Miscellaneous Notes

Tap tap. Is this thing on?

A few notes on recent controversies:

Net Neutrality: I'd be more likely to take seriously the claim that Net Neutrality regulations are a matter of ancient tradition if it weren't for the fact that every Net Neuterer has a different definition of Net Neutrality and a different timeline of how the regulations changed. As far as I can tell, Net Neutrality was a matter of custom … like tipping. It was enforced by the FCC frowning hard.

I won't more than mention that whether a foreign nation has Net Neutrality changes depending on rhetorical needs. If it's necessary to find an example to prove that corporations won't adhere to Net Neutrality standards without being forced, then there are lots of examples of nations without Net Neutrality. If it's necessary to say “All the cool nations are doing this,” then those examples disappear.

In the real world, Net Neutrality violations can be divided into:

• The beneficial (throttling a bandwidth hog);
• The trivial;
• The temporary;
• The imaginary.

Corporations: As far as I can tell, support for Net Neutrality is based on the theory that corporations are all-powerful psychopaths. As far as I can tell, the entities that act most like the way leftists imagine corporations act are governments and online mobs.

In a typical example of anti-corporation prejudice, the SF writer Ted Chiang compared corporations to out-of-control AIs. On the other hand, the original speculation comparing an organization to an AI was Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes which compared governments to AIs. (“What is the heart, but a spring?”). Nowadays, online mobs can also be compared to Leviathan. To paraphrase the movie The Terminator:

The online mob is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop …

The best reason to regard democratic governments as preferable to corporations is that they can be controlled by The People. The People also control online mobs, but that doesn't make them good … especially when you recall that Trump was elected by Twitter mobs.

Corporate power is also much less than many people think, some of whom run the corporations. For example, a few months ago, Cloudflare stopped providing DDoS protection to Daily Stormer, effectively kicking them off the respectable Internet. They tried the same stunt with Ghost Gunner. Ghost Gunner is still there. Blacklists don't work unless they're unanimous.

A personal note: I don't believe in corporate power, not because I disapprove of it, but because I think it's much less than many others think. Some of my actions were done in order to make that point. I joined Mastodon, partly to show that Facebook doesn't have a monopoly. I got a Linux computer partly to show that Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly. I started ordering books from Amazon when people were complaining that Barnes & Noble (or was it Borders?) was becoming a monopoly. (It might be time to change that.)

On the other hand, some right-wing commenters disagree with handling monopolies privately.

The recent tax bill has two problems:

• It made major changes a bit too suddenly. Making them more slowly so we know what we're doing might make more sense.
• It looks like it was written for the purpose of raising taxes on New York Times reporters. “The purpose of power is power” is bad. “The purpose of power is revenge” is worse.

“The purpose of power is revenge” might also explain “political movements that appear exceedingly stupid.”

Is free speech only for the powerful? I had trouble understanding the belief that free speech is a tool for the privileged. As far as I can tell, this is based on the theory that the privileged will always be able to censor. In order to level the proverbial playing field, the downtrodden also must be given the privilege of censorship. I find it much more plausible that the privileged will always be able to speak. (If they can be censored, they were not privileged in the first place.)

Ideas I agree with while opposing the proponents: An opinion you agree with may be a “tribal marker” for people you regard as dangerous. For example:

• Black lives matter.
• It's okay to be white. (It's more worrisome when “white” is capitalized.)
• Allah akbar. (God is great.)
• There's evidence that human action might make the Earth warmer.
• Sustainable anything.

“Cuckservative” and “neoliberal” mean the same thing: “How DARE you pretend to be on my side while believing in individual rights!”

The use of the term “cuckservative” might be due to one of the more bizarre assumptions of the “alt-right,” that anybody who disagrees with them must be doing so in order to avoid being called names and can be forced in the other direction by enough name-calling.

Free Will Denial

I suspect that a large fraction of left-wing ideology comes from a denial of free will: the belief that free will either does not exist or is valueless. That can have several effects:

1. If free will does not exist at all, there is little point in defending the right to make your own decisions. If something is desirable, it must be compulsory; if it is undesirable, it must be forbidden.
2. I've already discussed the effects of the belief that free will only applies to pointless actions.
3. If an individual's free will cannot affect his/her economic status, anybody rich got that way from ‘society’ (“You didn't build that…”) and the wealth can be redistributed.
4. Finally, if the combined free wills of all of humanity cannot cause anything good, then either economic growth does not exist or it has bad effects (e.g., global warming).

Harvey and Zoning Laws

Houston is noteworthy for the lack of zoning. Houston is also noteworthy for a $100 billion flood. Some people insist on connecting the two. Apparently, the riffraff moving in produce floods.

Let's do some arithmetic on the cost of Harvey. It's approximately $15,000 per resident of the Houston metropolitan area. Let's compare housing costs in Houston with housing costs in New York City (where the zoning plague started). The monthly rent for 85 \(\text{m}^2\) (900 Sqft) furnished accommodation in NORMAL area in New York City is $2,828. The monthly rent for a similar apartment in Houston is $1,228. In other words, the Hurricane Harvey cost as much as the additional rent for ten months.

A Note on Overpopulation

At the population density of The Netherlands (a food exporter, believe it or not), we can support 60 billion people on Earth … four times that if we cover the seas with greenhouse ships.

