Chaos Manor View, Wednesday, February 03, 2016

“This is the most transparent administration in history.”

Barrack Obama

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.

James Burnham

I have been working on fiction all day; I was interrupted by a lack of laundry soap, and Roberta still reluctant to undertake outside expeditions, so I decided to try it: it was a beautiful day, I feel fine, and I drove my ancient SUV the few blocks to the local store. There were no incidents. I do not think I will try to drive at night, but I am now confident that I can do small routine errands.

I’m making much progress on other work; apparently I am completely recovered from my bronchitis. Roberta is recovering from pneumonia, slower that she would like, but quite well. We are approaching normality – at least as much as Chaos Manor ever approaches normality.

I have just finished a Preface to the 2016 edition of There Will Be War Volume Nine: After Armageddon.  Originally published in 1989, this edition will be released as an eBook next week.

RIP Ed Mitchell
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/astronaut-edgar-mitchell-6th-man-moon-dies-florida-n512511

Dave Kenny

When I was President of the Science Fiction Writers of America about 1973, one of my duties was to arrange the annual Nebula Awards presentation. At that time we gave a dramatic presentations Nebula, and I was able to enlist the support of the Hollywood studios for the event. They bought several tables and gave us some money to hire a name speaker; not much money, but Dr. Ed Mitchell, sixth man on the Moon, agreed to come down and present the awards as well as make a keynote speech. I don’t have a transcript; this was years before personal computers and easy copies of documents. We got him to come without a fee because he was an admirer of science fiction and thought it important.

He was also involved in ESP research, partly at Stanford; these were the days of Dr. Joseph Rhine, who had been experimenting with ESP since 1928, and Rhine Card experiments were very popular on college campuses: with tens of thousands of unsupervised experiments it is statistically certain that some improbable events would occur—after all, if the odds are 100 to 1 against something and you run the experiment 200 times—but Ed was not a naïve believer, at least when I met him; he hoped it was all true, but he was fairly rigorous in his experimental protocols.

I didn’t know him for long or all that closely, but I was impressed, and I have been rather glad that someone of that stature has been warning us that we don’t know everything. The US government spent some $10 million dollars on remote viewing research; given the value of the payoff if it had been successful, I cannot quarrel with that appropriation, even if the final conclusion was that they had found no useful results. Ed Mitchell was heavily into remote viewing, but the experiments he conducted were fairly rigorous in protocol, not stunts. The results, as have been all the results of that sort of experiment, were ambiguous at best and not repeatable.

I’ve had no contact with Dr. Mitchell for decades; I gather he was still interested in weird experimentation; but so far as I know he was quite rational about it. We need a few people of stature to head such to introduce rationality and some rigor in testing the limits of our knowledge; or I have always believed so. Requiescat in Pace.

Think of this as a substitute essay by me; not that I agree with everything in it, but much is self evident and draws intelligent conclusion about the strange phenomena we are experiencing.

Erosion Of The US Middle Class

By Porkypine

 

Jerry,

In the recent Iowa caucuses, of the people motivated enough to show up, 50% of Democrats (Sanders) and 66% of Republicans (Cruz, Trump, Carson, Paul) voted for candidates who are explicitly running against the current Establishment. Moreover, in recent Rasmussen polls, 67% of US likely voters are somewhat-to-very angry about Federal government policies, and 81% think the Feds are somewhat-to-very corrupt.

I recently listened to a Bernie Sanders stump speech and found myself surprised. I agree with him on the problem: The US middle class has been under prolonged attack, is already seriously damaged, and it’s only getting worse. (Mind, the moment Sanders started proposing solutions, I was reminded of H.L.Mencken: “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong”.)

Given the modest but real chance that an anti-establishment candidate who actually means it will wake up in the White House a year from now, a quick review of the US middle class’s actual problems and some practical solutions is in order. Much of this will be rehashing of to-us obvious points, some of it perhaps not. I don’t have time to make this definitive anyway – I’ll be happy if it merely starts wiser heads thinking more thoroughly.

First, though, let me digress briefly to WHY fixing this erosion of the US middle class is vital. Recently, I wrote you about the role of a healthy middle-class majority in making democracy a stable and practical form of government. My main thrust was Western elites’ destructive foolishness in pushing democracy in places where it would predictably lead to some flavor of one-man-one-vote-once tyranny, but in the buildup I mentioned this:

“My take is, what actually makes for the stable prosperous societies many in the West currently take WAY too much for granted is middle-class rule, not democracy per se, with ‘middle class’ defined as those who tend to plan for their next generation, not just for their next week.”

“Consider the US, where the vote was originally pretty much restricted to settled property owners, and the Founders agreed “there never was a democracy that didn’t commit suicide.” We continued to do OK as the franchise was expanded for so long as this coincided with the expansion of a reasonably informed and forethoughtful middle class. Now that we’ve spent a couple generations simultaneously destroying our educational system and insisting that anyone who draws breath (and many who don’t) should vote, things are getting a bit dicey.”

My take here is, it isn’t just overseas where our self-appointed betters in the bipartisan establishment elite are screwing up. They’ve also spent decades imposing destructive policies on us here at home. Now, finally, what’s left of the country’s real ruling class, our middle class, seems to be catching wise, and we may – may – have one last chance to fix things before we’re history.

The Problem

I think it comes down to six things: Spending, taxation, regulation, education, and expectations. The sixth thing? A horrible result of these first five (though they do damage in other ways too.) To quote that eminent natural philosopher James Carville, “it’s the economy, stupid!”

Since the housing bust, GDP annual growth has been just over 2% – half the average rate for post-WW II recoveries. Unemployment is only “low”  because so many have given up looking, and of the jobs available, far too few are full-time at wages that will actually support a minimal middle class existence.

But that’s pretty abstract. I deal with the blue-collar lower margins of our middle class a lot. A few are doing OK, most are hanging on by their fingernails, and every year a few more fall off the edge. When they do, it tends to be ugly. The “safety nets” don’t help as much as you might think, as these are designed for stable clients. People whose lives have just exploded but who aren’t yet resigned to clientude can fall a long long way and hit very hard indeed.

More patches to the safety net won’t save our republic. We must remove a lot of the accumulated progressive dreck that makes it so hard to hang on in the first place. [emphasis added by JEP]

Spending

Federal revenues as a fraction of GDP seem prone to stabilize at around 18%, regardless of nominal tax rates, since shortly after WW II.

Revenue sees temporary peaks in boom times, temporary drops during busts, but always returning to the same ~18%. (I wouldn’t go so far as to call this some sort of natural law, mind – it’s more likely a matter of a natural inflection in the curve of American resistance to paying more taxes.)

18% of an $18 trillion GDP is a lot of money. Unfortunately, over the last eight years, Federal spending has averaged almost 22% of GDP (21% in 2015, but alas rising again from 2014.)

This level of spending has been sustained since the Dems lost control of Congress in 2010 by amazingly unscrupulous maneuvering – Harry Reid’s deliberate crippling of the normal Congressional budget process, and see also the recent revelation that Treasury knew all along how to avoid default in the various “shutdown” confrontations with Congress – IE, the White House threats of disastrous default were barefaced lies.

Assuming Republican control of both Congress and the White House next year, one of the first things to watch for is whether they get serious about bringing Federal spending swiftly back under 18% of GDP. It will be ugly, it will be painful, but it’s vital.

Taxation

Overt taxation at the bottom margins of the middle class is currently quite low. In fact, go low enough and EITC makes it outright negative – albeit on a one-“refund”-per-year basis that encourages a jackpot mindset unconducive to working back up into the middle class. This is worth fixing – if we’re going to subsidize lower-income workers with families anyway, we might as well figure out a way to do it per-paycheck instead.

