one small voice

stpeter's blog on jabber, technology, history, philosophy, et alia

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2004-05-26

Going Nuclear

Saving the earth, one power plant at a time.

James Lovelock, author of the Gaia Hypothesis, is so worried about global warming that he has come out in favor of nuclear power. Personally I think the evidence for global warming is anecdotal at best, and I doubt that we puny humans would be the cause of it anyway (the earth experienced many drastic swings of warming and cooling way before humans ever evolved, let alone before they went industrial). But it's quite amusing to see so-called "environmentalists" from Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and other advocacy organizations fall over themselves in the rush to condemn Lovelock's apostasy. I must admit that over time I've grown a bit suspicious of the nuclear power industry simply because it is just as dependent on government subsidies as the rest of the energy companies, but at least it's not killing 15,000 Americans a year like the coal industry is (at least according to the Harvard School of Public Health). Come to think of it, perhaps that's what the environmentalists want, since many of them are also in favor of negative population growth (though that will arrive naturally enough in 2040 or so if current U.N. projections are correct, which I doubt since the U.N. doesn't really know what it's talking about and tends to err on the side of population growth; perhaps 2030 is more likely).

But don't just take my word for it -- follow the links:

Posted on 2004-05-26 at 21:39. File under society.

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Oxymoronic

Do states have rights?

On one of the web forums I've been reading, someone mentioned that he is writing a book on states' rights. Is that not an oxymoron? Consider the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution:

The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Notice the care with which these statements were formulated. The Ninth Amendment speaks of rights retained by the people, but nowhere does it mention states. The Tenth Amendment speaks of powers delegated or prohibited or reserved by various governments (or by the people), but nowhere does it mention rights. There is good reason for this, because persons have rights but governments do not. Persons also have powers, which they may delegate to governments if they so choose, but governments obtain their powers only through delegation by people. So "states' rights" is a contradiction.

Naturally there is much more to say about these topics, but I'm tired of thinking about political matters right now, so I shall leave it for another day.

Posted on 2004-05-26 at 21:17. File under politics.

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Gulching Again

Some political skulking.

I've spent a good number of hours in the last few days skulking about on some of the Net's more obscure web forums, mainly occasioned by reading (and following the links from) Claire Wolfe's latest essay on gulching. It's all a bit apocalyptic for my taste, but at least it appears that Claire has gotten over the anti-urban bias of all too many Thoreauvian libertarians, who seem to think that everyone who lives in a town of more than 3,000 people is some kind of natural authoritarian.

Posted on 2004-05-26 at 21:03. File under politics.

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2004-05-23

Freedom After Speech

A day in the life of the USA.

The constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics included the same protections as the constitution of the United States of America (that's plural, thank you very much). The only difference: the Soviet constitution was the political equivalent of toilet paper. There used to be a joke about the Former Soviet Union that they had freedom of speech, too -- they just didn't have freedom after speech. The scary thing is that we're approaching that state in America now. Here is proof positive. Read it and weep for America and what it once stood for, because those days are long gone and we are all part of the system now. United Soviets of America?

Posted on 2004-05-23 at 22:03. File under politics.

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A Program

Electioneering, or the lack thereof.

I doubt I will vote this year (or, perhaps, ever again). I am beginning to see that seeking change through politics is simply the wrong way to go about remaking the world. Besides, my views are so far outside the mainstream -- or so unlikely to be brought into being through the political process -- that it is pointless to vote. If someone supported the following positions I might be tempted to vote:

No more foreign adventures. Period.
Give the schools to the teachers.
Give the courts to the judges.
Replace fiat money with gold.
Replace standing armies with local militias.
Abolish the federal government.

And that's just for starters. :-)

Posted on 2004-05-23 at 21:52. File under politics.

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Personal Providence

The beautiful chaos of existence.

While working on a paper tentatively entitled Nietzsche Contra Epicurus, I've been reading and re-reading a number of relevant quotes from Nietzsche; here is one that struck me today, mainly for the phrase "the beautiful chaos of existence" (La Gaya Scienza, section 277):

Personal providence. -- There is a certain high point in life: once we have reached that, we are, for all our freedom, once more in the greatest danger of spiritual unfreedom, and no matter how much we have faced up to the beautiful chaos of existence and denied it all providential reason and goodness, we still have to pass our hardest test. For it is only now that the idea of a personal providence confronts us with the most penetrating force, and the best advocate, the evidence of our eyes, speaks for it -- now that we can see palpably always everything that happens to us turns out for the best. Every day and every hour, life seems to have no other wish than to prove this proposition again and again. Whatever it is, bad weather or good, the loss of a friend, sickness, slander, the failure of some letter to arrive, the spraining of an ankle, a glance into a shop, a counter-argument, the opening of a book, a dream, a fraud -- either immediately or very soon after it proves to be something that "must not be missing": it has a profound significance and use precisely for us. Is there any more dangerous seduction that might tempt one to renounce one's faith in the gods of Epicurus who have no care and are unknown, and to believe instead in some petty deity who is full of care and personally knows every little fair on our head and finds nothing nauseous in the most miserable small service? ...

