'Nother Solent

Planetary Autarky

: Planetary Autocrat Annoying Old Guy responds.

I have a few good emails on that topic lined up. But transcribing them is too much like work for a Saturday.

You guys are an embarrassment even as enemies.

Damian Penny links to a MEMRI translation of an the views of a "cultural advisor" to the Iranian education ministry. Professor Hasan Bolkhari thinks that Tom and Jerry was made by Walt Disney (!) as part of a Jewish conspiracy to improve the portrayal of mice.

As a commenter, Rick McGinnis, says:

I don't know what's worse - that a regime this ignorant very nearly has nukes, or that this sort of metastasized stupidity is what we have to fight. Or, worst of all, that it's actually possible to lose, in real world terms, against this sort of monstrous inanity.

Who are the masters, the bureaucrats or the electorate?

Tim Worstall argues against the suspension from office of Ken Livingstone, a politician whom he "dislikes intensely".

Should Ken be suspended because he breached the "code of conduct"? No. There shouldn’t be such a code of conduct in the first place. That’s giving far too much power to the bureaucracy that writes said code and far too little to the people who are allowed to elect anyone they damn well please. "Allowed" may be too weak a word there.

"The limits are one's own integrity and one's own beliefs."

The speaker is Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell. (Bush having relations with a camel symbolising Iraq, yes. The Prophet Mohammed, no.)

Let Mr Timothy Blair guide you through a garden of elevated sentiment, as (in Mr Blair's apt words), "British cartoonists reflect on their courage and decency."

Bush-friend Hughes: "A wonderful Führer."

Davidsmedienkritik discusses what appear to be politically-motivated discrepancies beween the English and German versions of an interview in Der Spiegel with US Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes. The title of this post is the caption Der Spiegel gives to a photo of Hughes in the German version. The English version has a different photo and a different caption.

Some of the commenters say, hey, "Führer" is the German for leader.

So it is. I barely speak German but I know that much. And I also know that the German for "Der Spiegel respects its readers' intelligence" should be prounounced as "eye-ner grow-sir shy-sir."

UPDATE: Well, I was told it meant "a load of crap" and wasn't so bad in German. Rest of world: do not write in.

"I hope to God they all stay safe"

- Damian Penny on Iraqi bloggers reporting the violence after the bomb at the Golden Mosque.

The tragedy is that if destroying shrines is what gives the destroyers what they want, they will do more of it.

Do I hear the dam breaking?

Logic Times quotes General Georges Sada, late of Saddam's army as saying that WMD were moved to Syria.

Pajamas Media has a whole WMD blog. I've never quite figured out - possibly because I have only given three seconds thought to the subject - how that PMJ aggregation thing works. Does a machine or a person select what goes in? However it works, the subject of WMD is probably an ideal one for the treatment. Having had their noses rubbed in their own mispredictions once, many people who are now beginning to think that WMD were there after all don't want to stand up on their ownsome and say so.

This cocky so and so

Andrew McGuinness goes and recommends himself for the Britblog Roundup on the strength of this post. (Emphasis added.)

Therefore, the effect of this bill [the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act] is not absolutely to hand over legislative power to the executive; instead it is to give Parliament the same role as the European Parliament has in the EU - the role of an observer whose aquiescence, rather than approval, is needed for laws to be passed.

Indeed, the bill seems to model the government of Britain very closely on EU structures. The Law Commission takes on the law-drafting role of the European Commission, putting forward rules - through the Cabinet (like the European Council) - that automatically come into force unless prevented by Parliament. Anyone who thinks that Brussels is the ideal role model for structuring a democratic government should support this bill.

In the long run, the distinction between this bill and the Enabling Act is not likely to be very significant - a Parliament whose own law-making powers are stripped or made irrelevant is only likely to decline in authority, until occasional nuisance-value opposition to the government of the day is seen as a curious anachronism, and the last safeguards are removed.

See thou to it, Tim.

I've never seen the point of simpering

, "Oh, this old thing?" when someone admires my dress at a party.

Gary Cruse of The Owner's Manual liked my Dorothy Parker joke.

You know what? So did I.

"Time on the Cross."

