April 2008
A model of the global economy…
Suppose six castaways are stranded on a deserted island, five Asians and one American. Further, suppose that the castaways decide to divide the work load among them in the following manner: (for the purpose of simplicity, the only desire the castaways work to satisfy is hunger) one Asian is put in charge of hunting, an other in charge of fishing, and a third in charge of finding vegetation. A fourth is put in charge of preparing the meal, while a fifth is given the task of gathering firewood and tending to the fire. The American is given the job of eating.
So, on our island five Asians work all day to feed one American, who spends his day sunning himself of the beach. He is employed in the equivalent of the service sector, operating a tanning salon which none of the Asians on the island utilize. At the end of the day, the five Asians present a painstakingly prepared feast to the American, who sits at the head of a special table, built by the Asians specifically for this purpose.
Realizing that subsequent banquets will only be forthcoming if the Asians are alive to provide them, he allows them just enough scraps from his table to sustain their labor for the following day.
Modern day economists would say that this American is the lone engine of growth driving the island’s economy and that without his ravenous appetite, the Asians on the island would be unemployed.
http://www.safehaven.com/article-2810.htm from Peter Schiff of Euro Pacific Capital (there’s always a bull market somewhere)
Really kind of an amazing piece.
Pigs as insecticide
http://engineering.curiouscatblog.net/2008/04/20/pigs-instead-of-pesticides/
Apples drop from trees due to infestation.
Pigs eat apples, preventing reproduction.
You think monoculture farming might be really, really stupid? Like, clearly this is pretty much how the apple trees evolved to do this - drop the fruit when there’s a problem, and something will eat it. Fence off the apples, keep out the mammals, and the natural defense mechanisms are broken.
Monoculture is stupid. Throw rocks at it.
The Shrimpy Goby
http://engineering.curiouscatblog.net/2008/04/10/mutualism-inter-species-cooperation/
Very, very cute inter-species cooperation story.
Saltwater farming
http://www.ecoworld.com/home/articles2.cfm?tid=336
Interesting possibilities.
Pan Yue on Eco-Socialism
PY: Actually, the Green Party does not represent eco-socialism.
I study eco-socialism, but that is not to say I am in full support of it. It is too idealistic and lacks ways of solving actual problems, particularly for developing countries. However, it does provide political reference for China’s scientific view of development, and gives socialist ideology room to expand. More importantly, it gives a theoretical basis for the establishment of fair international rules.
ZJ: How did eco-socialism come into being. What does it consist of?
PY: The green movement arose out of a re-evaluation of western industrial civilisation. Although the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution were all contributing factors to the birth of western industrial civilisation, the root cause was colonialism, which permitted the large-scale relocation of developed countries’ economic and social contradictions. To ensure this relocation could proceed smoothly, capitalism created a set of international rules to protect its own interests, and environmental issues are a case in point. Developed countries account for 15% of the world’s population, yet use over 85% of its resources. They raise their own environmental standards and transfer resource-intensive and polluting industries to developing nations; they establish a series of green barriers and bear as little environmental responsibility as is possible. In the end, the green movement found that any problem can be relocated, except pollution, because we all live on the same planet.
Pan Yue is the deputy minister of the environment in Chican who talked about China having 150 million environmental refugees in the nearish future.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,345694,00.html
My old terms for this development - hard left green politics - ecostalinism and ecomaoism - are still at less than one page of google results each. Major blind spot. Apparently the “official” term is ecosocialism which… wel…. 16k hits on google, and pretty fearsome stuff.
Oh really? 200 visits to the white house…. **200** visits to the white house?
The other big gay scandal of the Bush years was bungled completely by the mainstream press. In January 2005 a blogger named Jeff Gannon who was a regular at White House briefings finally attracted the attention of his peers when George Bush called on him at a press conference so that Gannon could lob an exceptionally soft softball question at the president.