A Common Right-Wing Meme

If the mainstream calls ordinary conservatives Nazis, what will they do when real Nazis come along? Now we have some idea.

Penalty for being a pro-lifer: Winning the lawsuit.

Penalty for dissent on global warming: Getting your name on a Museum wing.

Penalty for homophobia: Getting your name off a declining web browser. (On the other hand, Pale Moon sometimes hangs on PJ Media articles.)

Penalty for Naziism: getting booted off the normal Internet and onto Tor … along with the drug dealers. (On the other hand, it's unfair to drug dealers.)

How Powerful Are Online Mobs?

Let's look at recent online mobs.

The mobs after Hobby Lobby and DropBox lost. Period.

The pro-gay-marriage mob lost the battle of Chik-Fil-A. They won a temporary victory over Duck Dynasty but had to retreat. They got Brendan Eich fired but the result was that Firefox is getting increasingly buggy and losing market share.

The feminist mob after James Damore got him a job offer from Wikileaks.

It looks like we have the equivalent of an aging black-belt who, after losing a fight or two, first picked a fight with a couple of white-belts, drew those, and finally went out into the street to beat up a cripple. (The black belt can get away with it only because the cripple used to be an even worse bully.)

I suspect they're marching against “Nazis,” not only to look noble, but also in order to look powerful.

What Were They Thinking at Google?

I have a couple of theories on why Google came down on James Damore like the proverbial ton of bricks.

Why there's a crackdown on anything that looks “alt-right” now

The tech industry top people don't actually like feminists (who have a tendency to produce expensive lawsuits) but they made the mistake of surrendering to them (at least verbally) a decade or two ago and it's too late to go back now. They have resolved to not let that happen again.

Meanwhile, opponents of feminism (or left-wing ideology in general) have been saying it's time to imitate left-wing tactics. As a result, the tech industry is trying to stop Feminism II before it starts. It is, after all, very difficult to surrender to two incompatible factions at the same time.

Without the threat of the imitation leftist tactics, disagreeing with company dogma would simply earn a reprimand and a warning to not do that again. With that threat, dissent produces:

JUST DO NOT DO IT. DO NOT DO ANYTHING SORT OF LIKE IT. JUST AVOID THAT ENTIRE CATEGORY OF THING.

The infamous memo might not be “alt-right,” but it can be plausibly claimed to be in “THAT ENTIRE CATEGORY OF THING.”

Was this a false flag?

A conspiracy theory I haven't seen anywhere yet:
Since Google has not actually been promoting that many women, it doesn't look like it is a real feminist-run organization. What if the purpose of coming down on James Damore in such a heavy-handed manner is to provoke such a lawsuit? They might be able to get a court order that they can wave in the faces of the feminists.

If the lawsuit goes the other way, of course, they now have a legal precedent that can be used to fire feminists suing them.

I (and apparently very few other people) noticed that, with a few minor changes, the Zunger response to the Damore memo (including the need to fit in) could be used against feminists.

Identifying Science-Curious but Science-Ignorant People, Part II

The studies I asked for a few months ago are starting, at least as far as brain science is concerned.

A Brief Note on Free Speech

Much of what appears to be a violation of freedom of speech is actually a matter of refusing to listen.

Much of the time such a refusal to listen, although not a violation of constitutional rights, is very unwise. If you refuse to listen, you might find that someone you loathe, that you thought didn't have a chance, just got elected President.

Things to Avoid in Health-Insurance Regulation

Any reform of health-insurance regulation must avoid the following:

1. A death spiral, when people put off buying otherwise unaffordable health insurance until they're sick.
2. Bankrupting the country, because promises that cannot be fulfilled will not be fulfilled.
3. Price controls. This includes giving governments the motive, means, and opportunity to institute price controls (e.g., a single-payer system).
4. A welfare cliff, in which people don't bother looking for a job because you lose more in benefits than the job pays.
5. Charging people twice for their health care, in which people with private insurance are charged for the government insurance they might be using anyway. (This is based on the fact that families with children in private school still have to pay school taxes.)
6. (Lest we forget…) Losing the next election.

I suspect this means we're stuck with the individual mandate, at least until the herd of independent minds starts to stampede in another direction.

Accidentally Serious

According to The Borowitz Report:

With a fury that could spell political trouble for Republicans in the midterm elections, Trump voters across the country on Friday expressed their outrage and anger that they still have health coverage.

According to public-opinion polls:

The only item from the Obamacare requirements asked about in this poll that most reject is the individual mandate. Two-thirds of the public want to eliminate that part of the ACA.

In other words, some people really are outraged at being forced to buy health insurance. Maybe Andy Borowitz thought he was being satirical …

In any case, the technical term for people who want to keep price controls on health insurance, oppose the individual mandate, and think of themselves as right wing is “deplorable.”

A Sound Bite for Conservatives

In view of the fact that Obamacare was associated with a jump in death rates, you can try accusing anybody claiming that its repeal will kill people of traveling backward in time.

