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

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…

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

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.

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.

: 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.

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…

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

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.

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

Mail 768 Sunday, March 24, 2013

I have a huge backlog of interesting mail. I will try to group it into subjects and clean it up this week. Except that it is tax season..

In today’s View https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=13050 we discuss fracking and natural gas flareoff.

flare off

Dr. Pournelle,

The flare off in Williston is similar to burned off gasses at almost every gas or oil well, and common to refineries, as well. They’re all over Texas, and here in West Virginia.

The oil and gas exploration was done in North Dakota and Eastern Montana beginning over 30 years ago — those farmers were getting rich selling their mineral rights in the late 70’s and early 80’s (while I was fooling around with Minuteman missiles in usually somewhat drier holes). The coal gassification and carbon sequestration that we corresponded a couple years ago was also begun at that same time. The lack of a pipeline in North Dakota is at least one reason partly given as justification for the road improvements that you were once critical of in your blog.

Reflecting, I seem to have followed the oil and gas industry around the country for 30 or 40 years without being directly involved with it. It has always my neighbors who were in it, even during my short stay between Lompoc and Santa Maria. Always the bridesmaid…

According to people I’ve spoken to, the overpressure light gas product that is burned off during the production and refining is too volatile to capture easily, and too dangerous to vent without combustion. It isn’t the commercial product that is wasted. I’ve always thought that a small steam generator could produce electricity to partly supply the sites intermittently, but there’s been none developed cheaply enough for common use.

-d

North Dakota lights

One of your readers says that the lights seen in North Dakota by satellite are from flaring. I would think that a well flare, which is essentially just a torch, would not produce enough light to be seen from space. Active well sites, however, look like small cities when the rig is lit for night drilling.

Best regards,

M Walters

There certainly is a lot of brightness across a one hundred mile stretch there in North Dakota. The important thing to note is that we have the technology and the resources to get out of this economic depression if we really want to; the fact that this effort is stalled says a lot about the state of the republic. The Framers would have left such matters to the states, and not have the federal government interfere so much. Perhaps we will rediscover some of the lost arts we once had.

In Spring of 1989 Roberta and I visited the Soviet Union for the first time. There had been a period in my career when I was forbidden from visiting the USSR, and another period when I would not have dared to, but we went with a party that included a number of others previously forbidden from going to Moscow, as well as political and journalist dignitaries, and I wasn’t worried; and indeed it was a pleasant excursion and quite enlightening. I was even honored with a formal dinner by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Mr. Gorbachev was in power in the USSR, and he was desperately trying to thaw out the Cold Was and convert the USSR into a liberal socialist state similar to other European nations.

Many wished him well, including both me and President Reagan; indeed it had been the intention of the SDI policy to bring something like that about. The key to ending the Cold War was to allow the USSR to stand down from its mission to liberate the world in the name of communism, release the captive nations, and reduce its enormous inventory of nuclear weapons and delivery systems by running up the price of a big nuclear establishment. Mr. Reagan offered the olive branch of removing the medium range missiles from Europe and a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty at the same time that the US began serious funding of the Strategic Defense Initiative he proposed in his “Star Wars” speech. SDI was strongly advocated by the committee I chaired to prepare the space policy papers for the incoming Reagan administration transition team. But that’s another story. The point I am approaching was that as late as Spring of 1989 none of us thought that the Berlin Wall would fall by November of that year, and that the Soviet Union itself would come apart, freeing the captive nations of Europe not long after.

The Foreign Policy Research Institute often has good papers on both history and policy.

FOREIGN POLICY RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Dear Readers,

Taking note that on Sunday, April 7, Ignat Solzhenitsyn will conduct the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia in a concert commemorating the Fall of the Berlin Wall, we asked FPRI’s Ron Granieri, a historian of modern Germany, to reflect on the fall of the wall and German reunification. What he has produced — The Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Power of Individuals, and the Unpredictability of History <http://www.fpri.org/articles/2013/03/fall-berlin-wall-power-individuals-and-unpredictability-history> — is both illuminating and moving.