As he promised, Jim Miller emailed me the summary of conclusions from a book called Time on the Cross by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman

The following are some of the principal corrections of the traditional characterization of the slave economy:

1. Slavery was not a system irrationally kept in existence by plantation owners who failed to perceive or were indifferent to their best economic interests. The purchase of a slave was generally a highly profitable investment which yielded rates of return that compared favorably with the most outstanding investment opportunities in manufacturing.
2. The slave system was not economically moribund on the eve of the Civil War. There is no evidence that economic forces alone would have soon brought slavery to an end without the necessity of a war or some other form of political intervention. Quite the contrary; as the Civil War approached, slavery as an economic system was never stronger and the trend was toward even further entrenchment.
3. Slaveowners were not becoming pessimistic about the future of their system during the decade that preceded the Civil War. The rise of the secessionist movement coincided with a wave of optimism. On the eve of the Civil War, slaveholders anticipated an era of unprecedented prosperity.
4. Slave agriculture was not inefficient compared with free agriculture. Economies of large-scale operation, effective management, and intensive utilization of labor and capital made southern slave agriculture 35 percent more efficient than the northern system of family farming.
5. The typical slave field hand was not lazy, inept, and unproductive. On average he was harder-working and more efficient than his white counterpart.
6. The course of slavery in the cities does not prove that slavery was incompatible with an industrial system or that slaves were unable to cope with an industrial regimen. Slaves employed in industry compared favorably with free workers in diligence and efficiency. Far from declining, the demand for slaves was actually increasing more rapidly in urban areas than in the countryside.
7. The belief that slave-breeding, sexual exploitation, and promiscuity destroyed the black family is a myth. The family was the basic unit of social organization under slavery. It was to the economic interest of planters to encourage the stability of slave families and most of them did so. Most slave sales were either of whole families or of individuals who were at an age when it would have been normal for them to have left the family.
8. The material (not psychological) conditions of the lives of slaves compared favorably with those of free industrial workers. This is not to say that they were good by modern standards. It merely emphasizes the hard lot of all workers, free or slave, during the first half of the nineteenth century,
9. Slaves were exploited in the sense that part of the income which they produced was expropriated by their owners. However, the rate of expropriation was much lower than has generally been presumed. Over the course of his lifetime, the typical slave field hand received about 90 percent of the income he produced.
10. Far from stagnating, the economy of the antebellum South grew quite rapidly. Between 1840 and 1860, per capita income increased more rapidly in the South than in the rest of the nation. By 1860 the South attained a level of per capita income which was high by the standards of the time. Indeed, a country as advanced as Italy did not achieve the same level of per capita income until the eve of World War II.

Having sent me that, Jim Miller added a note of his own:

My own caveats: I am not an economist, much less a cliometrician, as Fogel and Engerman like to call themselves, so I can't easily judge the quality of their work. I do recall that "Time on the Cross" received enormous praise and criticism when it was first published. I haven't followed the controversy since the late 1970s, so I don't know the status of the debate.

That said, everything I know about the beginning of our Civil War is compatible with their conclusions. It is a fact that southerners, by and large, were quite positive about their prospects. In fact, one could argue that it was their surge in prosperity that made them risk seccession. And it may have been the growing belief that slavery would not vanish for economic reason that made opponents of slavery less willing to tolerate the "peculiar institution".

If Fogel and Engerman are correct, then economic explanations of the demise of slavery in the United States are nonsense -- though they may have become true eventually. Instead, what ended slavery was a change in beliefs, especially the changes in the beliefs of some denominations, such as the Quakers.

Like you, I don't want to believe their results. But I would add something you might like: Apparently the southern plantations got results from their slaves in part by using market incentives, principally cash bonuses and allotments of land. The cash bonuses were important enough so that [a] few slaves bought their own freedom. And a few men were even able to free their families with their earnings.

I found this review of Time on the Cross by Thomas Weiss informative. Some of the book's conclusions have been knocked awry, others remain standing.