Get into the broad middle of the middle class, and overt taxation rises to a substantial slice. Outrageous, no, but substantial. This is probably inevitable as long as we insist on government continuing to do most of the things it currently does, as the middle class is still where the bulk of of the money is. We’ll be lucky to succeed in stopping further national debt growth and paying for the middle-class entitlements we’re already committed to. Significant middle-class tax relief on top of that probably can’t happen until we have quite a few high GDP-growth years behind us.

Covert taxation is another matter entirely. There are any number of things that, by government policy, we pay a great deal more for as soon as we start putting some daylight between ourselves and the official poverty line.

Some of this is obvious: The various explicit subsidies for the government-client underclass that go away fast as income rises. It’s not news that there’s significant pressure at the lower margin to just give up and slide into being a government client rather than continue struggling to be an independent citizen. Tinkering at the margins can actually be quite effective here, as witness the ’90’s welfare reform.

A bit subtler is Obama care, where the majority of the middle class is only now discovering that it’s us paying for all the new mandatory expanded benefits, via outrageously higher premiums for anyone moderately healthy who’s above the not-very-high subsidy cutoff. A free market in insurance, plus a formally subsidized high-risk pool, would get rid of this covert taxation, and allow rational decisions on both how much coverage we need, and on how much charity, how paid for, we can actually afford.

Other examples abound, any place the government mandates that we buy more than we might otherwise choose. Now, many of these we might not want to change. For instance, I find modern auto crash-worthiness quite comforting, compared to some of the deathtraps I drove when I was younger. (Modern fuel-economy standards, on the other hand, I think have led to all sorts of pernicious nonsense.) But, my opinions aside, all such mandates should be reviewed for which are cost-effective in terms of supporting the overall well-being of our average citizens, and which aren’t, with ruthless pruning of the latter.

Regulation

The regulatory metastasization-induced cratering of the small-business startup rate and (related) of overall economic growth has obvious implications for availability of middle-class jobs. Housing is also made more expensive by a range of government policies – largely local till recently, but increasingly national, with multiple new federal power grabs by the current administration underway.

There’s also the regulatory drag on individual initiative. If I start a craft guitar shop, will I go to jail for importing the wrong exotic wood? And on political participation – do my chances of going to jail for importing the wrong wood go up if I donate to the wrong cause?

Overall, regulation greatly overlaps with the “covert taxation” I’ve already described. One solution is the same: An ongoing review for which regulations are cost-effective in terms of supporting the overall well-being of our average citizens, and which aren’t, with an effective mechanism for removal of those that don’t make the cut. Another

solution: Mandatory sunset period for all new regulations. Another: No new regulation becomes final without resubmission to the Congress for an up-or-down vote.

The US middle class can’t afford Federal bunny inspectors any more.

Multiply that by a thousand and cut, and it’d be a start.

Education

The nationalization and homogenization of US education to provide full employment for a politically-connected credentialed educrat class whose fads and fashions are increasingly unconnected to actual learning has been well covered elsewhere, and the solutions are generally obvious.

Painful and politically difficult, but obvious.

My major beef here is that basic teaching of children HOW to be middle-class has been not just neglected but actively sabotaged. The basic math skills to plan ahead, the basic logic skills to spot deceptive sales pitches, the basic historical knowledge to spot political knavery, the basic practical and technical skills to work productively, the basic personal discipline to apply all of these to leading a stable and decent life – the parts of our middle class strong enough to pass these skills on in-family survive, while those at the margins crumble ever faster into government clienthood.

Let’s not even mention US higher education coming to combine the worst aspects of debt-peonage and Maoist reeducation camps. Some things are just too depressing.

Expectations

Curated this, organic that, free-range food, helicopter-parented over-scheduled designer kids – all these elite establishment cultural expectations hugely increase the cost of having a middle-class family.

It’s easy to dismiss all this as passing upper-class faddism – but increasingly it’s being applied to all by government mandate. As witness, parents being charged with neglect for allowing kids to walk to school alone, or schools being forced to switch to “healthy” foods the kids won’t eat (with the definition of “healthy” changing like the wind.) Much is curable faddism, of course – minimum “acceptable” houses growing ever larger, minimum acceptable media access growing ever more immersive, frenetic, and expensive.

Cultural counterpressure is the answer, of course, though blest if I know how to produce that. Beyond, that is, writing screeds like this and hoping for the best.

Porkypine

 

I note with interest that while Newt Gingrich – who, after all, as Speaker was able to get a balanced budget from Clinton – has not exactly endorsed Mr. Trump but has taken him seriously and has not joined the ritual attack machine.  As I say, I find it interesting.  And I do not expect Mr. Trump to tell me a lot of technical details; he will accomplish his goals (or not) the way leaders have always accomplished goals – by ordering them done by people he has a reasonable expectation of having the ability to do them, and seeing that they have the requisite resources.  He could not tell you how he built Trump Tower; and few of you could do so either.

You say we should not mention the utter destruction of the free public education system that took this nation from farmers to a middle class as our vanished apprentice system made for a blue collar middle class; but it is important. We cannot thrive if the cost of an education is a lifetime of debt.  We do not owe our academic masters a lifetime of luxury which they “perform” by abusing academic “adjuncts” and other minions. I agree that the system which produced me – financed by the Korean War GI Bill – was deliberately sabotaged, and credentialism has made essential a gang of academic thugs called administrators as well as given faculty. once accustomed to an adequate but not luxurious life, poppycock dreams which have been fulfilled.

The Ministry of Empty Gestures Wants You

Dear Jerry:

What do Al Gore , Darth Vader and the Animal Legal Defense League have in common ?

An advertising consortium with enough clout to commandeer the Eiffel Tower

http://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2016/02/now-all-they-need-is-secret-handshake.html

Shades of Kornbluth and Max Headroom !

—

Russell  Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University  

Sunday Evening:

You’ll see this again:

by the numbers 

Seen on twitter

 

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Chaos Manor View, Sunday, January 03, 2016

“This is the most transparent administration in history.”

Barrack Obama

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.

Roberta has the flu and worse; we didn’t get to New Year parties or much of anything else. Recovery is happening, but it’s a bit slow. Fortunately she has my walker to go to the bathroom because I am not able to help. Alex and Eric are off to Los Vegas for CES. Mike Galloway was over to help and drive me to the pharmacy today. As I said, recovery is happening.

Meanwhile I have been reading Hive Mind by Jones, https://www.google.com/search?q=Jones+Hive+Mind&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 and it is fascinating: nearly all the stuff I thought I knew about IQ but which was dismissed with prejudice by many of the younger experts remains true. There’s more to know, and we understand somewhat less about it than we thought we did, but I knew that long ago.

The higher a nation’s average IQ the richer that nation is; it’s a strong coupling. Individual IQ isn’t so successful in predicting individual success, but we knew that, too. But collectively – think Hari Seldon – it’s a different story. Couple that with Deaton’s The Great Escape http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Escape-Origins-Inequality/dp/0691165629?tag=chaosmanor-20, a book on diversity, and you have something important in the social “sciences” although I doubt that it’s politically correct enough to get past “Peer” review. Speaking of which, the February 2015 Reason Magazine has an interesting piece on how much of what we scientifically know is false, in part due to peer review.

So I have a lot to contemplate while not having a lot of time at the keyboard (and with my bad typing production is slow), but there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Happy New Year.

