of Rome in the West is quite prosaic: the Vandals, having moved through Italy into North Africa, declined the honour of providing Rome with free grain, as the African provinces had for centuries. This sudden shock to the Roman system leads to a precipitous, and not at all surprising, decline in both tax revenues (the tax in this case being grain itself) and people choosing to live in Rome itself. This all happens in the 440s, and Rome never really recovers.

The seizing of the African provinces was as much a problem for the Eastern Empire as it was for the west though. As it became clear that Italian Romans (as opposed to the Byzantine Romans) were unable to recapture Carthage and the other rich provinces of North Africa, the Eastern Empire moved. The Emperor Justinian sent his armies west, and his General Belisarius recaptured North Africa and moved across the sea to take back Italy. Between 533 and 550, the Byzantines were rebuilding the Roman Empire with Constantinople the new core. By 550, the Empire looks very familiar:



It's basically the Roman world save France and the bulk of Spain.

Alas, it was not to endure. Various new kingdoms existed in France and Germany, all of whom were willing to fight to take a chunk of Italy back from the Byzantines. The Roman structures had collapsed so thoroughly that it was impossible to put them back together in any sustainable fashion -- though Wickam doesn't present any evidence that the Byzantines tried to do that. They weren't looking to rebuild a powerful Rome, they wanted the centre of the world to stay in Constantinople. Meanwhile, in the North, South, and East, Byzantium's borders were being threatened by any number of invaders. First the powerful Persian Empire in the east fought for control of Mesopotamia and Syria, and briefly held Jerusalem but was eventually defeated in an early example of, er, a Crusade. Just as soon as the Persians were beaten, the up and coming Arab armies swung through Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa and absolutely devastated Constantinople's tax base and its ability to feed itself.

Within a century of the Empire's height under Justinian I, the city of Constantinople would see its population cut by 3/4, and it was sacked by Arab armies between 674 and 678. (It's a mark of how the Mediterranean world had collapsed, that even at 25% its previous size Constantinople was still the largest city in Europe.) The economy of the Byzantine region collapsed, and between 700 and 800 or so it seems like there was precious little coinage minted. Armies were localized, and the Empire was geared entirely towards self-defense. What tax there was, was raised in kind. Armies were paid with food, not money. What happened first in Rome, came later in Constantinople, but the results were the same: cut off from the richest source of revenue, the empire suffered demographic and economic collapse. The only difference is that in the East, the forms of the state continued, albeit radically different.

Of course, food isn't just revenue: it's energy. What happens to societies when the richest, lowest-cost sources of energy they've been using to subsidize the structures of power and finance collapse? It's worth pointing out that the Vandals were willing to sell the grain to Rome -- they just weren't willing to give it away as Rome had expected for so long. All that occurred, in modern terms, was that Rome would have to pay the real, unsubsidized cost for the energy it needed.

Oil is the obvious thing to compare to food here, but another good one would be food: Americans eat massively subsidized, protected food that is physically dependent on increasingly-precious oil and increasingly-precarious federal finances. And even with all this support, America suffers with some of the highest levels of working poor in the developed world. While on average Americans could afford to pay more for food, the reality is that the continuing inflation in food prices is making malnutrition a real mass concern. Both of the struts that support the American food supply are imperiled, and America could really use a Belisarius of some kind to help keep its system in check.

The problem is that not every society is fortunate enough to have a Belisarius when they need one.

Called it

Scene: My father and I, at dinner. His Blackberry vibrates.

DAD: Huh. Obama's gonna propose a 3-year spending freeze.

Me: Meaning, freezing everything except the military.

Dad: *Skeptical glance*

Me: What else will get through the Senate?

Later, at home:

On a conference call last night, the administration announced that its upcoming budget would freeze non-security discretionary spending between 2011 and 2013. That's like freezing non-defense discretionary spending, but it also exempts the Department of Homeland Security and the Veteran's Administration from the cuts.

So it's actually even worse than I thought -- the Generals and drug cops still get every demand met, while everyone from teachers to astronauts has to do without.