All this remains quite a challenge to the views I expressed in a piece for Samizdata a while ago: Life is still tough for the owners of lazy slaves. In order to get to a certain conclusion about AIDS research I quoted Seneca and various Victorians to the effect that slave work was ill-done and inefficient. When visiting the antebellum South the British writer William Makepeace Thackeray said, "In a house where four servants would do with us ... there must be a dozen blacks here, and the work is not well done." When searching for quotes for that piece I found others I could have used as well. Such quotes are also evidence.

Well, I guess it's another book to add to my reading list.

Huffing and puffing.

The Times has a roundup of how politicians reacted to the Prince's letters.

Technically, I agree with the first few. Impartiality of Head of State, et yadda cetera. But c'mon. He wrote a few letters to ministers - who cares? Long ago I used to draft replies to certain letters sent to the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, those that concerned our little tentacle of the Treasury's octopus-like body. It was always a pleasant break from real work. My boss would have a good loud laugh as he deleted all my best sarcastic quips, his boss would have a gentle chuckle as he deleted those few that my boss had left in, and no doubt the FST smiled slightly as he wrote out the insipid missive that was actually sent.

"Now these are the questions we want answered.

It is important to remember that we need a technical / legal answer to these. A mere assurance that it wouldn't be used in a particular way is worthless."

Via Tim Worstall, who calls it the "Abolition of Parliament Bill", Right Links has a page you should visit regarding the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act.

Do more than just visit.

Squishy killer

Via Odious and Peculiar

Rather desperate.

Bill Adams of Idler Yet examines a disingenous attempt by Tim Noah in Slate to claim that there is still room to doubt that the Rathergate documents were forgeries.

I watched that one unfold almost real-time, and feel a proprietorial interest.

Keith Windschuttle writes about the results of the intellectual fashion for Western self-loathing. Hat tip: Mark C at Daimnation.

Stand Well Back.

Here is the email from JEM that I promised. I've added titles to each of the two sections for ease of reading. He is referring to this post.

The Auschwitz complex: a holocaust denier takes one part for the whole.

JEM writes:

"Before I move on to nanotechnology, I fear I cannot just "ignore the author's more outre political opinions" as you put it.

"He is almost but not quite denying the Holocaust. That cannot go unremarked, especially as his central piece of 'evidence' seems to be that there was no gas chamber at Auschwitz. It is clear that by 'Auschwitz' here he means Auschwitz-I, the main camp, where no Jews were kept prisoner and no mass exterminations took place. Prisoners there were mostly Poles and Russians, and it was a work camp. Many died--between 50,000 and 100,000, it is reckoned, but of starvation or illness or overwork rather than gassing.

"He concedes the possibility of gas chambers (as I understand his ramblings) at Birkenau, as if it was another camp far away and unconnected to Auschwitz. In fact, the full name of that camp was Auschwitz-Birkenau, and it was built specifically to be the extermination "department" within the whole Auschwitz complex. Four gas chamber and crematorium units were part of the design of this camp from day one (the engineering drawings and equipment procurement orders and construction contract paperwork is all preserved: these people were bureaucratic Germans, after all) and these facilities went into "business" as soon as the camp opened its doors in the spring of 1942. Exact numbers are not known, but it's now reckoned between 1 and 1.5 million Jews died in these "non-existent" gas chambers of Auschwitz.

"There was also an Auschwitz-III to provide slave labour for an IG Farben factory in the complex, but that was not an extermination camp either.

"I do agree that jailing holocaust deniers is counter-productive now. Yet I'm afraid it's difficult to avoid allowing Lyle Burkhead's more-than-just-outre views on this topic to colour one's views on what he says on other topics, but I will try.

Nanotech and the Second Law

"I think much of his reasoning on nanotechnology is interesting. Some of it may be wrong, other bits right. But he misses out on what I suspect is an even more fundamental flaw in the Drexler vision as set out in his "Engines of Creation", and indeed any other nanotechnological vision that comes anywhere close, including his own.

"It is the overlooking of (I almost hate to say this once more) the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

"One of the most fundamental problems facing chip designers today is keeping more and more densely built CPUs from melting. The reason they face this danger is that in the process of doing their calculations, they have to move electrons around, and like every other machine, the process is less than 100% efficient -- that's what the Second Law tells us is inevitable. The electrical energy that does not end up translated into repositioned electrons ends up as heat. This is a very serious difficulty and may well be what eventually brings Moore's Law to a stop.

