Korea and the Easter Bunny; Global temperature; when is a cut not a cut; technology and where sf writers got it wrong; and elections and the middle class.

Mail 768 Thursday, March 28, 2013

 

Every now and then I am reminded that I covered a pile of subjects long ago and most of that remains available if a bit obscured. I recently had reason to dig about in my old Reports, and found this one which is still quite current: The Voodoo Sciences

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Things That Go Thump In The Easter Parade

Dear Jerry :

What stands four feet tall, weighs fifty pounds, and has a price on its head in North Korea?

The Easter Bunny:

http://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-rabbit-wars-if-kim-jong-il-seems.html

Russell Seitz

You just can’t help some people…

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Morale: Korean Roulette,

Jerry

Apparently the South Koreans have finally come up with a way to deter Northern aggression – threatening statues:

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htmoral/articles/20130328.aspx

An interesting notion, akin to building monuments.

Ed

Interesting. Let us hope it works. Of course the North Korean system reminds me of Kipling

It has been a while since I put up a copy of this. It’s time again:

Dane-Geld
A.D. 980-1016
By
Rudyard Kipling

It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say: –
“We invaded you last night–we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ‘em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!

It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: –
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: –

“We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!”

Actually last time I put that poem up I was remarking about another set of barbarians. They might even be interesting. https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=1355

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As if we didn’t know – Jerry,

None of this will come as a surprise to you or your readers. This is a committee hearing in the Washington state senate. It’s 111 minutes long, but worth it.

http://www.black-and-right.com/2013/03/28/the-br-thursday-movie-3/#disqus_thread

The link is to a blog and I couldn’t discover the original video. The News Tribune article has comments mostly from those critical of Dr. Easterbrook, but, predictably, little criticism of his data. Senator Ranker couldn’t seem to get his mind around the fact that Dr. Easterbrook was using "raw", original data while he was looking at "corrected" data — data that have been changed (read "falsified") and then presented to the public as genuine and valid. "Who are you going to believe — me or your lying eyes?"

A Google search on Don Easterbrook shows an abundance of links that clearly attempt to discredit him. About what you’d expect.

Richard White

Austin, Texas

Quite a bit longer than I have time to watch. Dr. Easterbrook is a highly qualified but elderly geologist who predicted in 2006 that actual global temperatures would be lower than those predicted by the IPCC. So far he is right. http://myweb.wwu.edu/dbunny/

His view is that Earth temperatures are cyclical, and we have reached a period when they will start downward again. I think that’s a good summary. My own view is that Earth temperatures are cyclical – heck we know that they have been higher and lower than at present in historical times, and far higher and lower in geological times – but we don’t really know what causes the cycles or where we are in them; we simply haven’t been keeping good records for long enough to have much confidence in our inferences.

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Re: Zuckerman’s Article

Jerry,

I’m not certain of the sources, but I saw a report on the news last week to the effect the the $85 billion sequester is not $85 billion this year, nor all at home. The report was that ~$44-45 billion hits this year and the remaining next year. Further, that out of the ~$44-45 billion, $22 billion are domestic spending. So Zuckerman’s note that sequestration is taking certain monies out of the economy, "including $85 billion this year alone" might be well off the mark.

Is foreign aid part of the US economy? Recent complaints that the US Government just released $500 million to the Palestinians (I am not sure to which entity) is certainly thought provoking.

Back to Zuckerman’s article, since when is a reduction in an increase reasonably called (closely paraphrasing) ‘taking out’? The reductions under Sequestration are not cuts, despite what most politicians tend to call them. The Administration, in managing the spending adjustments under Sequestration, is simply deciding where to spend how much more than last year. Without sequestration the increase would be larger.

The monies Zuckerman refers to as being taken out of the economy via reduced federal spending this year and over the next 10 years under sequestration are actually not even in the economy at present. The monies in question would be spent on credit. That poses problems that you have discussed at times. Paying for that spending via taxes also poses problems, as it removes the additional money from the hands of taxpayers.