Craptacular. I feel oddly prescient for doing without the privilege of voting for Obama tonight.

Saturday afternoon rant

Dear Golden Globes judges: Seriously? Avatar? Best film?

Not only was Avatar not the best film of the year. (Of the nominees I've seen, I'd say Up in the Air was easily better than Avatar.) Not only was it not the best CGI film of the year. (That would be Up.) It wasn't even the best film about oppressive corporations involved in extraterrestrial mining. (That would be Moon.)

Just a bag of fail on the part of the Golden Globes people -- something that the Oscars are all too likely to repeat.

The thing about easy confidence is that, well, it's easy

I swear I don't just react to Matthew Yglesias for my blog ideas, but this sat poorly with me:

...the point is that it would be really bizarre for the United States to enter a sustained period of decline. It’s not just that “people have said this before and it didn’t happen” it’s that nothing like that has ever happened. To think about it another way, it’s true that America’s infrastructure is crumbling, but in 1946 Germany’s entire infrastructure had been pulverized by explosives and a huge proportion of its surviving machinery literally picked up and relocated to the Soviet Union. But they just built new stuff. And dysfunctional though our politics may be, they built new stuff and saw rising living standards even in East Germany and I’m fairly confident we can maintain a “better than the GDR” standard of governance.

Now, we know that Matthew Yglesias travelled to Russia in the late 1990s. The question I have is, did he open his eyes much while he was there?

By 1999, the Russian economy had contracted by almost 50% in two years, territory under Moscow's control was 25% less than it had been a decade earlier, and the state was struggling to maintain even basic powers of taxation, with renewed secession movements all over the place. And what's really shocking is how little of that was predictable even a decade before those changes began. Even the mid-1980s saw few serious observers thinking that the USSR would collapse. As an instructor of mine (who had worked in one of Canada's intelligence services) once said: "People ask me how we were all surprised by the collapse of the USSR. Well, it surprised the fuck out of them, so I'm not sure I was supposed to see it coming!"

The point is that a spell of bad governance can, in fact, unravel a state in an incredibly short time. And people living through it will tell you, if you're willing to listen, how surprised they were at how quickly it happened.[1]

Now, there's the rejoinder that Russia has since enjoyed some decent growth and a return of relative stability, so maybe Yglesias is right -- though even without total state dissolution, I think post-Soviet Russia could be seen as a collapse scenario.

But Russia, and Yglesias' example of Germany, both recovered in the context of a global economic system that was growing, and where it was possible for a country to export its way to growth. The collapse of the US, if it comes, will necessarily come together with the collapse of the American-led global system. And any hypothetical US collapse would almost certainly be in the context of a global economy that was shrinking, or a system that had become unimaginably violent. To put it another way: Germany was rescued by the Marshall Plan [2] and Russia was rescued by rising oil and gas prices (c/o China). If the wheels come off the American economy, who would have both the resources and the inclination to rescue the US?

(crickets)

Ah, that's what I thought.

Last and least, I take issue with the argument that there's a bright line dividing modern and pre-modern economies when it comes to how quickly they can come apart. Humans are humans, and still need food, shelter, security, and all it really takes is for more and more people to be unable to secure those things through usual channels before they start to try to secure them other ways. Or, more succinctly: in 100 years, The Wire will be watched as a literary example of state failure.

[1] I don't know about you, but I would argue strongly that America has since the end of the Cold War had more years of bad governance than good.

[2] This is kind of what irks me the most about Yglesias' post -- if you read Marshall's speech announcing the plan for reconstruction, it's clear that the German economy didn't simply recover after the war -- it was in the process of falling further apart after the war ended, only to be reassembled by the Allies. Ditto for many other European countries. To say that "rich countries never collapse, even in the case of ruinous war" is to basically argue that the Marshall Plan was redundant or unnecessary. I don't think Yglesias believes that, but this is what you get when you make pronouncements without thinking them through.