"Now consider a nanoscale replicator, Drexlerian or not. Here we are moving around not electrons but entire atoms. Even a hydrogen atom, the lightest there is, has a mass roughly equivalent to one thousand electrons. But we would not be moving around hydrogen. Carbon (12 times the atomic mass of hydrogen), or silicon (28 times), or iron (56 times) or many other elements are vastly more likely candidates. So each individual nanoscale "operation" could be from 12,000 to 56,000 or more times more energy intensive than each individual electronic "operation" in a CPU. And assuredly the process would be less than 100% efficient.

"Thus, even if a nanoscale replicator were as efficient as a modern CPU, the energy required to run it at the same speed (in operations per second) as the CPU would be many thousands of times greater. Not a problem in itself, perhaps, but it's very doubtful it would be more efficient. So the waste heat would also be thousands of times greater.

"Such a machine would not be in danger of melting so much as exploding. Very violently too: more powerfully, mass-for-mass, than TNT.

"You might think to avoid this problem by running your replicator slowly. But there are going to be trillions upon trillons of "operations' to perform. To run slow enough to avoid explosion would, I suggest, have to be geologically slow. A few hundred thousand years to replicate a can of Diet Coke, say? Can you just hang on please?

"No, it's full-speed or not at all.

"Stand well back."

Tonstant Gardener Fwowed Up.

The director Don Boyd is ever so cross that The Constant Gardner didn't get nice prizes! Nasty Americans got prizes instead.

"But as it came to its conclusion I realised what I had been seeing in microcosm: the triumph of American cultural imperialism. A sad reminder that we live in the modern equivalent of a Roman-occupied Britain."

"Deary me," says Stephen Pollard. All sympathy, him.

So sad. Yes, the dome can be rebuilt as the human lives destroyed by the same evil cannot be. But you don't have to be a Muslim, or even a theist, to feel the sacrilege.

When I said

"getting back to the 'what killed slavery debate'" I didn't necessarily mean "everyone get back to the 'what killed slavery' debate." Apart from anything else there is a whopper email from JEM coming up on something else entirely! (Hint as to contents: I wondered why the name Lyle Burkhead, who wrote the 'Nanotechnology without Genies' piece quoted in a previous link was familiar, but just assumed it was part of the cloud of half-remembered names that buzz in my brain.)

You may have noticed that other people are writing my blog for me at the moment. Atishoo, atishoo, you get the idea.

No more of this isolationist nonsense!

Doug Sundseth writes:

JEM wrote: "So long as humanity is confined to one planet, planetary autarky is economically feasible right now. In fact there is no alternative."

I submit that if we don't import quite a bit of energy from extra-terrestrial sources (well, at least one extraterrestrial source, anyway), it will presently become coolish. Now, I like winter as much as most people, but enough is enough. Let's have no more of this isolationist nonsense. 8-)

Getting back to the 'what killed slavery' debate,

Jim Miller writes:

Natalie - I was following the discussion on your site for some time before I remembered that I have a pair of books that treat the question directly, Fogel and Engerman's "Time on the Cross". (The first volume has the exposition, the second the evidence and the math.) Here's the 4th conclusion (of ten) from the introduction to their economic study of slavery in the pre-Civil War American South:

"4. Slave agriculture was not inefficient when compared with free agriculture. Economies of large-scale operation, effective management, and intensive utilization of labor and capital made southern slave agriculture 35 percent more efficient than the northern system of family farming."

The books were terribly controversial when published in 1974. I don't know what the status of the debate is now.

I haven't seen this book, but I would guess that the apparent greater efficiency of slavery may have been an unsustainable effect of specific improvements.

The test that David Irving set me: do I really believe in the power of truth? There is a powerful article in today's Times by Daniel Finkelstein. "Must-read" is an overworked description, but you must read this.

Yesterday my mother told me of the day, as a young girl in Westerbork concentration camp, she said goodbye to her aunt and uncle and to her 14-year-old cousin, Fritz. These much-loved family members had been listed for the Tuesday transport train to Auschwitz. My mother still has the pitiful letter from her aunt promising that “we will meet again”. But, of course, they never did. David Irving presumably thinks that Fritz and his parents survived and are living in Israel. In which case, the joke is over: they can come back now, don’t you think?