Monday: still recovering.  A strong correlation is not a perfect correlation; and we know a lot about what happened in China.  High IQ would predict a higher economic performance in China, but The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution among other political events had a predictable effect.

Have a look at this:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/11/24/german-professor-nasa-fiddled-climate-data-unbelievable-scale/

Most of the climate change stuff is not so much fraud as eagerness to prove and reluctance to question, so that little difference are misinterpreted as significant when the truth is lost in the noise.

Most if it. But there is less and less evidence that we know more than Arrhenius did at the turn of the 19^th Century into the Twentieth.

Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get. And we can’t predict weather over a period of years all that well. It froze the Hudson and The Thames in 1700 and 1800. You could grow cattle and vines in Greenland in the Viking era. It has been both warmer and colder in historical times. Thus it was and thus it will be. Maybe we’ll get better at it now.

Replicability of results — The Grumpy Economist proposes a Demand-based solution

http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2015/12/secret-data.html

[quote]

So, rather than try to restrict supply and impose censorship, let’s work on demand. If you think that replicability matters, what can you do about it? A lot:

. When a journal with a data policy asks you to referee a paper, check the data and program file. Part of your job is to see that this works correctly.

[end quote]

Followed by many additional suggestions along the same line, to wit:

that those concerned, that lack of supporting data and computer programs constitutes a corruption of science, exert cultural pressure upon the offenders, and thereby stimulate the development of social norms that require making supporting data and computer programs available.

I wish such a solution would work in Climate Science.

Alas, I’m afraid the dominant clique have too firm a stranglehold on the peer-review process, and too firm a political hold on the funding process, in that field.

We’ll probably have to wait until the divergence between the model predictions and reality becomes so blatant that even the politicians who provide the funding realize they’re being sold a bill of goods.

Shall we start a wagering pool, on whether that will happen before the returning glaciers cover New York City?

Hmmm…

On second thought, since the theory is non-disprovable, even the returning glaciers will, somehow, be determined to be caused by anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide.

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

“They’re skating on the Hudson!  In November!”

“I Knew it! Global Warming! When will they learn!  Oh, and ask for another billion to refine our model”

Periodic table’s seventh row finally filled as four new elements are added

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jan/04/periodic-tables-seventh-row-finally-filled-as-four-new-elements-are-added

Russia Says Elon Musk Is ‘Stepping On Our Toes’ – Fortune

Do they give up when they realize they can’t compete? They did it in the Cold War.

http://fortune.com/2015/12/30/russia-elon-musk-spacex/

R

NYCON II photos: August 31st – September 3rd, 1956.

<https://www.flickr.com/photos/slomuse/sets/72157662390340119>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

‘Poverty and economic inequality are not identical.’

<http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

No, and we don’t really understand either. But we do know that nations that save more get richer, and high IQ correlates with accepting deferred rewards — saving.

What are they building skyscrapers out of?

Dear Jerry –

This news item http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fire-breaks-out-dubai-skyscraper-near-burj-khalifa-n488586 shows the exterior of an Abu Dhabi skyscraper burning over about 40 stories, yet the fire appears to be confined to the exterior sheathing, and according to the article engulfed the building in a few (less than 10) minutes, apparently set off by an errant firework.

So – what are they making skyscrapers out of, these days? Cardboard?

Regards,

Jim Martin

I don’t know. Interesting.

Japanese researchers develop touchable holograms, buffy willow

Jerry

This is huge:

http://www.tweaktown.com/news/49286/japanese-researchers-develop-touchable-holograms/index.html

Think ghosts. Think service members or astronauts hugging their loved ones at a distance. This stuff will soon be ready for Internet sex. Where does it end? I am thinking of the planet in Daneel Oliva’s case where there were few humans, and they had no physical contact with each other.

In case you do not want to go to the above link, YouTube has it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nlnRpFoBLo

Ed

But first Hollywood will use it….

Space Viking?

  According to Wikipedia:
“Pournelle was one of the few close friends of H. Beam Piper and was granted by Piper the rights to produce stories set in Piper’s Terro-Human Future History. This right has been recognized by the copyright owner of the Piper estate. Pournelle did work for some years on a sequel to Space Viking but seems to have abandoned this in the early 1990s.”
What is the status of this? Space Viking was an INCREDIBLE book — will we see you see you doing a sequel?

Gary Rogers

I wrote a daft I wasn’t happy with; it’s lost now.  I had a notion that one of the supercomputers survived and thought it was running the universe with the Gilgameshers as its agents.  They thought so too.  It was a good yarn, but I had other things to do and it slipped between the cracks.  I’m sorry.  I doubt I will ever turn to that again.

Beam was a good friend and II;’d have loved to do an homage.  He was one of the best.  John Carr has done well in trying to keep his memory alive. 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/wind-solar-power-soar-in-spite-of-bargain-prices-for-fossil-fuels/2015/12/30/754758b8-af19-11e5-9ab0-884d1cc4b33e_story.html

Wind, solar power soar in spite of bargain prices for fossil fuels (WP)

By Joby Warrick December 31 at 9:01 AM

In normal times, a months-long slide in energy prices would be enough to rattle a man who makes wind turbines for a living. Yet amid a worldwide glut of cheap fossil fuels, business is blowing strong for Vestas Wind Systems and its CEO, Anders Runevad.

The company posted record gains in 2015 and inked major deals to build wind farms in the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia. That boom in turbine sales was part of a global surge for wind and solar energy, which occurred despite oil, coal and natural gas selling at bargain rates.

“We’re seeing very good momentum across the board globally,” said Runevad, a soft-spoken Swede whose firm is now the world’s biggest producer of wind turbines. “We’re seeing growth in every region.”

Vestas’s performance is emblematic of the changing fortunes for renewable energy, an industry that achieved a number of milestones this year.Massive new projects are under construction from China and India to Texas, which now far outpaces California as the nation’s leading wind-power state. Just this month, the United States crossed the 70-gigawatt threshold in wind-generated electricity, with 50,000 spinning turbines producing enough power to light up 19 million homes.

Energy analysts say the boom is being spurred in part by improved technology, which has made wind and solar more competitive with fossil fuels in many regions. But equally important, experts say, are new government policies here and abroad that favor investment in renewables, as well as a growing willingness by Wall Street to pour billions of dollars into projects once considered financially risky.

“Renewables have turned a corner in a fundamental way,” said Dan Reicher, a former Energy Department assistant secretary who is now executive director of Stanford University’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance.

While solar and wind power have been expanding for years because of steadily falling costs, recent regulatory and financial decisions have set the stage for continued growth for years to come, according to Reicher and other energy experts.

In the United States, these include the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which requires states to reduce emissions from power plants, and the latest congressional budget compromise, which extended tax credits for wind and solar energy. Also key was this month’sclimate accord in Paris, where more than 190 countries approved a plan to reduce pollution from fossil-fuel burning worldwide.[snip]

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Chaos Manor View, Monday, May 18, 2015

ISIS has taken another large city. The Caliphate grows, and each success is seen as a confirmation of its right to rule. The latest conquest should be good for another 50,000 recruits who see it as a sign: this is a legitimate state. When I first wrote about this, I said that we could end the Caliphate with an infantry division and the remaining Warthogs. It would be messy, but it could be done quickly. We could give the conquests in the Kurdish districts to the Kurds, who would be loyal allies; and doing so would be a salutary lesson to the corrupt rulership in Baghdad.

Now it becomes more difficult. The problem is not defeating the Caliphate, it is governing the conquered territory. It is not yet too late: there are Sunni and Shia Iraqi enough to form a federation. And it is our responsibility. We broke it. We threw out Saddam Hussein, and we sent in – Bremer, who managed to set a much worse record than the worst of the Roman pro-consuls.