Quick hits

• I have no particular fondness for her, but in an odd way I'm happy to see Ambrose back in a high-level cabinet post.  More than any other minister I can think of, she didn't deserve to be demoted.  I believe in Ministerial responsibility as much as any fan of Westminster, but for an Environment minister to clean out the Augean mess this government has made out of that file is asking a lot.  The Environment Minister of the Government of Canada will start effectively managing environmental problems after there's a change in governing party -- or at least a different Prime Minister -- and not before.
• The fate of health care reform in the United States Congress is a nice test case for the ultimate cynics like me: a clear, unambiguous problem that can be solved at negative cost, and yet is now in jeopardy because the governing party has gone from 60 seats to 59.  The problem, as always, is that regardless of the party labels the real majority in the Senate is, and will continue to be, for the status quo.
• Speaking of preserving privilege, Simon Johnston has an interesting contrast between what the US forced developing countries to go through during the Asian Crisis of 1997 and what the US has done in the Crisis of 2008.  Inconsistency!

Discredit

The Internet-based community that's grown up around Peak Oil has produced some really phenomenal writing, some of which I've tried to highlight at this blog.

That said, there are also some arguments that simply shouldn't be made, like arguing that America is less vulnerable to severe oil shocks because it's "monoethnic" in contrast to the deeply divided Europe. Not that Europe isn't divided, but if your understanding of the United States is that it's monoethnic, or that ethnic fault lines haven't caused numerous crises within America's politics, you really ought to put your head down on your desk and think about what you've just said.

That said, the idea of a new Byzantium, where some parts of the global system stay intact when others collapse utterly deserves some thought.

Scenes from a media meltdown

Exhibit A:

Jan. 18 (Bloomberg) -- A group of investors led by a retired Canadian senator, an editor and a media consultant plans to bid for three daily newspapers owned by Canwest Global Communications Corp.

“I believe in the future of the newspaper business,” Jerry Grafstein, the retired senator, said in an interview today. Grafstein, with Quebec editor Beryl Wajsman and consultant Raymond Heard, plan to bid with other investors for the National Post, Montreal Gazette and Ottawa Citizen.

Exhibit B:

the company itself is in transition, waiting for regulators in Washington to approve a sale of NBC Universal from General Electric to Comcast, the nation’s largest cable operator. By the time G.E. finally decided to wash its hands of NBC late last year, the network ranked low on the list of those parts of the company most valuable to Comcast, which will swallow the network mainly so it can acquire the company’s money-making cable channels, like USA, Bravo, Syfy.

So Izzy Asper's dream of balancing Canada's media hegemony away from the Ontario-Quebec core is basically dead, as investors carve Canwest in to its most lucrative parts. Meanwhile, NBC -- the company that defined successful broadcasting for most of my life -- is being bought by a cable company (itself unthinkable even five years ago) so that Comcast can get at the real moneymaker: niche programming for nerds and latte-sipping aesthetes.

So, a question for consideration: how soon will it be before NBC shuts off its over-the-air transmitters and becomes cable-and-satellite only? Even now, actual broadcasting is maintained largely because it gives networks a number of regulatory guarantees, namely that cable companies are required to carry their signal in its local market. This kind of privilege becomes irrelevant when cable providers own the networks themselves, presumably.

The Canadian experience of Bell owning CTV was relatively brief, so we never got an answer to this question. Assuming the NBC-Comcast sale goes better, we'll see.

"Guided by our values..."

We invoke the name of Jesus Christ to blow away the heathens:

Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.

The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.

U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious "Crusade" in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents.

Frankly, I'm less concerned about the "crusade"-iness of all this than just the plain ickiness of tying Jesus to assault rifle parts. It's as if these people don't even read the Bible, as they quote directly from it.

Clearly, this is sustainable

Americans have stopped getting fatter!  Huzzah!


...because they've literally reached the point where their bodies cannot support extra weight.  Fortunately for us all, this point is well short of the threshold for imploding on themselves and creating a black hole that would destroy all creation.