A little checking turned up the fact that Gannon’s real name is James Guckert, that he had been rejected for a congressional press pass because of his lack of experience as a journalist, and that he had another interesting sideline — as a prostitute.
Until he was exposed by the blogosphere, the White House had for some reason been giving Guckert daily press passes for two years. How could this have happened? Guckert told Anderson Cooper there was no mystery — White House officials “aren’t interested in reporters’ sexual history,” he said.
Obvious questions were never answered: Who was Guckert’s patron in the White House, and why was he or she so eager to allow the nonreporter access to daily press briefings?
Imagine how reporters would have reacted if they had discovered a female prostitute had been granted special treatment by Bill Clinton’s press office during his administration. But because this story was about a gay hustler and George Bush, the Washington press corps just shrugged.
Two months after the story broke, the mystery deepened when two Democratic representatives — Louise Slaughter and John Conyers — forced the Secret Service to release White House logs under the Freedom of Information Act to learn more about Guckert’s comings and goings. Raw Story reported that Guckert had made more than 200 White House visits — including 24 appearances when no White House briefings had occurred. On at least 14 occasions, records showed that Guckert’s entry or exit time was missing from the logs. On several visits, Guckert either entered or exited by a different entry point than his usual one, and one day he actually checked in twice but never checked out.
http://www.out.com/detail.asp?page=3&id=23655
So, what’s the deal here?
The eight stages of genocide
1. Classification: At this stage, social groups are classified into “us versus them.”
2. Symbolization: At this stage, the classifications are symbolized. Groups are given names and other symbols (yellow stars, for example) and are required to wear them either by cultural tradition or laws. In Rwanda, Belgium began to issue identity cards (ID’s) around 1926 and required them in the 1933 census. The identity cards included each individual’s group identity, Tutsi, Hutu, or Twa. They thus reified group identity for each person, and made changes from one group to another much more difficult.
3. Dehumanization: This stage is where the death spiral of genocide begins. The victim group is dehumanized. It is called the names of animals or likened to a disease: vermin or rats, cancer or plague, or in Rwanda, “inyenzi” – cockroaches.
4. Organization: All genocides are organized. At this stage, hate groups are organized, militias are trained and armed, and the armed forces are purged of members of the intended victim group as well as officers and others who might oppose genocide. Propaganda institutions, such as the hate newspapers and radio station, are also strengthened and funded.
5. Polarization: Moderates are targeted and assassinated. Hate propaganda emphasizes the “us versus them” nature of the situation. “If you are not with us, you are against us.” There is no middle ground. Moderates who attempt to negotiate peace are denounced as traitors.
6. Preparation: During the preparation stage, plans are made for the genocide. Death lists are compiled.
7. Extermination: At this stage, the killing legally defined as genocide begins.
8. Denial: During and after every genocide, the perpetrators deny they committed the crime.
summarized from http://www.genocidewatch.org/aboutus/stantonrwandapreventionarticle.htm
ARM THE VICTIMS - one critical stage missing from this map is disarmament. Take their weapons off them, then round them up in a field and murder them. It’s a lot harder if, you know, they still have guns.
Somebody once asked me what do about Darfur. I suggested a re-issue of the Liberator Pistol and saturation of the area in these close range defensive weapons.
Never got a reply. People are all about “send troops, send troops” but, fundamentally, why send troops when you can send arms?
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
fixing Libertarianism - the Land Auction
The State, in its typical form, is nothing more than a protection racket for landowners. And that goes right back into the age of kings and barrons.
UPDATE: I’m rederiving Geolibertarianism. Albeit with a much more elegant foundation than land taxes. (spits after word taxes.)
The problem with Libertarianism is that it assumes that the state’s stolen property - the land historically taken by violence - can be grandfathered into a Libertarian state without any significant reappraisal of the situation. The initial wrongdoing implied in the formation of nearly all States - theft of land by violence - is replicated in the system of land-as-property.