Nietzsche was quite aware that the beautiful chaos of existence involves both creation and destruction (at least 50 years before Schumpeter coined the phrase "creative destruction"). There is so much to reflect on here -- I'm really looking forward to writing this essay...

Posted on 2004-05-23 at 21:28. File under philosophy.

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2004-05-09

Money

Think globally, mint locally.

Many things have been used as money throughout human history: sea shells, cows, metals, cigarettes, even things with no inherent value (think: little pieces of paper). Thanks to a link from Doc Searls, I've just been reminded of the local currencies movement, which seeks to replace government money with grass-roots scrip generated through voluntary exchange in local communities. The example I'm most familiar with is Ithaca Hours in the area around Ithaca, New York. Ithaca Hours are an example of time dollars (a similar project seems to be starting up just north of me in Fort Collins, Colorado). Interestingly, these projects all seem to come from the cultural or political left, and tend to put the emphasis on "small is beautiful" themes like healthy communities and even protecting the Earth rather than the traditional rhetoric of stable money and objective value that one associates with prominent and not-so-prominent advocates of a return to the gold standard. Open money, anyone? (Yet another example of when "open source" means free in the sense of speech, not beer.)

Posted on 2004-05-09 at 20:12. File under society.

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2004-05-06

More Magic

Further explication of a cryptic statement.

"Any sufficiently advanced society is indistinguishable from magic." What do I mean by that?

When Arthur C. Clarke formulated his third law of technology, I'd bet he mainly had in mind the usual whiz-bang gadgets and life-changing innovations. But I've come to see that society itself is simply a set of technologies. Law, money, markets, institutions, and much else besides are simply settled methods for solving problems. Technologies.

For someone transported to 21st-century America from, say, the Tasmania of 5,000 years ago or the Russia of 500 years ago or present-day North Korea, it is not merely our material technology that would seem magical. So would our softer technologies: contracts (how can you trust people to hold up their end of the bargain?), savings banks (are you sure they won't just keep your valuable stuff and not give it back?), humane societies (are you serious that people spend all that time and money to save mere dogs?), and thousands of other activities and institutions. Perhaps the seemingly effortless magic of America and other Western societies is what attracts immigrants and imitators the world over.

Posted on 2004-05-06 at 21:31. File under society.

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A Corollary

The magical nature of modern society.

Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law of Technology states:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

As I realized at the Liberty Fund colloquium I attended in Tucson last weekend, I think there is a corollary:

Any sufficiently advanced society is indistinguishable from magic.

The explanation shall have to wait for when I have more bandwidth. One clue: the mechanisms of society (law, money, etc.) are, in essence, simply forms of technology.

Posted on 2004-05-06 at 14:17. File under society.

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The Need for Speed

A brief history of messaging

As I prepared the slides for a talk I gave yesterday in San Francisco, I started to think about the history of messaging. I came up with the following timeline (the early dates come from Joel Mokyr's book The Lever of Riches)...

In 1800, it took 2 years to send a message from London to Calcutta. You wrote a physical letter and entrusted it to a wind-powered ship that sailed down the western coasts of Europe and Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, back up the eastern coast of Africa, across the Arabian Sea, etc. -- with, presumably, stops in just about every port (yes, they had multi-hop message transports back then).

By 1914, it took 1 month to send a message from London to Calcutta. The Suez Canal had opened, and steamships powered their way through the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, and thence to India. Big improvement.

With the advent of reliable airmail (1950s or 1960s?), the time was probably reduced to 1 week.

Overnight mail, which became popular and relatively affordable in the 1980s, cut that down to two days. (Remember those early FedEx commercials? "When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight!")

When the Internet was opened to commercial use, electronic mail became the killer app (1994 or so), and people grew accustomed to delivery times on the order of 10 minutes (depending on the number of hops, how frequently you polled your mail server, and so on).

Then along came instant messaging. Now your message gets from London to Calcutta in something like 100 milliseconds (and almost always less than a second). Plus you've got presence information, too!

Does this mean faster is better? No. But when was the last time you sat down to write a physical letter and sent it via surface mail? Sure, you might do that once in a long while, but it's rare enough that you remember each occasion.

The lesson I draw is that people feel the need for speed. All other things being equal, people will prefer the fastest means of communication available. That doesn't bode well for the email network. But, as Doc Searls recently noted, email is a slum.

Posted on 2004-05-06 at 14:07. File under technology.

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Back

Well, sort of. ;-)

I think I may be back. Been doing a lot of travelling of late, both business and personal, including NYC (I think I blogged about that, no?), the D.C. area, Tucson (that was the fun part), and yesterday San Francisco. Plus I've been burning the candle on both ends in the Jabber world. So my blogging time has been less than minimal -- and when I've wanted to write, I've been working to finish my Rand essays. But I hope to post more soon.

Posted on 2004-05-06 at 13:44. File under personal.

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