Blu-ray: still not replacing DVD

From the WSJ, last month:

The studios resolved their next-generation DVD format war almost two years ago. So far, though, the take from Blu-ray has been underwhelming. The high-definition home-video format, now four years old, will produce just $1.3 billion in revenue to studios this year, says Tom Adams, president of Adams Media Research. That’s about 14 percent of anticipated sales of regular DVDs this year, and half what the older format produced in its fourth year, in 2000.

I continue to believe that the adoption of Bluray is going to be extremely disappointing to companies like Sony, who bet a lot of money on convincing consumers to replace their whole DVD libraries with new BR discs. Except, of course, that this kind of thing almost never happens. (Except with the Beatles.) What drove DVD sales was that a combination of aspects that made DVDs a more useful, desirable product that consumers wanted to build new libraries.

I had a small collection of VHS tapes. I have a collection of DVDs that can't possibly be healthy for me. I would never have realistically built as large a collection of VHS tapes, but DVDs made it much easier.

Then there's this:

...shoppers are also flocking to models that cost a bit more, . . . for their ability to stream content from the Internet, including movies, television shows and music from services like Netflix Inc., Google Inc.’s YouTube and Pandora Media Inc.

So people are finally starting to buy BR players (still not enough, though!) but the ones they're buying are specifically the ones that are also compatible with the next video delivery system, the Internet.

Ouch.

That's a shame

Boy, NBC really shit the bed with this whole Leno/Conan thing.

Consider: a struggling (dying, even) industrial titan tries to hold on to market share by riding a legacy asset all the way to the bottom, instead of changing things up and possibly succeeding in a new way. Remember, Leno's new show was supposed to be "DVR-proof", in the same way that new CDs and DVDs are always supposed to be "Internet-proof".

It's never asked, when stupid executives say these stupid things, why exactly investors should throw money at companies determined to make their content phobic to some of the most rapidly-adopted consumer technologies in history.

Now, if you wanna be really depressed, consider that every other powerful institution in the universe is run by people of precisely this average level of intelligence.

Spot the error

Livio Di Matteo in last week's Toronto Star:

The patterns of economic history may be about to repeat themselves in Ontario's north providing an economic boost for the entire province. Ontario's north is still a vast storehouse of forest and mineral wealth, and continued growth in the economies of China, India and Brazil will eventually generate an upturn in resource prices, which will spark a boom in resource commodities.

In the James Bay Lowlands, in Ontario's so-called "Ring of Fire," there are more than 100 mining companies with holdings. The entire area north of 50 is an untapped region of forest, mineral and hydroelectric power wealth whose development will require the building of roads, communications infrastructure and power transmission lines. The export of the resources will rejuvenate Ontario's transportation system, including the ports of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway.

Well, I'd quibble about the utility of the St. Lawrence Seaway (seems more likely that meeting commodity demand in Asia would, I dunno, head to the Pacific coast) but fine, you've intrigued me.

Then there's this:

Ontario's government recognizes that the north's economy is poised to undergo dramatic changes in the near future and to that effect has commissioned a Northern Growth Plan. However, the plan is not a panacea because governments cannot ultimately plan economic growth, which is largely the outcome of market forces, though they can help facilitate and accommodate it.

But you just said

The entire area north of 50 is an untapped region of forest, mineral and hydroelectric power wealth whose development will require the building of roads, communications infrastructure and power transmission lines.

At least two of those three are only built by the Government of Ontario, at the scale we're talking about here. The choice to build publicly-funded roads and transmission lines is, ahem, economic planning whether we call it that or not. And if you think that private industry is able or willing to build that kind of infrastructure in this province on its own, you're clearly insane. If the examples of the 407 or Bruce Power are anything to go by, private business in this province likes to wait until the people of Ontario have paid to build assets, and then snap them up during the most convenient recession for pennies on the dollar, only to sell services back to Ontarians for extortionate prices.

There's a liberalism of the mind at work here, where we have to vociferously insist that we're not talking about industrial policy even when we're clearly proposing industrial policy. It boggles my mind.

