Yet another weird SF fan


I'm a mathematician, a libertarian, and a science-fiction fan. Common sense? What's that?

Go to first entry


 

Archives

<< current
 
E-mail address:
jhertzli AT ix DOT netcom DOT com


My Earthlink/Netcom Site

My Tweets

My other blogs
Small Sample Watch
XBM Graphics


The Former Four Horsemen of the Ablogalypse:
Someone who used to be sane (formerly War)
Someone who used to be serious (formerly Plague)
Rally 'round the President (formerly Famine)
Dr. Yes (formerly Death)

Interesting weblogs:
Back Off Government!
Bad Science
Blogblivion
Boing Boing
Debunkers Discussion Forum
Deep Space Bombardment
Depleted Cranium
Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine.
EconLog
Foreign Dispatches
Good Math, Bad Math
Greenie Watch
The Hand Of Munger
Howard Lovy's NanoBot
Hyscience
Liberty's Torch
The Long View
My sister's blog
Neo Warmonger
Next Big Future
Out of Step Jew
Overcoming Bias
The Passing Parade
Peter Watts Newscrawl
Physics Geek
Pictures of Math
Poor Medical Student
Prolifeguy's take
The Raving Theist
RealityCarnival
Respectful Insolence
Sedenion
Seriously Science
Shtetl-Optimized
Slate Star Codex
The Speculist
The Technoptimist
TJIC
Tools of Renewal
XBM Graphics
Zoe Brain

Other interesting web sites:
Aspies For Freedom
Crank Dot Net
Day By Day
Dihydrogen Monoxide - DHMO Homepage
Fourmilab
Jewish Pro-Life Foundation
Libertarians for Life
The Mad Revisionist
Piled Higher and Deeper
Science, Pseudoscience, and Irrationalism
Sustainability of Human Progress


























Yet another weird SF fan
 

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Michael Pollan and Science Fiction

I noticed the following passage in Michael Pollan's complaint about Big Organic:

Big supermarkets want to do business only with big farmers growing lots of the same thing, not because big monoculture farms are any more efficient (they aren't) but because it's easier to buy all your carrots from a single megafarm than to contract with hundreds of smaller growers. The "transaction costs" are lower, even when the price and the quality are the same. This is just one of the many ways in which the logic of industrial capitalism and the logic of biology on a farm come into conflict. At least in the short run, the logic of capitalism usually prevails.
This reminded me of a common assumption by science-fiction fans discussing the economic of space travel: that natural resources are the only important costs. This leads to calculations showing that asteroid exploitation, SPS, etc. will yield more resources out than were put in. (“It's raining soup…,” as the saying goes) This, in turn, is followed by yelling at businessmen for short-sightedly refusing to invest.

In the real world (sigh), labor (including transaction costs) and capital costs also count.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think the gigantic risks are the main problem. Besides the natural one's of rocket's blowing up and everything, there's the very real possibility that if you DO make a profit, it will turn out that it's illegal to make a profit off of what the UN calls the "common heritage of mankind".

7:49 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home

 
Profiles
My Blogger Profile
eXTReMe Tracker X-treme Tracker


The Atom Feed This page is powered by Blogger.