Obama did not start this, and Bremer was not his man; but his haste to get us out of Iraq, while understandable, showed his deep misunderstanding of Middle East affairs.

The Caliphate is not yet an existential threat to the West, but at it’s present rate of success, it will be. War feeds war.

More pictures from Niven’s birthday party

7

That’s Larry in the top picture. Jim Ransom in the next along with some of the waiters. This in in the entryway of Niven’s house…

From the blog of Fredrik deBoer, an academic in rhetoric and composition, May 13:

Criticism of today’s progressives tends to use words like toxic, aggressive, sanctimonious, and hypocritical. I would not choose any of those. I would choose lazy. We are lazy as political thinkers and we are lazy as culture writers and we are lazy as movement builders. We ward off criticism of our own bad work by acting like that criticism is inherently anti-feminist or anti-progressive. We seem spoiled, which seems insane because everything is messed up and so many things are getting worse. I guess having a Democratic president just makes people feel complacent. Well, look: as a political movement we are in pathetic shape right now. We not only have no capacity to move people who don’t already share our worldview, we seem to have no interest in doing so. Our stock arguments are lazy stacks of cliches. We seem to want to confirm everything conservatives say about our inability to argue without calling other people racist. We can’t articulate why our vision of the future is better than the other side’s, and in fact many of us will tell you that it’s offensive to think that we have an obligation to educate others on that vision at all. We celebrate grassroots activist movements like Black Lives Matter, but we insult them by treating them as the same thing as hashtag campaigns, and we don’t build a broader left-wing political movement that could increase their likelihood of success. We spend all day, every day, luxuriating in how much better we are than other people, having convinced ourselves that the work of politics is always external, never internal. We have made politics synonymous with social competition. We’re a mess.

So, apparently, I am not the only one to discover that America is losing its mind. We sowed the wind for generations; I said so at the time, and often for decades. I suppose it should be no surprise to discover we are reaping the whirlwind.

Dear Jerry:
You wrote in View for 5/17/2015:

I’ve been a bit depressed all week, not because of this place, but another forum which I had thought was still rational, but which has turned poisonous, everyone looking for verbal errors so they can charge racism or sexism or check your privilege, thus winning whatever they thought was a contest, and ending all discussion before it starts.

Immediately I was reminded that your experience is nothing new, that Paul wrote to Timothy about this phenomenon 2000 years ago:

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions,  and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.

2 Timothy 4:3-4 ESV

When entering the kind of forum you described I also thought how Jesus advised his disciples to enter a new town:

And whatever town or village you enter, find out who is worthy in it and stay there until you depart. As you enter the house, greet it.  And if the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it, but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. And if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town.

Matthew 10:11-14 ESV

You and I are of an age when we should not be bothered by the turmoil of internet forums and the shifting notions and passions of the day as nations rage and people plot in vain. I am reminded of what Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams:

1812 January 21. “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier.”

You can find this quote in many reliable sources including

http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-reading

http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/280

and in context at

http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letters-of-thomas-jefferson/jefl213.php

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16784/16784-h/16784-h.htm#link2H_4_0099

Peace, and best regards,
–Harry M.

Unregulated capitalism in Nigeria

Jerry:

Your recurring comment regarding unregulated capitalism has happened in Nigeria:

Nigerian restaurant shut down for serving HUMAN FLESH – and had bags in kitchen containing heads that were still bleeding
Police raided the restaurant after locals reported it was selling human meat
They discovered human heads which were still dripping blood into plastic bags
Weapons including grenades also found during the raid in Anambra region
Ten people have so far been arrested in connection to the various crimes

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3084326/Nigerian-restaurant-shut-serving-HUMAN-flesh-bags-containing-human-heads-bleeding.html

Sorry if I spoiled your lunch–

Doug Ely

We have not yet seen full decivilization, but this approaches it. Unregulated laissez faire leads to human flesh in the market place. Unrestrained government leads to the Nomenklatura and the ossified communist state. We have run that experiment; how many repetitions do we need?

“I did not know I had been served human meat, and it was that expensive.”

<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/nigeria/11610908/Nigerian-restaurant-shut-down-for-serving-human-flesh.html>

—————————————

Roland Dobbins

Peer review, evolution/devolution and sci-fi

Hello, Jerry Pournelle! I have been thinking about the fact that in real life, progress towards more unified theories in physics stagnated as soon as peer review journals gained access to the tools to enforce their policy against redundant publication. Peter Higgs and Francois Englert published the same theory independently without being stopped.
In the last decades, the only progress have been in fine-tuning of preexisting theories and in increased technical application of the same theories. General theories makes many unique predictions, increasing the chances of some of them being cheaply testable. Fine-tuning of existing theories, on the other hand, makes much fewer predictions and increases the risk of them all being expensive to test. So if the stagnation was due to increased research costs (e.g. Pareto principle), it would have struck fine-tuning of existing theories even more severely than breakthrough generalized theories. Ergo, it cannot be costs but must be something else.
I think it is due part to arbitrary divisions into “fields” in academia preventing ideas and falsifications from spreading, and part due to peer review no redundant publication policies scaring people with theories into not expressing them. This has given me a plot idea that can be applied into science fiction: that the road to a theory of everything allowing modified space-time goes by using the no redundant publication policy against itself so it ceases to work.
The entire idea behind peer review, claiming humans to be unreliable yet relying on rules written by humans and controls enforced by humans, is self-defeating. It is like when Epemenedos said that all Creteans are lying, despite being Cretean himself (the origin of the “all that is written at this paper is a lie” paradox). Psychologists do the same self-defeating thing when they claim all humans to be unreliable despite being human themselves. This also applies to other types of “control”, see 2 or more sections below. It does not, however, contradict evolution: while the existence of science requires the existence of science-capable beings today, it does not require the ancestors of science-capable beings to always have been science-capable. So evolution, including evolution of science-capable beings from ancestors that were not science-capable, is science. Psychology with it’s claims of “cognitive bias” today, however, is not a science and by the Epemenedos principle can never become one.
This also means that cognitive bias theories can be used to deny anything that conspiracy theories can be used to deny, without technically being conspiracy theories. Just like cognitive bias theorists claim all humans to share cognitive biases behind common mythological elements, they may just as well use the same type of arguments to claim that all agreement on, say, the moon landings or the holocaust is also due to panhuman cognitive biases. They may say that all observations of things left on the moon by the astronauts is also made by humans or by human-made instruments. When it comes to genocides, the cognitive bias theorists may state that since the testimonies agree regardless of the ethnicity of the witnesses, it shows that they are all fully human and that their denial is therefore not a hate ideology at all (repeating common claims of panhuman biases not being malicious). They may explain away the number of people disappeared by claiming a panhuman glitch in mathematical ability.
Which brings us to the next level of cognitive bias theory, things that conspiracy theories cannot do. Obviously, any cognitive bias theory is a more efficient denial tool than the equivalent conspiracy theory: cognitive bias theories rely on “selfish genes” just being there and not having to conspire, eliminating leak risks. Then cognitive bias theories can be used to deny not only historical events but also obvious things that no conspiracy could fake, like 1+1=2 and things fall down not up. They can even say that the assumption that you would leave the Earth if things fell up is also a genetic delusion not objective fact. Summary: cognitive bias theory is incompatible with science and thus not scientific theories.
I have also thought about that if cavemen specifically punished individuals with more Homo sapiens characteristics and “excused” the others by “they cannot help” their actions, that would have bred against Homo sapiens characteristics so that modern humans would never have existed. That made me think about some scifi possibilities too: maybe space archaeologists discovering ruins of civilizations that destroyed themselves by psychologistic morality somewhat similar to today’s Earth values breeding themselves into stupidity. Maybe the Fermi paradox being solved by all other proto-intelligent species thwarting their own evolution and humanity being extremely lucky to be so late in creating psychologistic morality. Maybe creation of intelligence-positive societies totally devoid of psychologistic morality, cultures in which the same action is never considered any worse just because it was conscious.
This must NOT be conflated with any kind of forcible eugenism against different behaviors. On the contrary, it is a rejection of the entire classification of certain behaviors/preferences as “sick”. Obviously, since considering the same behavior to be cool in an insect or reptile yet “sick” in a person is “intelligent guilt” psychologistic morality, and the intelligence-positive view rejects all “intelligent guilt” morals.
The intelligence-positive view is applicable without biologism too: forcing people to pretend stupidity is disastrous. It is possible to write stories wherein “justice” causes civilizations to self-destruct by forcing its members to “fake” lack of conscious choice. For maximum effect, they may be contrasted to other, intelligence-positive civilizations that faces peril yet survives precisely because they do not have “intelligent guilt” morality and thus do not force their members into malingering. Whether the civilizations are from different home worlds or instead offshoots of a single spacefaring civilization’s colonization that diverged into different societies is not really important to the case.
I would like to hear your replies as to these ideas.
Greetings,
Martin J Sallberg