I should say that, gratuitous ideological signalling aside, I actually think Di Matteo's argument is relatively sound. Certainly, building economic opportunity outside of the south in this Province makes a lot of sense, if only to try and take pressure off the increasingly-congested and dysfunctional GTA.

What, exactly, is the newspaper for?

An object lesson in media dysfunction for the weekend:

1) Rex Murphy promotes scientifically illiterate talking points, as part of his ongoing efforts to make the Canadian audience stupider.

2) The publisher of the Globe and Mail responds -- to his employee undermining the public purpose of the institution he works for -- with the mildest imaginable reprimand: Rex Murphy could keep his high-profile column in one of Canada's highest-profile newspapers, but would move from Saturday to Monday. [1]

3) Rex Murphy throws a hissy fit, takes his ball and goes home.

4) Home, in this case, being the National Post, for whom no climate denialism can be too illiterate or hysterical.

So who looks worse in this whole exchange: Murphy, for abdicating even the fig leaf of being an honest participant in the public sphere; The Globe, for accommodating Murphy and attempting to go along with his crap for too long; or the Post, for once again having open arms for flat-earthers?

My vote is Murphy, but YMMV. Nevertheless, this is a good time to raise the question of why newspapers think technological fixes (paywalls! e-readers! barcodes!) will save them when their problems are farces like this: a newspaper exists, nominally, to be a place for honest debate and dissemination of facts. Murphy was lying [2], on TV and in his newspaper column. But he couldn't be fired. No, that wouldn't do. So instead he was going to be moved to a marginally less prominent position. Instead, a different newspaper will give him a prized position for him to spread more lies.

I'm an enormous consumer of news. But why, in 2010, would I bother paying for either of these newspapers?

[1] It's possible to imagine milder reactions, but I daresay anything milder than this couldn't possibly be called a "reprimand" in the usual sense of the word.

[2] Spare me the hair-splitting over whether he knew he was wrong, etc. Murphy either knew he was lying or didn't care to find an honest answer.

I see nothing that troubles me in that example

Jim Fallows of the Atlantic has a nice long piece about people, ahem, like me who worry too much about the decline of American power. Fallows is of course correct that this is an old song, and the verses don't even change that much. (Hey kids, remember Japan?) But he and I agree that while America could be saved by the things that make it great, it is doomed by its politics.

Fallows uses this line at one point to provide some context:

Nearly 400 years of overstated warnings do not mean that today’s Jeremiahs will be proved wrong. And of course any discussion of American problems in any era must include the disclaimer: the Civil War was worse.

Ah. Um. Yes, that sure puts me at ease. The fact that American politics has already collapsed once, in a fashion so complete and violent that it was the most deadly human conflict in history until 1914, sure proves the pessimists wrong. This system is clearly up to the challenges of the 21st century, despite the fact that it really wasn't up to the challenges of the 19th.

With optimists like this, I should hang up my laptop.

States can have Alzheimers, apparently

Jared Diamond's book Collapse is subtitled "How societies choose to fail or succeed", but if you actually read the book, the argument is that societies fail by avoiding tough choices and not making necessary changes. So, it's not that the Greenland Norse woke up one morning and said "Gee, I think I'll starve to death", but rather (Diamond argues) he woke up and refused to recognize that the climate in Greenland was changing for the worse, and that major lifestyle changes (becoming more like the Inuit) would be necessary to persevere.

The larger argument, for modern society, is that building state capacity to deal with social problems is not only about proposing and adopting smart policies. It is an inherently politicized process, and one that requires we challenge entrenched interests and abandon previously-held beliefs that are crippling our ability to react today.

In that vein, I suggest you read Kevin Drum's piece in Mother Jones about the finance lobby's successful efforts to not only avoid any accountability for the smoking ruin they made through 2008, but actually increase their dangerous activities.

Unlike most industries, which everyone recognizes are merely lobbying in their own self-interest, the finance industry successfully convinced everyone that deregulating finance was not only safe, but self-evidently good for the entire economy, Wall Street and Main Street alike. It's what Simon Johnson, an MIT economics professor and former chief economist for the IMF, calls "intellectual capture." Considering what's happened over the past couple of years, we might better call it Stockholm syndrome.

