Gift To The Future
The Plan
There are however tricky aspects of the plan that are considered in the following technical sections.
The World as a whole cannot move wealth into the future through money.
Many systems behave with very exact determinism. The circling planets and a sphere rolling down an incline were examples that attracted applied mathematical treatment in the early days of modern science. When it became apparent that humans were systems built from the same stuff as inanimate objects it came to be thought that the behaviour of humans must be exactly determined. If you could know the exact state of the person then that persons responses could be exactly calculated. This was interpreted to mean that people don't have free will.
Then came the quantum revolution. Systems don't have exact state. The state of a system and its evolution are only determined statistically, not exactly. This was seized on by some as restoring free will.. This never made any sense to me.
Instead of mapping out a persons exact future, we can instead only map out the probability of all possible futures. Or if you prefer the multi-worlds interpretation then we can map out all the person's futures and how frequently each occurs. It is a mystery to me why anyone feels that this bestows any more free will than the more exact Newtonian determinism.
The problem of free will comes from the intersection of the ideas of science with the idea of an infinite God. God is envisaged as being able to do infinite amounts of calculation at infinite speeds. If we remove the idea of an infinite God then the problem of free will disappears.
Lets suppose that we wish to solve the problem at the heart of the free will issue. We wish to enter the state of a person into some computing device and extract information about the future behaviour of that person. If a person was as simple as a perfect sphere rolling down an incline then we would expect an easy and definitive result.
One possible way to address the problem is to make an exact copy of the person and follow the behaviour of that copy. Effectively we are using a human as a calculating device giving back information about human behaviour. A key question is: can we do better? Can we build a simpler system which will predict the behaviour of the person. Science now understands the butterfly effect: where in unstable systems small changes to small parts rapidly expand their effect to alter the macro state of the total system. Mathematically we now also understand that most information, such as the information describing the state of a person, is incompressible -- it can't be described by a simpler system.[1]
It thus seems overwhelmingly likely that you can't build a simpler system to determine the evolving state of a person. What this means is that the only effective way to find out what a person will do in a given situation is to put that person in the situation and see what they do. To rephrase that:
Observing what a person does is the only way to find out what that person will do.
To me this expresses the fact that the person has free will. The person's actions are not "determined" in any physically meaningful sense.
There is a problem with this interpretation. It also applies to hurricanes and bacterium. Clearly a hurricane doesn't have free will because it doesn't have will at all. A becterium, like a person, does act purposefully to decrease local entropy. If you don't want to allow that a bacterium has free will then the next step up is to creatures which have specialized cells used for decision processes. It seems unlikely that this is a hard break. Probably as soon as there is some cell differentiation then some cells are more concerned with decision and others less. And from there to people there is no clear cut point where we could reasonably divide those with free will from those without.
Sadly even the break between life and non-life is not that clear cut. Perhaps we are forced to the straight forward view that some things have more will than others. Will is always free will because the extent to which a systems actions are predictable by a simpler system is also the extent to which we would not identify something as really displaying will at all. We thus return happily to the sensible view that prevailed before the imaginary monster of determinism arrived on the scene.
[1] somebody, probably Chaitin, proved "nearly all information is incompressible" or something like that.
Overview
The current financial crisis is not understood correctly, and the proposed solutions are thus incorrect.The crisis is caused by the inability of the modern economic system to deal with a declining economy. The declining economy is an expected consequence of the Energy Crisis. The fact that oil production is increasingly incapable of keeping up with the demands of a growing economy is the first phase of the Energy Crisis. Later phases will be even worse unless we prepare now.
The Crisis is not about confidence, it is about real underlying problems that need to be addressed. The desire of people to take steps to prepare for the future is correct. The desire of governments to restart business as usual is wrong. People prepare by saving money. This is not the correct way for society as a whole to respond.
This document will mention many actions by society that might contribute to a solution. There is not enough leeway for us to go down many wrong paths. We need to make decisions based on hard-headed numerical calculation and vigorous open debate. We need to minimize decisions based on sectional interests and hidden agendas.
We need to accept that there will be a period of greater central control of the economy, and greater public ownership of economic assets. A Republican administration in the US has found that it needs to acquire an insurance company, so this should be obvious. It needs to be done in a more organized way. We need to plan for Long Crisis Socialism, not just do one ad hoc nationalization after another.
The Crisis will be marked by oscillations between periods of decline and deflation, and periods of economic revival and inflation. We need a better way of dealing with deflation. Current proposals to combat deflation by printing money and spending it randomly will work out badly, particularly if politicians get their hands on the money without oversight.
We are going to be short of expertise for many things we need to do. We are going to have to proceed bravely using intelligence and knowledge, as we do in wartime. The Internet makes knowledge accessible, and is a key tool.
According to the statistics we have enjoyed 60 years of nearly uninterrupted economic growth. Surely the middle class has benefited enormously from that? Let's compare the median American 2 child family between 1972 and 2006. In inflation adjusted terms the 2006 family spends significantly less on food, on clothes, on appliances. However they spend 70% more on housing. Does this mean they live in a big new McMansion? No only richer folk do that. Our median couple live in a fractionally bigger house, 6.1 rooms instead of 5.8, but it is 20 years older. The 2006 couple is less likely to have health insurance. The other new cost is education for pre-school and then for college. The significant fall in wealth is despite the fact that in 2006 it is much more likely that both parents work, even with very young children. The two jobs necessitates 2 cars. The final straw is this: in 1972 our median couple was saving 11% of their income. In 2006 it is -1%. Our 2006 family is gradually sinking into debt at the rate of 1% of income per year.
America is, in fact, poorer in many ways than it was in 1972. The reason is that 1972 was the peak of US domestic oil production. Since then an increasing amount of oil has come in from the global oil market, with wealth pouring out in return. But wait, a lot of the outgoing money isn't spent, and returns to America in loans. A giant financial industry grows up, skimming off enormous wealth while selling the white powder of debt to the increasingly impoverished American middle class. It was in fact a giant Ponzi scheme, dependent on new borrowing to prevent a credit collapse. Then the world as a whole hit peak oil in the 2005-2008 period. The resultant oil price spike pricked the debt Ponzi-like scheme. The economic collapse continues as this is written (Dec 2008), with no end in sight.
Society needs to make massive changes in basic infrastructure. It is abundantly clear that the current capitalist financial system is going to fail to support this work. We don't have the resources to get this work done while preserving the extravagant frivolous lifestyle of the rich. And indeed we can see that the rich have not been making the constructive contribution to our society that has been claimed and which might justify their privileges. How the middle class responds politically will determine how we come out of this crisis in 20 years time. We can go through a period of socialism and planning to get the job done, then transition back to an improved free market system that is ponzi-proof and doesn't require the current excesses of social inequality. Or we can just let the crisis play out with endless unplanned government interventions supporting the rich, and finally emerge with the massive social inequality that prevailed before the Industrial Revolution. The middle class is big, and waking it up is not easy, but that is the only route to change we can believe in.
Socialism is a dirty word in much of the West, but even Republican America is doing ad hoc nationalizations now. What we need is serious well-planned socialism. I commend Mike Moore's plan to socialize the American car industry for the duration of the crisis, but it needs to be done in a much wider planning context.
We'll start by trying to understand The Crisis before getting back to solutions and how to get there.
The first thing to understand is money. Money is certainly funny stuff, and our understanding of it is rather coloured by the way it used to be a redeemable stand-in for some physical stuff (typically gold). As it currently operates money does two things well, and is pressed into service for some other things which it does less well, particularly in volatile times.
The things money does well are:
Act as a medium of exchange to avoid the inconvenience of barter;
Provide a measurement of the relative value of things at a point in time.
Money is not so good at providing a comparison of value across time. This is not just because of inflation and deflation, but because the relative values of things change, so that inflation and deflation are not well defined: they only make sense if you know exactly what basket of goods and services you are considering, and typically the basket that makes sense at one time is incorrect for a different time.