While this history is far from complete, it will remind older readers of things best not forgotten, and many readers may encounter much they were never taught in school. The fall of the Wall was sudden, and not anticipated by many. By 1989 Stefan Possony, who was one of the originators of SDI and one of the strategists of the protracted conflict had been disabled by a stroke. Whether he anticipated the fall of the wall is hard to tell: those of us who visited him including my son who was his godson were certain that much of the old brilliance was still in there somewhere, but the frustrations of trying to communicate often reduced him to tears. I am thankful that he lived to see the Wall come down, and the USSR dissolved. If he saw it coming he was the only one who did.

In June 1989, SPD Minister President of Lower Saxony Gerhard Schröder famously remarked: “After forty years of the Federal Republic we should not lie to a new generation in Germany about the chances of reunification. There are none.” In late July, Joschka Fischer of the Greens, future Foreign Minister, went one better, dismissing the demand for reunification as “a dangerous illusion” and called for removing the call for reunification from the preamble of West Germany’s Basic Law. Even later that fall, Fischer said “Forget about reunification; we should shut up about that for the next twenty years.”

Three months later the Wall came down, and the USSR was doomed.

Previously we discussed minimum wages. I have chosen some representative views:

minimum wage raise and consequences

I wonder about the " living wage " thing as has happened in San Francisco and elsewhere where now the minimum wage is over $ 10.00 an hour.

Of course, businesses will raise their prices to compensate for the raise in wages and the corresponding costs for paying for contributions by the employer to unemployment, social security and the like.

I do wonder why no one ever seems to mention what I think would be an obvious result of a $ 22.00 minimum wage,

Wouldn’t it cause food, energy and other costs to go way up thus raising inflation and therefore making the purchasing power of those suddenly " richer " employees even less ?

Heinlein is still right.

TANSTAAFL.

I do know that even in San Francisco which has a kind of rent control, rents continue to go up.

A studio apartment in the city’s Tenderloin ( not the best area to live in for sure ) that rented for $ 200 a month up to 1980 now rents for $ 1200 a month.

If you made $ 22.00 an hour you’d have to work 54 hours just to pay the rent.

If you make the " living wage " you’d have to work about 108 hours to pay the rent.

And that’s before deductions.

This is something the OWS types never think about.

I don’t know about the rest of the country, but here in the SF Bay Area it’s one of the most expensive places to live.

And with people having their hours cut below 30 hours a week to avoid the onerous provisions of Obamacare, it isn’t going to be any easier for lower paid workers.

george senda

Well, of course we can’t let just anyone live in the elite areas like San Francisco and Fairfax, can we? Although there must be someone to hew the wood and draw the water.

Jerry,

Note the chart here: http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/asha-bangalore/major-economic-reports-mixed-message-with-unfavorable-tone

Note the month in which the unemployment rate inflected: July 2007. The month of the second of three increases in the minimum wage enacted by the Pelosi-Reid Congress in 2006 and signed by President George W. Bush’s.

QED, and it’s only Bush’s fault because he didn’t veto their mad scheme to increase the minimum wage 41%in 24 months, which he should have. The economy absorbed the first raise (July 2006 from $5.15 to $5.85, a 14% increase) with fairly minimal effect on employment, but the second increment (July 2007, to $6.55) combined with the then-bursting housing bubble, were the (synchronized,synergistic, and with George Soros funding the Democrat Party, certainly intentional) two triggers of the current downturn. Given that unemployment remains high, another 25% increase in minimum wage (from the $7.25 reached in July 2008 to the $9.00 requested by the President) would pretty much shut the country down.

That’s a definition, not an opinion.

Jim

The following contains a short dialogue continued for some time.

More on minimum wages (possible duplicate – retrying after crash)

You covered this a bit over a year ago, and you were kind enough to print my observations on it then. (Those are at https://jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=4295, and I worked them up into an article at http://www.spectacle.org/0112/lawrence.html).

Revisiting the topic just now, you quoted Milton Friedman once saying that every economist knows that minimum wages either have no effect or create unemployment, and that this was not an observation, it was a definition. You added that that should also be self evident.