I think you have stated your case very well indeed. Any time there is no possibility of dissent from a theory, you will get epicycles: in cosmology we have dark energy, dark matter, and none of it in our local area. So it goes.

I have long said that a reasonable percentage of research grants should go to the opposition, for crucial experiments: most will confirm existing belief, but not all; some will insert worms of doubt. And of course those results must be published. Peer review guarantees they will not be.

Yes, we need mechanisms to weed out barking madness, but even there we need caution. I am not worried about suppression of theories; but suppression of data, case histories, impossible experimental results: that is dangerous.

We are at present running a social science experiment on this; the results are not encouraging. We still sow the wind.

‘Rise of the Robots’ and ‘Shadow Work’

By BARBARA EHRENREICHMAY 11, 2015       nyt

In the late 20th century, while the blue-collar working class gave way to the forces of globalization and automation, the educated elite looked on with benign condescension. Too bad for those people whose jobs were mindless enough to be taken over by third world teenagers or, more humiliatingly, machines. The solution, pretty much agreed upon across the political spectrum, was education. Americans had to become intellectually nimble enough to keep ahead of the job-destroying trends unleashed by technology, both robotization and the telecommunication systems that make outsourcing possible. Anyone who wanted a spot in the middle class would have to possess a college degree — as well as flexibility, creativity and a continually upgraded skill set.

But, as Martin Ford documents in “Rise of the Robots,” the job-eating maw of technology now threatens even the nimblest and most expensively educated. Lawyers, radiologists and software designers, among others, have seen their work evaporate to India or China. Tasks that would seem to require a distinctively human capacity for nuance are increasingly assigned to algorithms, like the ones currently being introduced to grade essays on college exams. Particularly terrifying to me, computer programs can now write clear, publishable articles, and, as Ford reports, Wired magazine quotes an expert’s prediction that within about a decade 90 percent of news articles will be computer-­generated.

It’s impossible to read “Rise of the Robots” — for review anyway — without thinking about how the business of book reviewing could itself be automated and possibly improved by computers. First, the job of “close reading,” now commonly undertaken with Post-its and a felt-tip red pen, will be handed off to a scanner that will instantly note all recurring words, phrases and themes. Next, where a human reviewer racks her brain for social and historical context, the review-bot will send algorithms out into the ether to scan every other book by the author as well as every other book or article on the subject. Finally, all this information will be synthesized with more fairness and erudition than any wet, carbon-based thinking apparatus could muster. Most of this could be achieved today, though, as Ford notes, if you want more creativity and self-­reflexivity from your review-bot, you may have to wait until 2050.

This is both a humbling book and, in the best sense, a humble one. Ford, a software entrepreneur who both understands the technology and has made a thorough study of its economic consequences, never succumbs to the obvious temptation to overdramatize or exaggerate. In fact, he has little to say about one of the most ominous arenas for automation — the military, where not only are pilots being replaced by drones, but robots like the ones that now defuse bombs are being readied for deployment as infantry. Nor does Ford venture much into the spectacular possibilities being opened up by wearable medical devices, which can already monitor just about any kind of biometric data that can be collected in an I.C.U. Human health workers may eventually be cut out of the loop, as tiny devices to sense blood glucose levels, for example, learn how to signal other tiny implanted devices to release insulin. But “Rise of the Robots” doesn’t need any more examples; the human consequences of robotization are already upon us, and skillfully chronicled here. Although the unemployment rate has fallen to officially acceptable levels, long-term unemployment persists, and underemployment — part-time jobs when full-time jobs are needed, or jobs that do not reflect a worker’s education — is on the rise. College-educated people often flounder for years after graduation, finding temp jobs and permanent roommates. Adults of both sexes are drifting out of the work force in despair. All of this has happened by choice, though not the choice of the average citizen and worker. In the wake of the recession, Ford writes, many companies decided that “ever-advancing information technology” allows them to operate successfully without rehiring the people they had laid off. And there should be no doubt that technology is advancing in the direction of full unemployment. Ford quotes the co-founder of a start-up dedicated to the automation of gourmet hamburger production: “Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient. It’s meant to completely obviate them.”

Ford offers little hope that emerging technologies will eventually generate new forms of employment, in the way that blacksmiths yielded to autoworkers in the early 20th century. He predicts that new industries will “rarely, if ever, be highly labor-intensive,” pointing to companies like YouTube and Instagram, which are characterized by “tiny workforces and huge valuations and revenues.” On another front, 3-D printing is poised to make a mockery of manufacturing as we knew it. Truck driving may survive for a while — at least until self-driving vehicles start rolling out of Detroit or, perhaps, San Jose.

The disappearance of jobs has not ushered in a new age of leisure, as social theorists predicted uneasily in the 1950s. Would the masses utilize their freedom from labor in productive ways, such as civic participation and the arts, or would they die of boredom in their ranch houses? Somehow, it was usually assumed, they would still manage to eat.

Come to find out, there’s still plenty of work to do, even if no one is willing to pay for it. This is the “shadow work” that Craig Lambert appealingly brings to light in his new book on “the unpaid, unseen jobs that fill your day.” We take it for granted that we’ll have to pump our own gas and bus our own dishes at Panera Bread. Booking travel reservations is now a D.I.Y. task; the travel agents have disappeared. As corporations cut their workforces, managers have to take on the work of support staff (remember secretaries?), and customers can expect to spend many hours of their lives working their way through menus and recorded advertisements in search of “customer service.” At the same time, our underfunded and understaffed schools seem to demand ever more parental participation. Ambitious parents are often expected not only to drive their children to and from school, but to spend hours carrying out science projects and poring over fifth-grade math — although, as Lambert points out, parental involvement in homework has not been shown to improve children’s grades or test scores.

“Shadow Work” is generally a smooth ride, but there are bumps along the way. The definition of the subject sometimes seems to embrace every kind of unpaid work — from the exploitative, as in the use of unpaid interns, to the kind that is freely undertaken, like caring for one’s own family. At times the book gets weighed down by an unwarranted nostalgia for the old days, when most transactions involved human interactions. For example, Lambert grants that home pregnancy tests offer women “more privacy and more control,” while also lamenting — as no woman ever has — that they cut out the doctor and thus transform “what can be a memorable shared event into a solitary encounter with a plastic stick.”