Money is used by people and organizations to move wealth into the future. We put dollars into a suitcase under the bed, and spend it at a later time. It seems as if the money in the suitcase is a magical store of value, but that is very misleading. What actually happens is this: when you put the money in the suitcase you take it out of circulation. This reduces the amount of money chasing the same amount of goods. This causes a small amount of deflation, making everybody else holding dollars minutely richer. Then when you get the money out of the suitcase and put it back into circulation, that money acquires its value by causing inflation and taking a small amount of value from all the other circulating money.
It is important to see that this process, which makes it possible to move wealth into the future through money, only works for entities embedded in a relatively stable wider environment. Society as a whole can't move wealth into the future through money. We'll come back to this point later. Real wealth isn't money, it is useful physical stuff, and knowledge and expertise. Some of it can be moved into the future, but most loses some or all of its value in the process.
There is a real economy out there with real goods and services and activities. One needs to think clearly about that, and not think too much about money. That's what we'll be trying to do in this document.
The prosperity of the modern world has been built on cheap fossil energy, starting with coal for the Industrial Revolution. This fossil fuel is running out much more rapidly than estimates from official geological sources. Oil, and particularly cheap good quality oil, is evidently running out first. Even when the price was recently very high it was not possible to expand supply. Demand is now down because of the worldwide economic meltdown, but we are still using up this finite resource at a great rate. By the time demand recovers, the maximum available oil production rate will not be able to reach the plateau that we've seen from 2005 to mid 2008. It is almost certain that the peak of oil production is behind us and a long and bumpy decline lies ahead. The core job of governments over the next 20 years is to manage that decline and optimize the changeover to other sources of energy. More on that later.
This document will assume that we've passed peak oil, with peak natural gas and coal to follow within a decade or two. If you don't agree with this then what follows will describe a future rather than a current problem. That would be great. There would be time to prepare and possibly avoid any monumental economic catastrophe. But make no mistake: there has to be an end to exponentially rising consumption of finite resources (in this case fossil fuels), and there will be something like a bell shaped curve, with a peak followed by decline.
The last 60 years have been the age of Oil, and the clearest indicator of that is how closely the world's economic production has tracked up and down with oil production. It makes no sense to ask which causes which. We saw how quite small reductions in oil production during previous oil shocks lead to matching economic declines. Most of the time we've seen the reverse, with a rising world economy demanding more oil, and until recently getting it.
The world's economic infrastructure, particularly transport, is tuned to oil. The economy will decline with oil production, though at times it won't be clear which is leading and which is following. As we switch away from oil, the economy will eventually decouple. We need to make sure that happens sooner rather than later. Some Peak Oil commentators think that this won't happen until there is something like a complete collapse of civilization. I don't believe that, but I do think the problem is very serious, and how bad things eventually get will be determined by the quality of our response now. If there was a break in the continuous thread of industrial civilization, then, with all the easily accessible resources used up, our descendants would have a much tougher time rebuilding an industrial civilization than our ancestors had in building it. Quite possibly there will be no second chance.
Those likening the current economic problems to a tsunami are more correct than they realize. The characteristic of a tsunami is that a sudden change in the ocean floor requires the ocean to make a matching change. But it can't make the change across the whole ocean instantly. Instead it makes a much larger change locally, and that change is communicated to the rest of the ocean in a series of waves. Suppose there is a sudden uplift in a part of the ocean floor. Then instead of lifting the whole ocean a minute amount, instead it lifts the water just above the uplift by a lot. The top of that water is then higher than the surrounding ocean and collapses outwards as a spreading wave. It collapses so fast that it overshoots downwards creating a local trough at the scene of the uplift. This then follows the spreading wave with a following spreading trough. And so on, so that we get the series of peaks and troughs that characterize the tsunami.
Something similar happened during the recent rise in the oil price. The underlying dislocation was the sudden appearance of an unbridgeable gap between the demand for oil at the prevailing price and the available supply at that price, and indeed supply was unable to rise at any price. There was a need to reduce demand to match supply. But it was impossible to reduce demand in a uniform way across the whole economy, since so much activity was predetermined by existing contracts and unavoidable use. So the bits of the oil demand that were able to reduce needed to be hit extra hard. The price had to go up enough to stop vacation and other optional driving across the world, and other easily modified behaviour. To do this the oil price overshot upwards by a lot. At the prices that were reached, many companies were the living dead, continuing only on momentum and hope and existing contracts.
The
effects
of the high price spread out like a wave, touching
enterprises that aren't obviously much affected by the oil price. At
the time of writing (December 2008) the economy is in free-fall. It has
already dropped
enough so that there is no shortage of oil, but it has much further
down to go before it rebounds. When it does recover it will once
again rise enough to hit declining oil production, the oil price will
again soar, and a new episode of economic collapse will start. These are the waves of the Peak Oil Tsunami.
The future promises to actually be messier than the picture above suggests. Jeremy Grantham, chairman at Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo, an institutional money manager, said recently: "The global economy gives a good impression of having run at top speed into a brick wall". It is doubtful if we will get up that head of steam again. So the next time we will run into peak oil at a slower speed, with some parts of the world economy going well, and others less well. The price break out will be less dramatic and the crash less catastrophic. Maybe we'll ride the wave down the slope for a while instead of wiping out.
Many think that the economic meltdown is just a result of problems in the financial system. It is certainly hard to disentangle these issues, but we'll try.
In a barter economy, if you wanted to save for the future then you'd acquire durable stuff that would be useful later or exchangeable later. In a money society we like to save money. But money is funny stuff. If someone saves money then someone else has to go in to debt, to balance it out. Maybe you think they could just put it in a suitcase under the bed, but that would cause deflation and the central bank would end up creating money to lend to balance it out, aiming, as they do, for 2-3 percent inflation.
Unfortunately the world is cursed with some very determined savers. This includes the Chinese government and, most relevantly to us, some of the major oil producers. Hasn't it been a cosy deal. They send us oil and we send them bits of paper: dollar bills, bonds, equities. Much of this paper is turning out to be worthless. A huge financial industry grew up to recycle oil money back into the Western economies as loans. Hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, was siphoned off as our enthusiastic savers were connected to ever more dubious borrowers. “You mean I can live in this house for nearly nothing for 2 years, then walk away when you put the interest rate up?”; “Yep”. Then the lenders borrowed more money using those mortgages as collateral. Wow.
Still, no real wealth is destroyed by this chicanery. A lot of wealth has ended up in the wrong hands. The fact that banks and other financial institutions (and even countries) are insolvent is a real problem, but can be fixed, as we are seeing.
The real problem is that we have a declining economy and our economic system is not designed to handle that correctly. The oil price overshoot was always going to lead to an economic (and oil price) crash. But the management of the crash is incorrect. In particular allowing deflation is disastrous.
The prices of houses and other fixed assets are declining. The prices of commodities are falling. This is deflation. It hasn't made its way to the supermarket shelves yet, so official CPI figures are still registering inflation. That's a good reason why governments need to change their way of identifying inflation/deflation so that they get on to the problem sooner.
The combination of economic decline with deflation is disastrous for many reasons. With total output declining, wages need to go down in real terms. Deflation means that wages are rising in real terms, and this can be very hard to renegotiate. The result is rapidly rising unemployment and companies going broke. Another problem is that companies are unwilling to sell assets preferring to leave them on the balance sheet at an inflated price, thus concealing the loss.
When we have a forced economic decline (and we need to get used to that) then we would like to have that run smoothly, with everyone getting poorer together. Deflation prevents that, causing the economy to seize up. Deflation is actually easy to fix, but the important thing is to do it in a way that addresses the underlying problems rather than the symptoms.
It is crucial that independent central banks, not politicians, address deflation, just as they have the job of preventing inflation. The solution to deflation is to print money and spend it. However it should be done in ways that (a) are reasonably fair and automatic; and (b) is to a large extent reversible when inflation reappears. It is also sensible for the government to requisition some of the printed money to spend addressing the underlying structural problems which lead to the economic decline.
