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Apparently it is news that the UK is still in recession, or as the headline says Economic recovery in UK ‘on hold’. On hold? The government is debasing people’s saving as quickly as possible and stripping money out of productive sectors and pumping it into unproductive sectors, and generally trying their damnedest to drive businesses and wealth creators out for years now… and the fact this is tearing a huge hole is surprising to who exactly? July 19th, 2009 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
 University of Essex Professor Vic Callaghan has a paper addressing issues of privacy and intelligent environments. In his review of a video on the subject he notes:
Although I do not think the UN is going to have the effect he would wish, the worries he expresses are ones we all need consider. The era of ubiquitous sensing has already begun. PS: Watch the referenced Christine Peterson video for a good summary of the right way to approach this problem (and not just because she’s a very old friend of mine!) July 18th, 2009 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Which is why you can’t trust nature. Anatole Kaletsky is worried about stagflation. Can this be the same Anatole Kaletsky who only six month ago called for government to “punish savers”? As I wrote at that time,
Mr Kaletsky has got what he asked for and now finds he does not want it. Human, all too human. July 17th, 2009 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
“It is often wrongly assumed that the free market is always on the side of life’s heavy hitters. But sport gives plenty of examples that it is the market which corrects received wisdom in favour of untrumpeted stars. The internet has done something similar in publishing.” What Sport Tells Us About Life, by Ed Smith. Pages 88-89. Brian Micklethwait had thoughts about this short and excellent book a few months ago. A good book to read as the Ashes cricket series continues with the second Test at Lord’s starting later today. Bliss. July 16th, 2009 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
A good article over at Reason by Ronald Bailey, the magazine’s science correspondent. He talks about the factors that explain why humans haven’t been back to the Moon since the early 1970s. It is, he says, because of a lack of profit. Every time I write something about the incredible feat of putting someone on the Moon, as happened almost exactly 40 years ago, there is an inevitable chorus of criticism – much of it justified – about how the huge sums of taxpayers’ money involved rendered the project beyond the pale, even if the critics grudgingly accept what a great adventure the whole thing was. It has to be accepted that by “crowding out” private space initiatives in the way they did, government agencies both in the US, former USSR and elsewhere have arguably retarded more promising, long-term space ventures that might have got off the ground. The existence of large, politically directed agencies like Nasa do not help innovation, either. Consider how quickly the aircraft design process occured from the Wright Brothers and through to the jet age, and then compare the rate of progress of space flight over the past 40 years. It is not a flattering comparison. So this is precisely why Dale Amon is so right to comment on stuff like this. The best way to honour the likes the astronauts, both the living, such as Buzz Aldrin, and the dead, such as Gus Grissom, is not to continue down the statist path of space flight. This is too important an issue to leave with bureaucrats. July 15th, 2009 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
I always thought gleaming, European or US wooden motorboats were the height of cool. One can imagine David Niven, Cary Grant or Sophia Loren behind the wheel of one of these beauties. Yes, I know that in technology terms, some of the modern stuff is much better, but never mind. All I need now is my private Italian lake, and I can use one. (You can tell I have been out of the country for a few days and my mind is not entirely on TARP, Gordon Brown’s mental health, taxes, ID cards…..) July 15th, 2009 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Until fairly recently, I have been a fan of budget airlines, if only because they have enabled my family and friends to whizz around the skies of Europe seeing interesting places and keeping in touch with loved ones. (Until I make my millions and can afford a Learjet, this will probably not change). I prefer Easyjet to Ryanair in this – by a whisker – because the commutes from the airports that airline uses to wherever I want to go tend to be so long as to undermine some of the cost savings of using the airline. This is a marginal difference between the two airlines and other passengers might take a different view. So Easyjet gets the nod. But until now. Yesterday, on a fairly routine flight out of Europe, I spotted something that made my jaw drop – although that may be my naivete here. A young, short woman – less than 5ft tall – was struggling to push her hand luggage item into the locker above her seat. The bag was not all that big or heavy. But the flight attendant, a 30-something young guy with a rather annoying tendency to giggle at the passangers and staff constantly, refused point blank to help her move the item. I think the line went something like this: “It is not my job to move your stuff. If you cannot move it, then it is too big for you and it goes into the hold.” Eventually I helped the lady put the bag, which was fairly light, into the locker. Now I have checked the regulations on the Easyjet website and I cannot see where it is stated that flight attendants are not supposed to help short people push their bags into a locker. In other words, a woman was refused help because she was short, as far as I can tell. My wife speculated that Easyjet staff do not get medical insurance as part of their pay package, so they have refused to do anything – such as lift bags – that might lead to a problem. That may be the reason. I hate the whole litigation culture so I would not advise the person in question to have a go at Easyjet. And it is a hassle to spend more money to fly with an airline where the staff do not come close to treating their paying customers with an attitude hovering between fake bonhomie and outright contempt. And in these straightened times, we’ll probably do the British thing, bear up and put up with it. But all the same, I was not impressed by the orange airline, and will be avoiding it in future if at all possible. In fact, when I head for France next month, I’m taking the ferry across the English Channel and then duelling it out wiith the motorists of the Fifth Republic. Update: another big and fatal air crash. There seem to have been rather a lot of them lately. July 15th, 2009 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