It turns out that Milton Friedman was oversimplifying. There are exceptions which are even covered in introductory economics texts, so that that self evident thing isn’t quite true after all. By chance, I recently went into this in a blog exchange at http://statelymcdanielmanor.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/adventures-in-obamaland-the-sotu-2013-condensed-version, which I append below for convenience. The take away point is that there is often a small, sweet spot, in which a low, mandated minimum wage really does help – that is, it improves take home pay rates, numbers of workers, and all up production. The catch is that the common sense result cuts in very early, and politicians usually go for that instead of doing it right. Brad Delong reports that the consensus in the economics trade today is "… the EITC and the minimum wage have different weak points–too high a minimum wage will have a substantial disemployment effect, and too high an EITC does create incentives to pad your hours. A mixed strategy helps attenuate both these flaws."

I also noticed your follow on about Distributism. As far as I know, only some Distributists advocate getting it the way you describe, by forcible redistribution. Although some do, possibly because they see it as the fastest path to their omelette and aren’t much worried about the broken eggs involved, there are others. These more philosophical Distributists have it mind as a standard or reference to steer by and try to get to, but they are more willing to consider less destruction and force on the way there (my tax break approach to wage support might serve as one beginning, since it would actually reduce current burdens). For some Distributists, it might be enough just to get rid of the institutional support for present arrangements, if they think that generational change would do the rest fast enough for their tastes; you can see where the temptation for a quicker fix hits the rest of them.

By the way, distractions including a dying computer have kept me from emailing you feedback lately – I had to compose this off line, saving between crashes. Would you like me to catch up on feedback once I get a new computer, and if so would you prefer individual messages or a big compendium one?

That minimum wage blog exchange follows:-

<BLOCKQUOTE>

In this case, common sense need not be our guide at all, or our sole guide in any case. The history of such political hikes makes quite clear that they reduce, not increase jobs.

</BLOCKQUOTE>

Actually, the history is mixed, with any general pattern lost in the noise. Current best research suggests – no more than that, in my view – that a mandated minimum wage can be moderately helpful as part of a larger strategy that also includes other measures. Brad Delong recently went into it <A HREF="http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/02/yes-thoughtful-economists-think-raising-the-minimum-wage-right-now-is-a-good-idea.html">here</A>, introducing it with "I would point out that the EITC and the minimum wage have different weak points–<I>too high</I> [emphasis added] a minimum wage <I>will have a substantial disemployment effect</I> [emphasis added], and too high an EITC does create incentives to pad your hours. A mixed strategy helps attenuate both these flaws." (My own view is that the best thing, if we start from here, is the tax break approach I discuss <A HREF="http://www.spectacle.org/0112/lawrence.html">here</A>, covered in more detail in the work of mine and of Professors Phelps and Swales that it links to.)

<BLOCKQUOTE>

Minimum wage jobs are essentially for teenagers, unskilled and inexperienced children, entering the workplace for the first time.

</BLOCKQUOTE>

No, not <I>essentially</I> but <I>accidentally</I> (in the U.S.A.). That is, it is an accident of recent U.S. circumstances. Things are different elsewhere, and more relevantly to your concerns, they are becoming different in the U.S.A., and indeed have already done so to a considerable extent.

<BLOCKQUOTE>

But as you noted, I suspect we essentially agree that now is not an appropriate time to raise the minimum wage.

</BLOCKQUOTE>

We don’t agree, because my position is subtler:-

– It would probably help a <I>little</I> to raise the minimum wage a <I>little, now</I>, because of the mechanism I will outline below.

– The actual proposals are probably for too great an increase to be constructive, because that’s what politicians usually go for.

<BLOCKQUOTE>

There is, to me, no appropriate time. It’s not the government’s business.

</BLOCKQUOTE>

Sort of. That is, the government should never have been in that game in the first place, and people’s personal resource bases should never have been destroyed over the generations. That ideal world would have been rather Distributist (google it), with people working for themselves or for others for low, free market <I>top up</I> wages and getting the rest of what they needed from their own private resources (if they were working for themselves, their drawings would fold both of those in together).