A Suggestion for Congress

The main reason for the continued rejection of the attempted reforms of Obamacare are the horrendous-sounding numbers from the Congressional Budget Office. These numbers appear to be similar no matter how watered-down the bill is. It turns out that almost all of the alleged losses of health insurance come from the repeal of the individual mandate. The sequence appears to be as follows:

1. The Republicans propose a heath-insurance reform plan.
2. The Congressional Budget Office issues a pan report claiming millions of people will lose insurance.
3. Average voters (the “people of the land, the common clay of the new West”) hear about the report and figure it's because the Snidely Whiplashes in charge of insurance companies will throw people off insurance plans simply because they're mean.
4. They send lots of hysterical phone calls, emails, and letters to Congress.
5. The Congresscritters and Senators listen and vote it down.
6. The Republican Establishment looks for something else to water down.
7. Repeat.

Maybe they should repeal every part of Obamacare but the individual mandate.

Reactions to Microchipping Employees

Some of my reactions to the news that at one company is planning to install microchips in some of their employees:

• Incredulous stare.
• The Book of Revelations looks a little less insane now that we have the Mark of the Beast.
• By the way, why would microchips have to be implanted instead of worn? Is this an attempt at giving the employees something that's hard to remove?
• Is this what happens when people who are taught that businesses can get away with anything grow up to run businesses?
• If someone quits rather than do this … will he become a poster boy for government regulation of worker agreements?
• If he turns out to be a “fundie” worried about both the Mark of the Beast and gay marriage, will the Left abruptly drop him … followed by the Right using him as a poster boy?
• If his church opens a soup kitchen for illegal aliens, will the Right then drop his case? Will both herds of independent minds start marching in opposite directions?
• On the other hand, maybe he'll be a poster boy for his next employer: They can advertise “WE HIRE PEOPLE OF PRINCIPLE!”

The Real Problem with Left-Wing Politics

According to a recent article advising liberals on how to win elections:

It's possible to push for the policies you think are important on climate change without making people feel guilty about their hamburgers.

Translation: Don't tell people not to buy hamburgers; just tell people not to sell them.

A Brief Note on the Voight–Kampff Test

One of the Voight–Kampff test questions is:

You're in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it's crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't, not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?

The capitalist living inside the heads of leftists will not help the tortoise. A British health-care bureaucrat will prevent anybody else from helping.

I Was Wrong

A few years ago, I said:

It's a government regulation that hasn't been discredited yet. Advocate a government regulation in nearly any other field and you'll have libertarians saying “Look at how the State messed things up” In the case of net neutrality, our best argument is “Look at how the State messed things up everywhere else!” This, of course, can be spun as paranoid rantings. (It doesn't help that some of the people involved also engage in paranoid rantings.)

I was wrong. Net neutrality really was associated with bad effects.

Apparently, net-neutrality used to be the law, back when American broadband was rare. Net neutrality is not a matter of “You need to fill out this form for your Internet connection” or “You need permission from Occupy Wall Street to start an ISP” (despite what some people think). It's a matter of “ding ding ding ding khkhkhkhkh…”

I had overlooked this because the Other Side kept insisting that American slowness in adopting broadband was due to capitalism and—like an idiot—I believed them. (In the real world, the “cool nations” haven't been that strong on net neutrality.)

Meanwhile, in 2002–2015, we didn't have net-neutrality laws and had a rapid expansion of broadband. We also saw Comcast smack down Netflix for bandwidth hogging, but that was a feature, not a bug.

More recently, we also saw Verizon's arrogant treatment of ISPs it doesn't like, but it's doing so as a content provider. Strengthening ISPs might stop that.

They Really Believe This

According a “toot” from the Mastodon Federation (earlier mentioned here):

Mentally, I'd like you to replace "capital" with "big piles of money" wherever you see it. That's a gross simplification but I think it also makes some things more clear.

An economic system is one that determines a) what goods/services should be produced and b) how to distribute them.

Capitalism supposes that a) and b) ought to be determined by (people with) Big Piles of Money

It's "big piles of money-ism".

The explains the persistent belief in folk economics.

On the other hand, the phrase “big piles of the results of the voluntary decisions by consumers-ism” sounds awkward.

In related news, it looks like the Mastodon Federation might be the platform I speculated about here.

A Suggestion on the Health-Care Crisis

On the one hand, it looks like anything done to Obamacare will have effects on somebody that can be called catastrophic and might cause a Democratic takeover of Congress.

On the other hand, Obamacare continues to implode. For example, according to The New York Times:

Next year, about 35,000 people buying insurance in Affordable Care Act marketplaces in 45 counties could have no carriers to choose from.

It looks like the problem will then get worse.

On the gripping hand, there is an increasingly-plausible theory that Obamacare was designed to collapse and be replaced by a single-payer system riding to the rescue. The single-payer system might start as a public option for counties with no insurer and then get extended.

A possible alternative comes from New Jersey which was able to reverse a “death spiral” by relegalizing “Basic and Essential” health insurance. (I'm dubious about the details of the New Jersey plan because it saved money by having low caps instead of high deductibles but that's a quibble.) It might make sense to have a private deregulated option for people in counties with no insurers. The important part is for Obamacare to fail right instead of fail left.

It will be hard for the Left to complain about this because they will refuse to admit Obamacare is failing until it's painfully obvious. They will try to blame the failure on Trump, of course, but the failure has already started. I suspect Trump was elected by the votes of people whose premiums increased shortly before the election.