Printing money is a tax. It is used by all governments in war time because it is so easy to collect. It is a tax on people holding money and on lenders. Because it is a tax, the central banks should provide the printed money to government for spending when there is appropriate tax legislation. Other than that it should be constrained to spend the money in an automatic way that is reversible. In America the Fed buys up outstanding government bonds. Australia doesn't have any such, and I think even America may not be able to buy enough. Also pumping money into the bond market is a very indirect way of getting it into the general economy. I think the questions of how to reversibly spend the money needs to be considered more. My instinct tells me that the right approach is for the central bank to buy durable stuff that it can expect to sell when the economy picks up. Why? Because this is what an individual in a pre-money society would do to prepare for the future.
In our current crisis Governments need to spend some of the printed money on infrastructure to address the underlying problems, but this will turn into a feeding frenzy of bad decisions if governments are allowed to spend the printed money without the consent and oversite of the legislature.
We've seen how reaching Peak Oil requires some process to destroy demand. More important than demand destruction is capital destruction. Here I am referring to real capital: useful physical assets, knowledge and expertise.
When we move to a new technology we destroy the capital associated with previous technologies. A recent example is the move to mobile phones. Suddenly all those pay phones weren't making any money. And it wasn't just the pay phone booths that had lost value: behind that was a whole lot of back office equipment and human expertise. Of course we absorbed that particular capital loss with no widespread pain. Switching from an oil based infrastructure will be extremely painful, even if the replacement is just as good. And it won't be.
The Great Depression of the 30s has been portrayed as being about nothing substantial: just economic mismanagement by Government and Central Banks. However looking back we see that it was a time of enormous change in the underlying infrastructure of the Western world. Energy moved towards electricity, oil and natural gas. Transport moved from horses to motorized vehicles. Communication moved to the telephone. There was massive capital destruction, and the need to build new and different capital. Having said that we can see that things would have worked better if governments had not allowed deflation and perhaps they could have done more to help get the new infrastructure up and usable.
In our current crisis, the capital destruction caused by moving transport away from oil is not just the obvious: vehicles, service stations, mechanic expertise, airports, ... . It also includes a lot of things built on the assumption of cheap transport, particularly the Western world's sprawling suburbs. When we subsequently move away from fossil fuel for electricity generation, that will also destroy the value of a lot of energy infrastructure.
Getting the financial issues sorted out will reduce the pain and duration of the transition. Addressing the underlying energy problem is more important.
The initial problem is the decline in amount and quality of oil produced. Liquid energy has been particularly important for transport. We need to transition as smoothly as possible to alternatives. Boats and trains can transport for much less energy than road vehicles. Train lines can be electrified. Larger vehicles and boats can be run on compressed or liquefied natural gas. Cars can run on batteries or hybrid engines. Large ships could return to coal or even move to nuclear.
This is a huge change in infrastructure. Government will have to lead. Good decisions need to be taken about what to do and in what order.
Following uncomfortably soon we will see the worldwide peak and then decline of all fossil fuels. This is hard to believe in Australia where we have a lot of coal and gas, however there is no doubt that we will sell this, at least to our traditional friends, in an increasingly dangerous world. So the world, including Australia, needs to prepare for a post carbon economy. Of course this is pleasing for Australia which is predicted to be badly affected by climate change. Our chances of co-operation on reducing use of fossil fuels was never good, but it will turn out that the world has no choice.
The bad news is that all our non-carbon options, nuclear and various sorts of renewable, have significant up front capital costs before they then deliver energy with low marginal cost. The exception is biofuel which doesn't seem to deliver net energy at all, and will not be considered here.
As with transport, the government is going to have to take the lead in a huge capital investment during very difficult economic times. There is no room for spin, pork or emotional consideration in determining where to put that effort.
It seems as if there are many inputs to our modern life, but all of them can be replaced with enough energy. If you want fresh water then energy can desalinate sea water and energy can transport the water.
If we look at any physical thing shaped by human intention or any human activity, then we can see that it was constructed using existing infrastructure plus energy. If we look at that infrastructure we can see that it, in turn, was constructed with previous infrastructure and energy. This can conceivably be traced backwards to when there was no infrastructure shaped by man at all. Energy is everything.
There is one other essential ingredient: Suitably educated humans to utilize the infrastructure.
Energy and appropriately educated humans utilize existing infrastructure to generate directly useful stuff plus new infrastructure:
Note that our productive infrastructure is effectively decreasing
because it is tuned to an energy mix which is changing.
So total output is going to be reduced till that is fixed. To fix it
we need to devote a larger proportion of output to building new
infrastructure. So that is going to reduce the amount of useful
output even more. And then our productive infrastructure is not
optimized for its new job of building this new infrastructure, which
reduces its effective size still more.
With the Industrial Revolution, we learned to utilize an easily expandable supply of cheap energy. This leads to ever more sophisticated infrastructure, and a huge demand for educated workers to drive that infrastructure. The relative shortage of workers drove up wages and drove the price of energy down. In the following diagram the icons are set so that a typical activity requires an equal number of people (workers) and barrels (energy):
Because there was plenty of energy, energy prices were driven way down. The fact that energy prices got off the floor over the last few years shows that we aren't in this position any more.
If we get to the point where there is a significant shortage of energy then we might go back to the way things were before the Industrial Revolution, with wages driven to the floor:
This future destruction of the middle class is an additional reason that the middle class needs to wake up politically now. With this sobering possibility in the distance, we will turn to the consideration of what needs to be done.
There is this idea that the economic issue is lack of confidence. This is demonstrated in Australia by both sides of politics accusing the other of not talking up the economy. Nothing is more destructive of confidence than lies. Nothing would do more for confidence than publicly identifying the real underlying issue, explaining what is the best we can expect under the circumstances, having a plan to get that best possible result. People will get behind that, if the plan clearly identifies how it shares the pain as evenly as possible.
We don't only need more truth from government to people. We need more information available about what people and organizations are doing. We need more transparency.
The more transparency there is, then the better decisions the markets and governments will take. This becomes much more important in a long period of decline. People are going to be asked and required to make sacrifices. They need to be able to see that everyone else is also making sacrifices.
Since we need to make massive infrastructure changes at a time of economic weakness, we can't afford to make mistakes about this. We can't have politicians picking the most articulate advocate, or the most politically advantageous option. We need independent scientific and engineering teams with strong mathematical skills to conduct an open and vigorous evaluation of the costs and benefits of different options. This has to include substantial powers to investigate the claims of companies with a commercial interest in government decisions. A nice name for this investigation team might be "The Ministry of Truth": reminding us of the novel "1984" and the destructive power of spin.
People are clearly showing that they want to save to prepare for a difficult future. Meanwhile governments want their citizens to get back to normal spending patterns to get the economy back to business as usual. The people are right. We must go into “prepare for the future” mode. But governments can't prepare for the future by saving money, except by the beggar-my-neighbour tactic of saving some other safe currency, and indeed there is no such currency.
To prepare for the future we have to stop spending money on swimming pools, SUVs, eating out, etc. Instead the community as a whole has to spend on new infrastructure for a changed future.
To encourage people to save, and to channel those saving where they are needed it seems that we can learn from war time experience, and issue “Energy Crisis Bonds”. These would logically safeguard the value of the investment in real terms, as a proportion of the nation's wealth. During the period of deflation there will also be money available from unfunded spending (printed money) and that will also be available for building infrastructure -- preferably with the consent and oversight of the legislature.
Clearly switching the working population to different activities is going to cause a lot of dislocation, with massive unemployment having to be absorbed into infrastructure construction. The government will naturally make more labour-intensive infrastructure development choices, because of the substantial cost in unemployment benefits that is already effectively committed for each worker.