SpaceX is scheduled for a launch today or tomorrow from their pad at Omelek Island in Kwajalein. The payload is RazakSat for the Malaysian government. Most everyone in the commercial space business is wishing them good luck and hope the Falcon 1 flies well on its first ‘operational’ flight. I use quotes because it is still a new system and it takes time to really understand the foibles of that which you have wrought. Personally I would say their chances of a successful flight are excellent but not one hundred percent yet. The big one for SpaceX will come with their first flight attempt for the Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral. The rocket is on the pad and has been there for some months as they slowly work through all the issues preceding a launch of a big new rocket, probably later this year. This is the one which will eventually carry people in the SpaceX Dragon Capsule. For now though, stay tuned. I will pass on information on tonight or tomorrow’s launch window as I hear it. 18:40 EDT: Launch appears to be currently schedule for 02:00 UTC/Zulu/GMT. Live feed for the Kwaj launch is available but is still showing dead air. 2230 EDT: Live coverage has begun. Watch here 2250 EDT: We are into a 15 minute weather hold at T-30 min. 2300 EDT: The woman doing some of the interviews is someone I know pretty well, Cassie Kloberdanz. She is a young member of the commercial space family and a lot of fun. 2316 EDT: As you can see if you are watching, the weather is starting to clear. I understand there was also some issue on the Helium pressurization which the hold gave them time to deal with. 2323 EDT: The clock is rolling again. We’re getting down to t-13. 2346 EDT: SpaceX has delivered its first international paying customer’s satellite to orbit! The flight was almost flowless as far as I could see from the video’s. Most notable to me was how ‘cool’ the expansion nozzle of the Kestrel second stage engine ran relative to previous flights. With two successes of Falcon 1 under their belts, SpaceX is now a competitor to be reckoned with. So, what does this all mean? First, this was a key time for them. A launch failure would not have put their company at risk, but it would have had some serious repercussions on their future. The Augustine Commission is meeting right now and there is a political fight brewing in DC. There are some powerful congressman and constituencies that much prefer the status quo. The government backed Ares 1 project is, as one would expect, years behind schedule. The innovation of that particular camel is in the way they have taken bits and pieces of existing expensive hardware, manufactured for several decades in a number of key constituencies and managed to make a crewed vehicle out of it. There is a small budget, relative to that of the big aero companies, that was set aside for new players. Those companies will be paid for a result: cargo on orbit at the Space Station. There are two currently: Orbital Sciences Corporation (run by David Thompson and friends) and by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. This new way of doing business is something of a threat to the old one. The vehicles do not require huge numbers of people to process them. They are not as complex. They are designed with the idea that they will be commercially viable, and that means they cannot afford the baggage that every NASA designed ship has carried with it. Just as an example, the SpaceX rockets use the same fuel and oxidizer in both stages: Liquid Oxygen (LOX) and rocket grade Kerosene. Both are easily dealt with and familiar to industry. Notably they do not use Liquid Hydrogen (LH) for a higher energy, more ‘efficient engine’ because that efficiency comes at a high commercial cost. LH is squirrelly stuff. It will find ways to leak out if just about anything is not perfect. It is a ‘supercryogen’ and thus requires special materials and special handling. It is of very low density so it requires huge tankage to hold enough. By the time you are through, the margin gained in ISP (a measure of the efficiency of a rocket engine) is mostly eaten up by the extra structural mass. On top of that, the special requirements of dealing with LH are much more costly in terms of manpower, materials, care and testing. But wait, there is more: The Ares I rocket uses the absolute worst feature of the Space Shuttle it replaces: a stack of solid rocket engine segments. You know, the ones with the famous O-rings? Once you light them you cannot shut them down or change the flight profile. However at least Ares I is a vertical stack so they could put an escape tower on the top to pull the astronauts away to safety if they find the thing is going to blow up or come apart or the RSO (Range Safety Officer) decides it really should be blown up before it hits Miami. As bad as it is, Ares 1 had some major political clout behind it. Senator Richard Shelby from Alabama recently pulled funding that was to be used to do cargo delivery for hire and moved it to his district to feed the dinosaurs. A failure of this launch would have allowed these political types to say “See? We told you so! These commercial upstarts are not able to do the job. Rockets really are that expensive for a reason. That is why we need the money for our government designed rocket done by proper government contractors and with proper government design oversight… and built with parts made in our districts.” Elon could probably get by without the space station delivery contracts, but they would certainly help. The problem for the American Rocket Design Bureau’s is that if he succeeds, he will change the game to one which is open ended and done with a wider commercial model in mind. With this flawless launch under their belt, the case for commercial cargo delivery to orbit followed by commercial delivery of people becomes very hard to ignore. 0228 EDT: I heard a little while ago that the second burn of the upper stage was nominal as was the payload sep and the Malaysian customer satellite is in the correct orbit and is communicating with the ground. July 13th, 2009 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