A Brief Note on the Republican Health-Care Plan

Let's see … The current system (for the past few years) was based on:

• Adding some popular regulations that varied from stupid to trivial.
• Adding an unpopular regulation (the individual mandate) aimed at keeping the first set of regulations from being disastrous.
• A large expansion of Medicaid.

In response to that the Republicans are currently planning to:

• Repealing some (but not all) of the first set of regulations.
• Repealing the individual mandate (the only part of this system that came close to making sense).
• Cutting Medicaid.

The last might make sense except that they're not not doing much about Social Security … an even bigger program.

I won't more than mention that the regulatory part of the State (at least on the Federal level) is even more out of control than the spending part of the State.

Maybe, under Trump, the Republicans have misplaced priorities … but we knew that.

I Am Now on Mathstodon

Mathstodon is a social network that supports MathJax.

My Mathstodon address.

What Will Happen if the U.S. Joins or Leaves the Paris Accord?

If the U.S. joins the Paris Accord…

• Coal will be gradually replaced by natural gas.
• Carbon emissions will decline slightly.
• Coal miners will lose their jobs.

If the U.S. leaves the Paris Accord…

• Coal will be gradually replaced by natural gas.
• Carbon emissions will decline slightly.
• Coal miners will lose their jobs.

Wow.

Posts from an Alternate Timeline

I've noticed lots of posts on blogs or twitter (typical example here) advising the adoption of left-wing tactics. Those posts come from an alternate timeline in which the Left is winning. In the real world …

THEY LOST!

In politics, they lost the Presidency, the Senate, the House, most governorships, and most state legislatures. If we had a real Republican in the White House, we'd be well on the way to repealing Obamacare.

They're even losing the Culture Wars. Chik Fil-A: They lost. Duck Dynasty: They lost. DropBox: They lost. Hobby Lobby: They lost. WeRateDogs: They're losing. They're vulnerable.

How Some People Intend Net Neutrality to Work

Maybe the cartoonists had no idea of how net neutrality would work, but other people have some idea of how they want it to work.

Either some of the supporters of net neutrality are even more ignorant than the cartoonists or the cartoonists underestimated how much of a threat to freedom it would be.

By the way, smacking down a content provider hogging 30% of the bandwidth does not count as “broken.”

Four Political Factions

The Right-Wing NutJobs with which I'm sometimes allied will find it hard to believe that leftists are opposed to the “Establishment”. It isn't as absurd as it might seem. There is reason to think the media are not owned by far leftists. I think we can clear up the confusion of whether the “mainstream” media are right or left if we note that there are at least four political viewpoints common in the U.S. today:

1. the Establishment right;
2. the Populist right;
3. the Establishment left;
4. the Populist left.

We see that the first three are well represented (section 3 is excessively well represented) but the last tends to be ignored except when another group (usually 3) decides to speak for it. (Section 2 cannot be ignored nowadays. Even before the current administration, it was condemned but it was not ignored.)

The Populist left includes but is not limited to the underclass. It also includes underpaid artists, underpaid writers, underpaid musicians, much of the west side of Manhattan, and wacko ex-professors in Montana. (The Usenet version of this was written some time ago and it was based on a CompuServe rant dated April 22, 1996.)

The Establishment left tends to define itself in opposition to the Populist right. It will go along with the Populist left when it disagrees with the Populist right (e.g., on gay rights) or when the Populist right is apathetic (e.g., on nuclear power) but will oppose both populisms when they agree (e.g., on free trade).

The Establishment left will frequently pretend the Populist left does not exist. The Establishment right thinks that is because they will only pay attention to right-wing embarrassments. They may be right.

Here We Go Again!

Evan Williams, one of the people behind Blogger, now regrets starting Twitter, on the grounds that it my have put Trump in the White House.

This is part of a common pattern:

1. Leftists notice that not everybody agrees with the Enlightened Ones.
2. They attribute that to Establishment brainwashing. (They really do believe that.)
3. They then invent another platform that the Establishment cannot censor. (Seen on Usenet: “The Revolution will be Bloggerized” from a left-wing crackpot.)
4. They then become astounded at how the new platform is being used by The Enemy.

This may be related to the fact that Leftists don't know what capitalism is. (That may also have caused the reaction discussed here.)

As for the next platform … “I have no idea what it will be, and am in no great hurry to find out.”

I Have a Strange Superpower

I have a memory.

I can recall that the Rust Belt was called the Rust Belt long before either NAFTA or large-scale Chinese trade.

I can recall that we didn't have large numbers of people dying in the streets before Obamacare. (Those that were dying in the streets did so as a result of collectivism-inspired riots.)

I can recall when 7% interest was considered the minimum for a monetary crisis. (The interest rates at the peak of the alleged crisis of 2008 were much less.)

Addendum: I sometimes feel like this.

The Lesson of That United Airlines Incident

The usual claim is that United Airlines incident proves Big Business can get away with anything. I thought the large drop in its stock price in the immediate aftermath proved that it could not actually get away with anything.

As for “What were they thinking?” … The people who set limits on payments to passengers to encourage them to leave voluntarily may have been influenced by the belief that such payments are somehow dishonorable and selecting people by lot is the fairest system. That, in turn, may have been based on the plausible theory that poor people would be more likely to let themselves be bumped as a result of payments.