Lambert, formerly an editor at Harvard Magazine, is on firmer ground when he explores all the ways corporations and new technologies fiendishly generate new tasks for us — each of them seemingly insignificant but amounting to many hours of annoyance. Examples include deleting spam from our inboxes, installing software upgrades, creating passwords for every website we seek to enter, and periodically updating those passwords. If nothing else, he gives new meaning to the word “distraction” as an explanation for civic inaction. As the seas rise and the air condenses into toxic smog, many of us will be bent over our laptops, filling out forms and attempting to wade through the “terms and conditions.”

Lambert falls short of calling for the shadow workers of the world to go out on strike. But that’s what it might take to give us the time and the mental bandwidth to confront the dystopian possibilities being unleashed by technology. If middle-class jobs keep disappearing as wealth piles up at the top, Martin Ford predicts, economic mobility will “become nonexistent”: “The plutocracy would shut itself away in gated communities or in elite cities, perhaps guarded by autonomous military robots and drones.” We have seen this movie; in fact, in one form or another — from “Elysium” to “The Hunger Games” — we’ve been seeing it again and again.

In “Rise of the Robots,” Ford argues that a society based on luxury consumption by a tiny elite is not economically viable. More to the point, it is not biologically viable. Humans, unlike robots, need food, health care and the sense of usefulness often supplied by jobs or other forms of work. His solution is blindingly obvious: As both conservatives and liberals have proposed over the years, we need to institute a guaranteed annual minimum income, which he suggests should be set at $10,000 a year. This is probably not enough, and of course no amount of money can compensate for the loss of meaningful engagement. But as a first step toward a solution, Ford’s may be the best that the feeble human mind can come up with at the moment.

RISE OF THE ROBOTS

Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

By Martin Ford

334 pp. Basic Books. $28.99.

SHADOW WORK

The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day

By Craig Lambert

277 pp. Counterpoint. $26.

Soon They’ll Be Driving It, Too       (journal)

Intelligent machines are ousting low-skilled workers now. Next they’ll start encroaching on white-collar livelihoods.

By

Sumit Paul-Choudhury

May 15, 2015 4:53 p.m. ET

Should you be worried by the emergence of intelligent machines? To some the answer is clear. “Full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” Stephen Hawking warned recently. Martin Ford’s “Rise of the Robots” offers a more prosaic reason for concern: Partially intelligent machines might render humans not so much extinct as redundant. “No one doubts that technology has the power to devastate entire industries and upend specific sectors of the economy and job market,” writes Mr. Ford, a Silicon Valley software developer turned futurist. Will machine intelligence, tackling tasks once thought of as humanity’s exclusive preserve, “disrupt our entire system to the point where a fundamental restructuring may be required if prosperity is to continue?”

Mr. Ford invokes Norbert Wiener, who in 1949 prophesied an “industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty” in which machines would outstrip humans in routine work “at any price.” In Mr. Ford’s view, just such a revolution is under way in blue-collar work. Robots are ousting low-skilled workers everywhere, from fast-food joints to factory floors—a trend that Mr. Ford argues is central to the puzzling “jobless recovery” of the past decade as well as to other anomalous trends in pay and employment.

Now the machines are encroaching on white-collar livelihoods, which is why the intelligentsia have begun to wake up to their advance. To date, most automation has been of routine tasks that are relatively easy to describe in terms of simple instructions. But the combination of ever faster processors, ever smarter algorithms and ever bigger data is yielding supercomputers that are ever more capable of tackling complex challenges. IBM ’s Watson, having triumphed over human champion Ken Jennings at “Jeopardy!,” is now turning to medicine and cookery. Other machines are proving their mettle in fields ranging from scientific research to the stock market. Creativity no longer seems an insurmountable obstacle: Computers are starting to compose music or create paintings that could pass for the work of humans.

We are still a long way from all-round human intelligence—smart machines are becoming more flexible but still tend to excel in only a specific area—but Mr. Ford lucidly sets out myriad examples of how focused applications of versatile machines (coupled with human helpers where necessary) could displace or de-skill many jobs. If you are of the professional classes, you will likely read with mounting dismay Mr. Ford’s compelling explanation of how tools that encapsulate “analytic intelligence and institutional knowledge” will enable less qualified rivals to carry out your job proficiently, quite possibly from another country. An intelligent system might mine huge corporate data sets to distill years of experience into simple instructions for an overseas worker—who can then use translation and telepresence to overcome linguistic and geographical barriers. When the tools systems have become smart enough, those offshore workers may in turn be deemed surplus: In a particularly dastardly move, computers may even acquire those smarts by spying on their human users.

The author is persuasive in his discussion of the business logic that makes this process seem all but inevitable. Machines may be less accomplished than humans, but they are often cheaper, more dependable and more docile. While you might worry about their growing abilities, it is the economic incentives that seem truly problematic. Mr. Ford worries that if this trend runs away it will prove bad for all but the ultra-wealthy capitalists who own the machines. Because workers are consumers too, a declining workforce translates into declining demand, and that threatens the entire edifice of modern capitalism. Continue as we are, he suggests, and we may return to feudalism.

Will we? Why should this time be any different from previous waves of automation, in which displaced workers have moved, after some initial disorientation, to satisfactory new jobs? Machine intelligence, says Mr. Ford, is a general-purpose technology with broad applications: There will be few untouched fields to which workers can turn in their search for employment. Still, his copious examples, striking though they are, add up to no more than strong circumstantial evidence for that claim.

We should always be skeptical about the difficulty of transferring polished theories into unruly reality. And for the moment, there will remain bastions of human exceptionalism. One recent analysis suggests that “highly creative” work (including architecture, design and entertainment), which accounts for around a fifth of U.S. jobs, will prove intransigent. Mr. Ford also dedicates chapters to the ways in which the health-care and educational sectors have resisted automation.

Could we find new jobs in these areas for those put out of work by automation? The author’s short answer is that we can’t. Those at the bottom of the labor pyramid aren’t capable of doing jobs higher up it, and there wouldn’t be enough of those jobs anyway. Rather surprisingly, he gives only passing treatment to the potential deployment of intelligent machines to up-skill workers. “For the majority of people who lose middle-class jobs, access to a smart phone may offer little beyond the ability to play Angry Birds while waiting in the unemployment line,” he writes. Today’s smartphones, yes; but tomorrow’s smarter phones may enhance their owners’ reach and abilities in more productive ways.

The author’s apparent reluctance to engage with technological solutions to a technological problem perhaps reveals where his true object lies. His answer to a sharp decline in employment is a guaranteed basic income, a safety net that he suggests would both cushion the effect on the newly unemployable and encourage entrepreneurship among those creative enough to make a new way for themselves. This is a drastic prescription for the ills of modern industrialization—ills whose severity and very existence are hotly contested. “Rise of the Robots” provides a compelling case that they are real, even if its more dire predictions are harder to accept.

Rise of the Robots

By Martin Ford
Basic, 334 pages, $28.99

— Mr. Paul-Choudhury is the editor of New Scientist.

I have said often: by 2020, half of the jobs of those presently employed can be done by a robot whose cost is not much more than the annual wage paid to the current job-holder. Maintenance and supervision of the robot will be no more that 10% of the robot’s cost. The robot will need neither health care, family leave, vacation, nor a pension. Employers and investors will have decisions to make.

