Monthly Archives: January 2016

Robert Macfarlane, author of recent book Landmarks, remarks in NewScientist (19 December 2015) on the castoffs of the Anthropocene’s dominant species:

The [potash] mining is done by £3.2 million machines, which – at least to my zoomorphic eye – resemble Komodo dragons, low-slung and sharp-toothed. These machines are taken down the main shaft in six or seven sections, then assembled in bays a kilometre below the surface. Once complete, they take three days to trundle out to the production district, where they begin work.

Years later, when a machine has been exhausted by the demands of its labour, it’s just too expensive to bring it back to the surface, for this would mean suspending the transport of the profitable potash itself. So instead it is driven into a worked-out tunnel of rock salt, and abandoned.

Slowly, the pressure of depth squeezes the tunnel, and translucent salt flows around the machine, encasing it. Thus we lay down a future fossil of the Anthropocene: a machine-relic in a halite cocoon.

Great visual.

The Fiscal Times reports on efforts in the US Congress to defeat the market:

The combination of regulatory oversight and class-action litigation can keep companies in line. But a bill in Congress consisting of a little more than 100 words would not only prevent Kaplan from seeking justice but also cripple virtually all class-action lawsuits against corporations. It’s known as the “Fairness in Class Action Litigation Act,” but lawyers and advocates call it the “VW Bailout Bill.”

The bill, which will get a vote on the House floor in the first week of January, follows a series of steps by the judiciary to block the courthouse door on behalf of corporations. “There’s no question the Supreme Court has ben moving in that direction to limit access to courts,” said Joanne Doroshow, executive director of the Center for Justice and Democracy. “But Congress has never done something like this, trying to step in and wipe out class-actions.”

It’s always interesting how the greatest beneficiaries of market economics – corporations – often hide from the darker results of the market when it doesn’t suit them.  The natural place to run is the closest thing to a manager, the government, and attempt to find some way to ameliorate their misstep.  Removing class action suits continues an approach we’ve already discussed once here, where small-print agreements with consumers contain unbreakable requirements that disputes will always be handled via mediation, rather than the judicial system.

But I have to wonder if the members of Congress involved in this action have considered the long term problems this action may provoke.  The most important will be the market backlash: the American public, accepting that we have something resembling a free market, may be enraged that a company competing in the free market will be artificially protected from its misdeeds by an Act of Congress (will the President go along?).  Remember when the Bush Administration decided to support the “too big to fail” banks?  A lot of folks were really angry.

Second, changing the rules of the game is never a good philosophy.  Even business leaders will not be happy, as predictability, so prized by managers, goes out the window when Congress thinks it should be protecting one company from its own mistakes.

Third, an entity which doesn’t suffer for its mistakes will never learn from them.  Any parent knows this, and it applies to corporate critters as much as it does to singletons.

Fourth, if VW doesn’t have to deliver honest products to customers, why should anyone else?  The free market system excels when good product is delivered at an honest price, and that’s not what we’re seeing here – and it may be discouraged if this legislation becomes law.

To take one more quote from the Fiscal Times article:

The simplicity of the VW Bailout Bill belies the chaos it would create. Proponents like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the bill’s leading lobbyist, say they merely want to get rid of “non-injury” class-action cases, based on potential damages from defective consumer products or corporate actions that have yet to result in harm. Lawyers for class-action litigants argue that defective products deserve compensation even if the consumer hasn’t yet been injured.

This ignores the concept of irremediable harm.  There are some actions that can result in injury or death that cannot truly be remediated (despite legal attachments of value to human life, it’s little more than a gesture to the needs of the survivors).  By prohibiting such actions before they occur, damages can actually be less; by prohibiting class action suits referencing such actions, such as those resulting in climate change, we put more people at risk of preventable injury, and in that way the government fails to fulfill one of its key functions.

Finally, it’s interesting how we seem to be moving back to mercantilism, the economic system preceding free markets, in the sense that certain firms prosper because of governmental protectionism, while others no doubt will never survive because they lack the favor of the government.