In other words, this incident may have been due to the anti-market mentality.

Fearless Girl or Impatient Girl?

The Fearless Girl looks like she's saying “You're late! What took you so long?” This is obviously a protest against the fact that capitalism was rather slow to arrive and set humanity free. It might even be a protest against the fact that capitalism has not yet penetrated to every nook and cranny on Earth.

When Your Conscience Is in Thrall to Government Policy

According to bio“ethics” experts (seen via National Review):

Objection to providing patients interventions that are at the core of medical practice – interventions that the profession deems to be effective, ethical, and standard treatments – is unjustifiable (AMA Code of Medical Ethics [Opinion 11.2.2]10).28″31

Making the patient paramount means offering and providing accepted medical interventions in accordance with patients’ reasoned decisions. Thus, a health care professional cannot deny patients access to medications for mental health conditions, sexual dysfunction, or contraception on the basis of their conscience, since these drugs are professionally accepted as appropriate medical interventions.

In other words, it would be regarded as unethical for a doctor opposed to capital punishment to refuse to cooperate with the organ banks. If this becomes accepted, we might be an election away from compelling physicians to offer acupuncture. I won't more than mention this is a violation of the First, Ninth, Tenth, and Thirteenth Amendments.

By the way, if enough ethics experts disagree with this, would we be justified in censoring it?

I'm reminded of the anti-circumcision activists who appeal to “Society” while ignoring the fact that “Society” deems them crackpots.

A Note on Science March Slogans

I've been looking at poster ideas for the “March for Science” (for example, here) and I noticed a lack of assertions about science facts. Most of them are either irrelevant to science, expressing loyalty to “science,” or presumably witty slogans using science vocabulary.

The only issue where there is even an attempt at actual content is global warming. I didn't even see the anti-Creationist slogans I was expecting. Maybe those go together. It's hard to get really upset about CO₂ levels when such levels were higher millions of years ago.

Meanwhile, I've come up a few more factual slogans (earlier slogans are here):

• THE ENTROPY OF THE UNIVERSE TENDS TO A MAXIMUM!
• THE EARTH IS NOT THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE!
• ANGULAR MOMENTUM MAKES THE WORLD GO AROUND!
• THE EARTH IS BILLIONS OF YEARS OLD!

Mike Pence and William Shakespeare

The Mike Pence tempest in a teapot reminded me of the following quote from The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare:

I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following, but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.

Leftists, at least this week, regard that as “creepy.”

A Suggestion for President Trump

It's time for voting rights for chickens.

• Being a chicken is socially conditioned and is clearly the fault of either capitalism or neoliberalism (depending on what you're against this week).
• Even if you disagree, feathered people cannot help being chickens and should not be kept from the voting booth.
• On the other hand, if they can help being chickens, that means being a chicken is a voluntarily-chosen lifestyle that should not be penalized.
• You can even make the case that chickens have superior political skills.

Besides, this will help the Republicans. According to the latest research, conservative politicians are more attractive and chickens prefer more attractive humans. If you put those together, it is easy to see that voting rights for chickens will make the Republicans win in a landslide.

It's something that should be done today.

Non-Sequitur of the Year

According to PoliticusUSA:

“The days of ‘trust-me’ science are over,” said anti-science Congressman Lamar Smith, who serves as chairman of the Science Committee, according to The Hill. “In our modern information age, federal regulations should be based only on data that is available for every American to see and that can be subjected to independent review.”

In other words, if Republicans don’t like that results of scientific studies and data, they should have the freedom to ignore it and implement policy accordingly.

I don't see how you can get that from an assertion that science should be more open.

I already know what “non-sequitur” means. I do not require a concrete example.

A Paranoid Theory I Haven't Seen Anywhere Yet

What if the Left deliberately created a drug “epidemic” a half century ago to produce a health crisis when the druggies got old? That way, they could blame the bad health outcomes and runaway heath-care spending on capitalism.

On the other hand, it doesn't work on everyone. Mexican Americans have longer life expectancies than either Mexicans or white Americans. Asian Americans have longer life expectancies than either Asians in Singapore or white Americans.

On the gripping hand, there was a crime epidemic that started about the same time that we got over. Maybe we'll develop antibodies to opioids. A quarter century ago, the geographic arguments for gun control (“look at how much better Europe handles crime!”) seemed as irrefutable as the geographic arguments for government-run health care do today. That has changed … which has not yet percolated down to self-congratulatory people

Can I Get a Refund on Dilbert Books?

According to Scott Adams:

Then science ignores the models that are too far off from observed temperatures as we proceed into the future and check the predictions against reality. Sometimes scientists also “tune” the models to hindcast better, meaning tweaking assumptions. As a non-scientists, I can’t judge whether or not the tuning and tweaking are valid from a scientific perspective. But I can judge that this pattern is identical to known scams. I described the known scams in this post.

And to my skeptical mind, it sounds fishy that there are dozens or more different climate models that are getting tuned to match observations. That doesn’t sound credible, even if it is logically and scientifically sound. I am not qualified to judge the logic or science. But I am left wondering why it has to sound exactly like a hoax if it isn’t one. Was there not a credible-sounding way to make the case?