I see no reason to change that observation.

In 1982 I stated that by the year 2000, anyone in the Free World would be able in a timely manner to get the answer to any question that has an answer. The Internet made that happen well before the year 2000.

It is not too early to begin considering what happens to Democracy when half the population can cannot find employment that cannot be done cheaper by a robot.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/ready-to-lend-a-hand-or-3-in-the-next-disaster/2015/05/16/2ea78a16-fa6c-11e4-9ef4-1bb7ce3b3fb7_story.html?hpid=z1

Military push for emergency robots worries skeptics about lethal uses (WP)

By Christian Davenport May 16 at 10:18 PM

It’s 6-foot-2, with laser eyes and vise-grip hands. It can walk over a mess of jagged cinder blocks, cut a hole in a wall, even drive a car. And soon, Leo, Lockheed Martin’s humanoid robot, will move from the development lab to a boot camp for robots, where a platoon’s worth of the semiautonomous mechanical species will be tested to see if they can be all they can be.

Next month, the Pentagon is hosting a $3.5 million, international competition that will pit robot against robot in an obstacle course designed to test their physical prowess, agility, and even their awareness and cognition.

Galvanized by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power disaster in 2011, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — the Pentagon’s band of mad scientists that have developed the “artificial spleen,” bullets that can change course midair and the Internet — has invested nearly $100 million into developing robots that could head into disaster zones off limits to humans.

“We don’t know what the next disaster will be, but we know we have to develop the technology to help us to address these kinds of disaster,” Gill Pratt, DARPA’s program manager, said in a recent call with reporters.

There’s more but you get the idea.

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/dont-think-that-you-can-become-free-or-the-master-of-your-life-through-knowledge

Through Flaws in the Machine, Robots May Develop “Souls”: An Interview with John Gray

Photo via Flickr user Tom Simpson

It wasn’t until after I interviewed John Gray, major British philosopher, public intellectual, and the author, most recently, of The Soul of the Marionette, that I realized he was—in the words of a British friend—”a total hero.” Gray, who recently retired from a storied professorship at the London School of Economics, was not only blazingly smart, with a cracking wit; he also came across as down-to-earth, considerate, and rather even-keeled. Considering that his book makes a fairly damning case against the techno-utopian logic of Silicon Valley and cuts straight into our “self-flattering” ideas of freedom, Gray’s moderate tone was a surprise. Our conversation ranged from ancient Greek warfare to cryogenically-frozen tech tycoons, from the state of the humanities to the works of Philip K. Dick, from robotic souls to the UK’s astonishing general election results earlier this month. Much like Gray’s book, our 75-minute chat flew by and left me electrified.

The Soul of the Marionette offers a mini-education over the span of 20 short chapters, which romp through major and minor works of philosophy, art, history, and science fiction. The book can be disorienting—each of the chapters can be read on its own, Gray notes—but it’s never dull. Gray likens the style of this book to Pascal’s Penseés. (“Though, of course, I’m no Pascal!” Gray laughed, perhaps underselling himself.)

Gray’s ideal reader, in his words, is “a person who is curious, who thinks that there might be something wrong with our modern world, the world in which we expect human progress from science and technology.” If that sounds like you, check out The Soul of the Marionettewhen it’s released on May 19th in the US from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

VICE: The Soul of the Marionette addresses the fundamental question of whether or not human beings have freedom. You seem to say that we don’t.
John Gray: I guess a different way of posing the question that the book asks is, “What kind of freedom do we think we want, and do we really want it?” The book is not really addressed to traditional philosophical issues of free will and metaphysics. We all think we want to be free. We all feel frustrated and thwarted and powerless when we think we’re not free. But what is it that we want from freedom? Do we really want what we think we want?

Your book also discusses how torture and “hyper-modern techniques of control” are being used today, in the name of human rights and freedom. Do you see this situation improving, or worsening, over the coming decades?
All of these technologies, they’re ambiguous. What they humanly mean, their human values, is always ambiguous. I’m old enough to remember when photocopiers and video machines were thought as bound to bring down tyrannies, back in the 70s and 80s. People said things like, “Well, if massacres can be videoed, no country would dare to commit a massacre!” It happens every day now. It happened with Tiananmen Square. They possibly even use that movie to show other people, in other parts of China, what might happen to them if they rebel.

There is considerably more relevant to this discussion.

And now for the burning question:

What happens when you give eels cocaine?

<http://www.hakaimagazine.com/article-short/dr-eelgood>

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Roland Dobbins

‘We are convinced the machine can do better than human anesthesiologists’ (WP)

By Todd C. Frankel May 15

I wrote recently about Sedasys, a machine that automates anesthesia. It’s a first-of-its-kind device in the United States. Only four hospitals use it for now. It’s restricted to colonoscopies in healthy patients.

[New machine could one day replace anesthesiologists]

But Sedasys, in development for 15 years, is no longer on the true cutting edge of what’s possible with automated anesthesia.

A machine with the clunky name of iControl-RP is. It’s an experimental device that pushes the boundaries of how much responsibility is turned over to technology. It monitors brain wave activity. And it’s even been tested on children.

One of the reasons that Sedasys was approved by U.S. health regulators is that it’s a conservative leap forward. The device is innovative, but it doesn’t decide alone how much anesthesia to give to a patient.

It’s an open-loop system. The initial dose is pre-determined based on a patient’s weight and age. And Sedasys only reduces or stops drug delivery if it detects problems. Only a doctor or nurse can up the dose. That gave regulators a level of comfort.

But the iControl-RP makes its own decisions. It is a closed-loop system.

This new device, being tested by University of British Columbia researchers, monitors a patient’s brain wave activity along with traditional health markers, such as blood oxygen levels, to determine how much anesthesia to deliver.

“We are convinced the machine can do better than human anesthesiologists,” said Mark Ansermino, one of the machine’s co-developers, who works as director of pediatric anesthesia research at the university’s medical school in Vancouver.

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326592

Is D-Wave a Quantum Computer? (EE Times)

R. Colin Johnson

5/14/2015 08:52 PM EDT

Critics charge its not a “real” QC
PORTLAND, Ore.—Recently I had to explain to a reader why critics say that D-Wave’s so-called quantum computer was not a “real” quantum computer, the answer for which he accepted on my authority. However, the question kept nagging me in the back on my mind “why” D-Wave markets what it calls a quantum computer if it is not for real. To get to the bottom of it, I asked Jeremy Hilton, vice president of processor development of D-Wave Systems, Inc. (Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada) about why critics keep saying its quantum computer is not for real. He also revealed details about D-Wave’s next generation quantum computer.

“The Holy Grail of quantum computing to build a ‘universal’ quantum computer—one that can solve any computational problem—but at a vastly higher speed that today’s computers,” Hilton told EE Times. “That’s the reason some people say we don’t have a ‘real’ quantum computer—because D-Wave’s is not a ‘universal’ computer.”

D-Wave’s quantum computer, rather, only solves optimization problems, that is ones that can be expressed in a linear equation with lots of variables each with its own weight (the number that is multiplied times each variable). Normally, such linear equations are very difficult to solve for a conventional ‘universal’ computer, taking lots of iterations to find the optimal set of values for the variables. However, with D-Wave’s application-specific quantum computer, such problems can be solved in a single cycle.

“We believe that starting with an application-specific quantum processor is the right way to go—as a stepping stone to the Holy Grail—a universal quantum computer,” Hilton told us. “And that’s what D-Wave does—we just to optimization problems using qubits.”

There is considerably more detail.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 849 Tuesday, November 04, 2014

“I have observed over the years that the unintended consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences.”