Sometimes, in order to preserve something, we have to destroy it – a phrase with a delightful double meaning in this case.

But it’s really important that the US government dispense its favor in the commercial world as it does in the religious world – that is, not at all.

If California continues to dry out, inhabitants may face more occurrences of valley fever reports NewScientist (19/26 December 2015):

The Coccidioides fungus lives in the desert soil of the Southwest US and Mexico, but on dry, windy days it can get kicked up into the air. Inhaling a single spore can cause pneumonia – or worse. A drone designed at the University of California, Merced, aims to be a nose in the sky, searching for the airborne fungus to warn people when levels are high.

The fungus infects an estimated 150,000 people a year, causing a flu-like condition called valley fever. If properly diagnosed, valley fever can be treated with antifungal drugs, but little is known about how the spores spread through the environment, or how to stop this happening. The goal of the Merced project is to find out. The team wants to test for spores in flight, mapping their flow and potentially warning communities to stay indoors or wear masks on the most dangerous days.

Their initial approach is to use drones that can sample the air in real time.  The vision of warnings of high risk of catching pneumonia, depending on weather conditions, may be only the first as climate change moves our ecological niche in ways that make our adaptations less advantageous due to the release of more dangerous substances – both natural and unnatural.

In the same issue I was surprised to read that golden eagles will, when starving, kill adult reindeer by striking the large veins in their necks and waiting for them to bleed out.  Now I’m seeing other large creatures going after another large herd creature … humans ….

From NewScientist’s (12 December 2015, paywall) article on the research of Antarctica’s bedrock comes the word chemoautotrophic, referring to creatures (in this case bacteria) which leach energy from bedrock, so that they have neither a direct nor indirect dependence on energy from the sun.

Chemoautotrophic.  Remember it.  Use it.

Previous posts on this thread referred to identifying good human governments, but even elephant government appears to feature stability, as noted on Discover Magazine‘s D-brief blog:

Wittemyer and Goldenberg were particularly interested in how elephant social networks responded if a matriarch was killed. What happens when a matriarch’s wisdom and social skills suddenly vanish from a group? To see how elephants responded to dramatic changes, they combed through data collected from roughly 100 elephants during a 16-year period between 1998 and 2014 .

All four matriarchs that Wittemyer started watching nearly two decades ago were killed during that time period. In fact, just 30 percent of the elephants that were alive in 1998 were still alive in 2014, due to the impacts of poaching and a devastating drought. Surprisingly, the elephants’ social structures remained intact, and here’s why: After matriarchs were killed, their daughters stepped up to maintain the extended relationships their mothers had formed with other elephants.

Additionally, the daughters reached out to old acquaintances from their bond and clan groups to renew relationships and reconstruct their core and bond groups. Ultimately, the daughters reconfigured their social networks until they reflected the structure that was in place prior to a matriarch’s death. In other words, younger female elephants kept their mothers’ legacies alive, and, more importantly, prevented social collapse.

I wonder if we could learn from their example sometimes.

A list of words deemed unworthy of use on the Internet, courtesy Lake Superior State University: Physicality, Vape, Manspreading …

As a measure of my disconnectedness, I had never heard of that last one; on the other hand, I am a guilty party in the one most often asked to be stricken, that being the use of So to start a sentence.

(h/t various friends 🙂

One sector so far undiscussed is the free press.  This sector has difficulties, for while everyone is guaranteed free speech, there are no guarantees of free access to the necessary machinery of a free press.  Thus, there is a required intrusion of the private sector, which is the constructor of things, into the sector of news.

First, we should give a purpose for the sector of the press, and that is the delivery of news to the citizenry for its use in the everyday and long term conduct of lives.  Necessarily, fees are charged, but because of the achievement of scale in the collection and dispersal of the news, the prices are rarely onerous; audiences of specialized publications may find their pocketbooks taxed, but for the general consumer, the price of information is almost free in this age.

But the achievement of scale comes via the use of things, prosaic and specialized: vehicles, printing presses, journalistic skills, the Internet.  These are necessary and thus we cannot preclude the intrusion of the private sector into the free press sector.