I have a counterproposal which would only work in a denovo libertarian state, but which I think would work.
Here it is.
1> The citizens of the State are the owners of the State.
2> The land is owned by the State, given that this is a denovo state and property rights over land have not yet been created.
3> All members of the State have equal rights to the assets of the State, including its land. Note this refers to property of the government only - not all property within the boundaries of the State.
4> Land is made available for private use at auction. This is a multi-part process which I will detail below.
5> Proceeds from this land auction are divided up equally among the citizens of the state, and form a baseline of public support to the individual which is entirely fair in how it is divided, and without doubt fairly gotten. In short, we have public welfare without socialism. The State owns the land and rents it to citizens, and then divides the proceeds. There is no taxation: if you do not wish to own land, you do not have to participate in the land auction.
This is, I think, entirely clear and pragmatic. And, I’m gobsmacked to discover, Tom Paine and Winston Churchill had similar notions. Also compare to universal basic income, and most specifically, Georgism. The problem is that we want to implement a universal basic income without taxes: the solution is for the State not to surrender ownership of land to the individual, only use.
Is this insanity? It depends on the dynamics of the land auction.
Now, the dynamics of the land auction are key and core, and here is my suggestion.
Firstly, inheritance and transfer of property are not assumed. It may be that upon a person’s death, the land use right they have terminates. Or it may be inherited. Either way, there is no guarantee. Secondly, there is the issue of property built on land. If one creates a building, is it yours?
And in this we hit the rub - non-mobile assets, like buildings and improvements in farmland, which are naturally the property of those that created them, while the land they rest on is naturally (in this model) the property of the owners of the State in all.
One approach is to assign such things market value, and pay those that made the improvements. But the right not to sell the home you live in, even if its value has increased a thousand-fold, is clearly fairly deeply rooted.
To this issue we will return. It is a question of what is being leased? This also raises questions about the transferability of leases, subleases and so on.
In terms of the boundaries of each plot of property to be auctioned, and the length of time which the lease on the land is for, my suggestion is simple: the longest lease should be for 100 years, or some number with a similar relationship to the human lifespan. The shortest lease should probably be dependent on the transactional cost of the auction, perhaps one to three months. My suggestion is that in an initial run, these values would be randomized, and areas where leases were commonly thought to be too short or too long handled at an administrative level. Citizens could, of course, choose to surrender a lease to public auction at any time.
The actual dividing lines between plots would be generated initially with some care regarding rives, watersheds and so on, implementing some principles from bioregionalism. If it was commonly agreed that the boundaries in a given area were all screwed up to, say, the changing course of a river or original administrative errors, the lease renewal dates on those areas would be synchronized, and new boundaries proposed and implemented for the whole at the next renewal date. Note this implies mechanisms as-yet-undefined, probably including democratic election or popular voting for boundaries, and represents a significant issue.
It also provides a foundation for environmental law: one cannot dump one’s poisons on “one’s own land” because all land is leased, not owned, except the territory of the State itself.
I believe this schema implements much or all that is required for a libertarian state which is sound to the core to be implemented. Gives me the chills.
price volatility and global starvation
this is *not that hard people.*
if X is producing food more cheaply that local resources, local production will tend to drop as people buy foreign food
if X then stops producing, or jacks prices, there will be a gap before local production picks up again due to latency
in this gap, people starve
why? because prices change much faster than food production can compensate, which is why we have futures markets
but the poor do not buy food futures, the poor buy food so they are maximally exposed to price volatility.
This is not fixable. The poor are going to get screwed by food price volatility unless they grow their own, which is simply inefficient unless, well, something very cool indeed happens to manual-labor-intensive organic farming practices, like it out-produces high input monocultures.
Maybe one day.
solar power bubbles
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/04/concentrated-solar-power-balloons.html
basically, it’s a parabolic solar collector made using an inflatable form. dunno what they’re using to convert the sunlight into power.