Personally, I would find it compelling if science settled on one climate model (not dozens) and reported that it was accurate (enough), based on temperature observations, for the next five years. If they pull that off, they have my attention. But they will never convince me with multiple models. That just isn’t possible.

First, the known scams are a matter of separate isolated predictions mailed separately (which may have been what happened here and here and here) instead of aggregated predictions gathered together in an easily checked (and copied) place.

Second, the climate predictions resemble hurricane predictions, which also have the results of numerous models. We don't see people picking the best hurricane prediction and saying “WE WERE RIGHT!” (We do see a pattern of selecting accurate predictions and ignoring inaccurate ones in politics.)

Third, picking one best model would not alleviate the uncertainty; it would merely hide it. Real science has error estimates. We don't see that in scams. We do see that in the climate models (but not in people whining about “climate denial.”).

“Warrior” and Folk Economics

My fellow SF fans will be familiar with the story “Warrior” by Gordon Dickson. In it, the policemen thought that a professional military strategist would be helpless when dealing with organized crime. After all, soldiers wear uniforms, carry guns, and are found in a crowd of other soldiers. Without those elements, a soldier would be helpless. That turned out not to be the case.

We see a similar illusion in folk economics. In folk economics, a capitalist is someone in an expensive suit at a desk in a corner office instead of someone with a 401(k). In folk economics, decisions aren't made by consumers, they're made by capitalists. That's why we see people flying around the world warning of the dangers of fossil fuel use without recognizing the irony. That even explains why some people treat marketing expenses for pharmaceuticals as a type of profit. (The military equivalent of that would be someone who “saluted a Good Humor man, an usher, and a nun.”)

One Does Not Know How to Begin

According to Peter Frase:

Frase's Four Futures are:

1. Communism ("equality and abundance")
2. Rentism ("hierarchy and abundance")
3. Socialism ("equality and scarcity")
4. Exterminism ("hierarchy and scarcity")

How's that again?

There are two possible confusions here:

• A possible confusion between effects and causes: If we have both equality and abundance, that it likely to produce the society on the label of communism.
• A possible confusion between allowed hierarchy and permitted hierarchy. There is a difference between a “hierarchy” produced by people of differing abilities and a hierarchy produced by people of differing amounts of pull.

I specified “possible” above because I have not yet read the book in question. Maybe the author drew those distinctions.

Daylight Savings Time Might Be a Violation of the Ninth Amendment

Daylight Savings Time may be a violation of the Ninth Amendment. It was intended to ensure that people got up earlier in the Spring and Summer. On the other hand, in the debates on the Bill of Rights, Theodore Sedgwick said:

if the committee were governed by that general principle, they might have gone into a very lengthy enumeration of rights; they might have declared that a man should have the right to wear his hat if he pleased; that he might get up when he pleased, and go to bed when he thought proper.

The above reasoning, including the doctrine that personal schedules should not be a government matter, was part of the basis for the Ninth Amendment.

Government time? No thanks.

Cool!

This cryonics stuff might possibly work!

On the other hand, according to Cities in Flight by James Blish, anti-agathics are supposed to be invented next year…

Slogans for the March for Science

A few slogans that might be appropriate at the March for Science:

• WE WANT ERROR BARS AND CONTROL GROUPS!
• FOR EVERY ACTION THERE IS AN EQUAL AND OPPOSITE REACTION!
• A SYSTEM UNDER STRESS WILL CHANGE IN A WAY THAT LESSENS THE STRESS!
• THE REACTION MOST LIKELY TO OCCUR IS THE ONE THAT RELEASES THE MOST HEAT!
• YES NUKES!
• GMOS FOR EVERYONE!

Identifying Science-Curious but Science-Ignorant People

A few questions that will be answered one way by people who are science-curious but science-ignorant and the opposite way by science-knowledgeable people:

1. If you're on a ship crossing the equator and you're watching water run down the drain, will you see the direction of swirl reversed when you cross the equator?
2. Is plutonium the deadliest toxin on Earth?
3. Did Christopher Columbus discover the world is round?
4. Do human beings use only 10% of their brains?
5. Does the Moon have a dark side?

A Sanctuary Suggestion

It might make sense for a right-leaning county in a left-leaning state with harsh gun laws to declare itself to be a sanctuary county for gun owners. This will have several beneficial effects:

1. It will help defend one of the more untrendy civil liberties.
2. It just might give the right-wing a strange, new respect for the sanctuary concept.
3. It will provoke the wrong side of the left to claim that criminals will move there. That, in turn, might help discredit the similar predictions on the right for the immigrant sanctuaries.

Four-Dimensional Undecidable “Elementary” Geometry

A few years ago, I realized (with another update here) that the elementary geometry of points, lines, and circles becomes undecidable when it includes screws or spirals. You can think of lines and circles as the one-dimensional connected uniform curves in a two-dimensional Euclidean space and you can think of spirals, lines, and circles as the one-dimensional connected uniform curves in a three-dimensional Euclidean space. I'm still not sure of what a complete set of such curves in a four-dimensional space would be like, but it would include some very strange objects.

For example, consider the curve parameterized by \((w,x,y,z)=(\sin t,\cos t,\sin \sqrt{2}t,\cos \sqrt{2}t)\) where \(t\in[-\infty,\infty]\). It is easy to see that this is a dense subset of the Clifford torus that's the product of two unit circles centered at the origin (in the \((w,x)\) and \((y,z)\) planes). Unlike the similar curves in two- and three-dimensional space, this isn't closed.

