Friday, November 21, 2003
Krugman Actually Has a Point! (sort of)
But we'll begin with Sir Thomas Browne, instead:
'Tis not a melancholy Utinam of mine owne, but the desires of better heads, that there were a generall Synod; not to unite the incompatible difference of Religion, but for the benefit of learning, to reduce it as it lay at first in a few and solid Authours; and to condemne to the fire those swarms and millions of Rhapsodies, begotten onely to distract and abuse the weaker judgements of Scholars, and to maintaine the Trade and Mystery of Typographers.
Religio Medici, Sect. 24
As I am no longer a typographer, I am much more comfortable citing this. But what does it have to do with Krugman? Krugman complains today about the Bush administration and the Republicans in Congress (no, really!) and the AARP because he doesn't like the new Medicare and energy bills. (Who does?)
Krugman notes, "In case you haven't noticed, we live in a golden age of pork: the other big piece of legislation marching through Congress, the energy bill, makes the Smoot-Hawley tariff look like a classic of good government."
To Krugman, this is a failing of the uniquely corrupt, dishonest, stupid, and incompetent Republicans -- though how they can manage to be all four at once and yet consistently defeat the pure, honest, wise, and competent Democrats is something of a mystery. But to Browne and to me, it seems rather a natural result of the metastisization of government.
It is time, and past time, to "reduce it as it lay at first"; to declare a sort of legislative Jubilee during which all laws and regulations are repealed, and only those truly conducive to happy lives in a free society be re-enacted.
posted by vepxistqaosani 10:04 AM
Wednesday, October 01, 2003
Microsoft's treasonous innovations
Hey, so what if Microsoft can't produce interesting technology? They've got the market cornered on new ways to betray one's country!
I've blogged on this before: see this post from February 2003.
The issue -- which everyone seems to be ignoring -- is back in the news. A Slashdot post directed me to this article on C|Net. China has set up a lab to browse through Microsoft's Windows source code. Given that, as Jim Allchin, Microsoft's Group Vice President for Platforms, has said, "It is no exaggeration to say that the national security is also implicated by the efforts of hackers to break into computing networks. Computers, including many running Windows operating systems, are used throughout the United States Department of Defense and by the armed forces of the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere." Or, as eWeek put it, "A senior Microsoft Corp. executive told a federal court last week that sharing information with competitors could damage national security and even threaten the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. He later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed."
So, what Sun, HP, Oracle, etc. cannot be permitted to see because of the threat to national security can be freely given to communist China.
Someone please explain to me how this makes sense.
posted by vepxistqaosani 10:15 AM
Sunday, September 14, 2003
Fabulous Pianist Patch!
The Instapundit is in pain! But I can help ...
I suffered hand and wrist pains from computer use some years ago; I'm all better now, but my cure is an unusual one: Hanon.
Hanon is a set of finger exercises excruciatingly well-known among pianists. Since my mother was a piano teacher, I, too, knew of them. Once I had started, I eventually found a teacher -- and the muscular exercise of playing a real keyboard helped me train my hands to type using a computer keyboard in a healthier way (keep the wrist still and flat, let the fingers work, etc.)
As a side effect of this course of therapy, I can now play a few pieces of real music, even though I have no detectable musical talent.
Mouse overuse is still a problem, though, since traditional mice encourage truly lousy wrist positions. But it's rare that I have to use a mouse that much: keyboard shortcuts are so much more efficient.
posted by vepxistqaosani 5:17 PM
Friday, September 12, 2003
No Lind for Peas!
Oh, boy! My first Fisking ...
It is possible, I suppose, to be genuinely concerned about the poor of the third world and to be an American environmentalist -- but Michael Lind doesn't manage it in his New York Times piece, The Canc?n Delusion.
In fact, if a right-winger had come up with a third-world agricultural policy anything like Lind's, the Left would accuse him of racism -- if not fascism and genocide. And, for once, the Left's name-calling would be defensible.
Lind argues that eliminating agricultural subsidies in the first world would do nothing to help the third; that
... while the free traders are getting what they want out of the partnership -- lower taxes and expanded markets -- the populism and environmentalism of the left will be thwarted.