Whether either one of those alternatives is better than spending less is a different question. I am concerned that the rhetoric used by politicians gives a misleading impression of what is occurring, and that is made worse by others just giving in and using the same terminology. I know that you don’t, but Zuckerman did. Whatever good points he made, we should recognize that even under Sequestration the federal government is still spending more than it did last year, and that a great deal of what it is spending is borrowed.

Regards,

George

It is easy to fall into the fallacy of believing that a cut is an actual cut, not just raising the budget less than we said we were going to do it. Many readers simply cannot believe that: that a continuing resolution actually means raises and expansions in spending. And of course “entitlements” are not only not cut, but are not subject to lowering the raising in spending levels built into them.

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: Roomba dust-bust bot bods one step closer to ROBOBUTLERS .

Jerry

It’s after March 21, so it must be The Door Into Summer. “At last week’s GPU Technology Conference in California, a team from iRobot claim to have developed the first real-time generic object recognition algorithm:”

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/26/object_recognition/

The object recognition algorithm is “based on the Deformable Part Model (DPM), which is based on the idea that objects are made of parts, and the way those parts are positioned in relation to one another is what defines a person from a chair or a car from a boat.” Easy to say, but hard to do: “Running DPM is highly compute-intensive. Each pixel requires about 100,000 floating-point operations, 10,000 reads from memory and 1,000 floating-point values stored. A VGA image consumes 10 billion floating-point ops, loads a billion floats and stores 100 million. For more context, using the LINPACK benchmark as a metric, an iPad 2 can crank out 1.65 billion floating-point ops a second, while a middling desktop i5 system can drive around 40. So while it’s compute-intensive, it’s not insurmountable.”

“Not surprisingly, the concepts and maths that are the foundation of the DPM are highly complex. But they make the DPM robust when dealing with viewing angles, different scales, cluttered fields of view, and other visual noise that would confound other algorithms. After the software is trained, which consists of showing the model about 1,000 objects in order to learn that particular class of objects, it can identify complex objects with a high rate of accuracy. As long as you don’t need to do it quickly, that is.” Lots more stuff in the link.

Robert [Heinlein] would have loved this. But I don’t think he thought it would be this hard.

Ed

Where science fiction writers get it wrong is in underestimating how hard it is to do it the first time, but also not understanding that once we have done it technology tends to make it easier and cheaper. As we pointed out in The Strategy of Technology, http://baen.com/sot/ there is a sort of Moore’s law associated with nearly every advancing technology field (although of course not based on the number of transistors you can put in a given area on a chip). Technology advances in S curves, slow growth at first, then rapid rising to what looks like exponential growth, then a slowing of the acceleration at some point. Robotics are at the lower knee and can be expected to have near exponential growth now.

It won’t always be this hard.

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British Natural Gas Shortage

Jerry:

The British have ‘driven into the ditch’ with their AGW based policies, and are running out of natural gas. The video link to a several year old talk by MP and former energy secretary Milibrand is revealing.

Even worse than ‘bad science’ is believing it and basing public policy on it. NG Shortage <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/25/uk_energy_crisis_illustrated/>

Chris C

There are none so blind as those who refuse to see. California is very much in the same hole. Apparently there is an epidemic of energy blindness in the District of Columbia as well. We’re all right, Jack. We’ve got ours…

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This came in last November after the election and got lost. I recently saw it in a vain attempt to clean up old mail.

Two years is your probable limit

Sent to me, author unknown. This may need to be "toned down" a little, but it’s the thought that counts.

An Open Letter to the Incoming Republican House Members of the 113th Congress

Dear GOP House Members and Members-Elect:

Congratulations to you all for surviving the absurd calamity of November 6th. You need to know what’s in store for you.

To put it bluntly, you have two years to politically live as the House Majority.