Like all the other products of the industry's three-decade lobbying spree, the change to the net capital rule ended up in disaster when the overleveraged financial system nearly collapsed on itself. By October 2008, even former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, one of the country's biggest cheerleaders for self-regulation, was admitting the obvious: There was a "flaw" in the free-market worldview. "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity, myself especially, are in a state of shocked disbelief," he said in testimony before the House oversight committee.

If the case against self-regulation was strong then, it's stronger now. Far from being chastened by last year's meltdown, banks are back to their old tricks. The sliced-and-diced mortgage securities that caused so much trouble during the credit bubble are being re-sliced and -diced via something called a RE-REMIC (resecuritization of real estate mortgage investment conduit)—and business is booming. At Goldman Sachs, leverage in the first half of 2009 was at its highest level in its history. Even more astonishingly, the Wall Street Journal estimates that overall pay on Wall Street will rise to record levels in 2009, higher than at the height of the bubble. It's as if the global collapse that nearly destroyed them has been completely forgotten.

Meanwhile, Daniel Davies gives us a perfect quote to explain at least one aspect of the North American liberal Stockholm Syndrome:

the production of more or less mendacious intellectual smokescreens for policies which favour the interests of rich and powerful men isn’t a sort of industrial pollution from the modern economics profession – it’s the product.

The purpose of that quote is to lead us to an article by James Galbraith, writing about the economists who correctly predicted the crisis we are still living in, and how they did it. One trick seems to be not having any particular theory. But what struck me in the article was this particular line:

In the present crisis, the vapor trails of fraud and corruption are everywhere: from the terms of the original mortgages, to the appraisals of the houses on which they were based, to the ratings of the securities issued against those mortgages, to gross negligence of the regulators, to the notion that the risks could be laid off by credit default swaps, a substitute for insurance that lacked the critical ingredient of a traditional insurance policy, namely loss reserves. None of this was foreseen by mainstream economists, who generally find crime a topic beneath their dignity. In unraveling all this now, it is worth remembering that the resolution of the savings and loan scandal saw over a thousand industry insiders convicted and imprisoned. Plainly, the intersection of economics and criminology remains a vital field for research going forward.

A thousand bankers in jail? It reads like something from another age -- like Spartacus' defeated soldiers crucified on the road to Rome. The idea that we might actually punish the people responsible for our current predicament is so totally foreign to us that it might as well be ancient history.

Every time the continued power and influence of the United States is raised in discussion, there's an easy, complacent dismissal of the idea that the US could possibly collapse in any meaningful way. But America has lost, and continues to lose, the capacity to deal with difficult problems. Not because institutions have been disbanded, or because any of the absolute measures of power have declined: America has, if anything, many more jail cells in 2010 that could theoretically hold bankers. It's just that nobody of any consequence thinks that there's a snowflake's chance in hell of that ever happening. This, despite the fact that the crisis the bankers brought on has literally erased the last decade of economic growth in America -- while it might be nice for us all to be a decade younger, instead we've all become a decade poorer.

People like myself hoped that Barack Obama's election would herald an end to the age of self-loathing government -- that the Democrats, with both houses of Congress and the Presidency, would be able to actually reverse the mental deterioration of American state capacity. Indeed, Obama's acceptance speech at the 2008 DNC held this critical passage:

Tonight, I say to the American people, to Democrats and Republicans and Independents across this great land - enough! This moment - this election - is our chance to keep, in the 21st century, the American promise alive. Because next week, in Minnesota, the same party that brought you two terms of George Bush and Dick Cheney will ask this country for a third. And we are here because we love this country too much to let the next four years look like the last eight. On November 4th, we must stand up and say: "Eight is enough."...

For over two decades, [McCain]'s subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy - give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is - you're on your own. Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps - even if you don't have boots. You're on your own...

Ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves - protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.

Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. It should ensure opportunity not just for those with the most money and influence, but for every American who's willing to work.