He goes on to say that
Agricultural subsidies in the advanced industrial nations ought to be reduced -- but for reasons that have little to do with their impact on developing countries. Created to promote a rural middle class when much of the population still worked in the farm sector, most subsidies are anachronistic now that agribusiness in the advanced countries employs only a tiny percentage of the population. Farm subsidy programs exploit consumers and taxpayers.
So he's on the Right side of the issue. What's the problem, then?
So yes, the abolition of most farm subsidies by the advanced nations is an overdue reform. But the result is unlikely to be the one hoped for by the left wing of the Canc?n coalition -- the enrichment of peasant farmers.
In fact, ending subsidies, if it leads to the modernization of agriculture in the developing world, is likely to destroy the very sorts of communities the pro-trade left seeks to support.
So the Evil Forces of Globalization are back in the community-destruction business. And how will they manage such destruction? Why, by using machines and chemicals instead of human muscle. Quelle horreur!
The high-tech farming of the global north uses machinery instead of human labor, along with huge quantities of fossil fuels and artificial fertilizers and pesticides. If the third world becomes as attractive to agribusiness as the first, then machines will replace family farmers, who will become as rare in Thailand as they are in the United States.
Technological displacement has the potential to produce social disasters. Many of the inner-city poor of the United States descend from farm laborers and tenant farmers displaced by the mechanization of agriculture in the South a few generations ago. Those who joined the middle class did so because they were able to find work in the expanding industrial and service sectors. But such opportunities are scarce in the developing world. For better or worse, the anti-subsidy movement, if it succeeds, is more likely to eliminate developing world farmers than to enrich them.
Yes, there are problems inherent in the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. But would you rather engage in back-breaking labor 16 hours a day with no guarantee that you'll actually manage to feed your family (much less make any money for the future) or take your chances in the big city? Over the past 250 years, millions of people have been faced with this choice -- and the vast majority choose the city.
Perhaps left-wing environmentalists should be required to work a year on a subsistence farm before they opine. That would save them from embarrassments like this:
The desire of many on the left to preserve traditional small-scale agriculture in the third world ...
Wait a minute! You mean the Left actively wants to keep the poorest people on the planet permanently poor? Well, yes. But there's another problem Lind has discovered (no doubt helped by Jonathan Rauch's article on genetically modified crops in the October Atlantic, not yet on line).
... is also on a collision course with the goal of preserving the last remnants of global wilderness. High-tech agriculture wastes fossil fuels -- but it spares land, by growing more food on less acreage. Genetically modified crops promise to do the same. Premodern third world agriculture doesn't rely on chemicals or genetically modified crops. But it takes far more land to grow the same crop by traditional methods than it does by means of industrial farming. The earth's remaining wilderness would be in even greater danger if the opening of northern markets were to create a financial incentive for developing nations to replace forests, savannas and wetlands with land-wasting peasant farms.
Gosh. Industrialization and technology save the environment. Imagine! Who could possibly have guessed?
These are the alternatives, then. If third world agriculture is industrialized, then much third world wilderness will be saved from the plow. But most farmers will be forced off the farm, and therefore may not profit from the access of southern agricultural exporters to northern markets. If, on the other hand, third world agriculture is not industrialized, then the effort to enrich developing countries by means of exports from labor-intensive farms will inspire a vast expansion of peasant farm acreage -- at the expense of the environment.
Note the hidden assumption: that third-worlders are simply not smart enough to do anything other than farm in the same primitive ways that our ancestors did five millennia ago. Perhaps there's a third way: that the industrialization of third-world agriculture will free up a vast pool of labor for the task of waging the third world's long-delayed industrial revolution.
But that's not what we want ... or not what we should want, anyway:
What looked like a sweet deal that could satisfy everybody except for subsidized special interests, then, seems destined to fall apart on inspection. First world consumers and third world agribusiness (much of it foreign-owned) may profit from the opening of the agricultural markets of the United States and other rich nations. But the activist left is unlikely to get what it wants: an Arcadia of prosperous village farmers living in harmony with the land.
In other words, let's keep 'em down on the farm just because that makes us feel better. And if they want to get off the farm -- well, screw 'em. We know what's best for them.