With her own eyes, my mother saw Anne Frank arrive in Belsen (she knew the family), yet still Irving and people like him contend that Frank’s story is fake. And I have been to countless meetings, met dozens of people, who saw the Nazi crimes themselves, lost relatives, were scarred for life, only survived (as my mother did) because of unbelievable moments of good fortune.

It is difficult, even for me now, born in safety, free to bring up my sons as Jews, sitting at a desk typing my article in civilised Britain, it is difficult not to feel anger, rage at Irving. It is difficult not to wish him behind bars. And I do feel rage. But I do not wish him behind bars, not for giving his opinion, not for delivering a lecture, however warped and horrible his opinion is. I still believe in the power of truth. And my belief in truth is what separates me from Irving.

"Your children will have a library card that is close to the one the angels have in their wallets."

When I saw it, this post from ChicagoBoyz in which Mitch Townsend remembers going to his local library as a kid, and discusses Coase, transaction costs and the joys of the internet seemed so relevant to the end of trade stuff that I marked it up. Maybe it isn't relevant. Read it anyway.

Food isn't free, hence neither is nanotech.

Jamie Young also had thoughts on the End of Trade.

Dear Natalie,

You might be interested in this, given that you ran the 'end of Trade' post on your blog and like science fiction.

For the reasons why autarcky is unstable, even in a Drexlerian nanotech replicator world, see:

Nanotechnology without Genies


Ignore the author's more outre political opinions, it's an excellent rebuttal of 'Drexlerian' nanotech (as opposed to actual nanotech), and of the presumed 'post-scarcity' economy that would result. Remember - nanotech is just agri-business, and if food isn't free, why should the products of other forms of nanoscale-replicator manipulation be?

In the original.

JEM writes:

Natalie,

You pays your money and takes your choice...

(1)

You know, the press release from the Abteilung für Bildung und
Wissenschaft would sound so much more impressive in the original.

So let's talk about Kindersministerin Beverley Hughes and her
Allgemeiner Fähigkeitskern und Wissenkern, and her
Kindereinsatzsgruppe Strategie.

Why not?

It must make about as much sense to the typical 'English' voter.

Of course it is a relief to see that this press release does not
apply to 'Scotland'. Presumably. Yet.

Today 'England', tomorrow the 'World'?

(2)

So long as humanity is confined to one planet, planetary autarky is
economically feasible right now. In fact there is no alternative.

(3)

On your experiences in France, the Bard has already said it all, as
usual:

... gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

I'm sure that's how you must have felt at the time. No?

JEM

Actually, I had a splendid time and everyone I met was very nice. You just didn't meet any people doing service jobs at odd hours.

UPDATE: I just had another grin at "planetary autarky is economically feasible right now", and thought I ought to record that fact.

This blow struck true.

Amygdala writes:

I've despaired of hoping many bloggers will blog much on Darfur. It's only genocide.

If it's not of use as a political football, either against or for G. W. Bush, it's of insufficient concern to blog about. And if one's fellow pack-members aren't blogging about it, aren't swarming about it -- and there are no blog-swarms absent a news hook, or a created campaign (and mostly the latter don't work) -- it's not really news, anyway.

Bloggers aren't the least bit better than the dread "MSM" in their pack-journalism. If anything they're worse, save that there are more bloggers and thus more outliers. But if the leading blogs of Your Side aren't saying "this is important, here's the news, here's the outrage," few bloggers notice.

It's only genocide.

So, in my despair, I offer this.

Gary Farber then offers sample partisan reasons for pro- and anti- Bush bloggers and other political groups to mention Darfur.

As I've said before, despair is indeed the reason for silence. It's not just that there seems to be no partisan advantage in talking about it, it is that there seems to be no advantage full stop.

Normblog also posts on Darfur. If many people keep talking, keep thinking, maybe useful thoughts will come.

My hopes rose

when I found a press release on the website of the Department for Education and Science that began

Children’s Minister Beverley Hughes today set out the next steps in delivering a world-class children’s workforce, including the development of an integrated qualifications framework.