Question: Would it make more sense to focus on closed, uniform, connected subsets of Euclidean spaces? In two dimensions that would include the empty set, points, lines, circles, and the entire plane. In three dimensions that would include the empty set, points, lines, circles, helices, planes, spheres, cylinders, and the entire space. In four dimensions …

Stupid Petitions Are Not Limited to the Left

According to a recent petition:

We demand that J.K. Rowling grants no less than 18 refugees shelter in her mansions for at least 8 years. She rejects safe immigration, which is why we also demand, that there will be no additional vetting process for these refugees. Her virtue-signaling stems from ignorance, and the 100% effective cure of it will be this drastic change of perspective. To make this group of refugees representative of the situation Europe, we also demand that the group consists of 14 men and 4 women, since over 75% of the millions of refugees are male.

First, if you sound like this, you are doing conservatism wrong:

UPDATE: you can drop off an unwanted baby at a Hobby Lobby and they'll raise it

Second, why are they assuming that letting refugees in means that the State must build homes for them? When someone moves from city X to city Y in the same country, we don't normally assume that the the government of city Y must build the homes.

Third, if the government insists on building homes for newcomers, there might be problems with it irrespective of whether or not there are refugees. Keeping refugees out because the government is spendthrift is like getting a hangover from scotch-and-soda and, as a result, swearing off soda.

Finally, if you believe that Americans/British/whoever have the right to rent to refugees, does that imply that you have a moral obligation to do so yourself? If you believe that Americans/British/whoever have the right to smoke dope, does that imply that you have a moral obligation to do so yourself?

Which Trump Did We Elect? An Update

The test case I mentioned here might be happening. I still don't know which Trump we elected, but it's clear that the commenters at Instapundit voted for the bad Trump.

A brief summary of the comments there:

You know everything we said about the RFRA and religious freedom? IT WAS BULSHYTT!

The Reaction to Betsy DeVos Might Explain the Trump Movement

Some of the people reacting to the appointment of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education are planning to homeschool their children even despite the fact that she is a proponent of more homeschooling.

Apparently, they have been so brainwashed by standard opinion into believing that conservatives are authoritarian that they plan to get back at anti-authoritarian conservatives by doing something anti-authoritarian.

Question: What happens when someone who insists on being authoritarian believes the same thing? Would that produce someone who defends capitalism by limiting imports and defends American ideals by closing borders?

A Stalin Quote and p-adic Numbers

According to Joseph Stalin:

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

He was, of course, using \(p\)-adic numbers. For example: \(\left\vert1\right\vert_2=1>0.015625=\left\vert1000000\right\vert_2\).

To a Large Fraction of Right Wingers

Please note that the Left lost the latest election, probably due to blowback from their overreach. Please also note that the candidate who imitated them ran behind his party.

Do you sincerely want to lose?

Donald Trump and Cleon II

From Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov:

“But, what keeps the Emperor strong? What kept Cleon strong? It's obvious. He is strong, because he permits no strong subjects. A courtier who becomes too rich, or a general who becomes too popular is dangerous.

I was reminded, somehow.

A Few Notes on Trump's Recent Actions on Immigration

The current restrictions on entry from seven nations were based on an Obama-era policy (or would that be a Nyarlathotep-era policy?). You can think of this as Trump's Tariff of Abominations.

The Tariff of Abominations episode was when a populist President enforced a blatant example of overreach by his predecessor. It lead to the Nullification Crisis, when South Carolina declared itself a sanctuary state for smugglers. (The use of nullification by a slave state gave nullification a bad name. On the other hand, nullification was also used by free statea.)

Speaking of sanctuaries … One of Trump's executive orders is for the Federal government to, “on a weekly basis, make public a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens.” Will there also be a weekly report of crimes committed by citizens? (It's not science unless there's a control group.)

The same order will also cut off funds to sanctuary cities. I have a better idea: Let's stop subsidies to state and local governments in general. Such subsidies are a matter of taking money out of local economies, sending it for a wild night on the town, and giving some of it back.

Is Lying a Signaling Mechanism?

According to Tyler Cowen:

By requiring subordinates to speak untruths, a leader can undercut their independent standing, including their standing with the public, with the media and with other members of the administration. That makes those individuals grow more dependent on the leader and less likely to mount independent rebellions against the structure of command. Promoting such chains of lies is a classic tactic when a leader distrusts his subordinates and expects to continue to distrust them in the future.

Another reason for promoting lying is what economists sometimes call loyalty filters. If you want to ascertain if someone is truly loyal to you, ask them to do something outrageous or stupid. If they balk, then you know right away they aren’t fully with you. That too is a sign of incipient mistrust within the ruling clique, and it is part of the same worldview that leads Trump to rely so heavily on family members.

This works in more than one direction. If telling obvious lies on behalf of someone else is a loyalty signal, Trump is signalling his loyalty to his voters.