You are going to be demonized and destroyed by the Chicago Gangsters who run the White House and the presstitutes of the CorruptMedia. Your chances of retaining your majority in 2014 are 0%.

The question is: What are you going to do with these two years? Realize that the political outcome will be the same no matter what you do. While many of you may individually survive and be reelected in 2014, collectively your majority will be gone and you’ll all be just minority schmucks.

So if you plan to cringe, compromise, and cooperate with the gangsters just to be reelected as a minority schmuck, why not just resign now and collect your pension rather than continue a charade in order to keep your perks of power for a little while longer, and all that while you’ll have to look into the mirror every morning and see a coward?

Why not, then, see someone of courage in that mirror instead? There is a power that only you – a majority of members of the House – have that neither the Senate, the Resident nor any of his agencies, nor even the Supreme Court has. If you choose to exercise it, you will be feared and respected, instead of being Obama’s poodles.

But far more importantly, you will have done your patriotic duty to protect our country from the lethal illicit damage Obama is poised to and will inflict upon it.

The power the House Majority uniquely has is the Other Golden Rule: He who has the gold, makes the rules. Article I Section 7 of the Constitution states it very clearly and without ambiguity: "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives."

The Resident with his ill-gotten Executive Orders, no-basis Czars, multitude of agencies and departments, Harry Reid’s Senate, the Supreme Court, no part of the vast US Federal Government has the Constitutional authority to spend a dime that the House don’t give them. You all (The House), of course, know this. What is required of you now is to act on it.

The day after the Catastrophe of November 6, Harry Reid loudly proclaimed that the Federal Government will soon require the debt ceiling raised another $2.4 trillion, and that when the time comes to do so, "We’ll raise it."

<http://cnsnews.com/news/article/harry-reid-hiking-debt-limit-18794t-we-ll-raise-it>

The question to ask Mr. Reid is: "What do you mean "we, Harry (and every other Senator has no say in the matter)?

If you, the House Majority do not vote to raise the debt ceiling, it is not raised, no matter what temper tantrums Harry or the Resident have or threats they make. Pelosi either; buy her some more cover up and dismiss her to the ladies room.

Right now, as you read this, your children and grandchildren – in fact, every single American under 18 – is saddled with over $216,000 of federal debt <http://cnsnews.com/news/article/4-yrs-private-college-130468-median-priced-existing-home-173100-us-debt-american-under> they will be expected to pay off. They can’t, they won’t, and it is immoral in the extreme to expect them to. Their debt has to be defaulted upon. The way to start is to refuse to raise the debt ceiling. Oh, and by the way, speaking of debt; there has not been a budget since the usurper moved into the White House. Guess what else? It isn’t really the debt that should be the focus. Why don’t you take a look at something called the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR). This is the under the table set of books that shows where the bullion is really hidden and I would not be surprised if there is not enough ill-gotten loot in there to pay off the debt.

Just to be clear – when I say you have two years left to live politically, that’s a best case scenario. Unless you roll over and become Obama’s poodles, being a Republican Congressman may be the most dangerous job in America.

You may get death threats, so many you’ll lose count, and there may well be actual attempts on your life. Don’t forget, the Chicago gang is in town and they play very rough. The more public you are, the less they may target you. The CorruptMedia will oppo-research every hidden nook and cranny of your life to smear and expose whatever dirt they can find on you.

You must understand that America now has a government run by gangsters – by crooks, thieves, looters, and thugs who will be utterly ruthless in ruining you if you try to be in their way. Putin’s Russia, Chavez’s Venezuela, has come to America; and the Chicago gang and the cartels have come to D.C.

So if you don’t have the courage to band together and stand up to them, quit now. They can’t spend money you don’t give them. They will do whatever it takes, legal or illegal, to force you to give it to them.

If you can’t say "No" to raising the debt ceiling, if you can’t Defund Obamacare and the EPA and Obama’s steady stream of illicit Executive Orders, if you can’t refuse to appropriate money for more Food Stamps and Obama’s crony capitalist subsidies, quit now.