That's the promise of America - the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper.

In August of 2008, Barack Obama's followers filled an arena to hear him speak, and heard those words, and believed them. But in January 2010, it feels like a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

New Year Roundup

--Spent the last 2 days (yes, two days) clearing out the hard drive on my desktop -- and freed over 100 gigabytes in the process. Intriguingly, about 3.5 gigs of that was stuff I'd accumulated during my half-dozen years at a pair of Universities. Two gigs of PDFs and other associated text files alone, another gig or so of audio files.

--Winter finally seems to have arrived here in TO, so Vicki and I spent the morning watching the last few episodes of Season One of The Wire -- and holy hell is it as good as everyone says. Friends are lending us season two tomorrow, so blogging might equal no.

--Voyager probes: Best. Spacecraft. Ever. Those things are old enough to have kids in high school, and they're still telling us new things about the universe.

--Neat find, via David Pogue (via my dad): Readability. Really, really useful especially if you find yourself reading long blocks of text off the computer screen.

The year we make contact

10 years ago, I was a fan of Michael Ignatieff's.

True story.

Happy New Year everyone, and let's all hope the next decade is better than the last one.

WOO!

Patrick Stewart — "Star Trek: The Next Generation's" Capt. Jean-Luc Picard — becomes Sir Patrick in Queen Elizabeth II's New Year honors list, which also includes a knighthood for theater and film director Nicholas Hytner.

This calls for a song!

ET stay home

An interesting take on the Fermi Paradox -- maybe the aliens aren't obvious because they're growing much, much slower than we assume:

Which, finally, leads me to my Sort-Of-Best-Unheralded-Scientific-Paper of 2009. It's called THE SUSTAINABILITY SOLUTION TO THE FERMI PARADOX. Its authors, J. Haqq-Misra & S. Baum, have been quite creative in merging SETI with our new environmental concerns.

Their answer to the Fermi Dilemma is simple. Civilizations, even extraterrestrial ones, can't grow without limits. Instead of using the question the Fermi Paradox raises to infer that we are the only intelligent species in the galaxy, Haqq-Misra & Baum use it to infer that these civilizations have learned a lesson which we are just starting to grasp. You have to pace yourself. You have to live within your means. Exponential growth is not likely to be sustainable.

You can read the whole article here, and I'd recommend it for those with some time to kill.

I'd like to point out one part of the article that I'm not sure is actually well-grounded:

However, a closer look at human civilization suggests two problems with this assumption. First, where human populations are exponentially expansive, they often—perhaps always—do so unsustainably, i.e. in a way that leads to an eventual end to the exponential expansion. Second, not all human populations are exponentially expansive, such as the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert [5]. These slower-growth human populations are without question intelligent. Indeed, global human population growth is currently slowing, and humanity as a whole may be transitioning towards a slower-growth, sustainable development pattern. A slower-growth humanity would even remain capable of space colonization.

Of course, projections of human populations peaking sometime between 2050-2075 relies on a number of assumptions coming true: a general move towards greater wealth among the world's poor, the spread of education for women, the spread of basic sanitation, etc. But the demographic transition that wealthy societies have gone through isn't an iron law by any means, and I'd draw your attention to the increasing efforts by western countries to boost the incumbent birthrate, e.g. in France most successfully.

I yammer about the dangers of explaining everything and everyone through the lens of economics, but you could crudely explain the demographic transition by noting that, as a society westernizes, children go from being an asset to being a liability -- they go from being a source of income to being a substantial expense. This, in combination with the right of women to choose, naturally reduces the birth rate. (We can see also that, while this isn't exactly romantic, it is verified by the most successful remedy to date: paying women to have more kids.)

The question for me in relation to this article is whether the costs associated with child-rearing would naturally be continued in a spacefaring civilization. I tend to assume they wouldn't, especially if you assume a large population in O'neill colonies in the asteroid belt or Lagrange points throughout the solar system. I think any extrapolation of the trends we're seeing technologically today would reasonably lead you to conclude that if (BIG IF) we get past the immediate problems of ecological, material, and energetic overshoot -- and having a self-sustaining spacefaring society would imply we have -- there's a lot of reason to think that having kids will become cheaper, not more expensive.