The second phase of the energy crisis will be the decline of natural gas. This will not hit the world uniformly since natural gas is less likely to be transported. The infrastructure for transporting gas is being built, but will not be adequate for a fully global gas market for a long time: so most places without gas will be forced to go to phase 3 early. Natural gas does make a useful replacement as a transport fuel, even though the handling issues are more difficult and potentially dangerous.
The third phase is the decline in coal which will start within 10 or 20 years. We are used to hearing that coal will last for hundreds of years. However already we see that the good quality coal and the easily accessible coal is disappearing. While there is a lot of coal out there, it is not much use if it takes nearly as much energy to get it out and prepare it for use as you get out of it by burning it. The UK provides an example of what we might see with coal production: estimates of coal reserves in the UK were still being given as decades, until just before the coal industry collapsed in the 80s. We also hope to close down coal mining earlier than necessary in order to leave as much coal in the ground as possible, to reduce the level of global warming.
Peak coal is the most important. If we aren't well on the way to non-fossil energy sources by then, the consequences will be drastic. The timing of peak coal is very uncertain. There are other important reasons to want to leave coal in the ground. So moving to carbon-free electricity generation must be given very high priority, nearly as great as the priority we give to dodging the bullet of peak oil by moving to transport options that don't depend on oil derived fuel.
The key thing to understand about phase 3 is that electricity is nice for some things, but it isn't convenient for all things. A lot of energy conversions will have to be done, a lot of batteries will have to be built. You can't just add the current electric energy and the current oil and gas energy use and say "that is how much electric energy we will need". Instead we will need much more than that, just to stay in the same place. This at a time when it is hard to get any sort of power station built at all. Governments are going to have to ride roughshod over local objections to every sort of power station.
If all countries put a huge effort to move away from oil dependence for transport, it won't come soon enough to prevent real problems the next time the world economy gets going again. But the sad fact is that some will make less effort, and oil exporting nations may make no effort at all. So the countries that do make preparations need to do even more:
Normally it doesn't make sense to describe yourself as a Crisis Socialist since it is only applies in temporary circumstances. This time it's different. The Energy Crisis is going to be a very long crisis, lasting decades, with other environmental and resource limitation issues threatening to extend the crisis. The current financial crisis is the first phase. Ad hoc crisis socialism is happening everywhere, without any understanding of the nature of the crisis. We need to do Crisis Socialism properly: understand the problem, work out what needs to be done, and plan so that things are done in the right order. When we get past the crisis we can denationalize the socialized activities.
Socialism only works when people are in the mood to sacrifice for the good of the community. It works in crises. Preserving the people's good will and support is the essential ongoing requirement. This can only be done with a high level of trustworthy transparency.
If, as many have speculated, the recent increases in energy prices are already enough for us to meet our carbon emission targets, then there will be more emission certificates issued than are actually needed to meet our targets. So the market price of emission certificates will rapidly fall to zero, and there won't be any additional burden on the public. The Garnaut scheme is sufficiently flexible that we don't have to worry about whether it might be unnecessary. We must, however, look more deeply into the question of how peak oil and its related problems interact with carbon mitigation.
Some of the people who predicted the timing of Peak Oil so exactly, starting with M. King Hubbert in 1956, have also looked at natural gas and coal. Their deduction is that there is much less than is commonly supposed. The people who said until recently that there was no chance of an oil shortage, are the same people who say that natural gas and coal will last a very long time. Some of those who have been proved right on oil, believe that we will see the world peak of natural gas in 10 years and the peak of coal production in 25 years. Even the lowest scenario for carbon emissions in the IPCC report will never materialize, so the world temperature rise won't exceed 2 degrees (barring unmodelled positive feedbacks). It would however be nice if we could make the temperature rise even less.
The whole thrust of the Garnaut report is on reducing the rate of emissions worldwide to be aligned with the ability of nature to absorb that carbon. We can now see that that isn't going to be a problem. From a point of view of reducing the impact of carbon emissions the issue moves to this: As we move inevitably to a post fossil fuel era, can we leave some carbon in the ground? Clearly if, as I am convinced, those predictions are correct about peak natural gas and peak coal, then the world needs to move very rapidly to a post carbon economy. If we sensibly leave a bit of margin for error in that change, by moving more quickly than is entirely necessary, then we will, as a consequence, leave some carbon in the ground and suffer less climate change.
Garnaut encourages Australia to take the lead in mitigating climate change, since the modelling suggests that we will be the worst sufferers. Other countries are less negative about warming. Russians are publicly licking their lips. The Canadians are too polite. Many countries are too poor to consider any sacrifices. Garnaut himself has expressed pessimism about the whole enterprise. But the world has to respond to peak fossil fuel to lead us to a post carbon energy environment. If we do that as fast as we possibly can then we're still more likely to be late than early. If we're early and manage to leave some carbon in the ground that will be a bonus. If you're worried about climate change but don't actually believe that fossil fuel will peak, I'd still urge support for a world wide campaign to address peak fossil fuel, because that is more likely to actually move the world off carbon than appealing to moral sentiments and good will.
The aims of climate mitigation and overcoming peak fossil fuel are better aligned than they seem to be. Let's look at the two most obvious conflicting cases.
To me it is clear that the core energy infrastructure for most of the 21st century will have to be nuclear power. If it is inevitable, then let us get there as soon as possible and leave some carbon in the ground. There are many wild claims about this. Some say it is not price competitive. In that case it won't happen, and a lot of dispute will be unnecessary. With modern reactors the available uranium and thorium will last a long time, and there need not be a problem of very long term waste. Nor are modern reactors useful for making real atomic bombs. It would also be possible to site nuclear reactors in safe places and generate other fuel in various ways: e.g. hydrogen from water. Australia would be such a safe place, geologically and politically.
The question of whether Nuclear Power is necessary or not is one of fact. There are many other important questions that need to be answered. We need to get past politicians believing the most plausible experts and pandering to voters special interests. We need open vigorous expert well funded impartial investigations of the facts by people with mathematical skill. As Professor David MacKay says: we need numbers not adjectives, modelling not arm-waving. Prof MacKay is head of the Inference group in the Physics Department at Cambridge. I urge everyone to read his book on sustainable energy which is available free on the Internet at withouthotair.com.
We are running out of fossil fuel. This is the immediate problem that we need to address. Luckily doing so will address climate change more effectively than worldwide cooperation and goodwill were ever likely to do.
Huppert predicted in 1956 that US oil production would peak in 1970. He was derided but was almost exactly right. He predicted world production would peak in 2000. It is currently plateauing, only slightly late. However nobody seems to talk about a very big difference between US peaking and the world peaking. When the US peaked, it started importing, but the price wasn't much affected. When the world peaks the price goes up, potentially quite a lot, as we see. This means that a lot of things start to happen:
America will pull itself out of the recession by energetically going back to making real things and doing real things, not just shuffling money around. In particular they will drive the development of the energy industry. One only has to look at how quickly they ramped up ethanol production given a little incentive. In particular I expect them to lead the push to nuclear energy, thermal solar energy, and electric transport.
There is a vast oil-based transportation infrastructure. We can't turn it around on a dime. Oil for transport will continue to dominate for the next 15 years even though the consequences of expensive transport will be horrible:
Prices are already at the point where nuclear energy and solar thermal energy are competitive with coal. The demand for coal for coal-to-liquid will make it even more expensive. So we can move beyond a carbon based economy starting now. This is an unbelievably huge project. It requires us, the whole world, to put a very large fraction of our productive resources into it, at a time when our productive resources will be severely constrained by the growing cost of oil (shortage of oil). But we have to do it, because if we haven't got there when the oil/gas/coal runs out then the bootstrapping process to get back to prosperity will be very hard. It will be done because, with high energy prices, there is money to be made by doing it.