But it’s not like that. In the old phrase, they break your legs and give you a crutch. That creates dependency in a poison pill way: simply stopping government support just like that would leave people helpless, with just the metaphorical broken legs. So, on the principle of you break it, you bought it, it <I>is</I> the government’s business to provide support – only, not in the present, continuing way that perpetuates the cycle of dependency the government itself created but as part of a transition that gets us out of here (the tax break system I linked to would work as the first step of such a transition). Naturally, the government would never do that if it could help it, but it still owes it, morally speaking.

Now, as promised, for how mandated minimum wages <I>really</I> work out. Murray Rothbard’s <A HREF="http://lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard315.html">view</A> is typical of the faulty common sense understanding. It’s basically all bullshit because he doesn’t know what he is talking about, apart from his description of the unions’ interests in all this. It only works out like that when the mandated minimum wage is too high relative to the effect of ordinary hiring on the employers’ cost patterns. But when – as often happens – the employer is a significant one in a local area, or operates nationwide but is a big presence everywhere, and the mandated minimum wage is comparatively low, other things happen that change the outcomes. I already mentioned that Lipsey’s <I>Positive Economics</I> explains this quite well using graphs, but as I can’t do that here I will bring it out with a pair of tables using example numbers (I hope the tables are formatted OK! please reformat them if necessary):-

<BLOCKQUOTE>

Minimum wage

Number of Wage rates Total Incremental Total Total net Marginal

employees needed wages utility ($) utility ($)value value

0 9 0 0 0

1 9 9 15 15 6 6

2 9 18 14 29 11 5

3 9 27 13 42 15 4

4 9 36 12 54 18 3

5 9 45 11 65 20 2

6 9 54 10 75 21 1

7 9 63 9 84 21 0

</BLOCKQUOTE>

With this pattern of utility that each additional employee gives to the employer, a mandated minimum wage means that the employer is best off with either 6 or 7 employees (it comes out the same).

<BLOCKQUOTE>

Varying wages

Number of Wage rates Total Incremental Total Total net Marginal

employees needed wages utility ($) utility ($)value value

0 0 0 0 0

1 1 1 15 15 14 14

2 2 4 14 29 25 11

3 3 9 13 42 33 8

4 4 16 12 54 38 5

5 5 25 11 65 40 2

6 6 36 10 75 39 -1

</BLOCKQUOTE>

With this pattern of utility that each additional employee gives to the employer, a floating wage means that the employer is best off with just 5 employees. That’s fewer than with a mandated minimum wage!

What’s going on? Well, when each additional employee is hired, the employer has to increase what he gives to all the employees he already has as well, or they would just quit and re-apply and he would have to take them (or he would have to hire yet others who knew that they could hold out for that much). So the additional cost of each additional employee is <I>not</I> that employee’s wages but that employee’s wages plus the extra that has to be paid to all the others together. That’s not much more each, but it’s quite a bit for all of them together, and that decreases the optimum staffing level – so, with these numbers, a mandated minimum wage gives <I>both</I> more employment <I>and</I> higher wages!

Now, this doesn’t just happen because I found numbers in some sweet spot (in fact, these are the first numbers I tried). What the graphs and equations would tell you, if you could find them, is that under quite ordinary conditions there’s always a sweet spot of some size just above the "free" market wage – because those quite ordinary conditions aren’t actually a free market but a market with employers dominant enough that their own hiring affects conditions more broadly.

Yours sincerely,

P.M.Lawrence

The question is whether find the sweet spot is worth the price of letting the government camel have his nose in the tent. Once you concede that the federal government ought to tinker with such matters you have changed the nature of the Union. I have no objection to leaving it to the States to find the sweet spot you think is almost inevitably there, and I agree that the negotiation isn’t always equal; the question is whether the cure is not worse than the disease.

I wish your computer a speedy recovery and I apologize for the delay in getting this up; things have been a bit hectic here. I always appreciate your comments.

The death of our United States

Dr. Pournelle,

I have a lot of time to think during my daily commute now, and this is something that I think I think.

Historians will look back and mark as the death throes of the United States of America, the era when the meaning of the word "Freedom" changed from explicitly guaranteed personal liberty to an ever expanding list of invented rights and entitlements that must be provided by the government and paid for by someone else.