A few assumptions, before we continue: Humans survive the next century without a civilization-level collapse, and technology continues to progress in ways that we understand (no singularity.) Instead, we see a gradual decline in the costs of access to orbit, a continuing increase in the capacity of manufacturing, and continuing decline in the costs of information and electronics. Throw in some mundane AIs (software that can understand basic human language and logic, but not intelligent enough to be a threat) with some basic domestic robots, and I think you quickly have a situation in which most of the early, susbtantial costs of child-rearing have shrunk dramatically.

Health care: for the early years, providing basic sanitation and ample food really does most of the work. (Dear parents: yes, your doctor is valuable. No, don't stop going -- and please vaccinate. My point is only that rapid population growth is possible without these things.) Moreover, we're increasingly coming to the conclusion in parts of the west that the vast majority of primary medicine can be done in the near-absence of MDs. Ontario has a nurse practitioner program that is showing a lot of success at much lower costs than the apparently-chimerical goal of guaranteeing a family MD for everyone. There's no reason to suspect that, as far as basic health care is concerned, even isolated space colonies will lack for decent health results.

Education: here, combine two trends -- the move towards open-source software and documents with increasingly intelligent computing and cheap electronics, and I think you can easily imagine some kind of cheap electronic tutor capable of handling the basics of actual education. Human presence will be limited to crowd control, if we insist on keeping kids in dedicated buildings for the purposes of education, but there are good arguments for not doing so.

Material well-being: There's no real breakthrough necessary here -- simply the abundance of energy and materials in the inner solar system, sufficient to sustain a population of several trillion at least. This number is much larger if you assume technologies like the ability to turn raw carbon in to diamond, allowing a much larger number of super-massive space colonies. In short, there's plenty of room for growth.

Anyway, the point of all this is to say that there's no guarantee that a spacefaring society would continue the demographic transition that western countries have, and I think a few good reasons for believing the reverse. And none of this identifies cultural factors: a continued concern of being outbred by brown people (for example) or the natural frontier mentality of manifest destiny, the need to fill the empty corners of our universe with more people.

It's a relatively small quibble to an excellent article, and I really enjoyed it -- especially the repeated point that slow-growth societies, though not "modern" to our eyes, are of course quite intelligent. One could further note that for the vast majority of human history we have been "slow-growth" societies, with the last few centuries being the real aberration. If human society does survive the next century, it's quite likely that exponential growth will be looked back upon as a mental disease.

(Thanks to Liam, via email, for the link.)

About a zillion to one

It's a difficult argument over which is actually the worst, but if you wanted to make a list of bad policies currently being pursued with vigor at a national level in the United States, I think an uncontroversial top three would be:

1) For sheer daily cruelty, the prohibition of marijuana.

2) For long-term harm to our general survival, the impotent response to climate change.

3) For absolute face-palming stupidity, abstinence-only education.

These are by no means exclusive -- and arguably I'm showing my gender bias by not including the restrictions on women's rights to choose in the top three. What all three have in common is that there's basically no respectable evidence that the alleged benefits of the current approach even remotely approach the costs.

Here's my question, though: it would be bad enough if a country were busily pursuing just one of these policies. What kind of odds would you give a country that was busily pursuing all three?

Merry Christmas, everyone

Me, several hours ago at the Future Shop at Yonge and Dundas: I'm so lucky you're still open. When do you close? (This is the first question I ask a staffer when I enter a retailer's premises after sundown.)

Staffer: I don't know. We were supposed to close three hours ago.

Me: Thats... terrible.

Yes, it's that time of year when life is a living hell for the people who exist to make sure we're all tucked nicely in to our toys and iPods come Christmas morning. Spare a thought for the poor bastards who found themselves working unexpected overtime because head office decided there were a few more nickels to squeeze out of the general population.

Falalalala, lalalala.