Many people think that catastrophe cannot be averted. Certainly it is hard to have faith in politicians:
Which brings us to global warming. The good news is that there is not enough carbon in the ground (that can be extracted for less energy than they produce) to cause the extreme CO2 rises sometimes considered. It can't go over 500 ppm. The bad news is that the inertia of the vast petrol/diesel transport infrastructure means that we will use more carbon and generate more CO2 than economic fundamentals require (given nuclear energy). In particular there is no way to stop a lot of coal-to-oil production. Even if Australia didn't do it, and we didn't allow our exported coal to be used for it, still our exported coal would just displace other coal that was used for it. Better if it is done as cleanly as possible in Australia.
So there can't be reductions in CO2 emissions between now and 2020. Impossible. The serious economic problems that will be faced between now and then will make extra carbon charges impossible to maintain, and also unnecessary as the natural price of carbon will be enough to encourage everyone who can get off it to do so. The government's job is to plan and to push ahead of the market. Build nuclear and renewable energy power stations, and sell them. Build railways and ship docking. Get into ship building.
Beyond 2020 there will be huge reductions. 90% by 2050 is guaranteed. We just hope the reductions will be because of a smooth and prosperous switch to nuclear and renewable energy, and not because of global economic collapse.
The day is fast approaching when all radio and video will be delivered over the Internet. You pick a radio station by clicking an icon on your PDA. As we see on YouTube and many other places, this opens things up to the amateur contributor.
Another trend we see is the return to live music. Why do we have shows like "Australian Idol"? Because the whole point of music production is for the performers to show off their natural talent and for the audience to evaluate the performers. Music produced by electronic trickery in studios is increasingly recognized as comparatively empty.
It is possible to stream live sound over the Internet today. Internode is leading the way in Australia: http://www.internode.on.net/radio/. Many of the network providers can do this very efficiently using multicast. So my idea is to start an internet radio station providing only live music. It would later be split into multiple stations providing different sorts of music.
Initially it would be all free with amateur sound engineers and performers not paid. Later some extra channels would be supported by advertising or require a subscription (or both), and those channels would pay production staff and performers, not to mention management. Initially expenses, including some payment to management, will attempt to be covered by subscribers who will be able to vote on which acts they prefer to hear.
The station announcement between performances is "This is OLM: Only Live Music. We don't believe that recorded music is real music, and now you don't need it because OLM streams live music, produced with analog devices, 24 hours a day. Recording OLM performances is not permitted and detracts from their intentionally transient and contemporary nature. This doesn't prohibit technical aspects of streamed radio transmission such as the necessary cache delay. If you miss something then encourage the performers to do OLM again. And become a paid up subscriber so that you can vote on which performers you want us to feature".
The assertion that only live music is real, is a marketing position. It is designed to annoy and make people talk. Participants don't have to agree with it.
The key to OLM is to broadcast performances from different time zones around the world. This can be as simple as a solo performer with a good quality microphone broadcasting from their own home. However it will be better to broadcast actual live performances from venues. That requires some sound engineering, though these days that can be just multiple microphones feeding into a computer running some sound software.
Obviously OLM needs lots of people around the world. The sort of things one needs to do to achieve this are:
My view is that if some major ISP owner was interested to be part of it then all the technical issues would be addressed. I also think that OLM would attract amateur sound people and musicians willing to work for no payment if the technical issues were sorted out.
Humans are the most amazing thing that has happened in this universe. David Barrow summed it up neatly in the title of his book: "The Universe that Discovered Itself". The idea that the human story should end and be replaced by a superhuman or nonhuman world is something that people are too willing to accept: even otherwise intelligent people.
The first point to make is that there is not a requirement for change to make way for progress. Humans are tool users. Humans with intellectual and communication tools provided by Information and Communication Technologies are not limited in what they can achieve (relative to computers or improved humans).
There is an idea in the populace that when computers pass a certain level of intelligence they will magically acquire motivation. This is not the case. Our motivation comes from our genes. Our genes have motivation but it is not the same as ours. In the simplest example: If I or my identical twin brother is going to drown, then my genes don't care which. Genes give us complex motivation in which the desire to live and the desire to reproduce are only the most trivial parts. But the fact that genes, even in the simplest bacteria or virus, display clear though unconscious motivation shows that motivation is unrelated to intelligence.
Sure we could give our little machines motivation. We might accidentally give them enough motivation to wipe us out. What we couldn't do is give them the sort of subtle motivation which genes supply that keep us striving to understand, to explore and to conquer the universe, while at the same time perpetuating ourselves and living fascinating lives that we turn into literature and other art. In fact I'm certain that any motivation that us junior gods could bestow on our creations would grind to a halt very soon after we became unable to guide it.
And losing the ability to lead is the great danger of this inhuman or partly human world. If people start living for ever then we will quickly lose the input of youth that keeps human society fresh. The replacement of humans with computers and robots in positions of any importance will lead even more quickly to the loss of humanity's spark.
If machines were given motivation that would make them independent of humans then that would be a terrible crime which would hold the seeds of our destruction. Any motivation less than that would be sufficiently weak as to be no motivation in the big scheme of things.
There is no choice to a human future. The hard bit is to understand what that means in a world where many people have ignorant plans to change humanity. Our present life has already acquired features which will drive evolution towards something which is not fully human.
It would be better to tax wealth than income, but that is not easy. It would be better to get more tax from death duties, but that is not popular with voters. It would be particularly nice to raise more tax from criminals. I have a simple plan.
Tax payers have to specify to the tax office their Maximum Estate. When they die, if their estate is larger than their last declared Maximum Estate then that excess goes 100% as tax. So there is a strong incentive for those who want to leave money to set their declared Maximum Estate fairly high.
On the other side of the coin there will be a small tax, less than 1%, on the Maximum Estate value. This is effectively a wealth tax.
Even more importantly there will be a hefty tax on changes to Maximum Estate beyond income. So if your taxable income in a year is $100,000, but your Maximum Estate value goes up by $150,000 then the extra $50,000 that appeared from nowhere will be taxed at something like the maximum income tax rate.
Different people will make different decisions about where to set their Maximum Estate. Some will leave it at 0, effectively leaving all their money to the nation when they die. Others will pay as they go. Either way it will be a very progressive tax that will be effective against criminally acquired wealth.
Firstly: animal liberation and the protection of specific animals from human action, has nothing to do with conservation which is about the protection of species and ecosystems. Indeed animal protection is often at odds with sensible conservation. We don't cull koalas or fruit bats even when they are destroying endangered plants. We don't cull kangaroos but insist on letting them destroy their habitat and then starve to death. We don't allow kangaroo farming, so farmers are forced to continue with sheep and other things that destroy the Australian environment. We need to meet this sentimentality head on when it conflicts with the desire to manage the environment well. And we particularly need to denounce attempts by animal rights people to claim to be conservationists. The idea that the way to save animals is to not kill them is something that appeals to children and we need to forcefully say that habitat loss is the overwhelming cause of the loss of species, ecosystems and diversity. [Which is not to say that there is anything wrong with people pursuing animal welfare, I'm only complaining about those that claim that this activity is conservation.]
A second group think that conservation means conserving the view. So that people who don't want to see windmills on their bit of coast will try to claim to be conservationist.
The third group is opposed to modern life, and fearful of scientific and technological change. They are easily detected by their claim that primitive people are in tune with nature and never destroy their environment. How wrong they are! The greatest ecological disaster in Australian history was the destruction of the megafauna when Aborigines first arrived. Indeed it is impossible to understand ecological management in Australia unless you realise that we can't get back to the natural environment of 50,000 years ago. It is not the case that we can leave nature alone and it will return to a natural state. Instead without megafauna and Aboriginal burning we get fuel build up followed by ecologically disastrous fires.