Everyone thinks their personal favorite cause is a "right", which must be not only protected but enabled by the govt. Our rule of law is therefore perverted to give legitimacy to a chorus of demands for special treatment. This is not equality nor freedom, but is the manifestation of the tyranny of the majority warned against by our founding fathers.

There’s more to it of course, but that pretty much sums it up for me.

Sean

It used to be that discussion of “positive” and “negative” rights was part of elementary civis discussion. In the USSR, for example, there were no “rights” but there was a series of duties and regulations governing the actions of the militia and the prosecutors that was supposed to ensure rights; but there was nothing like “Congress shall make no law” commandments enforceable by an independent judiciary.

Now there is little such discussion in any classrooms at any level. The usual academic assumption is that government ought to Do Good, not prevent evil. “Negative” rights are of no use according to the usual civics instructions now.l

A remarkably honest article about Harry Dexter White.

<http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138847/benn-steil/red-white?page=show>

Roland Dobbins

White and those like him were part of the fuel that drove Senator McCarthy out of bounds.

Dinosaur Killer Likely To Be A Comet Not Asteroid

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21709229

In which case we can’t predict when the next one will turn up..

It is by no means certain which it was but this shifts the odds

Neil Craig

Of course we told you so…

Asteroid headed toward Earth? ‘Pray,’ NASA advises | Fox News

Jerry:

Hopefully this is a teachable moment.

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/03/20/asteroid-threat-earthly-budgets/?intcmp=features

We had a much bigger, not so near miss more recently. The improbability of so many near misses within such a short period of time suggests that God is trying to tell us something.

I believe that there is an error her regarding the size of near Earth objects that NASA has been tasked with detecting. Detecting objects 87 miles across should be easy while detecting objects 87 feet across is challenging. Objects smaller than 87 feet or ~ 25 meters across pose a significant danger.

Volume of 25 meter asteroid = 16,000 cubic meters.

Assumed density of a near Earth asteroid is 4

Mass of 25 meter asteroid ~ 60 million tons or 60 billion kilograms.

Impact energy at 40 kilometers per second = 5 eex19 Joules.

Equivalent to 11,000 Megatons yield.

It wouldn’t be Lucifer’s Hammer, but the scaling laws for nuclear weapons suggests that the probable lethal radius would be about 200 miles.

James Crawford=

And if we had twenty years?

But then I have :

faulty math in asteroid threat example

The Asteroid strike math is off by an order of 1000—math error ? double x meter^3 to Kilos?

11 mega ton strike not 11,000 Mega ton,

We’d never evolved if his math was correct.

Peter f Foley

It is still a formidable event…

Finally, maybe.

We know beyond a shred of doubt that portable electronic devices don’t interfere with aircraft electronics because the airlines are now putting iPads in the cockpit for use as aircraft manuals and so forth.

But we’ve known this for years, because aircraft aren’t falling from the sky.

People do not actually *turn off* their mobile phones, tablets, whatever. They simply blank/lock the screens of their devices. My guess is that maybe 1/10th of 1 percent of flyers actually truly turn off their electronic devices when traveling on airplanes.

So, given that aircraft aren’t constantly crashing, it’s pretty obvious that the claims of the airlines and the FAA are utterly without merit.

<http://www.technologytell.com/entertainment/14939/essay-electronics-devices-on-planes-is-the-madness-nearly-over/>

Roland Dobbins

It is getting obvious, isn’t it…

Almost in the same breath, I received an order from Ambassador Bremer’s office in Baghdad to cease the grain harvest and let the crops rot in the field.

———————

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

B

Karzai the US and the Taliban

Jerry,

Nobody ever said Karzai wasn’t crafty. By claiming an alignment between the US and the Taliban, he may be able to brand the Taliban as outside invaders and American collaborators, greatly reducing their acceptance. It isn’t about accusing the US of doing something wrong, because we are already western invaders and can’t get any lower in status. But putting the Taliban in our cultural category may be a masterful PR move. It sure won’t make us happy but it could help any non-Taliban govt quite a bit.

Sean

Actually, I hope it works.