“It has always been one of libertarianism’s insights…..that massive concentrations of government power are more likely to be used to benefit other huge concentrations of wealth and power than help the needy or downtrodden…the powerful few who benefit from government action are more highly motivated to work the mechanisms of democracy to their benefit than are the masses who all pay a little – often too little in each specific case to feel it worth fighting, or even knowing about – and thus win in the democratic game of shifting property and wealth from person, or group, to another. If a government were restricted to its libertarian minimums of protecting citizens’ life and property from force and fraud, all a corporation could do is to try to sell us something and we could decide whether or not to buy. It couldn’t tax us for its benefit, raise tariffs on its competitors to make their products more expensive, subsidize bad loans or overseas expansion, or take formerly private property on the grounds that it will make more lucrative use of it than would the former owner.” Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, page 589. July 13th, 2009 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
I had to read the headline twice. Then I read the article twice. I still don’t get it. What I first thought it said was,
Weird, obscure line, but no weirder than a lot of things that come out of the international development department, and potentially a lot more sensible. I suppose it might make sense for the big southern African companies, especially, to combine their employee health programmes. But if it were more effective, wouldn’t they already be doing it? Wouldn’t the South African government, in any case (now they have got rid of that barking health minister), be the one doing the urging? What it actually said was,
Now that makes a lot less sense. It is quite up to the standard we have come to expect from DFID, a real candidate for economic illiteracy of the day.
What can this possibly mean? There’s no real explanation here of how a ‘patent pool’ might work. It sounds like pharmaceuticals companies are being offered to the opportunity to swap an unstable legal monopoly for an internationally approved cartel, and to pose as humanitarians while doing so. Would that really lower the cost of HIV medication, and improve its effectiveness in general? It is far from obvious why that should be the case. Would medicines that are both cheaper and more effective be permitted to flow back to Western countries? I doubt it. Which points up the weirdness of the whole exercise. In order to be economic in Western countries, HIV medicines have to be very expensive to buy there. That is not just because they are expensive to develop, but because the absolute numbers of people who need them are small. In the West, just as in poorer parts of the world almost no individual can afford to pay for their own treatment. So there’s a different sort of cartel effect maintaining the oligopolistic market. Government protects the patentees; and government subsidies end up paying for the consequences. You don’t have to be a believer in the efficacy of beetroot and garlic as anti-virals to notice that the difference between the scale of the epidemic in parts of Africa and the richest parts of the world is not a consequence of the availabilty of drugs – or at least not the availabilty of anti-retrovirals. We have fewer people getting the disease in the first place. But we have fewer people with all sorts of infectious diseases. Malaria and dengue are not more treatable than they were when they were endemic in Europe, and the US, less than a century ago. The difference is better living conditions that everyone will work for if they have the chance. Patent pooling, it seems to me, is no better than patent farming, in that it seeks to exploit artifical restrictions on innovation that just happen to be there for the benefit of a restricted interest group. It is an exercise in dinosaur husbandry, with little real relevance to improving the lives of us mammals. A reconfiguration of corporarate welfare, with its concentration on subsidising treatment of a particular disease, and bureaucrats swapping targets with bureaucrats, is a distraction from the less collectively ‘manageable’ task of avoiding the spread of infection, which is the invisible part of the virtuous circle of the people who are not sick getting better general health and more comfortable lives. That isn’t going to come from government drug programmes. I suspect it might come from “people living in poverty” having a bit more access to the non-patent and never-patent – but still restricted – technologies of choosing their own priorities and exploiting their own comparative advantages. July 13th, 2009 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Where are they?” is a question I would rather had remained unanswered, Mbotu mused. The stone-like bench, lost in the giant and austere entry hall, was cold and uncomfortable. It grew more so as time passed. He had been punctual. One does not keep ones God King waiting. The reverse, however, is a given. Mbotu had once done so himself. Was it only a year? Just one year since he had held the highest office there was: Secretary General of the United Nations of Earth. It might as well have been a millennium ago. The now redundant world government had succeeded beyond the wildest imaginings of its 20th century founders. After three centuries, war and everything associated with it had been abolished. No one was hungry; there were no rich, no poor; the environment had been saved and the excesses of unfettered capitalism had been reined in by the gentle power of the institution to which he had given over his life. Mbotu’s thoughts were interrupted by the echoing footfalls of an approaching functionary. “You will be seen now.” By the time the elderly Mbotu rose aching from the bench, the figure