A fourth group are anti-conservationists. They think that we should only adopt conservation policies when there is no risk to humans, and damn the environment. In particular they favour continuing to burn coal and build dams rather than moving to nuclear power. The environmental impact of blocking the natural flow of rivers and of pumping CO2 into the air is horrific. The environmental affect of nuclear power stations is to create a really effective nature reserve around them. An accident has no negative impact on wildlife. Chernobyl has allowed the native flora and fauna of Ukraine to return. Not that we'd embark on nuclear power if we expected accidents. There is every reason to believe that Australia at least would run such stations very well. And we can quite easily site them far from the madding crowd. And we have just as much uranium as coal. This is something we can do for the world.
The Greens are so heavily infiltrated with fake conservationists that I can't imagine them ever having genuinely environmentalist policies.
Teaching a language is the natural thing to do at pre-school and in the early years of school. Children of that age are all wired up and ready to learn languages. Teaching them other things, like mathematics, is a waste of time. Children who learn non-language subjects at that age don't do any better, all else being equal, than those that don't. But for languages it is the best, and to some extent the last, time in which to do it. The failure of education departments to act on this knowledge over the last twenty years is verging on dereliction of duty.
There is a clear cut choice for a second language that can be taught everywhere: Sign language.
Sign Language
The language of the deaf is a real language. It isn't a variant of English. It has its own grammar and structure, so it fills the role of a second language for children. And adopting it has a lot of important advantages:
Perhaps the most interesting situation where sign language might be useful is in negotiations involving multiple people on each side. I can just imagine the Chinese putting barriers between the seating positions of visiting Australian trade negotiators so that they can't sign to each other under the table during the negotiations.
Sign language is a natural part of the human language armoury. It was famously used between the plains Indians in North America. It is almost certain that sign language preceded spoken language in the human story. This avoids the chicken-egg problem that you don't need a complex vocal system unless you have a complex language and you can't use a complex language without a complex vocal system. The fact that the brain is wired to allow language information to flow through other routes and not just our mouth and ears is the reason that we can read and write.
Summary
Currently we take pre-school and early school children who are all ready to learn languages, but not much else, and we do little to develop them. Let's teach them sign language. The kids of that age will love it and it will have all sorts of later benefits for the children themselves and for society.
Saving is good, but what does it mean? If in the future we will need some grain, then it is wise to save some. If in the future we will need something perishable then maybe we can save something non-perishable that we can swap for the perishable item at that time. We treat money as such a non-perishable item. This works in a small way, for individuals, but not for a whole society.
Suppose I save some money in a suitcase under the bed. That reduces the amount of money in circulation (by a small amount), thus making all the money that is in circulation more valuable (deflation). When I later put the money back into circulation it acquires its value from all the other money in circulation by making that other money fractionally less valuable (inflation). In this way an individual or a group can move wealth into the future through money. Society as a whole can't move wealth into the future through money. This is slightly confused by the fact that an individual country might be able to do it in the context of all other countries. However since there is no global economic control, or global currency, a country can only do it by putting itself at the mercy of some other country, as countries holding US dollars do today.
There is also a problem when too many individuals try to move wealth into the future. In so far as they try to hold money they cause deflation. However governments can't allow that, so more money is put in circulation. The trouble is that this leaves the potential to cause inflation in the hands of consumers, and the government has more trouble taking money out of circulation when inflation starts. The other way people try to move wealth into the future is by buying assets. This leads to bubbles when there is too much money chasing too few assets of genuine long term value.
Money has three roles: as a mechanism for efficient exchange of goods, as a unit of value, and, as discussed above, as a way of moving moving wealth into the future. The first two are related and inseparable. The third doesn't work and gets in the way of the other two, because stored money is always threatening to flood onto markets causing inflation and bubbles.
More on this another day.
We have to thank the Green Left for energetically bringing the issue of Climate Change to our attention. But now that we are starting to understand the problem we need to develop an Economic Rationalist solution. The views of the Green Left on how to solve the problem are not just wrong, they are dangerously wrong.
The message from the Green Left is that we have to sacrifice and suffer. If we suffer enough from higher energy prices from renewable sources, and from reduced energy consumption then that will solve the problem. Suffering is necessary and sufficient, they say. Does this sound familiar? Sacrifice and suffering is what religious leaders have been prescribing to appease the gods from the beginning of humanity. It taps into an instinct to sacrifice for the good of the community. We are all good at pretending to do it, while hoping that others do more. However it is completely irrelevant to solving Climate Change because it is not necessary, and because the sort of sacrifices being proposed, for example by Al Gore at the end of "An Inconvenient Truth", are nowhere near sufficient.
The first mistake is to see the solution in terms of specific regulations, penalties and subsidies. That always creates lots of busy work for government without making real progress on the issue. What we need to do is impose a cost on activities we want to reduce. I'll call that a tax. We want to give money for activities we want to encourage. I'll call that a negative tax. The Carbon Tax Base (CTB) will be the estimated cheapest marginal cost of removing 1 tonne of carbon from the air. Some fraction of the CTB will be applied to fossil fuels as they come out of the ground, and to imported fossil fuel (unless there is an intergovernmental agreement with the source country). The same fraction of the CTB will be paid, as a negative tax, to activities that permanently remove carbon from the air. Turning grassland into forest might be the cheapest way to do this, but it is a one-off and is not renewable. There may be a renewable solution here if the wood is regularly harvested and treated so that it won't rot. There will be in between cases where there is payment for CO2 taken out of the atmosphere (as wood in this case), and the money is repaid as positive carbon tax as the CO2 is returned (by rotting).
This proposal opens up every option to solve the problem. Energy costs are increased, so people will favour activities which use less. Fossil fuel is made less attractive as an energy source relative to alternatives. And finally people can put their minds to ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and get rewarded by that (and the continuing burners of fossil fuel will have an advantage in doing this, since they will have a more concentrated stream of CO2 to work with).
Initially the tax will bring in more than is paid out to those removing CO2. Indeed the aim will be to take 20 years to reach equality. During this period there will be a surplus, but the aim will be for the carbon tax to be revenue neutral. The excess will be returned to the people in the form of a negative poll tax (in other words equally to everyone). This will be quite close to an equitable way of helping people handle the increased costs. It would be silly to return the money in a way that gave more to those who use more energy since that would just subtract from the effect of the carbon tax.
There is basically just one parameter which needs to be adjusted in the scheme: the product of the CTB and a fraction chosen for policy reasons. This would be set by an independant body, following the very successful model of interest rates. The legislation would set Australia's aim for CO2 levels in the atmosphere. The independant body would aim to hit a net rate of emission/removal which would aim to hit the legislated target in about 50 years if all other countries were cooperating. It would work up to that cruising rate over an initial 20 year period.
Carbon Trading is another market based approach to greenhouse emissions. It is a left wing bureaucrats idea of how to do it. It targets the emissions, which need not be fossil fuel derived. It should target the fossil fuel extraction because that all ends up as CO2 eventually, and it is easy to police. Existing schemes don't seem to distinguish between renewable extraction of CO2 and one-off actions like reafforestation (which then needs to be policed to see that it isn't undone). Still this is an international system and the best way for Australia to use it would be to act as a single entity, with our verified CO2 extraction (paid for as negative tax) attracting carbon trading credits for Australia as a whole. We could then use these to encourage other useful activity world wide. And of course we should push for a more sensible international system, and make reciprocal agreements with other countries that are carbon-taxing fossil fuel mining.
The Green Left would say that the aim of combatting climate change is to return the world and its climate to its natural state. This is a terrible idea. With 6 billion mouths to feed, and counting, we need to manage the climate and keep it at an optimal level. Nature is just as capable as humanity of messing up the climate.
If you look at a graph of the world's temperature over the last 100,000 years or so you'll see this little straight bit in the top right. That's 8000 years of stable warm wet climate. Before that it jiggles around all over the place, and nearly always much colder and much drier than it is now. Very unstable, very cold and very dry is the worlds natural state since the age of the glaciers started half a million years ago. It is more important to avoid a return to those normal conditions than it is to avoid global warming. Of course global warming is much more urgent.