Irving Kristol

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

1030 Wednesday: Hiking with Niven and Barnes.  Back after lunch.   Obama lost.  Republicans would do well to understand that they didn’t exactly win: Obama lost. Now Republicans have an opportunity to show what they are for, and that they are competent, and that they can govern. That will take work, because it is not obvious to anyone including me.  Better than what we have, yes. Well and competent needs to be demonstrated.   Having said all that, Hurrah!

1630 Tuesday Studio City: The polls are still open, and Fox News says that it’s a very close election. It is a very important election. Part of its importance is that there has been a resurrection of conservative Democrats, and that may halt the Democratic party’s race to the extremist liberal/progressive position; but that’s speculation like everything else. An actual repudiation of Obama at the polls would be important. There has already been a political repudiation, with Democrats up for election inviting Obama to support them with money but to stay out of their districts.

I expect that many of the elections will be decided by recounts and decisions about fraud, but that’s speculation too. I’ll have more comments when there is something to comment on.

Here’s an account of the SS2 disaster:

Crash Analysis: How SpaceShipTwo’s Feathered Tails Work

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo in its "feathered" configuration, with tails upright. Credit: Virgin Galactic

The cause of the deadly crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo on Friday remains unknown, but the commercial spaceplane’s feathered reentry system looks to have been involved. Investigators at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that the vehicle’s copilot moved a lever to “unlock” the feather system earlier than planned, and two seconds after the feathers deployed, the spacecraft disintegrated.

The details of how or why this happened are still unclear. The feather system is normally used after SpaceShipTwo has already climbed to the peak of its parabolic flight path and begun to descend, to help the vehicle slow down and stabilize as it flies back to Earth. In fact, the design was one of the major innovations that enabled SpaceShipTwo’s predecessor, the smaller SpaceShipOne, to perform the first manned commercial spaceflight in 2004 and win the $10 million Ansari X-Prize.

SpaceShipTwo has two tails, one pointing straight back off each wing. Each one acts as a rudder, and has a small, horizontal flap at the back, extending to the outside. When the plane is descending, both tails can pivot upright, together, from zero to 90 degrees, so that they stand “vertically” behind the plane. In this configuration, the tails and flaps create drag. This “feathering” effect is similar to that of a shuttlecock in the game badminton. The shapes of both are designed to incite high amounts of drag from air resistance, and both are extremely aerodynamically stable, meaning the drag forces will always end up pushing the plane, or the shuttlecock, into the same orientation (a shuttlecock will always turn to fly cork first, and SpaceShipTwo’s feathered tails ensure it will reenter Earth’s atmosphere at the correct angle).

During a normal flight, SpaceShipTwo is carried upwards by its mothership, WhiteKnightTwo, and released in midair to ignite its rocket engine for the rest of the climb to the edge of space. During all this time, the twin tails point straight out behind its body in the “de-feathered” configuration. When it’s time to make the trip back to the ground, SpaceShipTwo’s pilots can deploy the feather, pivoting the tails upright. When pointed upward, the tails are at right angles to the direction of airflow, creating a huge amount of drag on the vehicle, which slows it down without overheating the spacecraft. This method works because SpaceShipTwo is not coming back from orbit; from the edge of space (it flies to a peak altitude of 110 kilometers) its top speed is low enough that the feather is enough to slow it down safely. Orbital spacecraft return at such high velocities that they require heat shields to protect them.

The feathered design has already proven itself in previous SpaceShipTwo test flights. During one test in September 2011, the spacecraft’s pilots briefly lost control of the vehicle while gliding down to Earth, but regained stability by moving the tails into the feathered configuration.

During Friday’s flight, the pilots normally would have deployed the feather when the space plane had reached a speed of Mach 1.4 (1.4 times the speed of sound) during descent, but the copilot Michael Alsbury unlocked the rudders early, when SpaceShipTwo was going Mach 1.0, according to NTSB Acting Chairman Christopher Hart. That action alone should not have been enough to pivot the tails upright, however, because neither pilot took the further step of turning the feather handle to actually move them, Hart said. Somehow, the tails rotated upward anyway, and the increase in drag at this point in the flight proved disastrous.

It is now clear that the Virgin Galactic SpaceShip Two was torn apart by aerodynamic forces after the ship entered the “feathered” “reentry” mode while still in powered flight beginning its vertical ascent to whatever maximum altitude the mission had planned. The hybrid engine worked as planned, and survived the destruction of the craft.

We can conclude with some confidence that what happened was that very early in the powered flight of SS2 when the ship was still at the breakaway altitude – 30,000 feet or so – the locking bar that keeps the “feathers” from swiveling was released. The ship was at something above Mach 1 at 30,000 feet.

This is at about ¼ atmospheric density at sea level so call it 250 millibars pressure, and the ship is moving above Mach 1. It is not clear why the feathers, which were now free from constraint, would rotate, but SS1 was designed to be a shuttlecock when the feathers are deployed, and to remain aerodynamically stable while moving through the atmosphere in that condition. The control surfaces on the feathers are presumably designed that way, and apparently, so soon as the feathers were free to rotate, they did so.

This would rotate SS2 to try to fly with its belly to the direction of air resistance, making for the stable shuttlecock attitude as the ship falls into the atmosphere at what I have been told is a velocity of Mach 1.4 or so; but note that in that situation the engine would be off, having burned all its fuel to get SS2 to altitude above 100,000 feet. Unfortunately, the engine, was still working, and would be trying to push the ship forward nose first, not at a high angle of attack. The resulting stress would be resolved by tearing the ship apart while the engine continued to thrust. What angle of attack it would now resume (so long as the engine continued to operate) isn’t easy for me to visualize, and I don’t know how long the engine ran, but by then SS2 was no longer under control. One observer has told me that “pieces fell off and then it came down like a lawn dart.”

I am appalled to hear that NTSB estimates it will take them more than a year to complete their report, and meanwhile any replacement of SS2 will not be allowed to fly. It’s pretty clear that this was an accident easily prevented, either by better control design – I’d be glad to do the human factors engineering if asked, but there are surely plenty of engineering psychologists with more recent experience than mine – coupled with better operations instructions. We can speculate on why the copilot – who perished in the crash – unlatched the bar that keeps the feathers secure, but we can be pretty sure no one will ever make that mistake again.

NTSB should issue the report by the end of the year so that Sir Richard Branson can get to work replacing SS2 and getting Virgin Galactic back on schedule. SS2 was never going to be a pathway to suborbital flight. It won’t get us to Tokyo in two hours, nor will any of its descendants. But it will give us operational experience in near earth space. A ship harbor is supported by harbor sightseeing cruises as well as by ocean liners.

2300. Alaskan polls close with Republicans ahead in the Senate race there.  The Republicans will have at least 52 Senators, and have gained 12 seats n the House. The country has repudiated Hope and Change and The One You’ve Been Waiting For.  Now it is up to the Republicans to show they can actually accomplish something.

Before that, there may be a Constitutional crisis, as Obama attempts to use his Executive powers.  He may try an amnesty move, and he will almost certainly try for a series of judicial and executive appointments while he can count on a Senate majority.  This will not sit well with many.  November, December, and early January may be very interesting times, and after that there will still be the Executive Powers.

“Do we falsify the resume? Yes, we do. We call it ‘spicing of the resume’.”

<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/28/-sp-jobs-brokers-entrap-indian-tech-workers>

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Roland Dobbins

It’s late and the election is over.  Time now to devise an actual program. It is not clear that the establishment Republicans know how to do that, but we can hope.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.