was already in motion. Instant and unquestioning obedience was simply assumed. No further words were exchanged and he followed as quickly as he could. A lift took them to the top of the five kilometre ‘palace’, if that was the right term for the new seat of government. When the door opened it was as if he had crossed light-years to another world and in effect he had. This was the private residence of the alien warlord who now claimed the once peaceful and unarmed Earth for his own. “Sit”, said an imposing alien figure. “Be comfortable”. As if realizing Mbotu’s thoughts, he added “There is no need for formality here. You are fully aware of your place and it is time to integrate you into the Imperial Government. You will be assigned quarters here. You will be restored to your former position and will retain it for so long as you are obedient and successful in carrying out our wishes. Earth must begin to pay its own way in the Empire and repay our investment in it. Our requirements are simple enough. You have advanced technology and global infrastructure. You will convert it to production to support our fleet and invasion forces. If all goes well, in a century or so you will supply troops as well.” “But… we have no knowledge of arms and war”, interjected an appalled Mbotu, “We have expunged even the basics of dangerous technologies from our libraries and archives. They have been outlawed for generations!” “We know. That is in fact why I am here and you are there.” After a pause he continued. “Perhaps I should explain the realities of the wider universe. Most civilizations travel a path similar to yours. They go from warlike tribes to larger and larger conglomerates hacking and beating at each other with primitive weapons. Then comes the first technological transition and wars which become more and more terrible. Those who survive become a single global state by one path or another. Since there is no longer a threat to be met, defences atrophy. There is no need for advanced arms, nuclear weapons or standing armies. Most societies degenerate to the point where they have only small special units for solving problems for the supreme ruler of the planet.” He continued. “A few, like you, are more extreme. You have eliminated your military entirely. You have destroyed traditions which reached far into your past and once allowed the training of effective soldiers. Even if we had allowed you ten years warning you could not have fielded a fighting force worthy of respect. You blocked the development of nanotechnology, advanced spaceships, nuclear power, directed energy weapons, force fields and a hundred other things you deemed too dangerous. Your population became coddled and addicted to a safe and easy, if somewhat impoverished, life. The concept of self-defence, even if you still allowed so much as a sharp blade to be manufactured or kept, have become as alien to your population as invaders from another planet.” “You believe you had a golden age, but soon enough your population will be taught the lie and will support our rule. By our standards you accomplished a global and equal poverty for all but the ruling class like yourself. We will return adventure to your decadent and risk averse populace. We will give you the option of thousand year lifespans and travel to the stars. Your children will be will be our willing adventurers and soldiers.” Mbotu, steeled by life as a bureaucrat, diplomat and politician, stayed calm. “You say most. Obviously you are an exception.” “Yes. A very small number of civilizations follow the path to Empire. From time to time we fight each other at the edges of our vast catchments, but for the most part we take the easier path. There are so many like you that it would be a waste of resources to spend our time locked in bloody combat and destroy the very planets and populations we seek.” Mbotu changed the subject. “How long have you known of us?” “Space is vast and the stars are like dust. Occasionally we stumble upon a pre-technological species, but for the most part we just listen. By the time we hear the first radio broadcast your sort are already into the endgame of the nation state. When we first arrived your Europeans were nearly ready for harvesting but there were still many capable of causing us annoyance. Your United States had the technology and fight to give us big problems. A deadly challenge to their supremacy might well have pushed them into developing some of the now proscribed technologies and made invasion too costly for us. Others like China and India had populations whom we would have had to mostly wipe out to stop them from fighting.” “Over the millennia we have learned the virtue of patience. A few centuries is usually enough. Once you are decadent, disarmed and centralized…” the alien did what could pass for a shrug, “We arrive with a show of overwhelming force and you surrender without a shot. There are usually a few hold outs, but they are easily dealt with and turned into object lessons without wrecking what we want: a developed planetary civilization that will supply us the tools for the next conquest. You were not able or willing to fight for your freedom.” He paused for effect. “And now you are ours.” [Copyright 20090712 Dale Amon, all rights reserved] July 12th, 2009 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
Whatever you believe about race these days in the privacy of your own head is pretty irrelevant. Having the wrong opinions about these issues is professional and social suicide so broadly speaking people with a stake in society don’t. People higher up the socioeconomic pyramid aren’t less racist than those lower down because of any greater enlightenment on their part. They are because they have far more to lose by refuting the orthodoxy. The defeat of racism in this manner has given the current cultural establishment the idea hat such authoritarianism is a fundamentally legitimate means by which to stamp their political and moral assumptions upon the populace. The elite’s ideas about the evils of racism at least had the virtue of being essentially correct. Most of the other opinions they want to violently foist upon us are not. – Commenter Jay Thomas, of the Thoughtful Ape. July 12th, 2009 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
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