The vigor of the free press can be said to correlate with the perception of veracity, and can apply to various players within the sector as well as the whole.  Consider the interests of the consumer: false information used as input for decision-making processes will, more often than not, lead to suboptimal solutions.  This dry, academic phrase can imply actions like driving off cliffs, losing retirement accounts to shysters, and even worse results.  Don’t blow it off: false information is a negative survival strategy.  Therefore, if the free press – or some segment of it – is providing false information on a systematic basis, then public trust in that institution will weaken, and that impacts both the organization and the sector¹.  The currency of the free press sector is the trust the public places in it, and nothing else.

The private sector does not necessarily hold veracity as a highest ideal, neither theoretically (all they want to do is produce and sell goods and services, and honesty is not necessary to make that sale to the consumer) nor in practice (consider the moral outrage of the denial of the tobacco-lung cancer connection by Big Tobacco): the goal is to make and trade things to others.  This is not the goal of the free press.   Thus, the private sector processes must be considered to be inappropriate until proven otherwise.

It’s worth explicating a little further: while pursuing private sector (or other sector) objectives in the free press sector isn’t necessarily impossible, using inappropriate processes such as disseminating false information will lead to short-term success but, as the consumers learn to distrust the compromised institutions, long-term weakness and even failure as consumers abandon the institution(s) in question.

Given the requirement of some private sector intrusion, how do we currently attempt to firewall that operationality to only positive uses in terms of the robustness of the free press sector?  In a phrase, journalistic ethics.  Wikipedia provides a useful summary:

While various existing codes have some differences, most share common elements including the principles of—truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness and public accountability—as these apply to the acquisition of newsworthy information and its subsequent dissemination to the public.

An explicit acknowledgement of the importance of previously noted requirements for the sector to flourish.  Through an implementation of these requirements, both on an individual level and through the concept of “editorial independence”, wherein the advertising section of the organization is asserted to have no influence over the news and editorial sections of the organization, the influence of private sector preferences is obviated and the attentive consumer of the free press’ offerings, that being information, can have a better hope of receiving information congruent with reality. Contrariwise, the breaching of this wall is the private sector leaching beyond prudency into the purview of the free press.

A marvelous example of this (h/t Steve Yelvington) is discussed in this Facebook post by Steve Majerus-Collins.  Steve, explaining why he is quitting his job, puts it best:

I work for a man, Michael Schroeder, who in 2009 bought the small daily that has employed me for two decades at a time when the future of The Bristol Press looked dim. He came in promising to shatter old ways and to help push the financially troubled paper to new heights. As is so frequently the case with newspaper publishers, his rhetoric didn’t mean much. By 2011, my wife – a superb fellow reporter who’d been at my side the whole time – quit in disgust after Mr. Schroeder cut a deal with a major advertiser, the local hospital, to keep a damaging news story under wraps. Because she could not let the community know the local hospital had fired all of its emergency room physicians, my wife, Jackie Majerus, handed in her resignation. It means very little to be a reporter if you cannot report the news. I stayed on, though, continuing to write about government and politics, because we could not get by without any paycheck. …

I have watched in recent days as Mr. Schroeder has emerged as a spokesman for a billionaire with a penchant for politics who secretly purchased a Las Vegas newspaper and is already moving to gut it. I have learned with horror that my boss shoveled a story into my newspaper – a terrible, plagiarized piece of garbage about the court system – and then stuck his own fake byline on it. I admit I never saw the piece until recently, but when I did, I knew it had Mr. Schroeder’s fingerprints all over it. Yet when enterprising reporters asked my boss about it, he claimed to know nothing or told them he had no comment. Yesterday, they blew the lid off this idiocy completely, proving that Mr. Schroeder lied, that he submitted a plagiarized story, bypassed what editing exists and basically used the pages of my newspaper, secretly, to further the political agenda of his master out in Las Vegas. In sum, the owner of my paper is guilty of journalistic misconduct of epic proportions.