At last! Get the little blighters out of the box and back to work as God intended. Have we not mines? Have we not chimneys? OK, fewer than we did in both cases, but still, a world-class children's workforce ought to be able to manage some job-sharing so that every child got to have a go.

The rest was a bit of a let down. For one thing it appears to be about social workers. For another it's in German. No, really. I can tell because all the nouns have capital letters. There's the Common Core of Skills and Knowledge, something called Options for Excellence, something else called the Children’s Workforce Strategy, the Early Years Professionals, and, most wondrously, the Transformation Fund that will transform the bog standard Early Years Professionals that appear throughout most of the document into the much classier Early Years' Professionals-with-an-apostrophe that appear once the Fund is mentioned.

The thing ends oddly.

This press notice relates to 'England'

Why the scare quotes?

The end of trade.

AOG of Thought Mesh writes:

My recent post on the ChiComs dilemma of accepting destabilizing technology made me think more about autarky and interstellar trade (two things I am sure sprang in to your mind as well).

But of course.

As nano-tech advances and we become ever more a society which manufactures information while our robots deal with the physical world, the need for actual trade will decrease. At some point, probably within the next century, robotics and nanotech will be even cheaper than overseas sweatshops. This is bad enough for planetary trade (what happens to that when autarky becomes economically feasible?), but one wonders what exactly would be traded between star systems. One might say information, but if progress remains possible, I expect that a local star system would generate it about as fast it the society could handle it, the the limits would be the ability of the society to consume information, not acquire it.

So David Irving

has been jailed. He should not have been.

I can see why laws against Holocaust denial in Germany and Austria seemed like a good idea to the occupying Allies in 1946. The metaphor I use is that of a man who has just managed to fight off a maniac. After a dreadful struggle the citizen has finally wrestled his assailant onto the floor and held him down. It must have seemed like madness to even consider letting him rise again.

I use that metaphor to understand the motivations of those who passed that law, not to say that they were correct. When I start to type the numerous reasons why Irving should not have been jailed a great weariness comes over me, but here they are again. Freedom of speech is indivisible: the fact that an odious man is free to say odious things protects those who wish to say things that are not odious but are unpopular. Lies should be fought with truth, not manacles. Once the precedent is set that wrong historical opinions can be criminalised, it becomes easier for the powerful to censor historical opinions that are inconvenient to them. Even where jail is never mentioned there will be a chilling effect on historical debate. Jailing Irving will make a martyr of him and give credence to his theories. Islamofascists will say that if Holocaust denial can be criminalised why not depiction of their prophet? Their fellow-travellers among the EU hierarchy will be happy, for their own reasons, to agree.

How ironic if the very forceps made ready to kill one evil ideology in the womb before it could be reborn to trouble Europe were to be used to assure a safe birthing into Europe for another.

Back from France,

land of cheese, wine and self-service petrol pumps that don't like British credit cards. Heading back towards Calais early in the morning we thought it would be clever to get off the motorway and fill up cheaply at an Auchan in one of those industrial estates that my children think make up most of the French landscape. But the heirs of Citizen Chauvelin were wise to that one: not only did a little screen flash a message that our card was not acceptable, a robot speaker said it aloud as well, alerting any passing Frenchmen to our shame. They didn't have a human being at the kiosk because all the kiosk attendants were expelled from France in the great purge of 1292.

We were well used to having our weary feet turned away from French credit-card operated doors. At a late hour the previous night Formule 1 had declared the Solents unfit to enter. However this turned out to be because my husband had booked the wrong date. Ah, but then we were between two beautiful sheets! as the French really do say. Except that our problem was that we weren't. No chance of asking the concierge if they were really truly complet or just pretending because trying to type in "pretty please" to those machines doesn't work; they are as a class truculent and supercilious to a regrettable degree.

But we were not long dismayed. "Your father was a hamster and your mother smelt of elderberries," that is what we say to Formule 1. For down the road we discovered Mister Bed. By some mistake of officialdom there was a nice young man with a job in a little office by the door. Shall I say that he was of immigrant descent? Yes I shall. He sold us a room for not many francs, as I still like to call them, and all was well.