The fact that we'd never consider such an option for ourselves and our own families is beside the point -- and only right-wing meanies would bring it up.
posted by vepxistqaosani 4:03 PM
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
The Fear of Being Right
Instapundit linked to the Angry Clam's outing of Berkeley's psychoanalysis of the right-wing mindset.
If I could still be offended by leftist idiocies, I would be.
But we've had debates at my church over the past few months (the clergy is quite a bit to my left), and I have realized what the Left's problem is: They're afraid of being right.
Sure, not everyone on the Left is a Christian, so my sample is skewed: but I think my observations of the Christian Left do apply to the rest of them as well.
Christians are required, after all, to proclaim the unique truth of the Gospel; liberal priests won't do that. Instead, they'll have interfaith councils with Muslims and Hindus and Wiccans and such. In fact, the assistant minister told me that she would be very uncomfortable in a world where everyone was a Christian.
And so to politics. If you are right -- and I mean absolutely right, not merely that you think (or, more likely, feel) that you're right or that your opinions are right for you -- I mean objectively, undoubtedly, unquestionably right -- then you will be obligated both to tell others that they are wrong and to act.
But that would be intolerant. It's a far, far better thing to do to wrestle -- as publicly as you can manage -- with your doubts and dither until the debate has been decided.
Then you can start complaining all over again. That way your superior morality can never be questioned, and you can continue to look down upon simplisme. By looking down on others, you can be guaranteed to please yourself, no matter how much you have to overlook to do it.
To put it simply -- which is all I can do, being a right-winger and all -- the Left has become the party of masturbation fantasies.
Dr. Jocelyn Elders for President!
posted by vepxistqaosani 11:41 PM
Friday, February 28, 2003
Microsoft Betrays America!
Oh, sure, everyone knows that Microsoft is evil. Those of us who have to write programs for the Windows operating [sic] system are, perhaps, easier to convince than most.
But there's a story today that forces one to conclude that Microsoft are either traitors or liars. (Or both, I suppose.)
See this from the New York Times News from AP feature: "Microsoft to Let China See Windows Code". You say you don't see any problem? You say that Microsoft should be free to show their code to anyone who can stomach it?
Well, that's not the way Jim Allchin, Group Vice President for Platforms at Microsoft, sees it ... or saw it, anyway. Last May, in testimony before Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, he said that one of the states' proposed remedies (to force Microsoft to allow competitors to see their code) could compromise national security. Quoting from the account in eWeek: "A senior Microsoft Corp. executive told a federal court last week that sharing information with competitors could damage national security and even threaten the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. He later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed."
So, when Microsoft is trying to suppress competition, national security is of paramount importance; but when they're trying to make a sale to a country whose interests are often inimical to those of the United States ... well, anything to make a gigabuck or two!
posted by vepxistqaosani 1:41 PM
Thursday, February 06, 2003
A Reason for Space
Arguments about space exploration usually wind up with the old canard that we should do something about <insert liberal crusade here> first. So the challenge is to demonstrate that space exploration will have some effect on earthbound ills. Weather satellites are too old-hat to do the trick; and spinoffs, it will be argued, mostly benefit the already privileged.
Solar Power
All right-thinking environmentalists are bound to be in favor of solar power -- at least, so long as solar power installations aren't large enough to be noticed; cf. wind power and the objections of those good liberals on Cape Cod. So let's give them solar power! But not inefficient, expensive, earthbound, Sierra Club--style solar cells: I'm talking about giant satellites beaming power down to Earth.
This may not be feasible, as there are substantial technological and economic difficulties. But it's well worth investigating, especially since innovations in computer technology and materials science have not stopped since the problem was last looked at (though research into propulsion systems seems to have lagged a bit).
As a starting point, take a look at this article from space.com and this neat picture of a solar power satellite under construction.
Global Warming
We can even imagine a solution to global warming, should it ever prove to be a problem: A parasol, hundreds or thousands of miles in diameter, orbiting the Earth.
Sound crazy? Sure! But check out Dyson spheres someday ... and Freeman Dyson's a very important, highly credentialed physicist, very unlike your humble blogger.
The best thing about solutions like these is that they drive environmentalists crazy. The last thing they want is a technological solution that enables the spread of the American Way of Life (the supremest of evils) throughout the entire globe. But why shouldn't we want that?
posted by vepxistqaosani 12:13 PM