There is no excusing this behavior. A newspaper editor cannot be allowed to stamp on the most basic rules of journalism and pay no price. He should be shunned by my colleagues, cut off by professional organizations and told to pound sand by anyone working for him who has integrity.

So I quit.

Note that his boss probably thinks he did nothing wrong.  Unfortunately, his goal is not consonant with the free press sector goals.  He should not be permitted to own the newspaper, as he has violated, in gross fashion, the primary rule for a robust free press.  My hope is that the more robust institutions will proceed to take subscribers away until the paper which he bought goes under.  Steve’s salutation is admirable but incomplete:

Whatever happens, I am going to hold my head high and face the future with resolve. Journalism is nothing if we reporters falter and fade. We are doing something important and men such Mr. Schroeder and Mr. Adelson – no matter how much money they can toss around – cannot have their way with us.

I would suggest that an American society lacking a robust free press would be unstable and, ultimately, fail.

So that brings us to Bruce Bartlett (with a h/t to Sydney Sweitzer).  Mr. Bartlett is a conservative historian who worked for the Reagan and Bush I administrations in the area of economics.  His recent release of an article summarizing a collection of studies of Fox News is instructive not only for the information – but for the fact that, as a conservative, he has little use for Fox News.  This article gives a handy history and psychological warfare insight into how the angry conservative movement, fragmentary at the start, was co-opted by Fox News and some collaborators.  For example:

Limbaugh’s move was fortuitous. At the exact moment he launched his show, the AM band on the radio dial was essentially dying. Since the late 1960s, music programming and listeners had deserted AM radio in droves. The FM dial provided a better signal and could broadcast in stereo, which became increasingly important as musical styles changed. Unable to compete by broadcasting music, AM stations searched for alternative programming. Talk proved to be very viable. Soon there were talkers across the AM dial, many expressing a conservative viewpoint.

There are many reasons why conservative talk radio worked so well. One is that conservatives finally had a news source that fed their philosophy. Another is that conservatives viewed themselves as outsiders and were attracted not only to the philosophy of conservative talk radio, but its tone and articulation of outrage toward liberals that many listeners themselves had long felt.

But hard results?  Here’s one:

A follow-up study in 2010 questioned people about misperceptions related to domestic issues.

Again, Fox viewers were more likely to be misinformed and hold incorrect views than those primarily getting their information elsewhere. As the study found:

Those who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe that:

• most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (8 points more likely)
• most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points)
• the economy is getting worse (26 points)
• most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)
• the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points)
• their own income taxes have gone up (14 points)
• the auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points)
• when TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points)
• and that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points)

These effects increased incrementally with increasing levels of exposure and all were statistically significant. The effect was also not simply a function of partisan bias, as people who voted Democratic and watched Fox News were also more likely to have such misinformation than those who did not watch it – though by a lesser margin than those who voted Republican.

There’s more, which I’ll forebear quoting as Mr. Bartlett’s paper deserves to be read in full by the interested reader.  I’ll simply note that Republican shock at losing the last two Presidential elections was widespread and should have led to hard questions being asked about the veracity of their sources of information.  Instead, reportedly questions were raised about the purity of the various candidates, and the GOP moved further right.

At this juncture, it’s fair to wonder: what are the goals of those in control of the Fox News organization?  Why, in a society which must, in the end, value honesty over ideology, is this organization permitted to indulge in a style of reporting which cripples its audience, while its allies work hard to ensure the audience never double checks the information and uses its critical faculties? Does it commit suicide purposefully?

More generally, the intrusion of private sector methodologies into the sector of the free press, which is a long running tension, is a matter for constant monitoring and management.  It’s quite one thing for manufacturers of printing presses to compete to build cheaper, better presses; it’s quite another for the more devious strategies of the private sector to be employed in the free press sector to achieve goals peculiar to the private sector – or even the political sector.