But if you can say "No", if you can Defund, then you will be heroes to at least half of America, the half that stands for honesty, decency, and protecting our children’s future. The numbers who view you as heros will grow annually. Make us proud or be gone. This is your chance to be heroes – or to be schmucks. Make these next two years the time you live up to the character and courage of America’s Founders.

Right now, history has chosen you to be America’s only hope to avoid her falling into destitution and tyranny. Live up to it. It will take more courage than you ever thought it possible for you to have. Reach down deep inside for the best within you. America’s future depends on it. The weight of history is on your shoulders. Stand up straight and accept the burden.

Minor edits by sender

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Middle Class Rule  Jerry,

I’ve been thinking on western-style representative democracy and why it works (when it works) for a while now. The key, I think, is that the majority of a country’s electorate be middle-class. That is to say, people who possess the goods of fortune in moderation, and who have a culture emphasizing earning those goods rather than pillaging them – people who will not consistently vote en masse for economically destructive policies.

Countries where such middle-class types are a minority, if most fortunate will end up ruled by an autocracy whose good economic management grows that middle class to a majority capable of stable rule.

South Korea comes to mind, as do Chile, Spain and Taiwan. Brazil.

Turkey still has a good chance. Iran might get back on that path if it ever shakes off the mullahs. China may well be on that path, if the Party doesn’t wreck things hanging on past its time.

The somewhat less fortunate ones end up with, via revolution, "one man one vote, once", populism, or some combination of these, an autocracy that will hobble the economy and growth of the middle class, out of some mix of incompetence and buying support from the poor majority. The examples, alas, are numerous.

(The really unlucky ones end up ruled by ideological fanatics who devastate their economies and people. Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, North Korea under its bastard hybrid offspring of Stalin and the Imperial Japanese Army occupation…)

This brings me to the "Arab Spring". The sorry results of supporting overthrow of the existing autocracies, from the above viewpoint were highly predictable – none of these countries has close to a middle class voting majority. Egypt arguably had an autocracy that wanted to support its middle class, albeit not very competently. (Egypt’s middle class minority is large and active enough that the Army may yet ally with them and re-suppress the Islamists.) Libya had an autocracy that at least imposed stability, its economic incompetence compensated for by oil revenue. (A pattern much echoed in the Arabian peninsula.)

My next stop, unfortunately, is right here at home. The US has enjoyed a solid middle-class ruling majority (albeit by means of property qualifications for voting in the early days) for its entire history.

This may now be coming to an end – the US middle class over the last century has been under enormous cultural pressure, with damage accumulating fast in recent decades. The education and common sense to avoid voting for economically destructive measures can no longer be taken for granted.

Since 2008, massive economic pressure has been added. The permanent underclass, "low-information voters" – whatever you call it, it’s growing fast. We may get one last chance when things get bad enough to reunite what’s left of our middle class against destructive policies, but absent reforms deep enough to reverse the overall trend, our long era of prosperous stability is coming to an end.

Porkypine

Aristotle told us that the only stable democracy is rule by the middle class, which is defined as those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation. It was clear to him that enormous discrepancies in wealth were a problem, in that the rich would be tempted to form an oligarchy, while a poor underclass would vote to confiscate the property of the rich.

It was that sort of stable republic that political philosophers have sought through the ages, and which the Framers hoped to establish on the continent of North America.

We still don’t know if that’s a stable force. We do know that enormous discrepancies in wealth can cause great friction. On the other hand, despoiling the rich to buy votes from the poor was the great fear of the Framers, because throughout history that has led to bad results.

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Product placement just for you

Jerry

Don’t like ads? Well, here’s product placement just for you (be sure to watch the video):

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/23/digital_advertising_futures/

No getting around it. Even the oldies are game. I won’t call it “fair game,” mind you. But somebody’s gotta pay for the content.

Ed

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