There is a lot of misleading comment around associating "warm" with "dry" climate change. Naturally the warmer the ocean is, and the higher the sea level, the more water evaporates, and the more rain that falls eventually. That's why the world's climate is either cold and dry during ice ages, or it is warm and wet during interglacials like the one we are enjoying. The reason the warm-dry combination gets mentioned is that climate change is not uniform. A British study based on simulations claims global warming will make 2/3 of the world wetter and 1/3 drier. However accurate that is, there are reasonable general arguments as well as simulations to suggest that global warming will make the southern half of Australia drier. Outside Australia the concerns about drier conditions seem to be only based on particular simulations and seem to be taken more seriously than they should.
Another popular misconception is that there was this CO2 in the atmosphere, just sitting there at a particular level, then we added more. In fact CO2 moves into and out of the atmosphere at quite a high rate. So, the fact that the level of CO2 has remained quite stable over long periods means that the rates of.CO2 entering and leaving are the same. But it means more than that. The world settled into a stable equilibrium of atmospheric CO2. If the amount of CO2 increases, say from a volcanic erruption, then the processes taking CO2 out of the atmosphere also increase, and similarly any decrease encouraged the processes that put CO2 back. We can imagine the state of the world as a balling rolling on a plane that isn't flat. It will roll down hill, following the course that water would take. Eventually it comes to rest in a depression. Whichever way it is pushed it wants to roll back to the lowest point of the depression.
Continuing our analogy, suppose we give the ball a push in a direction that we might call "higher CO2". Eventually we might push it over the lip of our local depression and the ball might start rolling again looking for a new depression: a new equilibrium point. However there is no guarantee that it will keep rolling in that direction. It might go around and end up in the other direction from the way it was pushed. In other words, a push in the direction of greater warming might tip us into an ice age, though perhaps not as fast as in "The Day After Tomorrow". I've been assuming that the push back force is well behaved like gravity. It might not be and it might force the ball back towards the low point, but then overshoot. In that way it might find a much lower lip that it can easily get over and then keep heading towards the other stable equilibrium that we know exists that puts the world into an Ice Age.
Suppose we set our CO2 target at 350ppm. Perhaps in 40 years the CO2 level will start to fall rapidly. If we've set up a flexible mechanism then that mechanism will react to support the CO2 level. When the carbon tax goes negative then business might go back to those abandoned gas fields and make money just by venting methane.
This plan doesn't involve government telling everyone what to do, it just readjusts economic incentives in the same way that interest rate adjustments do. This plan doesn't involve handing control back to mother nature, instead it takes a necessary step to control her. This plan doesn't involve any necessary sacrifice, it is designed to come in sufficiently slowly that it can leverage ongoing economic growth. These three things might annoy Bob Brown, but that is just a subsidiary benefit. The main point is that we need to solve Climate Change, and only rational economic policies will do it. If we don't do it then the Left will be pleased to take the reins, causing economic mayhem, and failing to address the problem.
My current obsession is workflow, and particularly a workflow-oriented user interface to everything.
Once upon a time computers were expensive and people were (relatively) cheap. So the idea was that people would attend to the computer and keep feeding it. The modern progress bar continues that idea: "here's something to look at while you wait for the computer to finish something". Window systems, and underlying multiprocessing, mean that computers can do more than one thing at one. Instead of looking at the progress bar we go to another window. Now we don't know when the activity is finished except by coming back to it. So we have to remember all the things that we are trying to juggle and keep going back and checking them for progress. So we need a workflow user interface, and what do people use: they use e-mail. That's something they keep looking at and maybe it comes with a notification system. But it is a really bad workflow user interface.
A real workflow user interface lets us know what activities need user input, or want it, or would be willing to receive it. My conception is that activities are organized in a tree and the nodes change colour: green means that this activity can't proceed without input from this user; yellow means the user might push things along, but does not have primary responsibility to do so; orange to red means that the user can only do things that won't affect other players much. For example if the activity is a chess game then the tree node for that activity is green if it is your move and orange if not (since you could resign) and red if the game is over.
Now we don't need a progress bar: the node for that activity will be reddish until it goes back to waiting for us to input. More on this another day.
Wirelessly networked PDAs threaten to become ubiquitous combined with mobile phones. These can hardly afford a multiwindow UI. Also it will be hard for the user to look around for stuff needing attention. Also interaction activities are likely to be the main applications. So for various reasons my workflow user interface is likely to be a good answer.
It must be nice to be Canada. They don't have to go along with the United States' military adventures like Vietnam and Iraq, except when right and World opinion are behind them, as in Korea and Afghanistan. Yet they know that the US can never let anything bad happen to Canada. Australia would love to be in that position. Well we can. More details below, but first some introductory facts.
Australia's proximity to the largest Muslim nation makes us nervous. This is undoubtedly irrational, but the feeling is a potent force in Australian politics. The response is to show slavish friendship to the Americans. The electorates support for our involvement in Iraq is typical. The fact that the war is a disaster doesn't matter. In fact in a funny way it helps. Our message to America is that we support you, right or wrong. However our slavishness is going to start to wear thin with the electorate as the government enacts the provisions of the amusingly named "Free Trade Agreement", like the recent Copyright act that will make nearly every Australian a criminal.
As a practical matter it is not clear that all our attempts to ingratiate ourselves with the Americans will be effective. The American electors have still never heard of us, except for those who think we have something to do with "The Sound of Music". Their political system nearly always picks a state Governor with no foreign policy expertise for President. The Presidency does not adapt to shifting opinion in the way that a parliamentary government does. So it is by no means certain that America will help us when we need them, particularly if America has other problems distracting it at the time.
Fear of our neighbors might be irrational, but one thing that worries me is the nuclear waste that is scattered around the world, often in geologically and politically unstable areas. Personally I would be more comfortable if it was skillfully processed, then buried in our sparsely populated and geologically and politically stable land. One form of processing that would make sense would be to use it in a Thorium reactor. This produces CO2-free energy, and at the same time it reduces the radioactivity of the waste to a two hundred year problem instead of thousands of years. Australia has huge reserves of Thorium.
Indeed I think that we shouldn't be shipping out Uranium (or Thorium) and washing our hands of the waste problem. We should take it back, for everyone's greater safety.
There are lots of reasons why storing nuclear waste is a natural economic activity for our technologically advanced and Uranium exporting nation. But there is a huge additional side benefit. Suddenly we are like Canada. We become a nation that America, and other advanced nations, can not afford to let fall into the hands of the bad guys. We no longer have to follow America into every quagmire. We no longer have to submit to their latest schemes to protect their wonderful Intellectual Property from the depredations of Australian consumers.
This is a plan than can be sold to the Australian voters. It will make the World safer if we can get all that nuclear waste stored in deep and stable granite. And by making the Australian voters feel safer, we can turn Australia into a force for peace, as Canada has long been.
The discovery that uncircumcised males are more likely to get HIV led to an investigation of the role of the foreskin. It was found that it contained cells that were designed to interact with their environment. There can be no doubt that these cells are there because they are beneficial in some way. Even if you don't agree with that: there is no urgency to circumcise babies, because they won't commence sexual activity for many years. So why is Prof Short explicitly recommending that babies be circumcised? The whole point is to intentionally deprive those children of their right to give informed consent to the operation. This is disgraceful.
Of course religious Australians are entitled to circumcise their children for religious reasons. Secular Australians must be allowed to discuss secular ethics without religious Australians taking offence.