¹ The use of the financial position of a free press organization as a measure of its health is an intellectual error in that this would be the use of a private sector operationality to evaluate a free press organization (or the whole sector).  William Randolph Hearst may have been a very rich man, but his publications are notorious, rather than famous, and are worthy of study only for his pioneering efforts in manipulation of public opinion – not for his honorable intentions.

Rachel E. Gross at Slate references a Science Magazine article discussing how legislative bills attacking the teaching of evolution have, ummm, evolved:

But how did creationists think of such a perfect way to frame their anti-science agenda? You might think that such a bill came into this world fully formed, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But actually, it had a predecessor. An ancestor, you might even call it.

In what is almost a too-clever illustration of how evolution works, a scientist at Australian National University has created a chart to show us the evolution of anti-evolution bills. The study was published last week in Science, on the 10th anniversary of the historic Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, which struck down the teaching of intelligent design, an attempt to mask creationism with pseudo-scientific language. Evolutionary biologist Nick Matzke revealed how these bills have evolved over time to avoid potential predators such as the pesky Constitution and public outcry.

However, the fact that it passed a state legislature (two, actually, the other being Tennessee) while explicitly denying that it violates the Constitution does not mean it’ll not fall victim to the Great White of the political landscape, SCOTUS.

It might, however, be better classed as a transitional evolutionary form.

Usufruct: “the right to enjoy the use and advantages of another’s property short of the destruction or waste of its substance.”

I ran across its use here, as in

Another problem is that the people of South Sinai are unable to own land in Sinai and are only allowed to have usufruct rights.

Louis Friedman, executive director emeritus of The Planetary Society, has a new book out and gives Discover Magazine‘s The Crux blog an interview in support of it, where he suggests Mars is the outer limit for the next 10,000 years:

[Discover]: Even so, do you think that will be enough for everybody? Wouldn’t some daredevil take a human mission to points beyond at some point, just to show that they could do it? Is it so unrealistic to think that China, India, Brazil, Russia, the United States, the United Nations, or for that matter a government that has yet to exist on Mars, could find itself in a new space race where the goal is to get people — live people — where no one has gone before, for that prestige factor?

Wanting to do these things just seems to be part of human nature, we always produce people who want to visit new places, even if there’s no logical reason, don’t you agree? Do you think artificial intelligence and other technologies will change something about us, so that nobody will ever take a distant, dangerous space voyage that has no practical value?

[Friedman]: You have raised several questions here. You are right about the possibility that if we can do something, someone might just want to. We have all kinds of extreme sports here on Earth. I don’t rule out some daredevils or tourist extremists from our Earth-Mars home trying a daring mission to the asteroid belt or Ganymede. But it won’t be very relevant or even as much a part of our Society as those extreme trips to Mt. Everest.

Somebody jumped out of a balloon from the edge of space a year or so again, interesting, but not relevant to human development. Humans will already feel present on Ganymede (and lots of other places) and the development of human life support to engage in those extreme efforts will be expensive and pointless – if even possible…I think NASA has it right now. Their Journey to Mars puts into context why we have human spaceflight. In my opinion, there is no other purpose to human spaceflight.

In his answer he’s referencing a previous answer where he suggests advanced telepresence will replace actual human presence beyond Mars.  What caught my attention was his suggestion there’s only a single purpose to spaceflight.  Surely this contradicts all of human history in which a multitude of purposes coincide into single – if composite – actions. He’s not suggesting there’s a physical barrier that cannot be overcome, but almost a bureaucratic decision not to go.

My suspicion is that commercial interests will find use for telepresence and limited artificial intelligence¹ in such exploration, but there will be various limits imposed by simple physical requirements², and that eventually those folks not interested in adapting to (or terraforming) Mars will make a go of it – for their reasons.

Not for Louis’.

¹By “limited artificial intelligence” I mean an artificial intelligence lacking a survival drive, as I see a mission of this sort probably not returning – and you can’t send something with a survival drive on a suicide mission.  Yet, without the survival drive, there is a lack of motivation to solve problems….

²I exclude the breaking of the laws of physics.   Instantaneous communications would mean rethinking all the current concepts.