But wait, there's more:

Imagine, for instance, that mistruths come in different forms: higher-status mistruths and lower-status mistruths. The high-status mistruths are like those we associate with ambassadors and diplomats. The ambassador is reluctant to tell a refutable, flat-out lie of the sort that could cause embarrassment, but if all you ever heard were the proclamations of the ambassador, you wouldn’t have a good grasp of the realities of the situation. … Trump specializes in lower-status lies, typically more of the bald-faced sort, namely stating “x” when obviously “not x” is the case. They are proclamations of power, and signals that the opinions of mainstream media and political opponents will be disregarded.

In terms science types might find familiar: High-status lies are not even wrong; low-status lies are wrong.

There's another advantage of lying: You can tell the truth and not be believed, thereby discrediting critics when the truth becomes obvious. You might get the Other Side to force middle-of-the-road people saying things opposed to the dogma of the Other Side into your coalition. You might even be able to get critics to refuse to believe their own allies, when those allies think for themselves.

On the other hand, this might turn into the new Dunning–Kruger effect. It's an all-purpose way to explain away anybody who disagrees with you without having to actually engage their with their arguments. The Dunning–Kruger effect (that unskilled people are often unaware of it) is commonly cited in debates between two groups of arrogant fools each claiming that the other side is unskilled and unaware of it. We might see a variety of ideologues claiming that the Other Side is lying to signal loyalty. (Devising examples will the left as an exercise for the reader.)

Oops!

In my calculation of the EmDrive acceleration, I skipped a decimal point. The acceleration should be \(5.16\times10^{-3}~\text{m}/\text{s}^2\). That will get you from Earth to Mars in 2–3 months

If it works, it might be worth doing.

I Have Some Good News and Some Bad News

The good news: The right wing is getting saner, at least for now. They're blaming everything on liberals instead of on foreigners.

The bad news: The left wing is not getting any more skeptical of government. Instead of uncritically trusting politicians, they uncritically trust bureaucrats.

What a Claim Sounds Like vs. What It Is

It's common for people to make a claim, and back it up with evidence, that sounds like something else with much less evidence. For example:

1. For example, that claim that loose gun laws are correlated with “gun-related deaths“ sounds like a claim that loose gun laws are correlated with gun crime but also it includes suicides by gun.
2. There's reason to believe social conservatism is correlated with “teenage pregnancy.” This might refer to unwed 13-year-olds but it also includes married 19-year-olds.
3. “Renewable-energy capacity” is growing rapidly. That's the peak generation when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing at the right speed. The actual energy generated is much less.
4. “Climate change” might refer to global warming … or global cooling … or droughts … or floods or …

When you see claims like the above, please do not respond to them with anecdotes that might point in the other direction; there are much better replies.

A Brief Note on Melinda Byerley's Rant

According Melinda Byerley:

She is completely correct. Job shortages usually are the fault of people in the area. We can start with the people who raise minimum wages to absurd heights, continue with people who protest any business that involves chemicals with scary names, and finish with people who close down a business simply because it specializes in wedding cakes for heterosexuals.

She is completely correct. We should celebrate diversity. We should celebrate a diversity of paychecks and of products.

As for the reaction … She waved a red flag and the bull charged.

Thoughts and Prayers and Tactical Assault Ballads

There's a common sequence of events:

• A domestic mass shooting occurs.
• People respond to it by saying “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims.”
• Other people respond to that with ridicule.

There's another common sequence of events:

• A terrorist action occurs committed by least one person who has crossed a border.
• People respond to it with a Tactical Assault Ballad.
• Other people respond to that with ridicule.

Both of them follow this template:

• A horrible crime occurs.
• People might possibly respond to it by advocating one form or another of people control. (Both gun control and border control are people control disguised by a euphemism.) What's worse, those who oppose that form of people control might look hard-hearted.
• In order to forestall that, those opposed to that form of people control respond with a purely symbolic action.
• Other people respond to that with ridicule.

To make matters worse, nearly everybody will ignore the resemblance of the sequences.

Is there a version of category theory for politics?

Explaining Theories about Population-Control Conspiracies

A few years ago, I realized:

… that explaining away opinions one disagrees with by attributing them to Malthusians can be used for a wide variety of opinions, many of them on opposite sides of a question. For example, are pesticides intended to kill off the excess population or are pesticide bans intended to allow population-stabilizing diseases? You can make similar arguments for both sides of vaccines, GMO foods, or nuclear energy. We must also recall that a policy can be intended to have an effect without actually having that effect and vice versa.

My current meta-theory about why the theories point in all different directions is that the theorizers differ on the question of where population-control ideas come from: Do they come from rich people or from loud people?

Loud people who are worried about alleged over-population tend to be overwhelmingly anti-pesticide, anti-nuke, anti-GMO, and anti-vaccine. As far as I know, rich people who are worried about alleged over-population tend to be pro-pesticide, pro-nuke, pro-GMO, and pro-vaccine. In other words, if you're opposed to Malthusian policies and you believe that the capitalists are the bosses, you're more likely to believe in one set of conspiracy theories and if you believe consumer sovereignty is only violated by brainwashing by the activist class, you're more likely to believe in the opposite set.

Needless to say, some people are both rich and loud.

Come to think of it, this might also explain the “You're a leftist!” “No, you're a leftist!” debates we've been seeing recently between conservative factions.

Do They Sell Lemonade?

I'd like to order Zorn's lemonade.

Addendum: Yes, they have lemonade.