Women drive cultural conflict, as we particularly see with Muslim radicalization in Western countries. Indeed women are amazingly keen to risk male lives. I guess their genes know that there will never be a shortage of sperm, and the less aggressive males there are around the safer their children are. Anyway here's something I wrote about that last year, and about how to achieve cultural harmony in the West:
Muslim culture is part of the normal spectrum of human cultures. It is not long ago that Western culture severely limited the rights and opportunities of women. That world is perfectly described by Jane Austen, one of our greatest writers. Towards the end of "Pride and Prejudice", Mrs Bennett says of her naughty but lucky daughter and her new no-good son-in-law: "We must have them to dinner". Mr Bennett is heard to say "They will never enter this house". Somehow we are not surprised to see the disreputable pair arriving for dinner. Indeed in nearly all the relationships portrayed in the book, the women strive and succeed in getting their way with their men. The exception is Jane and Mr Bingham, and that relationship seems completely implausible: who can believe a man really falling for someone who makes no attempt to stand up for herself in the relationship. We believe attraction, and lust, but we don't believe he can fall in love.
How much influence do women have on male behaviour? We know from the statistics that delinquent boys turn moderately responsible when they get a steady girlfriend. When it was suggested to Winston Churchill that women would rule the world in 2050, he replied "Still?". However a nearly universal aspect of human behaviour is that women defer to men in public. If a woman shows dominance over her husband in public, it reduces his status, and that is unlikely to be in the interests of her family. So Western culture is familiar with the idea of the woman going along with her husband in public, then telling him off in private. It is one of those incongruities that comedians love to exploit.
If women are so powerful within relationships, then why do they let themselves get into positions of limited rights, as in Jane Austen's day, and with Muslim women today. We really need to understand this in the modern Western world where young Muslim women, raised in the West, are taking to scarves and veils that their mothers had escaped. The answer is that it is a mistake to see men and women as separate groups that are in conflict for power and status. Rather it is groups of men partnered with women who are competing with other such groups of men and women together. We can hardly imagine the importance of this competition in our wealthy society, but historically most societies have lived close to the edge and power and status greatly increased the chances of survival and reproduction.
When we look at it that way, we can see that women will not necessarily wish to have the cultural dial set to a point where women have independence and public power and status based on merit. Different settings favour different groups. How much influence do women have in setting this dial? My opinion, and the argument of this document, is that women are actually by far the main influence in setting the cultural dial. When there was resistance to votes for women, this resistance included women. When resistance from women stopped then resistance from men faded away. Similarly we see, and are shocked to see, in the modern world that women are often involved in supporting activities that attack the rights of women: genital mutilation, honour killings, wife killings. Terrorism would not be possible without at least passive female support. Men would not do this if it meant coming home to the disapproval of mothers, sisters and wives.
If we can find a way to get into a dialog with Muslim women in Australia, then there are two things I would say to them in the form of a deal, discussed below. Others may have other ideas. Certainly we need to keep the conversation reasonably simple. One way to organize it would be to invite women to meetings which would elect representatives to meet with the governments representatives (female) and then report back. A way of compensating the women for their time would be to give them a voucher at the first meeting that would be redeemable for $100 at the 2nd.
The first thing the government needs to say to Muslim women is this: In the important business and government organizations in Australia, women have equal rights. If Muslim sons and husbands go to work in these important organizations, and we want them to, then they'll always be working with women and sometimes they will have women bosses, and women subordinates. This equality of women at work is an absolutely non-negotiable part of Australian life. We would eventually like Muslim women to actually take part when they are comfortable doing so. More immediately, and the first part of this proposed deal, we want Muslim women at home to encourage their men to get a good education and join these important organizations and accept the environment of equality there.
The other half of the proposed deal concerns politeness from the rest of Australian society to the Muslim people. I try to explain to my 3 year old grandson the difference between "bad" and "rude". You can be bad even when you are all by yourself. Rudeness is something you do, like saying a rude word, that is upsetting to other people. We vary what we say and do depending on who is around. To allow and encourage Muslim Australians to participate more in wider society we all need to avoid behaviour which Muslim people will perceive as rude. There are limited situations where the government can directly change this, such as broadcast TV and what is displayed on the public street. The main part of this offer from the government to Muslim people is to advertise to make people aware of the need for more modest behaviour in public and modest attire, particularly at work. The place for normal Australian vulgarity is at home, and in places where Muslim people will know not to go, such as pubs.
So that is the proposed offer. We want Muslim Australians to join in the major activities of Australian life, accepting the non-negotiable fact of female equality in those environments. In exchange the government will do all it can, without infringing civil liberties, to avoid activities which are rudely insensitive to Muslim people.
This is a small step. Others are needed. I support the call to have only government primary schools -- compulsory, very well resourced, and with thorough mixing, using bussing if necessary. Also, the more ways the government can find to give resources directly to women, such as the baby bonus, the better. Maybe somebody will do a movie of "Pride and Prejudice" set in the Muslim community in Australia, to remind us how close we are.
Why don't we trust these official pronouncements on diet? We just suspect that they are working for segments of the food industry. Gluten is associated with other health problems, particularly autism.
There are plenty of other cases. There is a compelling case that the western diet is magnesium deficient. And there is the amazing suppression of the A1/A2 milk story. Here is an extract from the NZ Food Safety Authority's study:
The best study was the most recent one which had a better design with blinded assessments where possible and a random allocation to diet or no diet. The majority of the measurements showed significant improvements on the diet (casein-free, gluten-free).
4.4 Summary and implications
The available evidence is suggestive of a role of reducing the casein and gluten in the diets of people with autism to improve the autistic behaviours and overall functioning of the individual. Further research is needed. The evidence is not strong enough for clear dietary recommendations to be made for people with autism and schizophrenia.
You'd think that governments would spring into action to evaluate the health risks of milk and whether it is particularly A1 milk that causes problems. But no: silence has descended over the whole matter and A2corporation has been beaten up in the courts to stop "false claims".
It is hard to think what could be done to restore my faith in nutritionists. Robust public debate without law suits. Funding of serious trials. Extricating nutritionists from the grip of the food industry. These would certainly help.
P.S.2003/03/09: Another example of failure to act where there was good cause for concern was the issue of honey with toxins from Patterson's Curse (aka Salvation Jane). The issue of the need for more sun exposure (with lack of sun exposure strongly implicated in various problems including osteoporosis and cancer) is another where people have to find out for themselves: official sources are silent. For most health issues you have to find out for yourself and weigh the evidence yourself without trustworthy guidance. It is then really stupid for the people who should be providing sound guidance to criticise us if we get it wrong by being overcautious.
The fact that the Iraq war is about oil is not news to many people. Nearly everyone, supporter and opponent, has known this from the beginning. All the other explanations have been provided with a metaphorical wink and a nudge. The practical economic purpose of the war has been the reason why there has been public support, even as casualties have mounted. The war is more about being well placed to protect Saudi oil, without having troops on holy Arabian soil, than it is about Iraqi oil.
So why did Howard (delicately) and Nelson (indelicately) have to say it? The answer lies in the Liberal party's parlous electoral position. Maybe 90% of the electorate already knew, but the government feels it has to reach that other 10% and tell them that the whole thing has some practical purpose. Of course their hasty retreat shows that they are well aware of their dubious ethical position, and that is what this post is about.
My grump for the day is with the journalists. When Nelson said "oil security", the question that needed to be asked was: "Do you mean helping the legitimate owners of the oil secure it against 3rd parties, or are you talking about securing it for our use against the legitimate owners?" Of course we all know that the latter is the case, but he would have been forced to respond with the former. But at least once he'd responded we can ask him who the legitimate owners of Saudi oil are: the princes who put the money in Swiss bank accounts, or the people who currently get the crumbs.
Which brings me to the biggest mistake of the Iraq war. The effect of preventing the Baath party and other opponents of the Americans from standing in the election was that the election had no legitimacy, particularly in the eyes of those opponents. If the Baath party, and even Saddam himself and al Qaeda, had been allowed to stand then they would have been roundly trounced, and the government would have had legitimacy, and everything would have worked out much better. As it is the insurgents can reasonably choose to ignore the election, assert that the government has no legitimacy to request American military presence in the country, assert that the current government are Quislings, and claim the normal human right to resist foreign occupation. And isn't it incredible that the Americans, whose country was founded on that right, completely fail to perceive its possible applicability here.